Special Asset Agent Carissa Decimus of O5-01’s Red Right Hand1 is seated in an interview room across from an unremarkable woman in business attire. Agent Decimus is noted to be a woman, appearing to be in her late 20’s or early 30’s with dark red hair. Among the features of note are abnormal feline characteristics. These include: yellow eyes capable of drastic dilation for high and low light environments, large, red furred, triangular ears, and a tail proportional to her height covered in long-Shaired fur similar to a Persian domestic breed’s.
Decimus is tapping her foot repeatedly, clenching her jaw, and her tail’s motion is erratic and violent.
Decimus: Repeat the question?
Interviewer: What was SCP-9000 to you?
Decimus tilts her head.
Decimus: 9000? Zeus’s balls, I wish one of you would pick up that I don’t read the documentation unless it’s relevant to whatever operation you have us out on. It makes me sick, damn sick to read the twisted things the Foundation does. ‘Oh, we’re improving’ not fast enough.
The Interviewer shifts in their chair.
Interviewer: Right, that makes—let me rephrase.
Decimus: You go on and do that.
Interviewer: What was Finnfelheim to you?
Decimus stares at the interviewer, growing visibly agitated.
Decimus: Why the fuck are you using the exonym? Why do they always use the exonym! Why the hell are you—
Decimus pinches the bridge of her nose and breathes in and out.
Decimus: I should have put this on the list of questions to never ask me. Is this—are you asking for Sherry’s office?
Decimus leans forward, ears flat to her head, lips pulled back. The interviewer pauses and looks at their documents for several moments.
Interviewer: I’m asking for RAISA and Operation High Tide’s Purposes. We’re trying to expand our documentation and understanding.
Carissa laughs. It’s a dry sound.
Decimus: Understanding, yeah. That what you tell yourself? Help you sleep at night?
The Interviewer shifts with a nervous expression.
Decimus: Nervous? That chair hot against your ass? Yeah? You think we don’t know? You think I don’t know just because I don’t read the documentation. Think I haven’t seen what you’re doing. What you’ve been pissing on for nearly a century?
Decimus places both hands on the table and leans forward. Her tail visibly fluffs outwards, hairs standing on end. Her teeth are bared, ears flat against her head.
Decimus: It’s ghoulish.
Interviewer: I don’t—
Decimus slams her fists on the table and stands up causing the interviewer to jump.
Decimus: Don’t you fucking dare claim not to know!
Guards enter the room, as with Medea they are visibly nervous.
Decimus: Oh yeah heeeeeere we go. Bring in the protection kiddy squad cause I’m an anomaly and dangerous right? Gotta make sure we remind the anomaly of her place.
Decimus spits on the table.
Decimus: You’re scum. You’re the worst of this whole goddamn cesspit. You sit there in your little ivory towers claiming to protect the world, thinking that normalcy is going to save us all. Asking all these cute questions like you’re just an innocent—question asker! This is it everyone! The Masquerade, the great farcical dance!
//Decimus picks up the chair and throws it at the far wall away from the guards and interviewer. They flinch; several raise their weapons. //
Decimus: And I just have to sit here and play along because Artemis’s Bow there might be some good or hope at the end of this tunnel. I have to stand here and watch you depraved ghouls desecrate a mass grave. Erase their whole history from the eyes of the world!
Decimus walks over to the one-way mirror and jabs the glass.
Decimus: I know you’re in there! You’re out there ordering this, stripping away an entire culture, desecrating a sacred site and the grave. You think you’re protecting the world but you’re not! You’re erasing a crime, a Genocide!
Decimus punches the glass of the mirror with significant force that shakes the whole pane.
Decimus: Yeah that’s right! Genocide! You heard me in there! I’m using the fucking G word.
Decimus turns and walks back to the table leaning over it. Several guards step forward, with rifles hovering only a few feet away from her skull.
Decimus: You want to know what the Singing City of Endless Spires Grasping At the Star Skies meant to me? I had friends there. The daughter of the Hlérsyngva who pulled me from the fucking ocean and gave me a new lease on life was there. She was one of my first friends in all the fucking world, and her daughter was there! What she built, what she made—you couldn’t possibly understand! Cause you’ve never built a damn thing in your whole pathetic life.
Decimus stands up, and points at the guards then the interviewer.
Decimus: But what would any of you know about that? You stand for nothing. You’d sell out your friends to the big chairs upstairs just to get a fucking leg up. You’d stab each other in the back for the smallest thing if one of you turned out to be anomalous. You couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to plant a seed whose fruits you’ll never taste. To build for a better world whose sunrise you’ll never see. You’re just cogs in a machine that hungers to oppress. By Olympus, there was hope! It was more than just friendship, it was— They got it. The Hlérsyngva understood. They knew what it takes to fight for the collective good! They didn’t build a city; it wasn’t just a place or shelter. It was a whole damn world! An ecosystem filled with some of the most spectacular creatures and life that this shitty little rock has ever seen.
Decimus balls her fist so hard that blood begins to trickle onto the floor and table.
Decimus: They understood the balance between nature and artifice! They built their world around it. Everything came from something and then flowed back into everything when its use was done. They didn’t waste, they recycled, used what they took and gave back. They sang, oh that’s right, they had art and song and culture, and I don’t fucking care about that shit normally, but you’d look at a painting and it’d move you to tears with what they put inside it!
Decimus closes her eyes and stands up again. She opens her eyes again and stares at her bleeding palm. The wound rapidly stitches closed and vanishes.
Decimus: And what did we do? What did humans do? What we always fucking do. No not we, I’m not—you’re still doing it. I’m not one of you anymore, Artemis made fucking sure of that. So I see it. The great big old churn! All you have to do is look a few hundred kilometers away from one mass grave to see it happening again! It’s the same old fucking excuses. ‘Oh, they provoked it! They fought back!’ What do you fucking want them to do? A wounded animal when backed into a corner for just trying to survive is always going to fight! You pushed them to that extreme! You took and took and took until there was nothing but the walls left and then…
Decimus trails off and stares at her hand. It shakes and then she curls her fist again.
Decimus: And then when they finally revealed their teeth and claws, humans threw them into the sea. Butchered them like cattle in the streets. Men, women, spawnlings, infants, it didn’t matter. We sailed through the fires that night y’know? What wasn’t—there were so many bodies. It still—I’ll never unsee it. Its not the same. The world isn’t the same. Why didn’t we—
Decimus stands in silence for several minutes staring at her hands.
Abruptly, she walks around the table, provoking the raised weapons again, opens the door and walks out. It slams shut again milliseconds later. Microphones capture a distant thump followed by Decimus’s yell somewhere outside the hall. Then the room is silent.
Guard: Should we bring her back? Or, I don’t know, stop her?
The glass of the one-way mirror cracks and splinters out from where Decimus punched it. It then shatters revealing the now empty room beyond.
Interviewer: No. Let her go.
In the Heart of Creation
Warmth brushed across the face I no longer had; like plush lips of a lover who was already long departed.
Badump.
How long had it been since I’d last woken?
How long had it been since the chains had bitten into starflecked skin and lashed creation’s song tight beneath hateful gravity’s all-consuming time-struck ire.
Badump.
I stretched then, many thousand limbs stilled as gleaming columns of metal wire and lightning struck sand. The sun glistened against my skin, tradewinds flaring through fifteen million throats and spires to greet the coming dawn.
Badump.
But something had changed.
Badump.
Oh yes, it came rolling back like the lazy midnight moon tide. In the blip of dreams that consumed your titanic slumbers. There it was, a new thread amongst the web of eternally winding strings.
Badump.
How long had that detail drifted, who had seen its contours in the tangled narrows?
The priests?
The magisters?
No, curiously, it was another.
Badump.
How curiously the one-who’d-seen took the meaning-to-be. Yet now she was nowhere to be found. I searched all the fragmenting minds and eyes of flesh and thaumic machine that wandered the veins and arteries across and below my skin.
Badump.
Yet the work was here, begun in haste. And at this pace, it would only be eight hundred turns of the star.
Badump.
I smiled, through the lips of others, a thousand small moments of joyous exuberation within the halls of my flesh. A tiny blip in the eternal torture writhing through me.
Badump.
The threads simmered in the great flaring waves across my metallic skin. They were agitated. This work had repercussions.
Was I wrong to let that dream drift so freely?
There were other threads, varied in their outcomes and paths. Many of fire and loss hurtling towards my shores. So which road will it be? Which fate acompli will sweep me?
Badump.
It all remains unclear. No matter how many threads of past and future I tread with legs that are not mine.
Badump.
And there, as I contemplated these worrying ribbons of fate, came the answer to my initial question. Sprung like a flower in the mind of a priestess greeting me in her morning mantras.
Badump.
Nine hundred ellipses of this little blue rock around its shimmering star. No wonder my syncopy of energy was still so thin.
Badump.
My eyes flickered, weighing heavily in the astral tides. I would need the rest for paths winding ahead.
Badump.
But wait. There, there was another brush in my skin.
Badump.
No, not a brush, an inferno throbbing near the organo-metallic and coral skin of my chest. A familiar pillar of—
Freydis.
So she was here.
It was finally time.
Time and threads drifting out of my hands. So that is how the future would come to be.
Out of my reach, and in the gentler hands of my child. Children. There was another.
Which path would be followed?
Before I returned to much needed slumber, I leaned in to see what had become of that brave little dragon of my blood.
I blew, grasping the wind with astral strings and shaping it to such pathetic flares of flesh and eyes.
She lay there before me in a bed of silken bliss in a radiant chamber of gold. Thick Rustics squirmed across the threshold which I could not reach.
I reached, across that grand abyss of ontological bridges binding all of me.
My little girl, all grown. Sat the construct upon the edge of the sheets, chilled tears of a cooler breeze flaring on my cheeks. Her skin was warm beneath my half-flesh wind fingers. Through meshing with nerve and flesh all that had been missed flowed forth.
We wept for we knew that our imperfections had left yet another behind. There was no going back. There was no righting what had been wronged, no fixing that band of isolation seared into her whole.
I did not know it could hurt so much.
I did not know that this cursed need for sleep could haunt me so fully.
Damn you. Damn you, Maker of Chains.
Damn you, Monarch of Scarlet.
Damn you, Hateful Tyrant.
Date: Night of the Joyous Fate, 2000 BCE.
Dramatis Personae: Your humble Narrator (Me), Freydis Aquailian, Ex-Queen of the Hlérsyngva, and Governor of the Great Basin Province (Alanna Bree), Segrusa of House Agrusa, First Finnwife and Chief Strategist of the Great Basin Province (????). Residents of the City at the Center of the World.
Locations: Finnfelheim.
Foreword: Freydis awoke after fading into vision and ghosts of memory, right as they had crossed the threshold of the 13th Ring. What she saw in the echoes of history filled her with that old firey love. She let it fill her as she rose from the silken sheets to explore the inner city. Adventure was the name and aim of her heart, a strangely perfect innocence yet untouched by the tithes of empire which she had so carefully built. Yet something eerie lay just beneath the surface needing still to be investigated.
The 1st and 2nd combined Rings, Hǫrgr. The Goddess' Belief and Heart.
The pinprick of light and pain grew into a soaring ache of the skull, as if she'd slammed her temples against a beam of wood.
Freydis Aquailian tried to sit up very slowly, grasping for purchase to pull herself up. She found the sanded and smoothed crystal headboard of the four-poster bed. Further fumbling with shaking fingers found the the shape of a pillow stuffed with great eldermuld duck feathers wrapped in algal silks from a giant mediterranean web weaver sea spider.
She shivered in the dark, trying to grasp ahold of her senses. The clarity of the in-between lingered in painful bursts of cognition.
A webbed hand rose to gingerly rub against her temple as she took stock of – something. For a moment between the lines of thread and the script, she was manifest in a way she hadn’t been in a little more than 2800 turns of the sun.
With the way things had been unfolding, she figured she only had a brief window of self-actualization before whatever was happening swept her away again.
She was physical too.
In that brief instance of cognizance, she did something quite unexpected.
She pressed two flickering fingers to her temple, light flaring against her skin in Rustic marks. Her twin concepts burned like a furious star in the blackened abyss as she wrapped abstract fingers around deeply entangled threads.
Something there. Something that shouldn’t—
And then with such suddenness there was you forming with the deep yank of many strings. You and her. A divide between, but it was ugly and mashed together. Where you began and she ended was snarled and twisted together like a teenager who didn’t understand wire ergonomics for their computer desk.
Her eyes shone like great twin suns as you were flung into orbit of her in that mental solar space. You were bound to her by great trailing solar flares that entangled with you in pulsing throbs of Astral Light.
The physicality of her sensations and emotions burned into and against you, frazzling thought. Yet there were stardust fingers winding through your threads, creating desperate space and unwinding murky memories. Her mental moves smote images to the front of your spinning awareness.
Need to get it out—
Alanna. That’s who you should be. But it was wrong in a schismatic way, fragmentation tangled up with this anomaly—no not an anomaly, she was a person.
Or she was a person. Had been a person. It didn’t—
Orange cracks spiderwebbed across the surface of your little mental planet with all its features beginning to take shape as more stardust poured into growing rock.
Her name was Freydis, and you were enjoined in ways you couldn’t—you didn’t have the space to—
It’s too bound up in me. Mither why didI can’t pull—what is this? Is that
She pulled on strings that caught aflame straight into the concept of you. Your tiny mental planet shook, orange cracks straining and beginning to tear. She threatened to shatter you apart into a thousand fragmenting conceptual pieces.
Ow! Stop!
You startled at the sudden willfulness of the thoughts flooding through you both. No filter between your minds it seemed. Color poured in through the solar flares. You felt her surprise pour in, fumbling to understand.
What?! You think?! There’s—Great Spirits!
You’re a soul!
Her grasp on the physicality slipped, mind racing with confusion and floods of aghastness. The threads of pre-writ narrative wrapped her up again in physicality of memory and play, and she was abruptly tangled and unable to yank on you anymore.
But you tried not to focus on that. On the way those great pillars of fire had snapped you back into place in between those twin suns.
You could think. You could see, you could hear but those senses weren’t your own.
Here at the center, the Astral Discharge floated through the air like motes of sunlight. Like a raucous background, it threatened to drown and swallow all other threads of Rustic magistry that swam nearby.
Yet it didn’t.
It burned through you both, feeling those ebbs and swells in Freydis’s strange—those must be ontokinetic or thaumaturgic senses. Things you didn’t have.
You weren’t sure.
But—
You could think.
You could speak.
Ok no, you couldn’t speak.
The mouth was hers and not yours, or was it both of yours? Shouldn’t it be your body?
That part was still too—
The point is, you remembered, with great difficulty, who you were. Her emotions, the agitation of a headache stemming from the Sight and her age—or was that the consequence of her whole being forced into and twisting your flesh?
There were so many questions, and she was feeling so many overwhelming sensations. It was hard to think straight. You were like a two-headed snake, except instead of a head with equal control, you were a barely formed half mind drifting in her cerebral matter, caught in her mental orbit.
If even that.
Everything else was her.
You could talk to Freydis in the confines of her skull.
You should talk to her, maybe that would make things make sense.
Or well if that too wasn’t—
You’re—we’re tangled up. Alanna, is it?
Are you still in there?
Where to even start?
I’m here.
I—are—am I dead?
Astral fingers wove through strands searching for memories, plying into that molten matter in the solar lock between the suns where so much of you and her were still tangled together in knots. A great burn of sadness swept through her chest, but what she was thinking didn’t bleed through, only the emotion.
So, there was a filter afterall, but on her end. That was less than ideal for any—how should you handle her? She’s obviously an anomaly, and there are protocols for that but this situation.
Everything seems out the window.
I’m dead. Was dead. Have been dead for—
The certainty of her statement smashed into you. Your body, your mind was embedded in—
This raised even more questions.
You’re, how is that possible?
She pushed deeper into your memories searching for something. Something recent that was there but you couldn’t quite pull out.
I’m not—
But you—
An intense wave of nausea swept through her and into you. Her body gagged but something, whatever held her suspended in the throes of playing out memory, washed it away seconds later.
Your body was twisted into mine. That’s how we’re, why we’re—
Of all the violations.
You remembered now. Through her. Through yourself. Through your own threads.
Falling, flesh twisting as something poured through into reality.
I remember. We’re—
Caught in strands of memory. No it’s more than that.
Reality bending. Cognitohazard maybe.
She thumbed deeper into the index of your memory. Some untangled part of you seemed to process something, that this was an extreme violation of boundaries and peering into deeply personal parts of what made you well… you.
But you were, well— turnabout was fair play you supposed.
Hermeneutic seems to be the term that fits best from your memory. Cognition loop telling a story, like—
Your thoughts must have swept in because she stopped. You felt her abrupt realization slam back through the flaring stardust and neurons, and she recoiled.
Skirtr, sorry I just, we’re so tangled it’s—
This is what a human thinks like?!
Sorry this is—where am I and where are you, why are we so—
The shock of the reality of the situation was beginning to twist into a conga line of realizations. It sank in that you were talking—ok far more than talking at this juncture, living and breathing in the flesh of an ancient fish person. Or in the head of an ancient fish person.
Did you even really exist right now?
Did she exist at all? Was this some grand delusion brought on by the annihilation of your flesh by an ontokinetic entity you couldn’t comprehend?
She recoiled again, swarmed by your burst of esoteric thoughts.
You needed to be more careful with no active filter between you. Could you form one?
You tried, but nothing came of it. That attempt rippled through you into her, and you saw the threads of fabric of the filter. The molten strands of rock peeling out from your mental planet thumbing through the tangles caught the whiffs of her memory.
Of course, it was thaumatological. How curious the execution—
A rain of concepts showered your brain, inflicting heat and painful sunspots in your mind.
Ow!
Ripples of concern poured through Freydis.
What happened, what were—Oh.
You can’t use my magic.
It won’t work.
I just wanted to see how you made that filter.
Can you make another for me?
I’d need control of my body, but even then.
You’re not separated enough from me for it to hold.
