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Abigail Im-Immaru1 and Aleah Im-Immaru,2 otherwise known as PoI-8710-02 and -03, are seated in an interview room across from an unremarkable woman in business attire.
Interviewer Notes: PoI are identical twins, with some deviations. Abigail exemplifies a leaner build, and Aleah is of more stocky character. Notable features include dark brown hair, brown eyes, light brown skintones, extreme Akiiva output, spatial distortions, a haloing-lens effect of orange light framing the outline of their bodies, and the presence of dynamic, luminescent skin tattoos across all exposed surfaces. The tattoos are of unique linguistic and pictographic character, in some cases resembling early Sumerian hieroglyphs in composition and symbolic representation. Despite this resemblance, no existing linguistic reference points for meanings are available.
Abigail is staring at her fingernails, while Aleah is looking directly at the Interviewer. The Interviewer’s voice is shaky and she is tapping the fingers of her right hand on her leg beneath the table. .
Interviewer: So, now that we have the formalities out of the way, I’d like to ask you a few questions about a topic you’re—
Abigail: Are you even with Operation High Tide? You look a little young to have this kind of clearance.
Abigail continues to avoid eye contact and looking at the interviewer.
Interviewer: Pardon?
Abigail: Eh, nah, not pardoned. Did you spoof the clearance electronically? How did you even know how to get ahold of us?
The Interviewer blinks several times in rapid succession.
Interviewer: I—
Abigail: That’s pretty exclusively need to know. Or so I’m told. Can’t believe this, they’re letting teenagers have access to our files.
Abigail looks at Aleah. Aleah looks back. There’s a small exchange of hand gestures and shifting of eyebrows and facial features before they resume their previous behavior. The Interviewer glances between them both multiple times in rapid succession, eyes wide.
Interviewer: Mrs. Im-Immaru, I am not a teenager; I just turned 30…Look I have all the proper paperwork and permissions—
Abigail: Sure you do. Look, there’s a line in our cooperative agreement for this sort of frivolous situation. You can’t just drag us in because you’re some wiccan who wants to have a fangirl moment with—
Aleah turns to Abigail and puts a hand on the latter’s shoulder.
Aleah: Abigail.
Abigail looks at Aleah and rolls her eyes.
Abigail: What?! Look at her, she’s practically fresh out of an American High School! This is unbelievable. I had business with Amaterasu in Jakarta this evening, and I had to cancel on her to come deal with a Jailer Toddler hoping to meet their hero. Look at her, she’s quaking in her chair!
Aleah removes her hand, and shakes her head, sighing loudly.
Aleah: You’ve not let her say more than a couple words. I really am sorry about this. She’s in a mood.
The Interviewer looks back and forth between Abigail and Aleah.
Interviewer: It’s not the worst interview I’ve had this week. I apologize for disrupting your…Diplomatic overtures? My questions will be quick and then you can go about your business.
Abigail: Too late for that.
Abigail throws her hands up and leans back in the chair, kicking her feet up onto the table. She balances precariously like this.
Interviewer Notes: PoI-8710-02 dresses extremely very simply for a goddess claimant. Fuzzy sneakers, jeans, and muscle shirts? With that said, the temperament and self-importance is definitely what I would expect from Inanna.
Abigail: I had to make reservations with her years in advance. There’s no unfucking my schedule now.
Interviewer: Again, I do apologize.
Aleah rubs her temples with both hands.
Aleah: Do you want me to talk to her?
Abigail: Oh that would be lovely, I’ll give you her number when we’re done here.
Aleah: Uh-uh, only if you are going to let this lady speak.
Abigail: Huffs. Fine.
Abigail waves a hand at the Interviewer, still rocking on two chair legs.
Abigail: Go on, ask your jailer questions.
Interviewer: Do you know what SCP-9000 is?
Abigail: Enlil’s fat ass, just because we can doesn’t mean we actually do look at your files or your skip shit. It’s like torture porn, technically within my domain, but Kur’s walls, I do not care.
Aleah: Abigail, what did I say.
Abigail: I let her finish.
Aleah: It’s not something we’re familiar with no.
Interviewer: Right, uh maybe you know it as [unintelligible Elder Finnfelk].
Abigail’s head jerks up. In one solid motion she sweeps her legs off the interview table, and lands all four legs of the chair back on the ground. She looks at the Interviewer with an inscrutable expression. Aleah stares with an open mouth. This continues for the next two minutes.
Interviewer: Sorry, do you need me to repeat it?
Aleah: No. We heard you very clearly.
Abigail stands up, pointing at the interviewer. Her chair skids back across the room, and spins in circles on one leg, twirling in the air on a glowing circular track of light.
Abigail: You’ve got a lot of nerve bringing up Finnfelheim with what you’re doing to it.
The interviewer starts at Abigail’s sudden motions, staring at the spinning chair in the back of the room.
Interviewer: How did you—
Abigail: You do fucking realize how sacred it is to them right? There’ve been squatters digging up and building on that mass grave for millennia now, but destroying what’s left of their art? Stripping out the heart and soul of their thaumic-technology and sanding off the trace of their fingertips? That’s unconscionable. A new low even for you vultures.
Aleah: As bad as what the Americans have done to the natives who lived and worked the land for tens of thousands of years before them.
Interviewer: I’ve—The organization has been made aware of how much of a violation the containment protocols for 9000 are.
Aleah: With all due respect, Ms…
Interviewer: …Bree. Operator Bree.
Aleah: With all due respect Ms. Bree, you’ve not been made aware of it enough.
//Several seconds of silence. Operator Bree stares at her clipboard.
Ms. Bree: I’m asking upstairs to consider a different approach.
Abigail pulls her lips back, showing teeth.
Abigail: Oh really? Are you now? You going to finally give it back to them?
Operator Bree shifts in the chair, looking anywhere but her interview subjects.
Abigail: Oh, don’t look so shocked, we knew the moment you stumbled upon that god-killing crab.
Operator Bree blinks in rapid succession. Her mouth opens and closes three times.
Operator Bree: You know about 4700?
Abigail laughs.
Abigail: We were there when it was being built.
Aleah: Metaphorically. Not physically present for its exact construction.
Abigail: But we were there the first time it was ever used. You don’t forget something like that.
Operator Bree scribbles something rapidly on a notepad.
Interviewers Notes: PoI-8710-02 and -03 intimately aware of SCP-4700 and the Finnfolk. Unclear if risk to Operation High Tide?
Abigail: Thank Tiamat’s Muddy Waters your little council of maniacs doesn’t have control over that particular piece of engineering. They might get the idea that they can just blast away anything that doesn’t slot into their definition of normalcy.
Operator Bree shifts in her chair and looks at the clipboard again.
Operator Bree: Let’s go back to your original suggestion, of giving it back to them. Finnfelheim, Thera.
Abigail and Aleah lean forward together.
Operator Bree: It’s not something I’ve ruled out. It’s not really my call either, but I intend to pass a proposal upstairs… if they don’t laugh me out of the room.
Abigail scoffs.
Abigail: Just words until the money is put where the mouth is.
Aleah: We’re getting far off track. Did you want to know something about Finnfelheim?
Operator Bree takes several moments to shuffle through scattered notes.
Operator Bree: As a part of updating its documentation, I wanted to know the perspectives of those who were actually there for its existence. Primarily, what it meant to you so we can understand the greater totality of its… destruction.
Abigail and Aleah are silent for the next three minutes.
Both: To us? It’s a failure.
Abigail and Aleah stare at their hands.
Aleah: We weren’t there when the tablets were baking in the sun. It cost our friends everything.
Silence for the next two minutes.
Abigail sits up abruptly, placing both hands on the table and leaning forwards.
Abigail: Did you find her? Among the debris, when your people have been desecrating the grave. Have you found her?
Operator Bree blinks.
Operator Bree: Who is her?
Abigail considers Operator Bree for an extended period of time. Bree shifts in her chair.
Abigail: Freydis Aquailian.
Ms. Bree: I don’t know how we would have—
Abigail: You don’t understand, she would not have died like a mortal. You would know if you had found her body. We looked for centuries.
Aleah: Anything out of the ordinary, strange remains that couldn’t be moved or—
Operator Bree: I am not completely sure what you are looking for, but we’ve found no corpses. The occasional preserved bones, but nothing strange or out of the ordinary.
Abigail and Aleah are silent for several minutes. They then turn to each other and start gesturing rapidly.
Abigail: You don’t think—
Aleah: Why would she? What would—
Abigail: No think about it for a minute. They would have found it; we would have found it. You don’t just— really, you don’t think?
Aleah: That is not something we should be poking at too deeply.
Abigail: Seriously? You don’t think we might be able to—
Aleah: Best not to. Whatever she has done, is doing, will be doing—
Abigail: Well there is a way to check.
Aleah: You wouldn’t.
Abigail: What is she going to do, strangle us? Pull out our skeletons? Don’t you think she’d want to know too? Don’t you think we should see what she’s planning?!
Aleah: Think about the conceptual risks.
Abigail: We aren’t the Olympians. I know exactly the approach—
Aleah: Don’t even—Abigail!
//Abigail and Aleah abruptly vanish from the room. Operator Bree is left alone. After several seconds she slowly sets down her pen. She stands, peering over the edge of the table. She sits again and takes off her glasses. //
After ten seconds, she shakes her head. Bree presses a button on the recorder, and it beeps. She presses a button on the table, and it clicks.
Operator Bree: Uh… I think they’re gone.
Five seconds later, a guard enters the room with an Akiiva sensor. He looks around, pointing the sensor at various portions of the room.
Guard: They just vanished?
Operator Bree: Yep.
Guard: I’m getting nothing but residual readings so they’re not hiding. They’re just gone.
Operator Bree: That was the strangest interaction of my career.
Guard: What did they say right before they poofed?
Operator Bree shakes her head.
Operator Bree: They were asking about a body and then just started gibbering to each other cryptically. Then, poof.
Guard: Reality Benders, they’re all mad.
????
Fine stencils of flayed lines stung across the parchment; the stuttered marks of a graphite etch marching the boundaries of sight across the page. Following in the path of the fragmenting lines and filling in the spaces came the tight, harsh strokes of a worn brush. From its decaying bristles danced depth, shadow and lighting into a corridor, arching lines of striated material demarcating fine cables made of those oh so familiar metal polymers. Grooves and etches of Rustic marks flowed at the behest of a finer detailed pen.
The former governor stepped ever further into the dimly lit and brackish watercolor maintenance shaft, her crab harvester guiding the way. Its thaumic lights and eye beams ate into the tarry black of the ancient corridors.
The air was chilled against her scales, the smell of ancient rust and damp stone permeating her nostrils. There was a taste against her tongue, earthy and rich as if she were filling her mouth with rich soils.
This place was old. Ancient and filled with traces of those who once called this place home in a different cycle. It should be dead, lost to cobwebs and dust. It wasn’t. It felt strangely lived in, alive, as if those distant residents milled about their daily tasks, oblivious to the ghosts they had become.
Deeper into the abyss they tread, turning, left and right. Marched down acheing stairs. Every descent, every step through a layer of increasingly ancient, brutish, raw, and lost organic architecture. Murals danced into realization and then dissipated at the behest of the brush, their power of interpretation silenced by the immutability of dream.
The deeper they tread, the warmer the air became, the heavier a new strange scent grew. It was eccentric, the wrappings of something sweet and fruity entwined with effervescent metallic tribulations and earthy dirt. As if she was smelling the arc of creation itself at the beginning of time.
Perhaps she was now, revived now only in memory, name swallowed in the tides forever in pursuit of something she was ill equipped to fully conceive.
Yet here she was, wading through this whole buried landscape of a forgotten and ancient city thrumming with life and power. The channels and canals ever flowed.
Just barely at the edge of hearing were voices, the murmur of crowds milling about, songs sung in an age lost to time and memory. Remembered in only half deciphered tablets of crystal.
A low, rhythmic thump grew louder with every step.
Bright and furious light trickled in the darkened abyss, the air thickening with Astral particles.
Down into blinding light they finally strutted, emerging on the edge of an endless cavern. The heat was warm against her scales, like a mother’s embrace. The scent of creations edifices washing across her like it never had before. Like it never would again.
She-whose-name-was-swallowed looked out upon the majesty within with a sense of intrepid reverence. Her eyes traced to the curved edges stretching as far as the horizon would resolve.
"And this my friend, my ever-loyal companion, is the key. What few souls must have gazed upon this wonder? She shall be our source, the reactor that shall lift us to destiny, and her freedom." She raised her arms to the cavern beyond, pushing them slightly out, fins extended.
As if reaching out to touch the spark found at the very beginning of everything.
"But this shall be no easy task. No, much will be needed to realize the dream. Sacrifices will be made, but all will be greater for it."
You must be wondering now, how truly many had ever glimpsed the sight beyond. What titans must she have stood next to in the ghosts of history’s weave?
Will I describe it now? Do you remember what I said in all those years ahead? Those years long ago? Those moments in the now and forever upon the dais in that place you called Carnegie?
It’s what a fragment fading piece showed Hege, you, Triemedes and the one you call Sherry. Your answer lies there though a reminder may be needed at the very end.
The parchment began to fray at the edges, the ink wilting and flowing away as single and immense lub-dub echoed clearly against the distortion. A voice rippled against your mind in time with the pulse.
"Freydis."
The 1st and 2nd combined Rings, Hǫrgr. The Goddess' Belief and Heart.
