And the Darkling Reefs Abide

Chapter 5

A beginner’s tool is always chipped and scratched before they truly learn how to use it, how to be properly careful. If they utterly lack latent, the tool will break first. But chances are, they simply come very close.

I came close to breaking as a ephyra. After meeting Friy, after growing bored with the field of horrors, when we took it upon ourselves to explore every last twist and loop of the greater bog reef.

It took us, surprisingly, long to find the entertainment district. We’d been into the trash heaps, the sultry red​-​colored districts which offered nothing to us, and burglared too many homes to count before it occurred to us to investigate the area where so many crowds gathered, and cries of enjoyment issued.

Though perhaps the crowds are why it took us so long.

It was our second day exploring it, when we found a little grown​-​coral stage framed by curtains. The stage itself was barely twice taller than my tiny ephyra body, but past the top curtain the structure itself continued several more body lengths, without narrowing.

A little crowd had sprung up all anticipatory around the empty stage, breathes bated, and with great confusion I nudged Friy and we waited there with them.

It was with a loud bang of a some triumphant chord that the story began. As important as this experience had been for me, the details escape me. I recall the center of the story was a jelly a lot like me, triumphantly proud and determined as a shell around a core of utter anxiety and dread. That detail stand out to me then — but it’s almost prophetic how much I’ve curled into being just like that fictionation medusa.

It was a tragedy, that much I knew, that much had been clear from the beginning. In the story, the gods had spoken, and he would have to take his just​-​strobilated brother to the altar on the highest peak, and sacrifice him for inscrutable divine reasons.

As much as he might resist the proclamation, it had been decided, and he would do it.

It was almost a master’s woven tale, that much sticks with me even now. I would love to go see another performance of it, if it hadn’t affected me as it did.

It’s always something small that upends you. You never miss something big.

And I was a ephyra back then. The sort of thing that gets past a little half — no, less than half — developed brain…

Well, suffice it to say that it was utterly small and stupid.

But you’ll see that for yourself.

The hero, he was a swordmaker. He fought it wars before he lot a tentacle and reconsidered. Then he simply switched to fighting the war at a distance, through proxies, as it were.

He found him a wife to stalk down with, another veteran from the war. The wife was one obstacle between him and sacrificing his brother at the mountain altar. She sees it as senseless and destructive, and will stop him.

At the foot of the mountain, where her attempts to convince him otherwise now seemed as useless as they were, it became a fight.

And the wife was able to rescue the brother.

But the reason.

Ugh. I sigh just remembering it.

He had forgotten his sword.

A swordmaker. A war veteran. Forgot his sword.

You might have guessed from how small the stage was, but there weren’t proper actors playing these characters. Far too small.

Being the dumb ephyra we all were, I looked upon the stone​-​eyed jelly bags prancing on the stage, and deduced that these were simply little medusa living out little lives and little struggles. The mostly likely explanation, I’d thought.

The world’s a weird place, you’d be surprised how reasonable silliness can sound when you know so little.

But when the swordmaker veteran forgot his sword, it’s was like a stabbing or severance. My belief that these were real people and the story being a reality — was at once utterly sundered.

There’s an instinct we all share. When we hear the call, or see the shadow pass us over, or just an indistinct dread rides up upon us, we anticipate that razor​-​taloned, bear​-​spearing death swooping down upon us.

And we jerk our bells up, to see the doom as it comes.

I jerked up, and saw my doom.

There are things about the performance that — if you’re a ephyra without much experience or potential to properly, abstractly, reason – you can miss or ignore.

The thumbing of the jellies bells seemed utterly unrelated to what they were saying.

While their bells could swell or deflate, there was none of the subtlety of experience you’d immediately miss.

And the tentacles, the eyestalks, the rhopalia, they never seemed to move.

It was all subtly uncanny, but I didn’t focus on it. There had been a story happening.

And then the veteran swordmaker forgot his sword, and I looked up, and I saw my doom.

It had been an old medusa, bell colorless with little white stripes like a laughing tiger. He was perched up their, stalk leaning over the stage, every one of his tentacles and tresses occupied.

At the ends of all of them were strings.

Puppet strings.

It may sound silly to you, I’m sure. But this broke me for just a little while.

I fluttered away from the stage, and never learned how to story ended.

(Friy didn’t either, having darted after me.)

I ended up somewhere high and far away — a mound in the field of horrors, probably — and staring up blankly at the dead blue sky.

I didn’t want to be anywhere where there were medusa.

It was something very, very hard to unsee, once you really looked. The bobbing of a medusa in levitation — did it really look all that different from the jiggling of puppet strings? When we spoke, were they really our words, or lines recited for us some place distant (it was always like that, as a ephyra learning speech, blind understandingless repetition. When did it stop? Did it stop, or did we merely forget?)

When we lived our lives, are they, in any sense, our lives, and not the stories written for us — not even for us, for some crowd unknown, as entertainments, by gods or strange fate?

Were we all just puppets?

I had nightmares about that, when I slept. For a long time.

Even waking life had seemed a nightmare — whenever I thought about it, myself or others, I could imagine the reasons and causes like the puppet strings of times, causality and physics controlling all our lives, determining everything from the cry to the last gasp.

