(Photo by Frank Cone)

Explosions in space make no sound. Fas, tumbling out of control, could only hear her own rapid breathing and pounding heart. In an attempt to calm herself, she began to chant. She wasn’t a sanctioned mage, and she doubted she’d have enough time to gather the needed magical energy required to perform even the simplest of things, but it gave her something to do, that she could control. Debris was all around her, colliding into her and threatening to rupture her suit. It felt like an eternity, but in truth only a few seconds could have elapsed before her booster pack kicked in and the automated stabilizers slowed and then stopped her spinning. It was then that Fas got a clear look at the full scope of the damage dealt to the transport ship she’d been on. The outer hull was all but got, blasted away by the initial barrage of missiles. Energy beams, fired from a dozen different satellites orbiting Isarch, were now cutting the ship apart. As each pocket of atmosphere on the ship was breached there came a sudden, albeit silent, rushing almost like an explosion as the gases rushed to escape. With every new breach came a new flood of debris…and bodies.

Another wave of missiles, fired from the planet’s surface, struck what remained of the transport ship, tearing the last few sections apart. The explosion scattered the debris field and Fas became pinned between two larger sections of the ships hull, careening down towards the planet. She’d heard from other soldiers who had survived incredibly intense and dangerous situations that a strange calm came over them and allowed them to think clearly through the chaos. Fas kept hoping for that calm to arrive.

The pieces of debris that held Fas were spinning, though not terribly quickly. Just fast enough that she caught glimpses of Isarch, each time closer than the previous revolution. The automated stabilizers in Fas’ booster pack kicked in once again. With the added mass of the hull fragments, it took much longer for them to stop the rotation. By that time, they were only moments away from striking the atmosphere and Fas had a clear view of the approaching planet.

Why couldn’t she have died on the ship? A swift death was certainly better than this prolonged terror. All of those hours she’d spent donning her armor, training to get as fast as she could at it. No one else had bothered to get much better than the basic requirement of five minutes. Of course, she’d be dead soon, burning up in the atmosphere. Such thoughts were of little comfort. The desire to live was overpowering to the point that, even with such impossible odds, Fas kept looking for a way to escape.

The first hint of air resistance began to show as Fas felt the change in velocity. At once the edges on the metal supports surrounding her began to heat up. Her suit would provide some protection at first but ultimately she’d be burned alive. In a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable, Fas activated the booster pack and began to rotate herself and the debris until the pieces of the hull were taking the brunt of the heat from reentry.

The red glow from the supports and her suit faded back to their normal colors while blinding plasma began to streak by on either side of her. Now it was the impact that she had to worry about, assuming the hull didn’t get burned away completely during reentry. Rotated as she was, not to mention the increasing plasma that was flaring up on all sides, she couldn’t see how close she was to the surface. Some suits were equipped with altimeters but hers wasn’t one of those. At most she figured she’d have a couple minutes before making landfall.

A faint aura began to rise up around Fas. She’d forgotten that she’d been chanting this whole time. It had been years since she’d last attempted to channel magic, since doing so would have earned her a life sentence, or worse. Magic was too unwieldy and dangerous to let anyone do it. She’d learned as a young child by watching and listening carefully to other mages and then testing things out when she was alone. She would have pursued a place among the mages but the military conscripted her before she had the chance.

The key to magic, as far as Fas had ever been able to discover, was having the right rhythm and tone. The words you chanted weren’t as important as was the intention you put behind them. The longer, more consistently you chanted, the greater power could be built up and thus do greater things. Fas knew that teleporting herself to the surface was out of the question. Even moving a solitary person more than a few feet would have required more time than she had to spare.

Her suit could protect her against a certain amount of force. If she could slow down her decent enough, she might just be able to survive the impact. She wasn’t very confident in her plan, but it was all that she had.

Taking a bit of the magical energy she’d built up, Fas peered through the hull and plasma in front of her so she could see how close she was from the ground. The curvature of the planet was still visible but only just. Fas knew better than to try focusing the magic into more than one task at a time so she withdrew her sight and instead began questing out for ways to use her magic to slow her decent. She couldn’t just turn the magic into wings or thrusters. Magic and technology worked in very different ways than one another and often worked poorly if at all when trying to mimic one another. Instead, Fas thought about how the density of the atmosphere interacted with the mass, surface area, and momentum of the debris. A less massive object with the same surface area would have lower momentum and thereby be easier to slow down, just like a leaf drifting through the air compared to a rock plummeting.

Chanting to the debris, Fas began to wick away its effective mass. She wasn’t actually changing the mass of the debris, just the amount of it that would interact for the time being. If she actually lowered the mass then it would be torn apart by the forces of reentry. At first it was hard to tell if it was working but soon enough the plasma began to thin, signifying that she was on the right track. She continued to chant, pouring more magic into it, until the plasma faded altogether. She was close enough to the ground now that she could see Isarch spreading out on both sides.

