《Crest of the Starbird》
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Act 1 - Prologue - Crysfire
Chapter 1
Chapter 2 Helmet
Chapter 3 Alice''s Gryphon
Chapter 4
Chapter 5 Felid Print
Chapter 6 Shadow
Chapter 7 Generic System ChartSupport the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
Chapter 8 Craghorns
Chapter 9 Gronkle
Chapter 10
Chapter 11 Male Adult Felid
Chapter 12 Fire-eyes
Act 2a - Chapter 13 Endomere Fem Elden
Chapter 14 Jaklan
Chapter 15 Eternium Block displaying origin system
Chapter 16 Diseased Wilderbeast
Chapter 17 Gryph and Aggie.
Chapter 18 Riverbank fungus
Chapter 19 Dig doors diagram
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Act 2b - Chapter 25
Prologue: Qardos (Illustration)
Captain Rael Draconis entered the ancient Catacombs, answering the summons from the Eldest of her people. With long strides she made her way through the web of carved chambers and passageways to the Shrine of the Light in the very center. She sensed the one who summoned her come up from behind as she ducked down on one knee to pay her respects to their Maker. When she straightened, she turned and nodded to the slightly taller figure in his male phase. "You asked to see me, Eldest?"
Her eyes grew wide as she saw what he was wearing, then she flinched as she realized what it meant. Instead of his usual garb, his thin form wore the simple white shift and slippers of those who were Passed. The Eldest nodded down at himself, "It''s my time, Rael." As she drew breath to protest, he held up his six fingered hand to stop her. "My mind is already made up. I called you here because it was only right to let you know," he said. He turned and made his measured way through the shadowed caverns, passing the first and second circle of tunnels that wound around the central Shrine.
"This doesn''t make any sense," Rae argued as she followed him, studying him for any trace of frailty. His skin was a healthy shade of gray, and his movements were free and unhindered. "Why now? You''re the last of your era, the link to our past. We can''t lose you!"
"And that is precisely why! I can barely relate to what''s left of the next generation, let alone you youngsters." He faced her, finally letting her see his crushing weariness as he rubbed his silver hair. "I''m so tired, little one." He gestured around them, where the shadowed forms of her ancestors lay in perfect repose. "In these tombs, all our ancestors, all of my generation, and even some of my children''s generation lie in eternal rest. It''s time I completed the third circle."
Silent tears streaked from her silver eyes as he stopped in front of the funeral niche at the head of the third circle, one that was long prepared for him. It was the only unfilled resting place of his era. He brushed over his name and titles carved deep in the rock.
"No, please" she said, laying a hand on his shoulder, then lifting it to touch his bearded cheek.
He surprised her by hugging her. "The only reason I''ve waited this long was to see you come into your own. I trust you to lead and protect our people, even without me around." Rae shook her head mutely against his shoulder. He cupped her face in his hands, long fingers sunk into her short dark hair. "I believe that you are the equal of any challenge to come. Believe in yourself, as I do." He pushed her gently back at arm''s length, then kissed the Gem she wore on her forehead before turning away.
She took a step back, shivering, as he laid down in his niche. He wriggled a bit, finding a comfortable position on the smooth stone, then crossed his hands over his chest. His blue eyes stayed on hers for a moment more, before he closed them for good. Her gaze fixed on his chest, watching him breathe once, twice... and then his breath leaked out of him slowly, and he was still.
She sank down on her heels and shook her head again, bewildered. No. I can''t believe that after all these years He Why? I dont understand A wild impulse struck her suddenly, and she scooped him up and threw him over her shoulder, rushing to the dim stairs that led up and out.
Spectral winds began to howl behind them as she pounded up the stairway, the Eldest''s body heavy on her shoulder. If she could get him to her ship''s med-bay in time His legs limply swung against her side as she made the last turn of the stairs and saw the outline of the wide double doors, picked out by the brilliant light beyond them.
Her fingers started to sink into the once firm flesh of his torso. Her burden grew lighter as motes bled off him, drifting back the way they''d come. She stumbled, and with a deafening roar, the winds caught up to them. The massive doors blasted open and the wind sent her sprawling under the fierce suns. Stunned, she shook her head, and squinted, just making out the last of his motes slipping back into the yawning darkness. Then he was gone.
Rae laid her head down on her arms, half muffling the keening moans that escaped her amidst her panting breaths as she lay on the stones. Why did he...? We needed him!
Firerain quietly sprinkled over her clothes, tiny sparks of molten matter tossed from the burning skies. Dusky Lava-birds hopped over the stones, hunting the cooling bits of metal before they hardened too much to eat. One of them approached her, and she turned her head to look at it, her silver eyes meeting the pale orange of the bird.
It hopped away, losing interest in her, only to flutter aloft when she levered up, forcing her aching legs to bear her mass upright again. She swayed, trembling. Her eyes blurred as reality itself bent around her. Molten metal seas on the far-off horizon bucked into jagged lines. Above her, the flaming auroras twisted and tore, speeding madly across the honey yellow skies in ruby ribbons.Stolen story; please report.
Trying to ground her perceptions, she lowered her gaze to the ancient ruins of the Eldest''s day that littered the island around the Catacomb entrance. The broken piles of stones jumped suddenly into clean spires and decorated buildings, as memories that couldn''t be hers overwrote her vision briefly and then shifted back again. In one breath the ruins were empty and deserted and then filled with the shades of her people at their society''s height in the next. The flickering visions made her feel sick as the whispering breezes resolved into words in an unfamiliar voice.
''Worthless failure... You''ve let your people down... He mattered more to them than you ever will.''
The meter-thick doors of the Catacombs rumbled, slowly closing on groaning hinges. Raes breath quickened, fearing if they finally shut it would be too late to fix this. She threw herself forward, pulling on the hoary rings to no avail. Shifting inside the doors she pushed with all her flagging strength, but they swung inexorably shut, ignoring her futile scrambling. She dove out under the suns again, unable to bear being trapped within them.
Standing, she felt a tremor coil from her feet to the crown of her head. With a gasp, she slammed shut the doors of her mind from all others as a fierce pressure built up inside her. Sorrow, pain, and self-hate trickled along this pathway, and burst from her in a scream of denial that tore agonizingly through her throat. The force of it cracked the ground in a wide radius around her. A shockwave bubble expanded out and flung the firerain away from her, startling flocks of lava-birds that took wing in all directions.
She coughed wetly, a warm pale trickle appearing on her lips, glinting silver as it dripped down her chin. Rae looked at her reflection on the dark metal panels of the doors. Rail thin, she easily topped two meters in height. Her disheveled black hair hung over her maniacally glowing eyes, sunk into deep sockets. Rae wiped the blood off her chin as her eyes rose to her reflected forehead. Above her brows was a blue-green Gem set into the gray of her skin.
It was a thumb-sized, kite-shaped rhombus, and she felt its powers thrumming through her. Sparkling, it picked rays off the sunslight, tinting her visage with prismatic refractions. The Crysfire Gem was both a Crown and a sword, and it symbolized an office and the duties that went with it. The Gem made her Chieftain, the living bridge between her people and their literal Maker. The Eldest had borne it once, and his heir after him.
Now it was hers, a burden suddenly too much for her to bear. She reached up to trace the four unequal sides, then covered the Gem behind her hand, hiding it in her reflection. Suddenly she began to claw at it, baring her pointed teeth. She dug her nails into flesh until fresh rivulets of metallic blood dripped down her face as she caught an angle to pull it off. Weighing it briefly in her hand, she thought of who to send it to, then teleported it to her predecessor before she could second guess herself.
In the panel, angry scratches marred her forehead where the Gem had been, and she turned away from the sight. Her hot rage drained out of her, and she limped away from the doors. Passing through the still jittering ruins, she made her way to the shoreline. Masses of foamy silicate bubbles writhed along the boundary of solid and liquid rock. She splashed through it to a large rock where she sat and looked dully out onto the deeps. In the distance, lesser sea serpents surged along the tall waves, snorting frothy red spray into the hazy air that glittered with gaseous metals.
Molten surf lapped rhythmically over the lower part of her boots, enticing little salamanders and minnows to curiously nibble on them. Rae felt another drip off her chin and looked down to see silver splatters of blood on her trousers. She dipped a bloody hand into the ocean of liquid rock, shooing off any small creatures, and splashed her forehead. Hissing, she gritted her teeth as the heat seared the shallow wounds closed. The lava ran down her face, some trickling into her mouth. Hunger pains seized her, and she used both hands to scoop it up, drinking her fill until a measure of strength returned to her.
The world quieted, and she could finally look around her without seeing the illusions of the far past that plagued her earlier. She couldn''t quite remember when or why she''d come here, but she had no desire to stay. Rae looked down the rough, rocky shoreline where her ship waited for her, hovering over the seething surf.
After all the years since she''d designed the Peregrine class of starship, she still admired the clean lines of them. The Question''s sharp-beaked prow hung between the crescent wing tips, the vessel trailed by a split tail. The metal raptor reflected the warm lurid colors of the bay. Around it, the air shimmered with heat.
Rising, she toggled her comm unit. Trying to speak, she only succeeded in making a harsh croaking noise. A fresh wave of agony gripped her throat, and she bent in a coughing fit that spattered more shining blood in the surf. She reached down to gulp more of the lava, wincing as she swallowed until the coughing subsided. She clicked the comm several times and called out telepathically, ''Come pick me up, Taylor.''
"Aye, Captain," the comm answered, and the Question headed her way.
The ship resettled with the prow rising high over her head, the talon landing struts digging into the stony beach. A personnel ramp folded down from the front belly, and she shuffled up, her back bowed in defeat. At the top, she turned and watched as the ramp shut out the planet''s blazing light as it closed.
Chapter 1 - The Star Yacht Question
Rae stumbled as the ship hatch sealed, looking blankly around the entrance''s equipment bay. Her gaze slid over the different planetary vehicles and neatly stowed gear as she lurched over to the inner door and the corridor beyond. She squinted in the hallway, the interior dim compared to the environment outside.
Side-swiping a bulkhead, she narrowly avoided a fall by sliding slowly down the wall into a heap. The cooling crust of rock on her boots cast a fading orange glow that contested with the aqua-colored footlights set into the deck every few meters.
She dully watched as the bluish lighting gained dominance as the heat she''d carried with her from the shore dissipated. Her eyelids drooped low as she shivered violently. Her outer numbness was approaching that inside of her when she heard the susurration of a hologram''s footsteps.
A large illuminated man in the uniform of a ship''s pilot crouched down in front of her. "Captain, you''ve lost a dangerous amount of heat. You need to transition to your Terran adaptation." Rae looked up at him with a silent glare. Without changing his posture, his projected image slid back a meter. "Please, Captain," he persisted. "Rael."
She blinked her silver eyes. In all their long association, she could count the times when Taylor called her by her first name on one six-fingered hand. Rae considered his words, looking within her, she saw he was right. It was nearly too late. She swallowed, wincing at the pain in her throat, and sent, ''Heat beam,'' to his telepathic receptors.
"At once," Taylor said. Hover drones projected heat onto her.
She sighed as she gained the malleability to adapt to the ship''s nitrogen-oxygen environment. She shrunk slightly, becoming more compact, her body less graceful and more human in its proportions. The advantage of the change was that the core of heat inside her was better protected, preventing the cold from licking her bones and freezing her solid.
He gave her an ingot of iridium, and she dutifully ate it. "Can you make it to your quarters?" he said. Rae hesitated, then shook her head in answer. She couldn''t even stand at the moment. A grav platform whispered over the deck to them, and Taylor pulled her onto it. He walked beside her to her private quarters, where he helped her sit up on the edge of a circular bed made of energy fields. Taylor offered her more dense metals that would take her a while to assimilate. When she finished them, he quietly left.
She wobbled on the soft edge before collapsing awkwardly on her side, then with an effort, she turned onto her front. Below the broad, translucent bed was an equally wide concave viewport. Through it, she watched the planet''s surface fall away until they reached orbit. Her gaze traced Qardos''s familiar scattered landmasses set in the molten seas for a long while before summoning a holo menu and directing Taylor to set course to her homeport of Deltia. The yellow planet and it''s binary stars slid backward out of sight, and when the stars lengthened to streaks beneath her, she finally succumbed to her exhaustion.
A chime roused Rae, and the planet visible through her viewport was intensely green and gold, interspersed with aqua oceans. She sat on the edge of her bed, thinking. She had a few research projects she was working on, but going back to them felt sickening. Even communicating with her collaborators felt unpleasant, and speaking to them was out of the question. She summoned a few screens and sent the various parties her incomplete project notes, along with messages apologizing for the inconvenience, but she would need to put the projects on hold. She would certainly understand if they carried on without her...
The polite diplomacies made her grimace, reminding her of how her spouse felt about having to do such things. Her vision swam with darkness, and she clutched her head, trying not to fall. Thinking of Jeol hurt her, in a way she''d never experienced before. The deep connection they always shared was attenuated to the maximum, barely allowing any sense of him through to her. Part of her ached for his presence, but a fear she had no name for kept her from reaching out. She covered her face with her hands and sighed miserably.
While she waited for her messages to be acknowledged, she stood from the bed floating over the viewport and dismissed the energy fields that made it. In the deck, benches circled the meters-wide bowl that doubled as a tub basin. When she stepped into the rim, the tub filled with steaming water. Rae undressed and stepped in, watching Deltian clouds move over the planet below, under her feet.
Taking supplies from a cubby set into the benches, she washed her short dark hair and soaped her gray skin, absently noting her paleness. Only her face and hands were darker, showing she''d spent too long working indoors. Androgenous, her lean form was a bit broader of the shoulder and narrower of hip than an average human female her height and build would be. Here and there on her body were ribbons of darker scars, each one marking a once-mortal wound.
Her bath was deep enough to fully immerse her as she stretched out to soak away her aches from Qardos. Finally emerging, she quickly shed the water from her as wisps of steam while the basin drained. She summoned a new force field over the viewport that was flush with the deck, opening up the room for a new purpose. She performed a series of careful stretches, followed by a few sets of katas to limber up. Only then did she dress in casual clothes, topped by a long green ship''s coat and matching high soft boots.
Rae eyed the lift in the back of the room that led to her office, wondering if she wanted to walk the upper decks. After a long moment, she decided against it and exited through the rooms only door. Stepping directly onto the bridge, on either side of her was a console bank with its own command chair. Taylors hologram stood in the column of light that dominated the center of the room. The A.I. turned to her and announced, "Captain on the bridge." She gave him a light huff, but he didnt respond.
She moved forward, bearing to the right to absently stroke the arm of the starboard chair. Passing by Taylor''s position, she stopped between the usually unmanned helm and nav stations before the main screen. Looking up at it, she picked out the enormous trees of the Deltian forests that anchored her base. It was a place she''d lived and loved and raised her children. The dull apathy that dogged her didn''t want to be here, either.
Rae turned away and moved over to the foot of the starboard ramp that led down to the bridge. The ship''s plaque was here, and she ran her fingers idly over the upraised letters. The Question was the first of its class of private star yacht. Technically, this was the second ship of the name, as the first one lasted a little over four hundred years before it was blown apart in an enemy ambush.
As designed, the hardened head of the raptor-like ship survived, mostly intact. Parts of it were re-incorporated into this new hull, like the ship''s plaque. Across the bridge, there was a ramp down the port side also. Together they wrapped around both floors of her quarters until they united and led to the main corridor. Since it was often just her and Taylor aboard, the ramps allowed visitors access to the bridge without passing through her private quarters.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
She paced a bit and went to sit awkwardly in her favored chair, drumming her fingers on the console. The instability she''d experienced on the ancestral island still wobbled inside her. Only the familiar confines of the Question kept it at bay, for now. A throbbing agony, both physical and emotional, still beat in time with her heart. Soon her desperate grip on it would break, letting the pain out. The only choice before her now was where. When the pressure inside her broke loose, she didn''t want there to be any collateral damage.
Her memory cast back across the centuries, trying to think of a place she did want to be. In her long life, she''d spent hundreds of years on civilized planets and half as many years ''camping'' on unexplored terrestrial-type worlds. It was almost a game to her; a puzzle to solve. Stranding herself with no tools and at times not even clothing, she''d time how many decades it took before she re-created the technology to call back her ship. She didn''t want to revisit any of her old camps. She knew them too well, but a new one now that appealed to her.
Finding such a world that wasn''t already inhabited, even by proto-sentients, was a chore, and since she preferred to go in knowing as little as possible, she outsourced this work. Straightening from her slouch, she typed a message to Chayse, who''d located most of her wild worlds. He lived here on Deltia, supervising the computer infrastructure districts that were the primary home of the family''s Artificial Intelligences.
When she was young, Rae created Taylor when she built the Question. He was a fine pilot and ship''s intelligence, but not a sparkling conversationalist. Chayse was her second A.I., completed not long after. He was first of the Kindred, a name the sentient machine mind called himself. More advanced than Taylor, his core persona was a blend of hers and her brother Jon''s mental engrams. For much of her early life, Chayse acted as her confidant and assistant until he wanted his independence. Because she considered him her eldest child, she''d gladly granted it to him. They still often worked together, but she gave him the room to have his own life and family, as she had hers.
She had been... the Chief of the Qard, the core organic race of the galactic alliance shed put together. The Kindred were their cyber equivalents, offering their computational abilities in return for rare algorithms, or goods and favors in the analog realm. She developed several ways for the Kin to move from cyberspace to meat-space and back again. First it was as kinetic holograms or robots, then as synthezoids, then all the way to fully organic bodies with unique genetics.
Chayse was the Kin''s Chieftain and her counterpart. Their leadership duties often overlapped when Kindred took on flesh to give children to the Qard, and those children in turn donated their engrams back, to create new members of the Kin.
Rae fidgeted in her chair, awaiting Chayse''s reply. What was taking him so long? His mind usually operated at computer speeds, and he lived just below. Maybe she''d caught him at a bad time. Leaning back, she put her head on the headrest, drifting, until a recording of a young man''s spoken voice came over the bridge''s speakers. "I think. I think I am. Therefore"
She sat bolt upright and glared ferociously at Taylor. ''I didn''t ask you to call him here!''
"I did not. I didnt even respond when Chayse queried me," the pilot said levelly.
She slapped her forehead, then winced, swearing, as she jolted her scratches. "Of course he''d come if you shut him out like that" The image on the main screen changed, to show a Kestrel, a smaller bird-like craft, approaching the Question and docking into one of the hangers of the bigger ship, set at the rear of the curving wings.
Turning her chair away from the console with a sigh, she simply hung her head, hands dangling limply from her knees. Soon enough, she heard footsteps coming down the starboard ramp. "Mom?" Fingers gently stroked the back of her forearms. "Mom, look at me." Rae slowly raised her head to meet Chayse''s gaze, clenching her fists to conceal the way her hands trembled. He gasped softly, his eyes fixing on her brow.
She gave him a measuring look. When he started his existence as an Artificial Intelligence, she asked him to design his appearance, using a palette of his choosing. He wanted a Qard-like form; tall and slender, four long-limbs each ending with six digits, bluntly pointed ears and teeth. He wasn''t quite as tall as she was, and in his male phase, his build was more classically human-masculine. His hair was dark like hers and Jon''s, and his eyes were deep molten gold. But it was his tawny skin that truly set him apart from most Qard.
His golden complexion, so different from the grayish skin tones natural to her kind, set off his long black sideburns, and a mustache that bracketed his mouth and trailed down to the bottom of his chin. When she built his various mobile forms, she always kept his choices in mind. It wasn''t until she was crafting the genetics for his organic body that she''d hit a snag, as the Qard genome simply didn''t allow for skin like that. It took an appeal to the Maker of her species to make it possible, and afterward, it became the skin tone of choice for the Kindred made flesh.
"What happened?" he asked, frowning with concern.
''I don''t want to talk about it,'' Rae thought to him. ''I called to ask you to do me a favor. One you''ve done for me before.'' He tilted his head and looked at her mouth. ''I strained my voice, badly,'' she thought, staving off the inevitable question.
He looked pensive. "Does this have something to do with why you withdrew from your research projects? Because I brought the replies to your messages and several concerned queries." He made a throwing gesture to Taylor, who nodded and displayed the messages on her console for her later review. "This is all very sudden, and a lot of people are worried about you."
She shrugged, refusing to meet his eyes. ''Sometimes things can get too much for me, and I have to get some space for myself.'' She gestured between them, ''I''d like you to find me a world. I want to go camping, but I want it to be well away from our Alliance''s territory.''
"Hmm." He summoned several data screens. "Your standard type? No sentients or proto-sentients. A Nitrogen-Oxygen world, with a carbon-based biosphere and a moderate axial tilt?" He waited for her nod, "Deadline?"
''Days, or less,'' she thought back to him. She looked down at the tremors visible on her white-knuckled fists. ''I have issues to work out. Soon.''
"That''s a pretty tight schedule," he said. "What I can find in that time frame might not be up to my usual standards."
She waved his disclaimer away. ''I trust you to find something close enough.''
"Lucky for you, I keep a shortlist of promising candidates skimmed from our stellar surveys. What kind of buffer away from Alliance space are you looking for?"
''Ten K lightyears.'' He raised his brows at her skeptically, as that was ten percent of the length of the entire galaxy. ''Fine. But no less than five K, then.''
"And there goes a lot of my list." He interacted with his screens, excluding a sizable portion of the galaxy. "That same distance away from any star polity, or just our Alliance?"
''Our Alliance. For others, just make it well outside any polity''s claimed territory.''
"There''s a fair-sized polity that''s coreward of Deltia, and if we only keep a buffer of a few hundred or so lightyears from it, that gives me a lot of new stars to check through," he said. "You look tired, and this might take a bit. Maybe you can get some rest?"
''I just got up not long ago,'' she grumbled, shaking her head.
Chayse''s brow furrowed at this information. He took a deep breath and said, "If this is a spur of the moment thing, have you picked out the gear you''ll need? Maybe you could double-check?"
She brought herself to glance into his eyes and patted his arm, nodding. It wouldn''t do to rush his work, so she''d go along with his suggestion. Before she left, she looked at Taylor, narrowing her eyes and subtly pointing a finger at him. Taylor raised an eyebrow, then laid his big hand over his chest with a dip of his head. Satisfied that he''d remember his duty to keep his Captain''s confidences, she went back to the equipment bay.
Chapter 2 - A New Expedition (Illustration)
"Boredom is the Bane of Immortals, and Ennui is their Chiefest Foe"
Rae started to pass her hand over the bays door panel when she felt a wave of dizziness crash over her. She swayed, slapping the wall above the panel with both hands, leaning hard on the wall until the disorientation subsided. When she felt able, she went inside and put her back against the door, shaking from head to toe. Interacting with others now was so hard. Taylor was tolerable, but even Chayse was hard to bear despite their long history. Anyone else in the Family would be just impossible. They''d demand answers she wasn''t prepared to even contemplate.
Pushing off the door, she made her way to a nearby bench. Insistent beeping at her feet alerted her to a swarm of cleaning drones before she stepped on them. Awkwardly she danced around them as they skittered away. She managed a less than graceful landing on the bench, hearing the struts groan as her near metric ton of weight slammed down. Trying to control her breathing, she watched the drones gingerly emerge from hiding and return to their work chipping hardened stone from the deck. Lava slag, from my boots she realized.
Flying drones worked on the ramp, folded up against the bow. A grav platform bumped into her knee, with several metal ingots stacked on top, obviously sent by Taylor. She was still close to her max density, but her unsettled nerves were burning through her mass reserves faster than usual. Eating all this ugh. Rae telekinetically lifted the bars in a sphere of mind force and heated the metal to a sludgy molten state. Once it was glowing a cheery yellow, she shaped a spout on the bubble and drank down the contents with a sigh.
She telekinetically fetched an inventory pad from the wall and looked it over. She imagined herself already there clambering over moss speckled rocks under the shade of tall green trees... What did she want to bring with her? She didnt have the concentration for a speed run, and wasn''t interested in challenging herself with a limited tool trial.
She decided to take more tools than she usually did, besides her basics. Skipping over the neolithic tools, she added forging implements and an initial set of hardened metal tools to use until she set up a forge of her own. Then it was several types of hover drones, some with surveying equipment to collect data, a pocket analysis lab, and a mini-mainframe to run it all on.
Shifting her feet, Rae accidentally nudged the platform, making it bobble. Nodding, she put a skyboard on her list, the platforms more powerful and sophisticated cousin. Needing a supply of clothing, she included hiking gear, a light and a heavy coat, and extra footwear. Speaking of which, she listed the usual contents of her boots; a pair of daggers, one for each, a narrow flute case, and a keyed harmonica. For her waist, the heavy Damascus bush knife she''d made a dozen camps ago, and an energy sidearm.
She wouldn''t need her energy sword because she had ''Oh.'' She looked at the pale band of untanned skin on her right index finger where her ring usually sat. The Crysfire Gem itself acted as the Chief''s crown, but she usually split the sword aspect into a ring she wore, so it was always near to hand. When she''d sent the Gem away, the sword-ring went with it. Dragging her eyes away from her finger, she put the energy sword down on her list as well.
That was enough to start. With a deep breath, Rae got up to pull her supplies.
When shed prepped her gear and taken that nap Chayse had suggested, she stepped back onto the bridge feeling slightly better. Her eldest was working at the port command chair. Hi, mom," Chayse gave her a small smile, "Ive been busy working on your project. He swept scores of holo screens into the room with a broad gesture, each with a percentage number over an image of a terrestrial-type world.
Rae cocked an eyebrow at him. The numbers combine all of my criteria for choosing a camping world for you, he explained. You don''t usually see this stage of the process, as I have more time and information to narrow the search before I select one for you."
Gesturing at the screens, he said, "These examples are 70% optimal or better, and the pictures give an indicator of the dominant biomes. The original flybys showed no humanoid lifeforms or artificial energy signatures on any of them. Once we narrow down the selection, we can perform a current survey.
She nodded and gave each screen a closer look. She dismissed the marginal worlds that were too icy, oceanic or marshy. Likewise, she swept away the overly toxic, arid, or volcanic. There were times she enjoyed a challenge like that, but she didn''t want the stress this time. She gathered the half dozen ones rated 90% or better that had pleasant temperate zones with the occasional snowy mountain range or island archipelago. I like these, she thought to him. Giving one a second look, she grabbed a corner of it and pulled it back to him. Why does this one have an asterisk?
Ah. About that, he said, this one meets all the specifications, but a starship crashed there over a century ago. The survey detected what seemed to be a distress beacon.
But what happened to them? she thought. You said there were no humanoids.
Why dont we find out? he said. If you dont like it, you can always pick one of the others.
The corner of her mouth twitched into something like a smile. She was always a sucker for a mystery. She nodded to Taylor, and her pilot set course for the planet.
"Taylor," Chayse said, "While we''re under way, you might want to send some probes towards the local polity, please. See if we can access a network of some kind, so we can pick up their trade language."
Taylor looked at his Captain, and when Rae nodded again he launched the probes. She passed the time expanding the world''s image and swiping it to take in the full globe. When the probes returned their data, Taylor gave his report, "They have a real-time interstellar data net. I am sending you the local common language files, First Kin."
Rae waited for Chayse to process the data for her. She had a special gift for learning languages, but she learned them best from spoken examples or organic minds, not as data. Chayse''s status as an embodied Kin allowed him to absorb the tongue as data so she could take it directly from his thoughts. She forced her mind into a narrow focus, to subject Chayse to as little of her instability as possible. When he was ready, he nodded, and she gingerly read him as he concentrated on the new language.
Once she had it, she went over it, quickly splitting it into a variety of language families as there were several very different root tongues involved. ''They''re a multispecies alliance as well, it seems,'' she sent. Her eyebrows raised, causing a brief flicker of pain from her injured forehead, ''And, hey, they''ve had contact with Earth. English, German, Mandarin Only a few words of each, but it''s there.''
"I saw that, too," Chayse said. "We''re awfully coreward from the Sol system, though, so I wonder how that happened?"
She shrugged. ''Taylor, do you have a read on that beacon?''
Taylor turned to them, an uncharacteristic look of mild surprise coming over his face. "This is the most recent entry, a continuous live broadcast, begun just under a century past."
"...attempt to land. This planet has a lethal and virulent plague, and we survivors of the crash are succumbing to it one by one. Federated Sentients General Order 14 prohibits landings on an identified plague planet. Warning! This is the ISS Daring, an Exoterran freighter out of Vassold. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to land..."
''Exoterran,'' she mused. ''That message had more Terran root vocabulary than the trade tongue.'' Sitting back in her chair, she stretched out her long legs. ''I don''t care about the plague or their General Order. It would have to be some kind of superbug to cross the elemental barriers between a carbon-based illness and something that affects a silicon-based biology, so I''m not really concerned. I do suppose I''ll need to eventually send this "Federated Sentients'''' a copy of my databases for whichever local world I camp on.''If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
"Perhaps," Chayse said. "The biological and geographical studies you undertake are usually intended to let nearby sentients colonize the world easily after you leave. That seems pointless for this one if you select it, as Federate records say the system was interdicted when the plague message was received. Maybe you can synthesize a cure for whatever it is if you want to."
She stared off as she thought. The Qard were a silicon-based Inferus lifeform, with internal temperatures that could instantly incinerate any carbon-based contaminant. Native to hot rocky worlds where softer materials burned or turned molten, it took a lot of effort to bundle that inner heat so far down she could safely interact with the type of world she wanted, one like the planet of her birth.
Rae was born on Terra in the mid twentieth century AD, for the simple reason her parents had been born there, back in the Triassic. They lived secretly in and around hominids from the time those evolved from the lesser primates. The only reason her parents were there was that her people came to live on Sol III when it was still a molten rock, fleeing the Devastation that caused Qardos to be abandoned. She''d taken well to the necessary adaptation techniques while still an infant, able to go outside the protective habitat her parents built for her and interact with the fragile biosphere of her homeworld.
She toyed with an old Earth copper coin she wore on a necklace. She''d grown up playing at being human, but the fact she developed three times slower made it hard to maintain a peer group. Rae learned to keep two calendars; one, her actual chronological age in Solar years, and the other was the age she appeared to be compared to an average human. When she reached her age of adulthood at 45 chronological years, she was developmentally a gangly teenager in appearance, with most of her eventual height but only around half her adult physique...
...She blinked, suddenly confused, and shook her head, pinching the bridge of her nose as she struggled to recover her chain of thought. It was Terra''s pristine greens and blues that she sought when she went camping, but the world she remembered was long lost to pollution and over-development. Now she lived halfway across the galaxy, and hadn''t returned to Terra in several centuries.
''Actually, the beacon might be to my advantage,'' she sent to Chayse. ''I dislike anyone interrupting me when I camp, and I may be here longer than usual. The plague warning will inspire them to keep their distance, without me doing anything overt that might catch the attention of a passing ship. Taylor, put out some satellites when you enter orbit, please. I want a higher resolution surface map and detailed scans.''
"Yes, Captain."
Worrying her lip with her sharp teeth, she turned to Chayse. ''Can you control the scans? If I do, I might spoil myself.''
"Certainly, Mom, what do you want to know?" he said. The look on his face told her he hadn''t missed when she''d zoned out. He''d always had a sharp eye, and like Taylor, was sensitive to her moods and frailties.
''Do some detailed atmosphere scans and take some bio samples. I''m interested in knowing if there are any easily detected carbon-based pathogens confirming the beacon''s report. Secondly, track down where the Daring crashed down. Refined metal scans, etc, etc. I''d also like you to double check for humanoid remains, specifically Homo Sapiens.''
"Pathogen scans on-going." Chayse fiddled with the data until the surface was rendered on the main screen as a topographical map. The shipwreck was soon located among a scattering of low hills surrounded by vast flatlands. Closer up, the mineral readings of the crash site showed advanced materials under the disturbed surface of the northernmost hill.
"Hmm." He generated a flashing series of diagrams analyzing the movement direction of the displaced soil and the damage they detected on the Daring''s bow. "Seems she was headed Northeast at a fairly low speed and clipped into the hillside, stopping most of the way through. I''m assuming she was heading for the flats, and missed."
Chayse put up bio-scans next over the topographic lines, thick with life-sign symbols in the valleys around the Daring''s resting place. "Quadrupedal mammals, and a lot of them, averaging a bit over the mass of a human."
Next, geo-scans showed a series of low rises nearby, with relatively recent excavations containing remains. Details revealed they were mostly human-variant remains, with a few aliens. "The oldest is a mass grave, probably from just after the crash," he said, "followed by a series of graves and tombs with only a few bodies each. The last holds only one, and was sealed roughly around the time the beacon was updated."
''Are they all accounted for?'' she asked.
Chayse dug into the Federated data records for the crew roster of the Daring on its last voyage. "Yes, that''s all of them." He bowed his head, "The Light rest their souls."
She absently nodded in agreement with his prayer. ''So, no functional ship, and no survivors. Can you do an Energy scan?'' she sent.
"The only active power readings are from the beacon in orbit and ourselves. There''s nothing here at the crash site." One of his screens beeped, and he checked it. "No trace of widespread dangerous pathogens. That doesn''t prove anything, it could just be the wrong season for anything to be detectable. The nearby creatures don''t seem affected, however, and the planet''s overall life density map seems typical for a world of this type and size."
She shrugged. ''Good to know, even though it''s not really important for my purposes. Now, please give me live views from the middle atmosphere. I''m looking for a nice mix of biomes.'' Chayse sent the main screen a real-time view from far above the landscapes of the crash site. She controlled the camera, focusing on an odd curving line of mountains northwards of the crash site, stretching east to west. ''Is that all the same range? They seem so blocky and discrete from each other. Most ranges flow more organically from peak to peak.''
"It seems to be," Chayse said. "Many of them seem to be plateaus, mesas, or the like, rather than proper mountains." He performed a geological scan that revealed they were mostly made of dense granites, carved separately from each other by glaciers long ago. Symbols showed that abundant minerals ran through the range, with scattered geothermal pockets underneath.