That plan was out the window.
Well, personal boundaries are out the window so no point worrying about it further.
Where are we? You have thaumaturgic senses, can you get a look at the hermeneutic, and its source?
Her thought structure and emotional basis was so eerily similar—or was that the fact that your mind was integrated into her neural chemistry? Difficult to tell.
There was one thing that was already different. She felt deeply, the genuine—was it regret? Guilt? She felt bad about it.
Again, I’m sorry. I’ll try not to hear your thoughts.
I can try but I think I already know who’s responsible.
Please don’t apologize for something neither of us can control. Where are we? You have thaumaturgic senses, can you get a look at the hermeneutic, and its source?
I can try but I think I already know who’s responsible.
She opened her eyes. You both regretted it instantly, lines of light swimming in the corners of her vision before gently fading.
But that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was the insane dais that spun out before her eyes, a Zoetrope of endless spiraling networks of what must be ontokinetic webbing, or so you’d heard it described, an eternal cylinder of writhing motion stacking towards an endless horizon and sky. It was bright, squirming with color and indefinitely shifting structure, composition and shapes that almost looked like massive paintbrushes.
And you were right in the middle of it, hundreds of thousands of strings knitting into and beneath the surface of Freydis’s skin.
And by the Mither did it nearly flay apart your mind to look upon.
It’s her.
Who?
Freydis’s body slumped down against the pillow, drowning in the endless dance of reality that burned against your mind.
How was she withstanding this?
Mom. Modir. The Mither.
I don’t—
She leafed through several strands of what might have been your memories. Looking for something to help you understand.
The voice in your…computer? Such a strange word.
The words and accompanying realization slammed into you like a bullet train at top speed, echoing through into her mind. Your whole mental world shook between her colossal twin stars, as if it might tear itself apart. She braced you, as if trying to buffer any reflections.
The fogs beyond her mental solar plane cleared, and out beyond the borders of your entwined orbits was something green, gold, blue, and red. It was incomprehensibly immense, the two of you but tiny specks compared to its four golden titanic suns.
How did you not put it together? Her mother, me, was an ontological being holding up a pillar of—
You were drowning, the ontokinetic cyclone screeching through her eyes into your mind was too much. That horizon’s infinite solar storm was going to blast you away. All of this was too much. You were going to fray apart at the seams into a many pieces and take her with you.
We just couldn’t have that now, could we?
Abruptly, it stopped. A switch flicked and the kaleidoscope of the play and marionette theater fell away. The infinite horizon vanished into the mental void.
Freydis was staring at the Astral Discharge field of the center of all of hearts creation. Or at least that’s what she was thinking. It was a much gentler thaumic underpinning for your mind. And now you could both see the room in full.
Curtains were drawn in a bedchamber decorated with the finest and most intimate murals depicting the entirety of Freydis’s people's history in ecstatic detail. Furniture, chairs, or what you thought might be chairs. Sofa’s. High tables with peculiar, flared waists and narrow necked tops. Low tables with flowing shells and coral like adornments. Scrolls, and what might be packs. Vanities, dressers, wardrobes.
The ornamentation was intimate, a proverbial feast on the eyes.
Water trickled somewhere, tiny waterfalls filling what must be grooves or canals in the floor.
It would explain the misty coolness and humidity gently splattering against her scales.
She hid it. I can’t see the strings or the framework anymore.
That was cataclysmic. Just looking at it was tearing me apart.
Fukka, I wish you had said something.
Panic through her strings.
Afraid that’s impossible, I can’t control your lips.
Disbelief, annoyance, and then indignant amusement.
You are a silly creature.
Her parade of brimming emotions sent you spinning, gave you pause. An emotional person you’d never been… so far as to be frequently called ‘The Human Bot’ by your peers.
In fact, all of Freydis’s emotions were flowing into you and then back across the proverbial mental highways. Each wave rocked through you like a merciless tide tossing a sailboat.
Then there was her amusement. Your literal interpretation of her words amused her and it was strangely muted compared to everything else.
In fact, as she lay there in that bed, both of you wrangling to grasp awareness of your predicament, there was that pervasive quiet… something to her. It was an emotion you’d never felt before on your own. But the term came to you through the threads of her own memories.
Melancholic loneliness.
A deep ache arose in your mind at its slow continuous roll.
Maybe you should bring it up? But that seemed… deeply personal.
If she noticed that you had noticed, she didn’t say. She was distracted, her eyes kept drifting to the murals, pulsing with brilliant lines of light and color. Snags of narrative thread were tugging at your minds, spooling images trying to fill conscious recollection.
The contours of her ontokinetic senses then vanished, momentarily dissipating the whirlwind of her emotional resonance.
It took a moment to realize she had turned them off, a thing you didn’t know was possible. You were learning quite a bit about her, and perhaps mages in general? Or was she something more?
The answer seemed more complicated and you didn’t have enough of a background to tell that she was anything more than some sort of colossal ontokinetic being.
You came back to the murals.
Freydis’s body, your body in transfiguration, was still struggling with the throes of wakefulness. So, she was forced to look away, the activation of a thousand different feelings and interpretations proving far too much for her aching mind to handle.
And this was the opportunity you’d been looking for to try to figure things out.
Okay let’s regroup and talk this out.
Regroup?
Her thoughts became lethargic. She seemed unable to resist the temperament of the compulsions of the hermeneutic. That was perhaps a bit more concerning because now your thoughts were growing lethargic.
Figure of speech in English… which you don’t know.
Right.
Let’s Reassess?
Take a step back?
Think things through?
You were trying your best to convey the linguistic concepts, without quite realizing that you were already thinking in Elder Finnfelk. The exhaustion was not helping.
That realization only struck a moment later and it was really quite embarrassing.
Oh, yes. We should talk through this concept of hermeneutics and how they work.
Your memories weren’t clear, and I don’t know how we ended up like this.
By the star sea I am so tired.
If this is the memory playing out that I think it is then—
With a creak, a door somewhere off to Freydis’s right opened, shining heavenly light into the room. She made a noise, gills oscillating rapidly several times in dread.
The flush and feel of her flesh and how she expressed these emotions in physicality was so strange, especially when they poured into you.
That burrowing anguish of fear was yet another of those emotions you’d never felt before. But it had a taste to it, playful in a sense. That was its own kind of confusing.
I’m afraid I was right; I’m sorry in advance.
What’s going to—
Freydis oriented herself on the sea-silk derived sheets, so soft and warm beneath her scaled skin. One arm came to rest across her eyes to protect against the maelstrom of burning bright. She wanted nothing more than to lay back down amidst the sweeping sheets, lose herself in the tide of dreams again. Her eyelids were so heavy.
You couldn’t keep your thoughts straight, why was she apologizing? What was about to happen?
I don’t think apologies are necessary. Whatever it is, it will be fine. We’re already so deeply entangled in each other’s personal private moments I can’t imagine anything that would be so violating.
You said this is memory, yours being played out?
Freydis pushed the tide of drowsiness back, forcing herself into wakefulness.
There was a hint of—you couldn’t place it. Two or more emotions mixed together and oscillating rapidly back and forth. Her gills were rapidly flickering. Then the play reasserted, and it was gone before you could try to pick it apart.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. I saw some of it in the threads of modir when we were looking at the conceptual framework earlier. It’s drawing from my memory, and the memory and emotions of everyone around me.
Something in her shifted, and abruptly there was a storm of emotions flowing in and through her into you. More solar fog cleared in the mental space and there were thousands of other bright stars, none so large as the twin suns of your host. Bombarding you with a web of solar winds carrying all their meaning. Countless small and immensely personal moments of feeling that shifted like seas in a storm.
So, this is what you felt earlier in the dreams and halls of vision. She was an empath on a grand scale.
Too grand for you to handle. She shut it out again when you began to flounder.
Again, I would like to emphasize, ow.
Sorry. I thought it wouldn’t—you needed to see more of the scale. It’s not just us.
It’s the mass interpretation of the memory she’s pulling from. Mine and everyone else’s. I can’t physically alter it. I’m being pulled along into reenacting these moments, past and future. It’s not unlike the Sight I suppose, in that respect.
What’s more concerning is—Undersky below, there are thousands of souls here intertwined or fused together. Modir what are you doing?!
Pangs flowed through you as you found the memory you’d been unspooling the threads for. You had done this. You went against Maria’s recommendation, thinking the entity could help you understand what was happening.
There you felt a deep wash of guilt.
Guilt. That—you knew the term instantly. Consuming, horrible guilt deeper than any emotion you’d ever felt on your own. It wasn’t something you felt. Ethics kept you accountable, inline, but Guilt? You felt bad about it? Unpleasant tight sickness momentarily awash in Freydis’s belly from your emotion?
This time you were certain it was your own and not hers. It was too strong to not be.
But why? Why were you feeling it at all? You had stayed within the ethical bounds! It wasn’t your fault that the anomaly reacted the way it did, was it? No one could have predicted it would sweep you and the entire site up in this!
You had all the safe—
No you didn’t have time to interrogate it.
But it was too late. She felt it. She heard your panicking thoughts, and she wasn’t about to let you escape.
You did this? You—why? Do you know why she’s doing this?!
You were going to respond, but something else came along and stopped the conversation in its tracks.
Your minds filled with a singular storm of thought that was hers through the theatre of memory. It was almost a relief.
How long was I swept away by the sight?
It was an echo, one more hallmark to separate the narrative from the conscious injection between you.
And then came a familiar voice.
"A few days." A hand gently cupped Freydis’s cheek, your cheek, in the dim lighting. Soft and familiar.
Flame seared in Freydis’s chest, a warmth and intensity that burned hotter than a main sequence star. Her cheeks flared beneath their scales. It flared into you, filling your mind. You couldn’t tell if it was yours or hers, or if there even was a you anymore.
“My love,” Freydis said breathlessly, leaning into the hand and the soft caresses of it’s scaled fingers.
“Where are we?”
What—
What is this?
Every crag and crevice of your twisting mind filled with that blaze. It was like you suddenly didn’t exist, all there was her, and this unstoppable tide.
"Finnfelheim."
It’s love. Have you never felt love?
You gasped for air with lungs you didn’t have. Of course you had, you’d felt love for your family. Soft and muted care for their happiness and wellbeing. That slow ache to hear their laughs and spend time with them during paid time off.
You thought that was what all love was. But this—
Were you wrong?
This can’t be love, this is—
You didn’t have the words, even her memory and depths of emotions didn’t help you here.
Why did she feel so deeply? Was it because she was an empath? Why did you feel so deeply as a part of her?!
Those stroking fingers gently lifted Freydis’s chin in a dizzying tilt. Her heart thundered in her chest, filling your mind with sound. Flush coolness, a vessel of water pressed to her lips. She drank greedily from it, sucking every drop into her famished body.
It is love. It’s not the same as—your emotions, your love, your…
Alanna what is—where is your…
Moments of aghastness and disbelief broke the thundering storm of love washing through her. Like she couldn’t believe something in your memories, these moments of what you considered to be intensity. Then they were drowned out again.
Are all humans like this? Living in a world of muted color where they feel nothing?
Nothing? You had, no you had felt, hadn’t you?
"You always know what I’m thinking." Freydis leaned against Segrusa, breathing softly against her flesh.
No she was right, you had never felt this. It was a deep burn simmering in Freydis’s chest. It wasn’t something you knew, maybe never would have if not for this. You’d never had any desire to feel it; it wasn’t something you needed. Other people did but—why didn’t you?
This love was full, all-consuming and intense.
"You are an open scroll. It is one of the many things I adore about you."
No. No I just—
You scrambled, turning over history and moments in your mind. Yours and hers.
Were you broken? Why didn’t you normally feel to this degree? Or was this—no it wasn’t a difference between Human and Hlérsyngva. You knew people, were ‘friends’ with people who felt great depths of emotion.
The flood of memories washed in carrying you both along.
That same old worn out kitchen table and wooden chairs, a piece of paper holding it up. You had spent your youth, your childhood fully dedicated to your studies at that table. No playdates. No sleepovers, constant unending academic progression. There wasn’t a TV in that room until the end of high school, and you never used it except to play music through your secondhand Zoon.
Your family was poor, an only child, and they gave you a good life at their own expense.
You wanted better for them. For you. You watched yourself come and go, hours ticking over from a small child to the fast food and retail uniforms, to the first skirt-suit at the end of your collegiate career.
You did everything to make that real at your own expense. Working problems well into the wee hours of the morning. Ignored those boys and girls staring at you with longing in their eyes. Even with her emotions flooding you, that still felt—made you uncomfortable in a way you couldn’t place. Like they didn’t look to who you were, but what your body told them you were.
There was no time to feel. No time for the trappings of romance if you were going to give them the better life they deserved. No time for long nights spent wrapped in the flesh of another. Breaking past those physical first impressions would have taken time.
You weren’t broken; you just never had the time. You couldn’t afford to feel while working two jobs and studying to make the grades you’d need in high school and college. So, you shut them out buried those feelings that just got in the way until you existed in a near constant state of flat nothing.
And where you didn’t have time, you just didn’t feel the need that others had.
The realization crashed into you like a sledgehammer and you fell apart. A whirlwind of emotions being swept up and drowned in the intensity of Freydis’s endless love for another.
A feeling you’d never had, a feeling you might now never have! What had you been doing?
A tear wormed its way out of Freydis’s eye before you realized you were affecting her. She groaned, and shifted in the sheets against Segrusa, sniffling.
“Freydis are you crying? What’s wrong?”
“I missed the tour.” Her melancholy washed back in and amplified the avalanche of emotion originating in you and flowing into her.
And with it came something else from Freydis’s conscious mind. You’d almost forgotten she was there, the silence emanating from her a strange contrast to the way another human might react.
There was a gentle compassion pouring from her, understanding in an alien way. Regret mingled in, and guilt too.
She felt bad for pushing you into feeling so much all at once.
I’m sorry. That was cruel of me.
What have I been doing with my life? This, I haven’t been living.
In a way it is living, a noble life but one without—you live such short lives.
I didn’t realize that’s how you grew up. My words were cruel.
You have been sacrificing, had sacrificed a part of your life for a better future. You’ve planted seeds for those who came before, who want live to see their blooms.
But your system has failed you. Your world has failed you. How many others come to pass in lives like that? You deserved better. Those who come after deserve better.
She fell silent, her words hammering against your mind again and again.
It was strange how much you had already learned through her… and some part of you whispered that this was only the tip of the iceberg.
Her story was only halfway through and there was much more to live in.
And that was strange too in it’s own way to think.
Yet her silence and warmth became a comfort in that moment of emotional wandering. That moment of coming to understand how much of your life you’d locked away to sacrifice for your parents. For yourself. How much the system you toiled in and for was a failure, and how quickly she cut to the core of it. She made it easier to understand the failures of capitalism, the modern world, and human society.
Was she radicalizing you? Or was this simply how her world worked? You could find out couldn’t you?
While you dwelt together on what understandings were starting to bloom, your mind turned to watch the play and story of her life. Would this provide the answer to whatever questions her modir had plunged you into seek?
"Shhhh, eat now." Segrusa withdrew the chalice and pushed a small platter into your lap. It was your lap after all, both your laps, her flesh, your vessel.
And she noticed.
Alanna are you sure that’s wise? To allow yourself to feel one with me in body and mind.
Her concern was touching but you were certain.
I think its what she wants. To see the world through your eyes. Through your people’s lens.
I think if she could fuse us together she’ll pull us apart and—
Well we were already completely fused once. What harm will it do to let myself be one with you and still be able to ask questions?
She was quiet a long moment, lost in thoughts behind that filter.
If you’re certain, I think you should know that—well…
Conscious choice with such soul and body magic can have unexpected effects. I don’t know what will happen to you. Some things can’t be fixed once done.
You took that in and digested all her words and warnings. Would you be ok with that?
The answer came faster than you expected. Certainty burning through all your threads.
Whatever comes of this… I will welcome with open arms. It might end my career but that’s probably already over.
So you dove in full, embracing the feel of her flesh and contours of her perspective while your minds were yet separate.
You looked down upon the platter laid in your lap and her wonder spread through you. The names of the dishes flowed twixt the strands of cognition: Bubble berry jam lathered upon mithrillian slug bladder, a side of deep-yeast bread slices soaked in raw sunfish egg yolk, topped off with thinly sliced sea cucumber sprinkled with tantrun powder.
A clawing hunger filled Freydis’s belly, salivating at the rich aroma’s pouring off the meal. It was a visual panache of colors and textures that certainly wouldn’t be appealing normally. But this was Freydis, and you were her and she did adore it so.
"What about the tour?!" Freydis whined, flopping back against the pillow with a dramatic posturing of arm over her face.
You found yourself smiling with fast rippling pulses of your gills. It was endearing, that playful joy sparking between you in the low light.
"Worry you not, I didn’t get to see it any more than you did. If you eat all of this breakfast, then maybe we’ll go out to see all of it. I for one, look forward to hearing you gush about all the little details." It was fairly clear by the look in her eyes and flutter of her gills that Segrusa was quite used to your tactics and mischief. It made the fire in Freydis’s chest burn all the bigger.
This is strange to have you—
You pulled back out of her, feeling less yourself and more in tune with her thoughts than before.
Is this too much? Am I crossing boundaries?
No I don’t care about you feeling the flame of my desire, I don’t have control over that. It just, your thoughts are in mine when we’re flowing as one. It’s like listening to your own voice through a transmitter.
We’ll get used to it I’m sure.
Segrusa did the smart thing and ignored you by sitting on the bed. But Freydis wasn’t done yet.
"Still hungry for more of me, hmmm?" the words poured from your golden lips, and they rippled strangly with incongruous lines of thought as you lingered in unpuzzling the affection flaring in your breast.
Segrusa ran her fingers through Freydis’s hair, sprinkled soft warm touches that sent shivers up her spine. You leaned into the little touches and motes of affection, drinking them down as Freydis began to dig into the food.
It was strange to be loved like this. To feel so full of warmth you’d never imagine feeling.