The throbbing call of a waking mind rudely jolted you back to reality. Light and swirls lingered in your eyes before clearing. There was a piece of scroll draped over your face. The tang of drying ink filled the nostrils.
Color and light resolved into a pair of screaming, dark purple eyes against the scroll.
You bolted up far too quickly. How many times in your youth had you been warned against it in the aftershocks of Sight?
Searing pain rippled through the temples and pulsed behind the eyes. Disoriented, you thrashed, chest tight with a distant terror. This only worsened the predicament, as sheets and parchment tangled with flailing limbs.
It took far too long to rip the algal paper aside.
Mither above!
Breath came in harsh waves. Gills flickered in distress. Frantically you grasped at the bed sheets trying to untie the knot. Freedom was hard fought. You pressed yourself up against the large mollusk shell that comprised the backboard, nails digging into the cloth and calcified wood.
The moment of lucidity was fading, and the strings were tightening.
It sounds like you’re having a fun morning. Did you anchor her in time?
Silence seeped in around rasps of fluttering gills. You, Freydis Aquailian stilled, the flight response fading as quickly as it came on. Awareness and realization of the surrounds settling the sudden and irrational fear roiling in your belly. Unpleasant taste of bile lingered on the tongue.
Did you anchor her in time? You couldn’t feel her oscillating emotions or mental tracks.
No, there it was, those echoes of her still thrumming in the flesh your soul had been supplanted in. But there had been something else in the moment of lucidity. Something strange in the fluttering through the stages.
Yes, yes, I got it off. Faen it all, what was that? What was that?!
What was what?
Something in the Sight, not part of the memory. I—purple eyes. Medea?
Medea? Wait—
Do you think she has been caught in this Hermeneutic? That is what it’s called right?
Yes, it is. I don’t know, I can’t be sure until we physically see her. I do know I haven’t had visions in hundreds of years. Why now?
Medea? Visions returning? Many more things to worry about. Always endless complications.
How is Alanna?
She was in a sorry state. Anchored but fragmented. Much of her was still twisted into the shape of your astral threads, and though the anchor had saved her core concept, its deconversion was abysmally slow.
She’s stabilized, but it’s ugly. She’s a mess of ontological fragmentation and corrupted Astral Threads.
The anchor will work on its own without us. We could leave it to do that, but it will defeat the point of whatever Modir is trying to teach her if she can’t even comprehend this dolphin and jellyfish show.
Yet I sense you’re still mad at her?
Of course, Segrusa could read you like an open book. Why was that a surprise?
Of course I’m still mad. You saw her thoughts on what should be done with magistry in the name of this normalcy she so desperately clings to. My mistakes with the ontological barriers aside, she reflects how little humanity has learned from their past.
No, in fact, they are erasing it. Erasing the greatest crime committed against us as we speak and have been for a century or more. It’s infuriating to share a mental connection with her. A knife pressed to my chest. Actively slicing open an old wound; leaving behind an oozing gash of memory.
Segrusa fell quiet, her thoughts and emotions obscured without the expressive intonations of gills and face to read from.
Then why help her at all?
You slunk back down into the sheets, muscles squealing with exhaustion. Your ears had stopped ringing with the sounds of fleshy thumps.
Because it’s in part my mess. I did this to her, unintentionally or not and I’m not about to leave her to fend for herself. We are better than that, we have to be better. I will fulfill the obligations I have to fix her, and then she can find her own way.
It’s more than they would do for us. It’s more than they ever did for us.
You’re a better person than I could be in this situation, but that’s always been the case.
Alright, what do we do then?
The room was dark, as it had been before. But the silence, that creeping black was somehow more oppressive than before. Hungry, and waiting for its chance to swallow you in its depths.
"Just a vision. Just another vision," you had said softly. How you had altered the pitch and chords of the voice, miming the tones of a soothing lullaby your mother once sang so long ago.
Your heart ached with the palpitations of those precious memories. The notes cooled the anger and fear boiling like a pot in your belly.
And then it was like the dark was an old familiar friend. Lit by the motes of Astral starlight from the thick particles in the air.
When you come through that door, and you will, we’ll have—do you remember this?
I believe so if it’s the memory I’m thinking of. It feels like the right time placement.
We’ll have—uhm.
Your thoughts slurred, eyes drifting down and threatening to fade back into dream. Its onset was like a sudden storm sweeping upon a sailboat in a calm ocean. Yet was it really so sudden? Your muscles were already screaming with exhaustion.
You were so tired. Not just in this physicality of memory, but in the soul.
You’d been at peace in paradise, and now you were here. Strung up and puppeted, for what? What was the point of being in this human flesh vessel? Why subject you to watching as another had their flesh and mind twisted into yours by mistakes at your own hands?
Why now after all this time were you being repeatedly slapped across the face with the raw flesh of an exposed past playing out like an extended moving picture in a holodrama?
Why? Why you? Why not another? Had you not thrashed enough against the cruelty of reality?
Freydis?
The frustration and exhaustion were agonizing, lapping and eroding the vice of agitation trying to crawl up your spine. What kind of rebirth was this? What kind of second chance at physicality was this torture?
Just, why?
I’m so tired Segrusa. I can’t—think straight.
Were you supposed to help humans come to terms with their past, to see the path narrowly walked was one bound for destruction? Was it because this twisted cycle writhed in your memory? You had watched everything you had built burned right in front of your eyes. That was enough for one existence. Why make you relive it again?
Why did that have to fall to you to teach another?
Look at you, in this bed, still half your life ahead and full of optimism. Happy, you were happy then. That pure kind of happiness in the absence of true understanding.
Blissfully unaware of what was in the tide ahead.
The absurdity, the cruelty. Callous, and cold, and yet someday you’ll understand.
Don’t pass out on me. I think I’m about to walk in.
I don’t think I can stop it.
Segrusa, I want to go back to the undersky. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to relive it.
In that moment you wanted to lay down and close those blue eyes and drift forever in the dreams of paradise. A thousand and fifty-five years old and perhaps you shouldn’t be.
Perhaps your people should fade on into the mid-morning mists at the end of their tenth century.
But then again, you were not ordinary. Age was yet another permanent reminder of how far apart you stood from the crowds. Of how you would never be among those who would be wrinkled and bent at this grand age.
You could never be that deeply coveted reality of just another face in the crowd.
I know.
And yet Segrusa’s thoughts alone were an anchor and beacon against that crushing isolation. She was a lullaby, rocking you gently against the cradle of sleep that pressed against your mind.
But of course, sleep didn't come, that would be a kindness that didn’t fit the themes of the coming days.
You were rudely jerked away by the opening of the chamber door and a flood of hateful light.
Guh.
"No," you mumbled. "No, whatever it is, it can wait."
Are you still with me?
"Don't worry," her voice, that smokey low song in your ear. It was gentle and full of warmth and love; it brought a flutter to your heart.
Unfortunately. It’s so bright.
A face, draped in shadow by a single hand to see the approaching outline of Segrusa.
Good, what are we going to do? I need you lucid.
The room filled with the scent of sea-lily perfumes. You never took her to be the type to indulge such things and yet she had such peculiar feminine softness.
The gears of your mind spun into meticulous mathematic intricacies, thumbing through the threads of five thousand years of thaumic rituals until you found what you were looking for. It would need some modification.
And some improvisation. Hopefully this was the right memory.
When you start touching me, and you will start touching me, we focus on the magistry and pushing it into the anchor. Use the heat of the moment to channel the concepts.
The door shut behind Segrusa, plunging the room back into gloom. You lowered those long, webbed, digits. Waiting for your eyes to adjust.
She was faster than your eyes. Her scales were so very dark, an advantage that had, on more than one occasion, made her especially effective in night fights.
You tried to put that out of mind, not wishing to linger in violence.
Air had displaced, and the bed depressed with weight.
Oh, I remember. Riskier than your usual schemes, and yet so very typical.
Something different pressed to your lips, it wasn't clay but smooth, cool and vaguely white. Porcelain, you'd heard humans call it. A soft, warm hand tilted the chin up for ease of access sending the drums in your chest hammering. It was a sharp contrast to the tangy and chilled liquid contained within.
The somatic motions will carry us. Go, now.
A tempest of affection swirled in your belly, eyes burning with blue in the quiet dark.
You met her gaze, the normally dark red of her irises a brilliant neon crimson.
The Rustics flowed into the strands, up into the conceptual anchor of Alanna’s name. They squirmed in the threads that were both yours and not yours.
Light bloomed along Segrusa’s skin, and soon her stream of magistry was tangling with yours.
[10%]
It’s working, we keep going until it’s done.
"I've cleared your schedule, passed everything off to your deputy ministers for the week."
"What happened?" You asked between desperate gulps of medicinal concoction. Embers of love and affection swirled like the flickers of a campfire in your chest.
Threads were uncurling, writhing shapes pulsing with bright purple stardust. Memories that were definitively not yours reconstituted in a storm of twisting remembrance, fog rolling back on their painted textures.
[20%]
"You passed out in the Artisan district and began spasming." Segrusa stroked the contours of your cheekbones with such gentle yet provocative motions. It drew a full body shiver and another flood of magistry up your spine.
"Your physicians are convinced the added excitement and stress has increased the frequency of the Sight."
"They're all hacks, and quacks," you replied petulantly.
How was it that you were still such a child at this grand age? Was it optimism? The unrepentant joy at the life you had lived. The beauty of the larger world and how unpleasant it was to feel trapped by a foisted duty?
Were you too shielded? Was that why you didn’t see the fires to come? Or did you simply refuse to believe the possibility that that could be your reality.
"Yes, well, they may be hacks and quacks, but they are hacks and quacks who care about your wellbeing. Almost as much as me." Segrusa kissed the knuckles of those webbed digits softly.
Then she ran ridged fingers through your hair.
A whole bundle of thread collapsed. A massive ripple that poured through you like skipping boulders on a pond. Dozens of memories and personality traits squirming away from the shape of your twin suns into something—the same and yet different. She’d been a rocky planet before, but now as Alanna’s mental iteration began conceptually diverging once again, it ignited with purple flame.
Curious.
[50%]
Something wrong?
The drag of scaled digits across such a sensitive scalp sent chills dancing up the spine, membranes pulsing erratically. Warmth and pressure welled in your abdomen, a quiet desperation leaking into the atmosphere of the grand, golden chamber.
No—no, just different. Mither above.
Still enjoying this all these years later? How many times do you revisit these sorts of memories?
H—hush and focus.
"Now who has the silver tongue?" you sipped down more of the warm tingling liquid, shivering beneath the sheets.
You were right, it was the memory you suspected, and it was only going to get more intense.
And here is where trouble raised its head. The deep threads writhed, stubbornly resisting the flood of magistry seeping into the cracks of the webbing. They were in your shape for a long time. It would take more to push them along.
[55%]
"Yes, so you keep saying?" Segrusa's fronds fluttered twice, hand moving to cup your chin yet again. Heat pooled behind the scales of your cheeks.
It’s not enough, we’ll have to give more. Be more.
"Did they find the construct yet?" you asked. It wasn’t a lucid question, but memory. Memory of that day of shopping and chases and lovely small moments in a city full of life.
Twist into each other then?
You looked deep into your wife's eyes, losing yourself in the striations of her irises.
Submerge and let the somatic motions carry us. Can you keep up?
"No, not yet. We have eyes everywhere but searching all of Finnfelheim is no small feat."
The threads weren’t budging at all now. Hard stuck. You would have to dance.
Well, I’m no child of the goddess, but I certainly can keep your pace.
I’m ready.
"Right… right." It was a deeply exhausted and breathy sigh that poured from your lips.
You leaned into the fingers dragging across golden cheeks, Segrusa’s hand tracing its way down your front.
Memory churned in your skull, a strange vision of golden fingers tracing down a human abdomen—
"We have the day entirely to ourselves, the whole week ahead really. Tell me coral of my soul, what desires do the currents of your heart and mind wish to indulge in today?" A fire in your flesh at the low smokey tone of Segrusa’s voice. Pooling deep in your abdomen.
"Sleep. Sleep and to lie with you,” Your voice bore the longing rising like a howling tempest in your belly.
It inflamed with the fingers dragging across scales, massaging the flesh as they drifted farther and farther down the torso. Your gills flicked wildly, fins extending and collapsing with pure, pink anticipation.
Dance with me?
Auric mental fingers extended to Segrusa’s avatar whence it appeared in the Astral Mindscape.
Gladly.
And she took it. You burned, pressing into one another’s conceptual flares and dove into those resistant strands.
There was the flame of passion and pulse of flesh. There was the desire to entangle. A conflagration in your flesh on the cusp of bursting free and snatching her into the sheets.
Segrusa leaned in and gently kissed you. A brief gesture, a momentary dance of tongue against tongue; followed by the dragging of lips across the skin of your cheek.
Those resistant spider silks of stardust burned in your passionate star fires. They flared with purple striations.
It was working.
You drowned in her taste, the breath of her lungs filling your throat. It wasn’t enough, you needed more. Needed all of her.
A shiver shot straight up the spine. Segrusa paused for but a moment to nibble on the lobe of one finned ear.
Then her hand disappeared from sight. All at once you were inured with the flood of her pheromones, the scent of delicate sweet fruits.
"That, I am happy to provide," she whispered with that gravelly husk in her throat.
Segrusa raised the sheets, and slid under, even as you turned to face her. Together, you shifted into each other's touch and fell into a familiar and affectionate rhythm. And Your mind became a storm of screaming sensation.
