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A Passion for Silver Angels

RIV - THEN

T he terrors never left him. The ghouls walked by him day and night through the darkened corridors of the underground tunnels.

They transformed from ghosts to shadowy creatures with thin profiles, creeping along the rocky walls.

They told him tales in voices that wailed, moaned, and screamed, thumping their chests in feverish song. But he sometimes thought it was simply the wind, his only companion in the otherwise deserted underworld shafts of Eden II.

Lost deep in the underground crevices, he hunched himself against the lunar winds powerful enough to shear skin off, seeking solace and loneliness all at the same time.

He’d escaped the others and their platitudes, appeals, and offers to help because he was beyond help.

His agony was so absolute, so deep that to escape it, he longed to walk to the edge of the sands and throw himself off the moon.

Instead, he’d become hopelessly lost, tangled up in the labyrinth of tiny winding arterials, tight as a duck’s kiss in others, littered with crumbling rocks, koko paraphernalia, rubbish, and hopelessness.

He fell beside a mound of abandoned furniture, boxes, and silver rocks, where he burrowed himself into the silver regolith, shaking with fever.

His shaky fingers tried to close the oversized jacket around his almost naked body, but it did little to keep the howling, shearing, cold wind that whipped up around him.

He thought he was about to die and sensed his soul’s desire to creep out of his body towards the outer embrace of space.

There was still a sliver of his existence that wanted to survive, and it shouted, screamed, and railed at the poison inside him that was turning his locks as silver as the regolith he lay on.

So the fight for his sentience continued, vicious and unrelenting.

Until she arrived.

His silver-haired angel.

She leaned over his broken and battered body and touched him with hands that warmed his frozen skin.

She spoke, her voice soft and earnest, urging him to drink the water she pressed against his cracked, broken lips.

She wrapped her small, skinny body around him and shared what little heat she had.

Feeding him tidbits of meat and bread from the folds of her robes, most of which he spat out and rejected.

She sang to him, sweet and husky, in an unfamiliar song with haunting words he didn’t comprehend, yet was drawn to as they began to heal his soul.

Lured by her siren-like potency, he turned his spirit towards the light, away from the darkness that had consumed it.

When he managed to stand on his ravaged legs, she encouraged him with smiles and tender words to rise from where he’d fallen.

She guided him through darkened tunnels and into a vast underground marketplace packed with sweet-and-sour chili noodle bowl stalls, underground speakeasies, sunken casinos, and tunnel rat bars.

Twas where red-eyed, empty soul figures sat listlessly chugging down synth-hol by the bucket load.

Her hand clutching tight, she led him away from temptation and into a rabbit warren of shacks before stopping at one of the Pika settlements on the edge of Pika City.

She welcomed him into her tiny hovel, where he fell to the ground exhausted. The humble dwelling was barely a hovel, with one sleeping pad and electromagnetic battery heaters to boil water.

There, they stayed for days as she nursed him through the worst of his hellscape. She laid blankets over him and tried to feed him with soup and noodles, but his body, burning from the inside, rejected it all.

The detox was brutal - his body shook with chills, his fever spiked, and he lost fluids through all his orifices. He lost consciousness several times and barely registered her presence, so lost was he to the pain and agony seeping out of him.

Finally, his body won the battle over the drug-laced venom inside him, and he fell into a deep sleep.

When he woke, he found a carafe of vegetable and rehydrated protein soup, dry day-old bread, and warm clothes in a pile. He ate what she’d provided, wondering where she’d gone.

He had no name for her, just a face. One he would never forget, for it had been burned into his psyche throughout his nightmares.

She had become the only beam of hope that had urged him from the brink of death and defeat.

He had etched her into his soul, from the soft, long feathers that grew from the nape of her neck under her silver, metallic river of hair to her lilac eyes.

His mind’s eye bucket load the sweet, soft pink lips, the high cheekbones, and the unusual freckles across her alabaster skin.

Her brows, too, were burnished, and he wondered whether she had been a victim of the silver death whose addicts were characterized by their hair turning chrome.

Nada. She was not a koko addict. She was too pure, too ethereal for that shit.

Where she came from was a mystery. She also muttered in her sleep in a language he’d never heard before.

She had to be from another world he was unfamiliar with.

What intrigued him most about her was what lay above those stunning purple beams of light - a stone embedded in the centre of her temple.

It seemed a precious jewel that glowed with a spectrum of colors.

She kept it hidden under the fall of her bangs and a wrap.

He only glimpsed it one morning when she had leaned over him during a fever so furious he’d screamed out.

She’d rushed to him, and her head covering had slipped, revealing her gemstone.

When his fevered eyes set on it, he felt a hit, a pure jolt of energy from it that washed over him with such love and feeling that he gasped, and somehow, his fever eased.

