Page 81 of The Bound Zodiac

We set up a sort of triage camp in the plaza just inside the city walls. Blankets, cots, and whatever supplies the Ophis could spare from their own stores. The Assembly members tried to take charge, obviously, but since most of them couldn’t even talk to the locals, that went about as well as a screen door on a submarine.

The Order elders stepped up, and for that, I would be forever grateful. Tala immediately started organizing people. Malakai paired up with one of the Ophis lieutenants to coordinate shelters, food, water, security, the whole nine yards. I did my best to stay out of the way and not pass out.

Nobody expected me to do anything in those first seventy-two hours. I think the city’s council assumed I was some kind of holy relic, because every time I tried to stand, a half-dozen people would rush over and physically put me back down.

I tried to make myself useful anyway. It was a compulsion, maybe. Or just guilt, since I’d been the one to drag everyone through the portal in the first place. But even the simplest things left me gasping, like carrying water, helping patch wounds, even just answering questions.

Most of the time, it was enough to just lean on one of my guys and try not to let my knees buckle. The city itself was unreal. Aurelian operated like something halfway between a medieval kingdom and a sci-fi utopia. There were no cars. No engines. No computers, unless you counted the weird crystal tablet things the locals carried that glowed with lines of unreadable text. Everything ran on magic. Literally everything. Lights, heating, water, all of it.

The Cree were everywhere. Massive horse-creatures that were way bigger up close than they looked from the cliffside. The Aelari rode them through the city, up ramps, across bridges suspended god-knows how high, sometimes even into buildings. There were stables built right into the ground floors of the towers, and the mounts were apparently incredibly intelligent and revered. Most of the riders had a familiar bond with their Cree.

There was an emperor too. I didn’t meet him, but everyone talked about him, or at least gestured vaguely in the direction of the palace at the center of the city.

The Aelari councils, the actual power behind the throne, were a different story. Each council ran their own city, or sector, or cluster, depending on how many people lived there. Aurelian had its own, but there were seventeen other major cities scattered across the continent. All of them operated independently, but they communicated via these insane crystal tech pillars that shot beams of light into the sky.

The language situation was a nightmare. Not just one, but five different dialects that morphed depending on what end of Aurelian you were standing in. The Order members who’d studied the old tongues were recruited instantly as translators, but even they could only get by on context and hand signals with some of the dialects. Most of the refugees from Earth had zero luck communicating with the locals, except by drawing pictures or shouting very loudly, which, shockingly, did not work any better.

I spent a lot of time feeling like a lost tourist. Every day, I’d wake up to the sight of the twin suns rising over the city, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with myself. On good days, I helped with the wounded, or sat in on meetings between the Order elders and the city council, offering my opinion whenever someone thought to ask. On bad days, I just… tried not to fall apart.

Most of my shield was finding their own rhythms. Jamie kept mostly to himself, which wasn’t a surprise, but he spent a lot of time with Gretchen exploring the spires. Lucas and Rowan were obsessed with the way magic ran water through the city, and spent an entire week shadowing the Aelari engineers as they tuned the crystals in the aqueduct towers. Percy, Aiden, and Eris stuck close to me, which was both sweet and a little claustrophobic, but I think they were genuinely worried I might collapse if they left me alone for five minutes.

Phoenix was a goddamn rock star from day one. The locals adored him, probably because he could make their gardens bloom by just walking past. The crystal bridges were lined with living walls of emerald vines and massive, iridescent flowers that shimmered in the sunlight. Every single time he walked the main avenue, people would literally stop to watch. I guess it was pretty rare to see a Taurus off of their home planet these days, so he was a spectacle,

Theo and Draco got sucked into the Order’s meetings with the Aelari scholars, because of course they did. My dad joined them a lot too, his professor brain going absolutely haywire as we essentially had to rewrite everything we thought we knew about the home worlds.

The Aelari had no intention of keeping secrets. They wanted to share everything, and thank fuck for that because we were going to have to figure out a way back to Earth soon to collect the rest of our people… those who wanted to leave Earth, that is. Some of the refugees might even want to go back, and they had every right to.

The more we learned about what had actually happened to Aelari society after the First Crossing, the less sense any of it made. The Assembly had always framed the home worlds as these haunted, ruined graveyards. Dead planets.

Yeah, no. The Assembly had no fucking clue.

The Order elders started putting the pieces together. In the beginning, it was a translation nightmare. Half the words the locals used for basic concepts didn’t even exist in Order lexicons. They didn’t call themselves the Aelari, for starters. Here, it was “Allari,” and the inflection shifted depending on the dialect.

Ophis wasn’t “Ophiuchus,” but “Ophiia” or “Ophera” depending on whether you were talking about the person or the magic. Even “assembly” was just a word they’d picked up from interacting with us.

The day we figured out what really happened after the First Crossing, our whole world shifted, quite literally.

Seraphine was a council leader, and a rider. She quickly learned how to communicate using our language, but it was choppy, and Tala translated most of it. She was the one who told us the story of the fall of the home worlds.

“Our oldest records say the world was ending. The bane came, and everything was death, and the sky itself was torn apart. The Ophera gathered the survivors, called the last Portal, and our people were evacuated. But not everyone left. Those who could not reach the Portal, like the weak, the sick, the children. They hid, and the leaders who remained, my ancestors among them, led a retreat into the deep underground safe havens. They closed the doors and waited.”

“It was centuries before our ancestors were able to come to the surface. The records are incomplete. The bane hunted us, even below ground. But eventually, they left. We came back to the surface, thinking we were the last.”

That’s why they never searched. Never opened a portal to Earth. If you spend centuries underground, generations passing, all the old stories morph into tales. Even if you had a record, even if you had an archive, so many details get misconstrued. And when you come back up, what do you find? Ruins. Maybe a handful of your own, survivors so changed by the experience they don’t even recognize themselves. You build new houses from the shells of the old. You start again.

That’s what they’d done. Every shield team, every axis, every goddamn tradition we’d been raised on, all of it had been invented or re-invented in isolation.

I’d asked about their armies, whether or not they had shield teams the way we did. Someone to protect the defenseless now that they knew what they were up against.

“We do not call them that. We have entire companies of warriors who share bonds, but we bond for battle, not for life. Our… academies…as you call them, are for war training. Every Allari serves for a portion of their lives as children and into their young adult years. Ophis are trained from early childhood.”

“What about contact with the other twelve worlds?” Tala had asked.

“When the old portal routs were rediscovered, we found the other worlds had done the same. Allari everywhere survived in safehavens, then rebuilt.”

They’d survived. Adapted. Maybe they’d suffered different wounds, but the people were still here. And they were united not by paranoia or bureaucracy or political bullshit, but by a shared promise to never let the bane tear us apart again.

I must have dozed off on the balcony, because when I blinked my eyes open, the world was dark and the sky was the wildest thing I’d ever seen. The stars were bright and abundant. Not the familiar constellations of Earth, but new ones. I wondered for a moment, if I might be staring at Earth’s sun in the distance right now and not even know it.