The rivers flowed, the winds blew. Wolves howled, reeds grew, the old 'uns passed away, new kits were born. Things went well, by and large. The Bjorks in the north navigated the currents of many gods in their native land, and in the south, the Bjarska simply shrugged and lived another day. In the decades that passed, a neutral observer might have noticed a peculiar difference between the two: Bjorks fought when times were tough. Biarsks fought when there was plenty.
"HAAARGH!"
Grotnip reeled back from the blow, already winding up his strong arm, and slashed his claw across Kmak's face like a fistful of blades.
Let's take a moment to see how things came to this.
"It's my bloody creek and it's my bloody stone! Everything south of the marker post belongs to the Western Lubov!"
"You MOVED the fecking post!"
"I moved it BACK! You moved it all the way past the second willow!"
"What? From where I'm standing, that's the third willow! Count 'em, you shit-brained maggot rat!"
Rolling her eyes high up into Heaven, Yek dragged her hands down her face and begged the Singing Maker to come and smite both men. She stamped down on her husband's tail to get his attention, and he yelped. "Grotnip! Quit your jabbering! Get back in the lodge right now before Toka gives birth with no-one but a rockslave to help her!" Actually, she realised, maybe Toka would prefer if she just went home and left them here.
"Shut your stinking gob, woman!" Grotnip pulled his long tail away with his hands and pointed in her face. "This isn't lodge business, this is men's business! You have no say here! It's the law!" Yek had no answer to that.
"The law?" Kmak had not forgotten their quarrel for a moment. "Let me tell you what's in the law, you sneaking old creep! This slave-rock was in my half of the brook, which makes it mine!"
"Well, I've seen where you dug it up, and it's on my side of the damn post!"
"YOU MOVED THE FECKING POST!"
The two bjarska continued to scream insults and accusations over the large pebble until Kmak abruptly picked it up and hit him with it.
Grotnip roared, and so their fight began: rolling in grass, in mud, into the creek splashing and tumbling every which way, digging nails into one another's pelt, sinking their stained teeth deep into shoulders. It was over in seconds. Kmak rolled his enemy's skull onto a river-rock; it connected with a bang and he went still. Blood trailed down the clean shallow water.
Yek yelped, clutching her hands to her mouth and splashing down to her spouse. "You bastard! That was my favourite husband!"
Kmak said nothing, gasping and groaning as he clutched his deep wound. Yek backhanded him with her work-hardened knuckles.
"You know the law! You killed my husband, now you replace him!" Kmak gave her a dazed and a pained stare. "Swear it! Swear it right now!"
"I swear," said Kmak, raising his paw, "by the Maker of lake and sea, and may the Sun-Headed Giant bear witness from his hill, that I have done you wrong, Yek of Svietla. I beg for thy mercy, and I grovel before thee, I relinquish my lodge, and I offer myself as the lowest of thy husbands."
There was a quiet pause as they both regained their breath. Something small swished the grass. Yek looked up and saw the pebble-headed earthenslave approach them. "My god, she really is giving birth. Damn you. You killed her only husband," she said, fretting with her hands. "Orphaned on the day they were born."
A noise in the brook. They turned and stared. Grotnip lay there on his back, eyes closed. His chest was heaving.
"I'm! Not! Dead!"
Yek threw a clod of mud at him. Kmak turned to Yek and roared, but the words could not be unspoken. "YOU! YOU TRICKED ME!"
"YOU SHOULD HAVE MADE SURE THE BASTARD WAS DEAD!" She scratched the sides of her face, groaning audibly. "Now I have three bloody husbands to deal with! Three! Shit!"
The two bjarska continued to fight with words only, as was proper between manbiarsk and wifebiarsk. Grotnip rolled and tried to at least get on all fours.
"Oh. Look, a slave-rock."
Dizzy from the head-blow and woozy from all the blood he'd lost, Grotnip yanked from the mud the stone he'd fallen on, a big gleaming pebble perfect for carving. The crude stick-and-bone golem on the riverbank watched with stupid interest. Then it turned and tottered back to the reedy mud-heap that was their lodge, where its mistress lay curled up by a little fire stoked by her brother-in-law.
Toka gave birth to eight healthy kits, and life went on.
We check in on the Bjarska. They're doing just fine.
Ea Nebel flicked her long scarf out of her face and its tail flew off to one side, the Monarch's colours snapping in the wind like a banner. It was curious just how windy the innards of this wreck could get. A hot metal shell, seized in place, played many tricks with the desert air; here cool, here windy, here stifling and dry and full of dust. She cocked her slurbow with a windlass and shot her grappling hook up onto a high ledge, across a wide gap that had probably been a colossal hip socket.
Tug, tug. Firm enough to shimmy her way up. She hauled herself up the rope with her gear, out of the dead machine's femur and into its lower body.
Astus was everywhere here- his materials, his notes, his greasy handprints. It was quite galling. Ea Nebel had forced herself to enter by a maintenance port on the heel only after much stomping about and muttering on the cool night sand outside. 'So long as you bear no hate in your heart...' Well! She felt entitled to be a bit miffed, and her outburst, frankly, had been far too composed.
Well. What was done was done. She'd said all she needed to say. No time to bear grudges. She would work through her feelings on the Astus incident here, now, and leave them behind in the sand. She had every intention to be worthy of her grandfather's gift, no matter how...
...
...Garish. Besides, Ea Nebel was planning to build a house, and it is very bad luck to draw the shape of a house with a heart full of anger. She did not want to be reminded of this episode by the walls of her own home.
She thought all this as she walked down some kind of hydraulic chute, dragging the Doomclaw along its metal wall, its new ivory hilt snug in her gloved fist. It left a ghastly metallic screech and a gash as tall as she was, rusted to powder. Then she conjured a spiked club and buried it in every control panel she passed.
"Oh what's this?"
Treasure! Ea Nebel dropped her club and it dissolved unnoticed, her fury lost in the fun. Something shiny in a delicate socket. She pulled off her glove- her otherworldly scarf, always exactly as vivid as it was in direct sunlight, somehow did not provide any illumination whatsoever. A white flame danced on her fingertip, and there it gleamed: a bright golden ring, set with a heart of jade that glowed soft and green, like the Monarch's own throne.
"A gift!"
She slipped it on, watching glyphs of her own divine will fade in and out of the air around her fingers as she did. It was the perfect size for a woman's hand. Ea Nebel extinguished the light and rotated her wrists together, watching it glow opposite the blood diamond on her other hand.
"You really are too good to me, Voligan..."
Groi-groiiii.
The demigoddess didn't move. The Iron Boar scraped the dust vigorously with both its forelegs, but still, no sign that she had heard- still crouched over on knees and elbows, head stuck under a scraggly bush. This was improper. Scrounging in the dirt was his job, and he did it much better, anyway. The giant hog sniffed and wandered off.
Ea Nebel rested her chin firmly in her hands and watched the scene under the twigs with big-eyed fascination. What a cute bug!
It was a wasp. Not a hornet or a yellowjacket or some other stinger-happy eusocialite with an obnoxious sweet tooth. A proper wasp, built like a bull-ant, with spindly splayed legs and a narrow body, marked here and there with the most brilliant orange. Even the wings were tinted. And a big wasp, at that. It marched staunchly on over the gritty, twiggy sand, dragging with it a twitching huntsman spider bigger than Nebel's palm. What a splendid insect!
She reached out slowly with her pointing finger, and it dropped its catch immediately, scurrying and buzzing back and forth around it in angry semicircles. She withdrew her hand and it went back to its business. She summoned the Monarch's scarf onto her neck (she couldn't wear it all the time, good heavens) and held it with her other hand. This time, the wasp let her stroke its wing.
It was a mud-dauber, she learned. A gravid female.
Ea Nebel had no desire to be interrupted while she built her house, especially with another massacre, so she wandered the earth seeking a fitting slave to help her intern bodies in her absence. Her delightful babiruša pigs were more than willing to help, were it not unforgivably lazy to leave any cadaver in her care to a shallow dirt grave dug by swine. As for the hagfish... she was surprised they even left bones. Very clean bones.
But the mudwasp was perfect!
She tapped the busy mother gently on the thorax and a stiff, rubbery clone fell out of her. Ea Nebel pulled it into the sun and left the wasp to her work. She wasn't sure quite what god or goddess had built such an exquisite animal. The life mother, Phelenia? Whatever. She drew a wide magic circle around the effigy, clapped her hands, pulled them apart, and enlarged it to the size of a coyote.
When Ea Nebel was finished her happy little dance around the sunny circle, the tombwasp's front feet had turned white, like gloves, and everything else about it was black. Even the wings neatly folded over its back were black, with a faint bluish iridescence, like rock-oil. She ducked back under the bush to see what the mudwasp was up to. The spider was gone, encased in a neat clay sarcophagus, like a pot, to which the mother was constructing a lid. All done! Just like me!
She tapped the tombwasp's forehead twice and one soul flew into each of its colourless eyes, lighting them up with a pale blue glow. It whirred its wings and pattered about, taking in the world with its huge eyes.
"The second soul is gratis, but you'll only be able to make one for each of your eggs. You'll have to find more for your babies. Only intelligent souls will do. Your soul is feeding you with mana right now, see, and only mortal souls accumulate enough of it. If you find a body out in the open, you can use it to summon one into your egg from... wherever they go. Am I clear?"
The tombwasp spread its wings and whirred off over the plain. The deva laughed. She wasn't worried. She'd let the giant insect keep its sting- she was of the thought that more weaponry was always better- after she'd given it an aversion to the taste of blood. That would keep it away from living targets, and leave the blood-marked Eidolon to sleep undisturbed under their shrouds.
The tired mudwasp mother buzzed away to find a meal. Ea Nebel still wasn't sure which god had designed such an elegant animal. Tuku Llantu, maybe? Perhaps Uncle Jiugui had dreamt it up in a fit of poetry and booze.
The Monarch told Ea Nebel that the beast-calming shawl (now scarf) wouldn't work if she had hate in her heart, so she dutifully works through her remaining anger at Astus by exploring the dead colossus and trashing its insides a bit. This works great and she is even rewarded with a magical runic ring! It doesn't do too much for her, but makes some unlucky dwarf's job more interesting.
Cut to a scene where she reveals herself to be an insect loving gremlin girl, to the embarrassment of the Iron Boar. She finds a potter wasp and thinks it's the coolest animal ever for burying its prey in clay capsules for its young.
Inspired, she creates a huge, gothic wasp species that lives at least partly on accumulated mana harvested from a dead soul. Born with one soul, a young tombwasp is provided with a second, mana-rich mortal soul by hatching in a simple clay sarcophagus built around an abandoned cadaver or skeleton. This ritual summons the soul of the lost corpse out of the afterlife and into the tombwasp, released again when the mana runs out and the tombwasp dies. Tombwasps are averse to blood, which keeps them from trying to entomb live mortals. We hope.
Otherwise, tombwasps are quick and can bite or sting, but aren't especially smart or sturdy. Their venom is a powerful paralytic that can easily kill the old or sick by impairing their lungs, like some snakes. They will occasionally eat any animal that isn't red-blooded, and live long lives to compensate for the rarity of their breeding fodder.
Ea Nebel can't seem to figure out who made the original animal, but we readers know better, don't we? Happy Yesaris week!
RAGING ROSA | THE DANCE-DEMON | FEVERFOOT | LEAPING LINDA
Mamang.
XVIII
In the calm and even seas, Rosalind the Feverfoot rowed her boat. The sun shone gently and skies were blue, and a joyous breeze played with her hair of twilight as the salty fragrance - for she loved it! - tickled her small browned nose. Her oar disappeared into the waters - the liquid parting, dancing, laughing around it - and the boat moved that little bit more towards its destination, carried by the bobbing waves. All had been peace since her encounter with the Exile.
From time to time, when the trembling of her feet became nearly overwhelming, she stood up in the boat and allowed herself - with no small amount of fear - to dance gently there. She danced like shy waves and gentle skies. She danced like a beaming sun and leaping rays. She danced like little joys and innocence, like the forgetting of past wrongs and pain. She danced like sweet, little joys.
It did not satiate the fever in her feet, but it was enough to keep the terrifying conflagration of fevered dancing - that uncontrollable and destructive motion - sleeping, simmering, for a while. She danced a little, she rowed a little, she beheld the liquid carpet around her and the great blue one above. She counted stars and sighed for starlight - wondered how the great blue carpet of the heavens turned to darkness and the one that flowed about her turned to blackness in the night.