"Each one primarily consists of closely related shades of stone, but over the extent of the range there''s a whole palette of colors." Blocks of color laid over the plateau images, ranging from shades of ivory to the far west, to deep grays and blacks on the eastern end. Many spurs branched out from the main range in a wide variety of colors. Mostly they were warm hues, in yellows, reds, and browns, but more rarely there were cooler colors represented.
Rae maneuvered the view-point to the eastern trailing edge of the range where the darker plateaus stood even further off from each other, the ancient glaciers having ground deeper between them. The jet black one at the very end captured her attention. It was small compared to those in the center of the range, measuring just a kilometer and a half in length, and about half that in width and height. ''I could carve a nice compound out of that. Right on a river, scrub and grasslands on the near shore, woods and rocky hills on the far side. I like it, this is where I''ll camp.''
Chayse shut down the other screens, and gave her his full attention. "Do you want to talk about whatever happened that triggered this, maybe get someone to help you?" She sighed and slowly shook her head, a warning expression in her eyes. He frowned, but changed the subject. "Are you keeping the Question with you?"
She shook her head again. ''That would defeat the point of camping, wouldn''t it? I''m already being indulgent with the amount of gear I''m taking.'' She turned to Taylor, ''Once I''m down you can park her somewhere in the system. Maybe transfer your consciousness home for the decades it''ll take for me to signal. Spend some time with the Kin.'' Taylor bowed his head, acknowledging her words.
Rae stood, taking a step towards Chayse, but he met her halfway. When he lifted his arms she flinched, so he reached over slowly to touch her upper arms. "May" his voice turned rough, eyes glittering with suspicious brightness. "...May you find the peace you''re looking for."
Oh, Chayse. Her own eyes burned, and she impulsively took one of his hands and laid her cheek into it briefly. ''Thank you, child, for everything. Tell the Family... tell them I''ll be alright. I just need time.'' He nodded, and she briskly walked away and up the ramp before she dashed away the tears that threatened to fall.
Chayse sat heavily in the chair he''d been using, and rubbed his face with his hand. He could feel Taylor''s level gaze on him. "You''re not going to transfer, are you?" Taylor gave a single shake of his head. "I''ve offered before to upgrade you to a Kin instead of a bespoke ship''s intelligence," Chayse said.
Taylor subtly tilted his head. "Then you wouldn''t be First Kin." Chayse sat up but before he could speak Taylor raised a hand. "Once we both stood behind our maker, united in her support. When you began your new life, of necessity you stepped away from that role to live for yourself. I don''t blame you for that, you deserve your happiness. But, someone still needs to look after her. To protect her..." He turned back to the front of the bridge, quietly murmuring words Chayse didn''t think he was meant to hear.
"...even from herself."
Chapter 3 - Black Gryphon Totem (Illustration)
"The Children of the Stars track the times when the Mother sleeps over the course of the seasons. Twelve times after the dark of the year, Her great white eye cracks open, slowly widening until full. She looks down upon us to see that we are well, then gradually closes Her eye so She might rest awhile."
--Fable of the Mother''s Eye
Of all the ways she could reach the ground, Rae decided to use her skyboard. It was two and a half meters long and over a meter wide. The sally port of the equipment bay was open, and she braced there on it against the cutting night winds as the ship approached her destination. Wearing a scanning helmet and with the rest of her gear strapped to the board, she watched the moonlit landscape whipping past under the Question''s belly. Through the amber visor, she spotted the dark buttes and plateaus of her target area as it swelled closer in the distance.
The helmet was a relic from an earlier phase of her life. Like a motorcycle helmet, it was painted brightly, a base of teal with feathered wings of gold on each side. A central stripe of silver went from the chin to the nape of the neck with blue crystals at either end. A smaller silver stripe went across the top of the visor. When she used to wear it, she''d still had illusions that she could meaningfully connect with humans and that she could make a difference in her life and theirs.
The ship''s trajectory was aimed at one of the narrow ends of the trailing plateau, and when they were only a few kilometers off, she launched. Relying on her momentum to carry her forward the rest of the way, she kicked on the hover thrust to keep from plummeting down like a stone. Like a bullet, the board pierced the night skies as she balanced it down on its belly, nose tipped lowest.
The fierce air pressure and velocity made her bare her fangs in a toothy grin under the helm despite her malaise. Her path swerved as she leaned from side to side like a skater in a halfpipe, then executed a 360. The river below flashed briefly with reflected moonlight as she slowed her descent. Rae wanted to land on top of the rocky elevation, after all, not inside it.
''So you want to Embrace the Wind like he did, do you? This method will hurt a lot more, which is only what you deserve, pathetic failure.''
Rae''s eyes widened as a crescendo of disorientation swept her up into a series of tumbles on every axis. Her vision blurred as she spiraled wildly out of control. The skyboard clung to her feet gravitically, its weight throwing off her sense of balance and making things worse. No longer able to tell which way was down, her heart raced as panic gripped her.
An aborted shout set her coughing, the scent of blood filling the helmet. The darkness around her was only relieved when the mostly full orb of the moon streaked past her eyes, revealing trails of wetness on the inside of her visor. How long had she tumbled? She felt suspended in a chaotic void, but she knew the ground was leaping up to meet her plummeting form. Imagining the results of that encounter, she curled in on herself, cringing, as she waited for the moment of impact.
A wide, dark shape blocked out the cartwheeling ground and sky, enveloping Rae. The air went still, and the gibbous moon swam over her head again. She was pulled back into a comforting embrace, and she leaned heavily on the warm shape behind her while catching her breath. Blood streaks still obscured her sight, so she set her visor to auto-clean. Rhythmically moving blurs to either side resolved into a great pair of dark wings that slowed her yet still propelled her forward.
She looked down and saw what held her was the talon of a giant bird of prey, with another stretched out in balance on her other side, gripping the skyboard. The limbs'' width were nearly as wide as one of her legs, which meant the creature had to be huge. She looked over her shoulder and met the fierce blue eyes of a black feathered raptor with upright, feathered ears. Leaning a little more to the side to look behind the creature''s shoulder, she saw the beast had the flanks and hindquarters of a big cata gryphon. A gryphon, of all things, had pulled her out of her tailspin.
It had to be a totem, the unique alternate form each Qard had in the likeness of a real or mythical animal. The black gryphon totem seemed familiar, but she couldn''t quite remember whose it was. It isn''t Chayse, she thought. His totem is a leopard. Jeol''s is a bronze lion, and mine is a black jaguar, so who is this? The big beak preened against her helmet as she wondered.
When she felt stable, she leaned forward, away from the gryphon''s breast, and it moved further back, now only lightly gripping the bundled packs behind her. The plateau was very close now, and as she tilted the nose up to land, the beast let go, beating its wings to hover near her. Rae turned to face the gryphon, her intended demand for privacy going unsent when she saw it was translucent. Someone was projecting their totem to her, but they weren''t really here. It nodded to her once, then slowly faded away. She stared where it had been, finding herself doubting if it had even been there in the first place.
But, she still smelled blood She pulled off the gaudy helm and looked inside. There were smears of silver on the lining and more on her hand when she dragged it down her face. All that proved was she''d coughed while wearing it. She looked inside and connected the visor to the skyboard''s computer memory. She projected the journey down in front of her, showing the steep loss of altitude, while gyro readings revealed the tortured tumbling on the way. So at least part of it happened, but... how much?
Rae shook her head and tucked the helmet under her arm, not wanting to think about it anymore. Toeing the controls, she touched down on the black granite. Stepping off, she opened her top pack, and released a few dozen computerized drones, and perched a stand-alone set of goggles on her head. She wedged the full helmet between the packs and ordered the board''s autopilot to follow her. Sending the drones flying off to map the plateau, she clambered over the rough rocks for a first-hand investigation.
The plateau''s roof wasn''t all black stone. There was a layer of thin soil that supported grasses and scattered scrubby bushes. She paused at one bush, looking at a snarl of pale fibers caught in the bramble. Pulling down her goggles, she reached out to examine some when she had a sudden feeling of being watched. Looking up to a nearby crag, she saw a horned face looking back at her. The type of horns reminded her of Terran mountain goats, if they had three horns instead of two. There was one on each side of its head and one in the middle. But the whole forward part of the head was bony, like it was wearing a slightly larger version of its skull as a mask.
The goat analog shuffled uneasily on the crag edge, letting Rae see it had three hoof-like toes on each forefoot. She slowly straightened, and its shaggy body suddenly launched over her head and scrambled away across the rocks, followed by a half dozen others. After they disappeared into the darkness, something drifted down in front of her. She plucked a long pale fiber from the air, seeing more raining down in its wake. With her goggles, she identified them as thick hollow hairs and verified that the fibers in the bush were from a similar source. Getting a case from her packs, she put a sample of the hairs away. Maybe she could make wool thread with them?
Finding an edge of the plateau, she started to trace her way around the top. Looking down the steep sides, she could see graduations of crumbled rock picked out in the moonlight. The skirt of scree rock that concealed the base of the elevation started several hundred meters below. Movements along the sides proved to be more small herds of the goat-kind, showing the group she encountered weren''t the only ones up here. If their wool was useful, she might be able to shear them periodically for a renewable resource.
When Rae reached the eastern edge, she spotted the river in the distance. Pulling up preliminary results from her drones, she saw the river came from the northeast, passed near the plateau then headed away to the southwest. As she continued clockwise to the south, the river came closer until it approached the southeast corner of the plateau, near one of the short ends of the elevation. The river shore was a bit less than half a klick away at its closest, and she teleported down midway between the plateau and the river.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Sitting on a stray boulder, she started to tease out the drone readings into a cohesive picture as her board flew down the slope to catch up to her. She could build a log cabin in the nearby woods or a rammed earth and straw home in the grasslands, but it made her nervous to sleep in homes that were so... flammable. Any slip of her adaptation could lead to a disastrous wildfire at the best of times, so she preferred to stay within the more forgiving shelter of solid stone.
Pre-dawn began to lighten the sky as Rae modeled the plateau that loomed beside her. It mostly consisted of black granite, and she ported a fallen, fist-sized piece of it to her hand and took a big bite, chewing as she analyzed the tastes. It was fairly dense for igneous rock, rich in minerals like hornblende and biotite. The metals in it were iron, magnesium, and hints of titanium that made it approach being basalt rather than granite. The scan data showed voids and caves throughout the stone and traced the locations of water sources and mineral deposits.
Deeper underneath were some promising lava pockets. Having a chamber of Inferus native environment nearby would be nice when it became colder. If she felt another explosive fit come over her, she''d have to relocate quickly not to damage this location. Stopping what she was doing briefly, she directed the orbiting satellites to chart the signs of volcanic regions within 100 klicks, moving out another 100 kilometers each time no significant surface volcanism was located.
Dismissing that screen, Rae looked at the elevation model, turning it around and imagining what she could make of it. It reminded her of a beast on its belly, curled slightly to the left. The right forelimb would be outstretched, and the left foot tucked close to its breast. The plateau was tall enough for the head to be upright and face squarely at the river. That same height also lent itself to wings, giving a winged yet four-limbed beast. In the days she''d worn her helmet unironically, she was associated with dragons, maybe?
''How arrogant and self-absorbed,'' sneered her inner voice.
She scowled, pinching her nose. Maybe a wyvern? But no, a wyvern didn''t have a proper haunch. Focusing on the scans again, she tried to see what else would work. Filtering up from the back of her mind came a flash of the beak of the Peregrine high over her head on Qardos, followed by a memory of the beak of the blue-eyed, black gryphon.
Pulling a stylus from a pack, she started sketching in the details on the projection. She brought up a 3D rendering of the classic ink drawing of "Alice in Wonderland''s" sleeping gryphon as a style guide and morphed its position to something matching the dark plateau''s outline. Curling the lion''s tail up against the left haunch, sizing up the wings, and uncrossing the forelimbs was a start. Lifting the head to an erect, forward-looking posture that stared off to the southeastern horizon with alert, pricked-up ears was even better.
Transferring her work to her goggles, she walked briskly to the riverside, then turned and digitally overlaid the design over the dusty plateau. She inserted the colors of the morning sky at places to simulate what would be carved away. Rae caught her breath at what she saw. It was still a rough depiction, but there was a lot of potential. ''Yes! I dub thee "Waking Gryphon".''
It would take a long time to clear the exterior of scree and crumbling, weathered rock. More to carve the exterior and excavate the many levels and chambers within the body of the beast she envisioned. She would trim any usable stone she extracted into building blocks to refine for paths or out-buildings. It wouldn''t be the first time she''d built a monumental structure. Her homestead on Deltia was much larger than this would end up being. Here, then, was a worthy project to occupy her days and quiet her mind, something she could bury herself in for many years.
She began drawing guidelines in the scan data, indicating exactly which direction the beak would point and where the middle of the chest would be. That middle would define the centerline between the great double doors Rae planned to make as the interior''s main entrance. Retrieving a handful of marble-sized holo beacons from her packs, she used the goggles to dispatch them as guideline markers.
Retracing her steps to the edge of the scree pile at the centerline, she began dividing the rock jumble into what was usable and what was worthless mass. Most of the stones here were only good for mass, fuel to stoke her internal engines. As she shifted through the rock, she found an increasing amount of solid stones that she piled to the side for later refining. When she wasn''t brute-forcing the larger chunks by hand, telekinesis hurried the work along, allowing her to shift and sort a half kiloton of smaller scree at a time.
The physical and mental exertions burned into her mass reserves, prompting her to heat a pile of waste rock to top herself off. Her kind didn''t require calories for their nutrition; instead, they needed large amounts of molecular mass of any type to keep up their physical density. She had to consume more volume of the rocks than if it was made of denser matter, like metals, but there was enough around to satisfy her hunger as she worked.
Hours passed. Day turned to night and back again as she unceasingly cleared a broad swath of scree, her mind emptied of everything but the present moment. Centering on the guideline, she reached her first goal; uncovering the foot of the plateau that faced the river. Letting herself finally notice her accumulated fatigue, she piled up short walls of squared stone at the elevation''s base. Clearing the skyboard, she put the packs down in a layer over the rock underfoot. Then, she pulled the board over them as a temporary roof. Rae stretched hugely and settling under the skyboard, and she rested her eyes for a while.
THWANG!
The skyboard rang with impact, and Rae jolted back to full awareness. Sitting up abruptly, her head impacted the still vibrating board. Hissing curses, she pushed the board further above her and looked around. A string of bone-faced goats scurried to the river, the few nearest giving side-eyes in her direction, seemingly as bothered by the noise as she was. She stared after them as they rushed to join the others in their herd. She looked up the side of the crag and blinked, thinking about what happened.
One of the Crag Horns... must have mistaken the board for a shelf of rock and hopped onto it on their way to the ground. She watched them as they watered and headed back to the plateau. She huffed in amusement when they split up, half of them angling out to either side of her. As the two groups got further apart, they slowed until one group of them sprinted across the field to join the others before they disappeared past a heap of scree rock.
Dismantling her temporary shelter, Rae looked at the vertical rock around the holographic centerline and refined her computer model. Using a combination of her scans and her sense of perception, she planned where to dig into the granite. She first surfaced the stone flat with her energy sword in sections wider than the doors would be one day.
Using segmented rods designed to conduct extreme temperatures, she heated them to glowing hot with her hands and pushed them deep into the rock as if it was clay. When she made a series of the holes in a line, stresses built up between them when she reabsorbed most of that imbued heat. The rock quickly cooled back down, creating squared horizontal columns a meter across and two meters deep. When the columns fully cooled, she''d telekinetically grab them and apply shearing force at the deepest part, snapping it free. In this initial effort, many of them fractured unevenly but were still somewhat usable.
She worked until she''d dug an opening four meters wide and four meters tall in the center, sloping down to three meters tall at the outer sides. When the excavation reached several meters deep, she went inside and used a pick and a pry bar to clear the loose rock and trim off the uneven places with her energy sword. Once she drove in a particular shaft or cross-shaft, it was easier to do the work because she could access more sides of a volume of stone to sever it from the belly of the crag.
It was nice having shelter from the elements. She could bring her gear underneath and work undisturbed from the local fauna. She drew on the living granite with light-colored chalk she fetched from her supplies, marking areas to excavate with an x, and drawing vertical lines on the places she would refine into support columns. As Rae gained a clearer picture of the space, she''d pause to update her 3d model.
The ceiling and the tops of the columns would be at four meters, like the top of the doors. If she encountered pockets of weaker, less solid stone, she could graft in good stone taken from elsewhere and melt it in place, cooling it slowly to fuse it permanently with the greater mass. But it was easier to take away material than to add it, so the procedure would be a last resort.
She used her goggles to even out the contrast of light and shadow after she went behind her first planned column and left it on. The passage of time blurred for her without the cycle of day and night to reckon by. She lost herself in the labor until the pick quivered in her grasp as she lifted it. Staring at the trembling motion, she loosened her hands from the tool with an effort.
Leaning the pick into a corner, Rae sifted through the blocks and shards littering the dig until she had enough broken rock for a batch of mass to consume. The influx of molten slag hit her system hard, and she found a place to sit before she fell. Her upper stomach began breaking the mass down into subatomic particles, spreading warmth within her. Embracing her knees, she stared at the digging blankly, unable to critically consider if the work was done well or not. Finally, she pulled the goggles off and laid her head on her arms until darkness stole up and took her.
Chapter 4 - A Change of Face
"The Seasons are controlled by our Sire. His flaming eye lights up the day, and he beds down to sleep when comes the night. He has his rhythms as he patrols his territory to protect us. The cold of Lowsun is when He is farthest away from us, while He is closest at Highsun. Halfway between Lowsun and High is the Rising Sun, and when He heads out again to the farther ranges, while the midpoint is the Falling Sun."
--Fable of the Sire''s Eye
Huh. One side of Rae''s face was colder than the other. That swiftly went from a mere fact to an annoyance, and with an effort, she tried to open her eyes. Succeeding with one, she frowned when her mind refused to make sense of what she was seeing. She slowly realized she was laying on her side, and the lower eye was pressed too close to the surface under her to open. That explained why everything seemed... sideways. Levering herself up she found she''d been sleeping on the floor of her dig, surrounded by chunks of rock, and a thick layer of dust.
Standing, she slapped clouds of rock dust off of her before surveying the chaos around her. Why didn''t she lay out her bedroll? This mess wouldn''t do. She summoned her board and began loading batches of the useful rock on it, telekinetically bundling the scraps along with her. By the time she was done carrying the rock out and her bags in, she felt too grimy to stand herself. She took off her coat and began loosening her shirt when she heard a jingle from the trio of slender chain links attached to the metal cuff on her left wrist.
She froze. Usually, she never noticed the faint sound, but it was so quiet, her oathband rang abnormally loud to her ears. She stared at the band and the engraved panels depicting each of the four seasons, sucking on her lower lip. She wanted to sound it deliberately, to shake her wrist and launch the familiar music to wherever the other of the pair was, around the wrist of her spouse. She''d always used it as a non-verbal way to show she was thinking of him. But...
Rae''s stomach clenched in tension at the thought, afraid of how he''d react if she signaled to him. The oathbands weren''t a Qard thing. They were the symbol of marital union on the distant world where she joined her life with the human, Jeol Harden, over a millennia ago. They had the same meaning as wedding rings, but the symbolism of bondage to each other was rather more explicit. The tension stretched at her nerves within her, then won out over her urge to connect back to him.
Swiftly she took off the band, stuffing it into a pocket of her clothing pack. Transfixed by the light gray skin that had been covered for centuries, her breathing quickened with guilt until she found a handful of dark dust to grind into her pale wrist. Hunting among her gear she took out a black strap that she laid over her shoulder, then found a portable scanner and walked to the riverside. The nearby shore had a small section of sand and rounded pebbles among the otherwise grassy, overgrown banks, and she knelt there to test the water.
It was free of contaminants and harmful carbon-based biotics, and when Rae tasted the water, it was good, clean, and fresh. She emptied her pockets and waded into the water, a streak of murky gray making its way downstream from her. Taking off each item of clothing in turn while waist-deep in the stream, she briskly rubbed them free of the dust, then tossed them onto the pebbled beach. She scrubbed herself with handfuls of sand, before finding more between her legs than she expected. She, or rather, he, had Changed their phase to male.
Double-checking, he patted his flat chest. His body had morphed with the newly turned phase, shoulders widening some and his hips becoming narrower. Still noticeably androgynous, some of his subtle curves had bled away into wiry, more masculine lines. He didn''t recall ever Changing without noticing before. Usually, there was some discomfort involved, but the way he''d been working lately, it was entirely possible he''d attributed the aches to the labor instead. The Change was inevitable, happening twice a month since his birth. It was simply part of being a Qard. They would slide from expressing one gender to the other, and at times lingering in a state in between.
Gendered pronouns like ''she'' and ''he'' weren''t part of Qard culture or language. When the race still lived on the homeworld, the language contained a myriad of subtle nuances describing sexual preferences and the Change cycle. But that was generations ago. The refugees who survived to see carbon-based life arise on the new world were rather put off by the way its genders often differed. His parents, although raised by the first generation, weren''t as repulsed by dimorphic genderism, but neither did it affect their sense of personal identity. Rae''s own childhood, on the other hand, was steeped in it. He''d chosen to identify as (marginally) feminine because he was most attracted to male forms.
In spite of their chemical & genetic incompatibilities, the reason he''d looked to humans for a partner was that his kind was nearly extinct. The number of Qard when he was born was five. Rae could count them on one hand with a thumb left over: his parents, a grandparent, his elder sib Jonai, and himself. Every other Qard who''d ever been was Passed. As a young person, he had personally walked the five circles of the Catacombs and verified that every niche was filled, except the few of his family. With no suitable options, and only close blood family, who else was there?
His youth among humanity made him willing to accept a human as a lover, but for many reasons, it wasn''t at all easy. It wasn''t necessarily even sex that urged him to look for someone. He could go years without that if needed. It was the companionship he wanted; a way to fight the long, lonely years that lay ahead. His parent''s relationship was still strong after hundreds of millions of years. He wanted that kind of relationship, and children of his own, but at the same time never thought he''d have them...
Grimly, Rae set his teeth and scrubbed his pale wrist clean. Ducking under to rinse the grit away, he came up to the shore and dressed again, letting his sopping garb dry from the radiant warmth of his frame. Wrapping the dark strap a few times over his band-mark he buckled it shut. It was enough to quiet the guilt he felt when looking at his bare wrist, at least a little.
He raised his gaze to look across the river, evaluating the trees clustered on the other side. He needed wood and a break from the digging. Returning to his bags, he set up the compact mainframe and its solar panels and took out coils of metal cable and a sharp axe. Donning his goggles, he linked up to two kinds of drones; a camera variety, and smaller ''no-seeums'' designed to sample the genetics of native flora and fauna. In this initial run, the drones would film and sample everything, and then it would be run through the lab after he returned, to be added to a database.
Upstream, on a grassy bank, was a shallower stretch of river, and he forded there, trailed by the skyboard. The waters averaged knee-deep, burbling around him as the samplers plunked under the surface to chase after fish and other water dwellers. He watched them, the goggles picking up the outlines of the sampled plants and animals. Once they cataloged this stretch of river, the little drones rose up, dripping.
On the other end of the shallows was a large patch of tall reeds. Cutting and splitting one with his bush knife he evaluated it for bendiness and tensile strength, for use as a kind of withy. This close to the river''s far side, he could see a large kind of bamboo among the regular trees. He nodded to himself. Reeds and bamboo could both be used for weaving mats or other crafted items. Rae cleared away the middle third of the reeds to make a pathway, wrinkling his nose at a murky, sour smell coming from some of the dislodged and tangled roots. Bundling up the harvested reeds, he lashed them to the board.
Coming up on the far bank, he moved through the undergrowth, tapping on the trees and bamboo with the back of the axe. He was looking for boles that rang with a clear note, indicating they were free of rot or hidden splits. The most common type of tree was a deciduous birchy sort, with tall narrow trunks with few branches on the lower two-thirds of their height. The tree''s upper third had a vertical canopy of shiny, silvery foliage which reflected the predominant colors of the sky.Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The other sort reminded him of oaks, having shorter, thicker trunks with heavy, sprawling limbs that loosely intertwined with those of their neighbors. Though examples of the latter sort were similar in overall appearance, their bark and leaf colors differed oddly from tree to tree in a way he didn''t understand but resolved to find out, eventually. He was never one to overharvest, and by force of habit strictly limited the amount of anything he''d take from any given area, based on the rarity. These woods were roughly 50 hectares, and he only needed a small amount of wood at present. He decided to take three mid-sized individuals of the birchy type and the bamboo, with trunks roughly the width of his thigh. He''d also take ten each the diameter of his wrist. For now, he''d avoid fully mature examples, or felling any of the oaky types.
Walking the woodlands, small animals skittered away from him, and the sound of him felling trees spooked larger bone-faced browsers. He collected fallen oaky branches where he found them. Vines entangled the bulkier sort of trees, making it hard to maneuver around them. Chopping the wood and bamboo trunks and branches into 3-meter lengths, they were lashed to the board as well.
Leaving the leafy canopy parts behind for the moment, he made his way through to the far side of the woods. There was a tall outcropping of greenish shale in the middle of a grassy meadow that he climbed, spotting the black plateau to the east. Marking the site as a landmark for his records, he took a 360 video from the vantage, getting a good look at the denser woods from the river. There weren''t as many of the bamboo there. Maybe they were hydrophilic? Sitting on top of the rock shelf, he rubbed over the wrist strap and looked off into the distance.
When Rae first met Jeol, the human was a happily married man with a young son. His wife intuited the not-entirely-platonic admiration Rae held for the dashing pilot but nonetheless encouraged him to remain a close family friend. Unfortunately, Karis Harden died a few years later, and Rae honored her dying wish by being there for the new widower and his boy. The closer the two of them got, and the stronger their affections, the more difficult their closeness was for Rae.
Even when ready to move beyond mere friendship, their differences threw up barriers against them. Mortals were so... ephemeral, and fragile. It took Qards almost half a century to reach adolescence, and twice that to be old enough to reproduce. Their bones were stronger than any man-made alloy, and their strength was enough to pulverize carbon-based life. Their inner heat made an incautious transfer of body fluids instantly fatal, so it took the utmost care to be intimate without harming them.
Add to all that the cultural and gender differences involved. Most of his relationship problems were from that last issue. One firm rule Rae drew with monosexuals was that a lover must accept all of him; male, female, and in between. The few times he didn''t insist on that ended in sorrow and tragedy all around. Jeol... passed that test. Accepting Rae as an ambisexual person was difficult for him, but out of love, he''d managed. They were both males the first time they were together, both physically were in their mid 20''s, or the equivalent, though Jeol was a third his own chronological age at the time.
Rae had given up on the dream of a forever spouse and accepted the certainty he would outlive Jeol. At least they could be together for his fleeting lifespan, however long Rae could extend it. Their love would be something Rae could remember in later years, a sad and bittersweet warmth to hold in his heart. Strangely, it was only when he stopped obsessing about what he truly wanted did he receive it. The Light, who''d created the Qard from star stuff, was still involved in their affairs. When Rae moved past his fear of being lonely and alone, the Light intervened in their relationship. Explaining that the Qard race was not meant to be extinguished, Jeol was given the opportunity to become one. Being a fully compatible partner to Rae was everything they wanted, and Jeol accepted the offer.
Since he''d reached physical maturity Rae had been a mother and a father on a nearly equal basis, mostly with Jeol. They had the same longevity now, and their marriage to date had lasted a thousand years. The only difficult thing was teaching Jeol how to manage the physical and emotional aspects of the Change. Years passed before Jeol was really comfortable with his own feminine side, but in their lives together there was no combination of their gender phases they hadn''t intimately experienced. Rae sighed and shook his head, thinking about Jeol wasn''t helping his mood.
Slipping down the other side of the stone outcropping, he spotted a relatively fresh grazer''s skull half under a ledge, the scattered remains of the skeleton nearby. Examining the bones he found the tooth marks of a big predator on it. Looking about, he spotted paw prints of large felines in a drying patch of mud. Rae identified closely with big cats, with a black jaguar as his totem. He looked forward to when he encountered the cats and could study them.
Retracing his path back among the trees, he gathered more oaky deadfall, and coil after coil of the tough vines. The leafy tops he''d left behind were strapped to the logs already on the board until there wasn''t room for them anymore. Tying the last few in a bundle he carried on his back, he turned to the river. Hearing chittering past the reeds ahead of him, he crouched and approached stealthily. There were several sizable bone-skulled rodents among the disturbed reed roots, Some were chewing on the roots, others were noisily tussling over them. He spotted more of the creatures downstream to the south, swimming after root bundles the waters swept away.
Not wanting to disturb the creatures, he set a few camera drones to observe and teleported to the far side of the ford, directing the board to swing wide to the north to avoid them. Bringing the wood to the cleared area in front of the plateau''s entrance, he started dividing the types and giving each piece an inspection. He half sank some of the birchy logs up against the plateau''s footprint as anchors and lashed the smaller poles to them to frame a wood drying shed. Stacked stones made the rear and sidewalls, and he would close in the outermost side with two wooden gates.
Splitting pieces of the bigger bamboo, he fashioned them into roof tiles, using a multitool to bore small holes to tie them down to the frame. Experimenting with the vines, they proved to be a good form of natural cordage. Terran bamboo was highly durable, and this species seemed fairly similar. By the time he''d need to replace them, he''d likely have a stock of clay tiles to use. He tiled the roof, then started moving the logs into the shed. He would build the gates, and pallets for the excess cut stone tomorrow. Also on his to-do list was a workbench for future woodworking projects.
Once the lumber was put away, the day was sliding into the evening. He started on cutting the leafy branches from the upper tree trunks. Those he spread over top of the roof tiles, bound with vines and held down by the remaining poles. The floors of his dig weren''t flat enough for sleeping yet so he heaped the remaining springy branches just inside the shed''s opening and put his bedroll there.
Not ready to bed down just yet, he flew on the skyboard to the top of the crag and pulled his harmonica from his boot. Rae serenaded the sunset and the goats, using the thumb switches to change the key or octave when needed. If the music he played were mostly sad songs, well, that was alright. Almost unwillingly, his thoughts were drawn back to his spouse.
His parents disapproved of him choosing a mortal to be with, pointing out that they had caused him heartbreak before. Rae not-so-politely told them to shut up; they had their happily ever after, and he was reduced to snatching shards of companionship where he found them. His critical inner voice agreed with his parents, and he stopped playing for a moment to wonder where that notion came from. Jeol was ephemeral no more and was as comfortable with his phases as a born Qard. If anything, Rae didn''t think he was worthy of Jeol.
They didn''t always live and work together, and he''d had the occasional fling with someone else, but Rae could never leave his spouse for long. The wake-up call was Warren, an Immortal he was looking after. He still regretted the way he''d hurt Warren when the young Immortal wanted Rae to leave Jeol and how devastated he became when Rae declined. That sort of thing never happened to Jeol and didn''t happen to Rae anymore, either. Friendships were fine, even with benefits, but he''d learned where to draw the line.
And now, he was... damaged... somehow. Seriously enough he felt the need to withdraw from the Family, and especially Jeol. Like a lit powder keg, there was an explosion imminent, and Rae wanted to be alone when it happened. After that, he''d try and put himself back together again, one shard at a time if he had to. In the meantime, he''d dance the familiar tune of working a wilderness camp.
The first stars were coming out when he took the board back down the slope. He checked the computer in the dig to see if a suitable volcano had been located yet, but the results were still negative. His eyes swept over his work, lingering over the pack where his band was hidden. Until this anomaly in his head was dealt with, he needed to limit his distractions, so the band would stay where it was.
Rae pushed away from the computer and went to the woodshed. He laid down on his bedroll and relaxed his constant levitation, an ingrained instinct to avoid causing excessive damage to this sort of environment. The leftover branches crackled underneath his weight. They''d be wood dust by morning, but at first, it would blunt the planes of the hard ground. He closed his eyes and eventually, slept.
Chapter 5 - Explorations (Illustration)
"The little lights in the dark above are the eyes of our kind who have died. They gather in fixed clusters, much as we do. They patrol the emptiness beyond the Nest and alert our watchful Dam and our fiery Sire to any threats to us, their children. If we are brave enough and strong enough when we die, our souls will climb above the clouds to join them."
--Fable of the Starband.
When Rae woke, it was dawn, and the light coming in from outside the woodshed was dimmer than usual. Rising, he looked out to see a morning heavily cloaked in mist. Scratching his head, Rae tried to capture the scraps of odd and uncomfortable dreams. Unable to do so, he succumbed to his restlessness and began to work on projects close to camp.
He built a stacked stone cradle for use in milling the wood into planks with his energy sword. The birchy type wood he was calling cloud-top was creamy-tan with a fine, dense grain. He slabbed some of the larger and straighter oak-like branches as well, discovering something interesting. The oak-type hardwood was all hues and shades of green, as each year''s growth showed a slightly different color; the grain consisted of highly figured curls.
He used the green-grained wood to make the top of the workbench, fitting three thick slabs together in tongue and groove fashion. Sturdy cloud-top branches supported the top slab and fit into each other via mortise and tenon connections. The outer parts of the slabs were left with live edges, the mottled deep brown and green bark giving a rustic flair. He brought handfuls of the dark river grit over to sand the flat side down, using his teke to crush them into increasingly fine particles until it was practically a powder.
As soon as he finished the bench, Rae started on his other projects. He built a tensioned bow saw frame and used twists of wire to fasten the toothed blade to it. The gates were twice the current height of the shed''s opening, as at some point, Rae intended on extending the outbuilding''s height and depth. After installing the gates, he started building pallets for the cut stone piled around, gathering stones of similar size on each to make it easier to transport the rocks. He trimmed rough but solid rock for building material and divided them among the various pallets for the rest of the hazy morning.
When the sun reached its full height, it finally burned the remnants of the fog away. He stood in the sun for a time soaking in the light, then ducked into the dig to check the state of the stonework. The cuts inside looked like they strayed off the designs here and there, and honestly, he knew why. He wasn''t always ''present'' when he worked here, and it was easy to lose focus. He put on his goggles and corrected the chalk lines, rubbing some of them out and drawing in new ones. When satisfied with his marks, he started excavating again. Some unknown amount of time later, he staggered out of the dig to collapse on his bedroll, hoping he was too tired to dream, but hoping in vain...
