Chapter 4 - Prismatic Fear

The Murky Prospector chattered as it maintained its high speed through the lower clouds, battered from small shards of floating stone in the depths that rested above the torrent. Occasionally, they would have to dodge some up on deck. These shards were more of an annoyance than anything. They caused a bit of drag on the sails when caught by their canvas. The crew's attention was now turned toward the aftermath of their recent peril, a haphazard storage hold full of thrown-about barrels and crates.

The large green gemin they had claimed lay in there, still covered. It let off an audible rustling, like dry beans in a bowl. Cowel could hear this even through the deck boards and was the first to approach it. He thought it to be another auditory hallucination at first, similar to the one he had experienced in the swamp. That was until the captain gave him an affirmative nod that she had heard the sound as well.

As he knelt beside the covered gemin, a sensation of complex emotions crossed over him that were distinctly not his own. Fear, mostly. A deep and primal fear was the most prominent. It was followed by profound confusion, as if he were a child aimlessly walking in an unfamiliar place, lost, and looking for his parents.

He reached out and hovered his hand just above the wax-treated canvas tarp that was atop it. This caused him to feel the warmth radiating from his breath. As he reached closer to it, the air around him became colder, and the tarp stiffer.

Alanea had followed Cowel downstairs and watched from a distance with her arms crossed. Saddened by the state of the room, and of the unknown state of the stone, which she had not taken mind of during their ordeal. It could have been chipped by a collision or worse. She knew that the stone wasn't destroyed, otherwise the ship would be as much of a death trap as the area around that exposed core they'd just passed.

She had seen strange things during her years of scavenging the skies, but nothing quite like this. The frost building up around the stone as Cowel slowly approached it was unsettling. Volatility was a dangerous trait of any gemin, but something as unpredictable as this would require extraordinary caution. She did not know if the scout that followed them was aware of the stone they had on board. If this gemin started to attract trouble, then their luck would run out sooner rather than later.

Her gaze flickered to the scorched pattern she'd wetted down only moments before. This stone was both a valuable find and a liability. It could endanger the ship if it continued to act up. Getting it off their hands was now a priority for her. Every day it was onboard increased the odds that someone would notice it, and notify someone else.

Edven, meanwhile, was meticulously inspecting changes and repairs to the engine. He ran a damp rag across a newly patched hot pipe that hissed as steam generated from it. Edven knew the power of gemin and had seen the many strange occurrences they seemed to attract. While he respected Cowel, he did not understand his feelings toward the stone. He had channeled raw power from gemin before, but to him, they were tools; even Keygemin.

He had seen Keygemin before, of course. New recruits at military posts had them around, and many pirates kept them as companions. However, he also heard many people's stories of ghosts in the clouds. Attributed to monsters that roamed freely on the whispers of Una's winds. They thought of them as a vast natural reaction to their presence in the skies, and as an omen of things to come. As if the wars of man disturbed the natural balance. Edven only trusted what he could command. What good was a gemin that wouldn't do as you willed it to?

"It's scared... I think." Cowel murmured with his voice barely audible to Alanea. His eyes were fixed on the still covered gemin. "...and confused. Like it doesn't know where it is or what's happening." He was developing a strange empathy for it that he couldn't determine between his own feelings and the stone's. Cowel never felt this way about an inanimate object before. Though he had heard similar stories to Edven.

The captain pushed off against the bulkhead and leaned against it with a boot bent up to rest on the doorframe. Her expression was unreadable. "Scared? Confused? Cowel... it is a rock." Her voice remained firm as she attempted to ground him back to reality.

"It is giving something to me... feelings and emotions." Cowel insisted as he looked up toward her. With a burning conviction, he explained.

"It is like... a whisper in my mind, but without words. It's hard to explain. Something you have to experience for yourself. This isn't the first time it's happened to me. I've felt something like this once before, from a Keygemin." He placed his hand onto the now ice-cold canvas covering the gemstone. "They are like impressions, sometimes images. You can't see them exactly, but you can feel them." He concentrated on it, toward it. Fleeting lucid beams of a rainbow of colors jittered around within his closed eyes. In an instant, changing in a violent jolt to a vast and empty space of darkness. Then a frame of the swamp where it lay before, returning to darkness again.

