This Falling Eden
A Novel by Ryan Grabow
Third Draft preview, September 2025
http://www.egrabow.com/eden/

CHAPTER E07 (excerpt)
This draft is subject to future edits.

They are climbing as much as walking; trees fallen on the ground are not lying on their side anymore, but are practically upside down. Every tree here is uprooted and heaped on one another.

“It’s a little easier when you’re hiking on the ground,” Venitcen concedes.

“I can’t tell where the ground is anymore,” Nitcef speaks impatiently.

The next tree is completely barren; no leaves or thin branches survive this close to the impact. The tree after is stripped of its bark. Individual trees become difficult to tell apart, and nothing but sky remains as they near the rim of the crater. Venitcen forgets his earlier thoughts of running to it. Walking so vertically, with no branches to catch his fall anymore, proves daunting enough.

A massive oblong crater comes into view before them, blown deep into the mountain rock; its circumference stretches halfway to the peak. Nothing green is visible on the other side, only plumes of smoke.

Nitcef pulls on Venitcen’s shoulder. “Down. Down. Down,” he hisses. “Don’t you hear that?”

Venitcen sets his hands on the hard ashen remnants of forest. He crouches and listens with hushed breaths, as Nitcef is doing. A pair of men’s voices come from the crater.

Their speech is difficult to make out, but Venitcen picks up “unity of the tribes”, “rumble in the sky”, “since the old fossil dies”, “Bluist Masters”, and “the Redist city.” Oddly, no memories imprint from their words. There is no sight through their eyes or sensations mapping on Venitcen’s own nerves. A vague feeling of power is all he senses, like a placeholder for all that’s missing. He never imagines one can block their mind so completely; even his mother never pulls such tricks with her speech.

Venitcen crawls up to the black mound and slowly climbs it, digging his hands into the ashen remains of tree roots, raising his head carefully, silently. He sees a couple of men wearing black uniforms, facing away, relaxed and eating. They sit only a stone’s throw away, at the near edge of the crater, where its surface is level.

“Is that bread?” Nitcef whispers.

Venitcen doesn’t care what they’re eating. His eye is drawn to the plasma rifles they have. He knows a single pulse can vaporize a man. Venitcen glances up at the sky, half-expecting some robot eyeball to stare back at him. Dust and smoke tickle at his nose again. If they sneeze now the invaders will surely hear it, and the knife will be to Venitcen’s throat again.

“What time are we due back?” one asks.

“[Tansha tansha],” the other replies.

“All right.” The first grabs something from a bag and stands. His hand is covered with something, like a gel glistening in the light. Venitcen sees part of his face, which glistens the same way. “Let’s get the measurements and leave.”

Nitcef pulls on Venitcen’s shoulder. They duck their heads.

“What kind of skin is that?” Venitcen whispers. “Are they reptiles?”

“I don’t know. Do you hear the way he speaks the time?”

Nitcef’s question reflects the invader’s own, giving the man’s strange words a more familiar outline, that of Nitcef’s own ideas. Venitcen, in effect, hears the invader’s question again; and it imprints on his mind more strongly. These invaders, he realizes, have a notion of time more complex than ‘morning’, ‘noon’, or ‘sunset’, well beyond ‘a few minutes’, ‘many hours’, or even ‘years’ and ‘centuries’.

The answer which is given has no form to Nitcef or himself; the strange words carry no memory; no existence. The words take up space and they are gone.

“How big is a satellite anyway?” the one grabbing equipment asks.

“About the size of a shoebox,” the sitting man replies, “and with a bunch of foil attached to it.”

Venitcen can actually see it in his mind: a spoken memory, complete with the invaders’ experience of learning about it on a screen, having tepid opinions of it, and mentally comparing it to other devices he knows. There’s nothing else; the memories of other devices fail to imprint in their own right, leaving Venitcen to grasp for ideas that lead nowhere. This foreign memory is extremely rigid, a sharply focused beam that illuminates only one thing in the darkness.

“Probably makes a nice light show on the way down,” the man finishes.

Venitcen raises his head, tilting so his left eye can just see over the fuzz of the mound.

“The light show is at the end.” The other one slings a plasma rifle around his shoulder. “A real nice welcome if you ask me.”

His friend stands. “All that from a grain of antimatter.” He holds pinched fingers in front of the other’s eyes, indicating something like a grain of rice. “Not easy to break containment on those reactors, but...” He pounds his foot on the mountain’s exposed granite.

“Right into this, at several times the speed of sound?” The man with the rifle shakes his head. “Yeah. That’ll do it.”

The unarmed one turns to look across the valley, giving Venitcen a better look at his face and arm. Their skin does not glisten from gel. They have scales all over which catch the daylight, trailing down long forearms to cover their fingers, and up to surround large eyes and ears, even shining beneath the thick, uniformly trim hair of their scalps. Venitcen thinks of armadillos, which also have scaly skin and hair.

“Let’s do the scans and go,” this man speaks, appearing to be the leader between them. “Making Naiad wait is like making Verian wait. It’s bad for our health.”

“Verian,” Venitcen whispers the name, annoyed that it comes with no memories of the man.

“Don’t rush me, I’m going.” The subordinate starts for the center of the crater, a walk that quickly becomes vertical for him. He sweeps some kind of sensor along the exposed stone.

Separated now, the speech of the nearer man becomes even stranger than before. Venitcen only hears noises from his mouth; it’s just like when they speak the time, if such a gap can swallow a whole conversation. Something also flashes on the bottom of the man’s ear as he talks.