Rae became aware of herself leaning against a building on Shrine island of Qardos and hearing people laughing nearby. She held a half-full globe of molten metal in her left hand, and she heard a musical jingle when she lifted it to her lips to drink from it. Looking sharply at her wrist, she didn''t find what she''d half expected to see but couldn''t say what that was. Instead, the sound came from a series of crystal pendants dangling from a sleeve of intricately woven metal ribbons along her forearm that left tantalizing gaps, revealing her skin in between. Ribbons similarly adorned her right arm. Glancing down at herself, she could see the clothing style continued over her front, less-than-modestly. The gaps were wider and imperfectly covered with crisscrossed wires of precious metal. Tethered beads hung from the weavings that shifted at her slightest movements.
She held out her right palm and moved it counter-clockwise in two tight circles as if burnishing something that wasn''t there. Summoned by the gesture, a plane of her silver aura materialized as a reflective surface that she used to study her garb. She flushed, realizing the wrap of ribbons and mesh were even more immodest than she feared, concealing nothing of her form from anyone who cared to look. She would never choose to wear anything like it but had to admit it made her feel tremendously sexy if the right person was there to see her in it. Speaking of which, she had come here to the celebration with a special someone, so where was her date?
A flare of blue-green light shot through with prismatic flashes caught her attention, and she turned to see a decorated platform near the Catacomb doors. There stood the Qard''s Chief, the Gem of leadership gleaming on his brow. He appeared young and somehow familiar. He had dark hair like her own with a hint of silver in his bangs and a trimmed beard and mustache. Addressing his people, he formally introduced his male-phased child to adult society. Her eyes narrowed in thought, then widened when it came to her. The Chief was her grandfather, Thane, early during his rule, before the Devastation.
Many of the Qard around him were unfamiliar to her, like Berek, the young adult they were there to fete. He must be an uncle to her because that certainly wasn''t her father. Near Thane stood Amerey, Thane''s parent and the Chief before him. Beside her was Lay''t Kal, Amerey''s parent, and the first Chief. Lay''t was among the handful of her people the Light created directly, taking hyper-compressed stardust and forming them in the ever molten seas of this world. All the rest of her kind descended from him and those made with him. Looking around from her semi-secluded vantage, she saw more unfamiliar Qard, and a smattering of aliens capable of withstanding the native environment.
Rae scanned the buildings around her, noting their beauty and elegant lines. Her eyes closed tightly as fragmented memories of ruins that snapped up to wholeness only to dissolve once more to a broken state sliced through her consciousness. She stumbled back against the wall, her hands spreading out on either side of her for balance. After a long moment, she shut the visions away into a far corner of her mind and gathered the wherewithal to stand again on her own. One of her feet was wet, and she found her drink had slipped from her grasp and splattered on her when the globe collapsed. Waving the mess away, Rae drew in deep breaths to calm herself.
She heard a warm chuckle approach her, and she turned her head to smile at her returning date only for the expression to freeze on her face as she saw him. She didn''t know who she expected to see, but this wasn''t him. The male-phase person before her was a tad taller than she, which felt wrong, with coppery red eyes. His long braided hair was the palest of platinum-gilt, contrasting with his blue skin. His facial hair consisted of a narrowly trimmed fringe from ear to ear along the bottom of his chin, paired with a small patch above each corner of his mouth. His dress was even more scandalous than her own, consisting of a gaudily decorated pectoral over his bare chest and a kilt, worn traditionally, of the same loosely woven ribbon and wire style that she was wearing. He seemed not to notice the look of surprise on her face and nodded his chin at her mirror field. "Admiring yourself, my dear? I can''t blame you; Ive been admiring you all evening." His eyes raked up and down her body, seeming to linger over every revealed scrap of her.
Blood drained away from her face at his unrestrained leering, followed by an angry flush as she fought to keep her displeasure off her features. He held a drinking globe in each hand and offered her one. "Thank you" she said, her face conveying her question, as she couldn''t put a name to this person, who was now openly checking himself out in the mirror field.
He laughed, "Oh, that''s cold!" then saw that she was serious, "How many of these drinks have you had? Maybe too many." He started to withdraw the globe, but she pulled it from his grasp, and with her other hand, she brusquely cut through the mirror, dismissing it. He raised an eyebrow, "Someone''s in a mood. Is your Change coming up?" She let her frown become visible. "Sorry," he said insincerely, "The name is Ethan, as you well know." He took a drink from his globe as another cheer came from the crowd clustered around the platform. "They''re such pretentious gits, aren''t they?" he said with a sneer.
She huffed noncommittally, taking a drink of the liquid metals blended with an intoxicant.
"Is this your revenge for taking so long to bring the drinks?" His lip curled teasingly, "Or maybe you feared I was talking to other lovelies."
She looked away from him. "I wouldn''t care if you did."
He moved closer, his voice dropping seductively, "I heard you were more possessive of your lovers than that."The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
She turned to meet his gaze steadily, "You heard wrong. Do as you like."
It was his turn to frown. He pushed himself into Raes personal space, grabbing her free hand and pulling her towards him. "Listen, Rael, I have certain expectations for this evening, and I suggest that you." She mashed her drink into his face, popping the globe and drenching his front with its contents. She yanked her wrist out of his grasp and glared at him warningly.
He threw his own drink down and stepped in to pin her against the wall, leaning close to force either a kiss or touch on her without her consent, but she didn''t give him a chance to demonstrate which. A concussive blast of silver aura threw him backward, and she stepped forward aggressively to settle into a combat stance. As onlookers gathered to gawk at them, he got up, "Fucking cunt, how dare."
She launched herself at him with a snarl as her vision turned dark
...Fabric ripped, and the ground groaned under him. Rae found himself midair, hearing a scattershot of rocks behind him as he struck out with his fist, only to find himself literally eating dirt when he impacted with the ground. He sat up, spitting out the earth that wound up in his open mouth. It was the middle of the night, the crescent moon concealed behind thick clouds. His sense of perception showed he was in the bottom of a furrow his landing had driven into the thin soil.
Rae sighed and picked himself up. Returning to the woodshed, he surveyed the damage. ''Oh, bloody hell.'' One of the gates was lying flat on the ground. There was a depression full of pulverized rock where he was sleeping, draped over with the shreds of his bedroll. The back and nearer side wall of stacked stones held numerous gaps where rocks had sprayed out from his kickoff. The wisps of his dream were already fading, but his dream opponent must have really angered him. The hole he could fill in, the gate rehung, and the wall stones restacked, but the bedroll He went into the dig, pulled out his sewing kit, then got out his goggles, turning on the light. In the hours before dawn, he patched up holes and sewed rips closed, restoring his bedroll to some semblance of order.
Unlike the day before, the clouds burned off at morning light, and he bathed in the river to clean the dirt off of him. He brought a section of scree rock on his goggles and sorted through the rocks for a few hours. Yesterdays work in the dig leveled out the granite floor, so he finally moved his bedraggled bedroll inside. Since he had to repair the shed anyway, he made it twice as tall and deep, so the gates now fit.
Rearranging the drying logs and planks, Rae saw there was plenty of room for more lumber, and now was as good a time as any to get it. Crossing the river, he gathered fallen color-oak branches and felled some cloud-top trees, and more of the bamboo, noting how gnarled their roots were. Trekking around to spread out his timber harvest, he found a source of greenish earthenware clay and elsewhere a salt deposit, gathering samples of each. He chopped down a mid-sized color-oak to top off his load, taking care to collect as much of it as possible. He trimmed the wood and tucked the logs in the shed.
Deciding to turn in early after the lack of sleep the night before, he was looking over his bedroll when the computer chimed, and he went over to check. The satellites detected three volcanoes in the most recent scan. There was a dormant peak to the north, overlooking a thick growth of evergreen forests. He removed that listing; too much life nearby to risk activating it. To the southeast, another rested in a tangle of tall mountains. The last one was on a high bluff overlooking the ocean to the south. He clicked on the volcano, viewing images of the semi-active caldera. Of the three, that one seemed the safest to trigger an eruption. If he prepared well enough, he could arrange a better than even chance the flow would find its way into the sea. He turned off the holoscreen and laid down for a thankfully dreamless sleep.
When Rae woke, he prepped for a trip south. He packed his geo scanner and a bevy of camera drones. Stepping onto his skyboard, he put on his cleaned helmet for the several hundred kilometer trip to the volcano. He could use his goggles, but this had the added benefit of keeping bugs off his face. He controlled the board directly for a while before getting bored. A skyboard wasn''t for long-distance flights. It was more of a sporty, high maneuverability vehicle, although it also had enough weight capacity to serve as his pack-mule. He set the auto navigator to head to his destination and sat cross-legged to look through the landscape footage taken by the drones.
The surveying software back at camp went over the feeds as they were filmed and occasionally flagged uncatalogued animals for his review. One large specimen with hulking shoulders and massive horns appeared to be a herbivore, as the footage showed it eating grasses before it fell out of range. Sometime later, he pumped his fist as three drones documented a group of the big felines creeping down a hill in pursuit of something concealed by the foliage of trees downslope of them. Each of the leopard-sized cats had a distinctly different combination of colors and patterns. The viewpoint was too distant and blurry to make them out clearly, but Rae watched the snippets repeatedly until the board finally slowed. Looking up, he saw that he''d reached the foot of the volcano.
Hopping off the board, he picked up his geo scanner and walked along the landward slope. He detected layers of lava flow on this side of the peak, but nothing recent. The last one was probably a few centuries ago, judging by the plant growth over it. Stepping back on the board, he flew up to look down into the caldera, which was only semi-active, with lava slowly bubbling on the surface. He flew around to the south of the peak, where the edge dramatically dipped. The scanner showed him raw, unweathered lava from a relatively recent eruption, leading down this side and washed over by the waves. Rae used his energy sword to create a platform on the south crater wall. His meltdown was still coming, and he wanted the eruption he would trigger to flow to the ocean. Getting back on the board, he set a course northward. Checking on the unstable wobble inside had given him a strong pit of tension inside. Halting for a minute, he pulled out straps from a storage compartment and lashed himself to the board. Secured, he sank into a deep meditation to try and quiet the instability during the flight back to camp.
He came back to himself when an alarm in his helmet sounded. Blinking, he looked at his notifications, seeing that he''d arrived back in camp ten minutes ago. Fumbling with the straps, he felt aches all over. After a moment, while he folded and stowed the belts, he identified it as the beginnings of the Change. At least he had some warning this time. He put the scanner away then glanced at the angle of the sun. It was too late in the day to get anything else done, but seeing the cats hunting created an urge in him. Stretching his limbs felt good, and he changed into his jaguar totem. His fur was a deep, shiny blue-black, with rosettes of matte black. Silver claws popped from their sheaths as he stretched out in a downward dog pose, lashing his tail. Straightening, he yawned, revealing sharp silver fangs.
Something about his totem form made the discomfort of the Change more bearable. Since Rae wanted to experience this region at night, he went to see what he could find. On the river''s edge, he saw a lavender glow that came from clusters of tiny, musty-smelling mushrooms growing on decaying vegetation. More glows in the forest''s litter came from the spots of large fuzzy caterpillar-things that hissed at him from both ends when he got too close. He observed nighttime animals he''d never seen during the day. Under the moonlight, near the shale outcropping, he compared his paw to the felid print. He thought the cat would be about his size, but something about the mark almost made it look like it would be bowlegged. The dewclaw pad was closer to the front of the paw, and an extra lobe on the bottom of the main pad looked like the carpal pad had merged into it. Odd. An unusual specimen, or had the prints warped before drying? He''d have to find more prints to come to an informed conclusion.
Predawn was staining the sky to the east by the time Rae returned to the camp. Energized with the Change complete, she got out her rock-cutting tools and went to the top of the plateau to reveal the upper parts of the gryphon, starting with the ear tips. Working down past the weathered surface rock, she reached the solid granite below. Having finalized the ear positions in her computer models, she started cutting away the stone that wasn''t part of the ears. Relying on the projections in her goggles, she carved meter tall pyramids into what became hollows in the plateau''s upper surface. Then she started lowering the stone surrounding the depressions, so the pyramids protruded above this end of the crag. Distantly she was aware that this sort of disassociation wasn''t typical for her, but the work eased her pain as she submerged herself in it.
When the sun was further along its arc, she noticed a sliver of cut rock rattle and slide away. Paying attention, she saw storm clouds piling up to the east glinting flashes of lightning, while the distant thunder was only barely audible. She loved thunderstorms ordinarily, letting herself be a conduit for the strikes, but this one had strong winds, which bothered her for some reason. Moderate winds pushed the storm to the west towards her, with a leading edge of rain. Warmer air in the clouds contrasted with the rain-cooled air to the front, creating substantial wind pressures. The bottom of the rain curtain slanted ahead of the clouds, suggesting how strong the winds were. It soon wouldn''t be a safe place to be up on the crag.
Rae packed her tools and ferried the loose rock down. She put several full pallets of stone in front of the woodshed gates in the hopes of keeping the lumber put. After a quick sweep for anything important, she carried it all into the dig. She lined up more pallets in front of the entrance as random wind gusts forced their way inside. For the last part of her preparations, her skin prickled with goosebumps, and she had to struggle to keep her breathing in check. It felt like fear, not of the storm but of the winds it brought. Since when was she afraid of?
A stronger gust made the heavy pallets shake, and before she knew what she was doing, Rae had slammed on her helmet and crammed herself as deep into the dig as she could, as her vision tunneled to dark.
Chapter 6 - Breaking Down (Illustration)
"At times, those of the Starband seek to bring gifts to the living, so they carry star-stuff back through the clouds to us, even if it means their true end. The stones are heavy, and they burn, falling at great speeds through the skies. Our ancestor''s spirits try to slow the stones down so something will still be left when they reach the ground. They succeed when the star-stuff survives impact, but failures leave only streaks in the air."
--Fable of the Starstones.
She wandered lonely through the streets of the Shrine Island community, threading her way among the unfamiliar Qard that lived there. A faint feeling of anger that the setting evoked soon faded as she studied the city built by her people in ancient times. She never realized the ruins she knew all her life once looked like this. Maybe someday these memories could help her restore them.
"Magnificent, isn''t it?" someone asked her. She turned to see a draconic featured alien who gestured broadly at the vistas he also seemed to be exploring. "Are you from one of the outer islands?"
"Ah, yes," she said, as it seemed correct that she didn''t come from here. She introduced herself, "I''m Rae."
He laid a clawed hand on his chest, "Hanet." He gazed at her admiringly, looking away when she crossed her arms, uncomfortable. "It''s a pity someone so attractive has no companion with them."
A flicker of anger bubbled up inside her and faded again. "I did, but we had a disagreement." She looked down, relieved that she wore practical clothes. "Nice meeting you," she lied, "but I have to go." She walked away.
Behind her, the pleasant tones of his voice turned gruff, "It would be better if you stayed. You will suffer otherwise!" She kept walking as the light around her was consumed by darkness. She could still hear his voice as it it followed her, "Very well, then.
...In the darkness, Rae found a column of light, and floating within it was a massive book bound in strips of contrasting metals. On the page it opened to was a scene she was familiar with, picked out in arrays of gems; the introduction of Berek to society. In Cont, her people''s tongue, the label read ''Ascension. The following page was a graphic and twisted depiction of the rape and murder of an alien female by a monstrous wyvern, the amethysts depicting her blood pooled on and dripping past the lower boundary of the frame. It was called ''The Death of Laiyal. She had to take a breath before she turned the thick page.
She cried out in pain at the image after, labeled ''Embracing the Wind. Young Berek''s face was framed by the Catacomb doors, wracked with grief. The edges of his head and shoulders were blending into the background colors as pale motes drifted backward from him. The imagery pricked too near the still-raw wounds inside for her to look at without tears. Hurriedly Rae turned the page to another gory scene, showing a furious Thane with the blue-green Crysfire Gem aflame on his brow as her grandfather butchered the wyvern with his blazing sword. Deep sapphires of the beast''s blood arched out from its wounds in arterial sprays, splattering inside and outside the frame. ''The Questioner''s Execution.
Fumbling, Rae revealed the next page. It showed a closeup of the kite-shaped Gem shattering apart into countless shards, leaving a dimmer and smaller round gem as the remnant of its core. The label simply said ''Judgment. The following page was a complex geometric pattern, and as she turned the page again, she saw a double image spread. Together they were labeled ''Devastation, and the first depicted a fleet of starships firing down on Shrine Island, destroying the shining towers. For the first time, the image held text because the nearest ship had ''Laiyal''s Revenge'' picked out on its hull in Cont. The second image showed a visibly exhausted Thane wearing the round gem core, trying to lead his dispirited people to fight back. But dozens of the Qard figures were sagging, some only trailing a few motes, others entirely engulfed in them. The path of the soul particles all led to the pitch black of the Catacombs entrance.
The next page showed an injured Thane gathering the survivors among the burning ruins and leading them through a portal, the brightest part of the image. The label said, ''Exile. There were no more gemmed images after that. The new ones were sculpted bits of many kinds of metal assembled to create a scene instead of being fashioned of carefully arranged gemstones. The artistry was just as exquisite as the originals, but the new medium felt less ostentatious. The first of the new format showed a far older Thane looking sorrowfully on a mere handful of his people on a cooling planet, as yet more streamers of motes fountained off into the sky. It was labeled ''Extinction? The remnant gem core depicted was shaped from shards of of the original Crysfire Gem, which was the only crystal used in these new images.
The second of the new images next showed her grandfather placing the gem core on her fathers forehead, as a barely adult Danel O?n knelt before him. The young face of Perin, her mother, could be seen among the few witnesses. The label said, ''Tainted Inheritance. The last image arguably showed herself, as if made by someone who''d only heard her description. A younger Rae knelt in front of two glowing figures crafted in luminescent metals. The greater figure was the Light in its humanoid guise, and the lesser was the Light''s messenger. The scene she remembered from her past showed the restored Crysfire Gem placed on her forehead, the depiction fashioned from another bit of shard. It was labeled, ''Future''s Hope?
There were no more images after that, so she closed the book. As soon as she did, the book disappeared. She still stood in the circle of light amidst the darkness, but now she heard faint noises beyond the light. Suggestions of movement and glints of eyes told her something was circling her, something big. "Do you believe that Evil ever dies, pup?" came sibilant words from the blackness. The voice was deep, laced with an undercurrent of growls. "Because I can assure you, it does not."
"Nice of you to classify yourself on that side of the fence, big guy," she shot back. Its words were intended to be intimidating, and deep inside, she was. Her jaw clenched, and she straightened her back. She would never show her fear to bullies.
Wild hissing laughter, like a feverish steam train, roiled around her. "So bold, little pup. You should be more respectful. You''ve already seen what I can do." The head and wings of the wyvern became visible as it glowered down at her, limned faintly by the light above them.
She raised an eyebrow coolly. "I''ve seen worse." She examined her nails critically. "Gramps did a number on you, after."
"With a weapon you no longer possess," it retorted. The wyvern moved further into the light, flicking out a snake''s tongue as long as her leg. "I will have you and all that you hold dear. You''ll surrender to me, or I''ll crush your will. Either way, you''ll be mine." Deliberately, she turned her back in defiance as it continued to speak. "It is amusing that the dusty old bauble still cannot stop your people from spreading themselves upon the winds, like the Elder you just lost."
...Outraged, Rae whirled to glare at? and her helmet clanged hard against the stone. She heard the wind still keening into the dig. A quiet whine in the back of her throat triggered a painful bout of coughing, fortunately without bringing up blood this time. For the Light''s sake, she was trembling because of a little wind and the fading nightmare. She curled in a ball in the back of the dig tucked behind the beginnings of a column. Her breath caught every time a wind gust disturbed the tools piled near the entrance. Clink Rattle A thousand years old, and at the moment, she felt every bit the immature kid her elders thought her to be.
"You know, between the two of us, I think I wear it better," said a masculine voice.
She nearly jumped out of her skin. ''By the Light!'' There was a dim bluish light in the dig. Gingerly, she peered out from her hiding place. Sitting on a shelf of rock not far from her was herself. Sort of. A male phase version of herself, wearing the uniform that went with her helmet. But instead of the bright colors she remembered, his form was tinted over with a dark teal wash. Gray pieces of some kind of plate armor laid over the top of it.The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
He leaned forward crookedly in mockery of her pose. "You seemed so pathetic back there, whimpering, I thought I''d keep you company."
''Who the hell are you?'' Rae thought to him. Between the winds and this apparition, her mental balance was faltering.
"I''m your Shadow," he said with a cold tone of voice. "The darkness you''re wrestling with inside. Since you won''t be honest with yourself, I will have to be."
Her Id had a form and a voice, it seemed. She shook her head, realizing just how badly she was losing it now she was talking to herself.
Her shadow self summoned a darkling replica of her oathband to himself. "It''s just as well that you set the mongrel human aside. He''s unworthy of us." He mangled the replica with his hands and tossed it carelessly away.
Rae let out an audible hissing noise. ''You don''t know what you''re talking about!''
"Mortals are inherently treacherous," the Shadow said. "Or need I remind you of your first mortal lover. Remember Raliard? Tall, well-built starship pilot? Never let it be said you don''t have a type."
''No'' she moaned.
"So kind. So handsome. So very homophobic," the Shadow said relentlessly. "And what happened was completely your fault, although you''ve blamed everyone but yourself. You hadn''t told him that you Changed between genders before you slept with him." Shadow came to loom over her. "You knew most carbon-based mortals were hetero and that most heteros didn''t respond well to those who blur the lines..."
She tried to cover her ears, a useless proposition when wearing a full helmet. ''Shut up! Shut up!''
"You Changed to male phase after the intercourse, and in the morning, you found he''d abandoned you after you''d taken such care not to harm him." His words cut through her careful segregation of those memories, bringing back the repressed emotions she''d buried with them. He crouched in front of Rae''s cubby as she pressed as far back as she could against the solid rock. "What did you feel when you stomped off to look for him?"
Anger. Annoyance. The feelings poured through her again, as fierce as they were back then. Embarrassment. Betrayal. Her trembling increased, and tears streamed from her eyes. She knew what came next.
"And you found him, inside his trader ship, splayed across the bunk in his quarters. His charred and liquefying brains slowly dribbling down the wall behind him, bolt gun still loosely held in one hand." He took hold of her helmet so she couldn''t even turn her head away. "The disgusting odors of his voided bladder and bowels filling the closed-up room." The scents from her memory overwhelmed her senses again.
"And even worse than the effluvia was the note he''d left for you on his screen. The one explaining that he felt you probably hadn''t meant any harm and that it was just what you were. But you should have told him you were unnatural, so he would have known not to be with you. By the tenets of his people, he had no choice but to cleanse his soul by taking his own life." He let go of her, and her head lolled as she gasped, starving for air.
Rae''s eyes followed her darkling self as he moved back to sit on the rock shelf. "It took you a long time to apparently recover, but you didn''t really. You were 50-something years old, barely more than a child, and you''ve clung to that pain for your whole life. Every time you lose someone close to you, the pain flares up again." He cocked his head, and his voice turned into a whisper. "Tell me, Rae. Have you lost anyone lately?"
She convulsed in momentary seizure, blocking her visor with her fists. When she could lower them again, the Shadow was gone, leaving her raw and alone. Forced to confront the memories of her past, she thought of what happened afterward. She''d went to a distant mountaintop and spent the next year in silence, building a grand castle. The solitude and work eventually scabbed over the rawness of her wound. That was why she came here, she realized, to heal enough to make herself functional, outwardly at least. A millennium of distance and experience let her understand now that Raliard''s death was his own volition, but she still held herself partly culpable.
The quiet in the dig drew Rae''s attention. She listened intently around her, then slowly pulled her helmet off. The wind gusts and rattling were mainly gone. With a sigh of relief, she unwound herself from the back corner. There was still some rain coming down, but the storm was pretty much over. How much time had she lost since it started? She suddenly needed to get outside. Rae headed for her goggles when she kicked something across the floor. Looking down, she flinched. It was the bit of metal that Shadow mangled, and it was right there proving it happened. She stepped gingerly around the lump, picked up the goggles, triggering her board to follow.
Rae moved the pallets and took the skyboard back to the crags top. She dangled her feet over the rain-soaked precipice, activating a holo keyboard on her lenses. Her fingers tested the notes, as she decided what to play. The wobble inside her was worse; she could feel it. Bringing up her hands, she began playing the opening notes of Moonlight Sonata''s first movement. Nearly halfway through came the first fumbled note. More wrong notes followed until she lost the melody entirely.
Rae leaned back, staring at her hands dumbly until her vision swam, and she seized uncontrollably. Pitching over the edge, she tumbled hundreds of meters down the plateau''s side, hitting every jagged rock on the way. Rae slid to a stop at the bottom, bruised and bleeding. When she could move again, her fingers probed a gash at her left temple, fingertips colored by the oozing silver. Rae struggled to sit up before deciding she was fine as she was, crumpled on the dirt.
An uncomfortable and unfamiliar feeling welled in her, making her belly contract painfully as if she wanted to expel something from inside. But there was nothing there, and it wasn''t even something her people could do anyway. Rae only placed the sick feeling from Jeol''s human memories he''d shared with her. Qards retained everything they consumed, converted into body tissues, or stored as increased density until burned to fuel their strength or psi. Another cramp hit her, and she wished she could vomit just to experience the relief afterward that the memories promised. But there was no relief to be found, and the oscillations inside were reaching a dangerous pitch...
''Child,'' said a vaguely familiar mental voice, ''if you wish to preserve the work you have done here, you must go to the place you prepared.''
Rae looked up, and the black gryphon stood over her, looking concerned. She reached up for her goggles but didn''t find them, squinting at where she''d tumbled down the plateau''s side. ''Need my board.''
The beast pinned its ears back and huffed, ''We don''t have time for this.'' Sitting on its haunches, it gathered her up with its talons, cradling her gently against its breast of soft black feathers. She leaned her head into the softness, hanging limp as the gryphon launched into the air and flew to the south like an arrow. Her fingers gently worked between the breast feathers, stoking the down underneath. The gryphon''s beak carded through her hair in return. ''Child, can you hear me?'' it asked sometime later. Rae responded with a mental hum.
''You need to understand that not all is as it seems to you. You are being lied to by forces of darkness and your own mind. Dedicate yourself to the truth, and you will succeed.''
''...Kay,'' she thought sleepily, and after some time, she felt their flight slowing.
''We are here. When I release you, try to warn the surrounding creatures before you let loose your pain. You have been so strong, but it''s time to let it all go.''
Rae withdrew her fingers and smoothed down the feathers she''d rucked up. She looked up at the gryphon''s blue eyes, glowing brightly in the dusk of evening. Nodding, it released her. Agony slammed her as the bubble of calm numbness around her burst. She wanted to scream and never stop but managed to swallow it down. Instead, she sent out her pain psychically, while flaring out waves of heat and kinetic pressure.
The sluggish lava in the caldera below her heaved up and surged, and a thick plume of gas and ashes shot upwards, charging the air. Instinctively she altered her electrical charge, sparking the first, fat bolt of lightning to strike her from the gathering murky clouds. More flashed from her and the clouds to the ground, which responded with bolts forking upwards. The peak trembled and shook as the eruption began. Molten ejecta started firing upwards, and she remembered what her plan had been.
Shaping the force waves flowing from her towards the sea, Rae directed the lightning bolts emitting from her at the south rim, creating a closed circuit between herself and her target. Grimly, she kept weakening the craters south side until it breached, sending strong pyroclastic flows out into the ocean waves. Her goal accomplished; she allowed the forces to go as they would. In a pause of the lightning strikes, she saw a glimpse of the gryphon silhouetted against the glowing ashy clouds, lit with actinic blue from above, and lurid orange from below.
It all poured endlessly out of her until there was nothing left. Her skin withered and pulled taut over her bones as her energies guttered low. Rae fell, no longer able to levitate herself over the lava. She sank under the surface, gulping some of it down as she thrashed herself upwards. Her head broke into the air, and she swam weakly to the edge of the molten pool, drinking periodically. Crawling out of the shallows onto the smoldering rocks, she collapsed, unable to do more.
Chapter 7 - Eyes in the Sky (Illustration)
"Hungry for younglings, the Mother Goddess traveled from afar to find a safe place for them. She found the greater light all alone, watching over the silent reaches of His domain. They courted each other, and soon She was gravid. Nesting in the richest of his territories, She gave birth and raised them to be strong and wise with the aid of Her helpers. When the Children were grown, She took watch over them from the lesser light and remains there to this day."
--Fable: Mother''s nest.
In the Peregrine Dawnstar, Jeol Starr blocked a body blow from the hovering sparring drone in his quarters. The size of a soccer ball, it projected a vaguely humanoid form of forcefields. Ducking a kick, he stepped up with a combination of heavy punches, then dodged an attempted headbutt. Before he could back out of range, the drone projection landed a knee to his gut. The lighting was dim, except for the overhead spot that followed them around the empty room. He wiped the sweat from his gray brow with a muscular forearm as he planned a new attack.
His exertions matted down and darkened his bronzey-chestnut hair, and his narrowed eyes glinted a light yellow color. Leaping forward, he got a round kick on his opponent and pushed it down to the ground with a flurry of blows. He clenched his teeth as the drone countered with a punch that glanced off his coppery beard at an angle and squirmed out from under him. Stepping back to guard himself, he channeled the hurt and frustration he felt. Surging forward, he pressed his attack until the drone dinged as it registered a knockout. He grabbed the hover drone and tossed it to an upper corner to get it out of the way.
Walking to the center of the room, Jeol stepped on a switch turning off the forcefield over the viewport. "Heavy rain shower and supplies," he requested, taking off his protective shorts and stepping into the shallow bowl of the viewport. Warm droplets cascaded down on him, and he enjoyed the sensation as it rinsed off the sweat before he pulled out his wash cloth and body wash. Working his cloth across his hairy chest, he thought about how the survivors of Qardos had little in the way of body hair, but that was changing as more mortals transitioned into the Family.
Once he was human, and he had the same build now as then when in his male phase. Not quite two meters tall, he was a tad short compared to the original bloodline. His well-defined, muscular build contrasted with their lithe and slender bodies. When he was male, Jeol was by far broader of shoulder and limbs than Rae. But as he presented as more masculine in his preferred phase, he was also more feminine when he Changed. His spouse only inclined a little towards the gender of her current phase, but he went all in no matter which. Rinsing off, he checked the estimated time of arrival displayed on his wall. They were nearly there.
Drying off and dressing, he strode onto the bridge. Sitting in the port command chair, Jeol nodded a greeting to his pilot Tomas. "Captain," Tomas said, and faced the main screen that displayed their progress to a fertile green planet orbiting around a yellow star. They headed for the planet''s sizable moon and soon approached a shadowed crater.
He saw not the one Peregrine he expected, but two. He pinged the ships as he landed near them. The Question''s response was, "Why do we never get an answer when we''re knocking at the door?" The other ship broadcast, "I think. I think I am..." then returned his ping. The Dawnstar sent out, "Rise, let us see you, Dawning is the Day..."
"In the Beginning," Jeol muttered. "Wonder why she''s here when Chayse said she left the Question with him?" Nodding to his pilot again, he teleported to the Beginning and made his way to the bridge. Chayse was sitting at the navigators station in front of the main screen which was divided into a myriad of different feeds. Like most Kindred ships, there was no autonomous pilot in the center of the room. The Kin could multitask the work that other Peregrines relied on their ship''s intelligence to handle, only breaking them out in emergencies.
Jeol clasped his friend''s forearm, following it up with a brief hug before he sat at helm beside him. "So," he said, "you needed more than one Peregrine?
Chayse chuckled, "Not really, but well, Lisen and I don''t have kids at home right now. She understands I want to watch over mom, but she doesn''t want to be alone while I do it. So she came to join me."
Jeol tilted his head, listening. "I don''t sense her around...?" He was friends with Chayse''s spouse. Lisen, once named Lizabeth, was the second to transition to a Qard, only a few decades after he did. He''d been able to help her adjust to her new state because he''d went through it himself. Neither Rae nor Chayse could understand how difficult it was to go from human mortal to alien demigod.
"She decided to do some surveying of the system," Chayse brought up a diagram of the stellar system as the main display. "We have a hot rock spinning on its axis in the first orbital slot. The second is a marginally habitable Arid planet that Lisen is currently checking over. The third is the Terrestrial planet Rae is on, followed by a pair of Asteroid belts. Next are two Gas Giants, the nearer of which has a ring. The outer two are a cold, rocky planet and then an iceball."
"Don''t you have duties back on Deltia?" Jeol said.
Chayse laughed, "Part of being First Kin is I have lots of able lieutenants. Besides, if I need to be there in person, I can telepresence into my synthezoid body there."
Jeol nodded and asked, "What''s all this?" as Chayse brought up the multiple feeds again.
"I''m monitoring the various drones and satellites on the planet. The ones with a white border are hers, sending archives to the Question and powering the survey algorithms Rae uses." The windows bordered by white flashed briefly. A larger set with yellow borders flashed, "These are mine, watching her. The blue-bordered feeds are the satellite net."
Sucking in a slow breath, Jeol controlled his voice carefully, "How is she?"
Chayse turned his chair to face him squarely. "Not well, honestly. Overall, it''s evident she''s in a fugue state, with lapses into deeper dissociative episodes. She''ll become hyper-focused and lose track of time, working until she''s exhausted."
Jeol covered his eyes with a hand and sighed. "What is she working on?"
"Tapping into her design data tells me she''s carving a plateau-sized gryphon," Chayse said. "It''s solid black granite, and she''s mostly been carving out the ground floor. This morning she''s working on the ears by cutting away everything else." You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Jeol felt a comforting hand on his shoulder. He uncovered his eyes and saw his friend giving him a concerned look. "And how are you doing, Jeol?"
"Flamin'' awful, why do you ask?" Jeol said.