[80%]
A Forgotten Bliss on the Edge of Dreams
Cool wet blades of what must have been—
You struggled to find the word in the incoherent black.
Grass, yes it must be grass. Cool and wet against your skin, and there was something else. A warm slow wave of heat washing across your feet and legs, dissipating somewhere around your hips. You had those things, yes?
Everything was jumbled and twirling around still. Like you’d been scrambled up and scattered out of order.
Your breathing, yes, you had lungs, it was slow and steady.
Fire. On the grass in front of a fire? Piecing these concepts together was a herculean effort in its own right.
They had distinct letters in your mind. Jumbled symbols of something you should know that glowed purple in the charcoal abyss.
Then there was something shifting in—
A nose, that’s what it was called, right? Aromas, odors. Something sweet and sticky in smell, with a particular wooden character.
Suddenly, everything clicked together like a jigsaw puzzle. A spider’s web of color and concepts burning against your mind’s eye.
It was almost too much to go from snatching these things together with mental fingers from the jumbled black threads to suddenly having to contend with the taut omnistorm of ideated meaning spinning in a kaleidoscope.
Memory poured into your skull like someone filling a cauldron full of sleep; the pieces stitching themselves together. Certainty of a concept, of a name that was yours.
Alanna.
Voices, familiar scrapes against the filing cabinets of a vast library of memory and understanding.
“There. That should be the last of her.” The voice was light, airy, a soprano. A songbird’s aria against the ears.
Your chest seized with the vice of anxious memory. She was the one. The Twin suns burning in the mental scape, the woman who’d pulled you from an all-consuming void.
“That was electric Freydis, my head is still spinning. Are you—”
“I’ll be fine Segrusa. I’m a dead soul bound to the Astral Stardust. We’re past the conceptualization of physical exhaustion. Or I thought we were.”
That’s right. That’s right she was dead. Dead yet, given new life in your flesh. What an insane concept.
Was any of this real?
“It’s still my job to worry, but fair enough. Reconstruction was intense. That bombardment of memory and ontokinetic solidification on that scale? Once that would have worn us to the bone.” The second voice was deeper, a contra-alto that washed across the ears with a smokey hum in its intonations.
You knew it less well.
“I’m still inextricably bound and entwined with her physical form and memory threads. Not right now for the former it seems. For reasons beyond my ken, we’ve been physically detangled, for the moment. Who knows how long that would last. If I had more time, I could likely unwind us completely. But it would be risky.” Someone touched your face.
Their fingers were soft and warm against the cool evening air. Ridged silken scales pressed into flesh, checking underneath the chin, tracing down the neck.
Had you ever been touched before? Shared the gentle intimacy of fingers gliding across flesh?
No, you hadn’t.
The drum in your chest beat faster, a strange warmth humming in your abdomen. What was that? What was happening?
The fingers lingered over the sides of your throat, gently pressing into the soft tissues. There was something there. Some strange, submerged structures that felt like a natural part of the throat and yet foreign in a way you couldn’t place.
“You already messed with that magistry once and look how it almost ended. Better that you don’t risk agitating the magistry fabric anymore than we already have.”
“A fair point, but I have a responsibility now to ensure she comes out of this intact.”
“We’re playing with fire, and for a human who sees us as something to be put in a box.” The words stung, cinching a vice in your chest. What an impression you’d made.
“Frankly I was concerned immersing ourselves to reverse the conversion process would result in overshooting and ending up getting swallowed in the way she almost was. Cursed to a blasted short existence of songless, uninspired flesh.”
The fingers shifted downwards, dragging and pressing along the collar bones, massaging the muscles as if trying to provoke a response that they weren’t capable of.
“Lucky then that the ontological magistry proved more than capable of keeping our conceptual streams separate.”
“And yet, we don’t know if humans now have the capability of pulling souls out of the Undersky. Or something worse, like harvesting conceptual energy of the long parted to power war machines. Aggressive, greedy little things.” That wasn’t what you were. You wanted to shout it, scream it at them so they’d hear you.
But would that change anything?
You just wanted to ensure that people could live safe and happy lives without the worries of the unknown and depths of malice lingering in the dark. Yet, this wasn’t the right way was it? They were right, you weren’t building a home for the morrow, you were caging what you didn’t understand. Poking and prodding it in the name of science, and yet never growing closer to truly understanding.
Your stomach churned with deepening chill.
That wasn’t planting seeds for a tree whose shade you’d never see. This path was only bound to create explosive fractal points to shatter a world built on the foundations of a lie. Wasn’t it?
But what else was there?
“Judging by her memories, they can’t do anything remotely close to that. Though I won’t rule it out as something they’d try if they had the means.”
“Oh good, then we’re in the clear.” Sarcasm.
“We’re not out of the benthic zones.”
Further down the fingers drifted, tracing the shape of your arms, dragging scales along the skin of your forearms and applying pressure to soft flesh in-between radius and ulna. Goosebumps trailed along the flesh, hairs standing on end. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, the way she worked out tension in your muscles and flesh.
“What, after all that?”
You felt her weight shift the earth, dragging skin up your calf muscles. The touches disrupted the guilt and dissonance humming in your chest.
Why exactly was she massaging your flesh so intimately?
There was a foreign heat rising in your cheeks like a hot air balloon taking flight.
“She still has to wake up.” The soprano’s voice was detached, emotionless and focused.
Perhaps a hint of tension there, as if she had already found something she didn’t like.
“Oh, right.”
Whatever she was checking for wasn’t there either. There were things to ask, shifting waterfalls of spinning thoughts blurring in your mind, but you hadn’t yet remembered how to speak.
She shifted back up, fingers tracing the lobe of your ear, applying gentle pressure and tweaking the soft cartilage and nerves. It was strangely— A shiver wormed up your spine.
“Autonomic nervous function seems fine, no residual—”
“Freydis, you’re getting quite intimate with her, what exactly are you—”
She paused, still running a single finger over one lobe. The muscles in your face were twitching, the threads of memory in their working swinging just out of reach. The heart was a drum, beating faster with every touch.
“I don’t know if you were keeping track Segrusa. We were only able to reverse around 80% of the soul conversion with the anchor and applied pressure. Another 8% with the reinforcement of the memories I was able to store and force the concepts back into the threads we couldn’t get with the anchor and stabilizers alone. Then it homogenized together when we set the puzzle straight.”
88%? Electrostatic shock mingled with the chill of fear.
What had you lost? Would you still be the same—your breathing hitched, throat feeling like it might close up.
You found your fingers; bodily control having been rather overwhelming at first and now becoming steadily more accessible. You curled them, the first test of returning coordination.
You needed to know, oh how desperately you needed to discover what was lost. You tried to remember how to speak and open your eyes, and doing both at the same time was a bit too much. The confusion spun the memory threads around for long enough that you lost track of where they had been.
You mentally howled with frustration; it trembled in the silent growl of your vocal cords that they couldn’t hear.
“12%?! Mither above, what did she retain from you?”
You’d, you needed to check what—how would you even do that? How could you even find out?!
“Impossible to know without her awake.”
I am awake!!! Can’t you hear me!!!
“That or a deeply invasive examination of her mind. That is the problem, not having the access to tell.”
“Why didn’t we look while we were in there?”
“Too risky. As you said, we were submerged in her and needed to keep ourselves anchored both from her and each other. That sort of examination would have required far more intensive protection. In any case, we’ll see what she says when she wakes up, but if she kept the capacity to do magistry—our magistry, well we both know how that will end.”
She sighed deeply.
“This would be much faster if we had a healer.”
“So, you’re doing this instead?” A hint of judgement in her voice, as if Segrusa, that was her name, as if Segrusa didn’t believe her.
“The soul is tied to the body. The physical is just as, if not more important than the components of her mind.”
“Right, and here I thought…So we wait till she wakes up, and hope that your modir doesn’t throw us back into reliving—”
You stopped listening to what Segrusa was saying, not because you lost consciousness, but because the Finnwoman known as Freydis was quite abruptly lifting your shirt. A maelstrom of emotions you didn’t know tore through mind and chest, tossing everything else to the side.
You grasped at the memories trying to figure out how to move your mouth.
There was so much growing heat in your abdomen and you didn’t know what was happening.
Her fingers kneaded into the flesh of your sides, searching for something else. Your shirt was unbuttoned and cast aside with practiced experience. Then, the bra too. She paused, fingers dragged against the soft tissue.
Again, a structure in the flesh that shouldn’t be there.
There was something wrong with your brain, or no maybe not wrong, maybe something had finally been fixed by waking you up on an emotional level.
Heat filled your cheeks as she dragged those scaled fingers across the sensitive flesh up onto the chest. It didn’t feel real, a dream, but the flesh was definitely…Your heart hammered fast against its cage as she drew closer to—
Reflexively, the spine arched, and she had a rather sizable portion of—
“Freydis?!”
You didn’t want it to stop. Why in all the worlds did you not want—
“That was unintended!”
“You’re holding her breast!”
She definitely was. Not just holding, squeezing, fingers pressed into fatty flesh. Her hands were huge, nearly fully cupping the entirety—
Then she wasn’t holding it anymore. It took a moment for your body to respond, settling back into the grass. You were winded, mind ablaze with the sudden dizziness of that stimulation. Not just your mind, an electric firestorm curling through the flesh, especially in the abdomen.
“I was checking for residual—it was reflex!”
There was a huff of air from right above you, warm breath washing across stimulated flesh.
“Nevermind I can see you won’t believe me.”
A hearty laugh somewhere to your right. “Easy to work up.”
What was wrong with you? Why did this—where did this come from? Mind reeling and trying desperately to process what just happened.
“Look, there are residual gill membranes in the neck and sides of her abdomen, which means she retained bio-genetic material.”
“Alright, so what does that mean? What is bio-genetic.”
“It’s the material that makes your body yours. That’s what the humans call it, apparently.”
“Pick that up from her?”
Her fingers were tracing over your middle, strange buzzing twitches and muscle spasms curling in your belly.
“This unpleasantness has had some benefits, but she’s hardly an expert. That aside, If we leave it unattended, mither knows what kind of long-term effects it’ll have on her. Especially if, based on my interpretation of what their understanding is, her base material has now been homogenized. We’ll have to fix it right away.”
“Great, it’s just one thing after another.”
“That’s the fun of scientific problem-solving. It’s always multi-layered.”
“Fun is the last thing I’d describe this this Odrverian concept tangle as.”
“It’s a turn of the standing stone.”
“Right well, do we have a reference point for her anatomy? Because I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been fin deep in human anatomy in more than 2800 years.”
“Not to worry though, I still have the echoes of her anatomy condensed. The actual magistry is going to be a bit awkward. That said, If she still has these that means we have to apply the actual bio-genetic pulses in—”
Her hand dragged down your torso over your middle towards where her other hand was already unbuttoning—
“You can’t be serious. Freydis no we can’t—”
Was the grass soaking through your pants? What was—
“I’m not fond of this sea-mite chase either. It’s making me quite queasy. Especially given her alignment with these normalcy maintainers. But this requires a different kind of magistry, one fueled by energy from where human life originates.”
“Shouldn’t we wait until she’s awake? This isn’t like the reconstruction process with our own tantric energy.”
She was moving around—
“Under other circumstances I would, but spin of the whirlmonger counts while we’re still inbetween. It’s this or nothing.”
“Well—”
“I certainly don’t want to get her killed or thrown in a cell because she starts spontaneously respeciating, or worse, gets physically transmuted into my body. That’s not considering the physical and emotional trauma that that would come with.”
You couldn’t think straight.
“I mean, would that not be a radical wakeup call? Not to be cruel or callous.”
“Individualized targeting is always cruel and callous. I am not for it.”
“Well, such principles didn’t stop your modir.”
“Humanity earned that response from modir by burning the tree we planted for generations we wouldn’t see. But it was an impersonal punishment. This is different.”
Her hand was…
Your head spun as all the blood rushed to your cheeks.
“Right, so you are still mad at her.”
“I’m mad at humans in general, and how little they’ve learned. You can’t possibly tell me you aren’t after hearing what she believes. What she said. Now are you going to help me with this or—”
There! There was the memory in the threads for speech.
“Please don’t touch me there right now.” You shivered, gasping down the air and forming the words barely in time. They came out of your throat as a squeaky croak.
Your voice was your own, belly filled with sparks of crimson lightning.
A welcome relief that almost made you burst into tears for reasons you were still grappling to understand. The memory of almost losing yourself came roaring back, and that put that confusion to bed.
The storm stopped. The hand in your pants abruptly pulled out without a second’s hesitation. There was conflict in your addled mind. The touches had been… intimately comforting in a way you’d never had before.
“Ferrier across the Astral River, how long have you been awake?!” Horror in the voice. Surprising how well you were able to interpret the inflective differences of her tone compared to a human.
“Since you started evaluating my anatomy.”
There was a new scent in the air, sweet and yet salty. Sweat? Or something else?
There was the lingering question of why you hadn’t tried to reach out via thought to her since you were, by her own words, still entangled mentally. Then you remembered she had shut you out of that method.
The more memories that had returned and oriented themselves properly, the more you had been surprisingly… okay with being touched. Now that it was gone it left you with an unfulfilled longing. Those were feelings you’d have to dissect later, when you weren’t exposed in the grass in front of two giant fish women.
What a strange turn your life had taken. Even stranger still that you weren’t all that perturbed by the concept of being barren and vulnerable in front of them.