It was a delicate thing, chanting just enough to keep the debris from falling too quickly while not going too far and risk losing control. Already she’d channeled more magic and for a much longer period of time than she had ever done before and she was beginning to feel the strain. She’d heard mages talk about the toll the channeling takes and how long it took them to build up their endurance. With the strain came the increased chance for breaking the rhythm or losing the correct tone. If that happened then magical feedback would begin to build up. If left to continue, that feedback would begin manifesting unintended consequences which were almost always destructive and deadly.

Unable to continue, Fas had to stop chanting. The remaining magical energy she’d built up would continue to affect the debris until the power ran out. It was obvious to her that there wouldn’t be enough magic to get her down to the ground safely so she began, once again, to cast about for anything else she could do.

The booster pack wasn’t strong enough to affect the entire chunk of debris that she was trapped within, but if she could find a way to break away parts of it, she might be able to reduce the mass that way, making it so that there was less debris for her magic to affect. She couldn’t move very much within the debris, but soon she managed to get one of her arms free. With it, she was able to begin pulling and prying at the pieces nearest that side of her, working bits loose here and there. With a sudden lurch, a huge chunk broke away, freeing her entire left side. With her arm and leg working together, pushing against the debris in front of her, she began to shift the two main piece of hull that had been sandwiching her apart.

The horizon was rushing up all around her now and Fas gave it everything she had. Pain flared as muscles began to tear beneath the strain but still she pushed through. The magic ran out and her decent suddenly accelerated while at the same time she finally managed to force the two pieces apart, freeing herself. In the confluence of all these events, she was thrown free of the debris altogether. Her booster pack kicked in to stabilize her, but it was never designed to be used on a planet. The thrusters were intended for micro gravity only and could do little more than hold her steady as she fell.

All around her streaked other pieces from the ship, blazing through the atmosphere and striking the planet, marring the surface with countless little craters and everywhere the land was burning, smoke and heat rising up to meet her. There were just a few hundred feet left between her and the ground and she doubted she was going slow enough to survive the landing. In one last ditch effort, she chanted out as quickly and as loudly as she could. Her tone was clear and an aura blossomed around her right as the ground filled her vision.

Everything went dark.

Fas thrashed around, waving her arms and legs to feel that they were still there, that she was still alive and able to move. She opened her eyes yet still couldn’t see. She tried to move about, crawling on uneven and unstable ground. She moved to place her hand down only to discover there wasn’t any ground there to put her hand on. Too late to stop herself, Fas tumbled down, face first. She thought she’d fallen off a cliff but quickly struck the ground once again, this time it was solid and no longer uneven. Even though the fall was short, her face hurt terribly from the fall and it was then that she realized she wasn’t wearing her helmet anymore. In fact, now that she thought to check, she didn’t have on any of her armor. Her entire suit was gone.

“Conflagrator,” a muffled voice spoke from somewhere nearby.

“Hello?” Fas said, confused and overjoyed that someone else had survived. “Where are you? I can’t see.”

“Have you activated your room’s lights?” the voice replied.

Something clicked and light flooded into the room. Fas was still lying, face down on the floor, where she’d fallen out of her bed. Skith, still a Ka’Rak, stood in the doorway. The expressions on a Ka’Rak’s face were sometimes difficult to read but Skith seemed to be genuinely concerned. He hurried over to Fas and helped her up from the floor and then sat her down on the edge of her bed.

It was a dream, Fas realized. She often dreamed of that event, though certain details were often different. She’d never had the lasers in her dreams before, though they had been there in reality and weren’t a figment of her imagination. Rather than adding to the event, it seemed her mind wanted instead to slowly add back in the details, as if easing her back into the memories of that day.

“I’m fine,” Fas said at last. “I just had a dream and it took a moment to wake up.”

Skith shifted his weight, as though considering leaving but then changing his mind.

“Yes?” Fas prompted.

“You were shouting,” Skith said.

“Shouting?” Fas asked. Remembering dreams was often difficult for her and although she knew what she had been dreaming about she couldn’t quite remember what she would have shouted.

“More like chanting, actually,” Skith replied.

A chill ran through her. Had she been channeling magic in her sleep? She knew it was possible, having witnessed a mage doing just that early on in her military career. The aura was unstable and the mage had to be killed before they could channel any more and risk the lives of those around them.

“I don’t remember what I was dreaming about,” Fas lied. “Was there an aura?”

Skith shook his head and Fas let out a sigh of relief.

“I didn’t think there would be,” she said, “not being trained as a mage, but still…good to check.”

Skith nodded and then moved to leave the room. Fas considered calling him back but instead let him go. In times past she would have confided in him, shared more of her experiences from that day, but the Ka’Rak Skith was still too new to her. It had only been a day since the transformation and she hoped to have it reversed soon. Then she’d be able to tell him more.