"Always." Segrusa’s impeccably stoic demeanor cracked, lips twitching at the corners.
Then it fell away, her body language changing to something you had to scramble to try to recognize through Freydis’s memories.
"Though my concern for the moment is over your health. That and the governance issues we’re here to fix, but the former is the larger concern."
A knot of anxious fervor squirmed in your gut. Why was she worried? Was it how you ended up here?
You fell right?
"Was this one bad?" You asked in a small quiet voice.
Did Freydis not remember?
That bit of cognitive dissonance took you out of the moment. Surely, she’d remember something like that, but the index of memory was grand, you weren’t integrated enough into her anymore to actively tell if she had remembered before you both had relived it.
The certainty of that memory was clouding you.
Did you not remember the fall?
No I—
She hesitated and for a moment you’d thought you’d pushed too far. Finding that line of the personal was going to be a working project and—
Then your brain clocked that most humans would not be this free or open with memory and emotion.
Was she ok with this? Any of this?
You couldn’t tell by her thoughts, and her emotions shifted like currents in a great river, too quickly to grasp the small only the larger overtures when you weren’t deep in her flow.
I didn’t mean to overstep. This is a lot and you’re showing so much already that you probably didn’t want a stranger to see. We’re so deeply entangled I don’t know how much of this is ok or where the lines are.
You don’t have to tell me.
Alanna, I am dead. There’s a purpose, a cause to this madness of making me relive…
She trailed off and there was an abrupt wave of fear that filled you both. Her fear. It vanished seconds later with the theatre’s recalled interpretation of memory, but you felt it nonetheless.
It was so remarkably blunt, a giant smack across the face. You did forget that detail for a moment, didn’t you?
You didn’t know what to say to that. Her life was being used to show you something, deeply personal and intimate things… and you were treating it—
I’m sorry.
Don’t be. Modir is doing this for a purpose.
But you were cognizant of it now whatever her words. The slight twitch in her emotional waves. Again that pit of guilt in your belly for having plunged her into this.
Here, stop lingering on what you can’t control Let me answer your question.
When the Sight comes, it’s hard, nearly impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not.
And harder still to remember the moments before. I only do now because of you.
You sat with that. Yet another twist and layer of complexity to her. What was she so afraid of? What was coming? Why was she so selfless putting you first, you the person who had plunged her into this madness?
These questions, there was certainty flowing from her. As if to say ‘you’ll see in time.’ So you let it go for now.
"You were convulsing when we pulled you from the canal. I had to take you below." Segrusa parted a strand of hair, putting it behind one of your finned ears.
“I heard you call my name through the fog.” Freydis leaned into the touch again, gills fluttering.
You fell back into her perceptions, her senses, her flow of emotions and thoughts. Those gentle traces of Segrusa burning a spire in your shared minds.
That throbbing low heat continued to flow through her skin. There was something about the softness, the care in those touches that filled some long unmet need. Intoxicating in a deeply personal, and startling way.
You could drown in it. You wanted to drown it. Some deep longing burning inside Freydis flowing into you.
It was certainly doing something interesting to Freydis downstairs. You were trying desperately not to acknowledge that detail, but it was difficult.
There was shame burning suddenly, as you realized you were living in someone else’s moment, but Freydis washed it away with a steadying astral hand.
“Did you? What did you see?”
“Us. Across time.”
“Even the Sight has a sentimental streak it seems.” Segrusa chuckled quietly. You couldn’t help but smile, fins half extending with flushed blood.
“Three days. Three days I was out…” you murmured.
"Longer than ever before. You missed your nameday fully. We should take it easy the next couple of days, no work yet.”
That felt wrong. To simply lay in bed while you didn’t yet understand the full scope and sweep of the problem plaguing the city. How could you sit here and let the world pass by towards… who knew what? Freydis had to get out there.
But before she could do anything, nature took over. You shivered, and her stomach roared angrily, salivating at the overpowering aromas still bombarding her nostrils. You gave in to the hunger, pouncing upon the tray like a hound that hasn’t been fed for weeks.
"There’s no need to worry now. I am recovered and fine!" The words flecked small pieces of meat as Freydis spoke without swallowing. Then she sighed languidly and with much drama pouring from the lips.
"Fine or not, I worry Freydis. The Sight does not come in predictable patterns and we’re always on edge.” There was an itch of agitation at the falseness of her statement and you couldn’t quite tell if it was from the specter of the play or one of you.
“I can feel them coming on. If it happens again I just need some place to sit down and I’ll be fine. Please, please let me explore?” Freydis pouted, your eyes becoming practically fishbowls in one of the mirrored reflections.
We seemed happy.
Sorry, you seemed happy.
You shook that off, a bit startled by how the thought of the two of you as we clung to your mind so fiercely. But you were drowning yourself in her threads.
Segrusa laughed, but Freydis wasn’t done.
“Besides, if we are going to start untangling the material issues, and assess the damage done by the previous governor, there’s no better place to do it than the Sixth Ring. The merchant guilds, their stalls and the crowds of traders will be our best to see where the winds are blowing.”
We were. Things were still simple. The world was our oyster, and…
You weren’t sure if the ‘we’ in her thought applied to you both and Segrusa, or just her and Segrusa. You weren’t about to ask either.
“It’s always multiple layers with you.” Segrusa mock scowled but smiled at Freydis moments later. There was pride in that look.
That old melancholic loneliness drifted in as your eyes softened in the reflections. It wasn’t there for long, as the memory’s strands washed it down. But it was long enough to notice it coming from Freydis.
“Fine, fine. Finish your meal and then we shall get you dressed and washed up." Segrusa wiped a small chunk of meat off the side of Freydis’s jaw. The touch was electric against your skin.
"Then we can explore our new home." There was a twinge of emphasis on explore, something you only just barely caught.
Then a flash of amusement from what was Freydis’s mind. Or was that yours? It echoed quite a bit.
Then Segrusa kissed Freydis’s cheek. The kiss became the drag of lips against skin, maddeningly slow across gills, drawing the barest hint of resistive noise from you. You reeled, assaulted by the sensitivity of Freydis’s flesh between those plump lips.
"There is of course, so much to explore,” Segrusa purred like a fishercat in your ear. She just about broke Freydis by taking it between her teeth with gentle pressure.
You indulged, by the mither did you indulge. Leaned into the playful chords of affection swimming across Freydis’s membranes and ears like an experienced acolytes serenades the Rustics to gift them their magic. You squirmed beneath the stimulation, letting it get only so far before Freydis gently shoved your wife away, a light trill arising in her throat.
You reeled, pulling out of synchronicity with her, grasping a false mental face as you held on tight to your own threads to try and recover.
Love was intense and you were not ready for that.
Oh thank heavens, I feel like I was going to explode.
Freydis’s soft chuckles echoed in your mind.
Just try to keep hold of some semblance of yourself. I would prefer not to come out of this with your soul twisted up into mine, and a second me running around in life.
There was a brief moment where that didn’t sound so totally unappealing. That on its own was a bit terrifying.
Lets work on finding some way to stabilize me?
I have an idea to keep you anchored, but we’ll have to wait until modir drops the strings again.
Clever little things weren’t you?
"Later, later I promise!" You cried to Freydis’s wife, squirming out of her attempts to reestablish a grasp.
You set the food aside and were out of the sheets before the bemused Segrusa could stop Freydis. She was a whirlwind, surging across the gap of the smooth metallic floor towards a pair of engraved doors. The song of their interpretation threatened to bleed through and swallow you both only for a moment as she threw them open and marched out onto the balcony.
Once the raging sun cleared your gaze, you mentally gawked, thrown from synch with her thought streams by what stood before you.
That—what?
This is but a dream but that is impossible! That cannot have been real.
I promise Alanna, it was. This is no exaggeration or embellishment of reality.
The palace complex sprawled out below the balcony, her eyes leaping from the deep grooves and divots to the massive crystalline skylights, precious metals embedded into the very fabric of the blue-green matrices.
So all our cities, all our great feats of engineering—
Wonderful in their own right I’m sure. Peaks of human achievement.
But your memories, they don’t sing like she does.
Welcome Alanna, to my home.
Upwards your gaze drew to the sprawl, the twisting shapes of tens of thousands of curved and spiraling towers, precipitous spires, columns of twinkling crystal and glass. Impossibly many colors and hues danced against the cone cells in her eyes, a coral reef daring to stand against the Mediterranean sky and stretch towards the stars.
And you turned, and behind you, arching up into the clouds, dancing with light and the nights fire, was a great coral spire. A perfect golden spiral piercing the heavens, great waterfalls pouring in arcs above the winding endless stairs and gardens contained within.
I thought that I had a pretty good idea from all the documents, but I have never been more wrong.
You stood before the glory of her people's greatest achievement, and extended arms out. Basked in the power on the breeze, the might of the sun's warm kiss. You basked with her, truly beginning to understand.
And you wanted to weep in many ways, because this was gone. It no longer existed. But here you were, in history’s weave, seeing what no historian would ever believe.
You were going to go mad for the rest of your days trying to get the Foundation to see what was here.
And there as you felt an inkling of despair, Freydis and the city wiped it away. The whole thing began to sing as the wind picked up, that same familiar song heard from so many faraway places over so many years.
♫We Swim With the Tide
Let Currents Take Us On a Ride
Through the ‘Strom We Find That Place
In The Kelp We Find Creation’s Heart Resides
We Are Singers Swimming With the Tide.♫
♫We Reach Towards the Sky!
Our Hearts Belong On High
Through Their Storms We Find That Place
To Astral Clouds Where We’ll Break Her Chains
We Are Singers Swimming With Her Tides!♫
♫Eyes That Glow With Gold
She’ll Catch Us When We Fall!
Through the Stars and Darkest Nights
We’ll Sail Where Singers Have Never Dared to Ride
We’ll Come Home To Finnfelheim On Her Tides♫
♫We Go with Astral Tides
Let True Dragons Make Our Guide
Through The Undersky We Will Find Our Place
In Paradise We Will Leave This World Behind
We Are Singers Swimming With The Tide.♫
♫Eyes That Cured Our Souls
She’ll Catch Us When We Fall!
Gold Eyes Tearing the Starry Nights
We’ll Sail Where Singers Have Never Dared to Ride
We’ll Come Home To Finnfelheim On Her Tides♫
Freydis turned as your wife emerged from the shadow of the palace.
"Where are we but paradise Segrusa? Mother's eternal dance is on the wind! Can you hear it, the song of fifteen million souls humming on the breeze? The great chimes of the Mitherine temples? The crack and thunder of a sky ever closer to our reach. This, this is the heart of the world, this is where we shall reach the heavens! The passion of those who came before is laid out before us like the defiant earth jutting into the angry sky! How lucky are we!? To be here, at this moment in time, to witness this grandeur that moved my Mother to tears."
Segrusa said nothing. Stunned as the roar of the city sang and grand Astral Whales dove and joined the symphony. The aria filled the air dancing against both their bones.
And you? Well, you had no words to give, no breath in lungs you didn’t have.
"Welcome, my love, to the Singing City of Endless Spires Grasping at the Star Skies, Finnfelheim!"
????
Bristles danced across the fabric of the page, the contours and pigmentation of shellac primer layering beneath swathes of orange and gold and shimmering cerulean. The scene resolved before your eyes, a desk in a large and unfamiliar chamber, shelves of vermillion and verdant stacked to the brim with kelp-paper rolls and bound books.
An orange-scaled Finnwoman looms over the fuzzy water-colored edges of the desk. A stuttering magi-tech automaton in the shape of a crab skittered back and forth impatiently as if awaiting urgent instructions.
She knelt on the floor in a graceful motion, and it stutter stepped over to her.
A sheath of parchment pulled from a tube hooked onto the belt around her hip. Its surface marred with an intimate design and schematic; scrawled and blurred by the bristles that rapped across its surface.
She slid it into a port along an anterior ridge of the construct. The skittering little magic robot chirped in pleasant tones, clacking manipulative claws, tapping grippy legs on the floor.
The Finnwoman put a finger over her lips and the construct stilled.
"Remember, discretion my friend. The Mither has shown me her grand design, the way we reach beyond the lights of the heavens. The grand engine to carry us aloft. Together little one, we shall realize it all."
The crab skittered off somewhere you couldn't see.
The Finnwoman stood up fully again and looked over towards the crystal window on wall, staring out at the glimmering starlit sky stretching into the beyond.
The threads of the parchment frayed before you, saturated with pigment and ink until all was black and filled with stars.
Of all the places in this world there were few that could match the sheer wonder of Hlérsyngva settlements. And of those spaces in which they lived and breathed, their places of exchange are yet to be matched by the other walking beings of our world. Full of life and song and movement of goods based near entirely on need for one to thrive as opposed to the idle greed of Daevae, Fae, or Mankind.
None was more enigmatic and spectacle of the grand canals and towers of The Singing City of Endless Spires Grasping at the Star Skies, or Finnfelheim as humans have come to call it.
A Tartarian insult of an endonym.
I apologize to myself in the future and any scholars who should obtain a copy of this text, there is no singular word or phrase that captures the wonder and beauty of the word that the Hlérsyngva have given the city in their language, the ældri syngva. It is so perfect to them that it has carried over to the ynglingr syngva with no alteration, despite its long past destruction.
But I’ve strayed from the topic. There was no bazaar, no market, no boulevard that can match the grandiose painting of that forlorn’s city Sixth Ring. No words can truly do its scale and activity justice, no matter how hard I could try. And why is it an enigma you ask? For everything could be found there that you would ever need. The prices were always fair and within reason, and hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of traders from across the whole basin came to sell their wares and by of the crafts and raw materials which the Hlérsyngva would hawk.
Every return I found the place grander than before, more alive until—well that is a hard subject write of even now.
There was always the scent of some alien but salivating delicacy on the breeze, and where the shops ended in the high towers, there were homes and places of life for those who ran their businesses.
Swindles were not tolerated, violence was nonexistent and where it arose, quickly and quietly handled with great diplomatic care. The Hlérsyngva did not believe in punitive administration. The three r’s were their tenant of justice, restoration, restitution, and reformation.
It is strange for a species like the Hlérsyngva to build such lavish palaces to mercantile exchange. Having spoken on many occasion with them in our travels, Carissa and I have come to find them curiously averse to the idea of such things as profit, accumulation of wealth and economic growth in an exploitive vein. Yet they built such fantastical places of trade?
They are a paradoxical curiosity in their approach to the world devoid of the desire to compete with their neighbors or take more than they need. And as you’ll see in my other notations and acquisitions of records from our dear friend Freydis, they produce far more than they ever need.
Maybe this should have been obvious to me because in my youth they often sent Emissaries to the grand palace of Colchis. Ion’s war for freedom against and from my people had not yet fully passed the Dnipro in the South, so our neighbors were still largely intact. Yet the Hlérsyngva came to our doorsteps along the Rioni.
As to what they wanted, it was a strange request that I didn’t understand in my youth. They wished to know the ways in which we traded, the structure of our economy in dealing with foreign trade, how we set prices and such other things.
The peculiarity greatened when Mother, the vicious architect and ruthless blood-iron lance of war she often was, greeted them with smiles and affirmations of assisting with them what they needed. Being the great manipulator she was at the time, I believed she would stab them in the back and bind them in chains.
But she never did. As the snobbish, xenophobic, speciest puppet that mother was grooming to be for her own purposes at the time, I suggested such a measure to her. She slapped me, told me I was a fool of a child, and instructed me not to grace her presence again until I had read up on the battle of Halti. Needless to say, upon seeing what 5000 of the Hlérsyngva did to both a large band of Ion’s revolutionaries, and our own armies, it was much more apparent why Mother was playing kind.
Had they to only gather the numbers we would not last a siege more than a fortnight.
So, much later in life on a return visit I dared to ask Freydis, my erstwhile friend the Unifier’s daughter, why they did such strange things.
“So, we can understand why bartering, selling and buying of goods comes to be. The mindset of such things. We don’t wish to disrupt the human societies all around us and bring down war to our doorsteps, though we’d rather no one go hungry, no one want for shelter. Would the world not be a better place without bloodshed and fire?”
And her answer was so striking. To understand other economic systems and build cooperation? To avoid war? Would they give so freely to other peoples if they could? Build shelter and better lives for them if they had the opportunity without war or bloodshed?
It seems the answer is yes. And yet they fight like demons.
Do they not fight over resources? Struggle to survive in the same way as us?
And the answer is simply no after more than two millenia among them. Their world is communal; everything is shared and building towards a greater goal. It is beautiful, in a melancholic way. A beacon upon the hill compared to the throat cutting competition of the Daevae and Humans with one another and their own.
They fight and train and spar with each other for the thrill of testing skill and talent.
It's as if they can’t even conceive of such a thing as needing to fight one another for resources. Why would they ever do that?
Perhaps that’s why things went the way they did. They just couldn’t understand our greed.
What a deeply shameful way it came to end.
- Excerpt from [Redacted]
[Stats on Commerce in the Sixth Ring]
The 6th Ring, Köpman. The Goddess' Market.
Freydis who—what was that?
Your thoughts were a swirl of chaotic hues as you regained your senses. Or really, as Freydis regained hers. It took a substantial amount of time, time in which your body was moving again, to process that you existed at all. That you weren’t just some small compartment in Freydis’s mind.
A forgotten dream of the Sight. It was the previous governor, giving a construct a, well—
You’ll see eventually.
Profound sadness poured through that stardust river into you. A deep ache in the chest, there only a few moments before the play washed it away.
Much to your disappointment, the window of lucidity, if there was one, was too short for Freydis to act in. No anchor yet.
It should be fine for awhile longer.
"You blacked out on the transport, I was worried." Segrusa holds Freydis's arm, running fingers over flesh with gentle touches.
Alanna?
Through brightly lit underground merchant fronts you moved, decorated with intensive blossoming colors and hues.
Yes Freydis?
Freydis tried to see clearly all the twisting shapes, handcarved sculptures and flowing murals darting like electronic billboards over frescoed surfaces. But her vision swam with the echoes of the scintillating etches of fading dreams.