He’d wondered what it was and who she was, but he had no answers.

He only knew he wanted to see her again and thank her for saving his life.

So he stayed in her hovel, feeling more robust and full of life by the hour until she returned.

He heard the sound of the shack entrance sliding open.

Her presence followed, lighting up the room.

Fokk, she was beautiful.

Her eyes widened in delight at seeing him sitting up in bed.

They lit up like an open sky studded with a million jagged diamonds, too many to count, in a wash of lilac shades too beautiful to name.

She clapped her hands together, her face suffused with joy. ‘You’re better.’

She sounded so happy he couldn’t help but smile at her.

Apart from his Sable brothers and his Eden Guard instructors, no one else across Pegasi had ever cared whether he lived or died before.

She darted to his side, her hair falling in a silver river to her waist. He’d never seen anything like it.

He parted his dry lips and spoke for the first time in weeks. ‘ Sante . For taking care of me.’

She smiled, her manner genuine and trusting. ‘Anytime, stranger. What’s your name?’

He shared it without holding back, discerning that he could rely on her. ‘Riv Sable.’

She smiled, her lips parting with such sweetness he gaped as he reached her hand out. ‘K’élisa Djan. But call me élisa.’

Her voice was like a cool breeze when Alphetraz’s stars were in close adjacency on a hot lunar day.

It resonated deep inside his soul and reverberated around him, making his hair stand on end and goosebumps erupt over his skin.

He took that soft hand in his, and at that moment, Riv’s heart was lost to her for eternity.

His entire core took a free fall, tumbling, soaring, and cascading into a mind-blowing connection to her and only her.

She must have felt it, too, because her eyes dilated, and she froze, keeping his hand in hers.

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Riv.’

He smiled slowly, then caught his breath as she sealed their silent connection by leaning forward and kissing him at the corner of his upturned mouth.

In that instant, they fell into an unspoken promise—a soul bond of meteoric levels.

Unless élisa needed to work from that day on, they never left each other’s side.

They cooked, read, slept, woke, and walked the dark subterranean world of Eden II together.

Luna Pika was a volatile place with tribal and gang-affiliated tensions.

The informal settlement was divided into twenty densely populated ‘habitats’, including East Pikani, West Village, Pikani South, and North Pika. Most were at ‘war’ with each other for the meager resources underground.

This was a harsh world where the law of Pika-eat-Pika took centre stage. Where senseless murder, breathtaking violence, and wild lawlessness ruled.

The Pika gangs ran drug rings, gambling dens, and speakeasies, where the residents, half of whom had employment on the surface, spent their earnings.

They worked among Eden II’s flourishing hotels and restaurants at the spaceport as unskilled labor or space porters.

The Edenite companies paid them well; however, the vices of the tunnels were irresistible, and many stayed mired in poverty after succumbing to the lure of the hideous koko narcotic or the alluring yet intensely addictive nebula dust.

Others were gamblers. Still, others were traumatized refugees from Alloria and Falasia who’d found it challenging to fit in with the ordered life on the surface. It didn’t help that the drug epidemic had turned many young Pikas into koko heads, who were a menace to the peace on the rock.

Despite the peril surrounding them, Riv and élisa worked hard to make their tiny home as comfortable as possible.

When he recovered, Riv found more boards to reinforce the synth walls.

They laid synth hide over the dirt floor. They covered their walls with colorful posters, prayers, and rugs on the floor.

Their relationship blossomed into a passionate, mind-blowing union.

Riv had never met anyone like élisa and was so grateful for her love that he showered her with affection.

They touched at every opportunity.

In time, they sealed their union with such wild, passionate sex he nearly passed out the first time.

They were intimate every day, and their lovemaking so flamed they felt their souls fly into the heavens every time, their ardor for each other almost combusting their young hearts.

Riv’s curiosity about her background only grew. Yet she never shared where she’d come from and how she’d arrived on Eden II.

While she let him see her naked beauty, she was stubborn about keeping her head wrap on.

One night, he touched her temple and gave her a silent, questioning look.

Her face shut down. ‘I can’t speak about it. I won’t.’

He saw tears pool in her eyes and moved to reassure her, wrapping his arms around her. ‘My love, you don’t ever have to.’

‘It may have to be that way. Always.’

He knew she was of no race he was familiar with, but her past and origins seemed out of the question.

He wondered if covering up her forehead was a religious expectation, but he dismissed the idea, for she’d never shown any signs of devotion to a particular faith.

He vowed always to love her no matter how dark her secret was. He indulged her request for privacy, grateful to even have a sliver of her essence in her life.

So he kept silent about insisting on knowing who she was or where she’d come from. Later, this would be his biggest regret.

Their budding romance flourished into full-blown love. One that nourished them both.