In the time his eyes were shut, Alanea had approached and knelt beside him with intensity and placed a hand on his back. A touch, which for her, was surprisingly gentle. "Cowel. Are you feeling alright? We went through some pretty rough stuff back there, and I want to make sure you didn't take a knock to the head." She jokingly dismissed him, but remained wary. A crewmate hallucinating was a serious problem when they were still being hunted.

"I'm fine... captain." Cowel shook his head in disapproval, and the images faded from it. "It's not me, it is the gemin. It is... communicating." He looked at the covered lump, which to him obviously wanted to remain there. "It's trying to tell me something."

Edven, with his vision obscured by sweat, clambered up the short step into the cargo hold. He wiped grease from his hand with his rag. "Communicate? Does it want to be polished? Is it complaining about the ventilation? Maybe we should open a window for the little guy. Every gemin I've used just do what they're told." His tone contained his usual dry sarcasm. He glanced at the covered gemin and then back at Cowel with amusement and exasperation. "We've got more pressing matters, like, for instance, not getting blown out of the sky by the next cruiser that spots us. We're lucky that clipper didn't have weapons."

Alanea stood up, shifting from Cowel toward Edven, then stopping to return gaze to the covered gemin. "We're lucky we didn't engage because it did have weapons. I only saw them as it turned away from us. It couldn't broadside, but had small guns on its top deck. The light sort meant to target crewmen. We need to focus on getting these stones off our ship."

The captain continued after a short pause. She remembered a small detail mentioned by Cowel a night ago. "Cowel. Can you explain to me what you meant by it flashing colors at you?" She left before being able to see this herself, but Cowel reported it after inspection.

Cowel's eyes lit up, "Yes! Just for a moment, when inspecting the stone, it flashed, like light through a glass prism, but very fast." He looked at the covered gemin again with a hopeful expression on his face. "Also, while we were going through the core discharge, everything around us was flashing so bright I couldn't see. Sometimes when I would open my eyes, I would see flashes of blue, purple, and yellow. I thought that was coming from around us, from the core we were passing. Now, I'm not so sure." He stared toward the stone under the canvas. "It was so bright that I didn't know where it was coming from. The energy that hit our ship came from cyan colored arcs. Maybe the stone helped us get through."

Edven chortled. "Help? I thought the captain's piloting got us through."

"I took my hands off the controls, actually..." Alanea informed, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

Edven returned from the galley table where the navigation chart was lying. "That's comforting... We're still a bit off course, though, and while I would like to get back to it, the propellers don't like us going crosswind. I suggest we take the nearest port we can and raise the sails."

The captain ignored almost his entire statement, already determining this herself. She knelt down over the covered gemin, and reached her hand out toward the canvas before hesitating. She felt a faint warmth, but nothing like what Cowel described.

"Uncover it." Alanea ordered, almost whispering. She needed to see it and to know its presence without this barrier between them. "Between us... us?" She thought, confused. Yet, she couldn't understand why she was unable to remove it herself. She wasn't afraid of it, that she knew.

Cowel, eager to comply, quickly pulled back the heavy canvas. It was a flawless emerald green gemin, radiating a soft verdant light that filled the cargo hold with its glow. Resting beside it, a large melon-sized blue stone... that somehow they had forgotten. Underneath the tarp this whole time.

"How... had... I? Forgotten?" The captain now quickly needed to understand what they were dealing with. Alanea placed her hands around the blue stone, the most valuable object she had ever seen. A captain scavenger of gemstones, on a ship named the Murky "Prospector", forgot the existence of the greatest find of her professional career.

Something was very wrong.

Cowel gasped as the gemin, which had been a uniform green, now began to subtly shift. A faint blue ripple appeared on its edge. Shimmering across its surface to make the stone blue, mimicking the large one behind it. Cowel felt a corresponding surge of emotion, one of somber sorrow; a sadness.

Edven, who had been busy with the charts, looked up as his eyes widened. "By the Source? What is this?" He calmly set down the charts on an overturned crate and approached the gemstone slowly with his skepticism forgotten. He reached out a hand toward its light and pulled it back as if it had been burned.

As such, the stone developed a tone of red, bathing the room in red light as if from the ship's engine. Its colors intensified. Swirling faster, they blended, separated, split prismatically, and reassembled. It was kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing. Cowel still felt its fear, but these feelings now contained flickers of curiosity, tentative questioning, trust, and guardianship.

