And the Darkling Reefs Abide

Chapter 3

I think that, if I had been nicer, the god — bird — vessel — thing would have given me a skyward lift. But… they were long gone now. (But not forever, if they are to be believed.)

So instead I just climbed the canyon. Not a very medusa way of getting up. Tentacles were for many things — but for climbing, it’d be easier to dig holes with a sword. Regardless, I managed. Living with levitation as lousy as mine — I had the muscles for it.

Three grasper tentacles it took to climb, because the other held my sunshield aloft.

And I climbed.

…If my graspers made to fall off once I took a break, breathing heavy at the top of this far, far too tall canyon, I really wouldn’t blame them.

And if tentacles in general decided I was a limb​-​abuser, and boycotted me from ever growing more, no, I still wouldn’t blame them.

But, it seemed, my tentacles had some loyalty or determination. Or, like me, they knew not when to quit it. Either way, they stuck with me through the climb, and rested beside me at the top of it all, my sunshield dropped to cover me like a heavy blanket.

There was grass up here, growing out of the glittering dark dirt. I appreciated it; the planty stuff was softer under my bell than angry hot rocks and muddy, dull dirt.

Not like having a pretty bell is going to help me, granted. Or matter, when this book finally closes.

I had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt. Assassination is dirty work. Perhaps I should be dirty.

(Perhaps I was never worth cleaning in the first place.)

I couldn’t rest forever. I had the mission breathing down my neck, of course. That, and you never wanted to be in the wild canyons when the sun neared the horizon. Twilight monsters arose.

The dry canyon reef was smaller, hardier than the great bog reef. It grew in the shadow of several massive slabs of stone. Most days, my time was picked killing the rodents — annelid rats, teethy urchins, wild stars — that made to crawl inward. It was a tiring job. Got you no respect.

But, for better and for worse, it was something that kept people away from me. No one much messes with the colorless rat killer living out on the fringes.

I wasn’t going to get tied down again, tied to other people. If — when – I had to leave the dry canyon reef, I would leave.

(Would have left, I reminded myself. After all, I had decided. It didn’t much matter what happened next — my sole purpose now was the act itself.)

I pulled myself to my stalk, and then magically pushed off in to my usual clumsy levitation. I lurched toward town. It was always visible – the tallest coral spires were hundreds of bell​-​lengths high, held up steady by magical polyps.

I everted six eyes and took a good look at the dry canyon reef.

A brick road winded into Avelt, the reef like a vast pile of coral. I saw the shelves of diners and stores that encrusted like a barnacle ringing the town centerward, digging in past the exumbrella of outskirt houses, almost like the internal organs floating in the mesoglea of Avelt.

(My stalk wriggled inside me, the lips of the mouth at its very end parting as if expecting food. I had fasted before visiting the shrine of death, and I felt it.)

Aside from them, I saw one building that stood out because of all the empty space around it — the Hornshell pits, a prison carved within the hulking remains of a hornshell crab, vaster than even the ghost snail. And it guarded by rank upon rank of annointed guards — among them the prisonmaster, the only known doppelgifted, who alone could match a legion in numbers and fight to attrition.

(I did wonder if, after the act was completed, this was where my story would end, when my purpose elapsed. A curious prickling crawled over all my exumbrella, like the biting of gnats. I rubbed me with feeler tentacles and let my mind be rid of the notion.)

Past all that, I saw my ultimate destination, the central spire of the sun. It rose higher than every tower around it; the spire of the sun ascended past even clouds. You couldn’t see the top. No one could.

I lingered there a moment, fantasizing what I would find as I climbed that eldritch height. There was something — odd about the spire that I had never looked long enough to notice. For all the barnacles and urchins and corals growing on it, the architecture overall was not medusan. It was — cyclopean. I’d said it myself — reefs seemed drawn unconsciously to those vast metallic sites of the ancients. Could the spire of the sun be what lured us to Avelt?

(There was a deep dread that coolly saturated my Mesoglea; I knew it when recalling the field of horrors and I knew it when standing before the avian vessel and now I knew it gazing upon the spire of the sun. I didn’t blame me for drawing a connection between all of them, and something startled within when I realize that the vessel I met had been of the same proportions as those ebon stone statues.)

Stare at my goal as intensely I might, soon my eyes were drawn horizonward, inexplicably to me, and in the distance the trees and wild corals densened league by league and became a wet forest and yielded to the vast bog beyond. There my old home lay and even at this great distance you could still faintly see the ruins rising in that field of black stone statues.

Still letting my gaze be pulled by whim, the sight I looked at last was the boundary of all the world, the distant mountains bordering on the twilight sea. There were strange settlements there, the only medusan habitations that knew night. It warped them.