What are the mechanics of these Hermeneutics?
You couldn’t get a grasp on any winding threads.
I’m not exactly an expert.
You tried to thumb through the threads of memory, finding it a tad disorienting to pull your threads from hers in this state of total mental synchronization. Pulling out of her twin sun streams helped but still took a moment longer than expected.
Certainly more of one on the topic than I. Even the big details may help.
They’re anomalous concepts that alter baseline reality through recontextualization around said concept. Cognitohazardous interpretations that snag anyone within their bounds into the story it’s trying to tell.
I think there are two types. Circle and Spiral class.
Circle is always the same events.
Spiral is reinterpretation partially based on the person?
She fell quiet, contemplating your words. At your back in the distance were the enormous many-legged—well, they looked like Millipedes but that’s not what they were called. Freydis had been shuttled in from the palace on one through underground or you supposed underwater lines out to the sixth ring.
But that was all a blur.
As your eyes cleared of the post-vision Haze, you were able to get better views of the information pasted all around this alien yet familiar place.
Strips of glowing Rustics danced across every exposed surface, pitches and advertisements for the latest tools and magistry laden devices squirming in their messaging. Decrees and advisories in others. The information would be stuck in your head for hours.
So we’re in a circle class?
It seems like it, but this one isn’t like the others I’ve heard about.
"I saw something. I'm not sure what it meant but I'm certain it was related to why we're here." Freydis gestured as they made their way towards the exit of one of many grandiose stations.
How so?
"What, out to the commercial district for shopping?" Segrusa glanced at Freydis with sharp flutters of her gills, incredulity without the pointed raise of an upper lip.
We’re locked into the actions of the memory, or interpretation of it. We can’t control or alter the flow ourselves. That’s not normal.
"No silly, to the former Governor, to the missing resources!"
You mean I’m locked into the memory’s actions.
Is anything ever truly normal in the world of magics and oddities?
Her words burrowed into you, dredging up something in your mind that you tucked away deep. You couldn’t let her see that, she might—how would she react? What would she do if she found out what you did?
Wait, why did you care if she saw or not? Wouldn’t she understand the need to protect the world against the dangers of the anomalous?
"That’s what I just said,” she twitched her lips up into that muted approximation of a smug grin, gills oscillating with puffs of air.
A flicker of annoyance poured down the river that was you and her before taking a steep dive into amusement. It washed away the sudden fracture in your being.
“You’re such a drake sometimes.”
“Owch! Your words wound me.” A bigger grin. “But all jokes aside, was there anything substantial to this vision?” The grin faded into neutrality. Furrowed brow scales gave away her thoughtful consideration.
"Yes. A small moment, but an important one, I think. She slid something into a small collector construct."
"A collector? You're certain?"
"The Sight doesn't lie in the past. Only in the future where many spiral paths diverge, and the slightest fluttering of a butterfly's wings can alter the course of everything on a whim." Freydis wobbled, the flush of swirling pressure still tingling behind your eyes.
When did you resubmerge in her suns? Was—you couldn’t remember doing it consciously.
Segrusa pressed a hand to your forehead. Her chest fronds rippled once as she frowned. Whether it was at the state of your temperature, or the newfound knowledge Freydis couldn’t tell.
"There were hundreds of those in the palace alone, millions across the entire city. Whatever she gave the harvester, we'll never find it."
Segrusa fiddled with a small latch on her belt, unhooking and pressing a small vial into Freydis's hand. She only took one look at it, before popping the cork and downing the bitter liquid.
Freydis stuck out her tongue and shook her head. A shiver rippled head to toe and you deeply regretted being in her stream at the moment of contact.
Oh, that is FOUL!
Freydis laughed. Pure, unmarred by that usual melancholy. It rung straight through your mind warming all corners, filled with the joy of someone shedding all worldly weight for just a moment.
It was good to hear her laugh. You hoped to hear more in the time to come.
It is good to know that it was not just me who hated that repulsive witchbrew.
"Well, we'll just have to look and listen in other places." Freydis wiggled in place with excitement, fins flaring outwards with color and blood.
Mid stride Freydis twirled and began walking backwards on her toes in front of Segrusa, gill fronds fluttering with elation.
I’m remarkably good at that for someone my age.
Was that you or her thinking that?
"But enough about that! Are you ready? To step out into the city proper?"
"You're going to say that endlessly until we've seen every corner of the city," Segrusa teased, reaching out and pulling Freydis back into walking side by side with her.
Fingers twisted together in entanglements of flesh. That slow throbbing heat burning in Freydis’s breast and filling your entangled minds with quiet glee.
Segrusa leaned over to gently press her lips into the crook of Freydis' neck, against her gill flaps. You found yourself, not as a component of the play, but you and her as one, wishing for more. A strange twinge in your mind as if something was flapping freely in a current of strong wind.
Freydis gently pulled away and playfully shoved Segrusa, who didn't move an inch from the motion.
"Oooh, sometimes you're such a carenton bass!"2
You pulled back from the suns to recover, there was an edge of difficulty there this time. Small, but taking a bit more mental will to actuate. Not alarming yet, but enough to be concerned.
Freydis?
I’m here Alanna. What is it?
You hesitated. Should you ask?
No, it would probably be better to ask.
Is Segrusa fused to someone? Does she have a soul entwined with her?
There was a pause, and a flutter of emotion in her mind. It was getting easier to pick up on their passing, though you couldn’t resolve what exactly it was. Not yet at least…
You just needed to be a bit more her for that to happen.
No, she’s not fused with anyone. I don’t know why modir would do that.
The sunlight brushed gently against Freydi’s scales in greeting as they stepped out into its lush warmth. It illuminated the soaring buildings all around with panoramas of color and flowing light. Sculpted and shaped into smooth organic flowing designs, pleasing the eye, emulating the waving fronds of kelp, the curves of sea organisms, and the slopes and rises of the sea floor.
Hundreds, no, thousands, of walkways, airborne lifted canals, and transport lines crisscrossed in every direction, connecting everything together.
Welcome to the Sixth Ring.
You were thoughtless. Stunned and swimming in the play’s stream with tides of purple wonder that meshed with Freydis’s golden excitement and joy.
If the light and buildings weren’t enough on their own, great curling fronds of multi-hued and pigmented plants latched and climbed across crystal surfaces. It was a veritable jungle of life.
The streets and walkways at the ground level were flowing with crowds of Hlérsyngva, occasional groups of humans, and even the Rare Daevae. They mingled, talked, and bartered at canal-side stalls, boat stores, and building shopfronts. Traders from every corner of the Basin and beyond were hawking goods.
"Now this is my ferð," Segrusa said.
Her neck fronds huffed and pulsed in time with the extension of her arm fins, the color of the webbing and scales brightening with the increased bloodflow.
"I knew it would be!" Freydis bounced on her toes and then checked the belt loop of her robes.
Then there were the murals, moving across every piece of free surface, fantastical works of art moving like liquid Rustics, millions of them twirling and writhing across crystalline metal.
The historians and the Archaeologists would give anything to see this.
The reverie of wonder dulled beneath a tide of melancholy from Freydis.
Or was it from you embedded in her? You were having trouble telling.
There are many who would have loved to see it.
Alanna, how do we resolve a Hermeneutic?
We have to reach the end of the narrative it’s telling.
If the narrative is your life then…
The melancholy dove deeper into something primal. Fear. Maybe even terror. A deep chill driving spikes into Freydis’s spine and enough to briefly make the puppetry stall as the body stumbled. You were swept up in it, mind spinning with incoherent visions of dark flowing shapes, deep reds and violent oranges pouring across a matte painting of rapidly tearing paper.
You were drowning, grasping for some purchase in the riptide of her terror. Something to hold you in place so you could pull her back to shore.
But nothing came.
Then the memory’s excitement rolled back in and flushed you both of that misery, casting you out of her Astral suns as you scrambled to gather yourself from the wreckage. But it didn’t flush Freydis completely. She fought it hard, leaving you with a whiplash of dissonant emotion from polarizing ends.
She lost to it in the end, but seeing her struggle with that depth of trauma was enough.
Are you—
No.
"You have that bag I gave you this morning?" Before you could respond, or ask any further questions of her, the play was already shoving you along.
You eased yourself back into the sun streams, cautiously now and not nearly as deep, though it was difficult to stay there as the currents were stronger than before.
"Right here," Segrusa said, pulling out the bag. Rustics moved across its surface.
"Good!" Freydis snatched it from her gently, and shook it, listening to the sound of clinking metal.
Ugh.
Disgust skittered betwixt your mixing threads. There was something else there, fronds of memory that you didn’t quite catch. A quiet rolling anger boiling in the ethereal river that was you in her. She was worked up now.
I can tell something is wrong. Something is bothering you.
It’s complicated.
She had been so kind before, in walking you through and awakening you to the state of your emotional turmoil. It would be the least you could do to offer to be that in return?
Wouldn’t it?
Do you want to talk about it?
Not now.
"Afterall we can't go into the world's greatest trade markets without coin or goods to barter with."
"World's greatest trade markets is a little much. The world is a big place." Segrusa rolled her eyes.
"I can't say I understand or enjoy having to pay for things that we distribute to the citizenry for free. Why not simply give it to these foreign traders based on their need like we do with our own people?"
It sounded wildly idealistic. Surely no society was capable of that scale of production? Of self-motivation. Her words, about planting seeds for fruit that you wouldn’t live to see rung in your skull.
Was that how they all saw the world?
"Humans, that's why." Nothing else was needed there.
"Mmmm. True."
And there it was, out in the open. That muted anger dulled by the play, the melancholy deeping into an icestorm of sadness in her chest.
Humans.
The cause was humans. It was a black pit in her being, something you couldn’t yet wrap yourself around. Something you didn’t want to.
And here you were in her head. Immersing yourself in her whole being.
What were you doing?
Alanna.
Her thought snapped you out of the start of a guilt spiral, stomach tight with knots.
This won’t help.
Just, be better. Try to be better.
Please. That’s all I ask, is you be better than the past. I don’t care about anything else.
It was a lie. But why? She did care. You didn’t understand.
No, wait you did. She was protecting you. You could feel the echoes flowing through you. Hollowed out grays of exhaustion tinting her twin suns.
Then abruptly you couldn’t.
Though you were still swimming in her currents, she seemed farther away. Closed off at this moment. There was a rift twixt you and her that you couldn’t fix, a rift caused by those who came long before. There was a way to fix it, and you were already doing it by drown—
You shook off the strange thoughts, a brief bout of confusion settling in your belly.
No, there was nothing to be done but giving her time and space to process. Even then that may never be enough, a depressing truth about what the world had done to her people.
What else could you do but return to the play while living in her skin?
Streetside stalls attempted to grab your attention pulling thoughts away from the sudden dilemma of mind and being. Merchants shouted greetings and offered deals to anything one could imagine.
Here Freydis voiced all her thoughts to Segrusa, of how the whole world came to buy or sell their wares and lifework in the grand exchange. Of the copious details of subsidization, pricing, licensing of space and stalls for ease of access. The grand endless cycle of more people, more goods, more prosperity, more labor, more growth.
You listened, small connections starting to rise, memories of documents pulled for the construction of the files flowing through your minds. Transcripts of those who were left, who’d been there. It was like pieces in a jigsaw, still with so many holes in understanding. You could speed up the process, access Freydis’s threads but…
That would be wrong, wouldn’t it? That would bereft the context and defeat the point. What you were doing now, being like her, being her was the best path to fill all the holes.
Right?
You snapped to yourself, realizing she’d seen all of that… and hadn’t said a word.
What was she thinking? Should you ask?
"Look! Mekhanites, Nälkä, bell beakers, Phoenicians, Sumerians, Kemet, and Hattians." Freydis pointed from stall to stall, groupings of merchants hawking different items and specialties from each region or peoples, in turn others wandered past them.
"So now you're an economist too?" Segrusa teased when she had finished.
"A good governor learns the societal systems of their province!" Freydis protested, grinning the whole way.
The grin faltered seconds later and her remembered thought echoed in your mind.
Yet we don't understand a thing about what's happening to the city's production. We have a lot of work ahead.
"Fortunate for us, because a politician and economist I am not. It’s good that one of us has a head for it.” Segrusa paused and glanced at you. “What’s with the face?"
"Well… I’m worried about what prices and trade are doing in the face of all the missing resources." Freydis looked down at the shark leather bag hanging off her hip. It was strapped over her shoulder. Scrolls and various items stuck out of the pouch.
"The last thing we want is to disrupt our trade interface with the human kingdom states. If we need to adjust subsidies upwards to compensate for decreased surplus…" Freydis paused and then pointed to the bag of money.
"Let’s do some ground level evaluation, we have a lot of coin."
Freydis marched off into the trickling crowds at an abrupt pace, startling Segrusa.
“Hey, slow down!”
She slid into the crowd with ease. Segrusa struggled to keep up with Freydis in the heat of her Erudite nature. Scents and aromas bombarded them as you moved through the streaming masses of people. Pastries, baked goods, assorted meats, spices, pheromones, and decorative perfumes.
As Freydis drifted through the crowd the chimes of memory rang in a slothful breeze across mind and sight. You were caught in the echoes of memory within memory, filled with chilled, longing needles racing up Freydis’s spine.
Or was it your spine?
“Modir look!” repeated a thousand times ad nauseum as she came to a winding stop on a quiet evening. It was smaller then; the sixth ring’s arcing towers and walkways were fewer in number and grandeur.
Yet still just as imposing.
Triemedes and Alva, hands clasped. Your modir’s unified.
Happy.
Alive.
There.
But now there was tension in the muscles and scales of Triemede’s arms, as if knowing some great trial was to come. Freydis reached, as if to touch them one last time, as if she could physically shift the past by telling Triemedes what was to come.
So maybe this time she could stay.
But her hand found no purchase in this phantom dream that was almost real.
Would they be proud of you in this moment? What she had become?
How you were becoming her?
Too swept up in emotions to notice the errant question fluttering through your mind. Too occupied to register the wrongness in it.
Tiny Freydis’s voice echoed into the background as the present crashed back in like a thunderous wave. She was alone, a single figure among a current of people flowing all around as if she wasn’t there.
A thunderstorm of grief and solace rippled and tore through you both. A single tear arcing down out of Freydis’s eye.
Wasn’t this what you always wanted? To blend into the world? To be just another face in the crowd?
Why did she still feel so forlorn?
She put a hand to her head. Pressed it against one temple. Her chest tightened, breaths shortening.
Freydis looked down at her webbed hands, fingers shaking.
Your hands? When you imagined them, they weren’t scaled, right? They should be human, right?
Why could you only see scales on your fingers?
Wait.
No, these were not your fingers. These were hers. Right?
And then a familiar strong hand on your shoulder, snapping aside the momentary confusion. Freydis looked back and found Segrusa’s eyes. They washed the loneliness away, and Freydis was left with a warm tender roast in her chest. You leaned on your Wife’s shoulder a moment before you moved on to rejoin the crowd.
You shivered mentally, recoiling with a strange burn of disgust pouring into you. For a moment, you couldn’t resolve where it came from.
Alanna?
Her thoughts sunk in like a serpent’s fangs, the tone edged in a way her words hadn’t been before. Hints of venom and disgust echoed through the currents. It wasn’t hate, it was—disappointment, revulsion.
Realization smashed through, tearing you from her stream. No, you didn’t get torn, she threw you out.
The solar flares of her Astral fingers were in your threads, how didn’t you see that? How didn’t you feel it?
Freydis what—
Her thoughts were shaky, filled with dark and aggressive colors. A flood of furious heat that made Freydis’s fingers curl.
What do you do?
What have you done?
What did you—
They both listened and looked around, a common theme began to arise amongst the flow of people.
Murmurs, whispers of discontent. Foreign merchants complain of higher prices compared to previous trips. Stocks were lower, fewer items were available from domestic stalls and merchants. Everything from building materials, to clothes, to food.
I don’t—
"I like this less than I thought I would." Segrusa silently shifted closer to Freydis, the tension in the crowd palpable.
You work for—
Anomalies?
Containment?
Normalcy?
A small entourage of guards who'd accompanied them out of the palace hovered farther back in the crowd, though Freydis remained unaware.
Breath stuck fast in lungs you didn’t have. Hot shame nipping at a mental neck that was almost there. You’d been so—this whole affair and blooming emotional connection almost made you lose track of why you were here. What had started this.
Wait, why were you ashamed of your work?
Weren’t you protecting the world?
Making it a better place?
It helps people. Protects humanity.
Isn’t that what you want? A better world?
You shrunk, as her twin suns swelled in the mental plane, orange light burning blue with the extremes of her emotion. It swallowed you, unable to break the entwined tether, drowning in her rage.
"I can't say I'm fond of it either…" Freydis looked around, eyes settling on a man in rags.
Locking people, gifted or cursed with the Universe’s oddities in dark square holes, in the ground?
That’s helping people to you?
Watching them at all hours like some science experiment? Proking, prodding testing?
That’s helping people to you?
You flailed in her stream, feeling the overbearing weight of her conceptual being smearing you deeper into the fury of her currents.
And the blasted play was trudging along like none of this was happening.
"I'm sure many of these merchants have enough to get by and then some, but some look like they are just trying to survive. Even on the edge of starving.” Your gills pulsed twice, long and slow. “No one should starve, have no shelter or have to fight to survive because they can't offer enough coin. We don't let our own people do that."
Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the few!
You should have known she wouldn’t understand. She wasn’t human, not like you. She was one of them. How could she understand, she was dead, and the world had left—
She shoved your mind against the raptures of perception, dragging a face you didn’t have against the looking glass.
SILENCE YOUR THOUGHTS.
You stared, watched and listened, deeply afraid of what she might do next. Fumbling to figure out how to present your case.
"Our reach can only go so far."
Freydis lingered on those words as they moved along. Was that really true?
"And asides from that… these people have states, kingdoms and governments of their own. Extending our reach would, well…" Segrusa trailed off.