Any other person, perhaps, would have found the whole thing frightening - all alone upon the ocean with naught but a boat and her clothes. But Rosalind rather liked it. Here, alone, away from others, she was a danger to no one - she could dance her little dances, little dances of sweet joys, and cause no pain to another or herself be brought to pain. Here there was no great risk that some sudden change would so astound her that her feet - without any warning - would leap up and start their dancing, start that motion of horror, movements rippling, darting, piercing. Cadence of her ancient terror.
No, here there was peace. And beyond here was the cold head of Galbar and her cure. All, she sighed with joy to know, was going to be well.
mahm
The sound had never really not been there, but suddenly she heard- or rather, felt- or rather, even, lived it. It rumbled through the water, the air, the world - and more than anything, it rumbled through her being.
mahm, mahm, mahm, mahm, mmahng
It was not an unfamiliar sound by any means, and it was not an unwelcome one either. She glanced about, trying to find the source of the sound somewhere on the waters, in the heavens.
pfsht! pfwush!
In the waters.
mahm, mahm, mahm, mahm, mahm, mahm...
Her head turned from side to side and her eyes darted. And then she leaned over, her bangles jangling and her tresses falling and flying as the waves grew more tempestuous and the boat was rocked and tested.
And then there it was, a shadow below her, a shadow all around her, a cloud in the ocean whose shape could not be mistaken. So close was the whale, so vast, that she could hear the voice in its throat even through the air, almost a bark, almost a chirrup, slow and impossibly deep. The whale itself was barely an arm’s length below her. Rosalind could see the faded markings of its skin. Its gentlest motion rocked the boat above, like a feather in light breeze.
She gave off a small squeak of sudden fear, a rational moment amidst emotions of awe and wonder - and no sooner had the sound left her mouth then her feet were trembling beneath, tapping tapping tapping tapping. She turned to them in sudden horror, glanced again at the rising shadow, rose to her feet and tried to dance, but only stumbled, tripped and fell down - jangling, rustling, crying out in shocked frustration. All about the waves were rising, rising rising with the shadow.
And then the waves ceased, for there was no more water. The boat heaved once and then rocked no more. It had settled, though there was no beach or shore, and around her was a little island, smooth and black and glistening, adorned with neither sand nor stone.
PFASHT!
Hot steam erupted from the whale’s blowhole. The plume, tall and straight as a pine, was swiftly dispersed on the sea breeze, washing away the potent stench of seafood. It did not dive. It basked there in the merry sun, carrying along Rosalind’s boat as though it were a pebble, its massive tail swirling the water behind at a sleepy pace.
The goddess righted herself and rose to behold the view. Not many could say - no one at all, perhaps - that they had ever been on a boat, on a whale, on the sea. She trembled and her feet - they had her now! - carried her off the little wooden structure and onto the whale’s leathery back. Her feet curled at the odd sensation of life, enormous life, beneath her.
It was only a second of stillness, however, before she leapt - gasped - and paused. Then tip-tapped forward - swiftly - skin of foot on skin of back, then paused. Then twirled to the jangle of bracelets and the breathing of her great skirt, then paused. It was as exhilarating as it was terrifying - her feet were light and loose, her torso tensed with fear. And then she darted forward and, with a sweeping pirouette, disappeared - spinning, shrinking, evaporating - down the blowhole of the whale.
All was quiet on the surface of the waters. The whale flared its blowhole briefly, spouted a confused puff of steam from its itching nostrils, then closed the hole, arched its body downwards, and dived, thoughtlessly flicking the empty boat with its tail.
And then there was no longer any sign of either of them.
XIX
Now, the normal order of business for any creature’s trip through the interior of a whale is rather replete with introductions to numerous coatings of saliva and various kinds of gastric juices. Even those who take the somewhat odd route starting with the blowhole can expect a rather pungent welcome followed by swift eviction (or, failing that, they will be swiftly booked in for a one-off introductory session with contracting muscles pulverising one’s form from all directions).
Rosalind, however, did not suffer any of that. While no one has (yet) come to truly understand how or why she suddenly shrank, vapourised and found herself flushed down the whale’s blowhole, it was not an experience that she would very soon (or ever) forget. And, indeed, these matters should not be overly studied; one should rather rest in the foreknowledge that such inexplicable oddities are bound to happen from time to time and are of the many peculiarities that make the world so exciting, wonderful, and (for Rosalind) terrifying.
It was made truly unforgettable - as I, being intimately familiar with Rosalind’s history, can conjecture - by the faint but conspicuous sprinklings of Yudaiel that lay scattered all across the Feverfoot’s physical and metaphysical being. As the Feverfoot moved and feverishly rippled through the whale,[1] the scatterings of Yudaiel within her made it so she did not just see and feel the whale, but for a time there she was the whale; that was her motion on the currents, that her skin against the waters, that her sight and those - those her memories.[2]
The first thing that Rosalind saw in the whale was, in fact, the beginning of memory.[3] Out of the darkness of forgetfulness the whale rose so that for a time it danced and sang alongside its mother, but then - before it was full-grown even - it boldly struck out alone. This was the flame of youth and lust for adventure, and as the whale swam - being then the singular light gliding through the darkness of forgetting - it sang out night after night, in sunlight and in moon: mmam, mmang. mmam, mmang. mmam, mmam, mmam, mmam, mmam, mmam…
Its throat had voiced this sound long ago, but only at that moment - as the Feverfoot comprehended it and motioned it - he comprehended it and understood it. Mmammmang, Mammang, Mamang; it was his name. It had always been his name. He had always known it was his name - his fin, his tail, his eye, his lips; all had known that to be their name.
The Feverfoot shifted, rippled, and continued seeing and becoming. She saw, as he saw, the curiosity that was the hole in the ocean, and the death it promised - the curiosity that was the Exile in the boat, and the death it promised. Knowledge - experience - not sin, was the natural death of innocence and the birth of fear. And fear was a good, loyal, watchful friend; this wisdom Rosalind had learned; this wisdom, too, was Mamang’s.
There, in the mind and memory of the whale, were the words of gods. How they had lodged themselves in there is another of those peculiarities of the world - words from the Moon, words from the Apostate, and, clearest of all, words from Ruina, speaking of Iqelis, words of war and warning.
Fellow divines, this is Ruina. I come bearing news which I find important. A god named Iqe- lis sought to a- ttempt to domin- ate my plans, and likely intends to try and dom inate more giv- en time. I do not trust them, and I would advise caution in dea- ling with them. Yu- daiel, your moon is spared from its test for now. I will not be a pawn in the games of another.
Free from woe now - made less innocent, true, but joyous once again far from the island of air - Rosamamang[4] chased the calls of friends in shallower waters, pushed past the surface and beheld the moon and far horizons. It was not curiosity this time, but lack of caution - the great explosion of the Eye (he had known it was the Eye even then, he knew it more so now, Yudaiel the Eye, Yudaiel the Eye) had punctured his ear and burned up his face. He watched the red goddess dance and sing in the aftermath, and he thought - and he had not thought it back then, but he thought it with the Feverfoot who thought it now - that it was right and good to dance for the dead. All who died deserved a final death dance.
It was lonely for a time then, lonely to return to the waters of childhood and neither hear the song of his mother nor feel youthful purity and cleanliness. He drifted, in a stupor, past the deathsong of orcas which, when last he tasted these waters, would have sent him fleeing into the protective under-fin of his mother. Of no danger were they to him now. But sick at heart, sick in form was he, burdened and unclean, liced and wormed was he. And so the memory of that strange ice spirit was sweet on Rosamamang’s mind, and he lingered on it as it cleansed and purified his form and in his heart - and he had never conceived this thing until now, never until the Feverfoot conceived it, moved it in his heart and mind - he was grateful. He had never quite realised that he felt, either, but now his eye seemed to gaze on his inner self even as the Feverfoot gazed, and he beheld emotion.
He watched then, as Rosalind saw, how he waxed mighty, how he challenged the greatest bulls, how in the battle season he could have, had he so wished, thrown himself into the company of his kind - company, mind you, for which he yearned - and still withdrew. He was older now, it was true, he had been gnawed at by the tooth of experience and had been burned by fear, but his wanderlust was greater still than the company for which he yearned. And so he threw himself eastward and greeted those friendly but distant eastern whales - for they were not of his kind. So southward he threw himself, did the whale, crossed into the strange shade of heaven before turning tail to flee from it in the company of that loyal friend, fear. Then, calmed by the call of one of its kinsmen, it crossed again with the certainty that there was nothing here to fear.
Amongst the dwarf rorquals of the south it wandered for a time, those little ones living forever, over and over, the calf’s fear of the orca and drowning - distant fears for Mamang, far off fears for that wandering whale. It travelled southward still, to waters that no whale wandered, putrid waters of green death - and he had never known green to be anything but life! Through pain and anger he beat his form, listened to the stationary song of whales in the farthest south (though how could they be whales? What whale sang such stillness?) He swam through that pain, swam through the death of his layers of skin and all that lived on it, till he came to the churning malice that painted the water with unlife.
It was not fear that caused him to turn away then, sick and starving though he was and with much reason to fear. Perhaps it was caution, for that was something his wandering - the loss of his ear - had taught him. Perhaps, having gained that wisdom, he turned away for purer waters where his skin was healed and he could feed and wander among the living and so return to life. He travelled back to familiar shores and his song, song of the world-wanderer, beat back every brazen bachelor when summer and the call of mates was nigh.
He stayed, then, with his kind for a time - and his place was one of honour, world-wanderer that he was! - so that when the red goddess (that is, gentle reader, Homura) passed by with her giants walking unnaturally through the water, Mamang won the feast while the others chased the giant legs. These were sorcerous seas, Mamang knew and Rosalind now knew too; they were lucky indeed who had only stumbled on a murderous Exile or fallen down the blowhole of a whale. They were lucky, also, though not as lucky, who had crossed the Royal hound - and Mamang knew then, as Rosalind motioned, that the Royalty above the hound was the Monarch. And Rosalind’s motion was fear - for the Monarch was fear, just as his hound was fear. Those who had survived the hound were as lucky as those who had survived its master.
And luck was an odd thing, Rosalind - and Mamang, too - had learned. Luck was like those little furred things drifting - dying - on wood in the middle of the ocean, preyed on by the weathers and sharks. He had circled them, watched them, and returned after feeding. He had heard their song and cry, felt their distress, and perhaps the paternal instinct in him had bid him stay and protect. Odd things with great flat tails - except one, whose tail and manner differed from the others. Still, he saw them to safety, those distressed calves of the dry places.
And once he had done so, he went a-wandering - for he was the incarnation of the wanderlust - and watched odd creatures that had (very suddenly, oh so sorcerously!) emerged. He ate of the godfish, glutted his hunger and felt power and vitality rush through him as had never done so before - not even at the height of his youth. But it was only for a short while; in the wake of the godfish came others. He had seen the dancerfish before, eaten his fill of them even, but never these laektears.
While their coming spelled the end of the age of plenty and the dawn of the age of fear, this here too was a wisdom - even in the manner godfish preyed on laektear as laektear preyed on godfish. All things were restored to balance - and they, the tribe of the whales, were now also restored to balance. They would still wander, but now the fear of the calf years would be a lifelong fear. In his heart Rosamamang wept that this should be, but knew, then, that these godfish, these laektears, were to whales as bangles on the wrists of a goddess wildly dancing the end of all things.
And it was only right that he should know - for had they not swum together, and were they not swimming even now, beneath a clouded sky and within a bloody sea in which even the imperial Sun Himself had been humbled? Of smoke-filled trenches the lady within Rosamamang knew little, and of gods the whale knew only dance. But he had tasted the burning ichor. He had smelled the iron and the hatred. That fog was dispersing now, as they travelled, their united wisdom whispering clues of a mystery best left in the depths.
So, as their single vision turned at last to the moments they were living, the movement that was Rosalind formed up and greeted the whale - a strange greeting from one to oneself, for they were one another though they had never met.
Mmang, said the whale. He said it to himself, as much as he said it to all things in creation, to every fish[5], and even to the curious dance that had taken seat inside him. It was all he ever said. It was all he would ever need to say.
So he said it with love.