Sharing of memories and fundamental soul aspects were probably to thank for that.
“Undersky below, how guh! I would never have—” Horror, followed by a stampede of panic and shame in her voice. “I am so sorry! Why didn’t you say something?!”
“I was still trying to remember how, and you had my thoughts blocked.”
“That’s true Freydis, I don’t think you ever unblocked her.”
“I can’t even—fukka.”
“Freydis there’s no time, get her consent now and—"
Then, without warning, all the color dropped from the canvas. Bright white light closed in.
Date:Month of the Singing Birds, 1950 BCE.
Dramatis Personae: Your humble Narrator (Me), Freydis Aquailian, Ex. Queen of the Finnfolk, 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. Bell Beaker Gaul.
Foreword: Freydis awoke to the call of a new morning, the acheing memory of that first week of bliss in the grand city fading from her mind. For fifty years she had now ruled the province, attending to primarily economic corrections and management of interior affairs. Yet material resources continued to vanish, and the harvester continued to evade them. With no way to compensate for the lost materials, prices remained high, though lower than before. No single spell, assertive missive, or singing minstrel was going to bring greater understanding to this growing tension in the network of webbings throughout the basin. The need to find the source of vanishing resources grew ever greater, the clock was ticking, and Freydis’s peace was at risk.
Fate hung in the balance, and many questions lingered in the air.
The 1st and 2nd combined Rings, Hǫrgr. The Goddess' Belief and Heart.
Fukka!
You were not a violent person by any means, but then and there you wanted to mash your fist into a wall. Hadn’t felt her wake from the conceptual slumber and then been too shocked by the brashness of your own desire to forge ahead. Now what? Would it be too late when you could try again?
So much for fixing it right away.
As this false pantomime of reality reasserted itself, you found yourself on the edge of the bed in that golden chamber. Oblivious to the peeking light of the rising sun starting to crawl forward on the horizon. Blue eyes roved over the hovering text projecting from the tablet, reading the numbers again and again. It was one thing to hear, ad nauseum, that the numbers didn't add up.
It was another to see it so plainly laid out on the screen on a truly disorienting scale. Why hadn’t you looked at the exact figures until now?
She’s giving us barely any time between stage switches or time jumps, and I have no idea what the physical entanglement is going to—Faen it all.
Alanna’s fear and confusion poured into you like the chilled water of snowmelt swells a river at the end of spring. Like a searat caught in a trap, disoriented and without a single thread of an idea of where they are.
And you were making it worse.
I don’t understand—
You must have been broadcasting through the mental linkage because Segrusa intervened.
Both of you calm down. As long as we fix it, it won’t be an issue. But we have to fix it in the next go around.
You took several deep, shuddering breaths trying to find your center.
She was right. Of course she was right, she was always right.
Segrusa’s right. Still your heart Alanna. Focus, we have to put our minds off of it and focus on the narrative modir is weaving. Calm down.
Calm down? H-h-ow am I supposed to calm down with the looming sword of Damocles that my body might twist underneath me!
Hey! Listen to my voice.
The first light of dawn washed across the city, caressing golden scales. The hue and color shimmered with the kiss of the gentle rays. The room was filled with the warm scents of burning amber and the air trickling against your skin was thick with Astral particles the size of marbles.
I will fix this. We will fix this and nothing will happen to you.
But you said—
I know what we said. What we meant was, it is easier for us to tackle it early while in the change of scenes. The longer we go without doing it, the more effort it is going to require to actuate. Whatever happens in the intervening periods, we can reverse any bio-genetic alterations with fleshcrafting magistry. This isn’t the pre-Nälkä days of static physical shape. It’s a sliding scale of difficulty and time intensive requirements.
That seemed to do the trick, Alanna’s thoughts trickled from a shark race to a crawling sea-slug over the course of several minutes.
Okay. Okay.
Now, let’s focus on the narrative that’s being woven in the meantime. It will help get the ordeal out of your mind.
You tried to picture the numbers, but when it hit six digits you lost them, again and again, mind refusing to fully grasp them. Despite this incomprehension, the numbers became your anchor in ignoring your own worries and guilt.
Guilt over the lie that it was only a matter of difficulty and time intensiveness the further away you got from the homogenization event. Guilt that you blocked off and prevented from flowing into her threads.
The chance you wouldn’t fix all of it was rising with every flickering ray of the sun.
But puzzling over the numbers remained a cool anchor. Where you couldn’t picture them, Alanna could. A welcome distraction to see the threads of awe blooming out from her purple strands.
This is—
Impressive?
Fantastical.
You wondered, as the finger drew down the semi-solid thaumic projection, if they'd always been like this and you just hadn't noticed? Certainly you had access to these numbers as Queen. Or perhaps, the thaumic advances over the last thousand years had truly destroyed any and all understanding you once had about reasonable production capacities.
Even after more than 2800 years it was still hard to picture.
Welcome to the world of thaumic aquatic herbiculture.
Ancient Thaumic Agriculture can rival modern agriculture…
There was conflict there in her emotions. The little trickles of thought that curled through the threads spoke to her dissonance between the benefits of your people’s practices, and the stubborn stalwart belief in the pure whale waste that was this concept of normalcy.
The door to the chambers opened, but you didn't look up.
With far smaller areas for production of similar scale. You waste so much dirt and water it seems.
Careful, if you get her rolling, she’ll talk about the intricacies of agricultural thaumic engineering until the sun dies.
Would that be such a bad thing in this moment?
That would be a terrifying long time.
Yet despite all of this capability, the harvests, the production, more than 60% of it keeps vanishing from the storage houses. How? Why? Where is it going?
Your stupor broke as lips pressed into the crook of the neck, stimulating the membranes of those sensitive gills. Shoots of lightning wormed up and down your spine, bouncing around in your brain.
Nearly jumped out of your skin; almost threw the tablet too. In that moment of affectionate assault, the sudden stimulation provoked a quite undignified shriek from your throat.
What did Segrusa do? She laughed, giggled like she was nothing more than a spawnling again.
And you thought you were the child.
"Segrusa!" You rasped out, squirming to escape her grasp.
But she had you tight with those sea-trunk arms wrapped around your shoulders. You pressed hands against her to buy space, but she was a rock that you couldn’t move. There was no escape for one such as you.
The head turn to chide her had been an ambush as It had been then. A gentle kiss stole all your thoughts and breath.
The tablet dropped into your lap.
You held there for an eternity, a storm of emotion writhing in that thousand-year-old chest. The temptation had swept through you to fall back into rhythm, cancel everything and waste the day in—
The kiss broke, leaving you gasping for air.
A hand had caressed soft auric cheek scales. Segrusa had smiled down at you, dark scales swallowing the light of the morning sun. It had drifted up and cupped your cheek, and you leaned into it, by the mither did you lean in. And all the while that heart hammered faster in your chest.
"Good morning, how blessed am I to have such a shimmering treasure."
Your cheeks had burned with scarlet heat, the color leeching through the gold of the scales. She weeped of incense and sea lilly oils.
You had stammered out a few syllables of pure gibberish, before finally managing to find the right words, "You are, without a doubt, the worst dragon to try to do work around!"
Segrusa roared with laughter through the telepathic connection while you and Alanna squirmed.
Alanna was still reeling in your mental plane. Her blur of confused longing for something she barely understood an unwelcome reminder that she was feeling everything you did. Every kiss, pressing together of skin, alluring scents filling your nostrils, flesh moving against flesh. She was an invader peeking into these private personal memories, flooded with your historical emotions.
Was your modir orchestrating the threads of narrative in this way to show Alanna what this world of magistry was actually like? Just people living through history? A demonstration of what her normalcy crusade was destroying in the present on an individual scale?
Or was it about the grander scale? Of what happens when there is incongruence between what humans don’t understand when confronted with civilizations substantially different from their own?
Or maybe it was both.
Whatever the reason, your stomach churned with the dragon’s breath.
Amused, Segrusa gently took the tablet from your lap and placed a tray laden with food there in its stead. When you tried to reach and snag it away, she held it up in the air, out of your reach.
"Yet you continue to let me hoard you night after night. Come, it is time for breakfast, after our adventures in the sheets last night you need your protein to face your official duties today."
You had looked down at the tray and the bounty considerately arranged across the porcelain. The puzzled look that fluttered across your lower membranes rippled through the shirt and up the neck at the alien cuisine. You had seen it all reflected by the pearlescent metal of the tray.
Thick aromas curled up into your nostrils, filling the mouth with saliva.
"Jovian blood sausage from pileuvian salt bison, southern wyvern shoulder steamed with angian pink spice and brack-cayenne for the meat dishes." Segrusa gestured at the large, skewered cubes of purple meat, and then the green tinted filet covered in orange breading.
Your stomach had roared with a raging hunger that wasn’t there moments before.
"Garnished with astraline black stalks steamed in cetacean cheese, a side of basilisk eggs and mangorian tubers." She gestured to strange, web-shaped pink and black vaguely vegetable-carved fleurettes. Of course, no meal would have been complete without blue yolk drenched over something vaguely trapezoidal of a starchy texture.
"And finally, eastern serpent fruit." She gestured to a bowl, filled with coils of amber.
The thick scents of meat, greens, and fruit had spun together a tapestry of aroma that dizzied the mind.
Is all your food so alien looking?
The better question is why human food is so remarkably plain with the exception of what you call desserts. Food is not only for the tongue, but an experience for the eyes and nose as well.
There are many human cultures, including my own, that consider visual presentation of serious importance to the experience.
Then that raises the question of why your particular tastes are more boring than a grey-headed tuna.
Your mouth watered, a small string of drool leaking from golden lips as the smells hit harder. Your stomach growled. Famished and voracious, you pounced upon the food like a starved shark.
As you dug in, Alanna was losing her mind as the swirl of meats mixed with the sweet and tangs of different spices and fruit syrups.
What are these textures?! This flavor?!
Have you never had good cuisine before? Sincerely Alanna, I am beginning to question if you have truly lived.
Segrusa picked up the tablet and looked it over as you ate. The playful flirtation fell away as she read the scrolling streams of numbers.
We do but this is so rich!
We must have more sensitive tastebuds than humans.
"These figures…"
Or they must have lost the how/why of making good food.
"They're beyond anything I've ever seen. All the more reason for us to figure out what happened with the previous governor. We have to find that construct, and stop whatever is going on," You said through a mouth full of meat. "60% of our production output vanishing from the storehouses is untenable and unacceptable!"
Or perhaps this normalcy has bound you fully as a circuit in a greater thaumic-board, unable to conceive of experiences strange and new.
"It’s been fifty years already Freydis. While finding the construct will be helpful, we should be prepared for the possibility that it no longer is carrying those documents." Segrusa sat the tablet back down on the bed, powering it off. "Have you thought about what happens if it doesn't have what we need?"
"I'm glad you asked." You swallowed so you could answer clearly. "After breakfast, first priority is to get out there in the canals and help canvas the city. Clearly leaving the search to our guards has not worked, since we stumbled on it twice and it hasn’t been seen since, we might change the odds.”
You swallowed again.
“That said, I do in fact have a plan if it's no longer carrying the documents."
Segrusa pulsed her arm fins twice.
"Before you get too deep into the currents, canvasing the city is a responsibility for the guards and soldiers, not you. They are doing their best and there is no guarantee our presence would improve things. That aside, you and I have official business to attend to."
You balked, nearly choking on a cheesy stalk. A tight dread burrowed deep in your stomach.
"I will not be forced to sit in some stuffy hall behind a desk and stamp papers and official decrees all day! I’ve been doing that for fifty years and look where we are. That is not how a good ruler serves her people." Your membranes flared wide in rebellion.
Maybe if you had gone out and canvassed, maybe things would have turned out different. Maybe all these wonderful recipes of Segrusa’s, the animals and ecosystems they came from wouldn’t have been lost to the tides of time. They certainly seemed absent from Alanna’s world.
Bureaucracy has its place, why were you so against it?
"I think your reputation precedes you well enough that the priestesses would need to be utterly oblivious to even try, love." Segrusa's voice sang with a tang of sultry allure, disarming you.
The priestesses were ever one of the only groups who did not care who you were, only what you were like. There was no pedestal with them. This above most other things was why you spent so much time in their company as you grew into the throne.
Well that and the fact that they were ardent listeners to the whispers of your modir’s voice.
"What is your plan?"
Bureaucracy does not actuate diplomacy or action. It binds the hands of those who would be irresponsible. Which I am not.
Hah!
"I have to keep some secrets. Keeps your webbing wet. The mystery makes it exciting,” you said through a mouth full of food with a grin that reached your gills.
Don’t you dare.
What?
I said nothing.
You were thinking about it.
"You and your secrets will be the death of me." Segrusa snorted air out of her nostrils.
The words were like a sledgehammer to your center, driving all desire for further mental banter out like air from your lungs.
You thought Segrusa might say something, but she didn’t.
It was a heavy silence.
"Look, this won't be like the time with the basilisk—"
"They are all like the time with the Basilisk. No blubber. The smell was with us for weeks." Segrusa pressed her thumb gently to your nose in a boop. A burst of static indignation coiled through your fingers.
"Why in all the oceans would I use blubber in this climate!" Your eyes crossed as the thumb pressed to the contours of your nose.
I’m not sure I understand the point of these moments we’re being shown. Is this the sum total of your life and relationship? Sitting on beds, wasting time and quipping at each other while touching?