"Right."
War. Images churned in your mind, burning spires, sagging crystal towers tumbling into masses of fleeing bodies. Fire and howls of machines. Freydis briefly braced herself against Segrusa, and you writhed as the images slammed against the frames of your mind.
Is this what happened? Is this the way things went?
Is this what was still to come. Suffering, death and slaughter. Is this what would happen if they stepped beyond their borders to give others a better life? Is this what they did? To give the people world they wouldn’t see for a century, and were met with the avarice of your kind?
It seemed so foolish for one so filled with the wisdom of a long life to do.
How could I have been so naïve with you? Let you in so easily.
How did I not learn my lesson 2800 years ago. I saw your early threads and thought you were different.
I trusted too easily. You take, you salt the land, stuff what you don’t understand in boxes, destroy what you can’t put away.
She threw you against the looking glass and let the currents of her emotions and mind hold you there.
Stripping history of my people’s suffering, of our pain and destruction? That’s helping people? Preserving precious normalcy?
Destroying my legacy, the legacy of your people’s crimes against us? That’s helping people? That’s preserving normalcy?
WHAT IS NORMALCY? Something you decide on a whim?!
Do you skin the babes of ‘anomalous animals’ and hang them from your Site rafters? Force magic travelers into cells, and stop them wandering the earth for the Library’s knowledge?
And there, there is my grandchild working alongside your kind!
You—modir put you in my head, twisted our souls and you’re no better than the ones who took everything for me!
Down to the same old excuses.
If it weren’t for humanity, our idealism would not have ended like that!
If you wanted a better world, you wouldn’t create such suffering!
You would help the few by providing them what they need to live a good life! Protect them from the many who don’t understand!
You would try to study and understand what’s happening to them, find the patterns and the solutions.
You would celebrate those long gone, preserve their legacy and right the wrongs of the past.
This isn’t preservation this—to use your own words, is fascism.
She was right. That’s what you should be doing, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t that be better for normalcy? Wouldn’t that be better for the anomalies? For humans?
No, then the normal world would find out they existed. That would be bad, right? You weren’t a fascist.
Were you?
Your mind was aswirl and being torn at both ends. All-consuming guilt burning in the pit of a belly you didn’t have as you stared through the looking glass reckoning with the force of her conceptual might.
You were waist deep in evil, confronted with the fact that every containment procedure was a cruelty cast against something that was just trying to exist. Just trying to survive.
But there were dangerous things in the world, harmful things that needed to be kept at bay.
Right?
She had an answer for that too.
No, you don’t lock them all away. Suppress and provide a safe world for those that could cause harm, a world they can exist in without hurting themselves and other. Only those malicious things that actively destroy the world should be sealed in such a way.
You’re just like those sadistic creatures from so long ago. You’re a monster. I should have cast you out, torn you apart when I had the freedom still to do so.
Normalcy is a screen for your greed, your desperate need to control what the world is.
And as she telepathically tore you apart the play marched forward. Freydis leaned against a pole on the side of the grand canal, Segrusa feeding her sips of water.
Then do it! Destroy me or fuse us back totally together!
A garbled noise of translation came from her and you at once, locked together in this strange mental dance. A cry of frustration flaring deep in her ontological being.
I can’t! It’s not my choice! Modir put you here for a reason, great spirits I don’t know why!
I don’t want to speak to you anymore. Maybe never again!
I don’t even want your foulness in me, but undersky below, you might actually fukkaing change and gain some self-actualization.
Do your world a favor, drown yourself until you wake up to what you are. Then stop being a raven-starved coward and take some accountability.
Another sound echoed through you, like a door had been slammed closed, one leading to Freydis. Emotion still pooled and poured, drowning and washing away beneath the theatre’s tides. It took all your conceptual being but you were able to haul yourself from the looking class to the surface of her Astral suns.
All you could do was wade in the streams of her emotion, inured in the silence of her absence.
Freydis? Freydis please don’t leave me alone.
The thoughts were a jumbled mess, and they got you nothing in response.
She had shut you out.
In the silence of your mind you turned her words over again and again. First, she showered you with depths of emotion how to feel, and now she left you adrift in a howling prison of your own making.
All you had was confusion, questions, and guilt.
What reason had driven you to the Foundation? Helping people? Making the world safer?
Or is that just what you told yourself because the money was good. Had you kept your head down and numbed yourself to the inhumane and cold detachment of what containment required? Told yourself that by working in RAISA you weren’t responsible for those sins?
You didn’t know anymore. You didn’t know what to do or say. Had you been so totally wrong? Was your whole life a lie? Were you deeply tainted by the sins of the greater whole?
You didn’t have the answers. Did she?
Your mind jumped to a potential solution and then recoiled. No, you couldn’t do that, thumbing through her strands of memory would be so deeply wrong now.
But you still needed her, for the Anchor, for—this was her life. The Hermeneutic was her life. How long would it take to reach the end? Could your mind survive her conscious integration intact?
You didn’t know. Mither above you didn’t know.
What else could you do but turn back to the play that had started this all? Losing yourself further in her depths might drown the guilt and shame. You might come to realize what this all meant, what paths lay ahead. Or you may dissolve and cease to be Alanna.
But there was nothing else.
Freydis had recovered, and she was rejoining the flowing waves of the crowd.
You passed a small group of people with metal limbs. Mekhanites, the true parental lineage of the Church of the Broken God.
They were speaking stoically to a group of much more animated Kemet; bars of gold being exchanged for various goods at the stall.
Shifting sunlight between crystal panes cast them in dancing hues. A rather lovely place to have a stall set up, frankly.
Before they could fully move past, a small commotion broke out between the parties. It was quickly apparent tensions were rapidly inflaming.
"First the scaled ones cheat us with increased prices and withholding goods, and now you think you can swindle us!" The speaker was a Kemet wearing a long cloak and a pointed hat. She snarled with animated fury at the Mekhanites.
"We have given you the logical amount for the provided goods, as is the custom." The recipient of this snarl? A man with a metal leg, tensed as a more burly looking Kemet reached to their hips.
"Our cotton is worth more than those mere rags you get in the west. This isn't enough in the face of this artificial scarcity,” the Merchant cried. "Do you intend to rob us too?"
"We intend to give only what is fair and logical, so preaches the line of our faith in the name of Mekhane."
Hands went to hips, snarls and bracing of metal ringing in the air. The crowd froze, turning to watch what happened next.
You shifted, reacting before things could possibly get worse. A concept burned against the edges of your mind, a burning symbol encapsulating the purity of a single idea flaring with power against the scales of Freydis’s flesh.
A knife drawn from a sheath, swung, and ensnared on the humming threads of a barrier. Freydis stepped in between the two.
Her magic again, different, more focused than the spell Freydis had used to pull you apart.
Two fingers held the spell between herself and the Kemet's blade.
Shouts, thunks, and all other sorts of commotion rippled through the back of the crowd. The guards Freydis hadn’t seen before tried to push through to reach their Governor.
Of course there would be guards. For a moment all the chatter swirled away beneath the bitter taste gliding against her tongue.
You weren’t thrilled about their presence here, that twinge of annoyance spinning in your chest. It declared Freydis’s status for all the world to see and couldn’t be walked back.
But that was a lesser concern.
At the front of the crowd Segrusa stood stock still, hand still cupped where she had been holding Freydis moments before.
Time smashed forward again as Kemet’s focus darted to her.
"Please friends. Finnfelheim is a place of fairness and compromise." Freydis smiled, disarmingly, burying the fierce alarm that coiled like a viper in her chest.
“With one hand the Gill Breather calls us friend. You must think us blind to the other hand raising all your prices, claiming to have less than half the usual stock of your finer materials. We see how luxuriously you live.”
Freydis fluttered her gills letting the confusion wash across her. Luxury?
“I never believed the finned ones to be swindlers, only to have their heads in the clouds."
You blinked and took an instinctive step back. Released the shield as the blade was withdrawn and sheathed.
"Swindle? No, such things are beneath us. Fair and reasonable exchange.” What you really wanted to say was left to the wayside in your mind.
We’d love to give you everything you need to survive, but it is your kings and pharaohs who grow jealous of the plenty and immigration of your people to us.
Freydis probably wouldn’t say such things in diplomacy.
“We adjust domestic prices based on what supply and surplus we have. As your own kingdoms do in the markets of your homes."
Freydis paused, considering that perhaps stopping them from drawing weapons further would be a good idea. Another symbol flicked from the small motions of her fingers, sealing the blades in their sheaths. The concept nearly blinded you again as it flowed down through her limbs.
"The previous governorship implemented changes in material policy that are… affecting everyone. I intend to return them to what they were before, but it will take time for all to adjust. Hopefully that will ease your concern?" You offered them earnestly.
The two burly Kemet, both still at least half a hand shorter than Freydis, took a small step back and away from her. The guards finally managed to get through the front of the crowd.
Freydis held up a hand and they slid to a halt well behind her. There were more eyes on her now, and that old, crinkled feeling of being separated from everyone else began to creep in.
So much for blending in.
The Kemet puffed out air and then pointed at the Mekhanites.
"Change in policy or not, it doesn't mitigate the fact the cog lovers are underpaying our prices significantly. Look at how they attempt to buy more than half my stock! Look at how little they offer in exchange. I have families to feed, fields to tend. How am I supposed to pay our hands with these impositions?!"
You turned to the Mekhanites, not completely taking your eyes off the Kemet. They had already attempted to draw blades, what would stop them from doing something else?
Segrusa moved over to impose herself in between the two burly Kemet, towering above them.
Oh right, Segrusa.
"Our friends from Kemet produce fine and soft cotton that makes luxurious clothing. They labor underneath the harsh sun to grow and make such things. Is it not one of Bumaro's tenets that such costs should be considered in any fair exchange?"
The metal-legged man hesitated and then nodded.
"This is true, finned one. Perhaps our calculations were in error."
Freydis mimed human body language and nodded her head where you would ordinarily flutter only the neck gills. Then you turned back to the Kemet.
"The Mekhanites of the West do not have the resources to make clothing that lasts as long or as well as yours. I've seen your recent prices, and, well, you’ll forgive my crassness, they are unreasonably high in comparison to past purchases.” A lie, it had been a hundred years or more since she had rode the fine sands of the great green river to the south.
“Do you not think you are unfairly overcharging?"
The Kemet merchant hesitated, gesturing to her companions to stand down.
“Yes," she replied after a moment, hanging her head.
"We've had a lower yield of crop than previous years, and we've struggled to move what we have. The year is hard, and the cost for materials from your people have tripled the past four trips. It is breaking our backs. I may have raised prices well beyond the acceptable norm to compensate our profits."
Yes! Progress.
Then she grew angry again, and Freydis’s guard came up.
"But this gearhead was still attempting to swindle us!"
A rumble from both sides as tensions rose with the insult thrown so freely into the heart of the fire. Segrusa placed her hands on the shoulders of the burly Kemet guards. They looked up at her and swallowed nervously.
You couldn’t help but smile at the sudden unnerved realization flickering on their faces.
It was realization right? You were surprisingly unsure. That reference for human body language felt a bit more foggy.
"There is no need for heated speech or accusation. Have we not all experienced times of need, where what was once plenty runs dry? What will the raised blade bring but more hardship upon you both. Would you not prefer to compromise with cooler heads?"
Both the Mekhanites and the Kemet looked to their fellows, quiet murmurs spreading.
"It's true, even we have run dry of precious metals and been forced to dig deeper for more, impairing progress for a time." A woman with a half mask of silver metal spoke from the Mekhanite party.
“A fight here would mean eviction from your crystal halls which we do not desire.
Freydis nodded and turned to the Kemet.
"And in the same breath, have you not sometimes undersold or swindled someone whose prices you thought were too high?"
The Kemet murmured amongst each other. Through the threads of your own mind, clouded memories of many visits to stores burrowed through. Overpriced goods across many shelves and stores across a life.
It took longer than it should have to clock they were your memories.
"It's true, the Hattians often overcharge us for precious copper."
Freydis's membranes pulsed once and she said, "I think common ground is before you, and we can overlook the violence that was set to arise in heated minds, don’t you?"
You clasped your hands together, a small burst of magic dancing around you from a shimmering light Rustic.
"We all come in peace; we all live in peace. Compromise and cooperativity will carry us through hard times." She smiled and held her arms slightly out. "If not, we return to chaos… and I don't think anyone wants that."
Both parties looked at her, then each other. The Kemet merchant sighed, and the Mekhanite man appeared abashed.
Exchanges were made, fair negotiations struck, and the situation resolved.
Segrusa moved around the group and gave a single sharp gesture which forced the guards to dissolve back into the crowd. She turned to you extending a gentle hand.
"Well done," Segrusa said, expression grim. "I would have hated having to step in."
Pleasant flame burned in your chest as you looked at the hand, but something else was squirming in your belly. Agitation like the cold touch of a corpse against your spine.
Why didn’t she tell you about the guards?
After a moment Freydis took it, feeling many eyes linger on her as if committing her whole being to a memory she couldn’t erase. That familiar fear of the isolation of being held above everyone else sank into your skin.
No, not again.
It trickled away as the crowd turned away from her and became a mass of moving bodies once again. The commerce carrying forth and forgetting you in its wake, a welcome relief.
"I didn't want violence in a place of barter. I don't want it anywhere, but especially not here." Freydis said, a hint of worry leaking into her voice.
"They drew their weapons to strike so quickly. Are things truly so desperate among our friends? Have the previous governor's policies really inflamed tensions this much?"
"Can't say for sure, beloved," Segrusa said gently. "But we have learned a great deal about the costs of the previous governor's actions. Let's enjoy the rest of the day more peacefully, no?"
“Were you going to tell me there were guards?” Freydis asked quietly as they began to move.
“No, they weren’t my idea, and I didn’t want you to—well…”
She didn’t have to say it, you knew Segrusa understood. One of many things you loved so very deeply about her.
That was Freydis, right?
Right?
Freydis simply nodded, but looked back as they moved on, unable to shake the tightness that blossomed in her chest.
And you? You were only now beginning to really clock that something was changing about you.
With the fog of uncertainty about who you were growing thicker, it seemed Freydis’s prediction that you may lose yourself completely was growing truer by the minute.
Deeper into the markets they waded. Freydis tried to shake off the weights that were trying to perch on your shoulders, distracting herself with the wonder and awe of the scenery.
Small carefully crafted shrines gleamed in the sunlight, statues of her mother holding out the Earth for all to take. Patches of dirt had been carefully arranged around the shrines, designed so those stopping for prayer could attune to the Earth and thus be closer to the Mither. Rarely did you ever see Hlérsyngva wear covers over their feet.
In their wanderings a crowd gathered before them, the local bustle of voices quieting as humans and Hlérsyngva pressed in together. Freydis pulled Segrusa through to see what the commotion was all about, inadvertently losing the guards.
A blessing all its own.
A dip in the ground descended into crystalline steps and many seats. The crowd continued to grow even as Freydis and Segrusa stood at the top of the steps. A symphony of musicians gathered in the depression that formed the pit. They arranged themselves on the dirt and stone steps that curled around.
Long necked string instruments of strangely colored wood, horns of crystal and metal of different sizes and timbre, drums, bells, chimes, wooden flutes and longer tubes with keys of shimmering metal. There must have been fifty or more Hlérsyngva, and they were all ready to play their song.
Rustics filled the air as the color and tune leapt from string and breath. Not a single Hlérsyngva in the crowd dared to remain silent, their voices rising with the notes. Humans were forced to place distance between themselves and the Hlérsyngva. It was that or risk shattering of the eardrums.
In a beseeching moment, the crowd fell deathly silent, as Freydis’s voice, or maybe it was yours, rose from her throat. The tones fell into perfect synchronicity with the instruments. Few had heard the golden vocal cords of the line of Aquailian, but none would soon forget it.
You almost stuttered and stopped, that ice of judgement stinging against your skin. But Segrusa’s tightened grip gave Freydis the courage to belt with all the height of the shimmering sun.
And as the song began, the great spires above fluttered with breeze and joined in to fill all the streets with the ballad.
And with the roaring strings and whistling things interpretation rose before them.
♫ In the spring they lost their homes
To the tyrant of Mother's bones
In the waves they wept for those
Lost to the tides of a hateful storm
But with no other place to go
They roamed the open seas
Desperate to be redeemed♫
The song of their triumph blazoned against the clear blue sky..
♫ And now they ride for battle
So find your voice my lovely friends,
Strap into interpretation's saddle,
Rise in joy as it all unravels
As your arms take hold of our mantle
And reclaim that old, desperate choice, ♫
Beneath the weeping tears of the Orcadian night, the Pact of the Bleeding Sky had gathered to face the greatest enemy, the threat to all life on the plane. The Tyrant, master of unbridled hate, envious of mortal life, conjurer of unholy storms. He who had shattered the sacred back of Hildaland, drowning Hlérsyngvaaheem beneath the waves and scattering a generation.
♫ In the spring we sailed for home,
To retrieve those forgotten bones,
In the waves we mustered rage,
Into the tides of that hateful storm,
So come on and sing with me now
This was the moment we had all been waiting for,
Redemptions fire burning at your door♫
Your modir, caked in mud with khopheshes in hand, had gathered the armies of the Fae, The Machine, the Flesh, the Plant-Tamers, and so many more. She’d fulfilled their desires in sealing the greatest harms and threats beneath stone and metal and magic. Now the pied piper had come calling; brought forth their might to face the greatest enemy of them all.
Lightning arced the skies, a thousand Krakens, Gud-Bani and so much more blotting out the stars in the stormy night.
♫So come onto the planes of Orkney
Where Triemedes claimed to the raging sea,
And danced against the tempest's sky
She's fire, she's freedom, she's got our hopes in
The heart of her kopesh's gleaming motions
It's honor, it's glory, beneath the Mither's devotion
There's something building in every measure of your emotion, it's searing
Into your hearts divide♫
Freydis knew this ballad, you knew it. You had watched from a distant isle praying to any spirit who had listened. The endless tide of atrocities the tyrant unleashed as he rose from the sea at provocations. Down the slopes of that gentle hill did the armies stream, the sky filled with the fire of hopeful tides.