And love was as novel to the goddess-motion as it was to the whale, and as it dawned on both of them it coloured - in one momentous instant - the entirety of their lives. Love danced in those far-off memories of mother and son, cow and calf; it danced in the jangling of red-gold bangles; it danced in the lust for new waters, new sights, new sounds; it danced in the soft forgiveness of an Eye; it danced in the anger towards sorcerous things spewing green unlife; it danced in a dreamborn boat; it danced in a stranger spirit’s cleansing of a stranger whale’s skin; it danced in the breaking form, the furious gaze, the rocky smile, of an earthy god; it danced in the mind and body of a whale in whose motions moved a god.
The goddess moving in the fin moving in the sea moved differently after the discovery of love. The whale flowing in the waters flowing in the great valleys of the world flowed differently after the discovery of love. The change within was clear in their cadence, and it was clear on all things. The currents of after-love were not the currents of before-love and the fishes and orcas and- all things of before-love were not those of after-love. It was impossible to know whether the change was simply in their mind or in their dance or in everything - difficult to know if mere knowledge had changed their motions so, had changed the world so.
Trembling feverishly and filled with wonder, the Feverfoot within the whale drew itself in and curled up on itself again and again until - still curling, still turning, still spinning further and further into itself and the whale - it nestled deep inside the great, broad, expansive heart of Mamang. And by all things, was he a big-hearted whale! There was space enough for an entire god in there - and, though none need believe the claim, there was space enough for even the world in there.
In this way nestled - the Feverfoot nestled in the Feverfoot and Mamang nestled in Mamang and whale and god, made one, nestled one in the other - there descended on them a quite different vision. It was not one of the past, for they had encompassed their now-shared past in knowledge and experience. It was rather a vision of death - a vision, that is, of the future.
Some may think it quite convenient to sit and write past prophecies of things which, to us now, are merely history. It is all too easy to sit and declare: ah, but so-and-so predicted that we would sit and speak of just this matter; or so-and-so predicted that past victory or that past defeat or that past birth. But if it is not sufficient enough for the critical reader that this is near enough to a primary account as we can have, then I do not know what manner of evidence will suffice.
So it was a prophecy of death. Now, the certainty of death is known to all, but it was a source of especial consternation to the Feverfoot in the whale - who, I should remind the reader, had only moments before learned and been awed by the idea of love. Whether she realised it or whether she did not, Rosalind pulsed then within the heart of the whale, bubbled and rippled - and was carried away, quite unawares, with the flowing hot blood of that giant. She became that flow, that movement, that cadence; she became the dance of blood through arteries of back, of stomach, of tail, of fin, of mouth, by blubber. The flow of bluest blood she was through veins returning, rising, gushing, flowing past capillaries, reddening, brightening, laughing. She was the movement of air from bluest blood, through thinnest walls, into the greatest of all lungs. And even as she was gathered up inside the lungs of Mamang, something of her remained - in his heart, in those arteries and veins, dancing in his fins, in that tail, flowing endlessly, moving ceaselessly, gyring tirelessly; the deathless dance that was Mamang.
XX
PFASHT!
The back of the whale broke the wind-stirred water’s surface with barely a ripple. His flukes dipped back down under the surface with only a little splash. The season had been cold, then warm, then cool again. Now they were in the northern havens once more, and Mamang could only lift his head and spy the far peak of that friendly island, from which little things with little feet would crawl into the ocean to listen to him. And now they could watch, too. The Rosamamang dance is a splendid storied dance- isn’t it?
PHWUSH!
Another tall plume of steam blew away on the crisp wind. The whale-and-god approached a shore, where white birds wheeled and squawked their boundary-song between the land and sea. Their story now had swirled together like the waters of two oceans, and somewhere in its verses, written into Rosamamang’s blood and lungs and all over the secret folds of their singing throat, was an ending.
The dance of the dancers grew in the whale’s muscles, one final trembling tension, and he lay there in the shallows, a great and perfect silhouette, holding the final pose, and then- he breached with all his might.
For a single timeless moment, they were a white fountain of sun and whale, visible from horizon to horizon.
When they fell at last, the sound was heard for miles, and waves swamped the shore as though whipped by a gale. Mamang lay in the waters, sinking, exhausted, and completely relaxed, as the curtain of seafoam fell on him, his last bow taken, his marathon run. He stirred his tail, and his tired head peeked once more above the shallow waters. And when he caught his breath-
PFWOOSH!
And Rosalind was there under his plume, veiled by fog, obscured by a rainbow. Her hair of dusk unrolled first, like a great tapestry across the heavens. Then her spiralling skirt of velvet turned in the air blow it, followed in swift succession by the rest of the goddess. Her bangles were the very last to form about her wrists, and as they did so a single bracelet of red and gold formed about Mamang’s caudal peduncle. The goddess beamed down at him for brief moments, and then she was carried off on a breeze - light as a feather, flowing like air - and had soon disappeared to that northward isle. Disappeared, that was, except for the trail of sprawling onyx strands she left behind, which stretched endlessly upward, southward, eastward, seemed almost like another layer of sky. They danced there, for a short while, with the weak northern sun rays, shivered and trembled for brief moments against the sky, and then snapped away - like a spritely young tree held down by some mischievous rascal, only to be suddenly released - to disappear after the goddess who was motion.
A wrinkled eye watched them go, and disappeared once more into the blue. He was not one for long goodbyes.
[1] I would here beg forgiveness for the inaccuracy of these terms, for it is evidently quite preposterous to speak of pure motion as moving, but here we crash and break against the limits of spoken language, which, I should add, is a limitation not suffered by motion. You will likely debate this point, as is the right of any thinking person, so I should like to linger on it, if but for a moment, to demonstrate the truth of my claim.
Motion, if we consider that motion can convey meaning and so can also be language, is by its very nature more accurate and succinct than spoken language. Consider that the speech required to convey anger can go on for minutes or even hours, while one motion - say, a good slap or a punch, or a throat-slitting gesture (in the case of anthropoids at least) - will quite often suffice. So too in the case of other meanings - a smile or laugh conveys faster than speech ever could one’s joy, a frown one’s sadness or confusion, a flinch that one is startled, and on and on. And this is not to speak of complex dancing motions of the sort that whales or laektears, or that gods like Homura for instance, often partake in.
So when one is forced to speak of ‘movement’ having ‘movement’ and ‘motion’ having ‘motion’ - for the Feverfoot in the whale was pure motion, you understand? - that is not to be understood literally but as an unavoidable artifice of language. The Feverfoot did not move through the whale, the Feverfoot was motion, and so to say ‘Feverfoot’ is no different to saying ‘motion’. Therefore, a sentence like ‘the Feverfoot moved through the whale’ is as superfluous as saying ‘the motion motioned’ or ‘the movement moved’ or ‘the gesture gestured.’ I will be forgiven, however, if by virtue of the syntax of language (which demands that nouns not at once be verbs) I continue ascribing verbs to the noun-verb that is the Feverfoot.
[2] Now the exact nature of that experience, I cannot capture for you - and if I did attempt it, it would be a garbled mess of meaninglessness - so you must understand, before you continue, that what follows is the fruit of aeons of tireless analysis, and that analysis has given forth an interpretation. It is an interpretation limited, necessarily, by the mode by which I must communicate it. It must also be understood that not only is this an interpretation, but it is an interpretation of a translation - for it is impossible to capture the pristine original (that is, pure experience) and present it to the reader. No, experience first had to be translated into words, and those words - garbled as they were - had to be analysed, and so was born this interpretation. I have endeavoured to keep it succinct and focused - and I am not unaware that much may be lost by this methodology (indeed, the Feverfoot is defined by a distinct lack of clarity or focus so that writing of her in such a way may give the illusion of purpose or intention where really there is none). As the first to bring these matters to light, I consider my primary duty the conveyance of knowledge, and I leave it to those who take up the mantle in the wake of these revelations to turn to the nobler purposes of bettering and furthering our understanding of the true essence and nature of these experiences.
[3] Note that these memories, at that exact moment, became Rosalind’s own, so that she was in fact there when they first occurred - by means of memory having become the whale. In that manner, and that being established, this was not truly the first time she saw those memories.
[4]Some may object to this usage, but I assure the gentle reader that this is a very accurate usage, for Rosalind-the-Motion and Mamang-the-Whale are, as I translate and interpret the experience here relayed, one. This being, both Rosalind and Mamang, I refer to as Rosamamang. Of course, this begs the question of whether a being, once merged with another and turned into something new, can ever revert to its prior form. This is a question worth studying, and I believe there is a case for an answer in the negative as far as Rosalind the Feverfoot is concerned. As for the whale Mamang, I cannot speak of him with any confidence as I have not had an opportunity to study the record - if a record of this remains at all. If he is an intelligent being, however, and there is a case, I believe, for the intelligence - if not in the conventional sense - of Mamang, then I would conjecture that a merging of this nature would have likely left a permanent mark on him.
[5] Yes, even them.
Row, row, row your boat! Rosa rows her rowboat rosily 'round. Everything is fine and peaceful at sea. She handles the isolation well, and she can even dance in the boat.
Then all of a sudden, what's this? The sound of a whale!
Mamang lifts up her boat... intentionally? who knows. Rosalind's fever catches her by the feet and she starts tap-tap-tapping her way across the whale's whole back, until, with a hop, a skip and a jump, she falls right down his blowhole.
Somehow, Rosa is inhaled. Yudaiel's influence on her essence contributes to her evaporating and merging with Mamang as a being of pure motion, united by dance- Rosamamang.
One by one, the Rosalind within the united being revisits the memories of the now rather storied and ancient whale. She listens to his memories of singing, and the two of them discover- though, of course, they had known it all along- that the song is Mamang's name.
We even see some hints of memories that have gone unposted: the whale is aware of the presence and absence of the Pariah, and has heard the shouting of Apostate and Yudaiel.
Finally Rosa catches up to the present moment she is experiencing as Rosamamang, and they 'greet' one another. She listens to the whale sing and learns that he is singing with a big-hearted love, which they both learn about together. The discovery of love induces a subtle change in the whale, in his future and in everything he touches.
Rosa curls up warm and cosy inside Mamang (who is in turn curled up warm and cosy inside Rosa's dance), and, while she is washed back and forth in Mamang's blood, she experiences an untold vision of the whale's death. Her dance and movement unites with the motion of Mamang's heart and blood, in a way that will remain long after that blood has ceased to flow.
Rosamamang surfaces somewhere around the Academy as Rosa builds up in Mamang's lungs. About a year has passed. Their dance comes to an end off the coast of the Thousand Lakes, and Rosa leaves Mamang in a spout, insofar as either of them can ever truly leave the other. A matching bangle forms around his tail, and then she is blown away on the wind.
4,236 whale points danced into being by the power of love.
Total whale points: 15,233
Rosalind:
Starting: 17 Vigour 4 Vigour [Reduced to 2 by Dance]: Mamang, soulless, now possesses an essence of pure motion. It is not a soul, it is pure movement - dance. Should he ever die, this force will be released unto Galbar and will be able to completely reshape any region of his choosing into one of absurd cadence - dancing hills, sands, rocks, winds etc. While he will thus be a phenomenon - akin to an aurora for instance - in this state Mamang will still be able, on occasion perhaps, to exhibit what is arguably a consciousness.
1 Vigour [Reduced to 0 by Dance]: Bless Mamang’s form and movements so that he swims in complete harmony with the currents of the ocean, is more agile and moves with even greater beauty, speed, and finesse.
1 Vigour: Enhance Mamang’s functioning senses - his good ear, his sight, his sense of smell and taste (which tend to be rather weak in normal whales) and his echolocation sensesilly Kho, only sperm whales have that!
2 Vigour [Enhanced by Dance]: Transform one of Rosalind’s bracelets into the Band of the Love Dance, presently worn on Mamang’s caudal peduncle tail. It changes size as necessary for the wearer. This enables the wearer to dance in such a manner as to inspire feelings of love - in its broadest sense - in all who look upon it. This can range from simply remembering things which should engender feelings of love - e.g. a loved family member, a beautiful scene - to bringing about feelings of love, from the brotherly, to the protective, to the romantic.
2 Vigour [Enhanced by Dance]: Retrospective payment for bracelet Rosalind gifted to Voligan. Transform one of Rosalind’s bracelets into the Band of the Guardian Dance. It changes size as necessary for the wearer. This band enables the wearer to execute a defensive martial dance, countering the strikes and agiley warding off anyone exhibiting aggression or hostility towards individuals or things the band-wearer deems worth protecting. Onlookers, even non-sapient or inanimate things, may also be drawn into the power of the dance and so form up to likewise protect whatever the wearer is protecting.