"Well, you''ve looked better," Chayse said. "You''re pale, and your features seem drawn. Compared to your usual cheerful self, your affect is down, and your body language is tense." Jeol rubbed over the oathband covering his right wrist. "I also see you''ve noticed what else she did. I was honestly surprised."
"She took off her band!" Jeol snapped. "She''s never done that without giving me notice first. You know we can feel each other with them? First, she slammed shut our mental link, then this! I hate this." His rubbing grew harsher until the bracer began chafing his wrist. Suddenly aware of Chayse''s frown, he forced himself to stop and looked away.
"She is struggling," Chayse said. "Sometimes she seems normal, and at other times completely confused. I''ve never seen her like this, just carving away at the stone with a vacant stare."
Jeol shook his head, "I haven''t either. The closest I can think of when she told me the story of her first lover. Her eyes were dull, and her voice was flatly monotone. Whenever we merged minds in Unity, those memories remained locked away from me."
"The one who killed himself after?"
"After they were intimate, yeah," Jeol said. "Even the memories following the incident show signs of trauma. She just withdrew from everybody and everything until she scraped herself back together again. I don''t think anyone else really knows how much that damaged her. She''s pretty good at concealing it."
"That sounds a lot like what she''s doing now," Chayse said. "Any idea what triggered it this time?"
"No, she caught me off guard. We had an open conversational link I wasn''t actively monitoring. I barely got a flash of upset and alarm before she slammed her mind shut to me. We''re now down to the bare minimum of awareness of each other. The next thing I know, Danel asks me why the Chiefs Gem appeared in front of him, covered with her blood. After that, I have to find out from Tomas that you''re helping her find an expedition world."
"Wait, she sent it to her dad, not you?" Chayse said. "As for the blood, it looked like she clawed it off her face." He threw up an image on the screen of how she''d been when he found her. Jeol winced and looked away. He breathed until he thought he could speak with a semblance of calm.
"Danel doesn''t know what he''s supposed to do with it. He was glad to give it to Rae and certainly doesn''t want it back." Jeol sighed. "I don''t get it. Usually, when she needs a break, she sends it to me for safekeeping. The Family is worried about her, too. Even when she isn''t directing things, she''s kinda the glue that keeps us together. Her brother Jon''s been grumbling for another reason. He''s having to help finish the more critical projects she dropped when he''d rather be back doing his own research."
Chayse frowned, "I''ll send some Kin to assist him." Jeol remembered his friend derived his core consciousness on a blend of Rae''s and Jon''s youthful mental patterns. Chayse said, "My observations haven''t seen any more self-destructive behavior, and she''s been taking basic care of herself."
"Maybe we can stage an intervention?" Jeol said.
Chayes shook his head. "I don''t think that''s a good idea. Before she left, she could barely tolerate my presence and flinched away when I went to hug her. The therapists in the Family think if we try to force her to accept help, it will break her further. As long as she''s not self-destructive, they said we should wait until she asks for help."
"And how long will that take?" Jeol said.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Chayse said with a shrug. "I can let you know when something changes what''s this?"
The border of one of the satellite feeds was flashing red. "Taylor''s flagged something for us." Chayse switched off all the videos on the main screen except the flashing window which expanded to fill the space.
On the world below, a volcano erupted violently. The screen split into two, as another shot showed Rae high above the eruption, in the center of a nexus of lightning strikes as clouds and winds gathered in fast-forward above her. She just hovered at first, then attacked the seaward rim of the crater until it breached. Then she hung there limply as the eruption vigorously gouted lava into the waves in the eye of the forming hurricane. The storm stretched out enormously, slowly rotating over land and sea, powered by ash, clouds, and the silver mist of her aura.
"Why why is she just hanging there like that?" Jeol said.
A couple of side windows popped up. "Sensors show theres a lot of pent-up energies that she''s venting into the storm," Chayse said. "Along with that, she''s constantly changing her electrical charge to attract and repel the lighting. The fact this activated the volcano seemed to be a happy side benefit." More side windows appeared, "I am concerned at how fast her mass reserves are dropping."
"C''mon, Rae," Jeol muttered. Abruptly, she fell like a stone, sinking under the surface of the burbling lava with scarcely a ripple. He shot to his feet, his nails digging hard into his palm. As the seconds ticked by, his green aura flickered over him. If she didn''t come up soon, he''d damned well ''port down there and pull her out.
"Wait!" Chayse said. "There!" He pointed, and her head came up into the air as they both sighed with relief.
Jeol''s aura dropped away as he watched her tired strokes to the lava''s shore. Pulling herself out of the caldera, she crawled up on the rocks before falling still. He sat back down and looked at Chayse.
"She''s going to be exhausted after this, and she doesn''t have her skyboard," Chayse said. He brought up a window of the board''s code and hacked in commands to home in on Rae once a certain amount of distance separated them, and sent it on its way to the volcano. Then he spoofed the logs to make it look like the command came from her. He winked at Jeol, "Hopefully, she won''t remember she didn''t do this."
Jeol watched the hurricane rage on, unchecked. His heart ached to see her like that. He couldn''t walk away, knowing what she was going through; he felt he needed to bear witness. His regular job of designing starships was something he could do remotely, although he usually didn''t. "That''s it. This moon is getting three Peregrines."
The night passed without further incident, and Taylor spent the time adjusting the satellite net over the planet. When It was morning over the volcano, he slotted a new surveillance satellite into a synchronous orbit above the Daring''s crash site far to the northwest. It quickly yielded clues to how the survivors lived. A small village of stonework buildings and pathways surrounded the hill that was the freighter''s tomb. Paths also lined the long, low ridge where the scans detected the ship''s dead. It was nearly a century since the last of them died, and Taylor expected the place to be overgrown and crumbling apart. Instead, the plant encroachment seemed under control, and the masonry was still solid.
The population of animals Chayse detected turned out to be groups of the felids his Captain wanted to investigate. Traveling along the pathways and flowing in and out of the buildings, they looked almost purposeful. After watching a cat move a fallen tree limb without using its mouth or paws, Taylor zoomed in for a closer look. A cluster of long, rope-like tendrils extended from leathery patches behind both its shoulder blades. Fully prehensile, the tendrils coiled around the branch to grip it securely and were jointly strong enough to lift it as the cat moved it off of a path. Not every felid nearby had visible tendrils, but all had the shoulder patches. As he watched, the tendrils of the one that moved the branch slid back within its shoulders, out of sight.
"Interesting," Taylor said to himself.
Chapter 8 - A Friendly Fire (Illustration)
"The Starband has many members, but the most visible are the rarely seen hunters. They leave long trails of fire behind them as they race after their game. When they appear, the Children watch them every night until the end of their hunt."
--Fable of the Starband''s Hunters.
Rae woke to a feeling of liquid periodically lapping over her right foot. Struggling upright, she found herself just barely above the lava level of the volcano, wearing nothing but ashes and specks of rock from the ongoing eruption. In the wan sunlight that reached through the plumes of gases rising from the caldera, she could see how skeletally thin she was. Her mass must be near the minimum to sustain consciousness, down in the two to three hundred kilos range, and it showed. Rae''s bones were visible, with shrunken ropes of muscle twisting under the thin padding of her flesh. Her ribs were prominent, and when she rubbed the grit from her eyes and face, she felt the bony ridges of her skull. A stiff breeze would likely blow her away.
Scooping up some of the lava to drink, she then gathered rocks to consume them. Rae visibly began to fill out to her optimum physical build. She was still on the light side, at maybe five hundred kilos, so she decided to keep going towards the higher end at double that. While there was a dramatic difference in her appearance between close-to-starving and optimal, that was where the outward changes stopped. The next five hundred kilos wouldn''t change her appearance; they would merely increase her density as the mass packed into her bones and tissues. The maximum she could carry was a hundred or so more kilos beyond that, but this was enough for the time being. There were no obese Qards.
A Qard had to deliberately protect their clothing from their internal heat, same as they shielded all the flammable material around them. The meltdown she experienced threw that control out the window, and she lost every stitch of clothing she''d been wearing. Rae would have to make her way back to camp naked. Standing, she expelled the particles away from her in a cloud of dust. Trying to send her sense of perception out to the plateau made her stagger. She had the mass to power her psi but not the focus or will. If she couldn''t see her destination, she wouldn''t be able to teleport there, so she''d have to travel on foot.
Rae couldn''t feel the wobble inside and hoped that her instability was gone. Climbing up to the northern rim, she froze briefly at an unwelcome voice. "Well, well, La?a?, you''re looking outstanding today." Her teeth grated together at the sound of her true name coming out of the Shadow''s mouth. From the corner of her eye, she could see him openly checking her out. She bristled but couldn''t summon the energy to engage with her narcissistic side and continued over the rim.
Halfway down the outer slope, she found the skyboard waiting for her. She was glad to see it, not looking forward to a kilometers-long trek in her current state of undress. She sat on the board and put the volcano she was already thinking of as ''Monkey'' behind her. She put her face in her hands, letting her mind drift during the flight, wondering what else she could do to recover. She''d been here for months, and a part of her just wanted to go home, but it still felt risky. When the plateau came into view, her mood lifted. She imagined the gryphon it would one day become and let it soothe her and make her feel safe. Well, safer.
Then with a mental lurch, the image changed and corrupted. The gryphon sprouted grotesque nodules across its body and dulled to a gray, spotted here and there with points of an eerie violet glow. Rotting flesh spread over it, and the purple light reached its sunken eyes. Some of what she saw looked like the symptoms of the plague described by the beacon up in orbit but far more exaggerated. Her breathing hitched, but she forced herself to ignore it and to dismiss the dark vision.
By the time Rae calmed herself, the board coasted into the entry of the dig and stopped. She stepped down and dressed from the outfits in her bags. She''d have to work on making more clothing before long. That involved finding the right plant or animal fibers and the equipment to work and weave them. Carding mills, spinning wheels, knitting needles, crochet hooks, and looms she jotted the list on a handpad. Now, where had she left her goggles? Ah, she''d lost them when she fell over the side.
She climbed up the slope of scree rock, past the evident marks from her tumble down. She found the goggles about 150 meters above ground level. Patting the dirt off them, she looked up, watching some craghorns hop awkwardly over the new gaps disrupting their narrow paths. She should shear some of them while summer still lay ahead. Hunting ungulate herbivores for their leather was something else she needed to do. It was wasteful for her to hunt for food, but if she were killing animals for another reason... With her predator totem, she enjoyed the taste of meat, although it was insignificant for her as a food source.
But that required her to be outside, and Rae didn''t want to today. The heat of the volcano was enjoyable, but she wanted a source closer to home. Deep under the plateau were pockets of the same lava that created the granite above. Heading back in, she pulled up detailed sensor logs. Calculating the depth of the nearest pool, she began plotting where to place a shaft that could go to a roughly 750-meter deep basement level. The same shaft would go up to around the same distance to the top of the plateau. She might eventually carve stairs to wrap around the opening, but her board would serve as a lift in the meantime.
She cleared and marked the shaft location and checked the other markings and work she''d done. Examining them with a clear mind, it was evident she hadn''t always been fully conscious of her design decisions. That explained why she had to keep adjusting the chalk marks. At times Rae only knew what she''d done when she saw the work completed the next time she went to work the dig. It was both exciting and, at the same time, off-putting, and she honestly didn''t know what the results would end up being when it was all done.
Initially, the plan had the ceilings at four meters high and flat, like the upper part of the opening to the dig. Instead, Gothic arched ceiling vaults reached another meter or so higher in between the regularly spaced columns. It was fancier and more overbuilt than it needed to be, but Rae rather liked the way it was heading. The roughed-in vaults would go even higher when completed, but there needed to be enough material to define the ribs and inverted finials at the top of each vault.
She updated the plans to this new style, allowing for potentially six-meter tall levels with six meters of rock in between, and began to dig the three-meter square shaft straight downwards. Over the next few weeks, she used every means at her disposal, hand tools, energy devices, and her psi, to reach her target depth of roughly three-quarters of a kilometer or 63 levels worth. If she fully completed the levels, they''d potentially be hundreds of square kilometers in area.
It was stuffy down here and hot. A mortal could probably bear the initial heat, but not the poor air quality. The air didn''t bother her, and she began to hollow out a portion of the level adjacent to the shaft, creating an area big enough that the lava pool wouldn''t be next to the shaft. She used the excavated stone to make a raised pool and piping made of hyper-compressed granite that could withstand the lava she brought up here without slagging from the high temperature.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Directional paddles in the pipes kept the pool from overflowing the sides and kept the lava circulating. One of the lines drew up the molten rock from kilometers below, and a higher intake pushed it back down when it got to a certain height. The slanted pool had a lower end smoothed for Rae''s bathing. The shallow end passed under a set of grates where she''d heat crucibles to smelt the harder local metal ores. This chamber would be her foundry, and using the raw geothermal heat would allow her to work with native materials without wasteful and polluting fuels. The room had exposed lava now and was hot enough she could fire ceramics here, as well as produce ingots to work in the planned levels above this.
Skipping several levels worth of stone up the shaft, Rae opened up another space. This level would be a forge, where she''d either cast or hammer out the harder metals to make components. Another set of crucibles to smelt softer ores like iron and bronze would use some of her inner heat to melt. Skipping up again, the next chamber she started was a metal shop. This level had the last set of crucibles, designed for the softest metals, like gold, lead, and copper. Higher up still, she''d eventually create an electronics shop where the most delicate parts and pieces would be crafted and assembled.
Over her lifetime Rae learned many human skillsets, and these were just a few of them. They only took twenty years for one to be competent and half a century to truly master. While they were pointless mortal pastimes from her elder''s point of view, she enjoyed practicing them. She could do everything from gathering fibers and creating fabric, tanning and working leather, and taking raw metallic ores along the whole process to create finished pieces. Specialization, after all, was for insects.
She used her board to rise back to the surface level, done with digging for a while. Settling in front of her computer, she started skimming the backlog of bio-survey samples and videos. Before the thunderstorm, a pair of the big cats traveled southward through the region around the plateau, and she paused and informed the algorithms to always flag footage of them for review. They had passed by in the night, so she didn''t get a good look, but the heat map sub-channel revealed odd motions along the back. As the storm was winding down, the pair came back, heading in the opposite direction. They traveled upriver in a hurry, on the west side, and she stared in shock when the tentacles came out near their shoulders.
The rope-like tendrils moved objects out of their way or pulled on things to give them leverage. No cats seemed to be in the region now, so Rae ordered her drones to actively scan for them and inform her when they came near and directed a few drones to follow the river to its source and then return. She queried the survey records to flag images of exposed bones, like the browser skeleton by the green shale rise. After another query to catalog wildlife footprints, she went to her bedroll to think about what she''d seen.
The word ''tentacles'' made her think of aquatic creatures, but that wasn''t the literal meaning in the word''s origin. It came from the Latin ''tentare,'' a form of ''tento,'' meaning to handle or to touch, modified by ''culum,'' a diminutive. Together they translated to ''little feeler.'' The feelers on one side of a cat worked jointly as manipulators, unconnected from their roots to tip and also acting independently. It was as if her separate fingers sprouted directly from her shoulder with the same amount of reach, just without the intervening arm. The tendrils were boneless, emerging from a bulge of the shoulder, only to invert back into hiding when unneeded. One of the cats showed six of them on each side, while the other had five.
It was fascinating, from an evolutionary perspective. Rae wondered if any other creatures on this world had this trait. The lack of bones made them potentially highly dexterous, but how did they operate? To what were the muscles attached? How did their mass disappear into the animal''s torso? Were they merely grippers, or did they convey a sense of touch to the cat? The number of tendrils seemingly weren''t standardized per cat but we''re possibly symmetrical per side. Most animals that developed manipulators sacrificed their quadruped stability and gained intelligence to compensate. But not these creatures The last thing that crossed her mind was how uncomfortable her bedroll had become.
Early the following day, she stunned a few groups of craghorns with her psi powers and sheared them. She put the shearings in net bags and washed them in stone vats, skimming off the oils to process later. She took the damp fibers down the shaft and scattered them around the metal shop chamber to dry. After washing up afterward, she went back to her computer. A new cat came near during the night, but when a stealth drone swooped down to take a closer look, its ears and whiskers twitched, and it ran away. Two more drones attempted to approach, and it responded to them by changing the direction it fled. The ears kept swiveling at the succession of drones as the cat retreated out of range.
Rae frowned and summoned a drone into the dig, directing it to scan her while stealthed. Listening with focused intent, she made out a faint buzz when it came near. When switching to her totem form, the annoying sound became more evident, and she could track the drone as it moved around her invisibly. If she didn''t already know what it was, she imagined it would be scary to hear something that she couldn''t see. If she wanted to study the felids more, she would need quieter drones.
She didn''t have the manufacturing infrastructure to make them from scratch, at least not yet. For the time being, she''d modify her existing models. Pouring over the schematics, the first thing she could work on was new mounting brackets for the gravitic hover engines and thicker sound baffles. She could do those things in the metal shop when she wasn''t using it as a wool drying room. A finished electronic shop would be necessary before she could make any adjustment more delicate than that. And a dedicated drying chamber. And processing quantities of various metal ores to create stockpiles because the materials she brought with her wouldn''t last forever.
Comparing these things to-do with her previous list, Rae pulled out a coil of small diameter steel wire and started to cut several thousand short but equal lengths of it. Going to her woodshed, she used some cured cloudtop lumber to create a hand-cranked drum carder to align the wool fibers and prepare them for spinning. A few drops of her blood diluted in a big tub of water worked well as a tanning agent for most hides, and Rae carved a new vat out of a large chunk of granite to use for the leather-making process. But to have skins to tan, first, she must hunt. That night she prowled the plateau in her totem form, killing two craghorns by breaking their necks with a single blow each. One was older and having difficulty keeping up with its herd. The second was lame and unable to reach enough food to keep up its condition. She put their hides in a vat of water to soak and covered it. The meat wasn''t the best, but good enough for something she had in mind.
Carving a ventilated firebox out of another block of granite, Rae slabbed enough cloudtop to build a smoking cabinet to fit around it. She inserted whittled sticks inside the enclosed top, sliced the meat thin, and salted it, draping the strips over the rods to cure them with smoke. If she couldn''t get the felid cats to stay still for filming, she''d set up a feeding station baited with jerky in the woods and catch them with stationary cameras. She''d head out to the woods the next day to look around and find a good place for the camera blind.
She felt achy when she laid down for the night, a sign that a new Change was coming. She grumbled to herself. That was the only good thing she could remember about wearing the Chieftain''s Gem the bearer could delay or reschedule their Changes and make the discomfort easier, even if they couldn''t eliminate them entirely. Without it, she was subject to the ebb and flow of her hormones, like any other Qard. She sighed and let her mind drift to sleep.
Chapter 9 ‐ Lovely, Dark and Deep (Illustration)
"As we can see the Mother''s eye, She can see the nest where her Children live. As seen from Her perch, our nest is a ball that sails the void, the top part is called High, and the bottom is called Low. In the nest, we cross the line between the High and Low poles by marking the direction our Sire rises and where He sets."
--Fable of the Directions
Unsurprisingly, he was male when he woke. It was best to Change while sleeping, as it was less uncomfortable. Sitting up in his bedroll, he noted the scent of smoking meat and quickly went outside to check on it and the skins he left soaking in a vat of blood-treated water overnight. Tasting a small strip of smoked meat, he gathered the first batch and put on another, feeding the fire and adjusting the vents. Stowing the jerky in a breathable bag, he took it down to the metal shop chamber to dry the rest of the way. The craghorn wool he''d left there was dry, so he bundled it again and stowed the bags in a far corner.
He marked where the electronics shop and the drying room would be before returning to the surface on the way back up the vertical shaft. Assembling frames of branches and withies, he stretched the wet hides on them. He wanted to head back into the woods, but he smelled of meat, smoke, and lanolin. Wading out in the river, he briskly rubbed his clothing before washing himself, ducking under to rinse his hair. His eyes glowed with pale light under the surface, drawing a few fish towards them. Rising slightly to take in a deeper breath, he ducked under again. Patiently he waited for the fish to approach again, dangling his arms like bare branches. His hand blurred as he caught one, then rose, dripping.
Working with the jerky awakened his predatory instincts, and the fish made him salivate. He struck the back of its bone mask sharply on a rock when he waded onto the pebbly beach, then dropped it and rinsed his hands before he dressed. Drawing a knife from his boot sheath, he took the fish to a flat stone to fillet it, then cut it into pieces. Rae cooked it by putting them skin side down on his tongue, feeling the fats pop and sizzle before chewing and swallowing. When he was satisfied, he scooped up the raw remains of the fish and tossed it in the river before rewashing his hands.
The fish would have been better with some rock salt, but it was still good. Ordinary stone and common metals tasted dull, but precious metals and crystals were too valuable for his crafting to eat. That''s where the occasional taste of flesh came in handy to satisfy his appetite, although not his hunger. Carbon-based meat was useless to him as a food source, even though it tasted delicious. Without the water content that his heat boiled away, flesh only amounted to a handful of dried chemicals and trace metals. One good-sized pile of rocks had far more mass than an entire whale, minus the water in its tissues.
Gathering tools and equipment from the dig, Rae set his board to follow and headed across the river. He ranged up and down the far shore looking closely at the life around him. His drones had the initial survey database to build on. They became more selective, turning their attention to atypical examples of already cataloged life or discovering new flora and fauna that were as yet uncatalogued. As he splashed through yet another marshy hollow near the riverside, he realized the regularity of the mini biomes was unusual.
Finding a lightning charred colored-oak, he verified it was dead before leveling the shattered remains with his energy sword. The now flat stump revealed its rings, each having its own hue and shade of green or aqua. Sitting on the sturdy stump, he sent camera drones up for aerial views of the riversides to the north and the south for several kilometers, viewing their feeds with his goggles. The little marsh areas were common, forming periodic pockets of wetlands on both sides of the river.
The drones cataloged a trinity of life forms present in many of them. They were thick with the sour-root reeds and a fungus that lived on them, as well as a particular low bush he hadn''t examined yet. The third was families of the river rodents. There seemed to be a synergy there that piqued his curiosity. Pushing the goggles up to his forehead, he walked to the nearest pocket. As he stepped out from the trees, a pair of waterfowl took flight from the surface of the pond, their legs unfolding, then unfolding again to trail behind them while they made a call that sounded like ''uncle.'' He was going to study that footage closely later.
The rim of the marshy hollows seemed to range from a circular shape to a blunted teardrop, pointing towards the river. The bushes tended to be on the outside of the rims, fading flowers clinging to groups of small green fruit. He estimated the season to be late spring from the state of their growth. Finding a withered bush among them, he compared the dried-up berries with the growing versions from the living examples. Rae rolled one of the dried berries between his fingers to find a pyramidal seed in it. Drawing a small bag from a pocket, he harvested every remaining berry from the dead bush. He''d try cultivating them eventually.
The insides of the damp hollows seemed to be a river rodent paradise, full of reeds and little fish and crustaceans. This pocket had a den dug into the sidewall, and a trio of the root-eaters was tensely staring up at him. Their snub noses and prominent claws were muddy, speckled with dirt from where they were pushing back the edge of the hollow away from the river. The rodents had heavy jaws, squat bodies, and a long muscular tail. He slowly backed away but stationed a stealth drone over this pocket for long-term study.
Dozens of camping expeditions refined his survey and catalog algorithms. Each world yielded lessons on the myriad strange forms life could take, even on worlds superficially similar to Terra. At some point, his expeditions had stopped being a game of ''how fast can I climb up the tech-tree'' while surveying the minimum of what was needed to get there. Gradually surveying had become the whole point, each world a vast, complicated puzzle of how the biosphere fit together. It was a way to unwind. The drone''s footage and bio-sample records provided Rae oversight over an otherwise automated system.
Striking out from the river, he bumped against a large bamboo plant. With a wheezy creak, it slowly began to fall. Rae backed up just in time, as one by one, a whole line of them jumped loose of the soil and fell over, connected by a thick mutual root. The root rotated in the ground 90 with the formerly standing bamboo trees lying flat. The root side that was now the top sported several nodes he figured would be the culms of new growth when exposed to air and sunlight. Leaning over to poke at the other side with a stick, he caught a whiff of the sour smell he noticed with the river reeds. They were both a type of grass; maybe they harbored examples of the same fungus?
Rae set his bio-samplers to check a few thousand examples of each type of plant. Taking out his axe, he harvested the fallen stalks that rolled over so they wouldn''t go to waste. Climbing on top of his board and rising a few meters to look around, layer after layer of downed bamboo was visible, from the freshly turned root just harvested to mostly decomposed stalks blending into the leaf litter. From the patterns he saw, it was a fifty-fifty chance which direction the mature stalks fell, the roots turning clockwise at times and counterclockwise at others. Stacking the cut stalks on his board, he jostled a few more mature stalk lines to see if they would turn. Two more crashed down, and when he finished cutting them, his board was fully loaded.This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
It was like the stalks had a ''sell by'' date, and after that, they''d turn and rot. Rae stationed a camera drone to observe any changes to a bamboo line within 100 meters of the first one that fell. That might be okay if he allowed half the new growths to hit the ground to enrich the soil. The important thing was to see how quickly they grew and replaced themselves, to determine how aggressive to be at harvesting them. It was something to think about as he walked back to camp to check the day''s footage.
Rae replaced any missing roof tiles from the storm after unloading the bamboo. Entering the dig, he put his tools away and sat in front of the computer. He brought up the waterfowls video. When he''d come into view, they had been paddling in the waters of the hollow like a duck. Their legs revealed another length, like a heron or crane, after rising from the water. The legs unfolded a third time, unlike a terrestrial bird. Analyzing the imagery, he realized the thighs were elongated, extending well beyond the body to give the legs a zigzag shape like a quadruped''s rear legs. That was something he hadn''t encountered before.
A holo window popped up and indicated the completion of the grass sampling. Not all the reeds or turning-bamboo had the fungus, but the mold strains were related when they did. The algorithms correlated the mold to the tiny riverside mushrooms and suggested including them in the study. Rae approved the request and checked the survey of bones that was ongoing. Very few of the bones in the area had Felidae characteristics, and they were only a few decades old at most. He dispatched kinetic drones to fetch back any skulls or claws. In the footprint directory, he opened the felid subfolder and learned the strange aspects of the print he found were typical and not distorted. Disappointed in the lack of older felid bones and thus any evolutionary clues to the cat''s development, he set off a long-term fossil record survey. That study would take several years to complete, but it wasn''t as if he were going anywhere soon.
That reminded him of one of his primary goals on this world: to detect and document the plague pathogen mentioned in the orbital beacon. His algorithms were set to flag toxins and poisons encountered, but not necessarily diseases. The listed symptoms described a highly debilitating pathogen, but he''d seen no sign of it so far. He called back the bone survey and looked for widespread die-offs by checking for large numbers of bones that all dated within a limited amount of time. The computer crunched the data but didn''t come up with any patterns like that. Maybe when the drones completed the fossil survey, he''d find those patterns further back in the past.
The local wildlife might have developed a resistance to the pathogen, and the sickness decimated the Daring survivors because they lacked that immunity. Rae wanted to ascertain the causes and effects of the disease to create an effective treatment. If he found animals suspected of being sick with the plague, he''d perform thorough necropsies to see what the pathogen did to its tissues. His conservation rules prohibited indiscriminate killing, but scientific studies were among the few valid reasons to kill animals in this world, besides their leather or the occasional taste of meat. And speaking of leather and meat...
He went outside and scraped the remaining flesh and fat off the drying hides. He''d reserved the goat brains in a bag, and they had been breaking down ever since. Using a scrap of wood, he mashed up the grey matter like softened butter. He trowled it on the skins evenly, then laid the frames flat to tan. An animal''s brain was the best natural material to make the hides soft and flexible, but it wasn''t easy to do. Since these hides were sheared and meant to be leather, he didn''t have to be quite so careful not to get the brains on the fur side. If he wanted furs for a rug or a coat, the process needed a lot more care.
Rae put on a new batch of meat to smoke, pocketed a handful of jerky, and washed up again. Bagging up a bunch of stationary cameras and related equipment, he headed back across the river to a particularly impressive colored-oak. Moving through the undergrowth and ducking under a vine-strewn branch, he straightened up on the edge of a clearing. He startled a family of deer-like leaf browsers that scattered in the other direction, leaping over bushes and clattering away over unseen rocks. Peering into the darkened gap of the shrubs, he found a steep-walled dried streambed. He inspected the plants the animals were eating, making a notation of ''animal x eating food source y'' for the database.
He scanned the massive tree when he reached it. The trunk was so large that two or three people wouldn''t be able to put their arms around it. Its outer canopy formed a hemisphere of foliage, but bare branches stretched over the carpet of dead leaves on the ground within that space. Stepping over fallen branches, he looked for a fixed object where he could wedge the jerky. There was a boulder on the far side of the trunk, and as he approached it, a part of the leaf litter writhed and hissed at him.
A fuzzy caterpillar-like creature as long as his forearm reared up, clicking its jaws in threat. He realized he''d encountered one of them before when he explored the woods in his totem form at night. Perfectly camouflaged in random speckles of tan and brown, there was no sign of its luminescent spots during the day. The rear colorations mimicked its head, probably making it harder for a predator to attack the vital end. It moved away surprisingly fast, combining walking on stubby feet and contracting and extending in a worm-like fashion.
The boulder was weathered but didn''t have noticeable cracks. Rae cranked the blade of his energy sword down to a narrow, knife-like length and whittled crooked slots into the stone. Jamming scraps of cured meat into them, he left the ends exposed to make it difficult to pull out. Rae pulled out a few cameras from his bag and mounted a few on the massive trunk at various heights. Spread far apart on the broad bole, angled to catch binocular side images of the near side of the area around the boulder. He inserted Fish-eye lenses in holes burned in the boulder to capture close-ups and affixed several cameras to overhead branches.
He backtracked to the streambed and gathered some rounded rocks. Each stone was the size of his two fists put together, and he carved in recesses to hold a camera and a grav anchor to hold them firmly in place. He arranged the rocks in a broad semicircle under the tree, focused on the bait station. With the project complete, he went back to camp.
As the day wound down, he took a dozen fist-sized camera drones and some of his more advanced equipment down to the metal shop. He checked the operational decibels before and after exchanging the brackets and baffles on them. Once they were at least half their previous loudness, he sat on a stone counter and put them through their paces across the chamber. Satisfied he hadn''t broken anything, he sent them out on felid duty for the evening and checked on his camp chores before going to bed.
The next few mornings, Rae grabbed his goggles first thing to look for new footage of the cats. The only things the camera blind detected were various smaller predators and the large caterpillars. It wasn''t until the third day that he got a result from the drones. He watched the drone get closer to the cat than before only for the animal to swivel its ears and run away like the rest. He cursed under his breath, then sighed as he started digging out the electronics shop and probably the drying room today. He needed to work on more delicate drone systems to get his desired results; a closer look at the felids.
Chapter 10 - Sea of Grass
"Do not doubt you are Children of the Stars. Look and see the Lume of your band all around you. When they blink, their Lumes twinkle, just as you see in the Starband above. So many colors shine on our walls, shifting and mixing as we move about."
--Fable of the Lumen.
Several days later, Rae had Changed again as she dug out the new areas. The few days since were spent refining the five chambers and installing equipment. The foundry in the lowest basement with the exposed lava was labeled B0. The forge in the next level up was B1, where she put in a heavy force molder. Its function was to cast temporary force field containers where molten metal could pour into customizable shapes. She also cut a mount for it in B0 for when she needed to pour hard metal ingots.
The metal shop above was B2, and the level higher than that was B3, where she set up the electronics operation. She had a medium molder she planned to use in the electronics and metal shops where she''d work with softer metals cast in smaller pieces. Over the last few days, she mined raw ores in the surrounding lands located by the geo-surveyors. Rae made silica sand, iron, nickel, silver, and copper stockpiles for tinkering with the camera drones. It was a bit much to use a med-molder for the delicate items electronics needed, but it could form arrays of identical items connected in sprues for injection molding. A standard industrial technique reminded her of the plastic model kits from her childhood, but done in metals instead.
After much thinking, she had figured out how to fire clay in the most efficient way. Ceramics was a dynamic process of gradual introduction then withdrawal of heat from the clay pieces to be fired. Mostly that meant a stationary kiln where heat raised then lowered, but her source of heat was fixed in both location and temperature, and the only way to reduce its effect on something was to move it further away from the lava. Since she couldn''t move the heat to the clay, she decided to move the clay to the heat.
Rae carved a 23 pitched ramp down to one of the lava pools and carved grooves into it in an extension of the forge. Constructing a framework on rails with thermometers attached, she placed a combination of gravitic impellers and grav anchors into the ramp. A program would slowly push the rack from B1 down to B0, then after the firing was complete, would pull it back to the level above to cool. After 3D modeling her bamboo roof tiles, she standardized the exterior edges, fastening holes, and undersides. Randomizing the tops to have natural-looking textures and flaws, she used the med molder to press a clean and worked clay layer into hundreds of tiles that were now firing.
After dumping the leftover clay scraps into a vat, she swept the floor and used her metal supplies to pour the raw components to improve the next batch of drones. She improved the behavior software, exhaust, and focusing array, tweaked the impeller target switching, and drove down the decibels even further. After testing them, she dispatched the mark two drones to see how they did. On the way out of the basement levels, she checked the drying room above electronics, labeled B4. It didn''t need a lot of fittings, just a lot of space filled with open racks. Woefully empty at the moment, it only had a couple of bags of jerky and several bundles of washed but uncarded wool.
At the computer, Rae checked the ongoing bio studies. There was a fascinating set of videos of a river rodent beginning a new marsh pocket. He was a young adult who started to dig a circular depression in an open but level spot along the river, between two established rodent habitats. Once this was complete, he dug a narrow channel to the river until the water began trickling in to fill the broad hole. The rodent wrestled rocks unearthed from the digging to line the water channel and choke it off when it was filled enough. Over the next few days, he carried in reed roots and living crustaceans and small fish from along the river.