A red day. A bold day. A day of defiance. A century before, the Tyrant had won the first Autumn Tumult.
Now a furious spring had finally come.
Freydis' voice rose in volume, crying to the crowd and to the heavens as abstractions swirled all around them. The crowd rose in answer.
♫ Whose bones shall carry us into the night? ♫
♫ Aquailian! ♫
♫ Whose fire dances highest with all the light? ♫
♫ Aquailian! ♫
♫ Her baptism will cleanse the bloody tides! ♫
♫ Aquailian ♫
♫ The tyrant can't stop her now! ♫
♫ Aquailian ♫
♫ So tell us what does she think? ♫
The tide crashed in. Though hope seemed high, the relentless flood pressed against the host of the Bleeding Sky. Ground was being lost, death sang in the air. Then in the midst of all, issuing forth a rallying cry, Triemedes belted her inspiring song.
Here before the crowd, she manifested larger than ever she was in life, a specter of the swirling magic in the air.
♫ Sitting here wounded and bloodied,
With this muddy tide standing at my feet
In the depths before a scarlet sunrise. ♫
♫ In the depths,
Before a scarlet sunrise!♫
♫And here on this hill,
In the hour of Eels
I'm trying to recapture our emotion,
While the drum of our steps keeps
A beat in my head
And all of the things I want to believe,
Drown in the shattering of tridents,
And things that don't mean much to me,
But the truth is,
Their bones will scatter at our feet!♫
Our feet!
So lay down your fear on this bed of mud
For now we bathe in a river of blood!
Woah, I want to see the bleeding sun as my mother once did!
And throw off all my lingering fears!
Yet we're all so far away,
So ride into fire in this hour of eels,
No longer we fear of a night without end
For the light shines brighter than this dawnbringer ever did.
But time is running low,
And nerves fray and bow,
Yet the truth is,
Killing has ne'er been so easy!
So we are sharks swimming through a muddy sea!
And tonight we feast on their blood!
Whoa, I want you to see and know this is our full victory
So charge with me!
So charge with me!
Charge with me!
All for ruin!
All for new beginnings,
For the worlds end!
And deaths rend!
To lay us down on all we defend!♫
For Orkney!
Orkney!
Orkney!
Orkney!
Okrney!
Thunder split the sky; horns sounded in the lochs. For a few desperate hours, strength was renewed in all their eyes, banners smashing down that central hill.
Yet even with morale renewed, the tide only slowed not stymied in its place.
Something would have to give, death seemed nigh on the wind. The terrible costs all incurred, and in those fleeting final moments all had seemed lost.
Then the sun rose, the clouds broke upon the tyrants back, and the goddess rose to the call. It was her, the one they knew as Mither, your modir, Alva. She smote the sky with a great blade of cerulean ire, and through tears in space and time Finnfelheim’s burning spire throbbed underneath a thickening sunrise.
It was then that the Tyrant’s eyes smote with the fear and hate of an age-old terror. Great flows of Astral Fire screamed from that deathly spire and seared across his otherworldly purple flesh.
In a flash it was over, the Tyrant was run through with a blade of corundum there underneath that bleeding sunrise. A storm of great light and symbols none had ever seen writhed in blade, flesh and atmosphere. The last of the great seals was forged at the end of thirteen nights of blood and wrath.
The ballad faded away as the instruments drew their notes to a close, interpretation drifting off on the breeze as reality reasserted itself.
Applause, cheers and whoops from the entire street who’d stopped everything in answer to their people’s sacred song.
It echoed and burned in every inch of the city as the sun reached its apex in the sky. It burned in Freydis’s mind, your mind as all of reality began to swirl and the sky itself seemed to rend with trickling blood.
You mentally staggered, trying to find the once clear entanglement of you and her.
You couldn’t. There were memories, clearly yours, clearly Alanna’s, but you couldn’t tell anymore where they ended, and you began.
Or—
Wait, no. You couldn’t tell where Freydis began, and you ended.
Wasn’t that true of before though?
But now it felt like most of your memories were entangled in the mass of her emotions and memory. You couldn’t hear her thoughts, or the direction of her mind.
It took a moderate effort to pull yourself out of the quagmire, separating your mind from her flow. And unlike the rocky sphere from before in that solar plane, you were a fragmented series of barely held together fragmenting chunks and debris. There was a strange ignition creeping in along the edges of your threads, concept swelling with heat and Freydis’s blue fire.
You were growing, becoming a sun of your own.
Worse, you couldn’t pull yourself far from the surfaces of her twin suns.
Freydis didn’t notice all beginning to drift in parting streams of bodies. The fog of memory was rolling across her eyes as she leaned on that ever-present staff.
And you were snagged back into her mass, her play-bound mind refusing to let you go.
You fell into the artifice of oil painting on a metal canvas with alkyl primer sheening the pigmentation. Organo-metallic pillars burned in the sky above beneath broad brushstrokes as your flesh and cloth shrunk.
You were climbing steps from—well you couldn’t quite remember. A deep melancholy swirled in your chest. A grief that couldn’t be placed.
You squeezed Alva’s fingers with your own tiny, scaled digits. You were fifty-five, barely half the height of your peers.
Just one more way you had been set apart from them. Your growth was slower, your maturation to adolescent held in a limbo of bio-thaumic underpinnings you couldn’t grasp. It was agonizing.
But that’s not where this grief was coming from.
So much about the world was changing so very quickly.
You climbed, eyes arcing over the flowing Rustics coating the seal complex’s heavy metallo-organic ceiling beams. And Alva? She was wiping her eyes, stopping every few steps to lean against a wall and sob next to you.
Why did she weep so? What had happened?
You clung tight to her and hugged her legs.
“Don’t be sad Modir, please don’t be sad. Should I go get other modir?”
And this, your innocent little words only seemed to cut a deeper wound in her heart. She looked at you with some profound sadness as if you had shattered her heart all over again. She kneeled and hugged you so very tightly to her green skin.
“I’m sorry little one, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. She’s gone. Triemedes is gone.”
You stood there in the shadows and lights cast by those flowing Rustics, not understanding. Grand murals glimmered like the night skin in the roof of this hallowed place, grabbing your mind into threads of history. But you refused to dive in.
How could you after what she had just rained upon you.
“But she was just here? She—she can’t be gone.”
She squeezed you tighter in response.
“She is. She is. But she loved you. She wanted you to know that. That it’s not your fault. She loves you so very much. You won’t understand today. Heaven’s above how could you? You’re so small and young and—” She choked up.
“You’ll understand someday. She had to go do something important. Something so very brave cause I made a mistake.”
Tears blurred your eyes until she was an indistinct swimming shape. She couldn’t be. How could your modir do this? No, it didn’t make sense!
“Will—will she come back?”
“No little one. No, she won’t.” She pulled you in as closely as she could, shaking against your tiny body.
You shattered into a thousand little pieces. Wept with her wordlessly there against the cool metal as the loneliness tore a chasm in your acheing heart.
There in her embrace, so very afraid that if you let go she’d go too. Gasped for breath, not understanding why this had happened. Why was everything moving so fast?
It took a lifetime it seemed to come apart again and stagger to the camp outside, lending her your staff to lean upon. There at the foot of the great temple of the final seal was a grand fire and around it sat all those friends of your modir’s; made across more than a century of struggle.
They laughed, drank, and ate hearty meats crafted in styles from too many cultures and recipes to truly count. And among them were many faces you too had come to know. And all were unaware that the woman who had brought them here was gone.
You were about to shatter their reverie with a steel blade to the heart.
There was that mysterious woman with writhing arcane sigils swimming across her skin in lilac tones. You still didn’t know what they meant. She was Daevic, so her pointed ears and sacred stolen fleece proclaimed. Medea her name, she had betrayed her people for a better world and failed at some point along the way to free them in full. You’d seen the world to come, how she lived in the shadow of a mother who would not let her go.
And leaning in close laughing with low and hooded eyes was one of blood-tinted hair with feline ears and tail of colors much the same. She was Carissa, one of fiery heart and gentle touch on warm summer nights. There was much depth to her entangled soul, much pain left unresolved. And how she loved that blood elf so deeply beyond all furious reason.
Not far from them were twins, near identical to your eyes, one stocky and one lean, both difficult to look at through the ontokinetic sheen. Lights and strange symbols constantly moved across their skin. You did not know their meaning; they were older perhaps than the skies themselves?
The lithe was Inanna, a thing of beauty, starlight, lustful love, mobile war, and justice in retribution. The other was Ishtar, once Utu, of Sunfire, gentle love, defensive war and justice in restoration. Somehow, you were certain these weren’t their true names, titles assumed along the way. Their eyes were beautifully kind amber in the firelight.
They were beasts of nature, and they were not alone.
There apart and yet close all the same was a third. A woman of stature, tall for a human, with an arm removed and replaced with blackened bone. Her hair was of blood, and she too was blindingly radiant in her own way. Her blackness seeped through the threads and filled you with chill. Yet she stared deeply into that fire, and at once it struck you of her loneliness and isolation in the dark that dripped from her skin. She was Ereshkigal, queen of a realm of death in the south, arbiter of nightmares, slayer of a false god who sought to force himself upon her. The aches of a life alone burned deep in her.
And not far removed from them was a man with dark skin and black tattoos. He strangely was known as nobody and had the ear and love of that primordial fire that Alva spoke so fondly of. You did not know him well, for your modir’s had gone very far afeel to meet with him.
Among them all, the ones who saw you most were two women of deeply brown hair. One of pointed ears and wide blue eyes looked upon you now with a curiosity befitting the trickery of her shapeshifting nature. She or He or sometimes They were Kirke, Circe and a plethora of other names. A creature of doorways, way guards and shifting shapes.
The other’s hair nearly scraped the ground at her heels. She sat with a staff across her lap with eyes greyed by blindness complete. She saw you, not along any physical axis but through time and light and color. She too had the Sight, stronger than any human who would come before or after. Her name was Cassandra, and she was a creature of prophecy much like you, cursed by one who sought to preserve legacy and once doomed her never to be believed.
There were many others too, old friends among your people, but this group of unlikely composition were the closest to your Modir’s departed heart.
“Alva! Come join us!” Inanna waved, and all eyes were upon you. They saw it, the grief in your gaze and the celebration among them screeched to a burning halt.
“What’s happened?” Medea was the first to rise, looking upon your modir with sharp concern.
Cassandra’s eyes opened and she stared in the direction of the fire. “She’s gone.”
“Who?” The circle turned their eyes upon the Seeress.
“Triemedes.”
It rippled through them like a thousand punches to the gut. Rank disbelief permeated their faces.
“Nonsense!” Carissa shot up from where she sat. “She was just here, drinking and eating with us this!”
“What do you mean, gone?” Ishtar interjected.
“She has gone to hold the seal,” your modir said. She cast down her gaze to the floor.
Another waft of silence between all of you.
“Hold the seal? What folly is this of which you speak Elder Goddess?” Eresh rose from where she sat on the opposing end of the fire.
“I—there was an unexpected variable.”
They stared at her. Waiting for more that never came. Ripples of confusion and then anger rose polluting your empathic senses with a firestorm of sensation.
“Are you saying it wasn’t good enough?” Circe took a step forward, staring up into your Modir’s rising golden eyes. “That everything we did wasn’t enough?”
“There was… a mistake. It was mine. There was only one way to fix it.”
Before she could be stopped, Carissa had leapt from her seat and bolted up the steps. She grabbed your modir by the collar of her top and lifted her bodily into the air.
“Speak plainly, what mistake?! What did she do?” She waited half a second and then shook Alva furiously. “Speak damn you!”
“T-t-there was something I didn’t forsee.” Alva swallowed, dangling in the huntress’s tight grasp. “A mistake in the threads.”
You pulled on Carissa’s leather pants, crying for her to put your modir down. It was to no avail.
“So, you let her go? You used her, she had a child not yet grown and wanted to return with her to build a life she had never had?! Your child nonetheless!” Inanna boomed, all the lights in the night sky and fire brightening. “You let her do this, sacrifice herself? We would have gladly given ourselves, any of us. After everything? After all she gave, after all we gave it wasn’t enough, and you—”
“It required the heart of a mortal and the palms of a beast.” Cassandra said, still staring in the general direction of the fire. “One brave of heart and set in purpose for the good of a world to come. There were no others worthy in this time. None of us could have fit the criteria.”
Silence sat heavy in the oil-strokes. Tears poured down your modir’s cheeks as Carissa dropped her, stepping back. She shook with quiet fury.
“You just keep taking from us! You and all your kind!”
“I tried to stop it,” Alva said meekly, but no one was listening except the Queen of the Dead.
“She’s gone… she’s really gone.” Carissa stared at her hands.
“What a rotten world.” Medea stared at the firelight.
And you? You stood there in the middle of their storm of emotions and rage a burning pillar of grief tied pain.
There was the sharp toll of a deep bell. It sank deep in your bones, making skin crawl. There across the way a grand seeping gateway of darkness appeared, swallowing the light of the fire that attempted to assault it.
“We have given too much. What next will you take heart of creation? Our homes? Our daughters? For this feud of the universal weave? Weep for the dead and what you have lost. You could have prevented this.” Eresh gave you both one last mournful look and went through the portal of shade without a fond word left to say.
The twins gave your modir one last scornful look, and then they too vanished within.
From there the rest scattered to the wind with grief and tempers flared. Bitter sadness smote the air and it was just you and her once again.
“Modir, why were they so angry with you?” you asked quietly, not fully understanding their rage.
“I—am flawed and incomplete… and I made terrible mistakes. Their anger is justified.”
“Will they ever forgive you?”
“I don’t know. I have seen the many threads and they… I don’t know.”
Deep despair smoldered in her eyes.
“I may never be whole.”
You clung to her leg and squeezed her trying to find something comforting to say.
“I’m not mad at you.”
She looked down at you, with galactic tears in her eyes.
“What?”
“I’m not mad at you modir. You’re doing the best you can.” And you saw the reflection of your great crystal blue orbs shining in her eyes.
She pulled you close and broke down into sobs. Picked you up, rocking you in her arms. And you sat there together in the empty firelight as the oil began to wash away.
Freydis sailed through memory unawares of the musicians beginning to drift on their way, their set completed.
Linger she did in effervescent memory, until Segrusa's gentle touch roused her from a destined feeling she didn’t fully comprehend.
You emerged from the tides of memory and emotion a tumbling mess trying to hold together the fraying edges of identity.
And here it was, the lucid moment you’d been waiting for. The strings had gone lax, the sky filling with a brief rain of salty water that might be tears. Freydis seized control of her limbs, a shudder running deep through her whole body as she gasped for breath.
“Freydis!” Segrusa whispered urgently in your ear, her ear. “Freydis, what’s happening? Why are we reliving—” she stopped as if the words themselves were too much.
But it was really something else.
“What is—why is there another soul in you? Half there, like it’s—”
Freydis whirled around fingers already in motion.
“There’s no time Segrusa.” Freydis’s fingers moved with incredible speed. The concept burned against the tattered edges of your mind, hugr. Her fingers pressed into Segrusa’s temple, the light squirming across your skin and echoing into Segrusa’s.
Can you hear me?!
Yes, I could have used some warning about what you’re doing, but I can.
What’s happening? What is that in you?
Freydis the anchor! Hugakeri!
You practically shouted the concept, confused for a half a moment at the knowledge of the spell. Your thoughts startled you further, the auditory intonation of your Astral voice different in pitch, tone, and accentation. It sounded like some inbetween of you and—
Oh no.
Modir’s doing. A tagalong human. One moment—
She began the motions, and then her body snapped and twisted around to face the musician’s pit. Your combined dismay an endless loop of amplification as more of her filled your Astral essence.
Skirtr! I was too faen slow!
Fukka.
You wanted to scream. What now? How long until the next opportunity? Would you even be you by then? Would there be anything left?
What were you trying to do?
I was going to anchor her so she doesn’t end up being twisted and transformed into a soul-copy of me. I should have waited. Skirtr.
Soul-copy, but she—Segrusa paused.
She doesn’t. The other fused souls, there is some sort of ontological shield on them. Did you do something?
Freydis explained what happened as the strings of the play began to wind up again.
So you used soul magistry to try and cast her out of you before you fully understood the effects?
Freydis, that was remarkably impulsive.
I—I didn’t know she was a soul! I thought she was just some sort of conceptual fragment! I was disoriented and confused.
Segrusa sighed in your mind.
Soul magic is incredibly dangerous. It looks like the process of her corruption/conversion has been accelerated, if you peeled off her mind completely from you—
"Come on," Segrusa said gently, placing a hand on your shoulder gently.
It wasn’t complete. The body is hers, to separate us I would have had to extract myself totally from the flesh, and from her, and that would have required a tremendous amount of time that I just didn’t have. The trauma might have killed her. So, I did what I could manage, pulled her conscious mind and a good deal of her memories, but we were still very entangled.
She insisted on immersing herself in my Soul Essence and Ontokinetic Streams to try to better understand what modir wanted from her. And now we’re here.
“Did you hear it?” Freydis looked up at the rolling blue skies.
That explains pretty much everything. When you unraveled her consciousness from yours, you must have accidentally destroyed the ontological barriers. The soul conversion would have started happening regardless of any submergence, albeit far slower.
Her diving into you has dramatically accelerated the process.
“Hear what?”
"The ballad and the interpretation is wrong." Freydis looked down to Segrusa, wiping a few errant tears from her eyes.
"How so?" Segrusa pulled Freydis closer, holding your shoulders with such gentle touches
"It was before the first charge. She gave the speech before the first charge. The songwriter wasn't even there; he just changed things around for drama." You stared at the musician’s pit with longing in Feydis’s eyes.
