I am a sword. At first the swinging, even from the running of that which carries me, is dizzying, disorienting. How can I focus my vision when I have no eyes? Around my legs…no. I have no legs. Around my hilt? I am grasped by a rough hand, greenish gray, sweaty, small but strong. He clings to me as though I am his life. And then, I hear him yell.

That means…

My vision faded then, and my eyes opened. The others were standing around me, and Gamon, one of my husbands, was there cradling my head in his hands, his large, golden wings shading my eyes from the bright sun above. I tried to smile, but I don’t think I quite managed it.

“Are you alright, Urassaya?” His voice was warm as he spoke to me, and in turn, it warmed my heart, which had grown cold from becoming steel. I forced myself to a sitting position and looked down at my hand, where I held the mostly shattered remains of the crude sword that I had become in my vision. With scorn, I tossed it to the side.

“Whatever they are,” I managed, “They came from beyond the edge of the world.”

Murmurs broke out among the rest of the scouting party. I could feel the accusations in their eyes as they stared down at me. Liar, those gazes said. You’re making up visions again, they silently screamed. Gamon held me tighter. He could feel me start to tense, but he was there for me. There was comfort in that, at least.

“Everyone, quiet,” said Prasert, our squad leader, before turning his focus back to me. Then he walked over and knelt down, looking me hard in the eyes. “Urassaya, there is nothing beyond the edge of the world,” he paused meaningfully, “as far as we know. Are you certain that you saw what you say you saw?”

With Gamon’s assistance, I forced myself to my feet. I was sore everywhere; the visions usually did that to me. Nothing makes your bones and muscles stiffer than becoming an inanimate object. I flexed my arms, my back, and my wings. “I couldn’t see what the thing was,” I admitted. “But I saw the outpost in the distance.”

“Which outpost?” Praset asked hurriedly.

“Sudthay Outpost,” I said. “And as the thing that carried that,” I pointed to the broken sword on the ground, “was running toward the outpost, the sun was directly behind Sudthay.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean…”

“The Cheatru was singing, Praset!” I yelled. The Cheatru was the morning bird. If it was singing, the sun must have been in the east. I hadn’t really heard the Cheatru in my vision, but I knew I was right. I knew the sword that I had become was looking east. It…had to be.

“Still,” Praset said, considering, “what you say is impossible.” His tone, I noticed, was not entirely convinced.

“Are you a psychometrist, Praset?” Gamon asked suddenly, defending me. “None of us can know what she saw. You asked her to read the object, she didn’t ask you!”

“Calm down, Gamon,” Praset said. “Nobody is questioning Urassaya’s vision. It’s just that what she saw…the implications…”

“It’s alright, Gamon,” I said, laying a hand on his chest. “Praset’s right, it is hard to believe. What matters now, though, is checking Sudthay, don’t you think?”

“Agreed,” Praset said. “I need someone to fly back to Prasath and report what we have seen to the Council. This is looking like an invasion, and if it is from beyond the edge…”

He let the words hang in the air while the rest of the squad looked around at one another.

“I think you should go, Urassaya,” Gamon said to me.

“What! But what if we need another reading? There’s bound to be more of these objects around the outpost, and…”

“You are the fastest flier among us,” Gamon said, “and not the strongest fighter. If there are more of these things, and it seems likely, you can get reinforcements fastest, and we would lose the least for not having you along.”

If he were not one of my spouses, I would have punched him as hard as I could. Unfortunately, he was right, and my punch likely wouldn’t have done much.

“Besides,” Gamon said, pulling me close and speaking in a low tone so that the others could not hear. “After you report, you can warn the family. Our wife, our husband, and our daughter deserve to know that we may be, for the first time in thousands of years, on the brink of war.”

My voice caught in my throat then, and all I could do was nod.

“I’ll go, Praset,” I said, still staring into Gamon’s deep, kind eyes.

“Very well.”

Gamon nodded at me. “Tell Achara, Sumate, and little Preeda that I love them, will you?”

“I will,” I said.

And that was the last time I saw my husband alive.

I remember how I wrung my hands on the day I got married. I know that everyone is a bit worried on their wedding day, but I think I was more nervous than most. The wedding ritual was a big day for us, when the courting is finally over and the coterie is formed, when two men and two women join together in a united coterie, ‘til death and beyond. It is an unparalleled moment in four lives, one we would live with and die with forever.