As the rodent tended his work, females would wander by and observe him, then move on. She realized the animal was cultivating the microbiome to attract mates. Clicking on the label of the animal, she renamed them ''Reeders. They were rather like a beaver without the protruding teeth but with large digging claws and an otter-like tail. Searching through her database, she found scores of these constructions, some barely bigger than this one and others many meters across. When the Reeders expanded the basic circle, they pushed it out in a cone shape with the point ending in the channel to the river.
Video from the camera blind caught a few of the felids. One of them was pale-colored, and another was dark. Each of them had similar facial markings, but each one''s mark was a different color. Mostly the blind recorded the giant caterpillars, eating falling leaves or gnawing on sticks or fallen tree limbs. If the jaws couldn''t make headway against a branch, the creatures would rub the hard nubs of their bone mask against it until the wood splintered, and they could worry fragments free. Digested material exited from the identical-looking rear end as a damp fine sawdust-like material. The caterpillars were solitary during the day, but they would gather at night when the near-perfect camouflage gave way to an array of green luminescent patches.
The tiny mushrooms associated with the sour smell would infrequently appear along the river. In sunlight, they were an inconspicuous speckled lavender color in sunlight, but they would emit an ethereal purple glow after sundown. Rae saw a recording of one reversing its cap and releasing its spores. Scans seemed to indicate the spores were related to the formation of molds on the reeds and bamboo. She would need to see if the mushrooms had the same odor as the mold. The released spores didnt immediately yield new fungi growth in the area. She needed to make more observations before she could determine what caused them to grow.
The river and light forest biomes on the far side of the river were gaining fewer data points as time went on, as there was little new to see at this season. It was time to investigate someplace new. Standing on the northwest corner of the plateau farthest from the river, Rae scanned the lands beyond. North of the crag was scrub and grasslands that turned into deep plains in the distance. To the west, low grassy hills had widely scattered thickets of bamboo and a variety of trees; narrow cloudtops spires, thick and sprawling color oaks, and other types whose profiles were unfamiliar to her. There were even fewer trees to the north, mostly following meandering creeks and streams bordered by belts of green that eventually emptied into the river.
Rae set her goggles to magnify and marked the larger fauna she spotted for further investigation. A few smaller Reeder habitats bordered a stream that ran past the crag. At a mud-choked watering hole, there was a group of slender gazelle types whose horns lay backward in a sine wave, drinking while keeping a cautious eye out for predators. Dozens of klicks out in the deep grasses were a few hulking animals approaching the size of elephants, with massive down swept horns. Two different types of large raptors turned lazy circles up in the air currents, while a smaller raptor stooped down on prey by the nearby stream. A dust cloud to the northeast resolved into a line of stocky onager-like animals.
Her view extended for many kilometers from up on the crag, but down at ground level, Rae knew the scrub and tall grass would shorten that range considerably. Ducking down into the dig, she packed some drones and some tools onto the skyboard. Following the stream northward, a sense of impending discovery filled her. The whole reason she''d chosen this place for her home base was the variety of distinct biomes in such a small area; waterway, woods, hills, and plains, not to mention that of the plateau itself was.
The water reeds and the rodents that cultivated them became less common as she left the riverside behind, and the average size of the Reeders decreased. Her bio-samplers confirmed the grassland Reeders were a related subspecies from the ones she''d been observing, tending to smaller wetland pockets. A kilometer out, a new waterside grass took over from the tall broadleaf bordering the river banks. They gave off a pleasant scent, and dried examples of it twisted together better than the more tender blue-veined river grasses. While she looked at the grasses, she found medium-sized canid prints impressed into a dried spot near the stream.
When the plateau had shrunk in the distance, she spotted a purplish mauve color under the water, where a smaller stream merged into the one she followed. Curious, Rae waded out and examined it, pulling handfuls of lavender clay with finer particles than the stuff she used for roof tiles. With a texture like that of porcelain, she foresaw making dishes and cookware with it, with blue and purple glazes dripping over contrasting colors of underglaze patterns and etchings. Pleased, she bagged some of it and noted the location in her maps, adding the material to her geo-survey database.
Stolen novel; please report.
Leaving the fork in the streams, she heard hooves ahead of her and crouched, pulling the board down with her. Tucking her goggles under the straps of her bags, she changed to her jaguar totem. Lowering herself, she stalked closer, blending her dark body to the brush and grasses as much as possible. At the edge of a game trail, Rae watched a group of the onagers amble by. Unlike the other ungulates cataloged, they only had two hoofed toes instead of the usual three. They were angular like a zebra or a wild ass, perhaps filling the role of a primitive horse-like creature. Too small to ride, they could pull a cart, or carry packs, possibly. They had a central horn prominent on their forehead with two brow horns on either side. As they moved past her, she noted their lashing tails forked into several branches partway down its length.
Changing back, she heard small birds tussling in the undergrowth. Ducking to look, she saw them contesting for a clump of white fibers. She set two of her drones to track them, to know why they wanted it. One seized the prize and flew off, eventually landing on a nest and adding the fibers into gaps in the weave. Recalling the drones, she sent them to find more of the threads in the vicinity, and before long, she sat on her board to examine some of it. Her scanners verified it was a plant-based fiber, and when she teased it apart, it seemed to be of fine cottony quality. She picked out the seeds and put them in a bag for cultivation. The drones did a systematic search for more of the fibers and the plants that made them.
After wandering a few hours collecting the clumps, she found a meadow with a mix of old and new stalks of a tall branching annual plant. The older plants looked like a skinny corn stalk with fig-shaped pods on the end of a few slender branches. The recent growth had immature bulbs on all of its limbs. The edges of the clearing were thick with the fibers and dried pod shells. As she watched, the wind stirred a tangle and flung it aloft, carrying it away. They were like dandelion seeds on steroids, with the fluff evolved to spread the plant far and wide. She began to fill a bag with dried pods when one exploded in her hand, making her jump. Tearing open at the seams of the hard outer shell, it released a cloud of suddenly decompressed fluff. It was a lot like holding a giant popcorn kernel when it went off.
She took a bit more care with them after that. It wasn''t as if they could hurt her, but they took up far more room when the pods were broken open. As she cleared the old stalks, she bent them over near the roots to get out of her way. When she''d removed half the meadow''s worth of unopened pods, she spotted something about a stalk as she bent it. Kneeling, she found they had a layer of fibers running vertically around a woody core. Could it be? Using her belt knife, she cut the stalk loose and slit it in two, peeling off the papery outer skin. These fibers also had potential, and she''d have to see if she could ret them like hemp or flax. She shook her head. The universe held marvels, and this plant was one of them.
The sun was low on the horizon when she finished gathering pods and bundles of last season''s stalks and returned. She''d store it all away until a day she wanted to do chores around the camp. Bringing her board in the dig, she saw the computer blinking a notification. A rare late afternoon visit by a grayish felid proved to be an opportunity for the mark two drones. The camera approached more slowly and at a lower elevation. The felid paused and looked around, causing the drone to freeze. After the cat moved on, the drone experimented to see how close it could come. It was a function of the nearest distance for filming that didn''t drive the cat off. It still seemed fidgety at the drones presence, so she had more work to do in that department.
As she put things away, the back of her neck prickled. She felt a sudden empathy with the cat because it felt like she was being watched. When the muscles between her shoulder blades cramped, she spun about to see her Shadow looming just behind. "Hello, Rae," it said with a dark mocking tone. Not daring to look away, she shook her head slowly. It was just an aberrant part of her mind, wasn''t it? A schizophrenic symptom of her mental breakdown? She wanted to turn her back and ignore it like she did when leaving Monkey, but she felt threatened this time, like she was in danger.
The Shadow tilted its head. "Au contraire, it is you who are the aberration." It took a step forward, and she had to take a step backward, unable to bear it coming closer. "You can feel it, can''t you? How much stronger I am?" Shadow advanced again, and she retreated once more. "I am the version of you that will leave this place, and there is nothing you can do about that." It backed her up another step as a quick side glance told her it aimed to pin her into a corner. "I will correct the way your upbringing warped you to imagine the filthy carbon-based hominids were worthy of your attention. We''ve already covered the debacle that was your first lover."
Her back seized as it touched the wall unexpectedly. Shadow chuckled, "Jumpy today, aren''t you? Who was next? That groupie girl, do you even remember her name? From when you were playing at being a ''rock star," it made finger quotes as it spoke.
''Josana. Her name was Josana.''
"Hmm, yes, and long since dust. She was so worthless you had to get smashed on your own booze to couple with her." It shrugged dismissively, "Maybe we''ll unpack more of that at some other time. But right now, I want to talk about your so-called ''spouse."
She frowned. ''What about Jeol?''
"Precisely! Him. He was a single-gendered hetero mortal, and you twisted his nature to be your plaything."
Rae shook her head, ''I didn''t do anything to him. He chose to be with me.''
Shadow chuckled again, "Do you really believe that, with all the ways you have to manipulate someone''s mind? Think of the family he had when you met him. How do you think he went from that to being your love puppet?"
She snarled. ''Human sexuality is more complex than that. He understood what I was and adapted because he loved me. He shared his memories with me, so I know.''
It scoffed. "Keep telling yourself that. You could put any thoughts you wanted in his head, and he would never have known the difference. And when he was ''converted'' to be like you so you could breed? Despite how he and the others that followed ape at being Qard, they are still mortals at their slimy, rotting cores." It leaned closer, leaning against the stone with one hand, barring her in on that side. "In the end, he''s just like Raliard and would end up betraying you. You know this to be true, or why else did you abandon him? Something you should have done centuries ago, by the way."
''I did it to protect him, from... whatever you are!'' Rae gestured at the manifestation looming before her. ''And if anything if anything, he was the more faithful between us.'' It stung for her to say it, but she had to defend Jeol.
"Only because he was too witless to realize he wasn''t enough for your appetites. I find it stupid why you stay bound to such a pitiful creature."
''Shut it. Just shut up!''
Make me. The darkling teal helmet came so near that it almost touched her nose. She swung her fist at it, only for it to catch her wrist in a crushing grip. After letting her struggle futilely to free herself, the Shadow raised its other arm high and brought its elbow down on her mid-forearm. The flare of pain coincided with the wet snap of her bone breaking. Her eyes went wide with shock.
"So pathetic and weak." Shadow beat her with fists and boots, slicing her with psi blades, until she was a bloodied heap on the floor, curled around her broken arm and trying to shield her head. It finally stepped back, wiping her spattered blood off its visor. Over the roaring in her ears, she heard it speak again as it faded away. "You could have been so much more if you hadn''t fixed your star to those filthy animals."
Rae whined quietly, trying to reboot her stunned brain. Her clothes were smoking because she''d been unable to shield them from the heat of her spilling blood. She drew in the heat around her sharply, and the now hardened blood cracked and flaked off her skin. What... was all that? How could a part of herself even do that? She wanted to cry but refused to allow herself that further weakness.
It was dark in the dig. The only light she could see were flickering indicators from the computer and reflections of the glow of her eyes on nearby surfaces. The main entrance opened to the southwest, and light wouldn''t come in until morning, many hours away. Until light did come in mere moments later, in the form of a brightly glowing felid only half the size of the adults she''d been watching. It padded over to sit beside her, looking down with what she thought was a concerned expression. Another hallucination, it had to be.
"I am not a hallucination," it said, waving tendrils in the air. Rae knew that voice. Like the Light itself, Kruegar, the Maker''s assistant, was an energy being able to take any form it wished.
''What do you want, Kruegar?'' she thought tiredly.
A golden tendril reached out and drew itself along one of her lacerations, leaving the white line of a scar behind. "I wish to help you, Rae."
''Go away. I''m dangerous. Even to myself.''
"But not to me." Another tendril touched her, and another cut was healed. "And you don''t outrank me, so I can disregard your wishes." Patiently it found all her open wounds and closed them, nudging her to move this way or that to allow access. "Besides, I owe you."
That confused her. ''How''s that?''
"If not for you, I''d still be in Limbo instead of free this last millennium."
''Oh, that. I was rewarded already for that.'' Her good hand tapped the mass of scars on her forehead where she''d worn the Crysfire Gem.
"That was the Light''s doing. This is my personal show of thanks. I''m going to help you sit now; please cooperate." Innumerable golden tendrils reached out to put her upright and lean her back against the stone wall. Another wrapped around the wrist of her uninjured arm and drew it across her body to her other bicep. "Hold your upper arm tightly." The tendrils took hold of her swollen arm below the break.
''Wait, no, what.'' Her thought broke off into a pained vocal cry as Kruegar pulled back firmly, drawing her bone back from the break. It aligned the bones, then relaxed the pressure slowly while tendrils wound tightly around her forearm to keep them in place. The glowing feline form rumbled to her as warmth built up from her break, soothing her pain away little by little, her consciousness fading along with it.
Chapter 11 - Rust-Red Forest (Illustration)
"We are not alone, Children. Other thinkers exist out beyond the Starband. Some of them are friendly, like the allies who guided our Mother here and helped Her raise Her young. But others mean us harm, and they are why our Mother fled from Her origin to this distant place. If they should ever find us, the Children will suffer."
--Fable of the Strangers
Rae woke up with a gravelly moan. She blinked, finding herself on her bedroll across the dig from where she''d lost consciousness, with Kruegar nowhere in sight. Rubbing her arm, she found it to be sore but relatively sound. Humming experimentally, her voice broke several times through the note, but it didn''t hurt. It wasn''t exactly comfortable, though, and she massaged her neck. Whatever damage her throat sustained on Qardos was mainly healed, leaving her voice raspy from disuse.
Rising to her feet, she went to get her goggles to scan her forearm. There was still some weakness in the bone alloys, so she should probably take it easy with it for a while. Looking down at herself, she sighed in annoyance. Burn holes and scorch marks spotted her shirt and trousers. She would run out of clothing if this kept up. The only thing these were good for now was making patches for other garments or as rags. She changed clothes, thinking how the misadventure moved up the timetable of making a treadle spinning wheel and loom.
Glancing at the computer showed notifications awaiting her. Between extended interactions at the camera blind and the improved behavior of the mark two drones, Rae was building a database of individual cats and their colorings. Unlike terrestrial wild cats, there wasn''t a single look to them. Instead, they had similar patches in common, with the colors seldom the same from felid to felid. They had a short, plain undercoat and a more vivid main coat over top of it. Some had solid coats, while others had gradients or patterns on them. They shared thickly furred neck and chest ruffs running up to the scalp, and a long tuft on the end of their tails was the same color as the ruff.
There was one set of markings on their heads and faces they all shared. They had a contrasting stripe under their eyes connected to a tear mark that ran alongside the nose, then followed around the muzzle pads to the corner of their mouths. The color also highlighted their brow spots and another spot centered on their chin. The same color ran up the inward edges of their large triangular ears and formed ocelli spots on the back of the ear. No two felids had quite the same color of the accent marks, but their presence gave a unified look to the breed they otherwise lacked. Their eyes were a solid shade with no iris or pupil and glowed in the dark much like her own.
Rae drew up a set of generic outlines on her hand pad linked to an identification database. By listing the colors of the common elements, the computer would fill out the diagram and assign the felid a unique code. Flipping back and forth from the i.d. table to the line art, she included the base coat, top coat, ruff, nose, and face accents as fields. Pulling up her image files on another screen, she noticed the tendril roots were the same as the nose color, and where she could see them, the paw pads were, too. She went back and added fields for pattern type and eye color and changed the nose field to ''leathers.'' There were a lot of factors to track, but each cat''s combination was as identifiable as a fingerprint. She attached each of the identifiable images to an incomplete database record to fill out later.
Besides the new felid footage, two more notices were waiting for her. One was from the camera blind and showed a particularly fat catapika that had curled itself around one of her camera rocks, obscuring the lens. It stopped moving, except for an occasional ripple of the wide bands halfway down its body. She meant to remove it the next time she baited the blind but hadn''t gotten to it yet. As she watched the flagged video, it started writhing and twisting violently. Wondering if it was dying or metamorphosing, her jaw dropped as it tore itself in half. Two more small heads appeared from the rip over the thickest part at the middle, having developed under its skin. After recovering a bit, the half with the largest head shuffled away to continue eating from the ground litter. The other end''s bigger head, which had been the first half''s tail end, began to move off as well, now taking the controlling role of its half as the newly revealed heads trailed behind them both. She''d never seen such a large creature reproduce by division before, and shook her head, weirded out.
A behavioral subroutine of her surveying program sent another notice. Only the reeders consumed the reed roots, and other root eaters strictly avoided them, even if exposed by the reeders. Most animals bypassed areas where the reeds were numerous when they watered at the river. The gronkle waterfowls would leave a marsh hollow when the reeders dug up roots. Rae wondered what triggered the avoidance behavior and what danger caused it to develop. She could only think of the unpleasant sour smell typical to the reeds and the romboo. She''d have to test that theory at another time by coming up with a substance that smelled similar and leaving it near the river to see what happened.
Bringing up the drone schematics, she pondered how to improve them further. The only way to get appreciatively better technologically would be to re-engineer the hardware from the ground up. It would probably take a year or more to build a sophisticated enough industry to do it, but that wasn''t the only way. She''d gotten the recent felid images from a change in the drone behavior software. Approaching more cautiously and from a lower altitude helped, and so did freezing if the cat looked around alertly. They also balanced staying close enough to get good images but distant enough to remain unheard and undetected. She set up analytics logs and linked that to an intelligent agent node which would tweak the behavior based on her assessment of the results.
The last notice was from the routine tracking the ceramic firings: Her kiln rack had completed its first pass. Going down the main shaft, she checked on the finished clay roof tiles. Satisfied with their quality, Rae brought the rack to the surface and unloaded it in the woodshed to finish cooling. Sometime soon, she''d redo the roofing, hopefully keeping more moisture from the drying wood. Making an addition to the shed for tools kept outside could be done at the same time. She prepared another batch of the green terracotta to form more tiles with the medium mold generator and shaped some cookware pieces with the mauve porcelain clay to test how it would behave. She left the porcelain pieces to dry in the dig and took the kiln rack and the terracotta block back down the shaft along with a group of drones. After pressing more roof tiles to dry, she performed maintenance on the drones after modifying them to her new standards.
Going back to the surface, something about her ceramic solution rattled about in her mind. She couldn''t bring heat to the clay that was it! If she couldn''t reliably lure the cats to come closer, why didn''t she go to them? The traffic patterns seemed to indicate there was a breeding population upriver to the northeast. Rae only saw solos and small groups go by using the riverside as a highway, all healthy adults. There was no sign of the aged, ailing, maturing cubs or babies passing by the Gryphon plateau. While she thought about it, she evaluated her wood, selecting pieces to saw or whittle into various projects. First of all, she needed to build a treadle lathe for turning wood into things like spokes or arrow shafts. For the spinning wheel, she decided to make the weight supporting parts out of the harder and denser colored oak while using the more easily shaped cloudtop lumber for the wheel and the lathe turned parts. She wanted to craft a bow of the colored oak for a tough draw and a fishing pole of the more flexible cloudtop. Collecting her choices, she carried them into the dig to finish drying away from the fog and weather.This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work.
Figuring she''d be gone for several days, Rae checked the extended weather forecast. Seeing rain predicted in the next few days made her shiver atavistically, then relax when no appreciable winds came with it. She packed a bag of jerky, a change of clothes and examined her boots, thanking the Light she wasn''t wearing them the evening of her meltdown. The flute and harmonica she usually carried in them would not be easily replaceable. No longer considering them safe on her person, she put the instruments and her Damascus belt knife in the small storage compartment of her board. She could knock out hunting knives like those in her boots in a day with her forge. She''d spend much of the time making the handles, securing their mechanical connections to the blades, and sharpening them.
She added containers and sample cases to the pile. She''d be on the lookout for signs of metals or clays immediately adjacent to the waterway during her journey. She dug out a net to make a ghillie suit and her teal shipscoat. The coat was made of exotic materials and could withstand her full heat. A dragon in flight was on the back of the coat, and jeweled medals of her totem and the Crysfire Gem adorned the chest. Patches on each upper arm had an outline of a Peregrine ship. She stroked one of the patches with a wistful expression, it was a painful reminder of happier times, but it was also her most enduring garment. If she lost it in a lava pool, she could swim down to get it, and it would be unharmed. She took a cleansing breath, then folded the coat and put it down firmly. It was time to get a good night''s sleep.
In the morning, she summoned some drones and rolled up her bedroll. There was a heavy mist out as she headed off, following the path the majority of the felids used to the edge of her drone-patrolled area. Once past her boundaries, Rae took on her totem form and started tracking the cats. Hours later, while passing a stream, she noticed black sand on either side of the inlet and a feeling of nearby treasure. Returning to the board and reassuming her own form, she scanned the streambeds with her goggles, finding alluvial gold deposits as suspected. She marked the site on her geo-survey maps with a note to track the traces upstream to their origin. Digging out a lovely nugget, she managed to resist eating it and tucked it into the storage compartment. Wiping the persistent sprinkles off her lenses, she stowed the goggles and got back to her tracking.
Travelling upriver while keeping the waterway to her left, she kept an eye out around her. Known examples of flora and fauna looked different from what she''d documented. The leaves of most of the colored oaks turned yellowish. The soil also turned lighter, and the granite pebbles in the water went from cool grays to grayish-browns. In the late afternoon, she logged a bank of grayish terracotta clay. The oaks continued their gradually warming color shift the farther north she traveled. What was the mechanism for it? They looked the same except for the different shades of leaves, bark, and inner rings. She trimmed rounds from fallen branches to study the progression.
At dusk, Rae started to lose the felid''s trail. The light rain made telling how old the prints were difficult, and she was finding fewer of them. The river chattered over rocks nearby, and her goggles told her it was shallow, possibly a natural ford? Sending drones to the far side, they picked up tracks on the other bank. It was too late to continue, so she sent the drones to find a shelter. They reported back several options, with a shallow cave being the best. Making her way there, she hung her sample cases and supplies from a grav anchor and put on her shipscoat before spreading her bedroll on the board and climbing in. It was getting cold as the weather worsened, so she pulled down her hood and slept dreamlessly.
Something jumped on her out of the dark, biting her arm, as unhinged cackles echoed around her. Her eyes snapped open and glowing skeletons surrounded her with exposed skulls, bare spines, and leg bones bracketed by narrow rib cages. Confusing this attack with the brutal assault from the night before, she flung away the horror gnawing on her and climbed to her feet. The creature she threw off yelped as it flew only to suddenly quiet as it impacted something hard enough she heard its bones breaking. The other skeletons fled, hiss-yipping as they went. "Lights!" She whispered, and the drones lit up the area. It didn''t take long to find the creature''s body at the base of a tree, looking more mundane than she expected.
The body looked like a small and slender canid, with reptilian, almost draconic elements, giving it both fur and scales. It had tall jackal-like ears, and its body was flat black in kabuki fashion, with grayish speckles. The ''skeleton'' was its bone mask and a series of scaly leathery plates down its back and tail. More plates went over its ribs and down its limbs, all in a bio-luminescent green. It seemed to have evolved to appear ghoulish in the dark, but she had no idea for what end. Blood was dripping from its mouth, presumably from internal injuries. Rae looked at its teeth, seeing at least one of its long fangs cracked from attempting to bite her. There were some grinding molars in the back, but primarily the teeth were designed for eating flesh.
Leaving the cracked tooth and the molars, she pulled out the sharp fangs for later decorative use and extracted the claws as well. The impact with the tree crushed the right half of its rib cage, with the dislocated right hip fractured and the right rear leg broken in two places. As she maneuvered the body, the neck lolled brokenly as well. Despite the injuries, the hide was undamaged, so she skinned it. Halfway through, she sliced a piece of meat from the carcass and sniffed it. Frowning, she chucked the flesh into the river, unimpressed. Carnivores usually didn''t make for good eating.
After removing the hide, she threw the remains into the brush by the treeline. Getting out a vacuum bag, she bit her thumb, letting three silver drops fall in her other palm, before licking the wound closed. Drawing the heat from the blood, she crushed the dull gray nuggets into a powder that went into the bag, along with some river water. Rae shook the mixture vigorously then put in the fresh hide, prodding it to ensure it was thoroughly soaked. She sealed the bag and activated the one-way valve, squeezing the air out until water started coming out, too, and closed the valve. She''d considered saving the brain, but this would have to do so far away from camp.
She wasn''t sleeping again that night, so she sat on her board tracing cat-sign with the drones. By morning it was raining steadily, washing away most of the pawprints across the river, but there were still traces to be found. She could probably sniff out the trail with her totem, but she didn''t want to get soaked to her fur. When morning finally came, she shook out the net and loaded it with grasses and twigs. Packing up her stuff, she sat on her board cross-legged and covered herself and her gear. She floated over the river and moved to the farthest trace the drones found. As she sent the drones out for more, she noticed a streak of pastel pink in the water, coming from a deposit of rose-colored clay. She thought about collecting some but decided to log the location and come back on a dryer day.
It took longer to follow the cats under these conditions, but she managed. The drones uncovered claw marks a meter and a half up a tree, as well as surviving footprints beneath overhangs shielded from the wet. Loose clumps of fur typed to the felids formed more breadcrumbs, as did large prey remains, but she couldn''t be sure the cats killed them or not. Later in the day, her drones spotted cats moving through the woods on the river''s other side. Rae crossed the river again and sat dripping to wait for a cat to follow. Looking around as she waited, she noted how the colored oaks here were of various oranges in color.
A tangle of heat signatures caught her attention, which a drone resolved as a cat carrying a juvenile browser partly over its shoulders, secured by its tendrils. It took the kill to a large thicket of even redder trees, and there was where she found the local base. Half-grown cubs chased each other through the rain as smaller babies peered out from a cluster of dens dug out among the oak roots. Several adults met the hunter, and one of them took the kill to a few elderly individuals, while other welcomers rubbed against the provider and licked away the worst of the rain from their sodden hide. She marked the place on her maps as Edomere or ''ruddy waters'', then looked for a place to shelter.
The local soil had a lot of reddish-orange clay, rich in iron. Raising her gaze from the dirt to the trees, Rae had an epiphany. Greenish shale dominated the soil of the woods near the gryphon, and the trees had green rings. Yesterday, the dirt was more of an ochre yellow, and the trees were warmer in color. Here, with this red dirt, the trees were a deep brick red. She''d have to confirm the hypothesis, but it seemed the trees revealed the dominant mineral composition of the soil they grew in. As the rain turned to sporadic downpours, she found a dry overhang well above a creek bed. Remembering the night before, she set some drones on watch and bedded down wearing her goggles. Visibility was poor, but it seemed like most of the felids were hunkered in their dens, waiting out the weather, just like she was.
Chapter 12 - Flash Flood (Illustration)
"From the Stars we came, and to them we will one day return. We will learn to swim the great dark as our Mother did. For now, we cower in our homes while we grow as a people and sharpen our weapons. Only then will we achieve our Destiny."
--Fable of the Void
Rae slept as soon as it got dark, partly making up for the interrupted sleep from the night before when the jackal-things attacked her. When morning came, the rain was back to sprinkling, and signs of blue were showing in the skies. She busied herself hanging her camouflage net from the drones on sentry duty just under the overhang where she sheltered. Now she had a place where she could watch the felids undetected. She set out a sample case to collect clean rainwater before she slept, not liking the look of the creek. It seemed to be running higher than its usual banks, opaque and red as rust. Her drones slowly spread out over the thicket of red trees and the surrounding area.
There were pockets of marsh, but most of them were untended. The river reeds seemed rare in the area. North of the thicket, there was a dip in the terrain filled with old bones, suggesting a behavior of carrying devoured remains well away from the living areas. She mapped out the felid''s territory by marking the signs she learned yesterday, such as footprints, hair clumps, and claw scratches on trees. The dens in the thicket were the center of that area. While most of the felids still slept, she assigned posts for the drones to record and waited.
The extended families started coming out of the dens around mid-morning. Intrusive camera angles checked the genders of the adults, and surprisingly, there were nearly equal numbers of males and females. So the family structure wasn''t like a lion pride with one male or a pair of brothers breeding all the females. The cats were very social and demonstrative, touching and rubbing on one another and linking tendrils. The nursing young were closely watched by their mothers, staying near their dens. The elders and young adults shared the minding of the more active youngsters like in a wolf pack, but unlike wolves, more than one breeding pair at a time had cubs.
Solo felids and small groups hunted and brought back meat for those in the community who couldn''t hunt for themselves for whatever reason. An adult male limped as he moved, slowly stretching out a healing rear leg, and peeled the skin from of a kill for an old and frail female who appeared to have bad teeth. Mid-sized cubs received small prey to devour messily, and the nearly adult carried off the stripped carcasses once there was nothing left. Young adults lay up in the high branches and looked out on the rocky terrain upcountry, farther north.
Rae made a new set of outlines for the cubs, tied into the same database. She modified the root table, adding fields for pattern type and color. The adult outlines needed adjustment to work for the aged felids. They had a much fuller ruff, thick around the neck and cascading down the chest. Their ruffs had a narrow crest stripe from the back of the neck or a wide cap. The look reminded her of a cross between a domestic Maine Coon and the developing mane of a half-grown African lion. Thinking about it and looking through the day''s recordings, it dawned on her that it was gender-based. Crests were on the males, and the caps signified the females.
Mics on the drones recorded them over the sounds of the chattering waterways. Baby felids peeped and trilled or yowled according to their wants. The adults had a similar range of sounds but at a lower pitch. They moaned as a greeting or chirped for attention. A rhythmic rumbling accompanied affectionate actions such as grooming and rubbing on another. A sharp, growling cough that seemed to be an alert call came when a young reeder drifting down the river came ashore near the dens. It had scarcely finished shaking off the muddy water before a watchful hunter pounced on it, breaking its neck with a single heavy blow of a paw. Rae scratched her head as the felid didn''t eat their kill and instead carried it some distance away with their tendrils. Flinging the kill into the bushes, the cat went to the river with their tendrils awkwardly spread out and rubbed them on wet river grass before inverting them back inside their shoulders. Maybe reeders tasted bad?
The cats had symmetrical numbers of tendrils on either side of them. The tendril root patches formed a hexagonal cluster of six patches around one, making seven spots total, but they didn''t always contain a tendril. The cats had varying amounts of tendrils, seemingly coming from random roots. The cat with the fewest amount had only two on each side, while the one with the most had six per side. Some of them had a tendril extend from the central spot, but the one with twelve total didn''t. There were more with four tendrils per side than any other amount, followed by roughly equal amounts with three and five tendrils, and the single individuals with two and six, respectively. Rae thought it could be plotted with a bell curve when she got more data.
They used the tendrils for many things. They carried burdens, pulled things closer, or pushed them away. Wrapping their tendrils around fixed objects, they could pull themselves along or execute a hard turn. They used them to manipulate small things, and in one case, used a sharp edge of a rock to scratch aimless marks on a softer rock. Turning on the geo scans, she looked for signs of flint knapping but found nothing. She didn''t consider them to be in neolithic, any more than a gorilla would be. The stone age required the deliberate making of shaped stone tools. However, being able to grip and manipulate objects was an evolutionary advantage that might get the felids there one day.
A splashing noise nearby brought Rae''s attention back to her local surroundings. Looking through the vegetation threaded through her net, she saw part of the opposite bank collapsing on the other side of the creek. The rusty water ran faster and higher than in the morning and louder. It was still well below her, though, so she set up an alarm to check it every couple of hours. For much of the day, she alternated adding more entries to her i.d. database to study the felids'' recorded behaviors as the water crept upwards. The afternoon sun angled sharply through the trees under cloudy skies when several sharp alarm coughs came from the den area. Checking the drones, the felids high up in the branches climbed down with their ears pinned back.
Three of the older females gathered in the middle of the dens and called out an urgent ululation. The hunting members of the community headed home if they were near or perched high up in a tree. The elders picked up the cubs with their tendrils and placed them into the dens as the adults to join them. After several more rounds of calls yielded no more stragglers, the older femmes crowded in the lower shelters and looked northward with anxious demeanors. Eventually, she saw why as the creek got even louder. The accumulated rainfall in the hills tumbled and crashed down the ravines to the waterways, overflowing their banks. As the sun went down, the only thing the drones showed of the felids were their narrowed eyes gleaming from the dark of their dens.This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Rae watched the remaining footage from the day on her goggles while keeping a window open showing the creek level. It started to rain again, and when she ran out of videos, she stared vacantly out at the raindrops, bundled up in her shipscoat with her bedroll laid over her lap. Her head was full of noise and pressure that interfered with her thinking process. A blue-green light slowly lit up her overhang, and she looked around for the darkling Shadow with her teeth bared in defiance.
It was leaning against a nearby tree. "Why do you bother with the flesh bags? They''re not that interesting." She glared back but didn''t bother answering, tensed in anticipation of violence. "The same is true for all these slime planets," Shadow continued.
Rae took a deep breath and turned her head, determined to ignore her aberrant personality. She used her goggles to track the flooding, concerned it would reach her or the dens.
"Carbon-based organic life is the Universe''s mechanism for turning slime into shit," Shadow said. "The fact that you bother with it just shows how your upbringing twisted you. Even with your weak arm, you could squeeze one until it pops like a saggy balloon." It made a squeezing gesture, then mimed shaking off something viscous.
Her teeth ground together. It wasn''t approaching her this time, or talking about her romantic issues, so that was an improvement, but still! The Shadow''s opinion of her home environment annoyed her. Rae observed it from the corner of her eye, ready to react if threatened.
It stayed where it was, humming discordantly to itself just over the gurgle and rush of the floodwaters. "I suppose they''d have some use as decoration if you skinned them for their pelts," it said. "If only they weren''t so flammable or stank so much when they burned."
Behind its cruel words were faint sounds of distress. Rae did her best to tune the Shadow out and listen more closely but couldn''t be sure there was anything there.
"Are you listening to me?" The Shadow said.
She shook her head, refusing to look at it. There it was again, distress. No, it was whimpering, and it was nearby.
"There''s something out there?" It shrugged, "Whatever. It''s not like it matters. The things born of this world wither and rot almost as soon as they''re born."