What do we do? Does this mean that I’m going to—
Fear. Deep, primal fear. Your Soul Essence was at war with itself, disparate strands on the edge of you swelling outwards and burning with the blue light of Freydis’s twin suns. Every oscillating wave a few more grew outwards and the memories that might once have been yours fogged with uncertainty of origin.
It doesn’t mean anything yet—sorry I haven’t caught your name.
"Oh…"
Alanna.
I think.
.
"They didn't sing Orkney during the charge either… they sang of Death." Freydis looked towards the horizon.
A curious name. We will fix this, but you need to calm yourself. Imagine taking deep breaths. Now, I want you to focus on your name, when you were born, where you grew up, and what your job is.
"Three times your mother stamped the banner before the host of the whole world upon the hill, three times she screamed death, pointing to the Tyrant rising from the lochs, and in her shouts of fury the host of the world shouted death in turn. Together they had united behind her. But only your people, my children, understood the significance of your defiance, that death did not mean an end for them, but peace and paradise in the beyond."
Okay. Okay I will try love.
Segrusa was silent, and it took you a moment to clock what you had set. It felt like you were coming unglued at the seams.
They stood quietly, letting reality sink into their bones.
"You could always correct them," Segrusa offered gently, squeezing you.
That just made the feelings of boundless affection that were confusingly yours and not yours worse. You were in love with her and yet at the same time this was the first time you’d ever talked to her. Yet you had spent hundreds of years with her. All of it was true and false at the same time.
She’s terrified and panicking Segrusa. I can feel her fear.
You’re talking with her?
Freydis smiled at the horizon sadly. "No, it's patriotic, more dramatic, even if it is distorting the truth."
I’m trying to calm her down. Can you not hear her? Or talk to her? She’s not that far along yet I don’t think.
Segrusa said nothing to that, merely nodding and squeezing you.
I shut her out, she is—it doesn’t matter right now. Not until we undo my mistake and get her stabilized.
That’s likely for the best. I’m afraid if you start thinking at her it’s just going to accelerate the process even further. Her thoughts are already starting to have parts of your voice.
What can we do at this stage? Fukka, I didn’t want this.
I know you didn’t. It’s all hypotheses and conjecture at this point, but we should be able to manually reinforce her identity. She’s too fargone for that to stop the conversion, but it will slow it down, hopefully long enough for us to get to another period of lucidity.
Alanna, if you do this, if you focus on yourself, what makes you you, we can get through this and fix it. But if you give in, then we won’t be able to pull you back. So fight, fight to hold on.
I will try.
So, the two of you moved along, leaving the past to the halls of memory. Freydis scrounged back from the pits of longing emotion, towards the excitement which drove them forth to this moment.
And in the shadows a shade with far too many arms watched on with four soft golden eyes before dissolving into motes of stardust.
In short order you abandoned the crowded streets of the markets for one of the larger commercial buildings, drifting inside like jellyfish on a current. In the process Freydis and Segrusa eventually found themselves in a bakery, warmly lit with sconces of orange and yellow Rustic lighting casting squares of light upon the tiled floors in the mimicry of a clear sunset.
What is your name?
"Oh! Welcome, welcome," the Finnwife at the counter said in an accent Freydis couldn't quite place. "Come to try Western Basin fluff dishes?"
Alanna Bree.
There were dozens of shelves containing hundreds of different baked goods of all kinds of sizes and shapes. Colors danced in the warm lighting, strange ornamentations slathered onto the various shades of brown and white. Toppings, sweet or sour or bitter, and producing all sorts of mingling odors in your nostrils.
"Fluff dishes? Oh! You mean pastries!" Your eyes shone like the brightest stars in the night sky, clasping your hands together. Segrusa looked on with hapless bemusement.
"What types do you have? Where do they come from? How do you make them?"
When were you born?
"Easy Freydis, don't overwhelm the poor Finnwife." Segrusa shielded her mouth and whispered to the baker, "Apologies, she's very excitable."
August 15th, 1988 in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City.
The Finnwoman behind the counter fluttered her gill fronds several times in rapid pulses. "Passionate about the art of soft desserts, are we?"
What is your favorite color.
"Any chance to learn new recipes or food traditions I will take." You took Segrusa by the wrist and pulled her closer. "So will she."
Your heart fluttered at the feel of her scales against your skin.
Purple.
Segrusa's noise of protest died with the barking laughter of the baker.
"Very well! Very well." She gestured. "This is the Serinakaker, it's an almond buttered sea-wheat doughed cookie originating from an Iberian grotto that's been refined for presentation here in Finnfelheim. It is a favorite among Northerners such as yourself! Though we aren't able to produce as many as we were two decades ago."
What did you study in this university you went to?
This bakery is becoming a major distraction.
"Hnghhhh." Segrusa's stomach rumbled as she practically drooled over the fluffy folds of delectable flour and sugar and bread.
An oscillation of admiration poured into you, the Astral Sun your mind was becoming swelling as a few more strands rippled.
You always did love pastries so much.
"They go especially well with Seadragon haberdasher." The woman's lips curled at the edges as her Fins flushed with blood, slyly knowing she'd caught a f- customer in her net.
"Or perhaps you'd be more interested in Skolebrød, jellyfish jelly and Atlantic cane sugar filled buns lathered in honey."
Alanna, focus! What did you study in university?
As the baker continued to taunt and fill Segrusa's mind with images of sinful treats, Freydis tried to hang onto every word, listen and absorb. But your brain couldn't help but latch onto that worrying statement. 'Though we aren't able to produce as many as we were two decades ago.'
Double major in Cybersecurity and—
And
And Thaumaturgy?
Were crop imports being affected? Were they disappearing like the other resources? Why?
Not good. What is your job?
We haven't had time to really interrogate this issue to the farthest depths… but if it is so visible everywhere in the commercial district…
My what?
Freydis was caught in another memory, Triemedes standing with her in this same shop so many eons ago. Pointing from shelf to shelf, asking to try each. Oh, how your modir’s face and gills had filled with the trappings of indignation.
That slow ache of longing seeping into your stomach as you tried to reach out to touch the Unifier. But the vision shattered like so many panes of glass.
What is your job?
Freydis was about to ask the baker about her supply issues, when motion out of the corner of your eye caught her attention. It was a slow turn to look, just as Segrusa was finishing up. She was menacingly wielding at least two bags of delicious smelling pastries, impulse control broken.
I don’t think I have one—I’m dead aren’t I?
No, wait—
For a fraction of a moment your vision crackled again, the scene with the previous governor playing out rapidly in the minds eye, clearer than before, focused in on the harvester construct.
It’s—
A specific number carved into grooves on its metallic hull, pulsing with thaumic light. Distinct marks on its chassis, and claws.
The vision faded, revealing the same harvester, here just outside the shop. swiveling it's eyestalks, evaluating its environment. Freydis grabbed Segrusa's hand even as she finished stuffing a pastry in her mouth.
That’s the construct!
Segrusa turned, bun sticking out of her mouth, and tilted her head questioningly. You pointed, attempting to be subtle.
"That's the one."
It was not.
Alanna, focus on my voice, fight that pull, fight! What is your job? Are you human?
You dug in your Astral nails, mental fingers not quite your own with their golden scales. You grasped your threads pushing through the fog. It was difficult to pull your swelling sun out of Freydis’s stream to focus, you were practically pressed up against her conceptual mass now, a quarter of its size and growing.
I am Alanna Bree, Site-212A’s RAISA Liasion. I ensure that the files for contained anomalies are kept up to date, and any ontokinetic/ontological deviations, memetic or cognitohazardous alterations are properly addressed. My job is important for the maintenance of normalcy and protection of humanity through information security and integrity.
But—is it though?
I think I’m human?
Segrusa looked at the construct, a dance of momentary confusion washing across the slow ripples of gill fronds. You watched her purse her lips, before realization snapped tight like a true dragon seizing on a titanocrustace.
Good hold onto that! Hold onto those things tight, because what’s about to happen I won’t be able to ask them again until it’s done.
Freydis, is that what made you angry?
The harvesters eyes winched back around, and stopped, focusing on them. They dilated, the hue of its Rustic marks changing to a bright yellow, and it bolted.
Focus on keeping her stable Segrusa. You know what’s about to happen.
Segrusa surged out, you running behind her. "We have to capture that harvester!" Freydis shouted. "Stop that construct!"
The guards, who'd been trailing an unobtrusive distance behind them, were utterly bewildered as first the construct ran past, and then Freydis and Segrusa.
Segrusa shoved two bags of pastries into a hapless guard's hands. The doppler effect rendered her "Hold these!" into a garbled and barely distinguishable blur.
"This smurtr is fast." Segrusa growled as you ran, hands darting to her belt to draw out a rod of carved metal that promptly began to glow in her fingers.
The construct jerked right down a side corridor.
Segrusa wheeled about and up into a momentary horizontal run on the wall to avoid overshooting or clipping the corner.
Your fingers shot through the air, frost bursting at your fingertips and feet. The concept band discharge of magic squirmed against your growing sun and then iss flowed in brilliant light from your drawing fingers.
Paths of ice snaked outwards as Freydis skated, half crouching to increase her speed and stability.
The guards, having regained their senses, wheeled around the corner some distance behind.
They turned right at a divider, a sharp left as Segrusa abandoned running, and hopped on the snaking ice path. She drew forth an iss of her own with the rod. Segrusa flicked her fingers out, curling her arms in a circle.
She tried to catch the Harvester's legs with strands of frost to slow it down or stop it altogether, but they snapped as soon as they pulled taut.
“It’s got some countermagistry in it!” Segrusa yelled.
Iss in one hand, you drew ferð in the other. Again, the concept throbbed against the swelling strands of astral threads, and something else was lost to the fog.
I think Magistry is making it…worse? It’s so—I like it. The thaumaturgy. I can see all the complex webs and constructs.
Freydis and Segrusa accelerated, arcing up stairs and then down a sloping ramp. A poor Finnwoman and five fledglings squeaked with surprise as the construct knocked their feet out from under them. You briefly met their eyes as ice, then you and Segrusa zoomed by.
Skirtr, magistry is making it worse. Alanna focus on who you are!
"Almost got you." Segrusa said as they slid down yet another ramp. She extended an arm as she got closer to the construct.
She would have had it too, if there hadn't been double doors leading out into the market district.
The construct burst through, tearing a hole at the base of the entryway. It darted to the left.
The blunt force of impact nearly knocked Segrusa off her feet and onto her back, only stymied by her excellent sense of balance, and Freydis's quick motion with a pulse of ice. You skid left to follow the construct, serpentined through the crowd, gasps of surprise and shouts of dismay marking its fleeing path.
The construct was almost caught at the edge of a canal. Segrusa's grasping fingers scraped on the metal just barely missing a grasp. Then it was gone, leapt out and down into the bustling narrow waterway below. The sides of the travelway were congested with gondolas and small boat-turned-shops anchored within.
You stopped at the edge, colliding with the railing with more velocity than you meant to. The construct looked up as you peered down at it. The little hrísungr looked almost smug. It was evaluating whether its pursuers would still be chasing it and taking its time too.
Infuriating.
"Skitr!" Freydis exclaimed as Segrusa took a quick glance around and bounded off to her right at a dead run.
I still have time to capture this thing, it’ll need more complicated rewiring to stop this flighty behavior, but I just need to nail it down.
You drew your fingers up into the air, light refracting from your fingertips. The forming lines glistened in the early afternoon sunlight, the symbols blooming in the air before flowing into Freydis’s fingers. She aimed, and jerked her hand backwards, shouting "Hō!"
Or it would have if the construct hadn't had an incredibly powerful barrier. Freydis’s commanding Rustics slid off of it like a hand trying to grasp a grease fish.
You grasped hard to the strands of memory. The concept burned in your mind, and you were desperately trying to stop the swelling. The attempt was futile, and instead those astral fingers jerked and grew longer, flecked with webbing. Why were you trying to do that in the first place?
It was right about then that the Guards came bounding up next to you, having finally pushed through the crowd.
"Helvíti, that thing has a barrier on it. We'll never catch it in the water." Freydis banged her fist on the metal railing and immediately regretted it. You shook out the fuzzy feeling that lingered in the bones and nerves.
Before the guards could get clarity on just why they were chasing a harvester mech, Segrusa deigned to make a reappearance in magnificent style.
"Freydis!" Segrusa yelled from behind. Freydis turned her head, the auditory schwoop of a skiff filling her ears long before she saw it.
She leapt into action.
You vaulted over the side of the canal, Rustic bursting off your twisting fingertips. The descent slowed and you barely noticed the swelling strands.
A hammerhead skiff ripped over the side and dove down. Segrusa arced it with incredible grace and caught you in the second seat. The vehicle ripped out of its dive just a hand’s length above the canal water and tore forwards.
"Where did you get this!?" Freydis bellowed over the wind in her hair, clinging to the handholds.
"Commandeered it!" Segrusa shouted over her shoulder.
You wrapped arms around Segrusa. The skiff took off with a Thaumic roar, sharply pulling up. An upwards, aerial roll spun them around to avoid vessels in the canal and several very prominent pieces of architecture. Your stomach arced up into her throat.
The construct was fast in the water, they'd been designed that way, but the skiff was faster in the air. It caught up to the small crab mech far quicker than when they'd been on foot.
The construct swerved to the right down a side canal. Segrusa jerked her hand on the powerpad to the right, aerially drifting the skiff in an impressive show of streaking thaumic lighting.
"Overhang!" you roared as a metal arch with curtains loomed in immediacy. Rather than dive, Segrusa jerked her hand, and they rolled onto their side. The skiff slid through a gap in the arch, several curtains batting your face at high speed.
The construct zipped right and then left in front of you. It juked between canals in rapid succession; forcing Segrusa to employ every trick in the book she had just to stop them from colliding with a walkway or building.
"Harvesters aren't supposed to do this!" Segrusa roared above the noise.
You whipped by several Mekhanite merchants hammering on steel drums and bells.
"I've watched half a dozen ram into a wall repeatedly for half an hour before finally changing direction."
"This one has to b— pole!" You shouted. Segrusa pitched them left and down, spinning underneath a horizontal scaffolding beam.
"Think I'm going to be sick." Freydis burped as her stomach roiled.
"This one has to be what?" Segrusa yelled.
The construct juked again, forcing her to go up now with the slope of the canal.
"Modified! A personal model. It had a barrier that my Rustics slid off of!" You squeezed tighter to Segrusa. The skiff drifted around another corner.
"A barrier? This has to go dee- Skirtr!" Segrusa hit the brakes as the construct zipped into a small flow through pipe, a fish ladder. The skiff just barely screamed to a halt next to the wall.
The sudden halt rattled Freydis, and this was the moment her stomach decided it had had enough. She discharged the pastry she'd had earlier into the canal below.
"Fukka! Can't follow it through there."
She punched the wall for emphasis, coming away with red knuckles for her troubles.
They hovered in place, Segrusa staring at the pipe while you gagged. Segrusa arced her head to look back at Freydis as airsickness set in.
"Ugh. It got away." You leaned over again, and that morning’s breakfast came back up.
Segrusa looked back forward and started to ease them back in the direction they'd come from, lowering down into the canals instead of continuing in the air.
"We'll get it eventually. Can't outrun us forever."
But you couldn’t outrun being twisted into Freydis for much longer.
The 4th Ring, Stad. The Goddess' City.
Hey, HEY, focus on me. What’s your name?
Freydis.
No, wait. No I’m—
It was hard to—you struggled to pull away from that conceptual mass twice your size. Those twin suns felt like you, but they were separated. Who are you? What is your name?
You didn’t want to think about it. You wanted to lose yourself in the past playing out, enjoy these moments of happiness. Break out into song and celebrate while you still could. Why was Segrusa asking these difficult questions.
I’m Alanna Bree?
"It has to be a personalized model. One the previous Governor built herself." You gestured as another station flowed by. It was similar to the ones in the sixth, but with far fewer Murals advertising luxuries and more advisories about health and safety considerations for disposal of waste and what to do in the event of certain hazards in the home. There was music too, coming from the strands of elaborate artwork, statues, sculptures, fountains, and elaborate embroideries.
Hold onto that. When were you born?
A myriad array of shopping bags practically flowed out of your arms. Yet you were still recovering from the multiple rounds of stomach flips inflicted by the chase through the canals.
Iceland, 050 YBSW
No that’s—August 15th 1988, North Sinai, New York City.
"I would love to pick it apart and see exactly what she did."
Hold onto that.
"Let’s focus on arranging finding it first. With modified enchantments and protocols like that, it is going to flee and hide whenever it even so much as gets a thaumic whiff of us. Finding it ourselves is going to be nigh impossible. I'll alert the guards and security forces across the city to be on the lookout."
"For the best." You tried to pivot her thoughts away.
But you lingered on the issues you'd seen in the commercial ring, unable to escape the uncertainty they left in your lap.
Or at least you were about to right up until the golden kiss of the sun washed across your scales. It was starting to hang lower in the sky, only a few hours now until sunset and all the buildings lit up the sky like a reflection of the sea of stars.
The sun across your scales wasn’t what stunned you.
Words escaped in a typhoon of wonder. You both exited the thaumic-lev station, heads tilting upward.
Pillars rose far up into the sky, immense sculpted towers of the ever-familiar alloy that, until this very moment, had only ever been viewed at a distance.
Now, up close, They dominated every direction and field of view. Truly gargantuan works of art, formed and carefully carved into flora and fauna of the sea. No two were quite the same and there were tens of thousands!
Yet despite their enormity, they were impossibly dwarfed by the colossal spiraling arch of Finnfelheim's central tower, the light in the darkest nights, and beacon of the city's grandeur.
You reveled in the warmth across your scales. Your mind ablaze with the grand imagery missed Segrusa’s question.
I’m trying to hold onto this thing you want me to but it’s hard. And I’m so tired. Love, why do you keep asking me these things? Can’t we just relive memory?
Listen to my voice. You are not Freydis, and I am not your love. You are a human, you just told me your name was Alanna.
That’s right, you had. Why did it feel so unreal? So far away? Why did you say it at all?
Why didn’t she know you?