Her hat did nothing to guard her from the heat. The sun was hot, the air was hotter, and the ash under her sandals still smouldered with fire. Ea Nebel clothed herself in the loose, simple dress and covers of a working woman and wandered that broken place, steadying her feet with her shovel.
Something under dust and ash had once been a feminine shape. She crouched beside it. When she wiped the layer of ash from its surface, it gleamed. "Your name was Carer," she said. "You came to a horrible end. There's not much I can do for you. But I'll put you with the ones you cared for. You deserve it."
The ones she had cared for were now mostly charcoal.
Immortals and mortals were a troublesome mix. Salt and water, made for one another, inseparable, until the ephemeral water dried away and left only eternal salt, thirsting yet again for its touch. Or perhaps gods were like lye, warming any water it dissolved in, sometimes even boiling it away... Lye that created many things, lye that burned. Ea Nebel had many days to meditate on this. Many days.
At night she would work.
She girded her loins and buried the Homurans by the towns where they had lived. One site for each town. One grave for each body. So many of them were in pieces that she fashioned round urns for them and incinerated them, that their shattered bones might have some semblance of dignity in the smoothness of powder before she lowered them into the once-fertile earth. The carbonised remains scattered around the town the Apostate had destroyed were given the same treatment.
She found them in the streets. She found them in their houses, where they had lain and fainted, sweating to death, fighting an exhausted battle with the heat- or committed suicide. She found them washed up on the beach. She found them in hiding-places around the country where they had been blown up by drones. She buried them. Then she buried the drones.
She saw more memories than she could have counted, had she not been a god.
Ea Nebel knelt at the top of the little hill-cliff, staring down at the great pile of dronescrap she had dumped at its base. It was the only grave such things wanted, needed, or deserved. She'd learned rather little about the Apostate, who had appeared in smoke and fire to punish the massacre. She had learned a lot about Astus.
Gods had strange natures. Ea Nebel's own father was very far from human. She didn't know how close to the mark she was, herself. Of course mortals would die when they touched with the men of eternity- they were mortal. The god Astus had raised them up with industry and and with industry struck them down again, according to his nature. She could not begrudge him that. The stolen Homurans of Astus, slaughtered for sin, may as well have been blown away by a fickle wind.
And yet, the more bodies she burned, the more bitter memories she retrieved from broken skulls, the more she understood whose sin that was.
'The door! I'm gonna make it, we're gonna make it, it's right there-'
'Polly! Please, Polly, come and find me, Polly...'
'Water, water. I just need... a bit more water.'
'Fuck- Was that-? No, it can't-'
'I won't drown. I won't drown. I won't I won't I won't I...'
'To whoever's listening... Should I not make it back, please take care of my sister.'
Ea Nebel heaped the last spadeful of earth over the place where Carer lay among her people, and threw the shovel down onto the dirt. It was stirred up with her footprints in every direction. Behind her, six-hundred and seven unmarked stones in what had once been a meadow.
"ASTUS!"
A fell wind leapt into life and started to wail, blowing away the working clothes and leaving her once more in her black coat, wide stance, fists clenched beside her.
"I am Ea Nebel, Goddess of the Tomb! Look at the work of my hands, Astus! Listen to the memories I have read! You took up the project of Man and Woman, and you failed!"
A man named White, crushing that which could not bleed, building war-weapons out of mere scrap. Two carriage-drivers racing fine animals across field and ford with such passion that their wheels were sent up to be repaired, again and again. A mother, crafting new life out of nothing but milk and bread. Visions flared behind Ea Nebel's eyes as she spoke the voice of power.
"Idleness and dependence- No weed of vice grew on this island that you had not bred! You cut down the tree that was waiting to be pruned. The industry of these people has been wasted in your fire! I could have done better, Astus! A pauper could have done better!"
The field of urns around her began to rise in a rippling mat of faint light. Hundreds of souls separated from the mass of power, ripped out from the Grey, the Ashen Plains, even the silvered Elysian Fields, flickering like barely-visible warning lights in the searing sky.
"You were lazy, Astus! You insulted me for nothing!"
The gale moaned and whined and spiralled around the center of the island, muffling the stranger and more horrible sound that emanated from the whirling souls, unleashed from death to complete their final task in the realm of the living- sightless, mindless revenge.
Seek a pyre, the deva commanded, and the ghosts did seek it, tunnelling through the earth, through the parched and brittle dead-woods, spiralling, moth-like, in every pond. Some found it. They infested wires, pistons, gears, fatiguing metal, lighting fires, or simply imploding in a violent snap of soul-energy. Seek a pyre, she commanded, so they made one out of every machine and mechanism they could find.
And those that never did- they whirled across the land, hiding, waiting, in their thousands.
Heavy boar-prints appeared in the dust-dry soil. Ea Nebel flicked her coat as the wind died down, and stood on the island no longer.
Ea Nebel appears to bury all the Homurans whom Astus killed and just kind of left there on the island. She doesn't care all that much about gods killing mortals, at least not yet, but it's a lot of work and a lot of rather nasty memories for her to record. She contemplates gods and mortals a bit and decides that she completely blames Astus for having created this mess.
When she's done, she reprimands Astus and turns the souls of the dead into thousands of little poltergeist landmines that infest the island. They're pretty mindless, but when they sense a machine nearby, they cause one of a few kinds of damage or malfunction before they promptly expire.
edit: it reads like she was trying to show astus visions before she left, that was just me messing with words, could be interpreted like that if ya want though it's an imagination adventure
6 Vigour start. 1 Vigour spent on harvesting souls to booby-trap the island with. Demigod Graves action, normal price. 5 Vigour remains.
"Well, well..." The deva wiped a little dirt off the lower side of the otherwise gleaming white skull. "You certainly weren't a lucky one, now, were you?"
The Iron Boar- well, warthog, really- lowered its snout, and Ea Nebel raised the skull that it might have an interested sniff. Here between some rocks on a sunny hill in an unmapped corner of the many forests of Orsus, an animal much like a lanky hairless pig had come to a pitiful end. Ea Nebel watched its memories dance before her eyes as she stroked the bone with her thumb.
Strong, bold, a devoted mother, it had gathered many years of bush-lore, only for its twin upper tusks- fine, shining ivory- to grow so long that their gentle curve had curled them backwards. Their sharp point had first scraped away the skin, then burrowed through the skull, growing further and further into the brain until it collapsed in its last and longest fit of animal epilepsy. O beast, thought the shroud maiden, you have overcome everything, save your own longevity!
She fixed her four eyes on the sockets of the skull, whispering out a divine lullaby from black lips, a sweet little nothing. It came naturally to her. As gently as she sang, the skull cracked and crumbled, falling apart in her hands, leaving only the eyes, and then only the tusks.
From the pile of shards, a young pig squealed at her, grey-skinned and long-legged. Its lower tusks just about poked from its lips. Its uppers were nowhere to be seen. Ea Nebel laughed and pet the thing roughly.
"I like you. Keep an eye on the woods for me, won't you? Your name is babiruš." With that she slapped the pig on its hindquarters and sent it scurrying into the undergrowth. The Iron Boar watched the bracken into which it had disappeared.
Ea Nebel let the tusk roll back and forth in her hand. It was so sun-warmed, so smooth and perfect. Its length was fated- it had grown only until it terminated itself.
"Just like you, Father," she murmured, comparing the length of the tusk to the stone at the hilt of her blade.
A pale hand swished left and right over the silty gravel of the kelp forest, sending little puffs of sand into the water.
"Ah. There you are."
Her voice carried cleanly through the blue murk, and she decided that she rather liked this body, which was much like her natural one, long black tail notwithstanding. She wrenched from the mud a skull, also like hers, only fitted with exactly two eye-sockets, no more than that. "...Until you, they did not know they could die. No wonder they just left you h- hoy- hoy!"
The thick, slick mass of gunk now coating her hand, it seemed, had been deliberately cast off by some kind of queer tentacled eel hiding in the cranium. Unable to shake the noisome slime, and too dignified to properly chase the pink-grey devil, Ea Nebel clenched her fist and seized the eyeless worm in a ball of blue mana, flickering with glyphs of willpower. It seemed to have a simple little round hole for a mouth, in between its four stubby front barbels, until its relentless snakelike wriggles showed her the nasty jawless flesh-scraper invaginated below that orifice.
Ea Nebel tilted her head, shrugged, nodded, looked away, shrugged, nodded again. The sea-hag wriggled.
It would do.
Ea Nebel marks two grey scavenging animals as sacred to her: the babirusa, because it reminds her of her boar steed and also of inevitable doom, and the hagfish, because she's just a nutty little corpse gremlin she is. She demonstrates knowledge of the Mer.
For now this doesn't mean much, but she'll have an affinity for these animals in the future and might use them as minions. They might start showing up in biomes they don't strictly belong.
8 Vigour start. 2 Vigour spent bonding with two sacred animals. Regular price because they're obviously corpse-eaters. 6 Vigour remains.
The isle-of-air that guarded the confluence of the gods was smaller than its kin in the open seas beyond the walls of Termina and Orsus. It was the first of the greater basins to come under assault, yet in a way it was the only one to escape unscathed: by fate or foresight, the Earthheart’s mountains had already marked with blessed stone the limit of the waters beyond that sacred isle, and the well-salted sea began to crack its fearsome enchantment not with an all-covering flood, but in a ring of towering waterfalls roaring through the gaps in the wall. Their clamour rose and fell with the tide, and caked the once-seabed far below with thick salt, thinly clothed with vast pools of shallow brine.
In those days, the vast ocean was alight with colour. Every crashing air-wall that shook Galbar with its fall left behind innumerable swarms of godfish, lighting the blue darkness with clouds of swirling embers as bright as the dawn. Fattened by the curse-breaking feast, the godfish had spawned, filling the sea with billions of their fry even as the last of the ruinous chasms were wholly consumed. The juvenile swarms scattered wide, scrounging for fresh godlight, scavenging for the least scrap of heavenly sustenance. Their beaks were toothed lances, and their glowing tangerine bodies were fiery darts, raining down a starved and desperate assault on any magic they could find.
They invaded the wall of the Tlacan Sea, chewing away its lethargic ooze, leaving radial chasms of clear blue in their wake, and dying in heaps, unable to stomach the teeth of time. When they reached the seething coast of the Hivelands, they fed well, for a time, chewing and tearing at stray tendrils of divine hyphae that infested every living alg and polyp on the shore, only to find their needle bones and blessed scales useless against the ravenous vermin that crawled in their veins and consumed their tender brains and guts.
They gawped and gulped at the cloud of muck that billowed from the groaning curse of the machine lord, and even survived, leading short and miserable lives at the edge of that marine wasteland, cleansing the waters around them long enough to be snapped up in the end by some other creature from bluer waters. Some broke through, and were lost in the chaos of the waters beyond- who knows what became of those godfish, ripped up by the elemental storms of Harmony even as they warred to calm its power?
Most didn’t make it nearly so far: the lush seas that starved them simply swallowed them whole.
The wandering whale journeyed at leisure across the Inner Ocean, where whole schools of the over-populated godfish were breaking their teeth on the wave-weathered rock of the Dancing Isles. Silver flashes shot them to pieces, packs of tuna and mackerel biting them apart and spitting out the chunks, swallowing anything soft enough to swallow. Clusters of amphipods and shrimp gnawed anything left to drift. Where the godfish spasmed and faltered, too exhausted by their futile attack on the enchanted stone to swim straight, crabs stretched up in squabbling crowds to grab them from the rock, picking the luminous meat off their bones without a care.
There were few birds in the southern chain of the islands, for the stone sank and rose every day. Fierce rivers of seawater poured down the flank of the island as it rose, washing away any grit and shell that may otherwise have been ground into sand, and the rock was soon carved into spectacular chasms, tunnels, pools and blades. The whole island was green with smooth, curly algae, and in its ten-thousand perfect blue pools were bright anemones, limpets, and tight clusters of tiny white winkles. In the caves and kelp, the clever arms of a big octopus teased after crabs and over-confident fish caught in pools by the tide.
The whale had already had its fill. For weeks its veins had been almost glowing with the fire of recycled godlight, its monstrous gut churning a heavy mass of glittering metal bones. Much the same was true of every other great shark and sailfish that prowled the open ocean, at least until the damage wrought on their bellies by those thorny skeletons became too much to bear. But the whale- ah! It had not felt this healthy in decades!
Sore memory led it to avoid that place where the curse of ruin had nearly slain it, but the new generation weaned on this sudden glut would never learn the danger of the isle-of-air, or need to. In the coming centuries silt would bury even the tumbled ring of bones that marked where each wall had been broken.