With élisa’s cooking and the delicious treats she smuggled from the small marketplace stall she worked at, Riv’s hollow cheeks soon filled out.

A fact that élisa seemed to appreciate.

‘You are so beautiful,’ she whispered to him one night after a particularly passionate lovemaking session. ‘You are magnificent. I love your silver eyes. And your face seems chiseled from granite, almost as if sculpted by a master. But most of all, I love your voice. It’s what called out to me and made me find you in the tunnels. It’s so lush and yet so low, like a haunting wind whispering over the lunar plains.’

His voice was undoubtedly one of a kind.

It was a resounding, hoarse rasp with a resonant rustle that he’d never managed to control. He could alter it slightly, but it was the only aspect of his physicality that he could not transform.

Not that he tried. Since finding freedom on Eden II, he’d been loath to dabble in his meta-transformation abilities.

He couldn’t even find it in himself to tell her about his horrific experiences with the crats. He focused instead on living for the future they would build together.

Nonetheless, he blushed under his pale, silver skin at her words. ‘You are the beauty, élisa. Not I.’

For he was beholden to her entire being, from her silver hair that flowed like water across her shoulders, which seemed like an ethereal glow had lighted it, to her lilac eyes, that seemed to pierce his soul and expose everything within.

Her body was a marbled sculpture of lean lines and soft curves. Her lips were a silky abyss that devoured his soul whole.

His malaíka tasted of sweet wine and sensuality, which became his new addiction.

They made love almost every day, Riv delighting himself in finding new ways to make her scream in ecstasy.

Riv finally ventured out of the underground ghetto and the nest of love he and élisa had built and reunited with his Sable brothers.

They were eking out an existence in Old Town Eden II, at the edge of the Pikani settlements. There, a sea of synth-board shacks lined against each other held thousands of Pikas crammed into tiny rooms.

His fellow Riders lived in a thinly walled hovel, existing on one meal daily.

Here, survival had been rough, lean, and scrappy; every hour, a struggle to survive.

All he and his Sable brothers dreamed of was a good life - not one of material splendor, grand homes and shiny flyers but a trouble-free existence, free of war, crats and the endless grind of poverty.

They lurked on corner streets, joking, playing, reveling in their freedom from the crats - the beings who’d kidnapped and held them hostage for over five years while torturing them without mercy.

United in their pain, the five men were determined to work together in a close brotherhood to overcome their past.

Kainan worked the underground and made deals to offer protection to local traders and entrepreneurs, shielding them from gang shake-downs.

Zane kept them alive by hawking watches and jewelry from a case on the ground.

Kage got into the kapo circuit, wrestling and fighting in the local kupiga dens, bringing home bags of cash from his wins.

Alongside Xion, Riv made daring raids on passing pirate cruisers, freeing enslaved people freighted from planets such as Alloria and reselling any stolen goods they found to help rehome the refugees.

He and Kage also started pulling apart the ship they’d stolen from the crats, studying its tech and components while integrating data into their neural nodes. Soon, they had enough of a schematic to start on ship-building prototypes of their own.

However, building ships was expensive, so Zane put his keen strategic and business mind into playing the markets.

In time, he was one of the top resource traders in all of Pegasi and secured the schills they needed to kick off their ship-building endeavor.

Elated as their business ventures grew, the five men consolidated themselves into The Sable Group, a legal entity headquartered in Eden II.

They celebrated their progress with drinks at the many kuratina bars and, later, tracked along the roofs of Eden II to the spaceport.

Where Riv and his brothers lay on their backs looking up at the stars and dreaming about taking over the rock for themselves.

Every evening, Riv met élisa outside the market stall where she worked and walked her home.

They laced their hands together and made plans for their future - one he couldn’t imagine without her.

For élisa was his dream girl, his silver-haired angel.

She’d saved him from the ghoulish, deathly clutches of koko . She’d given him hope.

She had him strung out and was now his past, present, and future.

Her care had given him a taste of the love so many spoke of. Love that the universe had deprived him of since birth.

So a year after meeting her, when Zane had handed him his Sable group share of the monthly takings, he wandered down to the bijou market, where he purchased a delicate ring with a small, shining diamond.

He knew it wasn’t much, but it was everything he had. And it was enough for élisa.

As they lay in bed together that night, Riv took her hand and slipped the ring onto her finger.

Tears welled in her eyes as she gazed at it, holding it up high above their heads, her lilac eyes shining with wonder.

‘K’élisa Djan,’ Riv said, his voice low and intense. ‘I love you more than anything in this world. Will you marry me?’

élisa’s tears fell onto her satin cheeks, and then she threw her arms around his neck, kissing him with all the passion in her soul.

‘ Naam , Riv Sable,’ she whispered. ‘I will marry you.’