Prelude to the End of the World

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” said the one beneath the black cloak. The fabric was nightworm silk, fine, glossy, and blacker than the darkling night outside. From the slits in the stone walls you heard the wind mutter, and it was louder than the murmurs inside the room.

Stabs of moonlight came in from those slits, cutting soft patches out from the shadows. Even still, the black cloak was in utter shadow, but not the six others to whom he spoke.

“So slows the pulse of the earth.” The reply came from a yellow cloak beside him, of course it did. Only that bird had the wit and tongue to match, always.

The one across from him, a white cloak, spoke now, rattling in his throat and saying, “Slows? It stops. We’ve ripped out the hearts of the earth. It is a corpse now, or will be.”

Beneath the black cloak, he shifted and its extent seemed to be expanding, playfully, mirthfully — even as the edges blended indiscernibly with the darkness and any motion could have been a trick of the light, a dance of the shadows. His face would have told you; but he was masked as well as cloaked, they all were.

In reply black cloak said, “What is every corpse but the food for new life? With the hearts we can fledge a new world. Our new world.”

“Always with the moribund metaphors,” White muttered.

Beneath the yellow cloak a wing twisted, some gesture of interruption. “If we’re building a new world, first of all we should free the slaves and grant them a say in the order of things.”

Black cloak seemed to bring two wings together over his breast; but a smile couldn’t be seen.

All the while, the bird who was under a violet cloak had been fidgeting, as if the garment itched, as if she wished to tear it off and tear off everyone else’s and be rid of these theatrics.

“Really?” she said. It was the first word she spoke this meeting. You could tell by the short silence after, by how she bounced demandingly forward, that she wished it could be the only word. Just a verb slap, slapping some sense into these playacting fools.

But she followed it up, she had to. She said, “We’re fucking scholars. Fledgling fucking scholars. We’ve barely a dozen scrolls writ between all of us. And only two of us — if that many — have the gilded robes at all. We could hardly make a book, let alone a world.”

Under a blue cloak, at least, there was a twist she suspected was a head spun in agreement. White merely cawed sharply, affirmation or just acknowledgment.

Black, though, was shaking in anger, that much she could tell from a look to his dark corner. Or it had just been a particularly intense cloud which passed before the moon.

White spoke. “She is right. We’re like hatchlings dressed as ghosts.” The eyeholes of his mask — through which you saw a gleam of silver, his eyes — passed over Yellow and Black. “Which of you had this stupid idea?” It had to be one of you. He didn’t say it, but all had heard it.

“I had thought,” — Yellow speaking — “that it would serve to get you, get us, in the right sort of attitude. Sworn rebels about to upend society. Dark conspirators plotting the fate of kings and proles. Secretive wizards meeting for a ritual to seal it all.”

“Rebels, conspiracies, wizards,” Violet croaked. “Really demonstrating seriousness and maturity fit for building a world.”

“Ambition, imagination, a little humor,” Black was jumping to the defense before she’d even finished, cutting her off. “Are these things you’d want absent from the rulers — from your world?”

“Interesting slip, there.” White had the tone and the words that seemed to cleave.

“Shut it, shut it, the both you.” Someone who hadn’t spoken, who’d patiently, silently, waited — a green cloak, bigger than all the rest but not taller. Deep voice, but she spoke quickly. Eyes like stars. “Look at it, we’re already here in the cloaks — and it makes Eythe smile, clearly it does. All of us are friends here.”

She waited. No one said anything.

“So act like it,” her quick voice slowed just a tad for this. She looked between the black cloak and the violet one, expectant. Apologies, or at least gestures at apologies, were in order. There was at least enough respect and dignity remaining between them that she didn’t yet coax them out like a stern parent.

Black spoke first. “She’s afraid, is all. Of the power we’ve unearthed and now wield, and the great, terrible things we could do with it.”

Stillness, utter stillness after the brazen words of the cloaked speaker. There was, faintly, the smell of bloody lunch from the breath of someone with mouth agape.

He followed it up with, “In all fairness, I am afraid too, I should hope we all are — it’s what caution starts with. But, I for one have enough trust in my, uh, friends.”

More stillness, more silence.

“So,” she in the blue cloak started, “we’re just going to move on as if that didn’t even happen, and hopefully this festering mess of a meeting stops being a waste of time.” She had taken up speaking, briskness in her voice, and some heft. She looked to each of the cloaked figures, black, white, violet, yellow, green, and grey, meeting all their eyes, and willed them seriousness. Not dramatic whimsy, and not the false seriousness of a sniped complaint. Real seriousness. “Let’s ignore the theatrics, and get to the hea—”

“No,” White said quickly, voice almost strangled.

“Yes,” Yellow was chiming in. “Let’s ease our excited pulses, and get to the—”

“I said no,” there was some unevenness to his voice; laughter implied like light beaming forth through cracks.

“I don’t see the issue,” said Black. “Perhaps we’re all still hot from the digging, but we should cool our blood. After all, we’ve struck a rich vein today, and we should discuss it before it circulates, as it will in a beat. Really, I’d love for us to get to—”

“What part of seriousness don’t you understand? Isn’t this exactly the problem?”

“Fine, fine. No fun at all.”

Yellow cloak was still clicking in his throat, and the rest had some twitch of reaction, but green was looking around quite bewildered. “Get to the what? Now I want to know.”

She looked to Black, who would not say. Nor would Yellow. Blue too, remained silent. Green’s bright eyes stared at the white cloak a long moment, compelling, before he finally decided he would have to complete the thrice interrupted sentence:

“We should… get to the heart of the matter.”

“Hearts, rather.” Yellow was smiling; he had to be.

“Absolutely insufferable, both of you.” And White’s mask was fluttering where he puffed out air.

Blue was looking between white and yellow, but decided it was just a friendly snipe. Her gaze swept the room. The cloaks which everyone wore billowed or draped widely, cut just short enough a single standing leg could be seen emerging from each’s shadows.

Between the single leg (almost a stalk) and the colored cloth that hung over them (almost a bell), you could see in their visage something of the slaves who strive in Antenora, hefting from the sea vast blocks of the frozen blood of the earth or acting as tireless servents in every city from mountainpeak to oceandepth.

It was almost intentional.

Around them, the room was bare, as demanded by he under the black cloak. The stone of the floor still was scuffed where tables were dragged out, the color of the wall brighter where paintings or shelves had once been. Yet still there were cobwebs, and in the corners and crevices, barnacles and urchins and anemones and other sessile things; for the slits had no glass, and plankton floated in and could not float out.

After everything else, the one thing that could not be removed was the blinking and beeping machine, a great spellweaver, whose softly glowing screen became the ambience of the room.

Centermost of all, there was a table, empty now but not for long.

“What’s taking the servants all this time?”

“It’s probably the weak, useless medusae.” White cawed, disdaining. “If we could afford more amoebae they’d have carried the load here before we’d even landed.”

“If we could afford more amoebae we wouldn’t have to meet in a dank room with cobwebs and barnacles.”

Yellow prodded black. “Did you, well, tell them that they could come in?”

He in the black cloak paused.

Then came a sigh, and an invisible swallowing of pride, and then he called out, high, sharp, three notes, and it was then that the latch was tried. It turned smoothly then stopped with a clack and wouldn’t open.

Quickly green was saying, “I think I must’ve locked it behind mysel…”

But she trailed off seeing that from the gap below the door, a black psuedopod covered in eyes, was emerging and climbing palpably the door, before latching onto the inside handle with a squish and letting itself in.

The door slid open first of all on a ghost snail shell, an ashen white spiral with faint soft lines of yellow blue dancing as decoration. Below, at the shell’s mouth, there exuded the retracting pseudopod which had opened the door, and a sextet of stiff black pseudopodia which upheld the shell and its denizen, each ending on soft, suckered pads. And there was a final appendage everted behind it, thicker than all the others.

Nothing else of the amoeba could be seen; the rest of the black weltering mass sat tucked snug and modest inside the cracked and bulging shell.

Beside and behind the amoeba were a half dozen slave medusae like a squad of floating jellyfish, each of which had a grasping tentacle outstretched.

Between the grasping tentacles and the amoeba’s thickest psuedopod, they lifted the object which he in black had requested.

It was chest no bigger than any of their heads. Were it laying on the ground you’d expect to kick and watch it roll; but your bones would break before it ever would move. Amoebae had the strength of mountains.

“On the table, right there.”

The high piping voice of the amoeba echoed him, “On the table, sir.”

They sat it there and the stone of the table cracked and the legs crumbled under it. Black had to stoop to reach the magic​-​sealed chest, and tap on its glowing touchpad the sequence which would open it.

White looked at the medusa that had rooted themselves all around and sat resting their tentacles in wet piles, and the amoeba who had retracted all its mass into its repurposed snail shell.

“What are you waiting for? Go on, shoo. All of you.”

“Go on, shoo, sir.” (The voice would be a twisted shriek if but for the low volume.)

White stared at the amoeba.

You heard the clanging of coins, and then saw, launched from beneath the yellow cloak, a wide titanium fivepiece arc and then smack down before the amoeba.

A podia shot out swift as frog tongue and the coin was gone.

More clanging, and then six more coins were tossed for each medusae.

“You… tip the slaves?”

“It’s an appreciation a mere ‘thank you’ doesn’t convey.”

“They exist to serve us. We created them to serve us.”

“An unfortunate and temporary matter, I hope, if our vision is to be realized.”

Black cut in, heedless of the greater conversation, to say, “I assured you it will. It is a certainty.”

White addressed he in yellow. “You’re projecting minds onto them. They’re biological automata no different than a drone or automatic worker. Nothing needs to change. They don’t want anything to change. They don’t want anything.”

Yellow muttered, “And I’m the one projecting, ha.” Louder, he replied, “You would think that, I suppose. But could it not be an oppression so complete they flinch to even dream of freedom?”

White dismissively tossed an appendage, but yellow wasn’t done.

