The Rise of Boulden Shade

One being's pleas before a council of his peers to take up the mantle of salvation

Premise ▶︎

This was originally written as an exercise for the WdC Superpower Reviewers' group back in 2018. Premise:

Our ship hit an asteroid and crashed on an alien planet. On this new planet, we have all recognized that we have new superpowers. Our assignment was to write about them and how they effected us and perhaps the environment around us. I chose to write mine as an appeal for the Greater Good to the remainder of the group that had survived and had consrtucted something of a headquarters in the north of the world (pretty sure it was the north; it's been a while, and the memory ain't a steel trap anymore).

Thus...the Rise of Boulden Shade

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I am honored to see you all again. Everyone is so different, it is as though I meet each of you for the first time. Rarely has history turned so quickly and with so much volatility. Many of us may have similar stories from the time after we hit the asteroid; from the robust energy I can feel from each of you and all of you as a whole, it must be so. I hope to know each of you anew by these tales, in time. For now, I beg, hear mine.

In times nearly forgotten, I have been told, this world had a sun similar to Sol, but more yellow and hotter. Life thrived here, and was cared for and husbanded by a race that call themselves the Dar. The Dar were beings of flight, capable of dancing in the wind as easily as the lush grasses of their world. They were tri-pedal, technically, although the hind leg had evolved into something more akin to a tail which was used as a rudder and stabilizer in flight.

The years and centuries passed in a peace rarely known in the universe as we have found it. But about 1500 years ago, the spectrum of this world's sun began to acquire an eldritch glow, yellowish-green, and became poisonous to the skin of the Dar. They moved underground, as have so many races on so many planets, and the Dar became hardy miners.

Then an extraordinary thing happened. As the stellar spectrum drifted into an emerald hue, certain crystals in the complex stone-scape of the Darrian world were energized by the green-band omicron-wave energy.

The Dar were eager to mine these suddenly-glowing crystals. Each time one of the crystals was struck or crushed in the mining process, there was a small explosion that disintegrated the crystal into superfine particles, similar to silica on Earth. Unlike Silica, however, the crystalline dust was harmless to the Dar; in fact, as the dust worked its way through their systems, it brought out latent abilities and powers.

For instance, over the period of the Dying Shade (their term for the spectral shift in their parent star) their wings thinned and weakened until they were no more than vestigial, as thin and translucent as a dragonfly's wing. The crystal dust not only revived the genes that grew these wings, but interpretively evolved them--over generations, instead of millennia--to serve very much like the insect wings they resembled. While the Dar were not likley to ever soar the skies again, they were able to use their pearlescent wings to hover up to a meter above the ground, and travel moderate distances in this manner with a bare minimum of energy exhaustion. Additionally, the dust grafted to their muscular structures, providing increased strength and durability. Being less than two-thirds the height of an average human, the Dar quite resemble the Faerie Folk of old Norse legends.

So the mining and building of their underground caverns proceeded at remarkable pace. The Dar were a happy race, diverse in their below-ground culture, and they began to know peace again. The crystals were revered, and the Dar called them Hal-Redden, the Burst of Life. But unknown to them, they were not the only race left on the planet after the Dying Shade. The Dyl-Fen (roughly translated as "angry leaf") were a predatory species that had evolved in the new green dawn. The Burst of Life was not for the Dar alone.

When found planet-side, the Hal Redden were much more delicate than when pressurized in the underground strata. They burst with the slightest touch: wind, rain, shifting of the earth. The Burst of Life sped the evolution of several species of flora toward sentience and mobility. As the Dar evolved and flourished underground, the plants above waked and warred for the soil and sunlight as they had never been able to before. Within the past 150 years, a dominant species took hold on the surface: the Dyl-Fen. Having achieved a sort of parasitic mastery, the Dyl-Fen subjugated most other species and sub-species of the new life, and bred them as "crops."

The Dyl-Fen looked to fortify their position against revolt and rebellion; they vined and crept among the loose rocks and boulders of the crumbled hill areas, and eventually they discovered a cave of remarkable depth. A fortress of stone within and access to higher ground for superior sunlight was the best of all possibilities for the plant-beings, and the Dyl-Fen began their exploration and construction of what was to be their capital city.

They rooted and crept deep into the planet, emerging inevitably into a far chamber of Darrian construction. It was recognized immediately that this was not a natural construction; thus there had to be other sentient beings here— and to the Dyl-Fen, that meant there was another enemy. The Dyl-Fen tendrils quickly adapted and fortified the great tunnel. When the Darrian family mining this tunnel returned to expand their work, they were puzzled to find the walls crumbled, and fine root-ish fronds hanging like a curtain from one of the cracks in the top of their tunnel. As they moved through the strange tendrils, they were suddenly and crushingly entangled within them, lifted, and twisted, and destroyed. The Dyl-Fen had made the first move in a war of mortal chess through the crevasses and cracks of the green planet.

Several of the younger Darrian family members had lingered at the tunnel's mouth, planning how to make a grand entranceway of it, and when they heard the screams and saw the strangling, crushing death of their parents and siblings, they flew with as much speed as they could to the heart of the city to report the catastrophe and the incipient danger. But they were young and had never thought of enemies or strategies; as they flew, the Dyl-Fen sent one filament-thin tendril stretching and growing along the cavernous walls and floors, pacing the Dar. In this way, the very heart of the Darrian culture was discovered and penetrated.