Love is like that. In the soft moments between moving in the world you have to breathe. It’s about laughing, it’s about being silly, it’s about spending time with the greatest connection you can have with another and treasuring them. You miss the small moments of nothingness next to each other when the world starts moving fast.
You aren’t truly living, aren’t truly finding love in the world if you aren’t making the most of these small hours and little wonders. Life becomes filled with regret if you don’t fill those spaces with words of meaning and affection for what you have.
"Come, finish your meal and then we shall get you dressed and washed up. You will enjoy this, I promise." She kissed your cheek. Then she ran her lips across the gills, drawing a sharp noise from your throat.
You protested quite heavily, gently shoving Segrusa away.
"How can I get ready and washed up while you're working me up!"
"Consider it incentive for later." Segrusa's lips curled up, gills pulsing.
"You are the worst! What if they find the construct while we’re away!?"
"Then it will be waiting for you in your office when we get back. The priests believe this is just as important."
"I certainly hope they are right," you said softly, looking back out on the rising sun.
I really do.
The 1st and 2nd combined Rings, Hǫrgr. The Goddess' Belief and Heart.
An hour later, and you were moving through a living piece of art. Murals scrawled across the ceilings of immense, towering halls. Balconies and staircases to chambers scattered in spontaneous arising patterns all reflecting the golden spiral which ruled the arrangements here at the center of the city. Each piece bore thousands, no, millions of tiny Rustics sung, painted, drawn, and carved into a rich tapestry of evocation and interpretation.
A priestess met you, bare before the Goddess's eyes, as they all were, and led you on.
You only barely registered their movements. The swirls of Rustics embedded with the narrative of a millennia past scraping against the mind as you looked upon the cascading waves of art.
Carried by their threads of interpretation into the howling past.
Swirling sand in crimson twilight, a storm upon a horizon. Her mother perched upon a grand beast of burden, Gud-Bani towering beyond her. Titans of the Kemet, creeping magics of their war tides rising from the sand and flanking many camel riders and chariots. The crimson nightmare, scarlet prince of deceit, the red shah upon the sands around that great place at the end of the world threatening to consume all in his path. He rose from the mist, blades sparking from far too many winding limbs as—
The interpretation faded abruptly; Freydis jolted back to reality with terrible dread settling in her stomach. They turned and moved through a pair of double doors trimmed with precious metals, the mural depicting the Mither, her mother, her goddess in the fullness of her multi-armed, four golden-eyed glory. This work was different, the microscopic symbols constantly flowing and changing across the surface of the metal, as a sense of warmth, love, and adoration spread through her chest, drowning the lingering dread in a storm of nostalgia.
"Nothing on Gud-Bani compares to this," Segrusa said looking up as the mighty doors sang beneath the priestesses' touch, while Freydis regained her bearings. "They wouldn't even let me near these doors when you were unconscious, both after we arrived, and after our day in the city."
"I would hope they wouldn't have, not alone at least. The place where we all arose, the center of our world is not a place to tread lightly." Freydis paused and then booped her on the nose. "Besides, you're very much not a priestess."
"What, is it cause I'm not constantly naked?" she fired back, letting Freydis's words soak in.
"You are in my mind, and in my heart." The arm fins wiggled, complimented by the fluttering of her gills.
"And you say I have the Silver tunga." Segrusa rolled her eyes playfully, responding in kind to the playful flutters with pulses tracing up her gills in rhythmic patterns.
"Always." Freydis' playful demeanor dropped away into deathly seriousness as the doors opened, creaking with age and mass.
They stepped through into an immense open ceiling chamber. Before them, the great spiral tower, with its evenly spaced Porticali that stretched up far into the heavens. The fractal nature of the structure gave the illusion of an endlessly curling inwards spiral. Waterfalls poured from the sculpted coral arches, creating a mist that only added to the atmosphere of the open-aired chamber. In the center, a monumental hole, from which all the Astral Discharge flowed, in radiant streams out into the surrounding atmosphere. A colossal and intimately crafted sculpture of the Mither floated above the great pit.
"Whatever you do, while we are here, never look into the chasm." The playful intonations had vanished completely from Freydis' voice. Reverence, wonder, and a tinge of homesick pining rising in her chest as the wash of Astral radiance sloshed across her skin like a familiar tide. It was as if her mother was there, running fingers through her hair, over her scales gently as she had done so many times in Freydis' youth.
"What's in there?" Segrusa looked at her in full with those deep red eyes.
"It's not a question I can answer." Freydis pulsed her gills once and then shrugged, borrowing a human gesture.
Segrusa tilted her head at her wife, crinkling her brow scales and pursing her lips.
Freydis looked at her as they moved deeper into the chamber. //Should I tell her? No, I can't, that would be blasphemy. "The only ones who would know, are the priestesses."
"Wait what? Do they regularly look?"
"No, no, only when they are ready to go. When the sight's grasp is all consuming, they throw themselves from the heights of the tower." Freydis traced her eyes up, Segrusa following her gaze. Clouds obscured the peak of the monumental structure, leaving it to imagination for the moment.
"I know it's tradition for our eldest to give themselves body and mind to the nine gates to maintain the seals, but… why throw yourself from that height?"
"It's symbolic. A leap of faith into Mother's arms, trusting she will catch you and carry you onto paradise." She spoke almost as if in a daze, the words and certainty flowing from her as if someone else was speaking. Segrusa didn't notice.
"But only those at the end of their lives, never the young?" Freydis looked back down and at her wife as she asked these questions. "And only priests?"
"It’s sacrilege to go too soon. Or, so they told me on Gud-Bani." Freydis' mouth became a solemn flat line at the thought, at the sacrilege she had already committed seeing it in the vision. Would mother see this a sacrilege? Would she weigh me lesser on the scales of judgement at paradise's edge for it? The possibility of it weighed in her heart. The memory would have to be purged. "But… there are illnesses of the body, inherited through family. Gill rot, wasting dryness, wet lung, and others that can only be soothed with magistry, never healed. They are exceptions."
"Right." Segrusa said, pitch dropping in solemn and grim acknowledgement. "I'll avoid this room like the drying plague." The joke landed awkwardly between them, and they walked the rest of the way in silence.
An elderly Finnwife, ancient and wrinkled, awaited them as they approached the edge of the chasm. "Governor Freydis, it has been so long! Too long since I have been graced by your presence."
Freydis tilted her head, lips pursed. "Oh!" A grin spread across her face, recognition blossoming in her eyes. "Grandwife Stimatie, is that you!? I didn't recognize you! It has been ages!" She laughed with the priestess, utter delight sweeping the upward curve of her lips and oscillating waves of her membranes.
"You don't look a day over one-fifty." The priestess gave her a wry wiggle of her ears.
"I don't feel a day over one-fifty." She paused. "Well, about half the days. The other days I feel my age."
"Mmmm, the Sight comes heavy to those who linger on the earth for so many years." She smiles at them both. "Welcome to Finnfelheim. It does my ancient heart good to know you enjoyed your first foray into the city proper… and a day of plenty." Another wiggle of her ears.
Freydis and Segrusa exchanged a look. Were we really that loud?
Before any deeper communication could occur, the priestess continued, in a much more solemn tone. "Deeper concerns aside. I regret the that strange tides are awash along the walls. More and more often it seems the world is changing, and oddities percolate the ripples we read." Air ran strangely over her gills, exhaling instead of flowing through the fronds.
"The missing materials. We think we've found a potential clue and link in the chain. No leads on my predecessor though." Freydis gestured extending one hand, the other lightly wrapped around her sternum. She pursed her lips as her gills lay flat. "But I take it there is another issue now too?"
"Yes, I've been informed of your search." She says with a simple nod. Ah so that's how it was. Ears and eyes everywhere. Of course, there was no greater spy than a priest. "A community of grotto's had their crops catch alight, and their storehouse went up with it. They have no food and have petitioned for aid. I figured as Governor you wou—"
"Want to go see for yourself," Segrusa finished the elderly priestess's thought. She was smirking now, finned ears wiggling in time with her gill fronds.
"Exactly, exactly. My, our goddess’s daughter has chosen well." The Finnwoman beamed at Segrusa, who in turn looked slightly flustered and though the depth of tone in her scales hid the flush. "The grotto is one of the last places Alith visited before she vanished."
"Can you tell us anything about Alith?" Freydis asked, the pitch of her voice rising with hope.
"Mmmmm." The old priestess considered the two of them carefully for a moment. "Alith was… peculiar from the moment she was appointed. Young too, perhaps too young. Certain of a path she could see but was blinded to us." The ancient Finnfolk looked up at the sky for a moment. "Ambitious and filled with purpose. I think you know the type, driven to the ends of the Earth. The first time she walked through those doors, the light in her eyes changed. That was a strange day. Strange day indeed, the whole world seemed to freeze around us."
"The Sight." Freydis raised a hand, pressing it to the back of her own neck.
"Your Mother speaks in the softest whispers, and then at times as loud as the bellows of a breech horn in the fog. Who can say what Alith saw in those moments where your Mother spoke to her clearer than she has. I have not heard her so clearly since the days I walked by her side." Stimatie smiles sadly, reaching out and gently pressing her ancient fingers to Freydis' cheek. "Does she call to you? You must hear her clearer now tha—"
"Thank you, your grace," Segrusa intervened, feeling the tides of conversation shifting to a place that would lead her wife astray. "Where will our transport be found?"
The ancient priestess drew her fingers back, the spell of the moment broken. Echoes of surprise rippled through her fins as she looked at her fingers for a moment, before the moment passed. She cleared her throat and reset to her previous demeanor.
"Several Krakens will be awaiting your arrival in the thirteenth ring. Now hurry along, little miss explorer, and don't keep them waiting." The old Finnwife winked at the Governor and shuffled off, her steps burdened with a sudden and great exhaustion, shoulders hanging low.
The two guards that accompanied them looked rather affronted. Freydis stared ahead, stunned at the lack of decorum, boldness, and puzzling over the fading mist of dreamlike atmosphere that had blanketed all of them.
"I guess when one reaches that age, all care about appearances is cast adrift in the currents," Segrusa managed after nearly a minute of impassive silence.
"C'mon!" Freydis took Segrusa's hand, wiping the bewildered look right off her face as she dragged the hapless former warrior along, making for the palace docks.
A Forgotten Bliss on the Edge of Dreams
Your eyes opened, the light parting the blackened abyss with the wide brimmed brushstrokes of oil creasing the sky of a wood canvas above with dark swaths of purple and black. The fire crackled in your ears.
Sitting up was a struggle unto itself. Like relearning how to walk after getting hit by a speeding truck. For a moment you even pondered if you had been transported into an Isekai, which was a nightmare of its own given the typical disposition of such media towards women.
You fretted with the strands of memory and bodily control. An arm, strong and scaled braced you so you didn’t fall right back down onto your back. A log, or backing was moved and you were upright, staring into the writhing tongues of flame.
You were in a rolling plain of grass, silhouettes of hills gently sloping off in every direction.
Your jeans—you rubbed your face, heat staining human cheeks pink. Not that you could see.
Was that what you were wearing when you got swallowed by the Hermeneutic? They were unbuttoned, the fly was down, and you were without a shirt or bra.
Ok, that wasn’t entirely true, they were hanging on a jutting branch emanating from the log. Gently blowing in the comforting breeze washing across your baren, sweat soaked back.
Minutes ticked by beneath the needly hand of some unseen painted clock. In the oily nightscape taking stock of yourself was both easier and more difficult than anticipated. Patting down limbs, torsos, and checking areas that, by every modicum of modern society, you should be ashamed to check in this way.
Yet you felt none.
Freydis was right, your neck and abdomen felt different, and you were taller than you remembered. The spine hadn’t been completely reverted, which made sitting a little awkward.
One of them watched, and it took far too long to realize.
Apparently, they had entirely different standards for Modesty.
You crossed your arms over your chest. Forgetting for half a second that your top was right there in reach. Moments later you had the shirt off the branch, haphazardly wiggling it into place on narrow shoulders to cover yourself.
But you didn’t button it, simply left it hanging loose from your body. What a strange contrast to your normally extremely neat and put together appearance.
Is this what normal people felt like in the aftermath of intimate moments with a one-night lover?
You looked down at your oil-tinted fingers, wiggling them for emphasis. They were approximately the right length, nailed swathed a light purple, with yellow branching in lines of what were probably lightning bolts layered over. That, that you didn’t remember.
You didn’t paint your nails.
A great shuddering breath poured from your lips. It was a lot to go through in such a short period.
When you’d had enough of the soft, uncalloused fingers of a woman who sits at her computer all day, you spared a glance at the slightly darkened fabric of your jeans.
Another shaky breath, hands dragging over your face.
Who even am I anymore?! What is my life?!
Then you looked up.
Segrusa was the one who had watched you, and she maintained her strange vigil. Freydis had her face in her hands.
Your gut was aswirl with complicated emotions, trying to find something to say as you looked between them. As if it would do anything for your utterly disheveled appearance, you parted a strand of hair behind one ear.
Was it longer than before?
No words came out of your mouth. What could you even say?
Segrusa was staring at your face. A look was taking residence there, one you’d come to recognize as confusion, at least judging by the slow irrythmic pulses of her gills.
“Of all the horrors to inflict on someone!” Freydis whined with muffled regret into her fingers. “Sweet dancing spear fish I am horrified.”