He continued, “But it isn’t complete. Of course you know of the tens of medusa yet who’ve committed some kind of rebellion. Of course you know the amoeba we cannot find or name.”

“Damaged, deranged individuals, what do you expect me to say?”

“Exactly that. Of course any deviation from your ideal, imagined complacency would be mere derangement. If you truly believe that, then tell me what would you expect to see if you were in fact wrong?”

(The amoeba chose then to echo in that high, piping voice that spanned too wide a range. “Mere derangement!“)

While this argument was happening, medusa touched Black’s leg with a cool tentacle, lined with venomous spines except where it tapped him.

It spoke now in that language the medusae can manage, composed only of pitched vowels and the most liquid of consonants.

Black looked to yellow for translation.

“He asks whether they should leave, whether you require anything further from them.”

Black made a rattling of thought.

Violet said, “Why not keep them here? A first test of yellow’s mad idea to ‘let them have a say.’ ”

“Or let them choose for themselves,” said Yellow, and then he asked the medusa in their language. It was not impossible to mimic the sounds, if one bothered to learn.

He got his answer and he curled tightly under his cloak. The others asked for it and at length he admitted, “They’d like to stay and watch us argue.”

“Tell them no grubs, because you two are cutting that nonsense out now.”

Black took one more look at the medusa, before shaking his head and finally lifting open the chest they’d all been waiting for.

“Behold.”

The lid came off easily because it was not what weighted it so. With the lid drawn back, the bright red orbs within began to shift and move as if they were magnets, as if they felt another gravity.

The orbs arose and floated and gyred and arranged themselves in a lattice or crystalshape only mathematicians could name

“The hearts of the world.” They were only vaguely orbs; rough and in places jagged, as uncut gems might be. All of the eyes behind masks watched the slowly drifting hearts like the sun itself had descended and before them danced.

The medusae meanwhile idly everted eyes from their membranous bells and glanced at the hearts of the world with as much interest as the shadows they cast, or the cobwebs and sessile things around the room — no, the sessile things merited more interest, because soon a meduse lifted a thin fluted tentacle and the fluted end recoiled as if it had emitted an invisible force and then the stone star at which it had been pointed started and crawled crazily and quickly around the room and another medusa caught it and they ate it all together.

The white​-​cloaked one stared at them doing this and rattled harshly in his throat.

But he in black he ignored it and began speaking anyway, his new cadence that of speech, a practiced speech.

“Every wonder we have as a civilization, as a species, from the nightless cities to the countries below the waves, the balloon fleets which cross continents momently to the boats which sail the moon, all were worked with but the single heart of the earth that we found in the deepest mines two hundred years ago.”

A pause, then,

“Here we have seven.” He reached out with a wing and brushed a floating heart, upsetting the rotation. Then all around moonlight shadows jostled by the smallest amount, like the world stuttered in its orbit. Or it was just the orb light, and an illusion.

“Seven hearts of the earth. With all these you could stop the world in its tread, bring down the stars from heaven, even alter time.”

“And you propose a few bickering scholars in a barnacled room dressed like ghosts should be the ones to do all that.” Violet made a dry sound.

In reply, he asked, “Who else? It’s not an accident that we found the hearts and now.”

“How about any of the ministers or kings? The ones whose business it is to run the world?”

“So you think the tyrants who sit on thrones of bone, or the presidents who preened and licked cloacas till they were thrown a title, you think that they have more a right to this power than the scholars like us who’ve spent years bettering ourselves, competing and winning against a flock of those with our same ambitions?”

“I’ve seen your room. You can’t even keep a ten foot cube in order. You want the world?”

“You don’t get it.” Black had a certain hidden excitement all along, and it was clear to see now. He was continuing, tone high and airy, “The seven of us, we are the best minds this world has to offer. Not the luckiest or the most flattering or the most ruthless. We cracked the riddle of Vanduan. We designed the spell to pierce the shell of earth. We routed and then endured the journey to the lost and sunken paradise in the underworld. There are none who deserve more to be writing this next chapter of history than us.”

(In the middle of all of this, the medusae were humming softly amongst themselves, low enough not to bother their masters. They caught bugs that crawled and made a game of how to distribute them.)

“You said it wasn’t an accident.” Green was speaking. “What did you mean by that?”

“It’s hard to put in a word. Destiny. Providence. Singularity. It’s like, every coincidence, every chance dealing of the world, was tuned and turned to point us toward this moment. Like there’s something great and vast waiting at the end of it all, waiting for us. Do you ever feel that? As if there’s this mass of serendipity behind you that put you on the path you’re on, made you who you are, and it almost seems designed. You know the feeling, right?”

“Yes,” Violet replied, “and its name is confirmation bias. What you aren’t remembering right now is the uncountable, outnumbering multitude of completely normal events and dead ends. All the things that didn’t go your way, all the things that could have been one more item on your list of coincidence, but aren’t.”

(“Confirmation bias!“ By now the amoeba, who could speak the song of the medusae, had coaxed them into passing it an anemone which it visibly chewed.)

“Forget it.” Black flicked a limb. “Point is, we have the hearts of the earth. We can do anything. The world is now ours.”

Green, in her sympathetic voice, was asking, “But first shouldn’t we stop and think, and not do anything drastic without measuring and considering the consequences first?”

“We don’t have time to stop and consider!” Black exclaimed, throwing out a wing in a gesture that almost lost him his cloak. “The first fleet of starwings unfurl in twenty days. The teeth of the earth are in place and begin digging in a month. Just as soon as they are as lucky as us, they will find another heart of the earth. And even now, even with just one heart we are plunging the limits of possibility. Can you not feel what’s on the horizon?

“We’re doing the things we’ve spoken of in legends and dreams. Soon we’ll fly among the stars. Do you want every planet we find to to be the toy of some fat despot on our world? Do you want our great grandchildren, even in the stars, still struggling and starving because those who have, still keep and hoard more?”

It was all a wave of words, a tide summon to knock down his opposition. Or it was a bricked shelter, and every word another block of perfect defense. Or it was a hole he only dug deeper.

Violet then replied: “Tell me what you propose to do about the kings and ministers, since you clearly have so little respect at all for any of them.”

“Make me king.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Like I said, I’m — we’re the best minds in all the world. We could build a better society than this kludge and accident we grew up with. And in our wisdom we can build better minds, who can then build minds even better still, until we have made a perfect world.”

“I’m not even listening at this point, I don’t have to. You just gave up the game. This is all a joke, a con. You just want to be king of everything. That’s all this is.”

She in violet reached for the hearts of the earth, and was stopped by a black slimy pseudopod, the amoeba. Even for all brazen and annoying ways, the thing still knew it answered to he in the black cloak, and knew it should protect what had been entrusted to it.

“What are you trying to do?” White asked, as straight and cleaving as ever.

“It was stupid to delve for the treasure. You see it all the time in stories; power corrupts, et cetera. Maybe no one should have this.”

“Look.” It was the yellow cloaked bird who spoke. Violet knew he was about to spin his defense of black, and she was right. “You think we should stop and think about consequences before we use the hearts. It makes sense. The thing that perspective misses is that the world isn’t going to stop and wait with us. The world is changing right now. It’s not that what we’re doing is any more dangerous than the progress that’s happening, it’s just that — forgive me for being so blunt — it’s just that you get a say in what we’re doing right now. Maybe you’d veto the skywings and the earthteeth too just as fast, but you can’t.”

(“Stop and think about consequences,“ said the amoeba, eyes on violet, pseudopod prickling.)

Violet paused there, a limb still reaching where the amoeba blocked her. The room waited with her. Yellow preening proud for his defense, black basking in said defense, and the medusae eating with squishes and plats.

“Hm. Hmm. I think… I think there is a way we can all get what we want.”

Green had the answer, and all turned to her.

“If the world won’t stop to think, we can stop it. If Eythe wants to free the slaves, we can free them. And if M—— wants to rule, he can rule the freed slaves. If it all doesn’t work out, no birds have be harmed.”

Black was nodding first of all. And so immediately violet disliked the idea.

Yellow gazed upward, up to stars if not for the ceiling. “Yes. You could all be rulers, if you wanted to. Pause the world and pause all the people in it, and wait for time to make us wise. Give the slaves peace and freedom. We could be — we would be like gods to them.”

“And you think we can just… unpause if it doesn’t work out, and everything will be as if it never happened?”

“If we need it to be, it will. We have have seven hearts of the earth, darling. We could arrange our names in the stars ten times over, and have power left over to do it a hundred times more. Erasing a little mistake will be nothing.”

Black looked around, to Yellow, to Violet, to White, to Green, and to Blue, and to Gray. “Is it settled then? Shall we crown ourselves kings and gods?”

His phrasing gave them pause, of course, but they knew what he meant, and it was settled. Altogether they gave an affirmative caw, and even the one who had been silent, their voice could be heard if not isolated in the chorus.

It is said that history turns like a wheel, and the ages separated like the spokes thereon. If it is so then a spoke was coming up now, and in that room the spirit of history hung heavy, a match for the spirit of earth incarnated in those floating, glowing hearts. And altogether there were three vast spirits crouched in that room, watching.

Watching the pulse of the world slow.

And so, he in the black cloak stepped once more toward the hearts of the earth, and reached for them. Like the playful caw of the raven, M—— laughed as the planet turned one round closer to his destiny.

The words that were said as their fate was sealed were: “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

Chapter 1

At the eleventh eclipse, on last day of eternal summer, I decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt.

For this act, there were reasons and justifications — of that I was assured. But, I was told, I stood not to the task of understanding. Nothing unusual for me — it was to be expected, if anything.

A sharp, final sound cut through my thoughts, flinching me, and what followed were fading noises which could, blasphemously, be called scurrying. The communion was over, that was what it meant. The god of death had departed.

On an inflating stalk, I rose. Cartilage popped back into place, happy that my polyp​-​like kneeling was over. My feeler tentacles brushed the cave dirt from my bell and I absorbed a breath. I was averting the eyes circling my bell and when the wiggly rhopalia were free, I saw once more.