It would be, perhaps, the last great wave of calving that Galbar would ever see. The sea was fertile, but the whales spawned in the north were vast, far beyond the scale of their natural prey, and their number had swiftly peaked. Now came the age of hunger.
In those days, the vast ocean was alight with colour.
The wandering whale had come upon a war.
That swirling blaze of pulsing turquoise-yellow-violet had been familiar once. The whale had taken them, sometimes whole schools, much as it would take lampfish and squid; they were too clever and fast for most whales, and so perfect prey for a beast of its speed. They had been familiar once, but no more. The dance of the dancerfish was fierce and frenetic, their mass flickering lightspeed signals within itself as it flexed, swirled, twisted, and burst apart, their sleek groups leaving behind bitter angry streaks of divine light, like tears.
Bolts of fire blasted apart the dancer battalions. Here, finally, the strongest of godfish had found fitting prey. The fiercest among them had bullied and cannibalised their path to maturity among their over-spawned sisters, and spat out their teeth, revealing themselves for what they had been long ago, when their maker had bled them dry of the weak blood of mortality: swordfish- huge thin marlins- clad in opaline armour, formed like javelins.
The whale’s presence disturbed the laektear formation only for a moment. In that time the godfish had drawn fresh blood, slashing scales into the water with their needle-point skulls before escaping the wings of the larger dancerfish, those sinuous adults who might hope to tear bites from their fins in defense of their tiny brethren.
The bodies were left to sink. The jaws of the godfish were atrophying. Destruction alone was their fill, as they had been commanded.
The wandering whale circled this unending dance of violence with its good ear, observing fire and rhythm. It could not draw blood of its own, for a wide-winged laektear of good size might choke it, and an adult godfish would be even worse. It watched the scene with such fascination that its stalker had no difficulty drawing near. Deaf on one side, by the time the whale noticed a stir in the waters, it was far too close.
A nudge- just a nudge.
The laektear giant re-ignited its darkened lights as the whale panicked and made distance, flicking its tail up to beat the water with a sudden crash. Its gills fanned calmly. Its teeth, sated for now on a long banquet of mummified shark and whale carcasses, had been worn down by huge bones, and would soon shed. For a while it would feed solely on the catch of its gill-rakers, those neat rows of featherlike filaments that were its own kind of baleen. And then…
The whale observed the laektear, and the laektear observed the war. Like the bull, it could not swallow that chaos without destroying its own, and it had grown too vast to easily pick off even the adult godfish. An orca might be more its size, if it took the mood to hunt- or a flipper of something larger.
The bull’s black pupils met again with its huge, shining turquoise eyes. They twinkled lustrously and the golden-red birthmark on its forehead seemed to vacillate between motion and stillness, and even that great hungering dancer seemed to vacillate between the motion of the strike and the stillness of observation. Its radiance grew and its colours multiplied as it watched, and the motion of the strike became a swirling cadence. It flowed with the invisible tides, its great fins swooshed and cut through them, redirected them in unseen transient whirlpools. Its tail flickered, its body twisted - its head rose as its tail fell, its fins spread out like wings and its eyes grew bright then dimmed. It now sped up, then slowly let up; when it had slowed to almost stillness it abruptly jolted and caused the depths to surge and thrash with the sudden great pace and when the motion had reached impossible crescendos it paused suddenly, frozen for breathless seconds as though captured in a painting, before flowing slowly once more. It was after this had gone on for a while and no strike seemed imminent that the whale understood: it danced, did the laektear-mother.
Not fleeing, yet always moving away from it, the whale held a certain distance from the laektear, arcing around it, never towards it. Tensing as the dancer surged, relaxing as it drifted, rising to breathe when the dancer dived, hiding in the depths as it whirled the surface. In the darkening midnight waters, the whale knew, without a word or a thought, that no matter how long they circled and chased the distance between them would never truly close, nor would it widen. The quarry was not the target, nor was the laektear its stalker. There was a focal point, but it did not lie in one another. The laektear led the dance. The center lay between them.
Blue water darkened to midnight-black, and the laektear’s wings grew ever brighter, alone and sovereign like the sun in an empty sky, in which the whale was but a lightless cloud. The waters around it rushed like wind as it whirled, and both beasts were silent within it. In that long silence, the whale’s heart began to yearn for a familiar passion- there was something absent, yet still here, somehow- a pattern- a pace- a rhythm- a voice-
As the whale watched, the laektear-mother thrashed theatrically and turned on its back, and its body went limp and bubbles trailed upward from its mouth - like tears. And those tears danced as the laektear-mother sank limply - only its tail moved and trembled. And once it had sunk a far enough distance, once again it rose before him - slow though, its motions not of laektear but resembling, oddly, whale - and it opened its great mouth so that the water before it was displaced all at once and surged in. It closed its mouth for the briefest seconds then once more unlatched the vastness of that dire, chasmal maw.
If of the lion tribe it had been, surely it would have been roaring. If of the clan of wolf or canine, its bark, surely, would fell mountains. But if whale, a glorious giant, then its song of beauty splendid would have matched its dance of sunset; would have matched its dance of drowning, dance of weeping, dance of birthing.
In the dark, forgotten records of the waters and the fishes - which no mortal mind remembers, which no mortal mind has written - danced the weeper of the laektears to the song of whales unknowing - to the song, that is, of the bull, whose great whalesong, as time passes, more and more becomes the sound that echoes all across the oceans: is the singing of the oceans, is the music of the waters.
Aye it would have been forgotten, never spoken, danced, or sung of - but for one awed, silent witness: yes, that giant of the waters, yes, that mother of the laektears. So that all the world may witness and the whales and fish, in great bliss, may arise in enthralled union and proclaim one great truth, which is: song and dance were made for water, made for bulls and cows of water, made for fishes in whose cadence are thus woven motions born of divine tears and god’s emotions. They who dance in the above-world, they who sing through air, not water, are the infants of the songcraft, are as fry - or less - to motion. This the great truth and conviction, this the wisdom in the fish-dance, this the tale that is remembered only by the laektear mother - by the laektear mother and, now, by the half-deaf whale that wandered.
To all this, and more yet, was he - was the half-deaf whale - a witness. The whale knew not from where the knowing came, nor where nor how it rested in its heart. The whale knew not knowing. The whale knew only seeing, and truly it had seen, and in that memory of seeing lay the story, fixed in beauty ‘til the whale’s final day.
Yea, in the long course of that night it had seen, and would not forget, how meaning could erupt from movements only - only motions!
And the motions made a pattern And the pattern had a pace! And the pace carried a rhythm And that rhythm was a dance! And the dance was born of music And with light that music shone! And the light lit up the waters And the waters filled with song!
‘twas the pulsing beat that echoed Through the waters of the world That remembered what was witnessed As the laektear-mother twirled
And the dark forgotten records Were illumined by the dawn In the eyes of one old whale On that solemn, silent morn
For the Truth was everlasting And their memory was long The whale and the laektear Sharing dance and sharing song
That song of birthing-waters Song of drowning, song like tears The story of a goddess Falling down into her fears
Where fevered feet were kicking Where the footless dancers swam And whalesong rang loudly Beating, mahm-mahm-mahm-mahm-mahm
And the memory of sadness Washed away by fins and light Had become a tidal ballad In the waters of the night
Thus the Truth of water-cadence In that twirling, shining tail Taught the music of the ocean To a humble half-deaf whale.
We first explore the ecology of the magic fish that are now in the sea.
As Sala's godfish consume the anomalous chasms left in the ocean by Ruina, they breed, and rapidly out-populate this abundance of divine energy. For maybe a few months, the ocean is filled by a swarm of starving, stunted sub-adult godfish looking for divine energy to feed on. They try a variety of different sources and deal a little damage to some of them, but they're mostly much more hazardous to a fish than the anomalies were, and can't support the same numbers. The excess godfish die off or are eaten by predators, and their population reaches a stable level.
There's one great source of nourishment for godfish though: Rosalind's dancerfish, now called laektears. While they can reach monstrous sizes, most of them are small, and the godfish are one of the few predators wily enough to 'prey' on them (kill them and harvest their energy). Hopefully that helps keep giant dancerfish from dominating the oceans completely.
Mamang watches a dancerfish-godfish hunt scene like he's Attenborough, but soon encounters one of the monsters: the giant laektear-mother who saved Rosalind in her encounter with the Exile. He's in terrible danger and knows it, but wait! what's this! the dancerfish wants to dance! (it's already eaten enough mummified whale for a lifetime and has lost all its teeth anyway. for now.)
The two big fish circle around for a while as the laektear-mother patiently teaches the whale. Thanks to their curious ability to communicate through light and dance, the laektear-mother tells Mamang the story of Rosalind, of her fall to Galbar, her struggle in the waters, and of the whalesong she heard when she fell, which was, of course, Mamang's own.
There are other special truths hidden in the dance, but you'll have to read the poems for yourself!
0 Vigour gained. 0 Vigour spent. 2,446 whale points harvested with the assistance of the dancerfish.
Darkness. Cold. Sprays of brine stinging their scratches. Wood splintering under the force of gale and storm.
The roar of lightning threw the panic on their faces into nightmarish light.
Darkness.
"Lu? Lu!"
"I'm- I'm holding-"
"Svietla!"
"She's heavy!"
"Hold on, Lu! I've got you!"
The world dipped and tossed, throwing them sideways, against the wood, against one another. Black water heaved and swallowed them. They emerged with their nails sunk deeply into the wood, gasping for breath.
"Hold on-"
Mamang.
XII
Strange encounters had been had in the cool waters of the north and central sea. The whale had grown mostly accustomed to being just about the longest thing in the ocean, excepting the cows of its own kind, whose usual quietness veiled that they were noticeably larger than the bulls that guarded and pursued them. Their presence was familiar, their soft calls warm in the whale's heart. There were also the loners, the giant rorquals of the north, who with their mere presence reminded the wandering bull that it had been a young bull once, timid amongst its uncles.
Yet something had cast a shadow upon the whales. It had come and gone, slow of pace and still possessed of a terrific speed, and the whale had watched it walk. Its shadow was wider and darker than any cloud, and a sonorous moan accompanied the lift and fall of its movement. Three gargantuan striders dipped their feet into the sea and raised them up once more, landing on a plane of brilliant red, like stirred rocks might land on the seafloor.
By this time, the whale had been exposed to quite enough sorcery. The sound of bending limbs scratched the inside of its skull, bleeding in memories of the foul curse at the south end of the world. To fly and walk and not swim was in defiance of good water and good gravity, and the whale reviled the alien...
Yet the glow of red was calming, and the sound of the colossi was smooth and paced, like whalesong. Watching the feet plunge and rise on their sorcerous bridge, heaving out bubbles as they descended and raining down rivers as they rose, the bull's trepidation was soothed, as it had been on that long ago day, when red light on the shore marked the end of the blood and noise and chaos...
Some whales followed the striders, rushing to keep pace for a while, singing back to the sound. They even dived under the very shadow of those beings, turning on their side to admire the glow, like an even cloud of sunlit krill, yet also harder than rock. The wandering bull did not join them long. It had seen plenty of wonders in its wanders. This was not its first taste of magic, and its memories were painful.
But sweet was the sight of the Arbiter's light, and welcome was her presence. The travellers passed one another in peace: one party unknowing, the other well at ease.
...
(Shortly afterward, the wandering bull swallowed a sardine run the distracted whales had been pursuing for two days.)
XIII
Scrsh, scrch, krunrungrunsh. A hook nose rummaged in the silt.
The bottom-feeder hucked back a throatful of muddy garbage and beheld the familiar silhouette with a louse-bitten eye.
Bmp mp. ... ... ... ... Bmp bmp bmp nn np.
Friend!
The pockmarked and barnacle-laden cow was an ancient, now, veteran of many summers and well satisfied, though her life was reaching its ebb. The whale had found her along much the same shores it had met her long ago, where the seas had recovered and bloomed and subsided, and her offspring now roamed alone. There was no longer any need for it to scrounge the seabed for a meal, only another hard and welcomed memory of rare company in its most difficult hour.
Still, they parted ways shortly, and were not fated to meet again. Our story turns once more to strange encounters.
The coasts of Galbar- a certain well-planned continent naturally exempted- were touched at their birth by the hand of Chance, and hide many secrets, uncovered often by the diligent and certainly by the lucky. White beaches and black cliffs, sea-arches, columns, hidden reefs and huge caves...