And I knew — but did not see, could never see — that past them all was the black ocean, the frozen life​-​haunted wastes where myth says the lands are tended by evil, alien medusae, and the last god waits in eternal slumber, and the darkling reefs abide.

The spell was broken, the the world knew motion once more. Clouds of plankton drifting above, the arms of rooted anemones being tussled by the wind, hopper worms searching for burrows, all these I saw as my awareness returned from the distance.

Over in Avelt, smokestacks rose where the flamegifted tended to their blazes, cooking meats or lighting firestone. Bright glowing beams twisted around where the lightgifted fired off messages. I watched the pale blue forms of watergifted tend the waterfall gateway that cleansed all who wished to enter the spire of the sun. I pondered how I might subvert them.

Even aside from all those annointed with gifts, all throughout the vast pile of coral that was the reef you saw was the bounding, ballon​-​like forms of other medusae drifting in and out of enclosed spaces. Levitating up toward the clouds, or propelled bullet​-​like out on some unknown mission, they had the determined energy I should have.

I tried to summon that. Put some heft in the magic I expelled, squeezing my bell and waving my tentacles. I had decided to kill the high priestess, and every action I took should be angled towards reifying that.

I had a sticky, problem​-​solving sort of mind, the kind that got snagged on thoughts like these. When I got there. It seemed instinct that caused me to pause there and rake it with my claws and tear open the thought.

Did I think I could just drift into the temple and levitate up to the highest levels and slide free a knife and –

No, of course it couldn’t be that easy. I had to evert the eyeless anxiety. It was slowing me down, clogging my mind like muck.

The death god… M… had given me a final resort for just this reason, something that would endlessly even the playing field. A Gift. Nothing like what you hear of in legends, he had assured me. No, I wouldn’t be wielding the power of gods. But enough to let me storm the temple of the sun? It was.

It will take time for the magical core to integrate itself. When the Gift is ready, you will know.

I waved a tress, free in this cycle of my levitation​-​gait. It was still tinglingly tired from magical exertion but like all the others there was a certain shiver within it like a coldness without temperature and that feeling slithered up and down it and waxed in intensity.

There were diseases that felt like this — Friy had told me all about that — but I trusted M. And I had never had those diseases myself. This feeling was new and if it were unrelated it was quite coincidental. What else could it be?

A whipcrack resonated in my bell, and my eyes jerked to full eversion. Like that, my mind once more settled in my body, in awareness.

It was a very late for that, of course. I should have been aware all along. I had a mission. But for now –

“Ru, is that you?”

I angled a few eyestalks at the medusae who vibrated. He was bouncing a bit more than the others, his bell all swelled up.

I puffed my bell once for him, and then gave a quick regard to the other medusae standing around here. Six. They had me surrounded — that was the magnitude of my unawareness. Some of them were drifting from corals and bushes, and one of them had a suspicious translucency about her.

They all had something suspicious about them. Not one of these jellies was colorless like me. The one who vibrated earlier — a burning red. The translucent female, had a hint of purple to her. There were two greens drifting all close to them. A deep, deep blue medusa with a golden ring levitated above her head (how?), and one whose color shifted a few times as I watched: blue, yellow, silver, cyan, gray — I gave up tracking it.

They all had metal guards lining their tentacles and tresses, and inside their sunshields blazed the fiery symbol of the lesser canyon reef.

Guards.

Deaths beyond, I hated dealing with guards.

Especially that red one.

“Why the silentness, R? Thought we were friends?” A tone of hurt harmonized with his melody. “We don’t need to worry, do we?”

It was the translucent one who spiked in before any response. “Of course we need to worry. You heard the tip we got. You know who we got the tip from.”

The medusa of shifting colors. “Should we me leaking the information?”

It was low, as if to whisper, but I was between them and half the other guards.

I focused on the guards who hadn’t spoken. The one with the halo, whom I saw other guards glanced to as if in differrance, bells angled submissively — she must be their acting coordinator. She floated there without bobbing, and watched me. Her rhopalia were wriggling, scenting the air.

The two green guards had as many eyestalks point at each other as toward me. I didn’t look long at them — irrelevant, they must be.

What should I do?

“Say something, R. I’m trying to be on your side here.”

There was a lot I could say about this red medusae, so much of it with a negative valence. But he tried to be friendly. He thought we had something. He didn’t realize.

“I just went — out. For a float. To explore. Is there a problem with that?”

“We just got a strange tip — involving, seemingly, everyone’s favorite ratslayer. I thought I’d run it by you, see what you think of it. It’s very concerning, you see.”