…Should have seen, rather. In the engulfing darkness of the cave – broken only by a single shaft of sun from its mouth — all visuality was reduced to mere suggestions. Macrohydra floated idly about and darting wasps made feast. Barnacles spread fervently around and wild coral claimed the linings of walls. Everywhere, worms crawled.

All this I knew, or guessed — little of it was seen. What I knew of the cave and what was unknown, both were equally reduced to mere silhouette and impression.

Long ago, I had strobilated in a dark warm cave — not this one, but the qualia was the same. And, as if in remembrance, the stalk holding me up slacked. I can rest here; that was the feeling in words.

With all the reluctance of one interrupting a dream, I focused sharply on the impressions which didn’t neatly fit into that comfortable image: I heard grunking and rattling; I felt a constant thrum of magic; I smelt corpses in every single stage of decay. Focusing on those, I was jarred from my reverie.

I straightened my stalk, killed the slack, and stood upright. I had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt, and I would.

A grasper tentacle groped out for my sunshield and another had found my travel bag and slung it around my bell and having everything, I fell onto my graspers.

It took three of your four grasper tentacles to walk — two if you had practice, if you absolutely couldn’t spare more. I was a master of both. It wasn’t a point of pride. With weight on my tentacles, my stalk curled inward, inverting into my bell. Like that I crawled away, crawled toward that shaft of light.

And then, I felt it as a tug, but only in my mind — inward, opposite the mouth, it was an urge to look, to glimpse.

There exist flowers, whose death​-​petals are visibly lined with swift spikes, and whose nectar is sweet and fain to attract little hydras to their end — a temptation which even their weak will can oft withstand.

If that which tugged my gaze were such a flower, then I am less than even the hydras. But the greatest wills do still falter, and I dare those who in my position would resist, I dare them be the first and only to criticize my action.

I unveiled my eyes, and looked.

It was a throne or shrine or portal, a sacred thing, and it rose up high and darkly exalted and crowned with wet spikes and it was the center and heart of the cave. It had earlier known the presence of the god of death — of that I was assured.

Brazenly, I leaned closer, breath tight in my bell.

Those easily impressed would note first of all the corpse impaled on the spikes, its mesoglea spilling out in rivulets, its gray membrane turning to leather, its long slender tresses ripped delicately out and all their cnidocytes dotting the ground, hollowed of their magical spark.

But what else would one expect in the demesne of death? Hardly a surprise, that.

No, peering closer at the crowned thing, I saw perhaps shed quills or feathers. Perhaps the diggings of claws. Perhaps a shadow, cast by a thing of such power that it lingered even after its caster had gone.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked. Mortal eyes weren’t to seek the form of gods. It was proscribed. It would be — it was — the highest disrespect. It would be maddening. Of that we were assured.

I drew my gaze away, and prayed a moment to that kind, general god of everyone, the god of knowing and certainty; I asked forgiveness for this trespass.

Was it a little thing, what I did? Perhaps. But for one such as myself, even little trespasses ought to be measured and corrected.

I’d fallen short in every area (of that, I was assured). Piety I could cling to. Piety I could control.

I absorbed a vast breath.

But I was a damned medusa already.

Of that, I assured myself.

The red sun aimed and struck true with such judgmental rays. I saw a dumb macrohydra like a tiny jellyfish floating blindly out of the cave, protectionless, and watched it start to dry and slightly wither not a cilia’s width outside the embrace of shadows.

Minutes later it was dead, and drifting to the ground, and still drying. It had been half my size, at least. I might last a few moments more. Cnidarians had it hardest in the eternal summer.

I looked. Farther outside the mouth of the cave, on the ledge which southwardly wound into the distance and northwardly curved out of view, there was a shelled star crawling along its way. On the aboral top, multicolored ossicles like scales caught and parried blinding rays of sun. Where its shell wasn’t rendered unintelligibly bright, you saw the design of the ossicles made a big plus sign shaped like a target.

An eager croak came north from around the curve and a frog with fangs was bounding over here. But its prey, the star, was swiftly snapping its rays snug into its shell. The bright​-​skinned frog slapped down right beside it, and was disappointed.

Before the thing left, though, its departing jump flipped over the star in its shell, like a petty little revenge.

With the frog gone, rays popped back out and waved and struggled, but writhe as they might, they couldn’t flip right the shelled star.

A grasper tentacle — my grasper tentacle — was reaching out and gingerly lifting and flipping the shelled star right side up. It went all still and timid then, but moments later, with my tentacle drawing back, the star was falling bottom first and flexing below it many tube​-​like podia like row upon wiggling row of walking grass.

Another tentacle was reaching for some tool in my bag and another still was taking that tool by the handle and then throwing it.

In the middle of the star now, just aside one arm of the big plus sign, there was lodged the blade of a knife.

…I had missed the target, that little plus sign shell marking, and I cringed. My aim needed more practice. Always needed more practice.

The star was screaming now, and my fourth and final tentacle now snatched the knife and stabbed again and quieted the screams, putting out the misery.

The sun crept further across the blue sky, shaving slivers off the shadows.

I fell back on my stalk, and tilted my bell and with three eyes stared up. Opposite the cave mouth was the other canyon wall, the top only just visible from this angle.

And beyond that was Avelt, and the sunspire, and at its top, the high priestess whom I would kill.

But for now, this canyon wall stood as my obstacle.

I stowed the knife away.

Moments later I realized I was resting on my stalk again, immersed in my thoughts again. You aren’t doing anything. I straightened my stalk.

Right now, I was rooted close enough to the exit of the death​-​odored cave that, with the heat of eternal summer reaching for me, I cooked slightly. Or imagined I did. Regardless, I was close enough to see that the sun had gyred around the sky and was poised to peek into this cave before long.

I could recite to you whole lists of reasons to rest here and contemplate like this — there was my plan to consider, now that I’d decided I’d kill the high priestess of Avelt; there was the heat (even on an eclipse day like today, the heat slightly melted you); then there was the endeavor of climbing out of the canyon at all.

The last of those excuses rang truest of all. Getting down here to the cave mouth had been trouble, and that was getting down. I prayed for elevation.

I could have waited day​-​spans by this cave mouth. But it wasn’t as though anyone had ever outwaited the sun, not in centuries.

When you got stuck in a mental loop like this, it was never something inside you that broke you out, not really.

A cloud passed in front of the sun. Simple, yes. But that shade cast over the canyon — what could I say? It enticed. I appreciated shade. Who didn’t?

It was like a leap or inversion, taking to the air. Gripping my sunshield in a grasper tentacle, I crouched and pushed off with my stalk even as it inverted back into me.

Quickly, magic snapped through my tresses and then flowed. Even as the magic exuded from the cnidae, I felt it reflect off the ground and return as a gentle push upwards. Slack the flow, just a bit, and the push slacks.

Like that, levitation.

Equilibrium in this came naturally to others (….or else I was that much inferior), but for me I would correct and overcorrect, anxious feeler tentacles waiting for that telling rise or fall of air that meant the flow was just so slightly imbalanced.

Awful, dreadful, exhausting.

This sort of treading levitation was a true headache of a technique – but directed levitation, that was a little better. I angled my tresses, and the magic flowing out pushed me along. Slowly at first — it gave me time to lift my near​-​forgotten sunshield and, holding it between me and the light, I was spared a withering affliction when I breached into the sunlight.

For the moment, I floated above the ledge jutting out from the canyon wall. It had been big enough to land on when I’d leapt down from on high, but small enough that now I only trusted my wobbling levitation moments before it would send me slipping down an edge.

Moments presently slipping away.

I had a chance — one chance — and I was poised to wait and waste it. I flexed some internal muscles, lowered some magic blocks, and the outward flow snapping down my tresses became a proper blast. I flew out from the cave mouth, careening promisingly toward the height of the opposite canyon wall.

You could see the whole expanse from up here. The cave itself crouched like a diminutive thing, and this high, past this angle, it was only seen for how the climbing vines and clinging corals strongly avoided it.

A detail without which I may never have found it, and may never have found my purpose within it.

The colorful leaves of the vines and the fertile polyps of the corals swayed and brandished their forms and figures. The vista was only injured by how every odd plant or coral was curled inward and everted to escape the sunlight, or seemed soon poised to.

Where the flora grew not, the ground knew a diversity of rock and dirt. It glittered in the sunlight, the dirt, and at an angle like this the earth looked half colored white. With instinct, I slid a veil​-​membrane over my eye and the world was dim.

What happened next, it was a conscious irony on part of the universe — it had to be. My surveying was at its end and thought of the wall I hoped to land atop had just returned to me.

Too late. The very same instant, I swore, was when the world grew painful and breathless. I smacked against the other canyon wall with a squish, and, in the span of the thought it took to arrest the flow of magic, I had crushed myself a little, magic still pushing me forward.

I was sliding down the jagged canyon face, snags and crooked bits tearing at my sensitive bell. I bodily pushed against the wall. Attached to nothing now, I fell.

I absorbed a breath again, and recovered enough to think to force my magic out once more. It was a panicked blast in panic from my tresses, aimed at the glittering ground, and — after a terrible moment of nothing — it returned to buoy me.

And was pushing me randomly leftward. The angle, it must’ve been so subtly off.

I fixed the angle of my still​-​blasting tresses, and it went on like that, half my mind always on keeping the right angle. Down I floated like that and aground I everted my stalk and rested on it.

(All the while a grasping tentacle had stayed rigid like bone, and the sunshield remained perfectly above me always.)

I took in a vast breath and I did my best to stare long​-​suffering into the vast blue sky.

The cave mouth was perhaps halfway up the canyon wall. I was at the bottom now. My own fault (who else could manage something so stupid?), yet I cursed who I could curse. My parents, my teachers — specifics didn’t matter, I was just everting frustration.

Like earlier, I could rest there on my stalk, stare up in the sky where lonely clouds drifted, and I could contemplate.

