Shedding

The vaporous clouds of Nereynis suggested some celestial smithy where work was done for the day. It was as if the sun had downed his hammer, and the agitations he beat out relentlessly through the labouring hours were ceased. A soaring ephemeral skyscape which once undulated and fumed suddenly held at an all but total still, save for the gradual cooling by which its last tints of brilliant gold assumed those more substantial bronze and copper hues which had already taken possession of the depths. Even in a heavenly forge however, light and heat were visitors of markedly different conduct, one favouring the fast flit while the other made no hurry to depart. Long after colour had forsaken the firmament, Nereynis nights stayed sultry.

For now though, the smouldering dome still arched overhead and its likeness shimmered brush-stroke for brush-stroke from the surface of the sea, an illusory rendering in blazing oils of inverse antipodes plunging as many fathoms as the canopy was high. Obliquely through the equator a vast polygonal silhouette imposed itself, anticipating the imminent hour when its die-cut outline and clear sharp angles would melt outward upon the realm of ember etching them and subsume all into warm black nocturne. From the uppermost plateau of this mighty shape a flag flew, and sufficient ambient sunlight lingered in the sky behind to make of it a dark beige transparency spanned by an ochre teleportation-effect motif.

So stood The Flash Club Embassy at Grindopolis under the encroaching dusk. Straight stylish stretches of pavement and stairway connecting a complex of bulwarks along the colony’s coastal rim were lost to uniform shadow, but for the very outermost turret which might yet be seen. Tonight, this appeared as unto a small foreground flourish meant to lend the giant vista its proper dimensions. Little more than an observation-point, it was mostly square window looking back over ocean at the embassy’s frontage. Beneath its awning two tiny tunic-clad Mini-Flashes were sitting quiet, girl and boy.

And only she, observed Joe, set this scene apart from a legacy of archetypes thus beheld throughout untold ages and every dominion here among these most ancient of stars.

She, or rather they, Joe corrected himself. What the pair of Mini-Flashes were in the process of becoming to each other was what was new, for therein lay the potential to overturn galactic expectations unshaken for millennia. Yet even amid these times of change, and even against a backdrop which did not physically exist a week ago, those long traditions Joe had glimpsed on his day at the old Flash Club archive persisted. How many generations of Mini-Flashes had sat like the young couple of tonight, sheltered by the body to which they belonged, gazing out on the prospects it afforded? No matter the upheavals which doubtless lay ahead, those noble and enduring values must not be allowed to perish. For what The Flash Club had become to this quadrant, the cause of The Four Heroes was destined to be, as they themselves bore witness when first they set foot in a Nottingham centuries after their own.

Neetra moved nearer to him without speaking. She loved it when he talked like this. Ever since she was a little girl, it had made her toes tingle.

The unconscionable acts Lightning committed as Flash Club leader required no introduction. Yet to study the old archive was to better understand his accomplishments within the context of his crimes. During a lawless era, he alone had extended an at least ostensibly benign presence to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Whatever that Flash Club in and of itself might have been, it must not be forgotten that the only power-blocs of comparable scope were the empires of Space-Screamer, Ungus, Toothfire. There was differency between those conquerors’ ambitions for the quadrant, Joe commented with a smile, and ensuring the rules of Flashball were the same on every planet where it was played. Though the particular edifice he and Neetra faced was almost literally a thing of yesterday, it was safe to suppose that somewhere behind its lines of tall windows stretched a banqueting-table identical to countless others of far more ancient embassies and bastions across the constellations. In such halls at the heart of The Flash Club’s golden age, glasses might be raised and each dignitary would know that what that toast stood for was ubiquitous, from Landonian border-territories on the outer orbit of Mnulx to gaseous gloom and perpetual night deep in Dexon’s Nebula, from the Green Moon of Owioo to glittering Merehpolis, and from the lonely shores of Acheldama to the very verges of the Seegs.

Joe admitted he never met Lightning. Neetra had done so, and her experiences of him were far from favourable. Flashtease too had ultimately seen his once-leader for what he was, but it was no mark against their Mini-Flash friend that when he and The Four Heroes met, he had loved everything his Flash Club represented. Rather, that spoke of certain qualities Lightning had embodied and which were communicable to one so pure of spirit. Those principles, it was to be hoped, Storm-Sky would recognise and defend. And if he did, Joe went on, none other than Neetra herself was to be thanked for it. Blushing would not make it any less so, he laughed. For on assuming command of The Flash Club when its glories seemed at their most faded, she orchestrated a seamless transition of its heritage from the pre-Solidity past to the present epoch of peace.

The Mini-Flash boy they were watching stood and stretched, showing faded glories that were not seamless, but still more than gaudy enough in the subdued light. “That’s a bit like Flashtease,” Neetra added.