Your jaw worked, trying to find the right words. Half of you wanted to tell her you—hells, did you like it? The other half had the sense to remember she still hated what you stood for, and that such an admission might very well inflame the situation. Which half of you was compromised by only being 88% of what you were? Neither half had had the proper time to really process any of this.
So, you said nothing.
This will require a great deal of therapy.
“Freydis, her eyes.”
“What about—oh.” Freydis looked up, halting mid-sentence to stare.
Pressing a hand to your cheek, you looked back and forth between them.
“What’s going on with my eyes?”
The fire crackled, embers floating up into the canvased sky. Warmth flickered against your skin. Freydis reached down and rummaged through a sharkskin pack, producing a conch-shell handled ornately carved hand mirror. She turned it toward you so you could see.
Your eyes gleamed in the dark, a deep royale purple. It wasn’t just that they were purple, it’s that they glowed as if backlit by neon. In the dim light of the campfire you could see purple streaks in your otherwise dark hair.
You stared, breath stolen by the person in the reflection.
What color were your eyes before this? Had you ever bothered to look at them in more than a passing glance? Ever committed to memory the striating little rivulets of pigment and color that should run through them?
No, no you hadn’t. Like the rest of you, they were unremarkable. Unimportant for the goals of your life. Appearances were there to get your foot in the door, nothing more.
But now, as you sat there, strange residual distortions of flesh aside, you couldn’t stop staring. Couldn’t stop touching all that space around your glowing eyes.
Were you always this pleasant to look at? Your cheeks reddened with the errant thought.
There was a strange warmth curling up your spine, mingling with the confusion bubbling in your stomach.
“Freydis is that—” you were too enraptured to look and see Segrusa’s expression.
“No, I don’t think so. Well, not entirely I don’t think. You feel that coming off her?”
“Not just feel, see it. Her hands.”
You looked down, away from the mirror, and found arcs of electrostatic purple discharge leaping between fingers. Your nails glowed with light of their own, the swaths of polish animate with flowing lightning.
One of their skiffs nearby started flickering, drawing attention away from the fingers. You looked between your hands and the vehicle, a simmering well of understanding boiling inside.
The circuits, the intricate pathways flowing through them. You could feel them. The tiny metal and silicon chambers of the phone in the back pocket of your jeans. You could feel those too.
So that was what magic felt like.
“Well, certainly a curious discovery.” Freydis was watching now, past indiscretions briefly forgotten in this moment of quiet discovery.
There was a strange air to her expression. Guarded in a way, but her eyes burned with the lamp-fire born curiosity.
“It seems you had innate magistry, and now it’s awake.”
You stared at her, then the magic crackling in your hands. Something tight and very very cold wrapped around the arcs of your spine.
Fear.
You would have to find a way to hide this. If the Foundation—they’d…
You frowned deeply. Is this what it was like? For people, sapient anomalies? Constant, twitching anxiety, that fear of being reduced to just another number, just another set of papers and files in the database.
No, you weren’t—Maybe they could take it away? Maybe if they fixed you, it would stop.
“As much of a surprise as this is, Freydis, there was a matter of importance that needed to be handled.” Segrusa nudged the Auric Finnwoman.
“I don’t want it,” your voice trembled. “I don’t want to be magic. I don’t want this.”
Silence, heavy and churning burned between you and them.
“I don’t want to be dead, but that is not within my power to control. Magic is inimical to you. It is yours, uniquely yours, a part of your soul and potentiated threads.” You looked up, Freydis’s face twisted, gills oscillating rapidly in bafflement.
It was like she couldn’t comprehend someone not wanting to have magic. Someone wanting to be ‘normal.’
What did that word even mean?!
“No I don’t—if you fix me. It’ll go away. It has too. It can’t be part of me. This can’t be me,” your breaths came fast, shallow. “You can take it away. You can make it go away.”
Your hands trembled, as you looked back up at them.
“No.” Freydis’s voice vibrated with anger. “No, you have to live with it.”
“Please! I can’t be this!” You tried to stand up, but your muscles weren’t recovered enough, and you just slumped back down. “I don’t—"
“Alanna, she can’t. Your magic is not because of us. It is part of you. Entwined with your soul and flesh. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t take it away,” Segrusa interjected, more gently than Freydis.
“I can’t take away something that was not given. I wouldn’t even if I could. Look at what your world has taught you, that this beautiful gift laid upon you by the universe is a stain, something that shames and marks you as other. It’s time to wake up and see what it is that you are, who you are, a cog in a machine destroying the natural beauty—”
“Freydis, we don’t have time for philosophical lectures. If your modir is resetting the stage, we need to fix the bio-genetics now.” Segrusa cut Freydis off, voice more urgent than before.
She sensed something, as if some grand current in the Astral Threads were shifting again. You felt them too.
“Alanna,” Freydis’s voice was firm. You looked at her again, shaking. Feeling as if you were going to come apart at the seams.
“We need to fix your bio-genetic signature now. It is very important to do it as soon as possible. It will also be very intimate.” You listened to her words, battling the waves of desperation, panic, and fear. “I need to do it. If we do it now, we minimize any chances of further disturbances.”
You absorbed her words, reeling. You had magic. You were a thaumaturge of some design. There was no taking it back, no undoing what was done. You were an anomaly. The very thing you had spent most of your professional career helping to put in boxes. To maintain this thing you believed in called normalcy.
A word you no longer knew the meaning of.
There was no going back, and you wanted to howl. Your life as you knew it was over.
What next? What was the point of any of it now?
“D-d-do it,” you stuttered out.
“Freydis, do you need—”
“I have it on my own.”
She moved with such incredible swiftness, at your side in half a second. She threw open your shirt with a single smooth motion, the fabric clinging to your back, hanging half off your arms.
Something was coming on the horizon, something driven by the currents of this false reality you were embedded in. The oil-brushed sky was gaping open, sloughing skin of some alien reality viscously pooling from the clouds in crimson blotches.
Freydis Aquailian was a giant of a woman, scales shimmering in the camp light. Her eyes burned with the passion of all the night’s stars. Anger. A fury that cut straight through your soul.
It was both at you, and not at you at the same time.
Yet her touch was so very gentle. Gliding fingers flowing across the skin of your stomach. You watched, cheeks simmering with heat. Rustics scorched into your flesh in a storm of neon hue and spiderwebbing warmth beneath the skin.
It washed away the fear, the panic, the desperation. Replaced it all with a sense of snug security. Calm. You were safe.
You would be safe.
Every breath came faster, shallow and filled with embers of the purple flames that embroidered themselves like the lines of circuits across the arcs and contours of you. They filled with that strange, twisting magical light curling down beneath the hemline of your jeans. A firestorm pulsed through every inch of your Astral Threads.
You had never felt anything like this. You weren’t sure you’d ever feel anything like it again.
So, this was bliss. This is what it felt like to truly live.
You looked up at her eyes. The crystalline blue was glowing, burning with magistry and Sunfire. The sky above and around was tearing itself to pieces, and the colors were starting to blur altogether.
“It’s coming!” Segrusa shouted.
Your head was emptying, her fingers sliding beneath the hem of your jeans and under—
Electric fire smeared through every nerve. Her mouth moved, soundlessly. Every exhale dripping millions of Rustics that flowed into your half open mouth, needling against the flesh.
Her hand—
An inhuman noise pouring from your lips. Flesh, muscle, fat, and bone squirmed and trembled.
Reality was collapsing, almost on top of you now. Thick globules of viscera forming a tornadic column of blurring color. It eroded the land beneath it and the sky above. There were grand acheing teeth digging into the fabric and dragging the breaches wider by the second.
She said something terrifying.
“Skirtr, It’s no good! I don’t have enough interface! Her—she’s too small!” Panic in her golden notes.
She was filling all of you, and your head was empty. Empty except for one thought that might save you both.
Kiss her.
She heard it. She must have, because her eyes widened. Stunned by your audacity.
There was no time, and she was close enough. Instinct took over.
You jerked forwards, lips mashing hers in an explosion of flame and electric fury that consumed every nerve in transformative fire. Spasms, stars, rippling color and white spots behind the eyes.
Tongue pressing desperately into her mouth.
You screamed into her throat as reality bled together, and the wooden canvas was washed away.
The 13th Ring, Bóndi. Farmer.
Oceanic Surface Area: 1638.2 km2
Average Depth: 385 m
Aqueous farm layers: 20.
Total Farmed Surface Area: ~32250 km2
Fruits and Nuts production: 5.177 million tons
Vegetable Production: 6.1 million tons
Grains: 930,000 tons.
Sea Vine production: 1.1 million tons.
Total Produced: 13.3 million tons
Total moved to storage: 13.3 million tons.
Total moved for trade/consumption: 4.32 million tons
End of year storage audit: 1.9 million tons
Unaccounted for tonnage: 8 million tons
"The timing is a little strange, you must admin." Segrusa gestured as the pair climbed up onto the deck of the Kraken, as they passed through the canal locks.
"At first glance it sounded more like a drought or an accident. Maybe a rogue lightning strike?" Freydis smiled at Segrusa as the Kraken pushed out from the mundane metallic walls of the loch into the canal.
"A lightning strike doesn't burn down an entire town's field of crops, nor the storehouse. Something smells fishy." She smiled at her own pun.
Freydis rolled her eyes. "So then, what, you suspect foul play?"
"I wouldn't rule it out. Look at what we experienced in the commercial ring. If tensions are to the point that knives are almost drawn in a neutral market, then well."
"Who would strike at a fishing village in Gaul?"
"Minoans?" Segrusa offered.
"Too regional. Not enough reach, besides, trade pact."
"Kemet? Hattians?"
"Similar problem."
"Mekhanites? Nalka?"
"Pact of the Bleeding Sky." Freydis leaned her elbow on the rail, cupping her own cheek as she stared at the thaumic mechanisms as they changed confirmation. "Can't rule them out completely, but it's still well outside their borders. Meanwhile the Northern Orthodoxy Mekhanites are too preoccupied trying to eradicate the Nalka." Freydis rubbed her temples.
"Local humans?"
"Mmmm, maybe? Whatever's going on, we'll figure it out. We're good at that."
"Mither's blessing, we certainly are." The gates of the lock opened and the kraken began moving again. Segrusa sucked in breath, eyes widening at the sight that greeted them. "Seven hells."
Freydis' shifted as she turned to her wife, holding her arms out for emphasis. "Welcome, to the thirteenth ring my love."
Stretching to the left and right was a huge, curved expanse of deep water. Pock-marking the surface of the waves were large, open-air platforms brimming with soil, trees, and vegetation of many colors and pedigrees. They floated in the water, anchored by long winding chains to an invisible ocean floor below. The chains themselves snaked through the thing that truly robbed Segrusa of her breath. Stretching in every direction from the inner wall all the way to the outer wall 2 leagues away were segmented, stepped layers of aqueous farms, a miasma of hues and tones and colors complimented by the darting shapes of schools of fish and aquatic pollinators. Around the edges of each platform unit, the sun glistened off the all too familiar metal alloy and strange large tanks. In the holes where the surface platforms were anchored, there were glimpses of yet deeper layers of the same, onward forever it seemed.
"Astral blessings, that is insane," Segrusa said, eyes wide. "Forget feeding Finnfelheim, you could feed the whole world!"
Freydis couldn't help but grin. Segrusa noticed it, the way Freydis' gills were flapping as she edged closer to the railing. "Exactly! 15 million Finnfolk to feed in the basin! Not to mention all the human states! All grown right here beneath our feet."
"Right, which is why we're here," Segrusa said, her eyes tracking back to her wife as she moved.
"Exactly." Freydis wrapped her fingers around the railing.
"Freydis—," Segrusa said, stiffening slightly in apprehension as her eyes widened. "What are you doing?"
"Surely you'd grow bored if we sat on top of this ancient Kraken all the way to our destination? There's a right and a wrong way to get to know the places you govern." And this is an opportunity to do some snooping.
"Don—" But it was too late. Freydis turned and leapt over the railing, streaking down through the air like a knife towards the canal below. Catch me if you can!
"Faen it all, Freydis! Stop! Pull us over! Ack, it's going to be to-"
Freydis hit the water, a bubbling glee rising in her stomach as she cut through the canal like scissors through paper. The sides of the travel-way were intimately carved and crafted with swirling Rustics and murals depicting the purpose and function of the ring.
A quick motion with her arms, fingers curling through the air as the light of the Rustic, the channel for her magic, took shape. Hlaupa pulsed through her flesh, and she streaked forward, leaping from the water and clear over the sides of the canal, to the amusement of several working Finnfolk in broad brimmed hats, protecting them from the vicious Mediterranean sun. All the while, she laughed uproariously.
"Freydis!" Segrusa's voice came from behind, not above, as her wife gave avid chase.
Down again she plunged, streaking through the water towards the stepped layer of platforms. She twirled, and spun, rolling out of the way of a portentous fish-shaped vehicle hauling bins of produce out of an anchor hole and up towards the surface. She dived, whole body twisting as instinct took over. Her fins fully came out from where they'd been pressed against her arms and calves.
Klaxons echoed in the water, a distant an exceptionally loud mechanical click cut clear through the water. Freydis was truly flying through the water now, as sudden and intense currents pressed her along, fruits and nuts pulled from vines and branches, filling the water all around her. Swarms of crab harvesters materialized seemingly from nowhere, writhing in the water all around her as they collected their cargo.