Its indifference spurred Rae to action. Talking the bedroll off her lap, she stood and moved past the side of her camouflage net to search the area. She didn''t see anything, so she set her goggles to temperature gradients. The ground and floodwaters were inky purples, while the heat radiating from her was brilliant white plumes. She was looking for something in between those extremes. Again she didn''t see anything until there was another whimper, and she looked closer at the far bank.
She raised her goggles to her hairline and jumped over the floodwater, using her teke to land lightly on the sodden ground. A little greenish blob with a yellow-green core was just at the waterline. It was tiny, only the length of her forearm. Up close, it was a dark-colored felid cub, using its claws to cling to exposed roots to avoid being swept away with the current.
"What a soggy mess. You should leave it to its fate. It''s not worth the effort."
Rae put a boot just downstream of the cub and stared down as it shivered with the cold and wet. It was losing its grip on the roots, whimpering every time it slipped further into the water. A flailing hind paw landed on her boot, and it turned to look, its gaze traveling up her form until its orange eyes met hers. It gave a creaking yowl, a more pleading sound than the earlier whimpers.
"We are superior beings, and we should only intervene with things that are useful to us," Shadow said. "That flotsam doesn''t qualify. You couldn''t even make a whole glove out of it."
She broke its gaze and gripped her head, the pressure and noise roaring in her head almost drowning out the sound of the water. That didn''t sound right. Are these Are these her own thoughts? Throughout her existence, she operated under the belief that carbon-based life was life. How could this errant part of her be so callused about their frailties? It didn''t even sound like herself.
Another pitiful yowl came from the cub, then stopped as something tumbled over her boot. Looking up, she saw the cub being carried away by the rusty waters, mouth open as it struggled to stay afloat. That was not her. She waded after the cub as it went under the surface. Tracking the panicked mind, she grabbed the sopping furball and hauled it out of the water.
"Not today, Shadow," Rae said, her voice rough from disuse. "That isn''t who I am." Holding it against her belly, she palpated the chest and abdomen, causing it to sputter out the water it had breathed in or swallowed.
"That''s disgusting," Shadow complained, but she ignored it. That wasn''t her. That was never her. She tucked the little bundle inside her coat and carried it back to her shelter. One hand supported it while the other stroked over it, emanating warmth. It hooked dulled claws into her shirt and huddled as close to her as possible, panting and trembling.
Sitting back on her board, she pried the cub off her shirt and pulled her bedroll over her lap again. Placing it on the bedroll on its back despite mewls of protest, she gave it a thorough rub while gradually increasing the temperature around it. She relaxed her grip and let it wiggle over to its belly. She offered some clean rainwater from her container, but it turned its head away. The cub shook itself all over, meeting her gaze then hissing at her.
"Really? Is that a way to thank the one that saved you from drowning?" Rae said. It screeched back at her. "So ferocious." She gently pinned its chest down and rubbed its head and cheek with a finger. It bit at her, but she pulled her finger away before it could break its baby fangs trying. She did a few rounds of this before the cub allowed her caresses, starting to trill quietly to her.
The cub was starting to dry off, and she combed its fur with her fingers. Warm and mostly dry, the cub reacted to the worst day of its young life by slowly falling over as it dozed off, squirming into a comfortable position to sleep. Absently stroking the soft fuzz, Rae thought about her newly revealed problem. The Shadow was not a broken part of herself but something external that somehow wormed its way inside her head.
There was a huff of laughter from the Shadow, still lurking nearby. "Took you long enough to notice, or did you believe you broke your own arm?" She frowned. She did until just now. Shadow gave her a sarcastic jaunty gesture and faded away.
Now she knew her mind had an unwanted tenant that she had to evict. It was no longer enough for her to stay on this world and hope to recover. This knowledge changed everything about why she was here and what she had to do if she wanted to get better.
Chapter 13 - Catch & Release (Illustration)
"The heart of every band is its grand Dam, the mother of their mother''s mothers. She must direct the band, lead them to new territories, and protect and develop the younglings. Wise and canny, she guides her family''s part of the Children of the Stars."
--Fable of the Damen.
While Rae worked the mud and snarls out of the cub''s fur, she took a peek below the tail tucked over its nethers. A little male. She double-checked if her theory on scalp fur agreed with this observation. A pale scraggly line started from the spine and coming over the head to his face. He had a crest, which was a data point in favor of the theorem. Like most sleeping baby animals, he was completely limp as she examined him. Shielding his face with part of her bedroll, she lowered her goggles and turned on the light.
Toe beans and tendril roots were similar in color and texture to the nose, which in his case was salmon pink. Rae scanned the cub in-depth, particularly under the root patches. There was a lot of nerve tissue in them. Gently prodding at the roots, she got the middle tendril to evert, a slender pink noodle emerging from the center patch, before gradually withdrawing. The structure and motive control of the appendage seemed to be from an intricate telescoping cartilage system connected by a network of slender muscle fibers. Trying the other roots, there were no tendrils under the upper and lower patch, but there were in the middle and the other four outer roots. The next time the cub was awake, she''d try and check how strong they were.
She examined his milk teeth and the cub''s damaged claws. Polishing away the ragged parts of the claws, she left them smooth but slightly dulled. There were abrasions on the paw pads, seeping traces of blood. She patted some clean gauze on the blood, put it in a sample case, and took other samples, saliva, loose fur, and the claw trimmings. She found a small amount of lanolin refined from the goat wool among her cases that she used to treat leather items, like her belt. She rubbed some on his paw pads, nose, and tendril root patches as a skin barrier.
Overall his fur was a dark gray with a medium gray base coat. His facial accent marks were a khaki color, and the bare hints of a ruff were a pale gray. If it werent for his charcoal markings of horizontal bars along his body and clusters of spots on his limbs, hed be very plain looking. While fast asleep at the moment, his eyes were a bright pumpkin orange which, along with his accents, added warmth to the otherwise cool color palette. She projected a holo keyboard and put ''Fire-eyes'' in his file. She took out her bag of jerky and tested its pliability. She had made it dry and hard to last a long while, so she split some rainwater into another container and crumbled some of the smoked meat in the water to soften.
Rae cataloged his physiological differences from the felids she was familiar with. Besides the tendrils, his brain volume was bigger than a terrestrial big cat his size and apparent age. His eyes were double-lidded and possessed a variety of rods and cones that would see in color and many light levels. The neck was comparatively thick and had three separate trachea branching between the mouth and an intermediate structure that supplied both lungs. The inner ear anatomy was sensitive to even quiet sounds, as they twitched when she rubbed her fingers together near his ear. She put down her scanners and stroked the soft fur of his face, tracing her fingers along the accent marks bracketing his nose and on his chin, ears, and eyebrow marks.
Her absent caresses continued, eliciting contented sounds from the sleeping cub as she looked off to finally think about her situation. Ever since Qardos, she''d been harried by demons both within and without... Now she''d learned those two were confused. She had a history of painful incidents and self-recriminations she generally kept tamped tightly down. This voice, this... something she''d thought was a hostile part of herself, was not. It was an alien presence, not physically there, yet residing in her head. Preying on her worst impulses, it triggered a meltdown and somehow physically assaulted her. It had been manipulating her and trying to make her indifferent to things she cared for. She hadn''t even properly resisted, at first believing the changes were from herself. So, what was she supposed to do about this?
Shadow didn''t like carbon-based organics. It constantly harped how disgusting and beneath her they were. She disagreed, and doubly so about her romantic partners. A lifetime''s worth of care and caution that allowed her to interact with human-habitable environments meaningfully was worthless to the Shadow. That was the only reason she could think of for not having saved the cub when she reached him. If she had simply picked him u, he wouldn''t have gone under the run-off. Her hesitation had caused him to aspirate the filthy water with all the attendant health risks that could cause. She felt she owed it to the cub to care for him and return him to his kind.
There were other ways the Shadow had probably been manipulating her, but she should probably pay attention now; the cub was stirring. She''d left him belly up in her lap, but he was twitching all over. Suddenly he squirmed his way upright, with his body slung low in a defensive crouch. Looking up at her, he bared his fangs and claws, emitting growls interspersed with hissing and low, threatening yowls. He glanced around for a way out, but everything outside the radius of their eye''s light was cold, wet darkness.
She smiled, "You certainly has a fierce. I understand. I probably look very strange to you." The cub''s eyes widened, and he quieted down a bit. "That''s an odd reaction to my voice, rough as it is."
Fire-eyes'' tongue appeared as he worked his mouth and swallowed hard. She turned to her packs as he backed out of her lap to find himself falling into darkness. Desperately he twisted, digging into her bedroll with his claws to save himself when he was caught up just behind his forelegs by Rae''s hands.
"Careful there," she said, "you''re higher up than you realize, but not by much."
She unfolded her legs and stood up from her skyboard that she''d been using as a bench. Tucking him against her shirt with one arm, she used the other to pick up her bedroll and rearrange it on the forward end of the board. He peered down from her grasp, watching what she was doing. Satisfied, she put him down on the fabric, then sat down again in the middle. He carefully tested his limits, finding the edges of the board where it ended under the soft surface that she''d placed him on. Then he leaned over to try to see what was below.
Rae took off her goggles and turned on a dim light so that he could see better. He blinked and flinched at first, looking at her face, then the glowing goggles in her hand before curiously sniffing at it. She brought it close to him and let him snuffle it, then slowly turned the light down to the ground and put her other hand on his back. The ground wasn''t far away. He would just reach the board with his forepaws if he stood below. She directed the light forward until it showed the swollen, rushing creek. She felt his back arch in alarm, and he inched closer to her. She looped the googles around her foot as she sat cross-legged again. She brought out several containers from her packs; the rainwater supply, the softened jerky, and a shallow, empty tray.
"Now," she said to him, "you looked thirsty before, and you''re probably hungry, too."
She put the tray in front of Fire-eyes and let him sniff it, then slowly dribbled some water into it. His eyes fixed on the clear droplets, his pink tongue appearing again. She stopped pouring and tapped the side of the tray. "Come on, what are you waiting for?" He looked at her hands, and she scarcely moved them away before his head was crowding in, and he quickly slurped up the water. She poured small puddles into the tray three times and watched him drink it all before she picked up the hydrating jerky. When she opened it, he sniffed hard at the unusual scent. There wasn''t much extra seasoning on the goat meat. She''d sprinkled on a little crushed rock salt and smoked it over a cloudtop wood fire, but it was certain he''d smelled nothing like it before.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Rae picked up a soggy sliver and shook off the cloudy water before putting it in her mouth, chewing and swallowing. Fire-eyes creeled softly with hunger, watching her intently. She warmed the container in her hands and poured some meat juice into his tray. He sniffed at it dubiously, but he quickly lapped it all up and looked for more once he tasted it. She put several chunks of the meat near the tray and watched him struggle with it. Raw flesh was inherently moist, and his sharp front teeth would release enough blood juices to let it slide down his throat. But this meat had been desiccated by salt and heat and smoke, then steeped in water, making it chewy compared to his usual diet. He jerked his head, working it with his back teeth. She put more clean water in the tray, and bit by bit, got it in him, interspersing it with rainwater to help him cope with the salt permeating the food.
His eyelids drooped when she''d emptied the jerky container, and he started squirming, looking over the side again. Picking up her goggles, she stood and put him on the ground to find a spot to piddle on while she provided a faint light to see. When he finished, he came up to her boots and climbed her like a tree. When he got to her waist, she picked him up and put him back on the bedroll. Rae scanned him again now he was awake and active. His eyes followed the glowing lights of her instruments and lazily swiped at them with his paws. She was concerned about the sodium she''d fed him, but it didn''t seem to be adversely affecting him. He nudged the tray, and she moved it to the packs on her other side. He crept closer and leaned against her, sighing as her hand came down to his neck and gently scritched. From what she could feel, he was in a state between asleep and awake, leaving her alone with her thoughts again.
Shadow had overstepped itself. If it were more patient and hadn''t tried to go against some of her hard codings, she might have succumbed to it. Her adoptive culture and her inclinations put baby animals close to her heart, even ones of dangerous species. She''d spent years on Terra raising and rehabilitating big cats, from bottle-fed newborns to palliative care for aged individuals. And it wasn''t just felines; she had a soft spot for most helpless baby creatures. Months of Shadow''s influence only made her hesitate in helping Fire-Eyes, but couldn''t make her ignore his impending fate. But because Shadow pushed her before it had a firmer grip, she was aware it was there now and that she had a problem.
She leaned over the cub, sniffing it, and her American penny necklace dangled free of her clothes. It was from the San Francisco mint, dated 1957, the year of her birth. She was born in a special Inferus environment chamber her parents maintained a handful of miles away from the mint that struck the coin. There was nothing special about its copper alloy. The reason it survived all these centuries, not to mention a dip into Monkey''s caldera, was the crystalline casing and chain of exotic materials that protected it and kept it near, to remind her of home. She tugged on the bedroll to adjust it, feeling the penny sway on its serpentine chain when a paw swiped up to bat at it.
Rae caught his paw. His ears swiveled, and he watched the penny closely as she let him go and reached up to unfasten the chain. "Feeling playful, eh?"
She wiggled the necklace, making the penny dance and turn and catch the light. Fire-eyes went into full hunt mode, alternating quivering crouches with sudden lunges with his claws bared.
"Let''s try something else," she said and brought him into her lap. With one hand gently pinning his forepaws, she dangled the penny with the other. "What you gonna do now, huh?"
He struggled at first, trying to escape her grasp, then everted all ten of his tendrils, reaching for the coin. She let him catch it, then gently pulled it away. As she swung it, she learned a lot about how far the tendrils could extend, their strength capacity, and how he could narrow the ends for more delicate manipulation. His tendril-eye coordination was good, but he was still a baby. If she could compare his tendril ability with his developing pouncing skills, he probably had quite a ways to go.
He twined his tendrils around the chain, and she let him pull the penny from her as she let his paws go. He looked at it closely, turning it over with his tendrils and trying to work the chain. He got the hang of holding the chain by one end and shaking it so he could bat the coin with his paws, but she had to cover her mouth to not laugh at the results. It was as if the brain controlling the feet and the tendrils was divided between the two activities, making him markedly clumsier at both of them. He dropped the penny next to her, inverting his tendrils. Snuffling at the packs strapped to the rear of the board, he homed in on the one with the jerky in it. Rae palmed the penny and refastened the chain, dropping it back inside her shirt.
"Seems like you''re still hungry, little guy."
A movement nearby got her attention, and she pulled down her goggles to see what it was. A small burrowing reptile dragged itself out a hole into the open just ahead of a surge of floodwater. It looked for a place to hide, but it was too late; it was spotted by a predator; her . She apportated the animal to her grasp and quickly broke its neck with a flick of her thumb. She tucked the body away and moved the cub back to the bedroll, putting the tray in front of him. She gave him some water, and while he drank, she examined the lizard, brushing the dirt off while her goggles scanned for poisonous carbon compounds.
When the tray was empty, she put the lizard in it. Fire-eyes snuffled at it and bit it but didn''t make much headway. He tried to claw its belly and pinned his ears back when he failed. He made a complaining sound, and she remembered seeing an adult cat opening a small prey for the young ones. Rae drew a knife from her boot and sliced open the abdomen, then cleaned the blade and replaced it in its sheath. The cub renewed his attack, making little sounds as he devoured the animal. The aftermath was grisly, with blood, scales, and bits of viscera smeared on his muzzle and the tray. He looked up after licking his muzzle. She pulled out a cloth that she dampened and wiped down both cub and container.
He climbed into her lap and nuzzled into her. "Oh, thanks, little guy or rather, you''re welcome."
She looped her arms around him loosely and listened to him trill happily. Her jaw clamped suddenly as her eyes welled with tears. This moment of closeness breached into wells of loneliness she hadn''t realized she''d buried inside her. She missed being around people, any people, and especially her Family. She let Fire-eyes go abruptly and gripped her legs with a bruising force so that she wouldn''t hurt him accidentally. Her emotional walls crumbled, and she did her best to choke back a sob as she hung her head. Jeol
Rae felt him bump his head against her chin and began stroking the cub with a trembling hand. She wiped her face on her sleeve and tried to get a grip on herself, raising the heat radiating from her to aid in making him drowsy. After he fell asleep, she waited out the dark stoically, with only the occasional tear she couldn''t hold back betraying her emotional upset. When dawn arrived, she had herself firmly in hand again. She assessed his condition, comparing it to how she found him, and nodded to herself. She pulled back most of her drones, leaving a couple to watch the dens. The felids stirred earlier than she''d seen the day before, checking on the lessening floodwaters and nosing around in search of some scent.
She roused Fire-eyes and put him on the ground to do his business as he yawned. She rolled up her bedding and packed things away as he finished. He sat and looked up at her curiously.
"Okay, cub," she said, squatting near him, "I think your family is looking for you, so I''m going to take you where they can find you."
She fastened up her shipscoat and tucked him inside the front. Detouring away from the dens, she jumped over the creek onto a large rock as he peered out. She crouched, stealthily approaching the dense tangle of trees behind the dens. Finding a dryish pocket of limbs, she scritched him one last time before placing him inside the scant shelter. She turned away, and he started to follow her before she gently pushed him back. His ears pinned back, when a call from one of the adults turned both their heads.
A nearly inaudible whine came from him, and he settled down. "Good boy," she whispered, "stay safe."
She backed away and heard him chirp as she moved out of his sight. She ported to her board and watched the drone feed as he answered the calls, and several adult cats quickly located him. Two females, one young and one old, nearly tackled him, snuffling and licking him from head to tail. The cub''s night certainly imparted unusual smells and tastes to him, from the heavy scent of metals from her, to the salt and smoke from the jerky, and the lanolin. The younger female gathered him up in her tendrils and nuzzled him, as the elder looked sharply around with her ears perked up, scenting the breeze.
She took a steadying breath and recalled the last two drones, sending the fleet out to find a path to the riverside. Rae moved the board out from the underhang and checked the area. She used her boot to scrape enough dirt to cover his business, and as she straightened, she spotted a fist-size granite rock that was nearly his primary coat color embedded under where they''d sheltered. Projecting a holo of his paw print onto it, her hands heated enough to press the shapes into the stone, leaving it smoking from her efforts. She gradually drew the excess heat from the rock, leaving it where she found it. She swung up on the board and floated silently through the woods on the way home.
Chapter 14 - Basic Training (Illustration)
"The older members of the band share their wisdom with the Dam. They no longer have younglings of their own, so they aid the paren who raise the future hunters. Slower of step, and grayer of face, the years have also given them a wealth of experience."
--Fable of the Elden.
Rae''s hands shook as she crocheted another panel for her project. After getting back to the plateau, she''d finished one item after another on her to-do list. She''d carded the wool and the cottony pod fibers she''d named boltan, spinning the fibers into wool and boltan yarn plus a yarn with both fiber types. She was currently working on dyes to color the skeins. The stalks of the pod plant were still retting, but the quality of last year''s growth probably wouldn''t yield much of the linen-like fiber she expected this coming year would bring. She put her forearm over her aching eyes for a moment. She''d scarcely slept in the weeks since her return, but thankfully Shadow hadn''t appeared in all that time.
When she finished this last panel, she could assemble the project. Her eyes flicked up to the polished orange agate she''d carved into a pair of buttons. When she managed to get some sleep, she dreamed of the cub and awoke in tears. Desperate for rest, she started a simulacrum of Fire-eyes, putting together a felt pattern she echoed in crochet. The lowest grade fibers would stuff the doll, while the medium grade made the felt and the best into yarn and thread. Knotting off the panel, Rae started the assembly. First, she stitched the felt liner together, then put the crocheted parts together to surround the felt. Once the body and limbs were finished and stuffed, she sewed on the agate eyes. Much work was needed to decorate it, but completing the form of the cub was enough for now.
She carefully put her tools and supplies away, then picked up the life-sized toy and cradled it in her arms. Moving to her bedroll, she looked at the Jackal-thing hide in a wooden frame she''d put on a shelf. She didn''t have an immediate use for the strange leather, and it was decorative all by itself. The pseudo-skeleton would probably be spookily festive when the autumn harvest time came. Sinking down to her blankets, she turned to the wall, curling up around the cat plushy and blocking out the world. Her hands stroked it as the tension in her drained away as she found a moment of peace. An alarm on her goggles woke her a few hours later.
Rae''s monitoring programs prompted her to check on the kiln firing. She''d marbled the lavender and rose porcelain varieties together, making a wide array of plates, bowls, and pots on a pottery wheel. Drifting down the shaft on her board, she thought of the materials she stored down here for her projects. There was more wool, leather, and metal ores. The metal was refined into bars and turned into electronic parts. She was in the process of increasing the number of drones to expand her surveillance area and modifying the ones she brought with her to local needs. Once at her kiln ramp, her scanners determined the clay needed a few more hours to complete the firing, so she input a delay before the rack would move back up from the heat.
She returned to the surface and walked out of the dig into the sun. She paused, blinking as a vision of a withered and decomposing gryphon lay over the partly completed granite walkway to the river. Moving gingerly forward, she got close enough to nudge it with her boot, only for it to fade away before she made contact. Another damned hallucination, why was Shadow doing this to her?
''Because the Shadow doesn''t like me,'' a nearby voice said.
Rae whirled towards it with a gasp. She met the sapphire eyes of the black gryphon totem that had been appearing to her all along. It now had a white streak along its back from its beak to the tip of its tail. "I don''t need any help," she rasped, "go away." She shook her head, muttering, "Probably not here anyway."
It approached her, raising a fore-talon to squeeze her hand firmly. ''I am here enough. And you have finally started asking the right questions. I have answers, if you want them.''
She drew her hand away. "Are you a Qard? And if so, who are you?"
''I am a Qard totem, preferentially masculine. You do know me, but the breaks in your mind have blinded you to my identity. I fear it would harm you further to learn it prematurely.''
"Who or what is the Shadow?" she asked. "What does it want from me!?"
The gryphon tilted his head. ''That is a complex subject, but the clearest answer is it''s a ghost, entangled with your Bloodline. As for what it wants, it has already told you.'' It ticked items off on its talons, ''It wants you kneeling at its feet in slavish worship. It wants to destroy your personality and take over your form, to reign over your family with a cruel and unforgiving fist. It wants you to suffer for a supposed crime that you didn''t commit. It wants you and our kind utterly destroyed.''
Rae frowned. Most of that was contradictory. "What does all that even mean?"
The gryphon shook his head and sighed. ''When one begins to teach a child mathematics, does one begin with calculus?''
It was her turn to sigh. "No, of course not. You have to learn elementary concepts first."
''Even so,'' he said, nodding. ''I can teach you the family lore lost in the Devastation. And you''ve never needed to use your psi powers offensively much, but to make any headway against Shadow, you must learn.''
She sat on a stack of paving stones tiredly. "Why haven''t I seen it lately?"
''You were correct to call it a parasite. It can only do what you can, using your own mental energies to do it. The more exhausted and disrupted you are, the less you''ll see of it. But that isn''t a feasible way forward. Being as you are at the moment is merely existing, not living.''
Rae nodded, "Alright, that makes sense. But why am I afraid of the wind?"
The gryphon blinked. ''That... has nothing to do with the Shadow. It''s a personal problem you must work through yourself.'' He came over to sit next to the stone stack. ''Contemplating your issues would be good for you, but not at the expense of your psi training.''
She stifled a yawn. "When do we start?"
He struck her with his beak, nearly knocking her down as she flailed for balance. ''When you get some rest and are no longer dull-witted and stumbling drunk. Even if that means more energy for your unwanted passenger.''
Rae straightened up and hauled herself erect. "Fine, then. I''ll see you later." She returned to the dig with as much dignity as she could muster. She checked for any pending alarms, feeling relief when there were none. She coiled around Agate, her new companion on her bedroll, and was unconscious almost immediately.
She awoke feeling better and sat up, tucking Agate under her chin. She hadn''t any notion of how to solve her problem since arriving on this planet, just knowing that she was a danger to those she cared for. The longer she stayed here, the worse she''d gotten. She knew what her problem was now and had agreed on a course of action. She rubbed her face and shook her head. The gryphon must be correct that she knew him, even though she couldn''t name him, because she trusted he could help her. Actually, she had two problems; the Shadow and the break in her mind. Gryphon only promised to help with the first one, but it was up to her to solve the second. But how? Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
He''d had given her a hint, though. Rae had to go through her hangups, some of which she hadn''t shared with anyone, even Jeol. ''Contemplation'' could mean many things, from thinking about something, to therapy, to journaling. Her new instructor seemed uninterested in discussing those matters, and with Shadow lurking in her head, she couldn''t be sure she could retain any purely mental progress. She didn''t have any paper or a particular desire to make any, and simple text files could be altered and the meanings twisted. If she wrote things out on her datapad and saved the screens as locked images with time/date stamps and encrypted version tracking That would make it difficult to interfere with, at least.
She went over to her computer and sent a camera drone upriver to Edomere to take a few images of Fire-eyes. She wanted to track his growth, but from a safe distance, so pictures and scans every couple of months would suffice. There weren''t enough new felid records from the local area to add to the database yet, because she wanted to do that in batches. New plants and animals were still being discovered in the surrounding biomes, particularly the grasslands. A larger ungulate reminded her of a wildebeest, and there were better pictures of a frankly massive bovine with rhino-like skin and feet.
Rae had found a grass with a sour floral smell that she had extracted and concentrated in the sun for an item on her to-do list. Putting some in a scent ball by the riverbank had yielded no reaction from watering animals. Maybe it wasn''t stinky enough? She had collected a sample of a slimy substance from the river''s edge on a bench nearby that had a robust bitter funk to it. She added some sour concentrates to it until she had a rough equivalent of the river reed''s bad root smell. Loading the mixture into a scent ball, she went to the riverbank, veering off to the side to anchor the ball and detail an observing drone. She washed in the current and dressed on the pebbled beach.
Turning back up the slope, she saw Gryphon lying on the stack of granite cobbles loosely holding her visor. ''You need to eat. Training your psionics will lower your mass, and you''re far too skinny as it is.''
"Enjoy the view?" Rae quipped, ignoring the totem''s flagrant eye-roll. She''d not topped her reserves in a while, but she hadn''t been doing much, either. "Fine." She wasn''t sure what annoyed her more, the fact that he felt it necessary to say, or that she''d been about to train at less than half her optimum mass. Aware of Gryphon''s gaze, she melted down some scrap rock and drank it down, shuddering at the rush of warmth and energy.
''Good. We will begin with a series of exercises to establish a baseline from which to improve.'' He looked up at the plateau. ''Do you see the white rock a little up the slope?'' She nodded. ''Without teleporting, touch the base stones from one to the next, to the top and across the length of the plateau, and down the far side. Pick up the red rock you''ll find there and teleport back with it. This exercise is timed. Go!''
"What does this have to do with?" Gryphon lunged at her with angry eyes; his beak spread wide. Startled, she stepped back, then shook off her lethargy and ran for the first marker. At a minimum, the course would be 3 kilometers if the markers were in a straight line. Touching the first white rock, she saw the second was off to the side instead of on the most direct route to the top. She zigzagged approximately 750 meters up and the 1500 meters across to the other side.
On the descent, she teke-jumped between two markers and received a telekinetic slam in her side, causing her to tumble down the scree past the next marker. She had to backtrack to tap it, then worked through the rest of them until she got to the red final stone. It was big, but she hefted it up and translocated back to Gryphon. "Did you shove me?" She asked him as she lowered the ending stone down.
''Yes. While psi jumping to increase your speed is commendable, you should be aware of psychic attacks at all times. For now, I''ll only push when you use telekinesis, but when you get faster, it could come at any point on the run. I''ll also remind you that translocating is the slowest form of teleporting, albeit the safest, and sometimes speed is more important than caution.'' He tapped his claws on the red block. ''What do you make of this?''
She ran her hands over it. "Is this Eternium?" Gryphon nodded. The mineral she named was from Qardos and was a hard stone with a metallic luster when polished. It was similar to hematite but in various orange, red, and purple shades. Carved on top was the symbol of a globe superimposed on a lemniscate with a star on either end. Her home was a binary star system, with a single planet that wound around both of them in turn. There was always at least one of the giant suns visible anywhere on the surface.
''This is to remind you of where we come from,'' he said. ''Sometimes, I don''t think you remember.''
Rae frowned at him. Of course she knew! She was there not long ago Her mind blanked for a moment, and she rubbed her throat to soothe a phantom pain.
''Next, you''ll test your physical strength using these,'' he gestured to a score of metal pallet cages, each already full of several kilotons of locally cut granite.
"Where did you get those?" she asked. She certainly hadn''t brought them.
''I borrowed them from a Deltian warehouse.'' She gave him a disapproving look, and he shrugged. ''If they''re concerned about the loss, they''ll detect my energy signature on a scan and write it off against the Family accounts.'' He walked to the pallets. ''How many do you think you can manage? Twenty reps, from full squats to full arm extensions when standing. No teke or I''ll psi blast you, and you''ll start over.''
She considered the containers of rock. "Two?"
''Make it three.''
Rae groaned. "What''s with the physical training? I thought this was to learn better psionic combat?"
''A fit body improves the potential output of the mind. You may use teke to lift the weights initially to get under them. After that, it will be physical strength only. Begin.''
"At least they''re made to interlock so that I can lift them as a single unit." He peered down his beak at her in an uncanny impression of an evil grin. "For now," she muttered as she assembled the cages and began. At rep twelve, the weights started to wobble when she didn''t lower them evenly, and reflexively she steadied them with her mind. A stinging mental blast destroyed her concentration, driving her to her knees under her burden as collapsing pallets pelted her with granite blocks.
Half the stones had tumbled out around her, and she looked at them and then at the assembled pallets. It''d be faster to start with new ones than to pick up the mess. Gryphon blocked her path and shook his head. Rae sighed and began to fill the cages again. She lost her balance the second time, dropping them but managing not to grab them with her mind. The third time was the charm when she finished the twenty reps.
''Good. Do these exercises every day and try to improve your performance. I do have an existence that doesn''t revolve around you, but while I may not always be able to be here, I will always be watching.'' He fixed her with one of his blue raptor eyes.
She managed a sound between a grunt of affirmation and a groan, sprawled out on the grass and feeling her legs quiver. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gryphon input her results on a holoscreen projected from her visor.
Gryphon stretched out his wings before settling them back at his sides. ''I will grant you a brief respite. Go back to the plateau and top off again. Then retrieve one of your packs and return.''
Climbing to her feet, she jogged back to do as he asked. She''d have to write this training regimen down to inflict on young Qards if she ever made it off this rock. It wasn''t until she got back to Gryphon that she started wondering what the pack was for.
She lowered herself to her knees and bowed ironically. "Yes, sempai?"
Gryphon sighed, then gestured to a broad grassy area near the plateau that stretched from the riverbank to the low plains far in the distance. ''Hidden in the grass are fifty fist-sized white stones marked with an x. Put them in the pack, keeping track of how many you have, as dumping them out to check will count against your time. Do not use your clairvoyance. The quickest way to accomplish this task is to combat teleport in a methodical search grid. Using clairvoyance will get you teleported in a random direction, height, and vector. Begin.''
Rae hefted the pack and picked out her first port point, muttering, "Ah, son of a" as she ported away.
Chapter 15 - Journaling (Illustration)
"Every able adult is required to take part in the hunts. Some do so exclusively, while others hunt among other pursuits. The lame and aged are excused, as are the mothers of the littlest younglings. Others participate only rarely as they have duties for the band that require most of their time."
--Fable of the Hunter.
''The root of a Qard''s power is their aura, which is the vehicle of their perception,'' Gryphon said as he warmed his belly on the paving stones, his ears flicking in the slight breeze. ''Each one as unique as the individual, it is the interface between your mind and the universe beyond it. Everywhere beyond your body''s senses and physical reach is accessible to you by stretching out with your aura. There are few limits to how far you can reach with an aura, and learning to manipulate it is the foundation of a Qard''s existence.''
Rae sat on the low wall she built over the last month. A meter tall and another wide, the stones for it had been cut from larger granite blocks with telekinetic shearing planes, an ability that Gryphon helped her refine. It lay alongside the pathway to the river, and extended half a meter below ground in a ditch her teacher had her shovel out by hand. After carving a veritable mountain of stones for it, she assembled the wall in a single continuous flow, dodging bricks that he kicked back at her because she placed them crookedly or for leaving gaps.
''There are three main ways of transporting yourself. The quickest is to choose a location by sight and perform a short spatial warp, also called a combat port. A longer method is to find a spot out of your physical view with your aura and then warp there. The extra time comes from directing your aura to your destination and holding a mental lock there while you perform the warp.
''The limits of this kind of teleport are how far you can extend your perception without passing through something that would interfere with the warp energies. Examples are things like exotic forces or the curvature of a planet. When one''s focus is not in their vicinity, there is also a risk of harm to their body while they aren''t paying attention. This risk is small in the longer warps because even a teleport of a few thousand kilometers only takes a brief amount of time.''
Today she was using the mind shear delicately by carving out the insides of a twenty-centimeter granite cube. Starting with removing a cylindrical core, she was to hollow it out, leaving two centimeter thick walls, then turn it into a shadow box by cutting designs in five of the six sides. So far, she''d eaten more of them as scrap than she completed. While she worked, she paid attention to Gryphon''s lecture because he would question her about it later.
''Translocation takes the longest amount of time and goes the farthest, but therefore poses the greatest personal risk from inattention. The time to project an aura across intercontinental or even interstellar distances can be significant. The skill is also used to move between disparate environments. The aura surrounds your body, and on the other end, a mirror of this aura duplicates your body''s form and position. When you perform the spatial fold, the contents of the mirrored auras are exchanged. If you transport to a hostile environment, whatever is inside the area of the projected mirror appears where you launched from after the fold while you appear at the destination. You can even port inside solid matter without suffering harm because the material you displaced is now where you began. This is what makes it the safest way to transport.''