Sea-caves and blue holes deep enough to hide whales. Coves wave-carved with sea tunnels that stretch far enough to hide many things indeed.
It was in such a cove that the whale was first met by the hand of Royalty. It had heard sounds, there, while skimming, of a whale acting oddly, rubbing about among the rocks without making a call. Sometimes it went quiet. Sometimes it was silent altogether.
Shadows in the distance. Something veiled by blue.
The whale turned its one keen ear to the motion, and still heard no song. It only saw the shape. One shape, or many, flapping, writhing, scrounging, seeking...
The motion stopped. The thing that was not a whale went still, then began to rise. The whale fled. Somewhere behind it, a heavy splash, then a rain. For a moment, nothing- then a shape that blot out the sun, falling like a hawk, folding its wings- crash of water- vast weight diving- giant claws-
Thrashing its gargantuan tail with terrible force, the whale was as helpless as a fish in the talons of a hawk before the hound of the Monarch. The thing that had once been a serpent stared down upon it, into it, its black predator eyes facing directly forwards at its prey. Its tail swept from side to side, groping the whale with its tendrils. A steady stream of water pumped from its gills-slits.
Then the pressure was released, and the leviathan spread its wings once more. With the force of an eel-like tail behind it, it surged back up to the surface and beat its heavy wet wings in the sun, returning once more to its hunt. For that was what it was, and the whale recognised it now- the swim, scrounge, sniff, swim, scrounge, the relentless pattern of movement it had seen before in sleepsharks and dire wolf-eels.
The hound of Royalty had no time to waste on such trifles. Not today.
Bleeding from rows of deep scratches, the whale gasped fresh air from the surface and fled, and did not stop or call until it was free in the open ocean, well out of sight of shore. Its brain tumbled in its head as if drunk. Every part of its body was violated, squeezed and cast down and gripped and hunted in ways no rorqual should be hunted. A horrible tension had crawled under its skin, into its blood, and taken hold of its muscles.
It had survived. Cast aside by some unnatural intelligence under divine command, it had survived.
And still the sea grew stranger.
XIV
"Lu..."
"Nothing, Mitsa. Just salt." Mitsa lay her head and closed her eyes again. Svietla, roused a little by the motion, only turned to look at the endless ocean.
They were dying of thirst.
With Tykhom lost to the storm, Arska was the only manbjork of the remaining four, and had taken to letting his whole lower body lay in the water, resting his head and shoulders on the edge of the raft. Occasionally there were sharks. There had been yelling and crying the first time he'd done it, and those savage wildfish had appeared shortly after, drawn by the smell of blood and despair. A pike or a gar could take lethal bites from an unwary bjork, and these fish were much bigger. Even now, the three wifebjorks still preferred to wait out the heat of the day under the crude shelter they had rebuilt at the back of the raft.
As their wounds healed and their thirst grew, Arska Snaketail had ceased to fear.
"Perhaps we should swim," he said. "We could each head a different direction- north, south, east..."
Svietla met his eyes, and he fell quiet. "If we do swim," she said, softly, "we will swim together." And that meant: I will not let you die alone.
Arska closed his eyes and turned away. He did everything alone. Svietla chewed a twig from the bundled supplies in her dry, dry mouth.
"I see something!"
All four were awake in a flash, staring at the ocean, staring at Lu. Lubov's young eyes were wide, her hand straining as she pointed out into the distance. "Smoke!"
"...It's steam," said Svietla, squinting. "Where'd it come from...?" None of them had an answer. The steam blew away, and they stared in hope and terror. Loud cries rose from the raft as the steam plume came again.
"We should swim-"
"Arska..."
"Arska can take the risk-"
"Svietla? Svietla!"
Without a word, the eldest wifebjork had submerged herself in the infinite blue. Gripping the sides of the raft, she took a deep breath, then followed her deepest instincts: head dipping, using all her muscles, raising her tail, and- slap!
In those still and empty waters, the sound felt as small as a leaf falling into a puddle. They said nothing to one another.
Crash!
Lubov pressed her hands to her mouth. There in the distance, in the near distance, the unmistakeable flick and slap of a gargantuan tail.
"It heard us." Arska frowned an exhausted frown. His tail was no good for slapping. "Do it again... Svietla..."
"Don't tell me what to do." Svietla was already steeling herself for another try. Everything about her was tired. She was the biggest, and had shared the last of her portion of water with Lubov. She slapped, and once again, the giant fish slapped back. This time it was noticeably closer.
"Pray," she commanded, or begged, and they did. Whether any god had answered, they knew not. Only the fish answered. Soon it was beside them, a shadow in the water.
"It could swallow us whole..."
"It doesn't care," said Arska, whose odd body carried odd instincts. "We're too small for it. Like a bear chasing a beetle."
"Bears... will eat anything..." Svietla shushed Mitsa and stroked the fur at the top of her head. Lubov stared at the shadow, completely transfixed.
"Is it... humming?"
XV
From then on the whale followed them. It was sometimes close by them, sometimes apart, visible as an occasional plume of breath in the distance, and sometimes gone altogether, to feed, Arska said. Sometimes it fed right below them, gulping down a little mouthful of shoaling fish which the bjorks had barely seen, circling in the shadow of their big raft. They watched the pleats of its throat stretch as it filled itself with water.
Sometimes the whale would nudge them along with its fin, or push them, almost carrying them, with its upper back. It did not push them far. Their condition did not really improve. The bundle of food disappeared, and they were reduced to gnawing on the wood of their own raft. A light burst of rain in the early morning was their only moisture, and they sucked from each other's fur, then from the wood itself. Their bones were visible even under their pelts.
Still they watched the whale, and still the whale sang. No more sharks came upon them then. They rested their bodies in the cool ocean water, and watched rainbows form in its spouted plumes. It gave them nothing but hope, and hope was all they asked. As long as the whale was there, the ocean was not so lonely. Its salt had lost its sting. They watched the whale breach, and forgot about their thirst.
And at night, under a spectacular blanket of stars, they would pray.
Land was sighted after thirty-nine days. Yelling goodbyes to the whale, they fled the raft and swam to shore with every last bit of their strength, sharks and pikes be damned, Svietla pushing Lubov ahead of her as she swam. When they washed up on the brown and silty beach, they found themselves by the mouth of a small river, and didn't even notice until after they had stuffed their bellies with grass and thistle and every bit of prickly green they found within arms reach. They slaked their thirst, the sun grew low, and in the orange light of dusk found themselves alone again.
"This land has few trees," said Mitsa, combing a sleepy Lu with her nails. She was looking better with her feet on dry land. Svietla was lighting a fire with grass and scraps of a stunted bush, Arska rummaging in the stream. "We won't have much of a lodge." Svietla met her eyes. They both knew that the real concern was food.
"Then we must live as the water-voles do, and eat what we can find." Arska returned from the stream with a struggling crayfish in his paws, stuck through with a twisted little stick. Mitsa gasped as he lowered the little animal into the flames.
"You cruel-"
"We will be like hunters who were taught by the Masked One. Like the giants, the hairless beings from the west. We will be like them. But we will waste nothing. Not even the offering of flesh- not even blood. That is how the Masked One spoke to his followers. Kill with purpose. Do not waste." Arska's tail glinted in the firelight. It was long, thin, flattened the wrong way, a deformity unlike any bjork that had been seen yet. He could neither slap nor pat down mud with it, but it had never slowed him down. "I've been to the top of the hill, Mitsa. There aren't enough trees here for one single clan. It will only turn our stomachs for a while, and we can't live on reeds alone. There is no old matriarch to judge. Who will stop us?"
Arska pulled the cray from the flames and took a crunching bite. He cringed, stretched his cheeks, made to spit, but held himself back. He swallowed. "Who will stop us! Hasn't the Singing Maker himself, or one of his daughters, appeared to us as a fish and saved us? We were meant to live!" He took another bite, smaller. "I'm not scared of salt water any more. I don't need a forest to hide in. So we'll have to build our homes out of mud and reeds- so what? Have you forgotten that these are the last days of the autumn? This land is warm! We need no lodge. We'll sharpen our nails and harden our hearts. Maybe we've found what we were looking for after all- a place for ourselves, far in the south. A place where no one can cast us out any more."
Mitsa looked down to the fire, then to the eldest. "Svietla..."
Svietla said nothing for a while. She could not reject Arska Snaketail, not after they had come this far together. She wondered if she could even pull rank on him any more. She had always been the little future matriarch of their little future clan, and everyone had quietly accepted that. But maidbjork cannot be without manbjork. The new world would have new rules. Nothing, now, was beyond question, not even Arska's odd instincts, held in his odd body. She spoke, and answered nothing.
"The spirit-whale has returned to the waters. Old-Bjork we have left behind far in the north. Perhaps for the better- they say strange things happen in his lands these days, strange dreams. Perhaps the Master of the Hunt will bless us, or the Lady Heat, in these warm lands. For now, we have no gods among us."
But she was wrong.
For beyond the hill, in the cool air of night, an eyeless giant with a head of bright brass was striding towards them, and its heart rang with the will of its dead master: Life, will, and the strength to persevere, strength it knew lay in the hearts of the mortals beyond...
Mamang encounters or recalls Homura's Colossi, its old friend from the Termina coast, and the Monarch's Serpent. The Serpent traumatises it a little bit.
Four bjork outcasts, three female and a male with a mutant tail and slightly weirdo tendencies named Arska, were swept out to sea on a raft in a storm. They encounter Mamang while drifting, and his company gives them hope to stick to the raft and carry on rather than try to swim out and eventually drown trying to reach something. They consider him to be sent by the Singing Maker (our good friend Jiugui).
They eventually land in the northern part of the island to the north of Orsus. The region is somewhat lacking in trees, but not barren, and has milder winters than the Thousand Lakes. At least one of the Guardians created by the dying Aletheseus comes to help them.
Here, thanks to the environment and a strong founder effect, they'll start a new race of bjorks, named after the mutant: Bjarsks, or Bjarska. They'll resemble muskrats (or nutria rats, another large water rodent) more than beavers, with a long, thin, paddle-like tail.
The Bjarska might be considered barbarian Bjorks by the northerners. Less social order, less inclination to build, more omnivorous, more inclined to fight, especially among males. But we'll see what happens.
0 Vigour gained. 0 Vigour spent. 2,794 whale points awarded for creating a new race unassisted uwu
Total whale points: 8,551
Then out of the silence, blurring motion.
A shape whirled before the eye of the bull. It could not be a whale. Twisted, tangled, writhing, then sweeping up towards it in ripples as only an eel and a ribbon can, the hound of the Monarch emerged from the seabed. It was vast- thicker than the whale, thicker than a bowhead at its widest point- yet had no curves, no natural silhouette- for it was impossibly long, its body stretching on and on at an even width through three dozen sand-yellow stripes until it ended at last in a snub and scaled head-
And that head carried a giant searching eye, and in an instant it brought that giant eye beside the tiny sunken eye of the whale, and it stared, as if to say:
The band gathered around their fallen brethren. His limbs ravaged by fangs and claws and the color drained from his eyes and markings. The salter placed her hand on his forehead, confirming the obvious. He was dead.
Marshall Edgar nodded, and organized the necessary preparations. When everything was ready, almost everyone gathered around the story-teller as he told stories about the fallen, followed by the story of Arvos’ death and made a plea that his spirit be allowed to join his noble ancestor. The story-teller then walked around to the various grieving people, giving them time to give words around the dead. Not everyone could be in attendance, as there still needed to be people to watch the sheep.
When everyone who had words had shared them, the salter took a bone knife and made a small cut where the chest marking had been, carefully removing a small crystal from the cut. She washed the crystal with a prepared bowl of water before placing it in a small leather bag. It would eventually be stored with the rarer and nicer possessions of the band.
As for the mortal remains, they wrapped the body in animal skins and then splashed it with animal blood, marking it as something unclean to any other band who found it. They then left it where it was and prepared to continue herding their sheep further south.
Once the band had crossed over the horizon with their animals, a new Eidolon showed herself. It was strange enough, among these wandering people, to be alone; stranger still to be mounted on such a beast, better suited for scrounging than grazing. The lonely one dismounted, adjusted the fine black xo fur around her shoulders, and knelt at the body, gently resting her knuckles where the sheepskin covered its forehead. It was something any Eidolon could do with little effort, but only she could do it for the dead.
Memories flickered from the body to the lonely one. She had no need for a story-teller.