I was a puppet.

I stood rooted to the reflective metal scales, the floor of the diner. The diner was the perfect intersection of best and cheapest.

I absorbed a breath, and then let it dissipate out of me. The guards were still here, in a circle around me.

The table with ground cabbage on a plate sat to one side of me, and green at the other, between me and the nearest exit. Red was rooted at the table with me, and the color​-​shifting guard was flashing between red and black a distance from the table.

I saw she’d produced a sling, from somewhere.

The guards were knots in the flow of the diner’s crowd. Ordinarily, medusae floated around at will, curving gentle around supports and the rare coral wall. All directions, but mostly parallel to the grounds; buildings were defined by having shade like gigantic sunshields wielded by genius loci.

But aside from that one divider, building and spaces blended into each other, with many entrances and exits and side passages and hidden ways. There was a comfortable multiplicity to it, redundant and flexible.

(Ancient ruins had nothing like this, only the stressing regularly of lines and squares, the single dual entrance and exit.)

A grasper wrapped around a pouch of fruit essences, and brought it beneath my bell to suck from the straw.

The guards were knots in this natural flow. It parted abruptly around them, limned by jellies who jerked out of their way. Some of them bumped into them, not realizing they were not floating (where such collisions are routine.)

Flow. It was easy — to me — to divorce jellies from their individuality, analyse the collective behavior. Look for the strings which tugged at them all.

Seeing the strings was the first step to grasping them for yourself, and guiding them as if on a leash.

A caw broke all the assembly.

I saw many bells turned suddenly askance — jellies rooted aground snapping free, levitating medusae jerking instantly away.

Instinct. Another puppet string.

It hadn’t been the first time the raven made some noise. Few of the jellies really got used to it. To their credit, not everyone here had been present for the first call. But they should have had their eyestalks keen. They should have seen what could have been a danger lurking the in shadows.

He sat underneath the thickest pillar which might’ve been a grasping tentacle uplifting the sunshield of the ceiling. I tossed him a few worms from my plate, when I still had worms left. The bird looked at me with one eye for a long time, and ate his share, and went back to sitting there on the ground.

I had an immediate problem to solve — overcoming the obstacle of the guards, get them to stop following me. But the raven pulled again and again at my attention, his unexplained presence poking my curiosity.

Why was there a bird in the reef? Why had no one shooed it away?

Why did it seem to blend in with the shadows?

There are diners where guards attend regularly — the diners from which I knew the red guard — and this was not one of them. It was one more way that the guards disturbed the atmosphere here. They didn’t belong. Other medusa kept long, hard stares on them. The nearest circle of tables was entirely empty save two brave souls.

Two gifted souls. It said a lot.

It was one more piece in the puzzle. Or at least, a tool I could use to piece together the puzzle. I was colorless. All three guards were colored, gifted.

There were parts of the reef that were falling apart, where the roofs didn’t block all the sunlight. Where a pursuing throng of guards would have a unfamiliar time chasing me.

Assuming I was even able to escape in the first case. A few of my eyestalks roamed back over to the green guard.

I had already decided he would be first.

Act.

I knew this was a failing of mine. A problem rears its head, roaring for me to face up or fail.

And I thought. And thought. And thought. Pursued backalleys of thought and side tangents. Got all anxious and tangled up in how I was thinking instead of acting, writing whole self​-​denouncing screeds about it.

After all, when you’re in a loop, it’s always something from outside that frees you.

The raven cawed once more.

And I decided. More than decided, I acted.

“Hey.” I nudged the green guard.

He stared at me with six eyestalks.

“That raven is rubbing me the wrong way. Want to go over there with me and see what’s up with it?”

I unrooted myself, pushed magic through my tresses, and floated toward the great pillar.

The green jelly was behind me.

I rooted down in the depths of the shadow. It was day enough that the torches around the pillar were out, and the shadows were black. I couldn’t tell apart the bird’s feet.

It strutted towards us, cawing. This close, it was more than a sound. You could imagine a resemblance to vibrating. The kind of resemblance the calling of gods had.

You could imagine the raven was saying Ruwene. Ruwene.

It says — something, that I feared the teleportation more than the sling.

I didn’t give myself time to think harder about it, weight the decision. I was a puppet. I reached for my own strings, and pulled.

A tress rose up, pointed at the green jelly.

The raven cawed. Ruwene.

I felt the coldness worm down the length. Turn to pure black dust at the flute of my tress.

I forced a different flavor of magic down its length. The coldness I’d begun to feel after death had Gifted me, assuring me it would endlessly even the playing field.

I let a breath dissipate, and, while all this felt very slow, everything – truly — was over in an instant.

The green medusa was lifting confused eyestalks, was squeezing their surprised bell, was lifting anticipating graspers.

Was.

Had been.

Where the green jelly had once rooted themselves next to me, was a another statue of that curious, pure black stone, like another piece by the sculptor who wrought the field of horrors.

The raven cawed some terrible word that started with M, then it flew far away.

The stasis that had found the rest of the diner seemed leave, and the world lurched into motion once more.

I looked to the spire of the sun, knowing my path clear of one obstacle.