But where the warm darkness of the cave invited thought, the blistering heat of the sun and its reflective co​-​conspirator the dirt, they eradicated thought. I couldn’t think for the urge to rip off fronds of plants and fan myself.

Motion. By the opposite wall, in the dead of the sunlight, another hydra was dry and cooking on the ground. But the motion I’d seen, that had been two ravens cloaked in the shiniest black feathers, dancing around the dread hydra just barely larger than they. The bouncing birds made sounds that could be mistaken for laughter, their grunking and rattling, and when that mirth of discovery had burned away they lowered their beaks and feasted upon the warm corpse.

If I dropped my sunshield, how soon would they make a meal of me?

Before I succumbed to that dark impulse, I absorbed a breath, everted my stalk, and forced levitation out of my tresses.

Treading upward again now, with all the headache of wresting control that implies. It grew wild — I was starting to drift about, and bob more and more — but before I hurt myself, I blasted off.

The ledge was still there, and if I could make it to that then I could breathe there, and then fly up to the height of the canyon itself.

Good enough plan, and I was already flying up. It was a small correction to now be angling at the cave mouth.

I undershot, ever so slightly, and got just high enough my eyestalks saw the ledgetop before gravity grabbed me once more.

But I had four grasper tentacles. Even with the one occupied uplifting my sunshield, three burst out from under my bell and held fast to the ledge.

Gravity pulled, and I pulled too. Two graspers was enough to get myself aground, three just made it easy.

Absorb a breath, let it drift out of you. Absorb a breath, drift out. Absorb a breath –

I made it. My insides strobilated just a bit at that. Accomplishment.

Then, of course, my mind caught to what I felt, and reared its ugly head. All that effort I expended, the thing I accomplished? Getting back, exactly, to where I started.

Gods I was dumb.

I looked up to the canyon’s height. Maybe I misjudged. Maybe the cave opening was as far down as a third its height. I undershot last time (I always undershoot, lazy medusa that I am), so I’d just have to double blast this time.

Absorb a breath, steady myself.

I failed last time, but I wouldn’t fail again. I wasn’t that useless.

I am that useless.

The only thought I could manage, staring up again into that vast blue sky, empty of even clouds now.

I said the outside was hostile to thought, didn’t I? The sun and ground conspired to outright eradicated it. Still, I only felt like thinking at this point.

Maybe I deserve to be eradicated.

I indulged the thought only for a second. I was the champion of the night, the death god’s chosen pawn. I had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt. If I endeavoured, if I saw the task to its final end, I would succeed — of that, I was assured.

I just had to get up, try again.

But a useless medusa like me — no matter how much I try , I will fail.

(Of that, I assured myself.)

I said it once. When you get stuck in a loop like this, it’s not something inside you that gets you out, not really.

I heard the high, terrible caw. I looked up, wondering if perhaps my end wouldn’t come tortured at the hand of the sun, but a quick, gory death. If, at my end, I too would be feasted upon.

A winged shadow raced across the ground and grew larger in descent.

Chapter 2

A forest creature, something with a fluffy covering and hard mouthparts and stalkless eyes and two thin, stiff stalks below it. What was the word? Avian?

But they were small things, kin of the laughing ravens. Nuisances that clawed through trashbags and pooped. Not mighty presences looming taller than me, whose mouthparts curved to a point sharper than spears. Who stood and scratched themselves on clawed foots like many knives.

They were wild creatures too and not things that wore armor. The plates gleamed metal, and the wide bit covering the breast was big enough I glimpsed a reflection it. I stared, desparately curious how I looked to this bird. Was I an enticing meal? Had I gained new menace from my sojourn with the death god?

Foremost I saw my slender bell, a membraneous exumbrella dotted with trachea. Around them, circling my exumbrella in a wave​-​like pattern, twenty four rhopalia peeked out with ocelli that blinked. Dangling beneath them, my four grasper tentacles upheld my weight and rested on fan​-​like pads. Coiled around them, my eight flat tresses bristled with magical cnidocysts, like a rough ribbon rife with venom, and the fluted ending tingled magically. Wriggling in between them, sixteen short feeler​-​tentacles blew in the breeze. Centermost between them all, my stalk came down in overlapping or segmented bulbs of membrane taut over cartilage.

My eyestalks were level with that breast, and they turned upward to stare into the face of the beaked menace, turned so that a single firey eye stared into me.

No helmet on its head, and it left you free to notice its fluffy golden down, colored like the metals on the finest altars.

I felt — recognized, measured, and known, in that fiery eye. The largest birds, the ones known only as morbid silhouettes in the distant sky, you knew to be wary of them. Few of them preferred live meals, but the ones who had not yet learned to be wary of a medusa. (And you would wonder if they should, given what often result from such encounters.)

And this bird would dwarf any vulture or eagle.

It was an amusing thought, when it first came. Will this be an end? Was it to be a gory feast of a death for me? Now, it seemed more a sober summation.

The feeling that thrilled through me — electric and subterranean, the forceful will to live — was none familiar to me. But still it struck true like lightning, with utter verity that limned it like a facet of pure reality. Undeniable.

It assured me: I would live. I would escape. I would kill the high priestess of Avelt.

It was not words that filled me. But if it were, those would be the words.

Magic welled up mightily in my glands. The exhaustion, the dearth, had gone, and in its absence were rendered the tools of escape.

I absorbed a breath –

It takes but a moment for all reality to be rent asunder.

“Do not be afraid.”

It was — it was the bird that spoke.

“Please speak to me, little medusa.”

“What –” I choked. Something from the holy studies must have returned to me, on some level other than conscious. I inquired as one inquires to a divine thing, asking “Who sent you? For what purpose?”

“How formal. Relax. You may know me as Eythe, He of knowledge, the one who agnizes many things. I’ve come to speak to you, little medusa. Relax yourself.”

“Are — are you a god?”

“For your peace of mind, I shall say no. You may think of me as a vessel. But do not worry about me. I worry about you.”

“Me? I’m useless. Below the consideration of — anyone, whoever you are.”

“But you have decided something, haven’t you? I know many things, I know that you intend something quite monumental. Involving some high priestess, perhaps?”

“I could never accomplish something like that.”

Why didn’t that feel like a lie?

The words may as well have never been said, for all that the bird cared. “So, allow me to return the inquiry. Who sent you? For what purpose?” The head leaned lower, level with my eyes. He said, “Forgive me for insinuating that you wouldn’t do this of your own volition but… you wouldn’t.”

I wouldn’t. Somehow, I couldn’t contradict the bird. What could I decide, on my own?

Who sent you? The inquiry had struck a match in my mind, and from its flame I could feel the earlier communion as if it were still happening. Perhaps it was still happening, and always would. There was something – sublime to it.

Death. The god of death. Doubt could exist, but it had to be him, who else would tend to a demesne that smelt so overwhelmingly of rot, decay?

He’d dared to tell me the name, even. His name. A terrible call that began with M.

How utterly I wished he hadn’t — I could well do without knowing. But telling me the name, that was a sign of trust. Even the hidden histories did not record the name of the god of death.

He had given me his Gift. It was trust, so much trust.

It was not a sum that this god — if god it be — would deign to match.

So be it. I was assuredly used to floating beneath notice, beneath caring by those important. I didn’t sting, it didn’t bother me.

No, it was the demand that pricked me. Who were they to know my master? My task?

“You are endlessly expressive, for a medusa.” The bird cocked its head, letting the other eye rest sidely upon me. It blinked once, and when the beak opened again, a mournful caw emerged. “Perhaps I should apologize? It was not my intention to offend you. I mean no disrespect.”

“So you don’t mean what you say?”

A pause, and a back and forth motion of the head. Confusion was written deep in the posture, like a dune​-​dweller staring uncomprehending at rows of sunshields. A cognizance of a cultural divide.

(But it was misplaced caution; it was not a fault of translation, but a trap in words.)

“Of course I mean what I say. I disgorge only truth.”

“Then you meant disrespect.”

“I don’t mean to wrestle in words, little medusa. I’m not here to play whatever status games it is you jellyfish get up to. I am concerned only with the growing, churning might of M. He’s planning something…

“And I can look into your soul, little medusa, and I can see the bleakness that awaits you. I can see your path ends only in tragedy – grand tragedy. Does it speak lowly of me to seek to avert that? No…

“Be still with me. I am a god to your kind, and I can help but if you allow me.”

“Then grant me passage into the hollow reef of the sun.”

“That is not my domain. Aveltane knows those grounds, and I cannot overrule that.”

“That is all I would like. You cannot help me.” One rhopalium angled up, an eye lifting to see the canyon wall I must climb. It was a lie, a damn lie. Curse my pride.

The bird was striding toward me, those overly thin stalks, those legs, coming down like swords, stabbing into the glittering dirt. The head leaned toward me. When the beak opened, I could smell a meal on their breath. I knew what every cnidarian smelt like. The priests assured me the gods held no malignity at all for medusae — but should I trust that it was only hydra meat I smelt?

The bird spoke, and the reek of its gullet imparted an dark undertone which was not there before. “Do not seek to use me, little medusa. I am not a resource to be exploited. Were I to assist you entering Aveltane’s demesne — what ail of yours would that truly allay?”

I had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt. I knew better than to say it aloud, though. Indirection had its use, when speaking plainly misses the truth. “It would fulfill my purpose.”

A sharp, deadly shriek left the deep throat of the golden bird. And now they spoke in such a tone of prophecy, I could believe my doubt misplaced; I could believe this truly was the vessel of something alterior.

They said, “Medusae do not have purposes. They are. They chose. They live. That is the right we carved out of the stone of the world for you. That is what we fought for.”

“And I chose to serve. I chose to fulfill this task. Would you deny me that?”

“I can only imagine what soft words M fed you to provoke such determination. I can only imagine what darkness he plans you to undertake in Avelt’s demenses.”

“I could tell you, if you’d finally agree to help.”

“No, I cannot assist M again. We’ve — He’s done enough.”

“I remain unconvinced.”

“For now. I will break you from this geass, I will drag you from this path if I must. I assure you: my patience flies long.”