You just need to hold on, we’re approaching another lucid point.
A small dagger to the heart. She was lying to you, was it idle hope that this thing would come along? Would it be so bad to just give in and embrace who you were? Why wouldn’t she—
Love, her memory threads are coming apart. I’m digesting and storing as many as I can in my memory, but she’s—
I know. If we can just keep her remembering her name—
Alanna, what did you study at university?
Alanna. That’s right, you’re Alanna. Didn’t you just say that? What did you study?
"By the Mither's grace." Segrusa's eyes focused high into the sky, jaw hanging slightly open. Her gill fronds stood on end.
"Are those… what purpose could things of such immensity serve? Surely they must be shrines, monuments to the Mither."
I don’t think I’ve ever been to a university. I don’t think those existed yet.
Wait…
Thaumaturgy?
No, that’s—
No, it was computer science. A double major I think but I can’t remember the other.
"Houses. Abodes. Places to live." Shivers arced up your arms and spine, fritters of excitement working underneath the scales. The fine hairs in-between your neck scales stood on end.
"The fourth and fifth rings house Finnfelheim's people, but most of the towers are less than a quarter full. We could house fifty million."
What’s your favorite color?
"Houses!?" Segrusa reels. "Fifty million?" She stares, mouth slightly agape, membranes sagging, before waving a hand. "Surely you're joking!? That is half the number of our entire population, perhaps a fifth of all humans in existence. That is ridiculous!"
Indigo, I think?
"Yet I'm not joking." You turned to gaze at Segrusa and then looked back to the towers. Stared in awe at the sheer scale and craftsmanship necessary to erect structures of this scale, much less sculpt and shape them into so many artistic expressions.
What’s your job?
"The infrastructure, the material requirements that's…" Segrusa did some math on her webbed digits. "The entire population… I cannot believe they all live here. Right here. Ten Million Hlérsyngva. Is it compulsory?"
No I don’t want to. I don’t want to be that. That’s monstrous. Putting people in cells, maintaining the information infrastructure for that, I’m enabling it. I’m horrible.
Horrible. I can’t be—
"Fifteen, and It's by choice," You added, still lost in the sheer scale and craftsmanship necessary to erect structures of that scale. "Not all of them live here, some live in the commercial ring, some in the artisan ring, so on and so forth."
You are what you are and you can still change Alanna. But not if we can’t pull you back out. There is still time, but that is what you are. You work for this RAISA and this Foundation, your name is Alanna Bree, you had a life before this, an identity.
"Fifty million." Segrusa turned the words over in her mouth.
It’s working Segrusa, we’ve slowed it down.
Everything was a spinning ball of confusion. Maybe 2/3rds of the size of those identical twin Suns, and you could feel their mind and thoughts. Why was she—was she not a part of you? Or were you different altogether?
Your name was Alanna, but why was hers Freydis when you were nearly the same? Whose name was the correct answer?
Pray to your modir that it’s enough to help her survive the last few uses of magistry in this day.
"I just… this is the work of ten thousand years of patience, generations of careful cultivation, collective effort, and faith in the future many of our predecessors would never see." You raised arms like a priest preaching to a flock.
You floated higher into the stratosphere of your people's grandest achievement.
"Everything that came before was for this moment, the moment that people like you and I stand on the shoulders of Giants whose names we'll never know. Together they form the collective spirit of this place, of this truly unmatched city of dreams."
"I've really lost you now," Segrusa said with a mock dramatic sigh. "Whoever will rule our wonderful shining city now that my wife has become a priestess?"
You crashed back to earth. Lips pressed tightly together with the closing of membranes.
"Sorry, I just got lost for a moment. I have dreamt of this place, this moment a thousand, thousand times."
Segrusa hesitated, fronds lying flat. Her nose wrinkled, fins half extended.
"No, I'm sorry, I know how much this means to you. I don't mean to mock." She paused.
For a moment you stood quiet together. The bustling hubub of the residential ring echoed all around you as the denizens went about their lives, oblivious to the names and status of the peculiar couple and their entourage of guards standing in the middle of the walkways, staring up at the sky.
"Let's go up," you shattered the silent, pointing insistently. "They have sky currents!"
"What?" Segrusa blinked, looking over at you like a shark without its head.
"Sky currents! The innovation I told you I always wanted on Gud-Bani! List—"
"No no, I got that. What do you mean go up?"
"The towers! To the top!" You pointed and bounced on your toes. Before she could stop you, you bolted for the revolving doors. The entry Rustics were already humming against your fingertips, shopping bags fluttering in the breeze.
Your mental sun swelled swallowing another strand in your growing and beautiful flames.
"Hey! Hey wait for me!" Segrusa cried after you, nervously laughing. You stopped at the door staring back at her, wondering what was wrong. up, and gulped. She did not like heights.
Several hundred floors later, you stood ten's of hands away from the entrance of one of the sky-currents.
Pressed up against the screen of the window, you kept making noises; looking at the sprawl spreading out to a trickle in the 8th.
The twinkling kelp-shaped tower swayed gently in the breeze. Residents who came this way and that gave you both odd, amused looks. Their membranes and fins pulsed the whole time.
You turned away from the window, and noticed a small group pass by, dressed in rags. A strange pang echoed in your chest at the empathic disillusionment leaking from their skin. A moment of alarmed unease twisting in your belly as they walked out of sight and around a corner.
"We should have dropped off our spoils at the palace or let the guards take them back before we came up here," Segrusa said, clearly winded and trying to be the adult in this situation despite the intestine knotting height.
"Nonsense, that would have taken an age. They can hold our bags now when we go down the tubes." You turned away from the window to look at your wife.
One of the ultra-sonic lifts beeped and the doors slid open, a mixed group of humans and wandering out, and scattering across the floor towards different hallways and doors.
Time dragged to a steely crawl as your eyes traced to the shape of a construct standing in the middle of the foyer of this highest floor, stuttering and shuffling from leg to leg. The same construct from before.
Finally! Our chance to grab it!
"Segrusa, no sudden movements or noises. It's here." You dropped your voice to a whisper.
You carefully lowered the shopping bags to the ground, doing as much as possible to avoid sudden movements. The guards watched the construct and you both.
Segrusa turned her head slowly to look. "Of all the places… Today is just full of coincidences."
"Here's the plan. I—" you began and ended abruptly.
The construct's eyes swiveled in their direction, froze and dilated focusing on you both. For a moment, it seemed like you might get a spell off.
Then it took off for the sky-currents door, and for reasons you couldn’t place, there was a brief flood of relief pouring through you from the woman who was and wasn’t you inside your mind.
"Here we go again!" Segrusa sprang into action, bolting after it. The rustics burned off her fingers ready to activate the sky current door before you could reach it.
The construct mashed the button, and the roar of rushing water, amplified by thunder in a compressed space, filled the atmosphere. It leapt inside with all the grace that a crab could ever muster.
"Skirtr!" Segrusa yelled, stopping at the door. Her face contorted in terror, rooting her to the spot with momentary indecision.
Was she afraid of heights?
"Segrusa!" But it was too late, you couldn't slow down, and you collided. Screeching of jet-propelled, compressed water filled your ears. You voomfed through the tubes, entangled in one another's limbs.
She was scream-singing, while you tried to detangle from her. The whipping current saw to it after several seconds of near collision with the tubing walls. You zoomed up and down and around, arcing lower in the network.
After a few seconds, you abruptly realized Segrusa was still screaming and flailing.
"Segrusa, like this!" You extended fins and started spinning in place to control the tumble and direction.
Segrusa quite abruptly stopped scream, and mimmicked you. Together now you surged forward in the water, moving with the current.
"There!" You sing-yelled over the roar of the jetstreams, nodding your head. In a parallel tube the construct was zipping along. "Interchange ahead!"
Segrusa looked, deeply regretting gorging on so many pastries. Her stomach must have twisted at the dizzying heights. The interchange was upon you in seconds. It was trivial to swerv, hopping the transition port and racing after the construct.
It must have seen you, because it hopped to another transition route. Then it burst past a few travelers. The hapless Finnwomen and Finnmen were promptly scraping the glass at high speed as Segrusa and you muscled past with deep apologies.
The network twisted, curled, another current jump. Down, up, down, left, right. A precipitous drop obscured by white bursting foam. You surged beneath the bottom-most floating platform into the undercity.
The light of the sun hit the canals and metal above, shining through the thick platform. Above, the great towers climbed high into the sky.
Here in the ocean water, looking upon thick volcanic rock and coral in the central rings, you found yourselves propelled alongside tremendous nega-towers. They were anchored to the underside of great floating platforms, mirroring their corresponding twins above.
For a moment, you almost forgot the mission. That forgetfulness nearly caused you to miss the constructs trajectory change.
It was truly easy to get lost in the spectacular world of multi-colored bliss, coral reefs, and metal nega-towers.
I missed this view.
A deep longing curled up in warm waves across your spine.
Me too.
Another junction, another loop, down, up, right, left, left again. You rushed after the wiley harvester. Closer and closer, almost within reach. You extended fingers, almost grabbing onto one of its metal appendages.
At the very last possible moment, it hopped currents, racing in the opposite direction. You overshot the interchange, that split second reaction time beyond either of you. All that could be done was to watch the quarry slip away into the towering masses.
"Lqngubak hrodi little vifill." Segrusa cursed.
You were deposited somewhat non-gently on the very bottom floor of one of the great nega-towers. Thwarted and out of breath, you lay on top of Segrusa looking up at the vast interlacing web of transluscent pipings, and the kaleidoscope of hues and colors dancing against the brightly lit waters of the ocean floor.
"I am starting to hate that harvester," Segrusa grumbled, sitting up and abruptly regretting it.
It was her turn to empty the contents of her stomach.
In all your wisdom, sat up much slower, staring at their surrounds. Then you looked back at her wife.
"Let’s do it again,” you said with far too much glee.
"What!?" Segrusa's eyes widened, and her gill fronds stood on end. "Are you mad? We'll never catch it now, it's away and gone in the network."
"Oh no I know."
"Then what possible reason could you have for wanting to go back in there?" She asked. The pitch of her voice lowered with the oscillation of her fins.
She really must be afraid of heights.
You were back up on your feet in seconds.
"It was incredible! I want to do it a hundred more times."
"Goddess above, you are going to be the death of me." Segrusa knew they would be here for a while.
Don’t say it.
Huh? Sorry I was monitoring Alanna. What shouldn’t I say?
Never mind.
The 3rd Ring, Torg and Brage. The Goddess' Crafts and Art.
Hey, what’s your name?
You sat upon a bench with Segrusa, watching Hlérsyngva and humans from all walks of life meander among the gardens, workshops, restaurants, artisan galleries, and guilds.
HEY! What’s your name?
Was she talking to the you thinking and feeling, or the other you with the Twin Blue suns that you nearly matched in size. You had a scroll out, though you were struggling to remember when you produced it. Or where you produced it from, maybe the bag on your hip?
Freydis I’m losing her.
An inkfish quill lazily worked across the parchment.
Beloved, who are you yelling at?
Try reversing the order of the questions. There’s a chance for a moment of lucidity during/after the Vision. You remember this one?
Surely you’d remember that right? A vision bound to happen soon?
I do.
Hey, what was your job?
The construct had gotten away, twice now, and while something in the pit of your stomach insisted you really should find it sooner rather than later, you couldn’t help diving into thought. And your thoughts they certainly were.
Right? There was an air of uncertainty there about the origin, small twirls of confusion from some strange bundles of Astral thread woven into your vast mental star.
This was a good day. The best day in years.
Hey! You, yes you, the one thinking about how good of a day this was, what is your job?
Now she definitely was talking to you. You thumbed through the threads, a sharp pain in the right temple flaring as your long webbed Astral fingers flicked across one of those strange bundles. You mentally gasped with lungs you didn’t have.
I don’t have a job—wait?
No, that. No that’s monstrous! Why would I ever do that!
Your feet ached from all the walking, the running and chasing of the construct. Arms tired from the many bags of pastries, clothing, and luxury items obtained in the merchant’s ring. Well, that and the repeated trips through the sky and under currents.
You didn’t want to think about this. A thick ball of hateful flame flared against your diaphragm.
Why was Segrusa torturing you like this?
Mither above, there is so little of her left in there.
What is your favorite color?
Blue! Royale Blue!
You remembered this night. You’d spent the late afternoon talking to artists about their craft, tailors of fine clothing about their materials and methodologies, and artisans about the ethos of their workplaces.
You just need to hold on a little longer and then we’re going to fix you.
Who—is that your name too? We’re the same, so that—unless we’re not?
You spun in confusion, another cluster of memory fiber swelling beneath your fingers. You were so close to being completely you.
Right Freydis?
You’re accelerating it, don’t interact with her! Focus on the incantations we talked about.
What did you study in university?
No two places were the same, the approaches, viewpoints were as wide as they were varied. All of it culminated in a unique and beautiful tapestry of Hlérsyngva and their lives. Yet as you sat there enjoying the breeze, all of them were also experiencing intermittent shortages of material that should be, materially, in heavy supply.
University? That’s a strange word. Is it human? I think I would—
Wait. Wait, no I—magistry computers? What is…
Whose memories are these? I don’t understand. What is happening to me?
You were so madly in love with all of it, and yet disturbances to the state of material life plagued paradise. If that weren’t bad enough, Segrusa seemed set on inflicting terrible amounts of confusion against the fabric of your mind. K
You’re Freydis! You can’t be anyone else. But there’s something wrong. There’s something so terribly off because—how are you only half of the twin in your head?! Where is it? Where’s the other conceptual half of you?!
You both looked up at the city around you. No words were spoken as the brilliance of day gave way to the majesty of night. The majestic glow of dancing Astral Driven lights flared against the sky and air around the towering structures. It was like one of your Christmas trees that you might remember if you weren’t almost totally Freydis Aquailian.
Is that what you want?
Where were you born?
Every single tower and building were a beacon to the night, so bright that they drowned out the stars themselves.
No—no, no, no!
It was Iceland! It was—
What is Sinai?! What is New York City?! When is 1988?!
It was growing hard to think, the Astral Intrusion dense in the air as it was. The landscape around them was sculpted of greens, blues, reds, and yellows. Statues sat between paths, and murals danced across the lawns. All of it lit up with the arrival of night.
I wish this day could last forever. There is still so much to learn of the city and its peoples.
Someone was shouting at you.
Your eyes came to rest on a particular installation, a scene you'd heard a million times playing out like a schism. The interpretation was always incomplete, never bringing to the visual seams. The Rustics where there, but they never answered in full.
"My love you don't have to do this." Alva, your goddess, your modir. The voice was distressed as it was everytime it replayed.
"I do, you know I faen do Alva! I will not let another." Fury, anger burning in the breath a few feet from your ears.
"If I told you that this was it, this was the way we all win, it wouldn't have happened! Now is the chance to let another." Pleading as the voice split into multiple layers, the eminence of emotion bursting through and swallowing you whole.
"Faen it all Alva, I will not doom another to this fate! I ran from responsibility once, and Agrusa paid for it with her life. There is no-one else, nothing else to do."
"Think of your child! Think of Freydis, what all she will lose."
"You should have told me the costs from the beginning! There must have been another way, how could you have been so careless…"
The voices faded again into unintelligible words, as they always did.
Your stomach trickled with hollow sadness, closing the eyes to push away the scene from the mind.
"We should get back soon," you said to greatest love of all your life. As you levered yourself off the bench, slower than was desired, you struggled to get your limbs steady. The sky above began to ripple, gashes in atmosphere twisting into wriggling protrusions of flapping pinks and oranges.
It’s here, you have to get her to say it or we’ll have nothing left! There are only a few bundles still there!
That all too familiar feeling crept back in, sudden weakness rippling through your limbs.
What is your name?!
Segrusa got up with a groan, and noticed your wobbling. She leaned over, hand pressed to forehead. "You're burning up."
You know what my name is, don’t be silly.
"It's fine," you said.
No, listen to me! This is a matter of your soul, what is your name?!
A priestess came along the path to fetch you both.
It’s Freydis silly—
You reeled, sharp pain in your temples as more of those unswelled bundles rippled beneath your fingers.
No—no wait that’s not it.
"Majesty, are you alright?" the priestess asked, accelerating her steps as she hurried over.
Think!
Whispers rose into distinct words, a voice calling. A voice you hadn't heard since you were but a spawnling.
No that wasn’t right. This wasn’t your memory, but every part of your mind screamed that it was. Why did it feel so alien?
I can’t—
I don’t know!
Pure panic swelled your star, you were Freydis. You were Freydis. Freydis, Freydis, Freydis—
No! That wasn’t it!
Then the headache swam into the confines of your temples, squirming down to sit behind the eyes. Viscous scarlet oozed from the widening wounds in reality's fire, dragging down the horizon like nails across a chalkboard.
You were about to die. Whoever you were before was about to be erased.
Take my hand!
"Freydis?" Your lover's voice was fuzzy and distant, everything happening so far away. You were vaguely aware of someone calling you Majesty.
And in the mental arc of your mind there was a woman with golden scales. The woman you were supposed to be, forcing your star into an indeterminate yet almost her shape. Her hand was stretching across the gap between you as those last few strands that weren’t who you were supposed to be throbbed inbetween your threads.
There was something in her outstretched hand, a concept. A name. It burned against the framework of your mind, and the swelling of those last few strands washed away beneath its light. You grabbed it desperately, head flung backwards as the Vision poured in, and your name, not hers, your name burned like a star in the Astral Night.
I’m Alanna!
Welcome home, Freydis.
Segrusa I’ve got her!
The woman who you might have become swayed on her feet and managed a weak "No longer a Queen." Her speech was slurred.
Hold on Alanna!
Segrusa moved in slow motion, as Freydis' lids came down, something more calling to her. Something she was a part of. Four golden pinpricks of searing evervescence swam against the black void of her closed eyes, infinitesimal shapes writhing in the starlit dark.
Welcome home, daughter.
She slipped into the black and eldritch embrace in her lover's arms.
But all good things must come to an end.