Page 1 of Grounded (Convergence #1)
The scream of a breach alarm jolted Chief Liria Drask from her daydreams. Her stare went straight to the cacher screen before her and widened at what she saw.
“Oh, fuck,” Liria muttered.
Fingers flying over the keys of the cacher control panel, Liria tried to recover the converged barrier they had just lost. On the screen, a pack of Nethren scrambled over the rocky ground of the pit and lifted their faces to the sky.
Sunshine gleamed off metal—not just their projectile weapons and armor, but also themselves.
Attention caught by that gleam, Liria glanced at the screen, but then her glance turned into a stare.
And locked with another stare—that of a Nethren.
An Aethari team was already targeting the Nethren man, and still, he didn't move, just continued to stare at the camera.
Most of the Nethren's face was covered in a full-tech helmet—no glow of magic found anywhere on him.
As magical as it seemed that metal gears, tubes, and panels were as much a part of him as flesh, bones, and blood, with entire limbs made of metal, there was nothing—absolutely nothing—magical about the man. As it was with the entire Nethren race.
Looking at the half-machine man, it was hard for Liria to remember that the Nethren had once been Medeans.
Unlike the Aethari, whose only un-Medean feature was their wings, the Nethren were monsters.
Men and women melded with machinery. Not through manipulation but birth.
Yeah, their poor women had to give birth to partially metal babies.
As if childbirth weren't hard enough. But at the moment, that wasn't what made Liria shudder.
It was the way this one looked at the cam, as if he could see through its lens and down the wires to her. It was just fucking creepy.
Liria wouldn't be surprised to learn that Nethren could tap into the vid feed and direct it into their eyes.
They were born of technology after all. Even though Liria was an excellent converger, her talent for merging magic and tech didn't give her absolute knowledge of either.
No one knew what kind of advancements technology gave the Nethren.
Only the Nethren, and they weren't sharing.
The Nethren warrior let out a roar and fired his projectile weapons into the air at the circling Aethari.
But even with his stare focused elsewhere, Liria couldn't immediately look away.
A shiver ran down her spine. There was something about him that really spooked her.
It must be his eyes. Slate Gray. Sharp and cold.
Analyzing without emotion. Nothing unusual there, not for a Nethren.
And yet, that cold, calculating stare unnerved Liria.
This wasn't your average Nethren. He was larger than the others.
They rallied behind him at his roar. Probably their leader.
The polished steel horns on his helmet might be an indication of his status, not just a way to deflect energy pulses.
Liria watched him duck and dive before leaping up in surprisingly graceful movements.
Yes, those were the actions of a seasoned soldier.
But Liria had seen hundreds of Nethren like him.
There was no reason for this one to unnerve her.
Another glint caught her eye—this one more subtle than steel.
Gold instead of gray. It was the Nethren's hair, sticking out from the bottom of his vicious helmet.
In the shadows, it appeared brown. But that was the way of shadows; they hid the truth.
Sunlight revealed its real color—golden blond.
Why was that even more disturbing? Monsters shouldn't have pretty hair.
It was just wrong. But gold was a metal too.
And all the metals bowed to Nethren command.
It was their reward for finding the Source of Technology.
Once, there had been only Medeans. Living on the surface of Para, the original race learned to harness the power flowing down from the Source of Magic and the energy seeping up from the Source of Technology.
Merging the two took great skill but resulted in magnificent advancements for the Medean race.
The talent was called convergence, and it became a part of them, infusing their very existence.
Every Medean learned to converge. Most didn't reach the level of mastery Liria had, but all could do it.
Of course, some people are never satisfied with what they have. It doesn't matter how wondrous the world is; they will reach for more. The direction of their reach determined the fate of Para.
Some Medeans reached for the sky. They used converged machines called erials to fly up into the firmament and search for the origin of the magical energy that added fuel and fantasy to convergence.
Higher and higher they went, and when their erials stuttered and failed, they created celestial orreries—converged flying vehicles aligned with the stars that could withstand the dangerous firmament conditions.
As they went up, other Medeans reached down in search of the origin of the scientific energy that created the mechanical part of convergence.
Just like those who set their eyes on the sky, these Medeans created incredible convergences to take them below—the Wyrm Engines—colossal serpentine machines that could maneuver through soil and stone like butter.
They followed the trail of scientific energy down into the bowels of the world, digging deeper and deeper toward Para's core.
Both groups succeeded. In a way.
The Sources of Magic and Technology were found. But clinging to one cut them off from the other. Both groups were altered so greatly that they were transformed into new races—the Aethari and the Nethren.
Liria could still remember pictures from the history books she studied as a child.
The image of the Medeans in ancient erials plummeting out of the sky had affected her greatly.
To this day, recalling those pictures made her heart race.
All those bodies falling. Limbs reaching up and backs bowed down.
The images that followed those should have reassured Liria and banished any specter of tragedy—men and women bathed in the Source of Magic's light, feathers sprouting from their backs, and then with fully formed wings spread wide in flight.
No one had died that day. They had fallen but never hit the ground.
All were accepted by the Source of Magic and given the gift of flight.
But Liria knew that wasn't exactly true.
Gifts are given without a demand for compensation.
Magic gave, but then it took. Same as Technology.
When the Source of Tech was found within the heart of Para, it claimed all the Medeans who had gone looking for it.
Technology fused them with the most durable material the planet could offer—metal.
It gave them strength and resilience. But it also claimed them entirely, banishing all the magic inside them.
Just as all technology was evacuated from the Aethari.
And so, the price paid by both races was the same—convergence.
Back in the pit, an Aethari dove, light streaming from the long metal barrel of his pulser, directed at the blond Nethren.
The Nethren dove but immediately rolled up to his knees to fire little pieces of metal out of his weapon.
While the Aethari were still welcome on the surface of Para and much was known about their culture, the Nethren couldn't be allowed out of their subterranean cities, and so all that was known about them was what was gathered during these battles.
Too long on the surface, and a Nethren's very essence would taint everything within a ten-yard radius.
They were the antithesis of magic—a living poison that could destroy anything magical by their mere presence.
Even a Nethren's bite was poisonous, paralyzing the magic in the other races.
For the winged Aethari who were mostly magic, that meant death.
Which is why Liria's job was so damn important.
If the Nethren escaped their underground caverns, they could kill all the magic on the planet, and that, in turn, might kill the Aethari.
Although the Sources resided above and below, they both gave freely of their energy, similar to the sun.
They flowed up and down to the surface of Para—tech infusing all that was physical, while magic gathered in streams called ley lines that hovered above the soil.
Liria had never seen a Nethren come in contact with a ley line, but it was believed the impact would kill both the Nethren and the line.
Those lines were repositories of magical energy that could be tapped by any Medean.
But if a Nethren were to physically touch a line, they'd die. And the line would die with them.
There were pits all over Para—entrances to Nethren tunnels that led to their caverns.
These pits marked the sites where the Nethren first dug into the world.
And every single one of them was sealed with converged barriers.
Not only that, they were also guarded by fortresses full of trained Medeans and Aethari who kept the barrier working and killed any Nethren who dared to crawl out of their hole.
Chief Liria Drask, along with her team, was responsible for guarding Pit 26 within the Brakfeld Fortress compound.
At least, that's what she did when the converged equipment wasn't malfunctioning.
“Come on.” Liria kept pumping in commands through the cacher panel, directing the magic inside the technology as she calibrated the equipment. “Converge, damn you!”