And, of course, there was the naming ceremony.

I have heard that in other places – now that I know that other places exist – marriages are mostly between two people. It has taken me a long time to understand this strange practice, but I will say this: it certainly simplifies the naming. In Niinby, though, things were a bit more complicated. With four people per marriage, whose surname do the other three take?

I have no brothers and no sisters. That is rare for a coterie, but my mother died in childbirth with me and I never knew her. My matron was a fearful woman; she was exceedingly loving, and to this day I do not blame her, but she was so afraid that what happened to my mother would happen to her that she refused to mate with my father or my sire ever again after my mother died. Because of this, though, I had no brothers or sisters to carry on the Vath name.

And that is why, on the day of my marriage, I was wringing my hands so much. We all loved each other, and as we spoke our vows, we all meant them in very real and sincere ways. But I was the smallest of the coterie. Achara was nearly a head taller than I am, and more muscular. Sumate was half a head taller than she was, and Gamon, dear Gamon, was built like a statue, larger than life and as hard as stone. I had no chance.

People from these other places do not understand the naming ritual. But it is an ancient rite to us. The ritual has two distinct phases. In the first, all four members of the coterie don cloth gauntlets and fight in a melee. Some struggle with punching the three people you love most in the world as hard as you can to knock them out. Those people usually lose their names.

The second phase of the ritual, which starts almost immediately after the first, is an endurance test. All three of the knocked-out coterie are awoken and checked for injury. Then, all four take to flight, and fly upwards as far as they can. Whoever flies the highest wins, and the other three take their family name. After the rigor of the melee, nobody ever manages to fly very high.

On the day of my naming ceremony, I was frankly frightened. I was – and am – in great shape, all things considered, but my husbands and wife were better. It would not have been so bad if my sire weren’t counting on me so much. His sire, my grandsire, is as close to a single leader as my people have, and if I lost the naming ritual, his name would die. I had to win, but I couldn’t win, and I didn’t know what to do.

As the ritual started, an idea came to me. It was, for lack of a better term, cheating. As the melee began, I reeled back and hit Gamon as hard as I could. He shook it off like an insect bite. During our courtship, and in the years after our marriage, I had always loved how strong he was. In that instant, as he prepared to punch me back, it terrified me.

His wrapped fist hurt, to be sure, but not as much as I expected. I think he pulled it a bit, surprised that I wasn’t moving out of the way. But as his punch connected, I dropped like a stone and closed my eyes, as though I were knocked out. The melee continued around me, with Gamon, Sumate, and Achara throwing punches, each other, and caution to the wind. It was quite a while before Sumate fell, leaving our two warriors to battle it out. Gamon was stronger, but not by much, and like I said, I think he was pulling his punches. Finally, after an exhausting battle, Achara knocked him out.

As the three of us were “revived,” all three of them were breathing heavily, barely able to stand. I, of course, having taken only one punch, was as fresh as a summer breeze. As we took off into the air, I knew that I couldn’t lose. Sumate dropped out almost immediately. Gamon fought for a while, but had to back out. Achara, always the strong-headed type, kept pushing onward, but eventually, she had to turn around, too.

In my elation, I kept flying upward and upward, higher than I had ever flown before. Higher, it turned out, than anyone ever had before. High enough to touch the sky itself. As I reached up above me, my fingers caressed the upper edge of the world, the invisible wall that no living Huven had actually known about, but that had lived in the warnings of legends. As I touched it, I felt a jolt of lightning surge through my body, and I had just a flash of a vision, just an instant of a sight that no mortal had ever seen, and that I could never describe.

And then I was falling.

I was not unconscious, exactly. I was aware of the sky, and of the sensation of plummeting, but there was nothing I could do. My arms, my legs, my wings, not even my head would move to respond. I was falling fast, and I was going to die. Suddenly, I felt a large form impact me, and I was in the arms of Gamon. I was told later that he took off toward me almost as soon as the congregation saw me fall. The impact of my falling body was too much for him, and his wings gave out, but Achara and Sumate followed his example, and they caught the two of us before we hit the ground.

Our coterie name was officially recorded as Vath, the name of my sire and my sire’s sire, and that was an amazing thing. I had married the three people I loved most in the world, and that was a magical thing. But more than anything, their love and protection had allowed me to touch the sky itself and live. It was the most amazing, most frightening day of my life.