My stalk flexed, and I rose from my fearful crouch, cartilage popping back in place. The words I’d spoken, which felt like echoes of M’s truth, they bolstered. As if giving voice and word to that determination I knew only intellectually, as if that lent it some visceral life.

I twisted my bell, wry, and said, “Is this conversation over, then?”

“For now. But allow me one parting gift, little medusa.”

The bird stuck its head into the bag, woven of taut fabric gleaming like silk. It arose holding in the beak a tight, leathery band. Dried, treated ghost snail skin.

It wasn’t new — as if a god’s vessel would ever buy a present for me.

No, it was an old, torn and nicked thing. It was worn down by years of use. It had glyphs carved into its side.

But I didn’t even have to read them. Perhaps it was that objects had some unseen aura that one could simply feel — or perhaps not. Whatever the source, I knew this band intimately, and at a glance an ephyrahood of memory gushed forth like blood from some enormous hurt.

It was a friendship band, one I’d long cast aside. I had last seen it the day I left the for the grand reefs of the badlands. Cast aside from a cliff overlooking a lake, as one would do in a poem. Full of drama and angst that come so easily to those lingering at the threshold of adulthood.

The initials sealed something — I knew not what — when I saw them.

F & R.

Forever.

…But it didn’t happen like that, it never does.

When the old snail​-​leather tressband passed to my tentacles, I stood transfixed, four eyes gawking at this long lost treasure. It was so close to the memory​-​image that sometimes haunted me at the depth of night.

It had spent long summers at the bottom of a lake, yet it seemed even the fishes knew there some something more to it.

I absorbed a great breath, and in the shuddering release, remembered the F to my R.

I remembered Friiya.

Reefs didn’t crop up randomly, not the medusa reefs. Like a mindless somnabulent, we seemed drawn to the sites of vast cyclopean stones or spires of unreplicable metal. Ruins of dimensions alien and austere, cities and polis that could not be the work of medusa tentacles, and yet – what other creature of the land or sky could truly construct?

The reef I strobilated within, the great bog reef, had one of the horrors of that lost world. For in the depths where even our coral refuse to grow, there lay a vast, leagues long field of black stone statues, perfect likenesses of avians larger than any seen by moral eyestalk. They could not have been carved.

You didn’t live long in the great bog reef without becoming aware of the field. The very shape of the reef seemed to imply its existence, so even without seeking it, the implications would find you.

It took me a long time to grasp language, wrap mental tentacles around the vibrations of my throat skins and the rhythmic exhalation of air. Harder without anyone caring to show you, for sure. But everyone has a story like that, most everyone. You were always on your own in the beginning.

But once I could speak, and once I could speak well enough people bothered to listen, the field of statues was the first thing I ever asked about. Ever remembered asking about. I’d already wandered it, explored it like a playground. (Curious ephyra didn’t last long. Somehow, I did.)

I asked. Even when medusae would listen, they wouldn’t answer. On a good day, I got something indirect, some deflection. No one quite liked speaking of the avian statues.

I think one hospice worker, she was the the only one who ever warned me away from the statues. Everyone else was fine letting me eat whatever great danger lurked in that field, alone.

And I did. Never did I encounter whatever shadow hung over their warnings, whose name they dare not speak, but I did meet what, for me, was perhaps the greater hazard in the end.

The shadows are strange when the sun tends close to the horizon, pausing there as if considering setting. Like a daily ritual — I knew, we knew, that he would chose the same thing every time. To turn his course, to return, and to pour his wrath down upon the world without the interruption of night.

Did it all seem so assured to him?

I know I, from time to time, drafted to the edges of the deepest caverns more than once, more than a few times — once a week, I’ll admit. And rooted there at the edge, peering down to where the shadows escape the light, I would wonder about falling.

I had never jumped — as you might guess. But if you had asked…

Perhaps the twisted, sidelong shapes — if they could be called shapes – the sun casted at twilight hour are some reflection of a torment that grips him. It must be hard, never again knowing the peace of night.

But the shadows grew whole again, with a brief turning of time, and the light grew brighter.

Some of the avian statues, they have open beaks, wide as if screaming out the horror of whatever final revelation had gripped them. I could climb in their mouths. It was cozy and dark in there. I don’t fit, these days.

I first saw them sitting in a bird mouth like that. They floated very steadily. When they paused to look at this stricken face or that contorted limb, this might’ve been a painting and them a subject. Suspended midair by brushstrokes like nails.

Then she moved, fast like a like a darting plankton when a shadow falls over them. She pasted by the mouth I rest in, didn’t look up to see my bulging rhopalium, eyes staring.

I hadn’t made a sound. I hadn’t breathed. I watched with four eyes everted, and as she disappeared in the distance, I stared a long time.

I might have slept inside one of those statues, one or twice.

A day passed, wherever it was I slept. I was in the field again. There were very big tentacle snails and worm rats lurking here, and I was big enough to swallow them.

And when my bell was round with the liquifying flesh of prey, I danced and floated and laughed across the field as I always did.

I wasn’t in the bird’s mouth when she came that day.

This time, I was the one unawares, unknowingly watched. But she had a curiosity or courage I lacked.

I had never moved as fast as I did when I felt that tentacle poke my bell.

I was blasting up into the sky. My bell was squeezing tight. All my eyes were out, spinning around to find the source. My fright had frighted her, and it was a terrifying moment of seeing only a seemingly empty field — knowing somewhere there was an Other, with an interest in you — before she timidly drifted, eyestalks and tentacles first, from out behind a stone avian standing tall, wings outspread like a hero.

We stared at each other.

She didn’t know how to speak, back then. She was younger than I, luckier. But that same bright curiosity that lead her to the field of horrors with me, that had her seek me out, meant that she learned quickly.

It was happiness, having someone else to play with as a ephyra. Few are so lucky.

One day, we had been exploring the wilderness that ringed the reef. The locals, when they listened and when they answered (by then we were known as those who spent days in the field), they would warn us of the northern wilds too. Told us of hairy things and feathery things. Things that slithered. Sweet​-​smelling plants that drove you happily mad. Mushrooms that spoke. Coral that frowned.

We didn’t listen. Well, when they told us of the strangeness and the wonders (all the world was wonders, back then), we heard them loud and clear. But danger was a empty, cowardly word. Maybe they lied, wanting to hoard the secrets to themselves. We would do that sometimes, when the other ephyra asked us where we found our food.

(The scarcity of important things, that’s something you learn early.)

So we floated over into those northern reaches, where the bog got really muddy and thick. The field was about drained dry of wonder, by then, and we thrown ourselves into the new source of novelty.

It took days before we really learnt the meaning of danger. We petted the slithery things. We ran laughing from the furry, roaring things. We gazed at the frowning coral as one would at a painting. We listened long to the mushrooms.

We ate the sweet​-​smelling plants. I one leaf, she two.

In the end, it is always the arrow one doesn’t see which strikes true.

The great bog was where tentacles snails got big. They were pests who, inside the reef, knew only poisoned food and traps. You got but a taste of them in the near​-​wilderness of the field of horrors. But in the northern wilds, none could challenge.

We had been tired that day. Attempted to chase some furry thing with horns, but they were quick. It was fun, still, anyways. We caught some wormrats. Were cooking them. Maybe that’s what attracted it.

Ghost snails — snails in general — have funny mouths. A long slit opening to rows and rows of teeth. Maybe it’s instinct, or priorities, that had me see that first. It’s not as dramatic as a dawning realization, or slow saccade around the head, though.

Zooming out, though, it had a shell big enough one could live it it. The four tentacles ringing its face writhing like the slithery things. Its eyes were sharp. Very well defined pupils, very good motion tracking. A predator’s gaze.

I think it would have settled for our still​-​cooking lunch, or just us.

And we didn’t particularly want to give it either.

So we fought.

I think it’s fit for a story on it’s own, how the encounter went down. The trickery and skills we employed. That dazzling bit of magic — she was always, always my better at magic — which punctuated the fight.

But this isn’t a tale of heroism, or bravery (or winning — of that, I was assured). It would taint the mood, I think, to tell of something truly epic.

Because, even now, I don’t think of myself as a hero.

So suffice it to say, under fire from the brilliance of the girl I grew up with, that massive, monstrous tentacle snail met its end. Suffice it to say, with bickering and wrestling and more effort than our lives, we managed to get that corpse somewhere near the great bog reef.

We talked to a butcher about it. He had this bright look on his face, his bell all puffed and swelled. He wanted to cut a deal. His tanner from friend could make us something nice from the leather skin of it. We’d get some money, even. But the butter wanted the meat, the juices, and the brain.

We were dumb kids back then, and I think we took a lot of bad deals out of simple ignorance and perspective​-​lack. But even now I think this was a pretty alright trade.

It’s easy to see where this is going, I imagine. This is where that band came from. It was custom made, fits right in the medial bands of my grasping tentacles, snug like a plug.

I had to make up a name at at point, and she too, and we became Ruwene and Friiya.

Ironic, I think, that we got our friendship bands out of that monster slaying. We stayed together for a few months after that, sure. But we had different ideas about what we should do with all the money.

She was always, always better than me at magic. She wanted to become a acolyte of something, wield the power of the gods. Only a central acolyte could access the hidden tomes about the secrets of magic and the world.

I didn’t really care about books, myself. Even after I learned to read, it seemed stupid. You can write whatever you want. It’s just ink blots on a page. If you spilled a inkwell over a sheet, would those random splotches become interesting?

You didn’t learn about the world by reading about it. You learned by doing, experiencing. Seeing for yourself.

I don’t know what happened to her. She probably went far along the path to becoming a friar or something. We left the great bog reef together. Her to find a university or temple. Me to

I don’t know. Never had a plan.

At this point, it all seemed pointless.

Had seemed pointless.

Because after all,

I decided I would kill the high priest of Avelt.

Hope springs eternal. Why did I taste a bit of dread mixed in?

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.