Joe immediately agreed it was, and Neetra decided not to dwell on why they should both be thinking of him at such a time, while their male Mini-Flash made a gallant gesture towards helping his team-mate down from the window-ledge only to find she was too high up for him to reach. Neither the distance nor the dark could conceal from Neetra and Joe her smirk. Then she alighted by the same power which had allowed her to ascend, and she must have weighed no more than a parachuting speck of thistledown. Her glimmering white looked if anything less substantial than the dim warmth through which she moved.

Each Mini-Flash clutched up his or her discarded boots then linked their free hands and set off at a run, bare feet kicking syntho-sand from the strip of Grindo-made beach. Joe and Neetra at once joined hands too, cautiously, like any other pair of humanoid visitors out for an evening stroll. They needn’t have worried though. The Mini-Flashes hurried past their leader’s predecessor and the galaxy’s most controversial individual without so much as a sidelong glance. Maybe such a pair hand-in-hand was so unexpected a juxtaposition as to be able to hide in plain sight, or perhaps it was merely that the boy and girl had more important matters on their minds. Our hero and heroine turned and watched them, skipping light as moths to vanish beneath overhanging woodland. Their tunics so bloomed in back that at the last a lepidopteran dance was what they suggested, one colourful male chasing a female with gossamer wings, until the shades enfolded even these and left the world to Neetra and Joe.

“I never flashed mine off that much when I was her age,” she declared.

“No,” Joe replied, with the air of one trying very hard not to make the obvious rejoinder.

They followed the shore as it wove in and out of the treeline, passing through stretches of night roofed by dense leafy canopies where trunks rose from the surface of tidal pools. Some fast-growing moss had already gone to work on the bark, contributing to Grindopolis’s illusion of antiquity. Joe could picture dusty paths far older to his memories than this one, where every well-remembered bend disclosed intertwined arbours such as these. It was however at one of the bare crescents of coast, under a sky now heavy with alien stars, that he and Neetra held as the reddish sea burst open.

A great finned and barbelled warm-water dweller leapt as if making a bid for the throbbing far-off suns. Their light played on its heart-shaped scales which flicked through a spectrum spanning onyx to late summer apple-sheen, each facet changing independently of the rest, a living mosaic ruled by the icthus’s aerial turn. From the twirling track of these transcendent acrobatics shook moist globes of amber hue, microcosmic stellar bodies where fire and water met, and which hissed like hot rain as their element reclaimed them. The parent-creature’s opalescent eyes and wise humorous lips bestowed kingly courtesy on its two spectators, a magnanimous welcome to the world of which it was sovereign eons before any of their air-breathing kind was seen. Then with a finishing tuck it plunged to range again the planetary lifeblood, nature’s current and course, the spawning surges.

Which was when Neetra said:

“He didn’t mind that she can fly and he can’t. It didn’t seem to spoil the fun for him anyway. We’ve both figured out at least a little of how important they are for the coming conflict and the cause. I’m just saying, that might not be all you could learn from them.”

It was like her to know what was preying on Joe’s mind without any need to be told. No smile could have been more familiar than that which he gazed on now, for all that its wearer had grown since the time they alluded to earlier. There was however some other resemblance, one Joe couldn’t quite place at first. Something about what Neetra was doing with her little nose.

“I mean, I’ve always been a more powerful psychic than you,” she mentioned innocently. “All these years, I don’t think there’s been a single minute you’ve agonised over that.”

Then he had it. Grindotron, and his conversation with Iskira. She had not only looked as Neetra did now, but displayed comparable insights on the same theme. Then it struck Joe he should have thought of her sooner, since the advice she gave him that day had been for no moment other than this.

Like mother, like daughter. That was the real continuity.

Before long luminous cosmos was limited to a parallelogrammatic panel in the wall’s black plane, and Neetra’s hands roamed with care and compassion over Joe’s healing scars. Our heroine made a mental note to have a word with that twin sister of hers about sending murderous lackeys after her boyfriend. She’d waited long enough to have him here again with her like this, safe and whole. Benmor had already derailed their plans once, and if he messaged Neetra now and told her not to intervene in this either, she was going to take her telepathic senses off the hook.

Afterwards, when the swollen stars of Nereynis had cascaded into the sea, and an evaporated ocean was a misty halo round the world slowly resettling to drench like dew two breathing bodies, Joe lay with one arm on the peacefully sleeping Neetra. There was no longer any question she was better at this than he was. All that remained for Joe to wonder at was his ever having let it trouble him.

For to lie here thus was to know there was a way back, even from this galaxy. He had not been wrong about that tangled trail down by the overgrown pools. Joe was where the grass grew long and sunset maintained an eternal poise on the slanting rooftops and hazy trees of Nottingham’s horizon, where outspread boughs turned everything past the rockery to a green shady cave, and where windfall damsons rested dark and still among the dusky tussocks. All the universe stretched from this spot, for only here was calm assuredness there were no other destinations. It was the one true journey’s end. Those shadowed hedges behind were boundary to the deepest place it was possible to be.

Home. Joe should have gone a long time ago. Now at last he could think.