Up to that point, at least.

The war with the goblins – which I now know is the name of those vile little green monstrosities - lasted nearly four years. We had the advantage of flight and of home territory. They had the advantage of sheer numbers. After the fall of Sudthay Outpost was made known in Prasath, we mobilized for war, but no matter how many of those creatures we killed, they always seemed to have more. It was in the spring of the second year of the war that we found the warrens they had dug underneath Sudthay, and my wife, Achara, led the charge that destroyed it forever, finally avenging our husband Gamon. Achara was always a greater warrior than I was, and while I wished I could have been there, I was fiercely proud of her.

Our surviving husband, Sumate, was a strategist for the Council. I have always loved Sumate, of course, but I was never as close with him as I was with Gamon or Achara. Sumate was brilliant, in pretty much every sense of the word, but he was always a bit distant from the rest of the coterie. Still, because he was such a brilliant strategist, the Council kept him in the city, and because somebody needed to watch Preeda while Sumate strategized, I stayed home, too. While Achara was off on the front lines, Sumate and I grew close.

After the Sudthay warren was destroyed, the war turned in our favor. For the next year, our warriors harried the goblins here and there, destroying two more warrens they had tried to establish and discovering a third they had attempted in the northern mountains, which had crushed them all in a cave-in, apparently almost immediately. All of Niinby celebrated that the land itself wanted to expel the scourge.

It wasn’t until nearly the end of the war that we discovered that I had been right the whole time. Once the established warrens were destroyed, we started searching along the edge of the world. The edge of the world is marked by a sheer mountain peak that reaches all the way up to the sky, the sky that I once touched when I won my name. The goblins had tunneled through, which should have been impossible, as I would later learn. But of course, everything about this war was Impossible.

I wasn’t there when our forces marched into the breach. Achara told me about it when she came home, her red-feathered wings mangled and useless from the battle that she helped to win. The medics said that she might one day fly again. They were wrong. There was never a lot of magic in Niinby. For some reason, it was difficult for mages to make lasting connections with the land. Magical abilities like my psychometry were rare. But the elders, including my grandsire, pooled enough magic to seal the breach. The war, at last, was over.

The nightmare, though, was only beginning.

I was in my coterie’s garden when the first of the volvers attacked the city. All I heard at first was the screams. They were distant at first, but then grew closer, and from all sides. Achara and Preeda were with me; Sumate was at the Council Hall. We had no idea what was going on, but it was obvious that it wasn’t good. Achara ran inside to arm herself while I tried to keep Preeda calm. She was only five years old. Achara came back in a rush, and she was sickly pale.

“Urassaya,” she said to me in a whisper. “Take Preeda and get out of Prasath. Fly as fast and as far as you can.”

“Achara, what are you…”

“Please!” She implored, her eyes quavering. “I can’t fly. You know that! I can’t…I can’t save either of you. Please, save yourselves!”

Before I could answer, the first volver burst through the garden wall. It did not climb over it, go around it, or tunnel under it. It came straight through. Achara was moving before I could process what was happening, and she cut the creature down. Instinct moved my body between the beast and Preeda, shielding her from the view of her mother hacking apart a monster. Howls and unearthly noises came from beyond the wall, but Achara ran back to me, pulled my head close, and kissed me.

“Be safe,” she said as tears started to well. “And remember me.”

I wanted to argue, but although it was my name that the coterie wore, it had always been Achara who was head of the household. I knew that if I stayed, we would all be dead. I grabbed hold of our daughter, nodded once to my wife, and prepared for flight.

“Tell Sumate I love him,” Achara said.

I nodded. “Tell Gamon the same,” I said, and then I took to the air with Preeda in my arms. I forced myself to not look back as I heard my wife’s dying scream.

I am a head. I have eyes. How do I have eyes? I never have eyes in my visions, because objects don’t have eyes. But somehow, I can see in a way that I can never see while reading. Still, I have no idea where I am. This place is all darkness and metal. In my ears – I have ears? – I hear a dull, constant thrumming of something deep beneath me. This thing I am in, this thing that I am, feels. It feels…comfort.

I and the other metal things respond with the only words we are capable of speaking. “Yes, Scientist.”