“What are they doing?” Nitcef whispers beneath his brother’s head.

Venitcen speaks even lower. “There’s a blue light in that guy’s ear.”

The subordinate is high enough to easily spot them. Venitcen lowers himself bit-by-bit as the man climbs, ducking as far as he can behind the mound.

“You know what that is, don’t you?” Nitcef whispers. “They’re talking in the language of the ancestors.”

Something catches the faraway man’s interest, and his back remains to them. Venitcen takes the chance to raise his head, to quickly see what the leader is doing. The man is sitting, drawing on a pad of paper; assuming it’s a sketch of the crater, Venitcen takes the electronic binoculars from a pocket in the vest. The translucent card-thin device projects its light onto his retinas, zooming on the surface of the paper. Rows of small sketches are there. Simple characters. Symbols. Letters. Words. Messages.

Messages, Venitcen now thinks, that the other man is speaking.

Writing.

Venitcen tugs on his brother’s jaw so he’ll lift his head. The binoculars tremble in his hand as he gives them to Nitcef. His brother lifts the device to his own eyes, only to pull back as if the sight of writing should burn his face.

The nearby man closes the pad and rises to his feet. The brothers duck out of view again, but his friend with the sensor is far too high now. Their hiding place is as good as useless.

Smoke is making the air hazy; it builds in Venitcen’s lungs and stings his eyes.

“We have to go,” Nitcef whispers.

There are rapid footsteps. The leader is running up to help the subordinate, who is shaking the sensor with frustration. Venitcen stands on the ash to spot the writing pad on top of their bags, and another plasma rifle on the granite beside it. He steps onto the edge of the mound, testing his shoes’ grip on the surface.

“Don’t,” Nitcef hisses. “Don’t you dare.”

Nitcef’s overpowering sense of danger threatens to immobilize Venitcen; the words are like prickly things set against the very idea of running into the crater, but Venitcen knows he must try. He is here to confront, to steal fire from the gods.

Allowing no time to change his mind, Venitcen vaults over the mound and onto the exposed rock of the crater. A kick of fearful exhilaration takes hold as he reaches the sweet spot where the surface is level.

He makes it. The writing pad is easy to grab; Venitcen shoves it between the tunic and vest before taking the plasma rifle in his hands. The weapon feels solid and is lighter than he expects. There’s a shoulder sling, but Venitcen doesn’t want to run yet; he’s armed now, and the invaders still have their backs to him. A smile grows on his face.

Nitcef hisses loudly for his brother to come back, but instead Venitcen points the weapon at the writer’s back and pulls the trigger. There is no blast. The viewfinder stings his eyes with flashing red symbols.

The leader reaches his subordinate, who turns around to speak to him and—

“Hey!”

Venitcen’s fantasies burst with all the resilience of soap bubbles. He pulls the trigger repeatedly, not knowing what else to do as both men run for him. The leader is too fast and loses his balance. This snaps Venitcen out of his panic; he turns and rummages though the bags in a frenzy, keeping one hand on the rifle while his other tosses their stuff all over. Nitcef shouts at the top of his lungs; through him Venitcen sees one of the men stopping, crouching down, aiming.

The hairs on Venitcen’s skin stand up. A cracking stings his ears, accompanied by a rush of heat. The beam misses him, flying past to hit the granite surface; it leaves no scar in the stone.

While his ears still hurt, the rifle flies out of Venitcen’s hand on its own accord; it smacks onto the granite and lurches upward away from him. The leader has his hand stretched toward it, drawing the weapon to himself like a magnet; loose metal objects from the bags roll and clatter beside it, all struggling against the incline. Venitcen jumps forward to reclaim the weapon, just as Nitcef leaps over the mound and throws a dagger at the leader, who pulls back his hand and dodges the attack.

“Forget the weapon! Take this!” Nitcef reaches over Venitcen to work a lever on the rifle. A battery falls out. The display goes dark.

Venitcen holds the useless thing up like a club. “Lemme at least break his nose!”

The rifle flies out of his grip again. Metal clips and utensils whiz chaotically upward, the man’s pull strengthening as he draws closer. Venitcen springs fast enough to catch the rifle in mid-air. The leader, holding his palm steady in Venitcen’s direction, yells something to his colleague in the ancestors’ tongue. The other plasma rifle is aimed away from Venitcen — toward his exposed brother.

Like a miracle, the beam curves to strike Venitcen anyway; it strikes him dead center, where the vest’s protection is strongest. The strike knocks the air from Venitcen’s lungs; if the scaly men should leap together onto his back the shock couldn’t be worse.

The strength is gone from Venitcen’s left arm. The vest is very hot. He feels his legs giving out, but Nitcef grabs him just in time. The plasma rifle flies into the palm of its owner, its dropped battery lurching around some paces away. The live rifle is still aimed at them. While Venitcen struggles to move at all, his brother fishes out one of the grenades. Another cracking noise. More heat.

Venitcen doesn’t know if the vest can absorb another hit. Nitcef arms the grenade, pulling the pin by his teeth, and tosses it into their bags. The leader forgets about his battery and tries to save their gear, running with his palm out.

“On my back! Now!” Nitcef hoists his brother up, keeping the vest between himself and the enemy.

He runs over the mound and slides down the smooth ash into the mess of branches below. Even as sliding becomes trotting, kicking, and frenzied dodging, Nitcef manages not to lose his footing until they’re well out of sight.

By the time Venitcen’s hearing returns, all he can hear are the forest fires.

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