Chapter 4

First order of business was distracting the red guard. I looked at him, at the swell which always seemed to be in his bell, and I decided I didn’t want him to harmed, not truly.

We marched onward toward the lesser canyon reef. Canyon country was a land scratched east to west with canyons. You could look at the horizons and see clear to where the mesas rose up in the north, or the forests grew thick in the south. The ocean was to the west, but I forgot what was between us and that.

Corals rose up gnarled and reaching. There appeared in bursts across the land, breaking the flatness. Hardy plants clung to life in even more sparse arrangements. There was moss where the water might pool, but altogether any break from the palet of grays and browns was reserved for medusae themselves.

Three obstacles. The green jelly floated behind me, sunshield held up in one tentacle and a spear gripped in the other. Several eyestalks were reserved for staring right at me, and it seemed many sensors were awrithe, sifting the air for any hint to be suspicious of.

The jelly of shifting colors floated beyond me, as if keeping far distance from the dirty ratslayer. She had gone full pink right now, and I wasn’t sure at all what these colors meant. She had a small knife, held as if concealing right near her sunshield.

And the red guard floated just in front of me, bell inflating, and a few waving eyestalks looking at me. He was significantly more useful than any of the other obstacles. The fool thought we were friends. He would stand by me, at least once.

And that sort foolishness — I didn’t want to punish it too harshly. I decided I would see him steered blissfully away from harm.

Even then, not taking a wholly violent stance towards the lot of them makes me job so much more interminable.

(As if I stood a chance if I would want to take them all out. My line of thought is funny sometimes.)

We floated onwards to the lesser canyon reef, toward Avelt. The sun above us was making a return journey, and from the other side, clouds were travelling in at the call of rain. They were dark.

I looked at the red guard, the shifting guard, the green guards. I felt the coldness stinging my tentacles. It would endlessly even the playing field — of that I was assured. But was it ready? M said I would know when it was. Did I know? Did they factor in my ubiquitous uncertainty?

(No, Of course they did. They were a god.)

I had to assess the danger of the three guards. Colored jellies had Gifts carried on down their lines from when the gods and first anointed them. They all had some strange kind of magic I didn’t. Red was a ubiquitous spawning — fire. He could spray fire from his tresses, just a few feet, just barely hot. He’d shown me once, so I’d know even if F hadn’t told me all about them.

Green and they of shift rutiliance. I couldn’t pin them to any gift F had explained to me, and guessing was useless. Green couldn’t be utterly rare — there’d been one more guard like it. The the shifting jelly could commune with the gods. Was that part of their gift? It seemed to be singularly their capacity.

“You’ve gone all silent, R.”

I said nothing.

“You know, a little friendly chatter and you’d been less menacing. You want that.”

“Hi.”

“There you go. That’s a start.”

“How are you?”

“Oh, I’m doin fine. Been tiring myself out working long shifts this week. Was just hoping to relax after this one — didn’t expect nothing to actually happen. But you know what they say of expects.”

“Okay.”

The red guard drifted closer to me, his melody dropping to subtle vibrations of his bell. He said, “You know, O Yera over there is really spooked by you. You can’t tell by her act — or maybe you can, deathly clever bast you are — but you are all bad news in her book.”

“Okay.”

“These ’okay’s ain’t much better than silence you know.”

I waved my eyestalks silently. I glanced back to the green jelly behind us. The pair had been all silent as well. Made me wonder. Quite hard to get a real sense of jellies without them speaking.

I was used to pulling together images from as little as I could get – but just the word choice, just the way they conducted themselves in chatter — It all counted for so much, building a good image.

I needed to know if they would go down easily, not not.

“Why do you expect O ratslayer to even be capable of pleasantry?” It was the shifter who spoke.

“’Cause I know them personally. They got a certain dignity in how they carries themself.”

“A certain dignity,” came the response. “Of a jelly who’s covered in mud like they slept in a pit.”

“Better than cowering as many meters away as you can manage?”

I saw the shifter’s bell scrunch up.

Thered guard was speaking up almost as soon as I finished, replying properly, “Extenuating circumstances,” he said. “You’d be in a mess too, I imagine, after a run​-​in with the god of death.”

The shift looked suddenly at me. Bell squeezed tight and angular. Their tone was araw. “What is the name of the death god?”

I stopped in my floating. Fell down to my stalk. The voice — it hadn’t been a jelly voice, and theirs was not a jelly name. If it could even be reproduced by my membrane — I didn’t have to heart to do so.

I said, “A terrible name that starts with M.”

She paused too, at that. “Forget everything he’s told you.” He voice had taken on a certain tightness, a surety of purpose. “You don’t have to follow this path. There’s no prize at the end waiting for you. It only ends in annihilation. You lose.”

I picked up on something — higher, in her voice. I latched on, and said, “Thought you would share prophecies with the ugly ratslayer.”

“No prophecy. Merely divine commentary.”

I twisted my bell at that, made a low wordless, vibrating sound.

“Truth is, Aveltane knew you would not swayed. Knew you were hopeless.”

“Determined, is the word I prefer. I decided what I would do.”

To the red guard, she then spoke. “Why then, are we humoring this? Why escort him, hearing everything he’s said?”

“I don’t see the issue?”

“Kill him. Right now, right where he floats.”

I forced magic into my tresses, and bounced high, high above them.

Then I found myself right back at the ground, as if I’d never rose, as if all my momentum was gobbled up in a second.

I threw myself upward once more, to escape –

And found myself right back on the ground, as if I’d never rose at all.

The guards were still talking. They weren’t trying to kill me. It’d only been a suggestion. One that the red guard had vehemently rejected.

“No. Why would we ever do that? What has he done?”

“He has all but admitted to being a servant of the death god. Keeping him here is a mistake.”

“It’s common sense.”

“It’s allowing whatever he’s decided to take place.”

“If this is the work of some god — who’s to say us trying to kill him is part of whatever plan there is?”

“Stupid, stupid objection.”

“I’m not going to kill a jelly for no reason.”

“Even if it could save many more? Even if it was the right, holy thing to do?”

“Even then.”

It had to the been the green jelly’s Gift, that kept me from escaping. Teleportation? They had a tress pointed right at me.

This is good and bad. I had another piece in my puzzle. Two more pieces – the green jelly could prevent me from escaping, easily, and the shifter jelly, indeed, has some sort of gift that lets her easily talk to the gods.

This was so, so, much harder than it could have been. I miss dealing with colorless jellies.

“I don’t like the way his eyes are searching right now. What are you planning?”

I was thrown off, just a bit, from how she went from talking about me to talking to me , but I responded, “I wanted to run. You are talking about killing me.”

“We won’t kill you.” That was the red guard. They thrown a tentacle affectionately around me. I flinched away, so hard and quick that the green jelly teleported me again.

“Can we get moving again?” My bell was expanded and deflating, and breaths were absorbed. What a dreadful exchange that was.

“Yes, let’s.”

“I haven’t had lunch.”

I said it as we entered town. The lesser coral reef was a forest of coral, rising up, spreading out, growing intertwined and interleaving. Jellyfish floated about, and octopus and snails danced around as well, some on leashes, some carried, some wandering about on their own, with the snapping energy of ferals. They all pressed themselves on through the maze of coral, finding their own way through the abundance of paths and spaces that defined a reef.

Some paths lead to dark holes dug in the ground or inside buttes. Many jellies tended the inside of these structures, like fruit poised on the limbs of a tree.

“Do you expect us to escort you to dinner? Did you not want to get cleansed at the sun spire immediately?”

I absorbed a breath, and measured by my words. “I think I might be waiting there a while. After all I — I intend to see the high priestess.”

They did pause at that, but it seemed like they were growing used to these revelations — the notion wouldn’t surprised them for an instance.

Then it was the shifter who spoke up. “No.”

“I stated a fact.”

“Here’s another: You will not, regardless of your intentions.

“You underestimate me.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I think,” the red guard interrupted, “Letting you two talk to each other is entirely a mistake.”

He looked to me. “R, we can drop by an eatery on the way to the spire.”

“Of course you side with him.” Before he could respond, she continued, “Are you in league with the death god too, I wonder. Might as well be.”

He audibly expelled breath, but the shifter continued speaking.

“But it’s stupid to do his bidding and not get rewarded, I imagine.”

“Here’s a last fact,” I said, “you should shut up.”

“Spare yourself, R. I’m used it. I’m a medusa. I can take it.”

I waved my eyestalks, and started impetuously toward my favorite — the cheapest — dinner.

I was teleported back by the green jelly.

I glared at him, my bell all squeezed and angular.

I thought I saw a hint of swelling to them, as we started, all together this time.

I really should have been thinking about my immediate next step in my plan. But my thoughts keep getting repeatedly stuck on the sharp corals of distractions.

It felt safe, knowing that I had a right proper ally in the red guard. It took dangerous edge off this situation, made me soft and squishy.

But when it came down to it, he was an obstacle like any other. I needed to see the high priestess alone, and I knew he would stand in way of that, when the time came.

The green jelly. My eyestalks kept point back toward them, following their every motion. At least two eyestalks were always on each of their eight tresses. They were the bars of my prison, truly.

I imagined taking my knife, and hacking them off one by one.

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.

Interlude: Oeara

He watched the great​-​clawed shrimp as it dug through the glittering dirt, eating grasses from the roots up. A dark, slender form was stalking up from behind, and the shrimp continued to eat, slow, almost unaware of the fanged danger lurking behind.

Then the tiny sand kitten leapt asudden, claws out to utterly gore the shrimp.

It simply dodged.

The shrimp moved quicker then you might expect, leaping right into the face of the kitten, raking it deep with claws, drawing lines of blood. Yowling, the cat died.

The giant shrimp leapt off its failed predator, and returned to grazing upon the grass.

He swooped down, then. A raven cloaked in black feathers, it stood above the gore and eyed with four pupils the medusae, one by one by one, daring them to contest its meal. None did. With a low crooned note, the raven began to feast on the corpse.