We did not win the war against the volvers. Prasath fell the very day they attacked. Many joined Achara in death that day, and many more fell in the days after. I flew all the way to the citadel at Thiphak with Preeda in my arms. I wanted more than anything to fly back, to do whatever I could, and to hopefully find Sumate, but I was too weak. I collapsed when we got to safety and did not wake for nearly two days.

When I regained consciousness, Sumate was there, along with our daughter and my grandsire, Apinya. We were all that was left of the Vath family. Our scouts, the ones who had survived the slaughter, reported that the volvers had poured out of a breach to the south, from beyond the edge of the world. Unlike the goblins, who had at least been somewhat organized in their attacks, these volvers – as I would come to call them later – were barely more than wild animals. They had no organization whatsoever, and had seemed to move toward Prasath only because they had smelled meat.

Mercifully, after the slaughter, they had scattered to lay claim to territory throughout Niinby, even turning on one another in their mad bloodlust. As refugees and wounded warriors trickled in to Thiphak, the remnants of the Council started discussing how to fight back against this new enemy that we could not understand. Sumate was conscripted to the Council for his intelligence and his wisdom, and he and my grandsire spent long hours debating the problem.

As I said, though, we did not win the war against the volvers. Something else did. Before we could manage to muster against the threat, scouts began to report strange occurrences throughout the land. The volvers, which had so thoroughly decimated the capital, seemed to be hunted down with frightening ease by strange metallic beings. Our scouts had, for the most part, avoided engaging with these metal men. At least, all the scouting parties that reported in had.

I never saw the metal men up close while they were living, if so you could call their existence. But considering what I had seen at my coterie’s garden, and over Prasath as I flew, I knew what the volvers were capable of. And if these metal men were obliterating them throughout Niinby, they must be worse still. The thought of it haunted my nightmares. Preeda, too, could barely sleep, so I spent most of my waking hours trying to comfort her. She had lost two of her parents, and Sumate, her sire, was busy with the council all day. It was all I could do to hold us all together.

One day, one of our scouts returned. Her squad had happened upon a battle between several volvers and a few of the metal men. They had held back and watched as the two destroyed each other, and when there was only a single metal man left, they attacked it. It still managed to kill two of the Huven scouts, but they had destroyed it. The rest of her squad was keeping watch, but they wanted to know what the Council thought they should do. Sumate suggested that he and I investigate, and that I do a reading. Apinya promised to watch Preeda, so my husband and I went.

As I recovered from my vision of the metal men – the Parati, apparently – Sumate knelt down next to me. He did not cradle my head, as Gamon would have done, and he did not kiss me, as Achara might have, but he was there in his own way. He also did not ask what I saw, though I knew he wanted to, and I said a silent thank you for that. Once I recovered, and had come back to myself enough to speak, I did so, uttering just a single word.

“Southwest.”

Once I had recovered, we flew to the southwest. The terrain below us was impossibly rough, and even the air seemed difficult to pass through. It was as though the world did not want us there, or maybe, it wanted to protect us from what we would find there. Looking back, I like to think it was the latter. Either way, it certainly explained why no Huvens had ever come this way before in how many thousands of years of our history. None who had ever come back, anyway.

A trail of dried blood and gore led us directly to a door that would otherwise have been hidden in the rock face. The door was wide open. These Parati were apparently as confident in themselves as the woman in my vision had been of them. We alighted as one in front of the opening and immediately drew our weapons, but we heard nothing. The entire jungle was eerily quiet, but I thought that I could just make out a distant thrumming.

We steeled ourselves for whatever we would find beyond the door and then, before we could think too much about it, we went in. Sumate took the lead, followed by the scouts, and I brought up the rear. What we found on the other side was, by a far margin, the strangest place I have ever been. The walls were not of tunneled-out stone as we had expected, but rather of a smooth, dark metal that also comprised the floor and ceiling of that corridor. Along the walls ran peculiar vines of metal that would, at occasional and irregular intervals, disappear into holes in the walls no wider than the vines’ thickness.

The metal walls themselves seemed to give off a very dull light, and so although the corridor was still dark, there was just barely enough light to see by. The passage continued onward so long that we lost sight of the door behind us, and our eyes grew accustomed to the limited illumination. It was shortly thereafter that the hall opened into a much larger room with other corridor openings lining the walls. We stared in wonder at what we were seeing as I tried to shake the feeling that I had stood in this room before.