Rae knew all this. She''d been using translocation for most of her life. Her parents had taught her how when she was a child, although they put far less emphasis on the quicker ports. She turned her attention back to her cube, turning it over in her hands, looking over the solid sides for inspiration. The first few sides were easy to carve, with repeating circles on one, interlocking squares on the second, and triangles on the third. Ovals for the fourth side and a honeycomb for the fifth. She began carving again as Gryphon continued speaking.
''Translocation''s spatial fold is capable of putting together any two places anchored by your aura, letting you momentarily perceive both locations. From your point of view, it isn''t you that moves - the universe does. The faster spatial warp is a different transport mechanism. It''s more akin to a small wormhole through space that you slide through laterally and then catch your balance on the far side. If there is an unseen object at your destination, you''ll need to move it out of your way as you appear. You''ll need to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each method, Rae, and how best to use them.''
Humming an affirmative response, she cleaned up her carving, dwelling on the irony of her current situation. Only the three other original-bloodline Qard were her senior. When the methods were established, she encouraged mortals and Kin to become part of the Family to increase their numbers. As Chief, she was usually the instructor of the new Qards. It was odd being the student and learning more about her powers than she ever thought possible. Gryphon was right about her laziness. Never having rivals or actual competition while growing up, she never had to hone her abilities. Her current training was difficult and often annoying, but she couldn''t argue with the results.
Gryphon was suddenly in her personal space, making her flinch and bobble the shadow box. She got it under control as he sat on his haunches and held out a talon in silent demand. She handed it over, and he examined it closely. ''Nicely done, but you should try for more intricate patterns next time. You''ve proven yourself competent; now try for artistry.'' He handed it back, then clasped her shoulder in approval. She smiled. ''Starting tomorrow, you''ll start cutting more blocks to do the other wall. I''ll think of ways to increase the difficulty of the task as something for you to look forward to.'' Her smile faded as Gryphon took wing and flew away.
Heaving a sigh of aggravation, she headed back to the dig and lined the new cube up with the other three she''d successfully finished. She picked up her datapad and created an image covering the days lecture. Rae was perfecting her style before beginning to journal her personal issues. It alternated blocks of handwritten notes with small sketches of the principles being discussed. The last drawing showed her entering a spacial warp, then coming out the other side and kicking a rubber duck out of her way. Saving her current page, she started a new one and thought about when her inner angst began, conveying it in a combination of words and images.
Looking at humanity from the outside was often painful for her. She and her parents were a little bubble of alien culture hidden within American society. Friends left her behind as they matured quicker, and human media assumed that there was a perfect person out there for everyone. The concept was ubiquitous throughout their calendar; Valentine''s day, love songs, mistletoe, and annual crops of romcoms. What really stung were diamond commercials and the idea that love could be purchased, while the gems were just food to her.
The pace of their lives was frenetic compared to hers. As a child, her parents taught her to manipulate chronal forces to live double or triple lives over her own timeline to appear to age like her mortal peers. If she had lived her life straight, the children she knew early in her life would be pairing up as couples and starting families well before she reached the equivalent of ten years old.
She absorbed the idea of having her own life partner like the very air around her, but with her education outstripping her maturity, the math of the situation soon appalled her. Humans on Terra had literally billions of potential mates to choose from, and she had none. It was just the three of them, and the other two were her parents. Genetically, that wasn''t the problem it would be with humans, but she''d absorbed their taboos along with their romantic expectations, making the notion distasteful for her.
Danel and Perin didn''t understand why it upset her and had little sympathy for her fears. It made no sense to them why she was fretting over potential mates while still a child. The Light promised she would have a partner in due time, and even if they didn''t know where that person would come from, she needed to trust that promise. But trust was difficult as she didn''t know the Light like they did. It drove her to seek ways to increase her kind by any means possible, so no child of the Qard would have to grow up hopelessly alone, like her.
Beginning a new image, Rae started by listing the means she ultimately found on the top of the page: the Immortals, the Kin, and those raised to become Qard. She put a box around ''Immortals, having stumbled on that path first, which led her to the others. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
After she left home and mostly recovered from Raliyard''s loss, she found an odd planet in the Andromeda galaxy that the unmistakably human inhabitants called Tellus. It was like someone had taken Terra''s ethnic cultures from thousands of years ago and remixed them in new ways. Their histories spoke of them being taken from their original homes and given untouched new lands.
Her parents confirmed that alien ships had randomly gathered two percent of Terra''s population in the middle Roman era and transported them elsewhere. Intrigued, they followed, and afterward, they visited Tellus every so often, but they hadn''t done so since before she was born. Yet, there was a hesitancy in the way her parents spoke of Tellus that she didn''t understand at first.
Tellus society was vigorous and optimistic, with their tech base and space program well advanced compared to Earth. It didn''t take her long before she found the man behind the current advancements in one Jon Giles. Sandy-haired and green-eyed, he was shorter than most and slight of build. Jon was an eccentric scientist, more comfortable with equations than emotions.
As such, he had a team of aides and minders who kept him ticking personally and professionally. Lorens kept the master list of his ideas to research, constantly adjusting the priorities as needed, and Henr acted as the public face and PR flack of AstraCorp. Leyana encouraged him to eat and rest, luring him from his work with scanty attire if that''s what it took to get him to take care of himself.
Rae was drawn to his orbit, taking a human guise to join his company as an engineer. Before long, she was caught up in his mad genius. Having built Taylor recently, she told Jon of her forays into artificial intelligence. The AI worked admirably for his purpose of operating the Question for her, but she felt he didn''t quite fulfill the potential of the technology.
Using the concept of memory engrams, they experimented with using organic mind patterns as the basis of a more advanced intelligence. The successful trial out of hundreds was a blend of them both, balancing Jon''s focused desire for knowledge for its own sake with her own all-consuming drive to save her people. He called himself Chayse.
She put a bubble around his name and drew an arrow from it to the edge of the page. Chayse deserved his own entry in this journal, and she would hotlink the files together when she made it.
The more time she spent with Jon, the more it made her brain itch. She''d only been granted the Crysfire Gem a year before, and she was still trying to get used to what it did. It told her something about Jon, but she couldn''t see what it was. Rae meditated on this feeling, exploring it until finally, she dreamed that inside him, in his very core, was a tiny bundle of emerald green sparks. The Gem recognized this energy and whispered its name to her. ''Aura. This man, this human was a Qard. But how could he be?
She saved the page and put down her stylus with a sigh, rubbing her temples. This sort of journalling was difficult, and she could only take so much navel-gazing in a day. She cuddled Agate before deciding to do something productive. Turning on her holo monitors, she looked over her research projects. She input a batch of felids into her recognition database, spotting one she''d seen during her visit to Edomere. Checking on her drone production, she released a group that just finished response testing to expand her surveillance range.
Rae switched to the drone monitoring her sour scent experiment and found the scent ball was now some distance downriver over a reeder pool. The metal sphere was partly submerged in the shallow water, with the stake and chain she used to secure it still attached. Speeding through the drone''s archived footage, the results of this test were quite different from the previous one. Where animals ignored the concentrated sour scent alone, this sour plus algae funk test was more in line with the reactions to the reed roots.
At first, most animals coming to the river to drink near it gave the ball a wide berth and then began avoiding that part of the riverbank entirely. Most, that is, except reeders. They were drawn to it, snuffling and pawing at the container until one determined individual dug up the stake and dragged it to their hollow. Going back to the live feed, she watched as a reeder played with the ball like a cat would with catnip. Some evolutionary force inspired most creatures to avoid the scent combination, but at the same time, it attracted reeders. Later, she needed to retrieve the ball and repeat the experiment at other locations along the river and out in the plains.
Frowning, Rae cocked her head. The Chief''s Gem occasionally nudged her actions when she wore it, although she never counted precognition as one of her native gifts. Gryphon told her it was an essential Qard talent to be mindful of and act on the impulses. She felt an urge to go out to the plains and prepped her board for an outing. She was still locating patches of Bolten stalks for the year''s coming harvest and sampling color oaks in different soil environments. She designed mosaic doors for the dig that depended on assembling and carving specific colors of lumber, some of which she still needed to find. She headed out of the dig site and took a cloud of surveyor and genetic sampler drones with her.
Out in the grasslands, she found a significant depression filled with dried grasses with a reddish head, sort of like a cross between wheat and oats. The new growth had small, pale yellow ears that weren''t ripened yet in her judgment. She waded through the waist-high stalks and found some of last year''s ears still containing grains. This might be the flour substitute she was looking for. The tiny seeds of the Bolten''s plant were edible when combed out of their fluff, but it was better used as a source of cooking oil than as a flour. She logged several new clusters of Bolten stalks. It was common to find one or two stalks on the plains wherever the wind had taken them, but when they ripened near brambles or other growth that caught and held the fluff, they grew in dense patches as the seeds concentrated there.
The few areas she found trees out here were near natural springs or the creeks that meandered from the higher lands in the north to the river. Rae found a black-colored oak and a nice light brown. She felt a vague sense of anticipation and dread as she performed her surveying tasks. It was likely the same impulse that brought her out here. Something was going to happen; she just didn''t know what. As she was cutting some small rounds from a greenish-brown ''oak'' branch, the sensation coalesced into a feeling of being hunted. Her first instinct was to use her visor to check the drones around her, but she hesitated. Gryphon felt she relied on her tech too much and that there was a reason her ancestors never needed it. Acting as if she hadn''t noticed, she put away her samples and tools and transformed into her totem form to hunt the hunter.
Her sleek black jaguar self cast about for an unfamiliar scent or shape, working her way closer to the source of the feelings. She paused at a wave of slavering meat hunger that told her she was after a predator. That was strange, though, because she didn''t smell like meat even as a totem. She closely slunk alongside the shadow of a low ridge when the top of it rose up with a roaring howl and launched itself on top of her. The creature was so still as it lay in wait, with the long hairs of its coat waving idly in the air that it blended into the landscape. Now enveloping her, the furry bulk of it far exceeded her own slender form. Wrapping her in its forepaws, the beast tried to roll her over onto its belly; she resisted, outmassing its 600 kilograms twice over. Growling in frustration, it resorted to pinning her under it and closed its toothy, drooling maw around her entire head.
Aggravated, Rae used her clairvoyance to locate its pounding heart in its chest and crushed it with her teke. A surge of life''s blood came up its throat to splash her. She forced its saber-toothed jaws open to extricate her head and shoved it off her with a grunt of distaste. Shaking herself, she changed back, wiping the dripping blood off her face. Using her aura to locate her board where she left it and triggered it to home in on her. While she waited, she laid the creature out along the ground. It had a mix of ursid and canid characteristics, measuring four meters long and about the same in girth. In sheer size alone, it was probably the local apex predator. It would take an entire family group of the felids to harass it, and unless the pseudo-skeletal jaklan came in much bigger packs, she couldn''t see them even approaching this beast.
The pelt was absolutely massive. Incomparably thick, it would make an excellent furry bedspread. Processing the carcass would be a messy affair and take a good deal of her time. When her board arrived, she used her water jug to rinse off her head and shoulders and hefted the corpse onto the board to send it back to her camp. Slipping into her totem again, she tracked the beast back to its solitary lair. Tagging the shallow cave on her maps, she was about to leave when she smelled something repulsively rotten. Jumping onto the top of the den, she saw a gaunt animal swaying over a small rivulet. Unfamiliar to her, it was light brown and spotted. It shuffled around to face her when she approached, and she recoiled at its appearance.
It was a plains grazer: A wilderbeast, based on the shape of its horns. It had a horrific case of something like deer warts all over; disfiguring fibroid tumors splattered over its sunken hide like a swarm of big and engorged ticks. Its drooling mouth gaped open, and from the lumps around its jaws, she wasn''t sure it could close. Thick, ropey strands of saliva continuously flowed down, fouling the trickling waters below it. One eye was obscured by a wart, while the other fixed on her with a faint purple light within. Staggering towards her a step, it didn''t approach any closer. Rae was filled with revulsion and a deep desire to kill it with fire...
Chapter 16 - Diseased (Illustration)
"What is carved in rock remains, not subject to age or forgetfulness. The Shaper depicts the Star Children''s history and the band''s memory to pass on to the younglings. Using rock to shape rock is a difficult thing, requiring strength, skill, and vision."
--Fable of the Shapers.
Waves of heat from her made the air ripple before Rae wrestled her revulsion under control. The same reflex sheared a boulder in two, and half of it tumbled from the mound where she stood with a clatter. The diseased wilderbeast was disgusting, but she needed to study it before destroying it. Changing back to her humanoid form, she accessed her visor, ordering her drones to film it from every conceivable angle. The no-seeum sampler drones headed for it before a scanner caught a cloud of particles coming off the creature, and she pulled them back. It staggered forward another step, and she put up a wall of force to contain it.
She set down on this world knowing there was some kind of sickness here, and she came prepared to find and study it. The data from the plague beacon mentioned skin growths and tissue degradation, so she suspected this was an infected victim. Casting her perception back to her camp, she summoned a case where she kept the infectious tissue containers and surgical supplies. Her tiny sampler drones worked by snipping bits of tissue and banking them into analyzers, but they had a limited use span. Rae had to continuously replace them, as they couldn''t be repaired with what she had on hand. Flagging the group of samplers closest to being scrapped, she sent the rest back to camp.
She undressed and apportated her clothes to the dig, as there was no sense getting something potentially infectious on them and having to burn them. The no-seeums were the only things she kept that could not withstand great heat to cleanse them. None of the ones she used today would survive. The analyzing containers were more advanced than she''d be able to manufacture here for decades. Each miniature lab provided the best environmental factors to preserve or culture the samples sealed within. She started by sending in a few drones to chase the airborne particles emitted from the subject and fly through the ropes of saliva. An ear twitched on the animal as the drones buzzed around it, then its sides heaved convulsively.
The samplers deposited their loads to several containers before she slagged them to bits of molten metal and glass. The wilder splayed its legs and dipped its gaping jaws in the streamlet. Rae expected it to drink, but it just held its gaping maw in the water, still drooling. One of the camera drones recording its heat-map caught a wave of coolness traveling in a wave from the head to the rest of the body. Penetrating scans detected an unusual capillary system transmitting the liquid directly instead of swallowing it into the stomach.
The following samplers took bits of hair and skin, as well as hoof and horn. The subject''s mangy coat shivered as if to ward them off. Again, Rae destroyed the drones after the samples were sealed away. The next set of tissues she wanted could only come from inside the animal, so she entered the telekinetic enclosure with the case and her tools. As she approached, the wilder''s head came up, and it clumsily tried to gore her, but she grabbed the horn nearest to her and used it to keep it at arm''s length. Legs scrambled as it tossed its head, still trying to reach her. The rotten odor closed in on her, and she pushed a little harder to keep it back. The animal suddenly crashed to the ground as the horn broke in her hand, showing a porous and irregular cross-section.
Ignoring its efforts to rise, Rae opened her tool kit and took out a steel stylus and a digital caliper. Turning the chunk in her hand to an unfractured side, she pushed the stylus into the horn, easily penetrating with a crunching sound. The caliper measured the tensile strength of the horn, her visor showing the material was unusually brittle and chalky. The wilder thrashed spastically, wheezing. It convulsed again, hacking up a withered mass that her visor told her was leathery lung tissue. She put part of the horn chunk in one analyzer then used the stylus to put the slimy piece of lung in another. She expected blood to color its spittle, but instead of turning red, it went milky, with only a trace of pink.
She reached out with her empathy to see if it was suffering and was taken aback. There was nothing. No sensations, no thoughts, only primal thirst, and mild aggression. She grabbed the good horn and stared into its remaining eye. Nothing... there was nothing there at all. Deliberately, she also took hold of what was left of the broken horn and with a sharp motion, broke its neck, almost tearing off its head. The scrabbling rear legs stopped, but it kept on wheezing. Whatever life it once had faded slowly, something else still animated it. She took out her scalpels and started butchering while it kept twitching...
Hours later, she had her scans and samples. She heated her tools and the case to sterilize them before sending them back. Rae increased her emitted heat to catch the nearby grass on fire and stoked it hotter while containing the blaze within her force wall. She consigned all inside to the flames, ensuring that the subject animal was turned to ashes. A pervasive fungus had colonized the wilder, keeping it upright and moving while devouring it from the inside out. The animal was literally rotting where it stood, like some kind of fungal zombie. When the patch of grassland was thoroughly charred and no sparks remained, she drew her heat back and translocated to Monkey. She needed a dip in the volcano after all that.
It took several phase Changes to pass before Rae exhausted the experiments he could do with the wilder''s samples. After typing ''zombie fungi'' one too many times, he''d coined ''zomgi'' as a name for the condition. A thorough search of his database revealed he''d already cataloged the source. The spores of the small purple mushrooms that grew by the river were nearly identical to the particles shed by the infected animal. Their purple glow at night matched the faint light he saw in the wilder''s eye. The manner of transmission still eluded him.
Exposing small mammals to the spores, he documented the stages of the sickness. The condition was difficult to identify until fatal, and not much of the animal''s original tissues remained. Before that, the skin fibroids first showed up as scattered pustules, and as they grew, the natural epidermis gradually paled to a dead grey. When detected early, the condition might be treatable with antibiotics. But as he searched for the causes and effects, another missing piece of the research puzzle was the germination of the spores. Once, he managed to get the mushrooms to grow, but didn''t know how and he couldn''t reproduce the result. There was some trigger in the wild environment that made them sprout, but he had yet to find what it was.
He now had three journals; one collected his thoughts about the disease, another documented Gryphon''s training regime. The last one was for his ''issues.'' In this journal, he looked back at the second entry on Jon Giles, and he remembered his confusion about the human with a nascent Qard aura.
The Crysfire Gem couldn''t, or wouldn''t tell him how it happened, so Rae asked his parents. They told him Rae wasn''t their firstborn. There was an elder sibling born a few years before. Something went amiss on Tellus when they tried to teach Jonai how to acclimate to an earthlike environment. A Qard could transform to hide such things as their extra fingers and metallic teeth, something Rae often did.
Infant Jonai did this without prompting, but the baby screamed when they took him back to their native environment bubble. He seemed ''stuck'' in human mode, unable to revert to Qard normal. Danel and Perin were heartbroken. They had chosen the opposite roles for this child, and Danel had given birth to Jonai but could not hold the child in his proper form. Raising him as a human would deny what they were, and it got worse when the boy matured at human rates.
Effectively, he was human, with all that implied, like mortality. Their parents could not bear to watch him grow, then wither and rot. They found adopted parents for Jon on Tellus with a moderately well-off couple whose business was in technology. He would have a good life while they returned to Terra and tried again. Things worked out for them with Rae, their second child. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Rae was overjoyed; there were four Qard in the universe, not three. Except Jon didn''t really count, Perin explained. He could never reproduce like a Qard, and in the half-century that it would take Rae to finish growing up, his brother would become old and start to decline. They hadn''t told Rae to spare him the pain of watching his sibling die a final death.
Jon didn''t even have a proper bier in the Qardos Catacombs, just a stretch of wall near Rae''s niche in the fifth circle with his birth name on it, Jonai Starn. Rae refused to give up on his sib. There must be an answer somewhere, but what Jon needed was enough of a lifetime to see it. So Rae researched a course of treatments to give him long life. It seemed Immortality had its own pitfalls. A quarter to a third of the mortals Rae granted it to eventually committed suicide, or asked him to take it away so they would once more grow old and die, which amounted to the same thing.
The words [Bucket List] were marked with a box drawn in thick, angry lines. It was a theory he had about the unacceptably high rate of loss of those she wanted to keep near. That would also be an entry, or maybe a rant.
Jon and his wife Leyana took well to the treatment, settling into a stable condition. Later, Jon asked why he''d done it for them. Rae told Jon what he really was and that he''d find a way to restore him. His sib cocked his head and said, what if that wasn''t what he wanted? It seemed to him that being a Qard came with even worse setbacks than being an Immortal. Jon had a spouse and a family. And no offense, but that didn''t seem to be in the cards for Rae.
The bitter truth of his words cut deeply, because it did hurt to see Jon have what Rae wanted so badly. But Rae was a Qard, and to go Jon''s path would be to give up on the future of the race. It would betray the oath to serve the Light he took when he was made an adult, and the Chief''s vow to put the welfare of the race before his own.
Rae wanted a family as a Qard, and he still had no idea how that might happen. His parents planned no future children, and Rae burned with an impossible duty to save his people. He wondered how Jon was translated to be carbon-based and still be recognized by the Gem, and whether his human children would also have nascent auras.
With a sigh, he saved the page. Honestly, it never occurred to him that Jon wouldn''t want to return to what he''d been born as. But he couldn''t blame Jon for his choice, as given the same circumstances, Rae would''ve done the same. Jon''s condition established an equivalency between Qards and humanity that would prove crucial later when Rae learned to make it work in the other direction. It was hard to relate to those old worries. Rae had made things work out in the end, more or less, so why should he still care?
So what if Jon was still a carbon-based Immortal all these centuries later? Why bother going through this old news? It wasn''t like it mattered. Rae frowned and shook his head. There was something wrong with his train of thought Shadow! Stop it! It was getting better at sounding like his inner voice, but when it contradicted his natural impulse to never quit, it gave itself away. He rubbed his pounding head as he tried to mentally push back against Shadow''s influence but couldn''t tell if he succeeded. Rae couldn''t get a handle on psychic duels with a presence he shared a brain with.
He stomped out of the dig to get some sun and stopped still. Shambling towards Rae on the dark granite stones was a zombie gryphon. It was a grotesque combination of traditional zombie characteristics with the local zomgi victims. He sighed, unimpressed. "What am I, a child? Go show your boogeyman to someone else." It wasn''t even a clever illusion, as it only showed up after he encountered the dying wilderbeast.
Sticking out his chin, he walked towards the image. They usually disappeared when he made physical contact. The hideous visage raised a talon to ward him off as he tried to walk through. Rae was knocked to the ground with a brusque shove by the real Gryphon that the illusion concealed. ''...ae? Can you hear me, child?''
"Oh," he said, getting up. "Sorry about that. Shadow put one of those illusions over you, and I didn''t think you were real."
Gryphon cocked his head, ''You couldn''t hear me either, until I had to push you off. It''s trying to be clever, but that was never one of its strengths.''
Rae sat on one of the pathway walls. "Tell me what you know about it."
Gryphon looked down. ''It is not a Qard, but its history is tangled up with our people. We didn''t understand its evil until it had already struck a cruel blow against us. I was instrumental in making it a ghost. But that didn''t end its villainy.''
"I suppose you''re here to put me through more training," Rae said tiredly.
''You don''t seem enthusiastic today.''
Rae sighed. "That''s because I''m not. I''ve been getting stronger, but so has Shadow. It''s like all I''ve been doing is making myself a better vessel for it. What''s the point?"
Gryphon moved in front of him, looking Rae closely in the eye. ''You are correct, to a point. What you don''t realize is that Shadow has a fixed upper limit. Once you reach that point, it will lag behind you in raw strength. You can go much further, hopefully far enough to destroy it for good. It won''t be easy for you, and it will depend on your willingness to stretch your own limits.''
"What, really?" Rae said.
Gryphon lifted his blue gaze to the distant sky. ''As we were made by the Light, Shadow was made by the Dark to torment and destroy us. Since the Dark, by definition, is not a creator, it chose a member of our kind to copy and corrupt. Shadow cannot progress beyond the best that the copied individual could achieve. Your purpose now should be to reach and exceed that best.'' Gryphon turned back to Rae. ''Once you have done so, you will be taught techniques to combat Shadow''s greater experience. That is how you will win.''
Rae covered his face with his hands and took a deep breath, then slapped his knees and bounced to his feet. "Let''s do this."
Gryphon sent him on a set of exercises, occasionally adding new wrinkles, like random psychic attacks during the plateau run. When he finished, he reported in, wondering what would be next. His teacher sat upright, shrouded by his wings, his eyes twinkling. ''Next, we will play tag. You will pursue me in the air, with telekinesis or levitation. You may not teleport yourself or the item you must touch to win. I will also be using teke and psi blasts for defense.''
Rae nodded. "What do I have to tag?" The dark wings slowly peeled back, revealing Gryphon holding something indistinct against his feathered breast. He turned his wrist and held it out for Rae to see. It was floppy, mottled, and gray, with orange stones gleaming in the light. "Aggie! Give him back!"
Gryphon hunched his head between his shoulders and spread his wings as he drew the plushy back. ''Come and take him.'' He launched with a downward wind buffet, beating his wings to climb steeply. Growling, Rae took off after him. He wasn''t as natural in the air as the totem, but damned if he was sleeping without his toy tonight...
After a strenuous chase, he claimed his prize and assured himself Aggie was unharmed before he fell asleep, holding him closely.
Rae found himself back at Edomere, walking to the dens unafraid of their reactions. It was hushed and still, with a stale odor in the air. Maybe the felids had moved on? Stooping, he peered into a den, turning on his visor light. There were lumps in the back and a smell of rot. Covering his mouth, he turned on the magnification view to see cat skeletons visible under ragged, dusty hides.
Backing up, he heard a wheezing sound near the river. A dull-colored felid swayed, drooling into the waters. It was a smallish cat, splay-legged from the fibroids. Sensing him, it turned its head, the once orange eyes turning muddy brown from the purple light within. It glared at him, silently blaming him for not finding a way to treat the plague. Step by step, it advanced, and Rae retreated until he heard growls behind him. Glancing back, he saw more zomgi felids, preparing to pounce
He woke with a start, and found sleep far from him for the rest of the night.
Chapter 17 - Bloodthirsty (Illustration)
"There are many beneficial plants. We can eat them, their leaves can flavor food, and blossoms sweeten our homes. We use wood to make tools, and vines can bind things together. The weaver knows what is safe and what is foul and shows the band the uses of what grows from the ground."
--Fable of the Weavers.
She''d Changed shortly after the nightmare. Rae now had a personal interest in finding treatments for the plague, not just an academic one. The disturbing dream of the disease destroying the Edomere pride made her pour over her experiment notes to find anything she might have missed. She felt she owed it to the felids to make some progress. A few weeks later, her sentry drones reported an uptick in the aerial spore counts near the dig. She did a search looking for a new source and found it.
Under a few trees downstream of the dig, she found a broad patch of the mushrooms, some with the purple caps inverted to release their spores. It was where she had skinned and butchered the saber-fanged ursoid. She shook her head as she experienced another ''eureka!'' moment. While she had taken the pelt away to tan and cleaned up the meat, bone, and viscera from the site, she hadn''t thought to deal with the gallons of blood that had soaked into the soil. Right here, where the mushrooms now grew in a profusion she hadn''t seen anywhere else. Putting up walls of telekinetic force, she sterilized the spot with fire, sending the heat deep under the surface of the ground to cook any blood that might lurk there to germinate more spores.
She hunted down a digger mole and brought it back to the distant shelter where she did her pathology experiments. She drained it of blood and prepared three experiments. The first had half of the blood pooled in an empty, sterile container. In the second, she put in a matting of low-quality boltan fiber to absorb the remaining blood and provide a base to root in. In the last one, she put in the bloodless carcass. She added an identical amount of spores to each mini-lab. Her new operating theory was that the triggering mechanism was animal blood. It made sense, now that she thought about it. The wilderbeast was anemic, with very little real blood in it. Instead, it had a milky liquid faintly stained with pink. The spores traveling through the circulatory system would allow them access to every part of the body.
A blood-borne pathogen opened up several treatment paths, such as antibiotics, blood cleaners, and transfusions. Finding an antifungal would also be helpful. Rae picked up a container containing some of the ursoid''s raw flesh and fat that she''d used as a control for an experiment where she''d tried germinating mushroom spores with a similar sample and failed. She queued the control sample to the molecular sequencer in light of her new theory. Maybe she''d learn something from it, as the wilderbeast had been in proximity to its lair. She had previously smoked some of the ursoid meat for bait in the camera blind. She went through her stores, queued some of the cured meat to be likewise examined, and put the rest in a stasis box. It would take a while for these tests to complete, so she''d check them later.
Washing up, she went inside to work on her journals, updating her scientific log first. She jotted down the running experiments, as well ones she planned after these were done, such as an intact dead animal exposed to the spores and then a live one. Her training log marked down improvements in her stats, and now theorized on things she could do to exceed her current limits. Then she opened her therapy journal, looking at a page she''d put down previously.
Qard stories said the Light was the sole witness of the Universe''s beginning, but it existed even before that. As the Big Bang was the expulsion of untold amounts of matter and energy from a great singularity, the Big Crunch was the eventual collapse of all existence back into a single point. One followed the next, and the one after that, like a glassblower making an infinite chain of bubbles blown in a glass tube.
Only one thing could transition from one Universe to the next, a powerful lifeform shedding its impurities to become pure energy: the Light. With every subsequent Universe, a new Survivor was striving to keep the forming reality expanding and growing as long as possible until the increasing weight of entropy led to the next collapse. Those aiding the Light in this were called Exergists, while those opposed were Entropists.
One of the first of the Qard was named Chief, who later retired in favor of one of the next generation, and so on. Each generation created a circle in the Catacombs around the central shrine, growing outwards like the layers of an onion. From the founding of Qardos to Rae''s birth, a span of billions of years, there were only a total of five circles. When Rae left home, her paternal parent, Danel, kept the round remnant of what was left of the Crysfire Gem in a dusty box.
In her travels, she found something odd in an eddy at the verges of the Universe. Made of a form of matter she''d never seen before, something extraordinary happened when she brought it back into real space. Cracking open like a chrysalis, a being of lesser light came into existence. It was like the stories she''d been told, but it wasn''t just a story after all, as the Light itself came to see what or who she found. They knew each other from the Universe before. Kruegar, the lesser light, found a way to preserve its essence and resume their companionship.
As a reward for Rae''s discovery, the Light restored the Gem to its original kite-shape rhombus form and offered it to her. She declined. She wasn''t the Chief, and it hadn''t been appropriately passed to her. Danel, her paternal parent, was summoned and presented with the restored Gem at her insistence. He said, ''After all this time, why now?'' When the situation was explained to him, he shrugged. ''It was Rae that earned it, not me.'' He told her to take it because he never wanted it anyway, and what did it matter with just the few of them?
Rae protested she was too young as she wasn''t a full adult yet. He said if she was old enough to swear fealty to the Light, she was old enough to bear the responsibility of rule. Of just the three of them. Or four, actually, but Jon didn''t really count. Except it was actually five. It wasn''t long after she met Jon that she discovered a living grandparent. Thane, Danel''s paternal parent, hadn''t been in contact with her folks since they were young. He had been the Chief before Danel and the last before her to wear the full Gem.
Thane was a grumpy curmudgeon who valued his solitude and had no wish to answer his grandchild''s endless questions about the history of their people and long-ago times that he''d put behind him. She let him fade into his obscurity and resigned herself to not seeing much of him. Then she went to the Catacombs and walked the five circles, making sure there wasn''t anyone else she needed to know about. There were only four open biers and Jon''s name on the wall. Her own bier had the Chief''s insignia now, underscoring the weight of responsibility on her. All her other ancestors were in perfect condition and lying in rest as if they could simply wake up and resume their lives.
Rae shut her eyes and leaned against the stone wall behind her bedroll. That was a sad day. There were only a few hundred of the Passed and the five of them on this side of oblivion. Those too young to swear when their parents ''Embraced the Wind'' Passed with them. They didn''t have a bier of their own and instead lay with one of their parents. She''d been in small nightclubs that had more people.
...Nightclubs. Her eyes opened as that last thought pricked another pocket of pain she could drain away onto a page.
In her life, she''d taken many roles and many identities. After she and Jon collaborated to make Chayse, she and her faithful companion went on the road on Tellus, where she presented herself in male form as Ian McLaine, a musician. Writing songs wasn''t her strong suit; she was better at arranging and was a competent musician. Luckily she knew a great deal of Terran popular music and merely needed to adjust for the language drifts and new instruments. The peoples of the two worlds shared a common stock and history until a few thousand years ago. She had an ear for what would play well locally, so she started with small gigs and worked her way up.
This one was going to be a mess, pronoun-wise. The self Rae was writing about was in male phase, so she was simultaneously putting down what her male self did in masculine pronouns while writing the thoughts that editorialized on those actions in the feminine pronouns she was currently using.
He collected roadies and bandmates as his act grew, and one of them was Josana. She was a singer and played keyboards, tenor strings, and flute, with a potential to master even more. Rae knew Jo was quietly in love with her or rather Ian, but he neither encouraged nor rejected her. That was a mistake, really, because the girl became close at a time when Rae was self-medicating her pain with mind-altering substances. She''d brewed something intoxicating to the Qard and was performing shows in a pleasant drunken haze. Ian was never obviously impaired or out of control, but he was never entirely sober either. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
One night they were working on an original song called ''Apple Brandy Wine'' about Rae''s new favorite drink when something clicked between them. The girl''s empathy and willingness dragged his loneliness and hopelessness to the forefront, and they kissed. In a storm of discarded clothing and unleashed passions, he forgot all the reasons why it had gone so badly with Raliyard and made love to Josana. When Rae woke, shed thanked the Light she hadn''t Changed, and hadn''t hurt the girl, but she swore it wouldn''t happen again. Until it did, several times.
Jo didn''t say anything at first about how Ian snuck out of her bed when they were finished, but she soon said she felt like his dirty secret. Ian knew he was using her as a salve for his weakness, but he justified it to himself as something she desperately wanted. Then came the day he was sitting with some fellows from the tour, and Jo came up to him and told him she was pregnant. Happy for her, he asked sincerely who the father was. She gave him a full-handed slap to his face and stormed off. One of his security guys got up to shout at her, but Ian waved him down and went after her, snagging a glass tumbler on the way.
He let himself into her dressing room, where she sat crying, and told her that he couldn''t be the father because he was sterile. She said he''d been her first and only lover. Deciding he owed her the truth, he explained he wasn''t human, and they weren''t genetically compatible. She gave him a dead, disbelieving stare. He breathed into the empty glass, carefully heating it and assuming his natural form. It soon glowed hot enough he could pull on it like taffy, then ate it. Cooling the room, he offered his hands, and she touched the extra fingers and the points of his ears.
