Touchstone 1 - Stray

getting himself under control.
    Of course, that immediately made me watch it myself, jumping straight to the last bit I remembered: closing the right half of the door. It’s highly disorienting to watch things you don’t remember doing. I only remember stepping forward, don’t remember at all looking into the interior of the Pillar. Most of it was taken up by the central core, with empty space curving off to the right and left. There was a rounded rectangular hatch just about at head height on the internal column, with two big white levers set into the stone below it. By big I mean almost as long as my leg, sticking out of grooves that ran to the right around the Pillar’s core.
    The hatch was designed to slide, and was open a crack on the right hand side, making a brilliant white vertical line from which aether drifted down. And as I looked up at that, something interrupted the vertical line, a few black spots blocking the brightness. Fingertips, claws, curving around the hatch from the inside. Then it pulled it open, the movement accompanied by a shifting rumble from the levers, and everything went white.
    A black hand shape appeared in view: my hand, trying to block out the light and not really succeeding. And then I must have gone forward, under the main intensity of the blast into the drifting mist of aether falling down from it. The top lever had gone left as the hatch opened, and I seem to have tried pushing it back to the right but wasn’t succeeding. Then I looked upward, into the spotlight glare of white coming out of the hatch, and there was this barely visible human shape, just the head, and shoulders, the arm hooked over the edge of the hatch, reaching. The scene dropped down abruptly – I must have ducked – and then moved right, pushing the lower lever instead of the top, with an accompanying rumble which was loud enough to suggest huge boulders grinding together, stopping with a nicely final thud followed by a hiss and a howling wind noise. The only thing I was looking at, at this point, was the floor, really close to my face. I levered myself partially upright, turned toward the door, and dropped again; must have fallen flat on my ass. Then my hand came up and covered my left eye and lifted away to show rather a lot of red and I bent forward, the scene becoming barely visible. I guess all that aether wasn’t doing enough to block whatever having your eye self-destruct feels like. The last moments of the mission log don’t show much, because I’d closed my eyes, but you can hear me panting and then I say, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light?” and let out this confused-sounding laugh and then the log stops abruptly.
    “Glad don’t remember that,” I said, after a moment. Maze had stopped looking upset, but Zee had taken his place: not so angry, but eyes wide and mouth pale. “Is thing in Pillar same Lights Rotation?”
    “Cruzatch,” Maze said, and you could hear the hate in his voice, and see him make the effort to put it aside. The word means “burning”, with overtones of destruction.
    “There are several spaces they appear, and they also roam. They’re not the only human-form Ionoth we encounter, not the only ones which intelligently react to us. But we have – for a long time there has been discussion about the level of their awareness of the Setari, and whether they retain and learn from previous encounters with us.”
    “The last massive to break into real-space was accompanied by a Cruzatch,” Zee explained. “Almost as if it was riding it. Guiding it.” She sighed. “The idea of there being organisation among the Ionoth is not accepted by many.”
    And certainly hadn’t been mentioned in any of the stories and movies I’d so far seen. “Organised not, that one bloody annoying. What happen it?”
    Maze made an equivocal motion with one hand. “No sign. We think you closed the intake of the Pillar’s power stream. We’re not entirely certain why all the aether was pulled back, but the entire Pillar seems to have shut down as a result.” He smiled at the expression on my face. “No need to look like that: it’s what we would have tried eventually, if not so soon, and the only thing we’ve really lost is the chance to study the Pillar in more depth. Everyone’s off-rotation, only clearing near-space, because it seems that the surrounding spaces are shifting, and we can’t trust the gates. But you did well, Caszandra. And were very