I did not see my Sumate fall. All I knew was that there was a sudden rush of noise and motion, and then the Parati were there. Sumate’s painful yell shook me out of my reverie and I moved to help him, but the Parati were too fast. They struck my sword so hard and so fast that it flew from my hand and shattered against the metal floor. I dropped to my knees and covered my face, waiting for the death blow, but it never came. It came for the scouts, and for my beloved husband, but not for me. I never got to ask Sumate to tell Gamon and Achara that I love them.

When I finally pulled my arms away from my face, I saw one of the Parati staring at me with its expressionless metallic face. I barely dared to breathe as it stared at me, its eyes glowing a subdued yellow. Finally, after I thought my heart would give out, the strange artificial creature spoke.

“Planeswalker recognized.”

I stared at the monster. I had not expected it to speak, and of course, at the time, I had no idea what a “planeswalker” was. All I could manage was a weak and shattered “What?”

The Parati seemed to consider me. “Risk analysis. Planeswalker power: Minimal. Membership in Dominia Cabal: unlikely. Threat to experiment: Experiment already compromised. Last visit from Cabal agent: Incalculable. Risk of total data loss…unacceptable.” It seemed to consider me again for a long moment. “What information do you require, planeswalker?”

“I…I don’t…” Then something broke in me. As I looked down at the broken body of my last spouse, I just couldn’t take it anymore. “Why are you doing this!?! Why are you killing everyone!?!”

“Mission directive. Two of four sectors are compromised. Experiment ended. Any further data corrupted. Affected sectors must be cleansed for possible future re-seeding.”

“No! You can’t do that!”

“Sector 9A cleansing progress: 93%. Sector 9B cleansing progress 85%.”

“Sector 9A and 9B? What are you talking about?”

“Sector 9A: Seed species Human and Goblin. Crossbreeding success: 0%. Humans achieved extinction 11,223 years ago, Baltfir time. Additional note: Goblins in sector 9A have underperformed in evolutionary expectations. Despite relatively short lifespans and large generational yields, inbreeding and in-fighting have effectively negated forward evolution. Recommendation: As goblin control group exists in Sector 2E, there is no need for this group. Recommend extermination and reseeding of Sector 9A with new seed Humans and Goblins from alternate plane.”

“What? Goblins? Humans? Humans haven’t existed in thousands of years.”

“Sector 9B: Seed species Human and Aven. Crossbreeding success: 100%. Humans and Aven in Sector 9B correctly recognized limited gene pool and began self-designed eugenics program. Dozens of generations were forced to mate in teams of four, locally referred to as ‘coteries,’ in which each member has a mostly Human mate and a mostly Aven mate. Addendum: Over countless generations, dimorphic differences have vanished. Sector 9B species are now fully integrated into species locally referred to as ‘Huven.’ Species appears predominately Human, but with Aven wings and strong but lightweight hollow bones. Current Huven population culturally conditioned to find genetic variance sexually appealing.”

My whole world started to spin then. My entire life, my people, my world? All just a science experiment. And what about my husbands and my wife? Was anything I had ever felt for them real? Or was I just conditioned from before I was born to look for mates who were different from me? I thought of Gamon then, big, strong, and compassionate. I thought of Achara, her skill and her natural leadership. I thought of Sumate, who was lying dead at my feet even now, and his intelligence and wisdom. Had we truly all been brought together just because we were so different?

The Parati was still talking, but I had stopped listening as I tried to understand, as I tried to make sense of everything. But something it said broke through my haze, and shattered the last few shards of my heart. It said, “Addendum: Sector 9B cleansing now 98%, with the fall of fortress, local designation Thiphak. No survivors reported.”

As my mind registered the meaning of those words, the reality that my grandsire and my daughter were both dead, I started to fall. I tried to catch myself on something, but my hand passed through whatever it had been. I waited to hit the floor then, to curl up next to my husband’s body, but I just kept falling. My world fell apart, and I plummeted through the cracks.

I fell then, just like I had fallen that day years before when I touched the sky. I fell the same way, aware and yet unware, and completely helpless. And what I saw when I fell, or rather what I felt, was the same thing I had seen in that brief instance when I touched the sky. Only now do I have even a sense of what I saw that day, when I caught the slightest vision of the sightless forever in which my world, Baltfir, sits like an object suspended.

I have no idea how long I fell, but eventually I felt a plane rise up to catch me in its arms and bring me safely back down to the ground, a refugee from beyond the edge of the world.