Freydis darted between them, reaching out and teasing her arcane digits across the depths of their enchantments, admiring the complexity and craftsmanship. She darted down, Fingers dragging along leaves of different plants as she swam, blitzing between stalks and bushes to avoid her pursuer, taking in the aromas and dancing colors of the plentiful bounties of the thirteenth ring.
As fast as Freydis was, even with the current's assistance, Segrusa was faster, catching up to and wrapping her up in strong arms as Freydis laughed under the water, bubbles rippling up to the surface. Segrusa's lips curled up in an affectionate but stern smile, tinged with the barest hint of worry in the way her eyes crinkled. She pulled her captured quarry up through the anchor hole towards one of the surface gardens.
They burst through the surface, Freydis' singing laughter filling the air over the sounds of distant gulls and vehicles. Segrusa pulled them both out, and onto the buoyant platform. "Paradise above Freydis, you cannot do that!" she chided, trying to reset to a serious tone, by the way her gills closed.
But Freydis wasn't paying attention, any intentions of investigation suddenly caught up in the tide of excitement.
"Look! Look at these," Freydis said, wiggling out of her wife's arms, and prancing over to a nearby tree with blue and wrinkly leaves. She reached up, pulling a richly colored pink fruit from it. In the process, her fins caused several chimes, flowing over with Rustics and drilled with tiny holes, to swing back and forth. A rising breeze trickled around them, making the metal quietly sing gentle, but warding notes.
"Freydis you can't just run up and pu—" Segrusa's admonishments fell on deaf ears.
The Governor took a big bite out of the fruit, listening to the song. A farmer working nearby paused in their task, a look of bewildered amusement rising to the man’s lips as his neck gills half opened. Sweet and bitter intermingled, to form a rich composite pallet experience in the former Queen's mouth.
"Mghhh! Oh, so much flavor! And that texture. Here!" she said, shoving the fruit into Segrusa's startled hands.
"Freydis, we have a time—" Segrusa stopped as the fruit was shoved into her hands. She looked at the fruit suspiciously, but took a bite, and then her face lit up. "Oh, that is. That is unique. I have no words for that." She chewed and swallowed. "And the aftertaste…"
"It's τάρτα fruit, from star trees. Please be gentle when picking the fruits, we're lucky to even have them." the farmer explained, moving over to the pair. He was a male, and like most males, Freydis and Segrusa towered over him.
"Ill-suited to the climate?" Freydis asked, tilting her head curiously.
"Freydis," Segrusa said with a laughing sigh, trying to get her wife's attention.
"In a manner of speaking, they were almost wiped out in the Sealing Wars. Only three places left on the planet where they can be grown," The man rubbed the back of his head, and his eyes almost bugged out of his skull when he saw the royal insignia on Freydis' rope-like robes. "Ma'am." He gave a shallow bow.
A pang of memory rippled through Freydis' chest, a reminder of how they were even here to begin with. It vanished again as the bubbling excitement rose. "Amazing!" she said, bouncing on her toes. "And look, look at all these fields, all these gardens and vines. You are incredible. To keep so many species alive and healthy!"
The Finnman laughed modestly. "I am just one pair of hands among many. Could never feed this city by myself."
"So, where do all the excess crops go? The ones that don't immediately go straight to the people?" Segrusa asked the Finnman.
Before he could answer, Freydis cut in. "Oh, well" she said with a mouth full of fruit. "Rustic preservation units right?" She swallowed and spoke more clearly, looking to the farmer as she bounced from one foot to another.
Bewildered, the man nodded in agreement. "The Governor is correct." He points to large floating containers attached to the platform by strange, fibrous ropes. "Into those, and then we move them to the storehouses built into the inner wall." He gestures towards a large, protrusion in the wall between the 13th and 12th rings, large, cylindrical, dome-topped towers jutting from the huge monolithic mass of metal. More were visible off into the distance. "From there, the freight managers handle transport to the commercial district for trade, or the food distribution centers in the residential rings, or we ship them out to other places around the basin."
"Like what we're about to do!" Freydis paused and then asked "You wouldn't know anything about the vanishing food would you?"
"Freydis…" Segrusa growled a playful warning.
The farmer tilts his hat up, and scratches his head. "It's so strange. Worked my whole life in the fields, and we've never had anything like this happen. A blight once or twice, fixed within a year, but nothing this scale for this long."
Segrusa's attention went from trying to pull her wife away to focusing on the man. "Your whole life?"
"That's right. 300 years a farmer." He shifted, leaning on his tool.
"When did it start? The Vanishing?"
"They didn't tell you?" His eyes widen ever so slightly.
"Well we haven't been here long… haven't exactly had time to do a lot of digging."
He shifted again. "Well, Alith, took to the office and then all of a sudden." He gestures. "I wish I knew what was happening, losing 40-60% of our harvest every year for the past 50 means the folks in freight have to thin out what we have left over till the next harvest."
"…50 years is a long time," Segrusa said, scaley brow wrinkling.
"Who handles the sorting and proper storage procedures?" Freydis tilts her head.
"It's mostly automated. Harvester and mover constructs. The storehouses have Magisters to monitor them, keep them maintained, but it isn't like there's many major disruptions in trafficking. The produce just… vanishes. Gone like it was never there."
"Do you think maybe Governor Alith had something to do with it? Did she ever come out here?"
He adjusted his hat again. "Ah I don't know. She was a strange one, I mean all the governors get a little strange, you live that close to… well, you know, and it's going to effect you. But her yearly addresses over the mag-network were always more eccentric than our previous governors. Reaching for the stars, lifting the whole earth… I don't know about any of that. I do my part to move us forwards, but all of that preaching prophecy, and religious abstractions goes beyond me. Guess that's why she was a governor and I'm out here."
"Well thank you for taking the time to explain, we do appreciate it!" Freydis checks one of the bracelets on her wrist with a thaumic display. "Oh! Segrusa we should probably go, they'll surely be waiting on us at the nearest storehouse and we're on a timetable! Why didn't you pull me away sooner?" Freydis' lips rose teasingly at the corners, eyes narrowing as her gills fluttered.
"Think you're being cute huh? I see what you're doing." Segrusa turned her head, bemused, and smiled apologetically at the farmer before saying to Freydis, "You are, without a doubt, the greatest menace to any timetable." Segrusa took the Erudite troublemaker's arm. "Let’s get going before you have another flight of fancy." Her gillflaps fluttered gently, and she addressed the farmer as they turned to leave. "Sorry for bothering you, we'll get out of your hair."
"Really it is no worry. Always happy to have curious officials come by," the farmer called after them, before turning back to his work.
Freydis was continually distracted by every minute detail as they walked away, like a squirrel with the perfect nut. A skiff pulled up next to the garden, manned by a member of their exasperated retinue. Freydis ignored the man and pointed at the horizon as they got on, stuffing the empty husk of the fruit into Segrusa's arms. Her gills laid flat, and her lips briefly curling down in annoyance.
"Hold onto this, we might need it later. Look at that!"
A continuous stack of sea fields stretched out ahead as they climbed aboard the skiff. Great undulating shapes stood against the backdrop of a fast-moving blue sky, metal gleaming in the sunlight, visible even here nine and a half leagues away.
Annoyance at suddenly being a waste bin melted away in what stood before them. "What a sight." Segrusa's voice rang with the sheer wonder in her tone, the bewilderment of her wife's antics fading.
The skiff pushed off the side of garden and began it's journey back towards the wall. "Imagine arriving on a sunrise with the sun framing the whole city against it." Freydis gestured, holding onto the side railings as they skipped across the troughs.
The whip and whir of Thaumic Engines roared overhead, and she looked up to see sundfljúgavagns fly in from over the wall between the 13th and 12th. These bore the markings of the defense force and military escorts. The gleam of thaumic weapons embedded in their hulls shone in the sunlight, provoking a tinge of discomfort at the thought of needing such an escort. I hoped those would have been phased out by now. What a dark world we live in that even in peace such things are needed.
Behind the smaller vessels came five great and modern Krakens, the howl of their thaumic mechanisms giving the illusion of some great beast roaring. Immense channels were carved into the hulls, flowing lights and Rustics powering large banks of weapons. The beautiful design underlined its true purpose. The Kraken was not a peacekeeper. It was a tool of war. Thus, its beauty was terrifying. Any peace that must be maintained by such displays of power is not a stable peace. Especially now.
"Is it just me, or are the pilots flying a bit aggressively low?" Freydis tilted her head curiously as the vessels drifted about, turning to come in low as their skiff passed between buoy's directing them to the storehouse. She studied their designs and the shape of the rustics and the tunnel fueling the vessels flicking back and forth above them.
"Oh, I imagine they are probably just a little displeased that they're being delayed." Segrusa laughed heartily, her gills fluttering. "I think your little escapade just now didn't help. There was a time where I would have shared that feeling."
"Good thing we fixed that, hmm?" Freydis teased. "They can wait just a little longer. I dictate the pace of my work, and I say we investigate that storehouse." Freydis batted back with a childish fire in her breath that made Segrusa laugh.
"Freydis, we cannot search the entire storehouse and expect to make it to the village in the same day!"
"Do you really give up that easily?" Freydis snapped back, hovering at the edge of the rails.
The skiff pulled up alongside the docks of the storehouse, and before Segrusa could stop her Freydis was off the skiff, and jogging along the dock towards the storehouse.
Exasperated, Segrusa watched her march up the steps, and straight past bewildered workers using heavy thaumo-mechanical cranes to move containers in and out of the storehouse.
She laughed to herself, and then threw her voice. "Don't marry an Aquailian Seggy, they're a wild breed who follow their whims. She'll cause you so much trouble! Mother was right, but Mither above I do not care." She got off the skiff to follow.
30 minutes of trawling around the storehouse later; a gaggle of anxious looking magisters followed behind Freydis. They almost piled on top of each other as she stopped abruptly, looking at a massive stack of containers. Segrusa pushed past the magisters to stand next to her wife, winded and trying to get her governor's attention and failing. Freydis looked between the stacks of containers, eyes narrowing as her gills fluttered.
"Governor?" One of the magisters asked with anxious pitch.
"I need to get back there." Freydis pointed.
The magisters exchanged looks. "Sorry?"
"I need access to that back wall!" Freydis turned on them impatiently.
Segrusa stepped between Freydis and them. "She wants the containers moved," Segrusa says over her shoulder. The magisters scuttle off.
"Freydis, this is going nowhere. You've searched every aisle in the storehouse with magistry and found nothing.
"I'm not giving up that easily, there is something here, I can feel it."
"Our escorts are waiting on your word to start loading the cargo. You're not going to find anything behind those containers."
Freydis looked Segrusa in the eyes, and repeated "There is something there, I can see it. We just need to get back to it!"
Segrusa sighed, amusement and patience for Freydis' antics running low for the day. "Alright, but when we find nothing back there, we go yeah?"
Large multi-armed crab mechs scuttled into the aisles and began moving containers out of the way. It took them an additional ten minutes of orderly maneuvering to remove every container, leaving the barren wall in view. Freydis's lips turned up into a smug expression as a large and irregularly shaped patch of discolored paint decorated the back wall. "What did I say hmmm?"
Segrusa squinted at the patch, and turned to wave down a magister. "Go get me a mahi-mahi. That segment of wall needs to come down."
The magister blinked, seemed about to protest, before withering beneath Segrusa's commanding gaze, and gave an anxious nod. They scuttled off. A minute later, a mediums sized personnel transport wove through the ceiling high stacks of containers and came to a hovering stop just above Freydis and Segrusa. Segrusa caught a web-rigging thrown to her and climbed up, hanging off the side of the giant fish as she spoke to the weapons-master. "I need you to blow that piece of wall open." She pointed at the discolored patch.
The finnwoman stuck her head out of the entry port to get a good look. "Consul, that just looks like an odd colored patch of alloy, you sure?"
"Just do it." Segrusa, braced herself on the vehicle's rigging.
The weapons-master fluttered her gills once, and dropped back into the seat, drawing her fingers in wide spirals across several different glowing diodes, before jamming her palm into a central glowing panel. It blazed crimson, and then the mouth of the vehicle opened as the air crackled with Astral fire.
SCHREECH. A thick blue beam of writhing Astral fire leapt from the mouth and smashed into the wall for several seconds, throwing up a thick cloud of particulate matter and dust. Debris bounced off a barrier that Freydis drew around herself, falling harmlessly to the ground.
Everyone held their breath, waiting for the dust to clear.
When it did, a hole was left in the wall perhaps 10-11 hands in depth, extending into solid metal. Segrusa patted the hull of the transport, gesturing for them to head back out.
Freydis stood staring at the hole, as Segrusa dropped down next to her. "I could have sworn there was something there."
"We're chasing striped seahorses Freydis."
"But I had a feeling, a burst of the Sight…"
"I'll have the guards do a deeper search, but we are not going to find anything here, not when we have more important business to attend to."
"Yeah… I guess you're right." Freydis' shoulders sagged, as she turned to her wife. Segrusa took her hand, and they made their way back out of the storehouse, oblivious to the brief glimmering illumination of thaumic lights visibly moving and dancing behind the semi-translucent hole in the wall they'd made.
Freydis gave the order to begin loading the cargo, as heavy thaumo-machinery set into rhythm of moving containers to the docks.
"So how precisely are we getting the people food?" Segrusa asked, back of her palms perched on her hips as she watched the crab and lobster mechs move containers about. "Krakens aren't exactly known for their expansive cargo spaces."