Alanea stared into the technicolor stone, and her mind raced as fast as its colors changed. This was well beyond anything she had ever encountered. This was not just a valuable gemin, but was something else entirely. Her concern for its volatility grew exponentially. If it could do this, what else could it do? Any pirate clan would kill for something like this. They would destroy anything and anyone who stood in their way to get it.

"What would happen if it fell into the wrong hands?" This thought chilled her... or maybe the chill was from the large melon-sized blue stone. "Oh, now the freezing makes sense." Alanea was no longer muddied by that bit.

Cowel tried to speak, "It's..." but his words were muffled by a force outside of his control. His voice was filled with reverence and awe, but its words and meaning were lost. He reached out, and his finger brushed against the natural facets of the gemin. As he touched it, the colors within it exploded into a blinding flash of rainbow light that filled the cargo hold. Then just as quickly these colors faded, leaving the gemin. It pulsed and emitted a green color once more. Its natural musical hum was louder now. This rhythmic beat was no longer synchronized with Cowel's heart.

The captain flinched back from the sudden flash, with her hand going to her rapier. Edven stumbled back, eyes wide with shock. The silence that followed was only broken by the gemin's rhythmic beating. Alanea looked toward Cowel with new wisdom. No, this was not just a rock. They were in far deeper trouble than she ever wanted to be.

"Safe." Cowel uttered the statement in a strange and certain way. "It wants to be safe." He looked toward the captain and Edven. This object was never meant to be wielded as a weapon or exist as a prize to be won. It wanted protection. Now, apparently, he, Cowel, was its protector.

Alanea sighed in a long and weary exhalation. Her pragmatism suggested to her that throwing the gemstone overboard was the right call, but she respected Cowel, and that held her back from doing so. She was the captain, and her crew now included a sapient gemstone.

She looked toward it. "Alright. If it wants to be safe, then we'll keep it safe, but we need to understand what we're dealing with, and that is information we need fast. We have the other gemin we can sell, and hopefully nobody knows of the other. That is the leg up we have." It was a secret which, if found, would change their lives for the worse. Shadows would gather and be drawn in by the irresistible music of their mysterious find.

The gemstone pulsed a radiant light again. Its gentle rhythm seemed to acknowledge Alanea's words by shutting back into total silence. The entire crew was grateful for this and that the stone understood the gravity of their situation.

"We need to hide it again. This time deliberately. Put it in the..." Alanea, unsure of the circumstances she was now in, amended her statement. "Cowel, ask the stone if it doesn't mind being put in the smuggling hold." The captain, cognizantly aware she was about to roll her eyes, decided not to and bit her lip instead.

Cowel wrapped the stone in a dark cloth and tied it around, laying the gemin on top of the blanket he shoved in there. He put both the green and the larger blue stone inside. Nobody on the ship could recall the last time they used the smuggling hold. No spiders had gotten in since it was last cleaned, so there weren't even cobwebs.

Edven was clearly still shaken by what he had witnessed and ran his greasy hands through his hair. "Captain, I've seen and done a lot with gemin, but nothing like that. If word gets out about this..." The implications were clear. They would become the most hunted prospectors in all of Una.

"Then we make sure word does not get out." Alanea firmly stood her ground, arms crossed, speaking with one hand open. "Once we understand what we are dealing with, we might be able to ask for help from someone we can trust." She looked at her two passengers. "Knowledge of this does not leave the ship. Not a word to anyone. No broker, no gemer, not the queen, nobody can know. Our lives depend on it. Even if you think you can trust someone, they might kill you anyway."

The ship split through the clouds as fast as its little twin propellers could. Wind was now starting to enter crosswise to their sails, which needed to be retracted. They had to return to their rightful course with only engine power.

As the sourcelight turned dark, Alanea set their bearing toward the nearest pirate-neutral port. They would need supplies, new hands that could keep a secret, a gemer, and answers. The stone had chosen them for reasons they did not yet understand. It had forced them into something larger and more dangerous. If it was powerful enough to communicate that it needed protection, perhaps it was capable of protecting itself. In the smuggling hold beneath a dark cloth, the mysterious gemin waited, beating in time with the ship's engine.