After a few seconds she removed her hand, looking down over the body. If the Eidolon had been asleep, he would be comfortable, warm at night and shaded by day under the skins they had left him. With the incision hidden below, the only thing that really marked him as dead was the blood, an important token.
But why skins? The lonely one crouched and mused as a vulture circled in the distance, perhaps confused by the unnatural shape of the covered body. The Eidolons had many skins, from hunts and herds, and could easily afford to spare a few they did not need for straps or shoes or rawhide tents. It wasn’t a burden, but it wasn’t a choice, either. There was little else they could use to cover the body but soil. Perhaps burying the dead in the earth from which they came was distasteful to them.
She stood. They were a primitive people. They had done well with what they had. And they would do better with more.
The band continued to travel towards fresh grass. While the herd didn’t need to travel great distances for its next meal, the group was travelling faster than their usually slower pace. A misjudgment meant that they didn’t have as much water as they needed, and so they were hurrying to a nearby river.
As they approached, they saw a strange sight, a herd of black sheep mostly left unattended, and a black tent. From the distance, they could make an Eidolon shape. They didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the valuable livestock, though the band couldn’t tell what they were doing.
Cautious, the marshall signalled for most of the band to keep their distance, but he called for one of his best hunters and the story-teller to follow him to greet the stranger. Both Marshall Edgar and his hunter wielded a spear, lowered by his side, and ready. They were the only two spears entrusted to his band from the noble ancestor’s supplies.
The stranger, too, bore tools in her hands, and she set one down only for a moment to wave a peaceful greeting. Whatever she was doing was plainly very important. Her head, they soon saw, was bandaged with hemp fibre, and she wore black furs. Her left hand was steady, holding a simple bone around which was turned a mass of fine black hair, and her right was busy, turning and twirling a thin, straight bone, stuck through the center of a clay ring, supporting a narrow string of twisted hair between the two. It was the back of those hands that drew their brazen eyes: the lines that traced her life-energy were coal-black, and, when she met her gaze, her exposed eye was the same.
She said, “Welcome.”
Edgar was the first to approach, with the two others a few steps behind. “Hail, stranger.” he said, “Your heart’s color is not one I have seen before.” he said, as a statement of fact. His tone did not indicate any particular judgment.
“Indeed,” she said, still focused on spinning the weighted bone around and around on a smooth concavity in a rock. “It’s not one you’re likely to see again. A curiosity I was born with, nothing more.” From this close, they saw that she wore on her neck the unmistakeable shine of three Eidolon heart-crystals, polished with great care, and secured in a curious way. They were not strung on a leather cord through a hole, as some did with tooth and bone trinkets, but caught in a fine and delicate web of tightly wound fibre, along with other precious things: a rufous feather, a glossy black beetle, and a glittering pyrite.
“My name is Ea Nebel. Come, rest, water your flocks, eat of the meat and the bulbs by the fire. You will help me- I have food and sheep, but no pair of hands that will lighten my work, and there is much wool to be spun.”
The hunter, Luca, raised his spear when he had a chance to get a better view of the stranger’s attire. Edgar signalled for him to lower his weapon, but walked over to him and let the hunter whisper to him. Edgar turned back to Ea Nebel, “My band-mate is concerned by how you are treating the dead. I find it strange myself.”
Ea Nebel listened, then smiled a little. “Indeed? You have good instincts, Marshall. There’s no safer place for them than here, with me. They were close to my heart, after all. They still are.” With utmost care, the stranger set aside her tools and removed the necklace, the length of it wrapped tightly around her wrist. The thread, they saw, was much like the spun hair wrapped around her tools, only finer, thinner, smoother, strong. She pointed out the adornments one by one. “My father- solemn, like the scarab. He, too, made provisions for my future. I never knew my mother, not since my earliest days, but my uncle honoured her with an eagle’s wing, because she travelled far, with keen eyes. I always think of her when I see one soaring. And my own choice, for my uncle- something shining brightly, all around, that struck a warm spark for me, like he did. This is part of their story. It’s how I remember.” This time, she tucked the memorial under her furs, against her chest.
While the marshall was trying to formulate a thought, and the story-teller silently observed the situation, Luca raised his spear again and interrupted, “How do we not know that your father is not the Usurper of Morning Hours? Your eyes shine with his color!”
“...Mm. Yes. That is why one of them was plucked out.” Ea Nebel tapped the hemp covering her face. “The Lord Night isn’t dead. Just wait another six hours if you don’t believe me. My father lies in a shroud of felt many miles from here, where we mourned and left him… But your band doesn’t know of felt, do you?”
Luca rushed forward, his marshall grabbing his spear but the hunter let go of his prized weapon. He reached out, and grabbed her arm where one of her symbols laid bare. She tensed, stood, backed away a half-step, but did not pull away. Luca could feel her heart through her skin: A wave of shock, fading away into nervous fear.
One did not need the empathy of an Eidolon to see the rage upon Luca’s face, “How dare you be the one surprised. You are alone and careless with your herd, and yet haven’t been parted from it. You must be some type of trickster wearing our flesh, did you take it from the departed?”
Ea Nebel’s face was like stone. Only her hand had moved: wrapping around Luca’s wrist, holding him as firmly as he held her. He felt a different kind of anger. “You have good eyes,” she said, rather softly. “But there’s one more thing that’s strange here. Haven’t you noticed?” A tiny smile. “I don’t have a horse.”
She kicked her boot against the rock she had been spinning on, and it woke up, shaking off a shower of soil and mud. The giant hog-spirit pulled itself out of its hollow and shook off the dirt, holding Luca in a cool stare for only a moment before lifting its head to sniff in his direction. It towered over the four of them, and Ea Nebel did not let go.
“Go. Watch the flock.” The beast grunted once at the Eidolon, then wandered to the riverside, where the cluster of black sheep accepted it as though it was a ram, or a master shepherd.
While the hunter and marshall remained silent, it was the story-teller who spoke next, “Unknown spirit, forgive my band-mates suspicion and hostility - his close friend had recently returned to the ancestor’s grace and our clan has been frightened by errant stories of invaders upon our lands who steal from us our precious life.”
“Luca is forgiven,” said Ea Nebel, releasing his hand and pulling away her own sharply, sparing a glance for the light bruise on her arm before she looked warily back at the three Eidolon.
Luca stepped away from the spirit, however trepidation still appeared on his features. The story-teller looked to the marshall, back to the reminder of the band, and finally to the unknown spirit. “If you would give me my curiosity, over what do you reside so that we would know better how not to offend you. Is it the river, or perhaps this felt you mentioned?”
A little light entered her eye, but only a little. “The fault isn’t yours. You were observant. Your traditions are strong, and you value discipline. I should have spent more time learning… Forgive me. I am the spirit who remembers the dead. I am the maid of shrouds.”
The story-teller glanced around once more, talking longer to think before asking, “Do you promise on the name and honor of Avros, and the ancestors of Avros, that you do not intend to harm or steal from our band?”
Ea Nebel nodded, raising her hand. “The band of Edgar has done right by its fallen. I swear it by Avros, and by the secret name of the Sun, and their honour. I will steal neither stock nor spear nor life from you.”
The story-teller looked over at the marshall and nodded. Edgar continued, hesitancy in his voice, “Then spirit of the fallen, we shall do what you ask. Whatever that might be.”
Ea Nebel met the Marshall’s gaze and repeated the words in her mind. She paused, choosing words. Somewhere behind her, the hog murmured a low grunt. “I do have only one pair of hands,” she said at last. “Perhaps… you would like to help me spin some wool?”
Despite having heard it mentioned before, now that he was not immediately distracted with other concerns, his shock caused him to repeat what he heard, “Spin sheep hair?” The story-teller immediately shot him a harsh glance, and he corrected himself, “We would be glad to assist you in your work. Allow my story-teller to go and call over the rest of the band,” he said. The spirit nodded.
The weighted bone, explained Ea Nebel, was a spindle, and the weight upon it, which could be clay or stone but always circular, was the whorl. The spindle was notched so as to better guide the wool being pulled away from the bundle on the wool-bone or stick, which was the distaff, and the coil of wound, spun fibre forming around the spindle as she turned it was called yarn, lengths of which could be twisted to make string and thread.
Many among Edgar’s band were wary of the stranger, or shy, but their Marshall reassured them, and the spirit did not pressure them. There was plenty of time to rest and water the animals, and much wool to work with. Ea’s flock was small, but, she explained, many animals would grow a fine fleece if they were carefully husbanded, even their own sheep. She even offered to exchange one of her rams for one of theirs, to strengthen both their flocks.
Her wool she had laid in a low tent, held up in the middle by a rare staff of wood from the north, along with many other tools of bone. Its edges were secured with yet another coil of coarse, thick fibre twisted from hemp: rope. From a long way off, its woolen walls were easily mistaken for fur. This was the felt of which she had spoken: thin, light, sometimes soft and sometimes stiff, cooler than furs and much warmer than straw. Having much wool, Ea Nebel showed them a low basin lined with hide which she had dug and filled with river-water, mixed with a soap of sheep’s fat and ash, where she made the felt by soaking it well, then pressing and rubbing it with a stone. This way, she explained, she had much to gain from a sheep, even before she slaughtered it.
The felt she made was sewn together with a fine yarn and a needle made of bone. Ea Nebel had a fondness for bone, and her tools had a rustic elegance, much like the band’s own. Among them were an array of long pins and thin hooks. These, said the spirit, were all that was necessary for yet another task. Taking a bundle of yarn and tying the end in a dextrous loop, Ea Nebel hooked and twisted the fibre in a kind of loose, endlessly looping knot, pulling and pushing her hook through the mesh that she was making, turning the yarn back and forth into itself. To do this, sometimes with one hook and sometimes with two needles, and even with a large notched square made from the long bones of xo, was to weave. When she was finished with her hook and yarn, Ea Nebel put the object gently on a child’s head, warming his ears.
“Wool and hemp can take any shape,” she said, late in an evening, tying together a good length of string by firelight to repair a net she had cast in the river. “They cannot replace hide, for which there are still many uses you have yet to learn. But they are useful. Thanks to your help, I’ve spun all my wool and mended all my things, and now there’s so much to spare… You should take all you’ve made while I taught you. You’ve earned it.”
The band accepted the spirit’s generosity, primarily concerned with not offending them, especially while their boar-beast lingered nearby. While usually they would have stopped by the river as the Lord Night reclaimed the sky, the group continued along the river away from the spirit’s dwelling. They settled out of sight, but they would not soon forget the maid spirit or her craft.
Ea Nebel let her head lay on the flank of the hog, more exhausted now than she had been by a thousand miles of travel, the fake bandage now resting in her lap. “You can go now,” she said, and the tent dissolved into a handful of blowflies. Tomorrow the sheep would wander off as well. She fell asleep, and the morning sun found her still by the side of the river, grinning from one ear to the other.
A sheep-herding band of Eidolon from the wood-deprived south of the plains, led by Marshall Edgar, bury one of their number after an attack by predators. They grieve for a little while before performing a small funeral, in which the crystal core of the dead Eidolon is recovered and the body covered, marked, and left behind for scavengers.
Ea Nebel observes the practice and approves of it, but notes that the Eidolon still have very little in the way of material technology. She contrives a very subtle and clever plan to teach them how to make the most out of the wool from their sheep.
The Eidolon encounter a disguised Ea by the bank of a river, showing off some interesting wool products, and very quickly realise that something weird is going on. Ea Nebel tells a whole bunch of lies to assert herself as a Perfectly Normal Eidolon, drawing on her own life history for inspiration, but doesn’t understand enough of the mortal culture yet to get away with it, and is called out by Luca, a friend of the fallen Eidolon, for not keeping an eye on her sheep at all times.
Some tense words are spoken and Ea is bailed out by her pig.
The two parties make up with the help of the band’s story-teller, who identifies her as a spirit. A little spooked, they put themselves at Ea Nebel’s service. She can’t believe her luck.
Over the course of a day or so Ea Nebel teaches the band about spinning wool, making string and rope, felt-making for tents and clothing, and forms of weaving similar to knitting and crochet that won’t take a lot of wooden tools. There was also a line about a loom in there somewhere, though.
Still a bit uneasy, Edgar’s band departs from Ea’s encampment with quite a story to tell about the shroud spirit.
Ea Nebel enters the cycle with 10 Vigor.
1 vigor spent to teach some southern Eidolon about fibre and textile crafts.
In those days the seas grew lush- lush beyond measure.