"Easy. Tentacle lift." Freydis said, bouncing in place as her disappointment was slowly replaced with new excitement.
"Tentacle lift?" The Finnwoman's brows rose on her face, as she turned to face where the thaumically driven arms of the Kraken groaned. The tentacles unclasped from each other, fluidly moving through the air as if they belonged to an actual squid. Reaching out each one gripped stacks of containers full of produce.
"Tentacle lift!" Freydis said gesturing. "Sometimes I forget you were a scub pilot, and not a Kraken marine."
"Every day I learn something new around you," Segrusa said bemused, as they walked up the closest Kraken's ramp, standing just inside the hold as it began to lift off the ground toward the sky.
"That's always the goal."
Bell Beaker Gaul
Freydis shielded her vision as they walked down the ramp, her steps stuttered and swaying, as she wiped the remnants of fruit off the corner of her mouth, still brushing stray drops of vomit off her waterproof robes. They stepped out of the shadow of the Kraken into the grotto. As soon as her eyes adjusted, the town of ornately crafted wooden saucer shaped buildings came into view. Built along the water's edge, the bustle of daily life marched on regardless of the encroaching military vessels.
She looked around slowly, eyes drifting across small stalls run by merchants, groups of children playing games with oddly shaped and glowing objects, older Finnfolk weaving threads to fine sea-silk quilts and blankets. Twanging strings pricked against her ears as she turned to see a small group gathered around a long-necked instrument gently glimmering with Rustics. Peace and warmth rose in her breast as the emotive tones drifted on the breeze with the song.
And in the notes of the song, she found herself drifting again, even as the metal clanked beneath her feet. This was a ballad older than her, only just barely. The colors of the world swirled with the Rustics carried on the air, whistling in her ears.
There was her mother again, diving into the depths of the abyssal bay in the south and east. Twelve Krakens, the first of their kind, new and gleaming with the lights of their Rustics standing out like beacons in the dark. Thousands of her people, skiffs and transports. More than just that, strange vessels of wood and bark from the plant-tamers of the south, metal birds and swimming things from the Mekhanites of the hidden landmass.
Then from the depths, screaming up towards them all, came the consumption of thought, drainer of soul, great winding serpent of the body of Bengal. Mindless in its hunger and terror, stripped dry by her mother eons ago. Then they all coll—
And suddenly she was jolted back to reality as she reached the bottom of the ramp.
A younger Finnwoman, not in uniform, waited for them. Krakens whirred by, setting down their precious cargo of produce filled containers, before landing gently in the grass of the inlet. The lids slid back, and soon they were being picked over by Finnfolk and a small smattering of humans.
"This way Ma'am, I'll show you to the damage." The newcomer said promptly and began walking, before Freydis and Segrusa could ask any questions. Freydis looked at her wife. Segrusa's fronds fluttered once, and then she walked on, Freydis following shortly after. They followed on behind her, walking at a brisker pace to catch up.
The wooden structures were decorated with colorful paints, chimes that twinkled notes in the wind, rich gardens and the sounds of people living and loving filled the air. It's nearly the same as where I grew up… That thought sent a pang of longing through her chest.
She missed her moms.
"Here we are," The Finnwoman said grimly.
Before them was the blackened earth, ashen remains of crops stacked everywhere. Freydis sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. "Segrusa?"
"I smell it too." The former warrior waded in among the burnt ashes, wilted stems, and knelt, scraping a finger along the soil, and then rubbing two digits together. "Quicklime." She called back to Freydis.
"So not an accident." Freydis' stomach churned. So this is what comes from the previous governor's policies? Fire in our people's unprotected fields.
A young human man walked out from around a fence. "Ah, Governor! I'm glad you're here. There's something else we want to show you," The young man said, gesturing to Freydis to follow.
The local Finnwoman and Governor followed, with Segrusa not far behind. Together they rounded some fencing and walked towards the charred remnants of a large structure. Spoiled and burnt grains and crops were spread everywhere.
"I found this when sorting through the crops." A half-burnt rag was handed to Freydis.
She took the cloth from him, sniffed, and winced as she held it away from her face. "Animal fat."
"So, someone made an accelerant, and then used quick lime in the fields." Segrusa turned to look back at the burnt fields, and then to the grain store. "So, I was right, it was a deliberate act." She frowned. "An attack."
"Destroying the crops and the grain stores, are they trying to drive them from the land? Why?" Freydis asked. Her confusion and worry slipped into her eyes, further illustrated by the way her lips curled downwards. "Do your merchants not trade them food, and herbs, and supplies?
"My father did, and his father before him, and other merchants too. Some summers still do, but you don't send us as much as you used to in my grandfather's day." He paused, and then added. "Some inlanders grow jealous of how easy we live, and how high the cost of barter has become for food in winter. They blame it on the abundance of resources here on the coast, call us greedy," the young man scratched his skull. "They don't understand that much of it comes from Finnfelheim. We can sustain ourselves, but if the winter is too harsh, or the summer is too dry…"
"You rely on what we can send you." Freydis says closing her eyes.
"So I guess, that resentment is starting to boil over." He looks at the scenes with worry in his eyes. Well, what Freydis assumes is worry. Humans are not as easy to read.
"But we control most of the inland territory?" Segrusa wrinkled her brow.
"This seems targeted. Like they're trying to isolate the inland pockets, push us out of ancestral holdings." Freydis frowned.
"Right, drive the coastal trade points away, take the river deltas and then there's no way in for goods and food to flow." Segrusa's lips curled down at the corners as her lips laid flat. "They drive us out, take these places and then… realize they can't support themselves on the land alone when they run into the same challenges you have." she gestures to the man.
"The river valleys and deltas are more fertile," the local Finnwoman added. "They could support their populations alone off it, but not us and them."
"One thousand years of peace… that's what's at stake if this continues." Freydis stood up, gills lying flat.
"The best course of action would be to fly upstream into the interior with our forces, and use force," Segrusa tapped her foot, frowning at the ground.
"What!?" Freydis turned her head to her wife. "Absolutely not, there is still room for diplomacy! We can't abandon talking and jump straight to violence."
"Love, look around you. The violence has started in this field. If we respond with diplomacy, we look weak and they'll do it again."
"We don't know the full motives yet! There might be easy ways to please all sides without bloodshed!" Freydis's fists tightened into balls. I cannot believe she is jumping to violence so quickly? Has she forgotten how things were before the peace? The violence, misery and bloodshed? No we can't go back.
"I think charging up into the interior with the Krakens will just provoke them more… turn those who are neutral or indifferent hostile when you invade their space." The Man offered gently, shifting nervously at the raised voices and expressions of two Finnfolk who very much towered over him.
Segrusa breathed in and out. "We'll assign more defense forces here and other local grottoes," Segrusa she said noncommittally.
"Thank you. Hopefully that will be enough deterrence," the Finnwife said.
Segrusa took Freydis' hand, and they began to walk away.
"Segrusa—"
"I know. It might lead to violence, but I don't see an alternative." She didn't say it, but Freydis knew now what she actually wanted.
As they moved back into the village, a commotion arose, followed by the ripple of thaumic discharge. They looked at each other, and then ran inwards.
In the square, a younger Finnfolk stood holding their own arm as a human ran away from him, hopping onto one of shark-shaped skiffs.
"Stop him!" Shouted a soldier, as several people ran out of the parked Krakens, magistry rich arrows and bows drawn.
"Don't shoot!" Freydis shouted, provoking hesitation from those who had a shot.
It was all the human needed. He activated the skiff and took off. Circling off a fair distance away, before he did a hard drift, speeding back in. Freydis felt the thaumic energy pulse and rise in the vehicle.
"Segrusa!" Freydis' hands were already moving instinctually, fingers already rippling through the air as motes of light gathered at her fingertips. Aegishjalmur smote the air with blue astral fire, and rippled outwards into a protective barrier. Thaumic bursts ripped from the skiff smashing into the protective barrier, as the master Rustic blazed brilliantly in Freydis' torso. The humans fired additional bursts, hitting two of the barges and they burst into eclectic flames.
"Huglausi!" Segrusa flicked her fingers and Sowilō crackled against her palms, as she shoved one hand forward moving her whole body in time. A crack of lightning ripped from her fingertips and slammed into the pilot, careening him off the skiff as it whizzed by. The skiff tumbled through the air, out of view and over a hill where it exploded with a cracking boom.
Freydis let the Rustic fade out, the barrier falling away as she started to make for the crumpled form of the human on the ground. Dismay burned in her stomach, had they killed him? Mither above please let him be alive!.
Her legs trembled carrying her forward only a few steps as something far away called her name. She stumbled vision blurring.
"Segrusa," she slurred it out, starting to fall. Strong arms caught her before she could hit the hard ground. The sky above her tore open as if cut by a knife, the wriggling flesh of reality squirming and swelling in pain as waterfalls of maroon flooded down all around her, threatening to drown the whole world.
"Shhhh, it's ok. I'm here. We'll get you back to the ship." In the swirl of colors that was her wife's face she saw Segrusa look up and shout. "Vision! Get me two stretchers!"
Freydis fought to keep her eyes open, fought against the end of time, but she failed. She failed again. As she did every single time. As she was always destined to.
She failed to stop the howling end.
A Forgotten Dream, The Astral Sea.
There was no fall this time, the twinkling, inky stars of the nights sky banishing the rising wail and ache in your skull.
The fire crackled at your feet, the brush drawing the little strands and fans of flame this way and that, locked in an eternal dance.
A figure sat across from you. It was hard to say what she was, or if she was even there. You weren't even sure you and your partner were there, the watercolor stained grass beneath you feeling so surreal.
"Do the dreams always feel like this?"
"Sometimes," you responded. "Sometimes they are nice, and peaceful. And sometimes they are filled with fire." You smiled at her. You thought you knew who she was. Who she would be, but you weren't sure.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That mother forces them on you."
"Don't be," you said to her. "It doesn't bother us anymore."
Quiet settles between you as the flames crackle, the brushes pulling strands back and forth, and occasionally flicking sparks down and away.
"Does she love you?" you ask, a strange sensation tightening in your chest, as a pencil snags and draws the fans of your gills closed. It's not jealousy, it's the weight of neglect, of absence.
"Yes or — well, I hope so. I didn't know her long." Your face draws up with a guiding stroke, taking her and her answer in. The indefiniteness of her form snags on the edges of your mind, trying to grasp some definition, but fails. However, the blueness of her eyes touches up with every sidelong closure of her horizontal lids, growing more defined, vivid, and real.
"Oh. When did you realize what she was?" your voice falters. Was it wrong to feel this way about something? Maybe it was jealousy? Or maybe you were envious of a life lived without knowing.
"When she told me. Not too long ago." Her indeterminate form shifts, shadows and lighting striated by the strokes of an especially attentive brush.
How could you feel that way towards someone who never knew? "Does she speak with you often?" Your tone flexes, the hint of feeling leaking into your voice.
"Only in deepest dreams." The voice trembles with hesitation. "I'm sorry, if she deprives you of attention."
"You're not culpable for her decisions. In totality I failed her. It's my sin to bear."
She grew quiet, the painted moon arcing above them, drawn through the sky by a blessed brush.
"You've got another with you," she said looking up to you once more. "Will you tell us again? About Finnfelheim and its end?"
"Of course."
But you find her gone the moment you begin, the creeping dark drawing in as the ink runs along the brush's path. The stars begin to bleed, and all you can do is scream. The fire rises in your skull, that churning in your soul flickering as you fade back into the endless march once more.
Were the play’s strings not already pulling you back into their binding, you’d be tempted to rip out your tongue and regenerate it. She was there, mind separate and anchored. A confused flood of emotions rippling from her into you and back again. Why was she so quiet?
Of course I’m still mad. She wanted to throw it away. In the name of that nonsense, normalcy. It boggles my grey matter; how can someone not want one of the greatest gifts the universe can give?! Especially a human whose kind is so much less in tune with the Astral Flux and Threads?
I don’t understand. I don’t understand this attachment. What does throwing anything that doesn’t fit with this foolish concept of a baseline reality into a box do? Why subject so many to such cruel inhuman treatment? There is no such thing as normal, we live in a paradoxical realm of the increasingly weird.
To be wary or afraid of the unknown is natural. You, humans in general, but especially you, are enamored as creatures of habit. Change is different, scary, a wall behind which you can’t see the path ahead.
It is natural to be afraid.
What is not natural is to let it consume you. We have lived on the path of fear and retreat. We have seen the dark tides of blind complacency and that fear of what comes next. This idea that you have changed and are now othered and of no worth is not new to us. We have lived at the edge of its teeth. Our whole world payed for it at humanity’s hands.
Your world may be different, but there will always be a path through the unknown to a better life. And modir? You were right. She wishes you to see the consequences of letting this fear win.
But what if you’re wrong? What if I endanger everyone by my existence. What if I can never control it? What if I and every other anomaly should be locked up? What if normalcy is needed to keep the universe in balance and I am the tipping point in its destruction?
Then you’re a Huglausi, willfully ignorant, vitskertr and we’re wasting our time trying to convince you. There is no such thing as normalcy, there never has been, and there never will be. You are weird, strange, eccentric. These are not insults, they are facts. The whole world is. It has always been this way.
If you have doubts, then the time for words has passed. Only you can bridge that gap of understanding, and for that you must see for yourself our life in its totality. The struggle of our people. Then you’ll understand the complexities of the real world you live in and how everything you have known is a consequence of how we came to our end.