The Dyl-Fen were ruthless. They destroyed constructions, and extinguished whatever life they could. The Dar could not be harvested, so they must be killed.

The Dar were quickly driven into corners and shelters among the hardest stone near the center of the planet. The heat of the core and the prolonged distance from the green life-giving sun made the reach of the Dyl-Fen weak indeed in these reaches. But the rock of the mantle was inconsistent and unreliably thin in places. Efforts from the Dar to rebuild at this depth resulted in many deaths from inadvertent underground volcanism.

So ends a sad history and brings us to the curious present.

When I recently awoke in their chambers, I was told how lucky I was to have been in the underside of the ship that had buried itself belowground. How and if the remainder of my people had survived, they told me, was beyond their knowledge. But the our disaster was the Dar's boon: our dying ship eradicated a major center of Dyl-Fennian strength, giving the Dar crucial time to regroup and recuperate.

The Dar told me that the planet was grateful, and had provided me with a gift in return: Hal-Redden, the Burst of Life, had invested within me, also.

I was endowed with Darrian strength, but on an exponential level. They had discovered this gift with sad irony; several of the Darrians were injured as I thrashed in my fevered recovery, and a few were killed. While there was no protein in my DNA make-up for the construction and manipulation of wings, I found (alarmingly, and quite accidentally) that I had developed a psionic ability to manipulate shadows. The omicron-wave impact in the right side of my hypothalamus allowed me to project this same green-spectrum energy outward, refracting and bending light to my purpose. In cases where the Hal-Redden crystal was present, I was able to translucinate--align my molecules along a cohesive photon plane, and move along that plane to any point up to and including its terminus. An incredible feat of physics and psionics, this nascent ability came to me as naturally and easily as standing up did when I was a baby.

Reobscuring in solid rock was a terrible fear at first, but since the solidity of the rock at the end broke the photonic shear plane at a ninety-degree angle, I was automatically reobscured at the point where the omicron-saturated energy was forced to escape the crystal at right angles--that is, just before the surface of a rock. While this did not prevent several accidental and painful falls, from which my newly-imbued imperviousness protected me, it did prevent my suffocation in the walls of the caverns.

It turned out, however, that I was only able to reobscure in shadows. ...Safely, that is. Bursting forth once on the surface from an exposed crystal end, I was flung an incredible distance through the air: the omicron energy had been freed in a straight line through the air, with no interruption of stone. Although I reobscured immediately as my molecular pattern rode the photon wave out from the end of the crystal, I was ejected with incredible force through the air, landing hundreds of kilometers away in a vast ocean. I was disoriented and confused, treading water and doing a poor job of it. I have never been a good swimmer. I hope I never mistakenly reobscure underwater!

I slowly--excruciatingly slowly--worked and gasped my way in one straight direction. Through some wonderful chance, I happened on a tiny island, about a square meter in surface area. It rose from the surface of the sea no more than 5 centimeters, but for me, it represented the second time this planet had saved my life: just visible below a thin protective casing of rock was a vein of Hal-Redden. I was able at long last to leave this watery limbo and translucinate back to my adopted family of Darrians.

But I returned there with strange memories and disturbing news: the Dyl-Fen were not the only other race abroad on this planet, nor was I the only survivor when the Powership crashed. As I tumbled above the landscape, I had seen areas of war and destruction as well as peace and beauty; and I had glimpsed a tower, far up near the pole of the planet, radiant with a calm power. Before landing in the dark ocean, I saw the wreck of our ship, and perceived transferences from the ship to the rapidly-dwindling tower. Whether they were transportations of my fellow Power crew or whether I was seeing the energy waves of communications with the mothership, I had no way of knowing. But I knew I had to find my people.

The Dar understood my need, but were discouraged nonetheless. Before I left, the Dar held a ceremony of incredible gravity. They accepted me as one of their own, bound to them by the Hal-Redden. I was no longer adopted; I was made brother, father, counselor and friend. As the Dar considered themselves, I too was now blood of the land. enDar-wyth'n-gretta they named me: Savior of the Dar, Giant of the Shadows; and they called me Jzoul-Bar, Master of the Dying Shade. I was their rock of protection, quite literally, as I was able to monitor the Dyl-Fen's movements and strategies from within the planet's crystal veins. I accepted these name as titles, and called myself, as the name of my heart and mind, Boulden Shade, a name with a double-edged meaning: Stone of Darkness/Mind of the Sun.

And now I, Boulden Shade, stand before you, my fellow crew, and offer my services as before--but with renewed relevance and immediacy. The warring races of this planet are ignorant of each other and of their own purpose. Though they read their own symbols, they miss the meanings and the signs they have written with them. We have the power-- and thus the responsibility-- to guide and shape the growth of our new home into harmony and life. Instead of a world of the fungal usurpation of the Dyl-Fen or the parching defoliation practiced en-masse by the cyclopean Fen-Kylla, we are in a position make this planet one vast Burst of Life, an explosion of knowledge and light.

We have the power to be heroes; we have the power of the written word.

So let us begin...