Vast was the expanse of blue sea that stretched beyond the clasped hands of the continent, and bright colour swirled therein as if stirred in by a paintbrush. Fish they had known, and water-bugs too, the little cyclopes, but never such a bounty as these: whirring, kicking animals, their stalked eyes black and fearful, cast about in the cold water like a muddy cloud, as abundant as raindrops.
The whales gorged. Fish alone had allowed many a race of whales to make far forays into the endless ocean. Now the gift of krill had shattered the chains that bound them to shore, and there was no limit to their travel; they crossed the planet whole, freer than condors. Even the lonesome giants of the ice had come to wander south, lording over all others with their unspeakable bulk. The whales grew fat on that bounty, and the sea did not cease to provide; swallowing shoals of plankton and forage-fish without number, they became mothers, and soon they were countless.
Hot with passion was the young bull then. The whale grew and grew until its very bones would let it grow no more, and then, one day, it was not a young bull at all but a mighty one, a titan of song and muscle, stoked with the fire of life and hunger. It leapt from the warm green waters of the southern summer, and the crash of its fall was an avalanche. Many were the rivals that heard it, and answered with strong song; no longer alone would this great bull be!
And yet, even in the battle-season where bulls won cow and heifer, the whale did not throw itself into the lifelong company of its kind, for which it had so yearned in the north. Even now, this bull was a wandering bull, a straggler, a stray, and the breadth of the unknown ocean called to it.
By day the imperial Sun did rise, and the whale gave chase as it fled to the West; by night travelled the injured Moon, and the whale followed, swimming through a sleep rich in dreams. So far west the whale travelled that it circled Galbar, and arrived on the rich coasts of Orsus.
IX
There in the East the whale did play, and feed, and roam the bright coast, filled with life long before the wide ocean had ever been seeded. An abundance of rivers washed curious smells down from the forests, and strange shore-fish had grown to be shoal-fish, as they had in the sea of giants. The wandering bull met many whales there, most quite like itself, sleek blue and grey rorquals filling the water with pulses of their low, mumbling song. Skilled fishers they were, and they showed the whale how to cage whole shoals in the bubbles of its breath, a fine dance in which the joyful singing whales of the central sea had not permitted it to take part, their white-black wings guiding them to spin elegant circles the rorqual could not hope to match.
Friendly were those eastern whales, but distant, and they were not its own. Their song was not the same, no matter how the whale twisted and turned its working ear, and their bodies did not bear the markings of its race. Every time it lifted its eye from the surface, the fin of their backs reminded the whale that it was not among family. Their bulls would not challenge it, nor was there any sport in challenging them, for there was no cow among them suited for the northerner, and the only tension was the far cooler matter of food. For many years already had fish filled these waters, and of ordinary size they were, though their shape be primitive. There was only so much room for yet another whale to come and forage in these populated waters.
So the whale travelled on, far to the south, until the sun one day rose, and did not shine.
Caught in the queer dimness, the whale turned and tossed and lifted its eyes up from the water and could find no source for the haze, not even a smell. It skimmed the water for cyclopes, and found them in plenty. It sang out to the fishing rorquals, and one answered with lazy calm. The whale returned north, a little way, and the sun soon brightened again.
Most puzzling was this darkness cast by no cloud! The whale had seen quite enough sorcerous water-borders in its youth, and was wary of this one. But all was well. The shade of heaven left the tropical sea no less warm, and the whale learned those seas to be safe. It entered the shadow, and crossed it without fear, once more emerging into light.
X
The whales of the south were small compared to the bull. They were vocal, fond of repeating their curious songs, now a long string of brisk beats flowing up and down like the tide, now a drumming growl, ba-brmm, ba-ba-ba-brrr... They ate what they could find, be it krill or forage or cyclopean plankton or prickly rock-fish roaming the shallow shore in schools, and were little troubled by the large stranger, though it swept up at once forage-patches that would take them three passes to clear.
The whale had encountered them before, and knew that their lot was a troubled one. Small enough to thrive on seas that would starve a giant like itself, they were small enough, also, to fall frequently prey to the all-conquering hunger of the orca. Perhaps it was that hunger which had chased them to travel so far south, in some vain and desperate hope to run from the invincible rip and tear of those hunters.
To the wandering bull, they were like children, perhaps trapped forever in the calf's nightmare of drowning and death- and yet, they travelled alone, swift and fearless, their hearts as bold as the great titans of the icy north. Strange indeed! Still, they were rorquals, like itself, even patterned in much the same way, and it was grateful for their occasional company.
Having lived in the open waters of the far south for longer than itself, the whale faintly expected their range to continue as the southern waters became cold again, the winter nights long. It swallowed down krill and fish at leisure at that far latitude, uncontested, singing its low beat all on its own.
A fell current found it there, alone in those waters, and the whale's appetite began to wane.
It did not cease its journey south, seeking another clear bright shore among the well-salted ocean, as it always had before. The sea remained quiet, and the krill was bitter in its mouth. The wandering bull would have journeyed far, even alone, even on an empty stomach, as it had done when it was young. The memories of that hungry voyage to the island-of-air grew clearer and clearer, poisoning its dreams until they became real.
Once again, a sorcerous barrier corrupted the waters in front of the whale.
There was no celestial enchantment casting this haze. It hung in the waters before the wandering bull, a noxious green stain that mocked life. It was like a cloud of silt that did not settle, but rose instead to loiter at the surface, another cruel trick of demented gravity. The water there was foul in the whale's mouth; its blowhole burned when it surfaced, and even the lice on its skin, grown thick again from its long journey uncleaned, seemed to writhe and die at the touch of the cloud.
The wandering bull did not touch that streak of corruption. It followed, cautiously, the westwards path of the cleaner waters beyond the cloud, occasionally circling to turn its good ear towards the cloud. The only sound came from far ahead. It might have been mistaken for the song of some still more bizarre race of whale, had it not been so relentless, and so stationary.
It clicked, and growled, and moaned low, unspeakably angry and pained, horribly un-alive. Wary of sorcery, yet afraid of nothing in these orca-less waters, the whale approached, and as it did so the cloud grew ever lower, tighter, darker, its corruption concentrated in one narrow stream- a single line of monstrous pollution billowing from a deep reef, a stunted island that had never grown tall enough to touch the surface, or feel moonlight.
Anger!
The noise was deafening. The shape was unlike anything the whale had yet seen. The whale dived deep into the blue dark, shielded by its ruined ear. It dared not approach this growling monster, shuddering and breathing yet sunk like a carcass. Such a poison that had been laid upon the ocean by a curse no larger than its own body-
Anger! Pain!
The whale levelled its eye at the light of the blue ocean beyond the curse, beyond the cloud, beyond the reef. There, somewhere, was a new sea, a clean sea, on the other side of the barrier. The whale twisted and twisted and listened for something it did not know, something it knew lay there where the night was so long the sun never rose, for the alien song of eldritch whales that knew no shore at all-
-but the sound of the curse was deafening, and the whale had only one ear.
XI
So ended the journey of the wandering bull. Starving and sickened, the whale fled north to the bright waters of the central sea, where green meant life, and so did song. Its appetite returned with a roar, and its flaking skin grew back clean. By the time it returned to familiar shores, the summer call of mates had lit fires in its heart, and young bachelors flinched back from the song of the bull who had travelled the world.
It was a wanderer, like no other whale- but it was a whale, still, proud! Great was that whale, and is still, crossing these oceans to this very day!
Aye, it is a whale!
Phelenia seeds the oceans and the whales, which were already doing pretty well, rapidly expand to fill the entire ocean.
Mamang reaches his full size. He circumnavigates the world and finds himself on the east coast of Orsus for a while, which whales have already filled thanks to fish from Tuku Llantu's coasts. When he travels south, he finds the shadow of the ring, but it's not too big a deal to cross.
Far in the south, he encounters the cloud of marine pollution generated by Coolmachine #1, which local whales have learned to avoid. Circumpolar currents have drawn its pollution into a long ring around the south end of Galbar, forming a barrier between the natural seas and the chaos around the Tree of Harmony. At this stage Mamang is easily large enough to destroy it, but he lacks the intelligence to identify this course of action, and that might be a suicide mission anyway... for now.
With this post, Mamang's story has now featured every major classification of baleen whale- can you identify them all?
0 Vigour gained. 0 Vigour spent. 1,696 whale points awarded for still being a whale
Tamo was a Scholar, and never one to travel much. He was also an Exile. This moderately awkward juxtaposition had left him in rather tense standing among the Academy faithful, who seemed sometimes uneasy around him, and other times angry that he hadn't left yet. Was his kind a spy, an infiltration by blasphemers? Would he wriggle into their heads with innocent words, undermining their loyalty and tempting them to gaze up at that sinful orb? The Moon was very beautiful, thought Tamo, and it was a shame that his brethren quite refused to acknowledge it. But he never spoke about it. In time he was glad he didn't, because, despite their differences on the lunar question, the Archive Kynikos grew accustomed to his comings and goings, and the guards, once again, felt more like a shield than a threat.
"Good day, brother," called a somewhat familiar voice, and Tamo looked. The Ranger's name was Meritala, if he recalled correctly (but he always did), one of the many exile rangers who had remained on the Academy island to map it thoroughly. Much of the preliminary scouting being now finished, Meritala had spent the last few weeks combing the rocky shore for sea-caves. "When I last drew maps in the Archives, I saw you here, in this very spot, facing the same way. Have you moved at all since?" For most species, this would be considered a 'joke'.
Tamo shook his head. "I am watching whales," he announced. Meritala's hood tilted a little. "I have been watching whales for some time," he elaborated. "Look over there," he said, pointing out far into the ocean with a gloved finger, "I see some now."
The glow of Meritala's eyes dimmed in a long and earnest squint, but he saw nothing. The whales were there, he was sure (a particularly hard-headed true believer might have attributed it to lunacy), but he didn't quite understand what he was looking for. "Pardon my ignorance, Tamo, I'm not sure I understand. What is a whale?"
"It is a particularly large breed of fish," said Tamo, still staring out at the unknown seas. "They are gill-less, with horizontal tail-fins. For this reason, I believe they must be closely connected with dolphins, as are the orcas. You can recognise them by their puffing at the water's surface. There- they are puffing now." Meritala looked carefully, and saw that it was true: large, smooth shapes were disturbing the water, blasting tiny clouds of mist as they went.
"There are many kinds," Tamo continued. "The ones you see now puff a distinctive bifurcated spray, as if blowing from two nostrils. In fact, the spray emerges from the back of the head. They are further known by their rounded body, which has a disproportionately large mouth, and black skin, patched with white. They call often under water, like songbirds. In this they are not to be confused with another singing whale, which I call the joyful kind, for its jumping and splashing. It is also common, and frequently has irregular patches of white that may cover much of the body; but they have narrower snouts, an angular build, and long, notched fins."
Meritala nodded. The knowledge was delicious to him. He could feel it whet his appetite for more. Such books, that could be written of the sea! "What of that one, Tamo? I think I see another approach."
"Ah! Well sighted, my friend. That is another kind altogether, of the thin, fast variety, which we call rorquals. I recognise it by the ridge towards the end of the tail, but it is coming towards us, and you will soon notice, if you look carefully, a pale, twisted streak on its back. I call it the pale-jawed kind, for when it rolls onto its side, you see the same kind of marking on the right side of the jaw- but not the left. It is easier to spot from underwater, or from the high towers of the Archives- You should try it, Meritala, they are quite delightful to see from above. The guards don't bite."
The ranger shrugged, shook his head a little. "Ahhh, I should rather prefer to try it from the top of some cliff or mountain. Tell me more about this whale, Tamo, my journey's not been fruitful, but I am yet to experiment with the patience of the faithful for mere sustenance. It seems curious."
"Indeed," said Tamo, "a little oddly so. The pale-jawed kind does not typically make much use of its eyes above water, but this one has looked our way twice now. They do not call so much, either, especially the females, but there is a particular one about every few months that doesn't seem to shut up."
"Perhaps it sees us," said Meritala, listening for the sound of a distant tail-slap on the sea wind. "Perhaps it is hungry for knowledge, as we are."
"Indeed. They must be quite clever."
"What a blessed animal."
"Absolutely."
this post affects literally no one lmao it's just whale indulgence
Some knowledge-eaters, eager for new knowledge, take up whale-watching. At least one of them is remarkably good at it, correctly distinguishing several types, including a familiar face.
GOD I LOVE WHALES
0 Vigour gained. 0 Vigour spent. 832 whale points awarded for being an awesome whale that everyone loves. Just a really great whale. The best.
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