She asked him how the pregnancy happened, but he didn''t know. Chayse knocked and said there was a visitor they needed to see. The man had long silver hair, a salt and pepper beard, and a ready smile. Ian could see it was the Light in human form. He introduced himself as Jonathan and explained he''d given them something they each dearly desired. Josana received a child of the man she loved when Jonathan translated Rae''s essence into something human-compatible. While Rae learned that even when things seemed hopeless, a miracle could change the nature of her supposed fate.
Rae wasn''t planning on living as McLaine permanently, so she set up Josana and Mira financially, establishing a generous college fund for both of them. Then, she created a new record label supported by Ian''s royalties and appointed Jo and her family to the Board of Directors. The two of them refused her offers of Immortality and were dust long ago. Jo''s daughter, their miracle, took a good deal after Rae. Tall and graceful, with dark hair and gray eyes, Mira had strong psionic latencies that were still reverberating in the Tellusian population among her descendants.
Rae swore off drinking after the incident, which was just as well, or she''d have spent much of her time on this planet blackout drunk. Shutting down her tablet, she walked outside where Gryphon waited for her. Keen blue eyes locked on her as she sat down next to him. "Why won''t you tell me what''s going on?"
He cocked his head. ''Before I do, tell me, why did you go to Qardos before you came here, and what happened?''
"I was on Shrine Island, and I don''t remember." Rae shrugged uncomfortably. "Then, I just had to leave."
''Something traumatic happened to you, giving you holes in your memory,'' Gryphon said. ''Until you process that trauma, I''m going to have to be careful with giving you information.''
"I''ve been working on a journal," she said softly. "Putting down the things that hurt me. Encrypted, so you-know-who can''t screw with it and gaslight me. Well, hopefully, anyway."
''You''re done with it for the day?'' At her nod, Gryphon said, ''That''s good.'' Sitting upright, he summoned a ball of plasma, letting a shock of heat blow past her. ''When Qard fought against each other to practice battling with the Entropists, one of the greatest weapons was the manipulation of cold.'' He let the plasma travel along his forelimbs and orbit his feathered head. ''Where everything was hot and crackling with electricity, plasma, like this is ineffectual. But here, it can be devastating.''
He sent the ball flew out over the green grass with an outstretched talon, a thin trail of smoking ash following. ''Shadow will use your love of this place against you. He will threaten to burn it all down to hurt you. You need to learn to offensively manipulate temperatures to protect the beauty of this world.'' The plasma ball hovered over a flower. ''You know how to let out your heat and how to draw it back,'' he said. ''You have these skills; you just have to learn to use them in different fashions.''
Controlled plasma spun above the blossom. ''Pretty, isn''t it? Defend it.'' The plasma rippled, and the flower stalk wilted slightly from the heat. Rae started to get up, and Gryphon''s talon caught her and pulled her back down. ''You won''t always have the luxury of proximity. If I can kill it from here, surely you can save it.'' She used her senses to feel what he was doing to propagate the energy and tried to block the heat from destroying the plant by drawing it away. She fumbled with the forces, trying to channel them as she wished without pulling them to her to equalize. Rae lost the contest when the flower burned and gritted her teeth in frustration.
''A good first effort,'' he said, ''but there are always more flowers.'' The plasma dissipated, and he turned back to her. ''Here. Connect to my senses and observe.'' He manifested his buried heat potential into another plasma ball before him without radiating it outward from his body. Dismissing it, he summoned a ball of hoarfrost, so cold crystals of ice grew along the rock wall and the nearby grass.
Rae could tell the heat and the cold somehow connected to his core. A direct conduit would warp the air currents in the vicinity, creating a localized wind pattern, but that wasn''t happening. Gryphon formed a ball of each temperature extreme with a glare of concentration and willed them into a complicated dance around each other while the air remained still. How? She tracked the energies but could not see how he controlled them or how they were connected, yet not directly traced to him. She spotted a flash of blue and realized suddenly, "Your aura!"
He let the forces dissipate and looked at her warmly. ''Yes. It all comes back to the aura. Want to see or port to a place not visible to you? It is your aura that allows that access. My aura projected the plasma without the heat traveling in a column between the manifestation and myself. The cold was a hard-drawn point in the air, with the harvested heat conveyed by my aura. It shouldn''t be difficult for you to make one or the other ball or counter one of mine, aura versus aura. Doing both at once will take you longer, but the challenging thing is moving the points while not disturbing your surroundings.''
Rae looked at a stalk of grass and touched it with her aura. When she sent out or drew in heat, it was by convection or conduction, either of which affected the matter intervening between her target and herself. Auras skirted that need for a material channel by moving the energy through a transcendent medium beyond what regular physics could describe. She felt the passive warmth imbued to the grass by the pleasant day. Blocking off all other awareness of the grass, she drew its heat to herself, freezing it. That was curious. Usually, she felt it first on her skin when she pulled in heat, but this was like a burst inside her inner core.
Having killed it, root and blade, she reversed the flow of energies, returning its heat and more. The stalk let out a burst of steam before blackening and turning to ash. Opening her eyes, she hadn''t contained her efforts as neatly as she hoped. There were faint signs of frost or scorch marks on the surrounding grasses. Gryphon nodded. ''Well done. What I showed you before is essentially a weaponized party trick. You can forge weapons of heat against a temperate environment like this or cold weapons against an inferus region, like your volcano or the innermost planet in this system.''
He rubbed his beak with a talon and sighed. ''It can lead to a profoundly powerful set of techniques I was unable to grasp, and even my teacher managed only the barest glimpse. Add this to your practices and stretch yourself. Rest well and keep your mass up.'' He looked weary as he flew off. She could sympathize, feeling tired herself. But she topped off her mass and tried to refine her skills before getting some well-earned rest.
Days later, she checked on the pathology experiments. The spores reacted in the blood-only sample, but they were withered puff balls inside the glass instead of fully formed mushrooms with roots. The one with the blood-soaked bolton fibers had a firm foundation for the mushroom roots, sprouting tendrils seeking out every trace of the blood, absorbing it, and using it to spur more growth. But already, the young mushrooms were wilting without additional resources available. The bloodless digger mole had small purple nodules around the body''s natural openings, such as the nostrils and mouth. There were more around the incision she''d made to drain it of blood, but it lacked tendril formation in its tissues.
So far, her expectations held up, so she would continue the line of experiments she had in mind in the future.
Chapter 18 - Bad Touch (Illustration)
"In our Holy Place of beginnings, the Elden tell the stories of our origins for the arriving pilgrims. At least once in the life of a Child of the Stars, they need to see and touch the ancient artifacts. Guides are those who know the way to this land and lead the pilgrims along the path."
--Fable of the Guides.
Dawn''s first rays saw Rae laying under the heavy saberfang pelt with an arm covering her eyes. Throughout the night, a trio of drones traveled upriver to Edomere. She was waiting for the newest update on Fire-eyes. Her tablet chirped, indicating they had reached the pride''s territory, and it was light enough in the red forest to start the search. Sitting up to check, she saw only the littlest of the younglings scampering under the red trees, certainly none with his colors, nor did she see the senior queen whose DNA proved her as being Fire-eyes'' grandmother.
A drone finally spotted the ivory-furred older female with violet eyes on a low limb at the grove''s edge, where it bordered on the flowered meadow around the bone pit. Older younglings prowled the field under her watchful gaze, looking under grass tufts and pouncing on what they found, and Fire-eyes was among them. It was the first time Rae''d seen him out there. His limbs were longer, and his head wasn''t as big a proportion of his total size now. The drone got his exact measurements, and she added them to her chart.
Comparing his growth over the time it had taken, she guessed the felids would take twice as long as a terrestrial big-cat to achieve adult maturity, perhaps four to six years. He was probably less than one year old when she encountered him during the flood, and he was well into his second year now, rapidly approaching adolescence. Rae watched long enough to see a successful pounce from him. He proudly displayed his small prey to the fem elder and devoured it, licking himself clean. A faint smile crossed her face before she closed the program and recalled the drones.
She bathed in the early morning light, then dressed before heading for her pathology shed. The last few experiments seemed to confirm that the fungus spore germinated from the presence of blood or bloody tissues. The newest two tests were still underway. A dead digger exposed to the spores sprouted mushrooms, similar to where the ursoid was butchered. The giant beast''s raw tissue examination showed a minor spore infection. Still, the meat from it that she jerked showed no trace, possibly indicating that heat could make infected meat edible, at least in early stages.
The other digger was alive when she exposed it to the spores and became infected while appearing normal as the spores began to colonize it. She introduced a sampler drone daily, destroying it after getting her sample. Later, when the spore count was similar to the ursoid''s, the digger''s behavior changed as a low-grade fever took hold. It acted as if intoxicated, erratically bouncing around its cage. It lost all fear of her, staring at her through the glass. She noticed it drank more water while eating and eliminating less. Muscle mass was declining as spore filaments started to spread throughout its body. In her lab journal, she speculated how long it would take to be as bad off as the wilderbeast.
Rae felt a little sorry for it, recognizing the gruesome fate awaiting the animal, but if she were to study the spores properly, she''d have to condemn even more animals to the same fate. She wanted to understand the sickness, what spurred it on, and what inhibited it. Creating an antifungal agent was top of her list, followed by an effective treatment to fight the infections. It was going to be a lot of work, and she was more of an engineer than a medical researcher, but for Fire-eye''s sake, she was going to press on. Outside the shed, she flared her aura with a careful dose of heat that would cook any spores on her but not damage her clothes.
Rae topped off her energies back at the rock scrap pile at the front of the gryphon carving. A few days ago, her mentor told her to practice ''catch and release'' of local animals in her totem form while integrating as much of her new skills into the exercise as possible. She figured she''d do the same today. ''Come up here, child,'' Gryphon called to her. Reaching out with her mind, she found him overhead, idly beating his wings as he looked down at her. She levitated up to him.
''You spent far too long among humans when you were young,'' he said and then folded his wings, standing in the air as if it were solid ground. He raised a talon and casually scratched under his beak. ''It''s like when you were learning heat and cold manipulation. You''re habituated to think there must be some connection between you and something you think of as real to stretch out your power. But that is what the aura does; bypass such channels by esoteric means. Even now, you''re pushing against the ground. Stop that and stand here like me.''
"There''s this thing called gravity, you know," Rae said while bobbling slightly. It was much harder to remain still in the air than fly through it.
''By gravity, you mean falling, and falling is optional. The mundane universe can and must be transcended. Stand upon the place of your choosing, where your aura intersects with all that you think of as reality. With it, you are connected to every place and everything. Gravity is a gradient that gets weaker the farther an object is from a massive body. You understand that, yes?'' She nodded. He projected a flat plane of his blue aura at the same height he was standing. ''Feel the gradient from the planet''s core stretching out until it becomes undetectable. Come over this aura construct and rest on this point with your aura. With your mortal physics, you could calculate the exact gradient from your lava pool under the plateau to beyond the atmosphere. Calculate the numbers for this spot here, and fix yourself to it.''
Oddly enough, when Gryphon couched the idea in those terms, it helped. Rae locked onto the aura plane and stood on it, finding it as stable a support as the ground. She grinned, glancing down at the blue translucent surface, then back up again. Gryphon cocked his head, ''Look again.'' There was nothing under her, and immediately she fell, barely catching herself before hitting the ground. Gryphon gave an exasperated sigh. ''That was a mental error. You were doing it. The surface I projected wasn''t kinetic; it was just a visual cue for a randomly chosen height. You chose to fall because the programming of your youth said that you should, and even that you must. But you aren''t bound by those rules, so get up here and do it again.''
Raising herself to his level again, Rae sat down cross-legged in the air, and Gryphon lowered himself on his belly. She fumbled for the same feelings without the visual marker and eventually found it, staying steady next to him. "I suppose you''re the roadrunner in this scenario, and I''m the coyote." Gryphon shot her a baffled look, and she couldn''t blame him. The reference was somewhat dated. "Why didn''t my parents tell me this stuff?"
The totem looked away, his mental voice softer, ''Because their training was poor. They weren''t interested in learning the old skills, and those who could have taught them were equally uninterested in giving those lessons. They taught you what they remembered and found to be useful, and you retained what you could use, filtered through the lens of your mostly human upbringing. You must overcome this to face a foe who was a capable opponent in the days before the Devastation.''
"How tough could Shadow be, with only half my energy?" She said with a shrug.
''Did your parents tell you of the Questioner?'' he asked, and she nodded. ''It was the destroyer of the Qard and the boogeyman of their nighttime stories as children. That is who your Shadow really is, and it was a match for me. It is using the half of your utmost potential it can reach, and you are not. You scarcely use a quarter of what''s available to you. Whatever you don''t utilize is added to what it''s already claimed. You gift the remainder to your enemy when you don''t fully use your portion.''
He gave Rae a sharp telekinetic shove. She wavered but found her balance again. He looked fiercely at her and summoned the twin temperature orbs, setting them to orbit her closely. She tried to fend off more teke blows and psi blasts while staying alert to the spheres and maintaining her position in the air. Suddenly, it was too much, and she fell to the ground, still dogged by the orbs. Gliding down to ground level, he crowded her as she rubbed her bruises. ''Do you see your problem now? All of these new skills I''ve been teaching you? The Shadow
can do them all at once. Get serious with your training, or the Questioner will be your end and cause untold suffering to your Family.''This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
She stared back at him, hoping he was exaggerating, but fearing he wasn''t. She nodded stiffly to him, and his blue aura swirled up around him as he translocated away. For the rest of the day, she worked out fiercely with a balance of mental skills and physical conditioning. When night fell, she shook with fatigue, hoping she wouldn''t dwell on the fears that gripped her throughout the day. She climbed under her heavy fur and held Aggie in her arms.
Drowsily, Rae woke during the night. Green filtered moonlight from the Great Forest poured in through the wide windows of her bedroom on Deltia. She heard slow breathing beside her and felt the small current of heat that trickled from him to her. She drew in a little of the warmth around her at all times, leaving her cool to the touch. Jeol always let out a small amount of his inner heat, as he did when he was human, and that constant yet unconscious flow formed part of their intimacy.
She stroked his arm, slowly sliding it upwards to caress his broad, bare shoulders. He stirred with a soft sound and turned towards her. Pressing his leg against her core, she felt his hands move on her body, and her long-suppressed desire flared up. Nibbling on her neck, he kissed his way down her chest. She moaned, squirming, soon wet with readiness. Catching her hands, he pulled them both over her head to hold them there.
Rising over her, he began to love her with a slow, languorous pace. Rae did her best to make it faster, but he didn''t respond to her usual cues. She made a sound of frustration and pulled at his hold, but he just tightened his grip on them, preventing her from pulling her hands free. A frisson of uncertainty went through her, "Jeol?" she whispered. That got a reaction. He sped up and bent down to kiss her aggressively. At first, she kissed him back, but her doubts grew. She felt his beard against his cheek but not his mustache, and his taste she jerked her head back and looked into his eyes. Instead of the warm jade she looked for, they gleamed red-orange malevolence in the faint verdant light, long loose pale hair framing his face.
"Hello, La?a?," said Shadow. She writhed to get him off of her, but energies coiled over her to keep her pinned in place. He became brutal as he laughed mockingly. "I told you I would have your body. But I admit, I like you better under me!" She growled in anger and fought him bitterly but to no avail. He seemed so much stronger than her, something she''d only experienced once before, and even then, it had taken several attackers to restrain her. A rush of suppressed memories came over her, making her breath come quick in panic. Shadow chuckled, "How sweet of you to share your rape with me." The room swam around them, changing to an ancient stone temple, with thick frost obscuring the narrow windows.
A band of ruffians in fur and leather clothing crowded around where she was being taken against her will, cheering on the entertainment, holding her down, and jeering at her slender body. This was Thorne, the snowy planet she was stranded on with Jeol before they got together. The Light had turned her mortal and as carbon-based as her brother, while leaving with the same appearance and remaining ambisexual. But instead of the bandit chief on top of her, Shadow used her body for his enjoyment. Rae remembered his face from another dream; Ethan, blue-skinned, with a pale fringed beard without a mustache. Here, she had long thought she''d overcome the trauma of that day, but she found herself again overwhelmed with the shame that buried itself deep inside her. "No!"
Wrenching her eyes open, Rae awoke in the living area of the dig. Shadow was here, too, the dark teal projection looming over her. ''Having you helpless and despairing is a good look for you.'' She combat ported out of bed and across the chamber, snarling. ''Still, have some fight in you? Good. That old totem was right, you know. I am many times stronger than you.'' It advanced on her as she marshaled her defenses, settling into a fighting stance. It swung on her, and she flinched, making him chuckle again. Usually, she was more composed than this when fighting, but the threat of sexual trauma made her jittery and unsure.
It blinked out of sight, and as she tried to locate it again, she felt it behind her, reaching around her to palm her breast, then grip the fabric of her nightshirt there and ripped a large patch of it away, exposing her. She swung her elbow back hard, but it was gone before she could connect. Its presence flickered around her, too quickly for her to get a fix. Suddenly it was in front of her with one of its energy blades in hand. She summoned electricity around her hands and batted the blade away as it swept at her. She''d prevented it from cutting her, but a sudden draft on her thighs told her that she wasn''t the intended target. Glancing down, she saw the long nightshirt''s hem was sliced open. Shadow kept flickering around her, and the next time it came up against her, it gripped either side of the cut hem and ripped it upward to her navel, revealing that she slept commando.
Toying with Rae, Shadow came at her in unpredictable surges, threatening her with the psi blades. She blocked most of them with electricity but sensed Shadow was hardly making an effort. ''You want to play with energy? We can do that.'' She felt an intense cold swirling around her, then touched her arm like a brand. She cried out hoarsely and tried to draw away from the freezing point, but it too flickered, making her unable to track it. She wanted to put her back to a wall, but Shadow shoved her to the center of the room when she tried. Wreathing her arms with lightning seemed to provide some warding from the blades. Playing total defense, she kept the blades from cutting her deep, at the expense of her hands and forearms, soon covered in nicks and shallow slices until her hands were dripping silver. The lightning proved useless against the burning cold, and nothing she did hurt Shadow.
Rae sensed a new kind of energy as Shadow dragged something sharp and hot from her neck down her back to her waist. With this attack came the sound of sizzling and the smell of her flesh charring. She gasped silently, in too much agony to even cry out. She didn''t even know something could be hot enough to burn her. She staggered, and Shadow slammed her injured back against the wall. She screamed, and the projection threw her out of the dig to roll over and over on the paving stones. She ended up on her belly, gasping. She heard measured footsteps come from behind her, and she willed herself to get up to her hands and knees and try to stand. When she got halfway up, a boot settled on her neck and pressed her upper body flat to the ground while her lower body was propped up on her knees, lewdly displayed.
She squirmed, clawing at the stones. ''Stop that,'' she felt Shadow poke her middle back, making her groan with pain and stop moving. It reached down to pull the back of her hem to pool on her lower back. ''It''s like you''re offering yourself to me, and I don''t mind if I do. But first, let''s bring back some old friends.'' Rae heard the bandits yelling again as their dark projections clustered around and took over holding her down. Shadow stood back, and she looked up to see what was coming next. It deliberately undid the belt at its waist and began to unbutton the trousers'' fly when she did. Her breath came in short pants as it walked around her, trailing gloved fingers along her sides. ''You belong to me, and it''s time you realized that.'' The other projections dragged her ankles apart as she felt Shadow behind her, then reached down to rip the fabric away from her other breast. Her mind thankfully went blank as it savagely took her.
As Rae''s conscious mind shied away from what her body was undergoing, she found herself back in the temple after her old assault. Her bare body was covered with a blanket, and she saw signs of a fight around her. The brigands were defeated and removed from the chamber. She thought about what has led to this experience long ago. She stayed behind in a women''s shelter as the local warriors and Jeol went in hunt of the predators on two legs. The refugees didn''t trust men, understandably, but she assured them they''d be safe with her. If there were fewer of them, say, only half a dozen or so, she would have been a match for them, even in her carbon-based body. But there were more than a dozen, some with crossbows.
She told the women to hide. They begged her to join them as they went, but she couldn''t. There were evident signs that people lived here, and if the bandits found no one to play with, they''d tear the place apart and find the hidden chamber, and they would all be their prey, Rae was stronger and combat trained. It should be her that met them, she insisted. Concealing the secret passage, she made it look like it was just her that lived here. When they pounded down the door, she greeted them with derision, focusing their anger on her. She fought as they went for her, knocking several of them out. One of the crossbowmen got a target on her, making her freeze, and the rest of them grappled her down.
She couldn''t stop what they did to her, but she''d found solace that she had chosen this for the good of others. It wasn''t pleasant, but it was bearable, and she kept her promise while retaining most of her agency. What was happening to her now in the conscious world was completely different. It had all the shame of before while leaving her completely helpless to resist. Rae felt like a victim for the first time, and she couldn''t do a thing about it except getting stronger. The chamber gradually became brighter as golden light poured in the narrow windows
Rae blinked open her eyes to the predawn, feeling her pain diminish with myriad gentle touches along her back. She was sprawled over the paving stones with Krueger next to her, healing her. The lesser light was again in the form of a half-grown, glowing felid. ''Rest easy, Rae, and I''ll take you inside,'' he said. She let her eyes close as she trembled in reaction. Krueger''s presence meant that the torment was over, at least for now.
Chapter 19 - Backlash (Illustration)
"That which creeps along the ground, eaters of litter and possessing too many legs, are not fit prey for the Children. Among them are animals not large enough to be proper meals. They are burrowers of the ground and undergrowth who feed on the creepers even smaller than they. Only the young hunt those, for only they can be satisfied by their meat."
--Fable of the Creepers.
Hundreds of golden tendrils caught Rae up and carried her into the dig. He laid her gently down on her bed, as he must have done the last time he visited her. Tendrils continued to pass over her wounds, finishing her healing. "Wha what is your excuse for being here this time?" she rasped.
Krueger spoke softly. ''I was told to visit you when you need healing. I can be here physically, unlike the projection of your teacher.'' He shrugged his tendrils, ''At least as physical as an energy being can get.''
Her forearms bore new thin scars, and her hands crusted with dull grey blood. They began to tremble as she stared at them, the twitching traveling up her arms to her torso as she broke into full-body shudders. Her emotions spiraled out of control, and she wrapped her arms around herself tightly, but she still felt herself shaking apart. Rae lurched over to the golden felid''s form with a groan and clung to him convulsively.
She lost herself to wild sobbing while pressed against the silky fur, feeling a forepaw and many tendrils wrap securely around her to hold her close. She didn''t know how long it lasted, but when she began to quiet, she heard Krueger say, ''I can only come to you here one more time.'' She nodded roughly into his neck, then felt her consciousness dim as she slipped into a dazed state. She let him go, and he faded away. She stared off vacantly, already missing his companionship.
''Rae,'' came a soft voice. She lifted her eyes to see Gryphon standing at the dig entrance.
She held out a hand to him, ''Gryph'' He approached her, settling near her bed and opening his wings wide. She moved to swing her legs over the side and leaned against his dark feathered breast. He closed his wings around her as her arms embraced him. Her tears were quiet this time, pulled painfully from the depths of her soul. ''I wanted to believe you were exaggerating. You weren''t.''
''No, that was only the truth. But Shadow won''t be able to manifest for a while; you''re too drained.'' He craned his neck to smooth down her hair with the sides of his beak.
''I don''t know if I can do this,'' she thought to him. ''I dread his return.''
''Don''t be discouraged, child. Believe in your potential, as I do.'' She sighed and shook her head, her self-confidence shaken. ''You can be so much stronger if you train diligently. There will come a time when Shadow won''t be able to claim the whole of its half of your energies because of its limitations, and then it will be you tapping the unutilized potential and your own.''
Rae had her doubts but kept them to herself as she buried her face in his feathers. She jerked awake sometime later as one of her hands fell limply from her hold on him. Gryphon opened his wings and gently pushed her back. ''You should sleep now,'' he said.
Yawning, she nodded, heavy with weariness. She crawled under the heavy fur on her bed. Gryphon retrieved Aggie from where the plushy had been flung across the room and gave it to her. Hardly had she put her head down when sleep claimed her.
The Gryphon totem watched Rae as she slept. Her suffering was difficult to bear, but he had restrained the fell creature that she called Shadow for billions of years. He had long desired to Embrace the Wind and finally be at rest, but until now, he was the only one who could hold it back. Finally, his successor was strong enough to take up the burden once she finished reaching her potential. She was still little more than a child in his eyes, but she was learning quickly.
His predecessor looked in from the entrance. Preferentially feminine, her totem was that of a great silver eagle with a brass beak and talons. The edges of her wing and tail feathers were trimmed in deep blue, and her eyes were amethyst. ''I fail to understand why she allowed that. She didn''t seem to enjoy it?''
''She grew up among a young species of dimorphic monosexuals, and sexual violence often happens among them. In our society, matta, adults don''t have such profound physical and psychic imbalances.'' He left Rae''s side to join the eagle''s projection in the doorway''s sunlight.
Meeting his elder''s eyes, he said, ''And I don''t understand it all either, but with her background, she knows far more than we do about the kind of abuses and perversions the Questioner wants to unleash on our descendants. Neither of us was ever as vulnerable as she has been in her life, so all we can do is offer her our support.''
''Do you think you might have shifted the full burden to her too soon?'' the eagle asked him.
He glanced back inside the dimness of the dig. ''I most certainly hope not.''
A stab in her shoulders roused Rae as her bones rubbed together, shifting inside her. It seemed to be near noon from the light coming in the entry, but she hurt too much to check for sure. Her groin cramped, and she rubbed it gingerly. The Change caused parts of her skeleton to change their shape and alignments. Her collar bones were lengthening, forcing her shoulder sockets further apart. It was coming on hard, taking minutes to enact alterations in her form that generally took hours. A process that generally was mildly uncomfortable was instead agonizing. Rae breathed deeply to cope with the pain and turned her mind to think clinically about what was happening.
Three things influenced the severity and frequency of a Change. Firstly was the monthly hormone cycle, rising and falling like clockwork. Then someone''s conscious gender self-image played a factor. Lastly was the individual''s emotional state and stress levels. Rae was moderately happier to be in her preferred feminine phases, which is why they lasted a little longer than her masculine. But internal stresses could create a potent brew of organic chemicals that affected the orderly rhythms, triggering Changes out of turn and speeding it to a nearly incapacitating rate. After the day she had yesterday, it wasn''t surprising that this happened.
Her hips bones were moving now, narrowing, the bones getting denser in response. The groin pain was from her pelvic bones realigning and the soft tissue of her sex organ moving from being mainly inside her body to now being exposed. There were ancient and clinical words in Cont that would describe how this Change was different from usual and the exact gradient of gender presentations she was passing through. They didn''t use those terms anymore, as most of the present Qard were either born or created alongside monosexuals or were one at birth. Now, she referred to herself as ''her'' until she could take herself in hand, as it were, and from there, he considered himself a ''him.''If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Rae staggered to the shaft that plunged deeply under the plateau and called his skyboard when the worst of it was over. Straddling the board because he didn''t trust his balance, he descended to the lowest floor and glided over to the lava pool. He didn''t so much step into the thick, viscous fluid as fall into it, globules of molten stone spattering the area. The heat of the lava enveloped his pelvis as he sat and then sank until it covered his aching shoulders. He sighed in relief as the tension and stiffness began to fade.
Letting his mind drift, he thought of a couple of new projects. He had enough of the colored oak to build the great doors that would close off the dig when he wanted. He felt a nervous prickle in the nape of his neck at the inability to secure his sleeping quarters. With a deep breath, he knew that it wouldn''t keep out projections or energy beings, but on some level, it would make him feel safer if he could shut out the outdoors.
Soaking in the heat reminded him he was tired of bathing in a cold river. He''d mostly cleared the gryphon sculpture''s left side of scree during his training. He could undercut an area along the belly that he could put a bathing area in, tapping on underground water reserves below. Rae thought about where he''d carve a corridor from his current excavation to the baths. After a long soak, he returned to the surface and started a page in his journal, describing the assault he suffered on Thorne in as much detail as he could recall. Repressing those memories hadn''t done him any favors, and the stark honesty he practiced on these pages often helped him achieve a measure of distance from his traumatic past.
He''d just had a fast, rough Change, as he had nearly a thousand years ago after waking up from the rape on Thorne. Rae described how Shadow evoked that event and weaponized it against him. He could deal with the shame from the memories by acknowledging that what happened wasn''t his fault. He certainly didn''t seek the experience out, but he would have done the same to save the already traumatized women from additional abuse. The fear that had given the memories away to Shadow was more problematic. In the intervening years, he''d consoled himself with the knowledge that he wouldn''t be vulnerable again to the likes of the bandits; they were only mortal, after all. But he had to remain wary of Shadow''s whims, which he could not evade or prevent.
Saving and closing the page, he went to the pathology shed to feed the ground digger, a creature akin to a gopher or mole. Refreshing its food and water, he noticed it still stared intently at him. It went into an angry fit when the drone he introduced retrieved the daily sample. The mammal scrabbled furiously at the surfaces of the container, splintering its long claws. He pinned it with his teke and trimmed back two-thirds of their length so it wouldn''t hurt its claw roots further.
His secondary lab unit was out here, and he used analyzer chambers for the daily biosample and the claw trimmings. The lab examined the molecular, chemical, and genetic makeup and then destroyed them. The primary lab was in the dig, running the survey program. Autonomous samplers would dock to it and deposit the biological or mineral materials to be analyzed. Any inconclusive analysis result would trigger the program to collect more samples of the same sort until the lab resolved the error.
Going back into the dig, Rae sat at the computer server to watch a stitched together animation of Fire-eyes''s growth pattern. After the most recent frames, the computer estimated the future growth by adding outlines of progressively older Edomere cubs up to young adulthood. A felid notification went off, and he switched over to the latest video. He sat up as a bedraggled group approached the river from the southeast. The oldest was a fem old enough to bear young, and the youngest was a fem scarcely older than Fire-eyes and the smallest cub he''d seen outside of a pride''s home territory.
The group looked gaunt and exhausted, with a few exhibiting signs of infirmity. Rae recorded their color combinations, speculating from their behavior that they were related, perhaps a displaced pride? Curiously, the adults and near adults each carried a rock on average the size of a baseball. They moved tiredly through the area and rested when they reached the riverside. Thirsty, the cats drank deeply, then a few moved off to hunt while the majority bedded down to sleep. Rae entered commands to sample each of them while they were nearby, on the chance the illness was from the spores.
Another notification came up with an update to the survey catalog. Rae looked at the pictures of dozens of different types of creatures as they scrolled by. Something clicked in his mind as he watched them. Pausing the slideshow, he looked to the other screen at the group of felids. Setting the slideshow to a slower speed, all the lifeforms pictured had something in common: a bone or cartilage mask. The only exception was the felids. He spent the next few hours looking at every animal or insect in his database, and only the felids lacked a bone mask. He was unsure why that was the case. It seemed highly unusual that a single branch of evolution differed from the vast majority of life he''d cataloged on this planet.
Rae put on his goggles when the sun dipped below the tree line to the west, scattering golden light. He had the feeling something was missing with his logic, but he was a bit too scattered to figure it out. He made a note to investigate the matter further. Giving up on abstract thinking for the day, Rae went out to do his daily training, starting with the current set of physical exercises and progressing to the psionic ones, which were less successful. Gryphon didn''t show up to teach him anything new, and it was just as well because he didn''t think he could retain a new lesson.
He sat on one of the rock walls and played his harmonica. He recorded different tracks into the goggle''s memories and then played them back as he layered more on the previous layer. When Rae finished, the glow behind the trees was mostly faded, and he went back into the dig to rest. He paused at the entryway, turning on a light to look at the sides and think about the hinges he''d have to set into the rock to hang the doors. Maybe he could put glass planes around the outer part of the doors to let in light around them? Something to think about.
In the morning, Rae created a quick graphic of his plans for the doors. He''d have to incorporate a pair of curtains at the entrance, one diaphanous and one light-blocking. While working on his pad, he sighed and opened his journal, starting a page on Thorne.
Jeol''s son Kardn was eleven, and he''d lost his mother two years earlier in a street accident. His mom was descended from ancestors that on Terra became the Romani. Karl Daniel was named after Karis''s grandfather and Jeol''s favorite uncle. They called him Danny, but Rae was the one who combined his names, after a word in Cont meaning ''traveler.'' The boy was set to spend a month over the summer with Jeol''s brother''s family.
His dad and Rae would spend the time on a shake-down cruise in a new short-range interstellar spacecraft they''d jointly designed. Halfway to a nearby star, their ship was caught up in a wormhole that led them to the icebound planet known as Thorne. They were displaced in time and space and would spend the next four years there but be missing from Tellus for only about one year. After a hard landing in a snowfield, she had scarcely made it down the ramp when she got the first inkling of trouble.
The Crysfire Gem and ring flared up its blue-green prismatic fire. The Gem burned through the skin on her forehead. There was a still scar from that injury under the nail scratch marks she had gotten recently. Meanwhile, the sword ring around her right index finger burned through her fingerbone just below the knuckle. She screamed and plunged her burns into the snowdrifts, not understanding what had happened.
When Jeol checked on her, he found her usually grey skin turned a pale olive, and her silver blood was as red as his as a kind of carbon-based version of a Qard. He got her back inside the ship suffering from profound shock. Using some heavy grade steel sheeting, he scooped up the hot jewels and bent the metal into a protective packet, surrounding them with ceramic insulation pellets. Luckily, her powers of regeneration were still strong, and when she was assaulted later on that first year, her index finger was almost wholly regenerated.
He didn''t want to go on with the page today, but that was enough of a start that he could pick it back up later. Taking his pad with him and putting on the goggles, he went to the entrance and modeled the exact measurements. He drew up a diagram for the hinges he would carve out of granite and connect to the plateau by titanium rod axis pins. The pins he would first forge down in the lowest level of the shaft, so he could use them to check the fit of the hinge knuckles. When he assembled the hinges, he''d go back down to make the glass panels he''d used to frame the doors in titanium strips. After all that, he would start working with his stores of cured color oak. He felt his mood improving as he concentrated on the designing process...