“That’s the third raven I’ve seen today. Pests. Where in the sun are they coming from?”

Oeara turned lazy eyestalks to observe the speaker. A wide, striated jelly, colored a translucent purplish hue. She treaded lightly in the air.

She only considered his words once before he spoke. You always consider your words at least once. She said, “It lends at least a little credence to the suspect’s claims. Ravens are the servants of death. It is known.”

“You think he’s telling the truth?”

“I think we’ll find out.”

She — Hua — spun in the air once. Letting a breath audibly escape her, she said, “You have to be expecting something when we find this secret shrine or temple or whatever.”

She considered the boredom of answering straight. Squeezing herself slightly, she answered, “Do I have to expect something?”

“You can’t not. Why don’t you want to answer?”

Another squeeze. “What haven’t I answered?”

“I’m not going to spell it out.”

Oeara felt her bell swelling a bit at that. “I win.”

“So you do.” The sharp, sullen note in that only swelled her bell further.

Oeara turned a few eyestalks up at the indication of the sun behind her sunshield. Others looked out at the expanse of the the wild canyons.

“Let’s go. I want time enough to rest when this nonsense is over.”

Oeara was who had stopped them, and at her unrooting and floating off, the other two medusa began to follow.

The head guard ran just a trickle of her Gift through a tress, and a lance of bright blue stabbed through the shrimp and killed it instantly. The bird fluttered away a space, staring, impressed.

Oeara swore it called her name as they floated away.

“I can’t believe none of you thought to ask for directions.”

“We should be able to find the shrine by following the scent of rot.”

“This is such an obvious delaying tactic. He wanted to get us off his trail. I can’t believe you fell for it.”

Four more eyestalks swiveled to regard Hua. Oeara’s response: “And he could only distract us by revealing knowledge he did not want us to have. You had to have caught that too. Why would he want us to know of the death shrine?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Trust my judgment. And trust our partners to keep Ruwen under restraint.”

She sung something unintelligible.

Oeara could guess the sentiment which didn’t bare mention. Who ever rooted out the death shrine would be rewarded. Would be remembered. Get their own mural in the sun spire. Nothing else, for the one who finally secured the rule of Aveltane under the sun.

Even internally, where only she herself would hear, Oeara could not kid herself and say that it would only prudence which launched her after the shrine so quickly.

Nevertheless, they followed after the scent of rot. The raven had been a premonition of sorts — the farther they went into the wild canyons, the more black forms they spied high in the sky, or milling in the grass, or staring inscrutably, almost medusa​-​ishly off canyontops.

Oeara imagined even Hua was coming to believe there was something here after all.

Aside from all the ravines centuries​-​carved into the countryside, the wild canyons were largely a flat affair. One saw far to the horizon, with hardly a hill or butte to block the view.

At first, it was just another black form to them. As it came closer, the size became apparent, and the shape, and it was decided that round form floating closer could not be any species of raven.

Hua activated her gift, and she was simply a distortion in the air. Oeara and Waia — the unspeaking green medusa — had magic barely restrained at the mouths of their tresses. Both of them had slings in one tentacle and a spear in the other.

Oeara called out wordless and melodic, pitched loud and low in a way that would carry.

The black form called a friendly reply in response, before angling themselves for speed. Diagonally they shot across the country, crossing vast canyons in breaths.

This close, they could see the medusa wielded no sunshield, only a cloak drawn tight across their bell. Sown into that cloak was the emblem of the vast desert reef, and a name: Maahi.

They were a tall, slender medusa, with a loop bulging about their bell, and black tresses and tentacles that came below the cloak.

“State your purpose.”

A swelling beneath the cloak. “Does any medusa have a purpose?”

Oeara lifted a tress, took aim, and fired. A lance of blue bulleted close enough to rip the first layer of their cloak.

“Slow down. You do not want an enemy in me.”

“Then cease antagonizing, and answer the question. What are you doing in the wild canyons? You tend close to the lesser canyon reef and we are the guard.”

“I travel. A medusa comfortable in no place, seeking forevermore a land which she may not find — is that so foreign a concept? What dread has you so swiftly at my throat?”

“You have no need to know.”

“Oh, so it’s entirely fine to play with my questions, is it? How about I decide I do intend to know, and to have you tell me.” They adjusted the loop around their bell.

“We seek a certain shrine rumored to lie in these canyons.”

Maahi chuckled. “You mean the death shrine?”

A pause, then Oeara lifted a tress aimed at Maahi, wordless.

She didn’t fire. “It seems that we have a mutual desire for answers, then. You start.”

There was a raven, up on a coral tree, watching with one eye. Beak bloody, it was familiar.

“Well?”

Oeara considered. Then, “Waia, did Llaree’s vision include a traveler? Anything close?”

“The master of the serpent,” he replied. She never got used to his enunciated, sine wave melodies. “They remember that phrase. Who blazes like the earth and seeks the key. Something like that.”

Oeara lifted another tress, then she poised to shield her heart. In case the traveller had some missile, or projectile gift. In case Oeara had reflexes quick enough to make a difference. She considered it.

“We simply intend to investigate the shrine. We have accounts that suggest that the death god may be planning something against our temple of the sun. We are precautious.” Oeara spun around. “Now you go.”

“I am on a pilgrimage. I visited the death shrine, and will visit your sun spire next.”

Half of the deep blue jelly’s eyestalks pointed toward the green jelly, the other half toward the empty space on the other side of the cloaked medusa.

The words were sharp, quick. More a first move in a battle, than the request they seemed. They were: “Come with us.”

“I will not.” They adjusted the loop around them once more.

Oeara had rope in her bag. A few eyestalks glanced to Waia again. Above, the raven still watched.

“So be it.”

Three things happened at once, but are properly understood in sequence.

The traveler recoiled back, out of line with the coordinator’s tresses, anticipating the missile she’d fire.

Magic flooded through Waia’s tresses, and the traveler reappearance on the other side of Oeara.

Oeara, instead of firing immediately, adjusted her aim, knowing exactly where Waia would teleport the cloaked medusa.

It didn’t hit anything vital. Missed the heart, missed the primary blood tubes, but of course: her aim was true, considered.

It did, however, spear one of the traveller’s magic glands. A precaution.

(Always, it’s the small things that knock you off balance.)

The sudden trauma choked off the flow of magic down their tresses, and the travelers was falling to the ground.

And then the bulging loop around their bell moved.

It went down, under the cloak, and came out jostling the eyestalks and tentacles the dangling below.

A harvai eel. It had deep, brightly saturated eyes, purple like drops of concentrated poison. It’s massive jaws yaned open, emitting a low, hitching noise that provoked something primal. And the smell of processed death emitted from that maw.

It moved like a sinuous dart, and it was instinct the rocked Oeara out of the way for one second. Just one second, because then her magic choked up, and she couldn’t think quick enough to get herself out of this, let alone far enough ahead to deal with the murderous, unholy worm. Then the eel wasn’t there anymore. She saw it surprised and – for now — motionless, far away, a canyon between the jellies and the floating land eel.

Unfortunately, it was a distraction.

There was an black aura forming around the Maahi — their gift — and as they moved (faster than even the eel) it was as if they left afterimages.

A knife was held tight in their grasping tentacles, and sinking into Waia before stopping, barely a tress’s width before reaching the heart.

A hostage.

“I will reiterate. You do no want an enemy of me.”

“Now,” was all Oeara said.

Hua regained visibility with a spear in her tentacle and rushing toward the traveller.

Then she hesitated, eyestalks glancing to Oeara for indication.

Blackness crackled as it flew down the traveler’s tresses, and engulfed Hua, and then a singular sound filled the canyon for a moment.

Waia was fresh to the force. It was this day that he learned the cacophonous, shattering timbre of a medusa in agony.

A breath passed, and the red orbs at the end of the hilts of the traveller’s eyes peered into Waia, then Oaera.

Then blackness traveled once more down the magic tentacles, and you saw suffering limned in the distorted forms of the black bolts.

They struck true to Waia and Oeara, and then they knew no more.

They heard the high, calmly victorious voice of traveller — and growing smaller as it went.

“Send my regards to M.”

There was no traveller when they awoke. They skin of their bells seemed to crack as they lurched into motion, first Oeara, then Hua and then Waia.

Silent, they observed, looked for strength in each other.

The raven rattled deep in its throat, then leapt away.

Oeara took one more moment, to absorb another breath, to consider her words.

“There’s something at work here. Something dangerous.”

Waia, surprising everyone, was the one to respond. “Quite. I — I recognize the symbols woven into that traveler’s cloak. Chaos. Rebellion. Do you know it?”

“No. You’re the one who spend the twilights rooted to a scroll.”

“A desert sect. No gods. They reject any religious calling, and vault medusakind above all the ancients. They are exiles in every reef.”

Hua. “The traveller was a chaoswright?”

“Yes.”

“Or they want us to think they’re one. We can’t take appearances as reality right now. We’ve got to squeeze into highest suspicion.”

“So…” Hua was rhythmless, legato in her melody. “What do we do now?”

“Whatever Maahi intends for the Avelt, we have to meet it before it strobilates. One of us has to fly back to Avelt unseen, and warn the guard.”

Waia was a listener. “You’ve already decided.”

“I have. I think it should be you, Waia. You stand the greatest chance if you meet the traveler again.”

“And I’m the newbie.”

Every eyestalk he could angle towards her now pointed at Oeara. His bell was rapidly deflating. She knew the despair that coiled around him.

If she sent him back — if he let her sent him back, he wouldn’t make it into the mural. He wouldn’t be a hero. He wouldn’t be remembered.

“It has to be one of us.”

“Hua. Send Hua. Her Gift — the traveler would never see her.”

“I can’t activate my Gift and fly at the same time.”

“It’s an escape, if you need one.”

“I –” Hua stopped. “Why not Oeara? She’s the most experienced among us. She’d stand the best chance for sure. She can kill with her gift!”

“You forget,” the deep blue medusa started, “Not every danger is behind us. We don’t know what waits for us at the death shrine. We don’t know our odds. There is no worst case, it’s all unknowns.”

