Excerpt: Orphans of Fenris

Space appears empty to the eyes of most humans. The air of a planet looks much the same. "Space" after all, means that. A nothingness, a room for something else to come and fill it.

But to the eyes of Corvus, no such entity as "space" existed. Waves filled everything. Pressure zones, curving like rubber walls that gave against bodies leaning against them, or human hands trying to push their way through from a prison on the other side. The walls of what other people told him was "the real world," those objects he could pick up and feel, or should avoid walking into, had a different appearance than these other walls that cavorted everywhere he looked, even with his eyes closed. He could sit motionless in the corner of a room and do nothing more than watch the walls of the force that others could not see spin and dance. If he turned his mind deeper in on itself, he would lose sight of those "real" things, and see farther and farther off these twisting mazes of planes and wall and curves.

Gravity fields. His teachers had told him that these were the miracle objects he could see that others could not. He needed to think only about the gravity fields. Anything that was "real" was not important--unless his teacher told him it was. The teachers, of course, told him that they were real and very important, and he would feel pain if he forgot this.

He learned fast how real the teachers were. He had blisters across his back from the electric brands they used on him the first year of hard realignment. They stopped after when he started to see clearer and faster than they had hoped. He never tried to disobey them again. They were the only "real" that he needed to acknowledge.

Until Lady Kalla stepped through his spinning web of gravity fields like a statue of solid granite. More real than anything he had seen. His teachers and their lessons and their tools that worked on his brain appeared as no more than blurry silhouettes cast from dying lamps compared to Lady Kalla.