“If you have a warrant –”

“We don’t have a warrant. By all indications, you haven’t done anything –”

“That we know of.” It was the translucent female. Her tone had gotten sharp, like strings.

“You haven’t done anything.” The red guard repeated it. “However, we got a — premonition. Omen. Very concerning, you understand.”

F had told me about it. “Omen, true communion with the gods — it’s once in a lifeline stuff, right? This is has never happened for most of you.”

The shifting one. “No, it’s a bit different in the greater reef. We have the high priestess of the sun god. It’s — routine.”

Red smack out a tentacle, and it swiped the air between him and the shifter. “With the sun god, it’s routine. You know that’s not who you heard.”

“Why we we discussing this in front of the ratslayer?”

“It concerns him. Look, tell him what you heard, and we can see what he thinks of it.”

“I will not share my prophecies with a rat slayer.”

“Do you have a problem with me?”

“I prefer not to commune with filth, is all.”

“Enough.” It was the blue, haloed guard.

I angled some eyestalks toward them. Then had lifted themselves up, drifted closer.

The red guard had noticeably deflated. The shifter drew back. The translucent jelly inclined their bell.

“What were you actually doing in the wild canyons? Speak the truth.”

“I smelt the rot and decay. You all smell it, don’t you? Ever wondered what? Where? Why? I did. I was curious.” It felt like a incantation. To all the nonsense I did with Friy, so many summers ago. It felt like — like I was me again, just for a word.

“The investigators determined it was simply a burial ground for the singing coyotes.”

“It’s nothing suspicious.”

“Nothing worth sticking your dirty bell in.”

“You say that like his bell doesn’t belong among the rotting shit.”

“Enough.” The syllables were chopped, emphasis sliced up and dolled out.

“Where are you intending to go?”

“I wanted to visit the spire of the sun.” It was an instant like ultimate luck, where something in me sparked, and inspired me to append just a neat lie: “I wanted to clean my spirit a little, after spending so much time around corpses.”

The jelly of shifting colors drew big. The red guard might have paused in his bobbing levitation. The deep blue medusa watched me, same as ever.

“We will accompany you.”

“I — am not sure that’s necessary.”

A wave went through the coordinator’s eyestalks, and they pointed toward the shifting jelly. She flushed a oversaturated yellow, and she said, “It is. Entirely necessary.”

“So shall it be.”

“Wait.”

I started like that — stopped them like that. I knew whatever the winning strategy was, it opened with that move. But the next play eluded me.

What could I say to get the guards off me?

Well, why were they on in the first place?

The answer seemed to floated towards just as soon as I saw use for it. The god of knowledge betrayed me. They told the guards I would do – something. He couldn’t know my decision, not yet.

(Was it even a betrayal? Did we have any kind of trust? Regardless, I can take offense at someone putting me against the guards, no matter what relationship we might have. It was highly rude.)

But how did that help me? To them, a god just told them I was bad news. And if I wanted to throw them astray, fray their line of action, I’d have to work with matters on the same level as a god’s warning.

“The god of death visited me in that cave.”

It should not have said it. If anything was trespass, high disrespect, this was it. It was something secret, private, intimate, what existed between a god and their acolyte. I would pay for this, of that I could be assured.

But it was necessary, that I might have even a chance remaining, to attend my goal. I had decided to kill the high priestess of Avelt.

“Is that true? Can we trust your word at all?”

“The shrine is there for you to find.”

“The shrine end what else? The land is lousy with shrines.”

“The shrine and the shed feathers of a god.”

Everyone paused in their bobbing at that. Wiggling everted stalks held utterly still. A moment of consideration — the detritus of a god is something of its own.

“I will see this for myself.” That was the low melody of the deep blue jelly. One of their tentacles rose, and pointed at the translucent jelly and one of the greens. “Come with me.”

Then, regarding the ones she had not selected, she said “Mind him closely.” It had the inviolable surety of an iron law.

I kept my elation from swelling my bell. A tactic that simple had halved my opposition.

I looked to the spire of the sun, where I knew this story would end. It was one trial closer now, I knew it.

I looked at the three guards who were not floating towards divine glory. I looked at my three remaining obstacles.

I felt the coldness without temperature that tickled my tresses, running in currents up and down them, growing like little fruit inside my magic glands.

M had given me the tools to endlessly even the playing field, of that I was assured.

I’d find out what his Gift was, soon. I’d have to to.

I looked at the green jelly who tended the back as we floated into motion toward the lesser canyon reef.

I felt the cold energy pooling in my tresses. I looked hard at the jelly – no, at that obstacle. And I decided.