And if I’m facing the unknown — I want Hua there beside me.

She couldn’t say anything to that effect, even hintingly. But — it was her real reason, actually. But she could live with that.

“Run through the canyons.” Oeara was still trying to encourage Waia. “They can’t see you that way. You’ll live, for sure. But with me, in the death shrine?”

Oeara paused. She scanned with idle eyestalks, found the raven (there was always one watching). She didn’t know why, but she lingered looking at it. Just long enough she noticed it in herself, but no one else did.

“I’m going to be honest, I’m not expecting to come out of it. I’m not counting on living.”

“Finally,” Hua was muttering.

Waia spun around, and made a wordless assenting note. “I pray you survive. Both of you.”

“Yeah,” said Hua.

“If you don’t come back…”

Oeara broke all eye contact.

“If you don’t come back, I’m going in there with you. I’ll find you – avenge you if you can.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I’ll be stupid, then.”

Waia floated up abruptly, and starting towards the distant reef without any a floundering goodbye.

They didn’t leave with that same energy. Oeara lingered, staring at the reef on the horizon. Hua lingered there beside her.

“You’re looking hard at the town.”

“It’s crawled over my membranes, this dark feeling. Like I have to worry that before the sun gets to the other horizon, if the reef will even be there.”

“Like the end of everything.”

“You feel it too?”

She hummed as response.

A few ravens came by and landed there and paused in meditation with the jellies.

“If it were all ending…” There was a certain timbre to how Hua said it.

She came so close their sunshields clinked.

Oeara came close in response. Their bells squished against each other, and Oeara felt the cool wetness of Hua’s membrane.

“If it were all ending, I’d want to hold on to you.”

And she did. Just in case.

When they reached the mouth of death’s cave, they knew.

It was as if all the creatures of the land had come into some uneasy alliance. Coyotes were scuttling up to the cave, snails or shrimp or kittens in their mouth, and depositing it before the dark cave entrance like some foul tribute.

There were slithering worms and long rats who squirmed inside the corpses, blurring the lines between inside and out as they luxuriated in the blood and intestines of the sacrifices.

A kind of butterfly Oeara had never seen fluttered in a great swarm all around. Their wings were white, and in place of any beautiful flower, these bugs drunk with their long tongues the blood of their greaters.

Over all these sat the ravens, watching like judges or masters or students. They rapidly — but independently — turned to gaze at the approaching pair of medusa. They cawed and rattled and grunked all as one, and raised an enormous racket.

Whatever waited inside the cave know surely of their coming, now.

It was a long drop from the top of the canyon down to the outcropping at the other side where the cave dug into the wall. Oeara paused here, and Hua did likewise.

“You can back out, if you like.”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t have to tie your fate to mine. I can do this alone.”

“No you can’t.”

Hua didn’t wait. She leapt first, her tread losing its balance as the ground went from just under her to so far down below, at the canyon bed.

Oeara had to go after her. If there was danger, she had to be the one to shield her from it.

It spoke to — something, that Oeara controlled her levitation tread enough to reach the ledge before Hua.

She waited with a twisted bell, and Hua spun before landing. Smug.

The coyotes, entirely out of form, scurried away. The blood butterflies drew back, and fluttered at a distance so precise the swarm of them seemed to form a sphere around the pair.

The ravens, as always, watched.

Oeara threw out a tentacle, stopping Hua from recklessly throwing herself into harm’s way again. The deep blue jelly considered the cave mouth.

Was it natural, or carved? The mouth was taller than any medusae entrance need to be. The floor and what she could see of the walls seemed to be flat in a way that unnerved her. There was some moss and crawling vines giving texture here and there, which kept it from all being full uncanny.

Did it matter which one it was?

Oeara wanted to keep looking hard, try to puzzle it out. If only because keeping her brain so occupied meant that she was spared that much from thinking about the smell. Death, death, death. Rot, decay, atrophy. Ruwene’s tip had entirely borne out. This was, with no considerable doubt, the death’s demesne.

“So are you just going to keep gawking, or…”

“This is how careful you need to be, Hua. Things are going to get so much more dangerous. Keep every eye out, take every precaution.”

She twisted left, then let her bell recover shape.

“Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Oeara didn’t say anything, and the purplish jelly took this as indication to start inward.

She got a few treads before a blue tentacle flew out to stop her.

“Evidently not. Look.”

A blue tress took aim, and a magic lance speared into the cave.

It was a wild star, crouching near the shadows of the entrance. Its skin lined with dark green spines, oddly pierced or dented in one spot, and dripped with poison, one drop of which was — would have been — even to put Hua beyond the reach of any doctor.

They entered the cave.

Scones lined the walls, and there were, in some at least, oiled bits of wood that could be lit.

Oeara wished they were lit. The darkness put her at ease. This is a safe place, her instincts seemed to lull. I could root myself here, rest hours.

She did not. But the temptation road up on her more than once to a call for break, root down. Just for a moment.

Hua probably sense this. She looped a grasping tentacle around hers. They ventured into the cave like this.

The horror show seemed to most subside as they went in. There was vague caw that hinted at ravens hiding in the shadows — against all standards of behavior for the species. Bugs scuttled, and corpses piled up like progress markers.

But it only shocked you once.

Then their path widened sharply, opened to a big room.

There was a giant spike spear up in the center, a dead medusa mounted there. They were long dead enough their membrane was cracking and falling apart.

The torches were lit in here. And they saw that this is where the cawing and rattling had been coming from. Every surface along the wall from the floor to the ceiling was covered in ravens glaring out with red eyes.

And in the center, on the other side of the impaling spike, was a dark form. The torches seemed to stop shortly before the center, and the even the ones that were lit seemed wary to shed a single ray for the thing that lingered there.

It lengthed at the their appearance. A motion which might be analogized to a jelly extended their stalk while rooted, save for how uncannily jerky and segmented the motion was, betraying primitive, lower anatomy like joints and bones.

The form wided then, just as suddenly. Like wings being spread — the forms which it extended even seemed to have feathers, and be in the shape of wings.

And had tentacles squirming at the fringes.

The wingspan was wide enough the light could not restraint itself from falling, if halfheartedly, on the thing. One saw oblong blinking orbs embedded in the skin like boils. Their pupils were dilating.

Lastly, the form lengthed once more, and it must’ve been the head. It had a beak — one could deduces from certain unfortunate angles it took – but it was far to round and bloated to be a bird head.

Far, far too late did either of them realize what — and, consequently, who — this was. Too late to avert their eyes.

It was proscribed to look upon a god.

Perhaps that was not a point of morality, but simply practical advice.

“Welcome, welcome,” came the voice, angular and tectonic. “Always a pleasure to meet another instance of your kind. Root yourself if you like. I’ll try not to hold you long.”

Were this simply a medusa, Oeara would have demanded to know what they were planning, what they wanted. Cowed them, intimidated them.

But she considered her words first, always, and she knew this would have been mistaken.

Hua said, “What under the sun is any of this? What are you doing here?”

“Bold. I like that. Your kind needs more of that. Less boring apathy or subservience, more vim and vigor.” They made some motion, jerky and brief. “I digress. You want to know what’s going on. Who doesn’t? But worry not. A good villain loves to explain himself.”

A cracking, shattering sound, like the mountains clearing their throat. Death began, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. God — capital G, the big guy — molds the world to his liking. He crafts creatures in his image, and lets them inherit the world. He crafts servents for him and these creatures, powerful beings. One of them questions him. Beings to wonder about tyranny and freedom, hierarchy and… rebellion. Dreams of, perhaps, taking some throne for himself.

“God doesn’t take kindly to it. He refuses to negotiate, refuses to listen. He refuses all compromise.He forces it to violence. It becomes a war. That questioning angel — loses. Is damned to hell. Where he bides his time. Where he plots freedom for the creatures, for the angels, for God himself. Chaos, rebellion, anarchy. Growth, evolution, progress.”

Oeara considers this.

But Hua says what they’re both thinking. “That’s not how the myth goes. You’re forgetting the scheming. You’re forgetting the murder, the genocide, the lying and plotting and manipulating. You’re forgetting that death is the bad guy. That he was cast out for a reason more than just questioning the sun.” Hua spins. “You call yourself the villain. How could you forget that?”

“And you don’t think the sun god has his own secrets? Things he left out of the myth? At my worst I’ve killed thousands of medusae. I know birds whose fuckups killed millions.”

“What did the sun do that was so bad?” Death seemed to like talking. Questions were safe. They got answers for Oeara, and — perhaps, (one never knew with a god) — led him to think that she was coming to his side.

“He put us in stasis. All of the angels except for his chosen few. Our future was stolen from us. Our potential, our lives, our hopes. Because of the stasis, the world forgot about us.”

Oeara considers this.

“And I’m going to undo that. Revive the angels. Make you medusa fight for your future instead of having it handed to you. The sun god lays complacent atop his spire. And you medusa lay complacent in a world that belongs to only you.”

“I’m going to change everything.”

“You’re going to end everything. Destroy it, unravel it.”

“I will. You’ll thank me.”

Oeara considers this.

“What happens to us now?”

“I want you to return the rest of your kind. Tell them my words. Tell them I’m going to change everything, whether they try to stop me or not.”

“Ruwene?”

“He will knock the first piece over, set it all into motion.”

“He’s going to the sun spire.”

“He’s going to wake up the sun. Make him mad.”

“Unless we stop him.”

“I evened the playing field. But if he’s going to succeed, he’ll have to fight for it. I welcome you to try.”

Oeara considers this.

“I’ve said what I will say. I’ve done what I will do. I am inevitable. Evolution is inevitable.”

The wings, the head, the figure in total seemed to curl in on itself, then the shadows grew deeper, and then the death god was gone and nothing was in his place.

The ravens quick dispersed and left the pair of medusae alone with the echo of his words.

Hua reach out with a grasping tentacle and Oeara took and pulled her close and they felt their bells squish. They grasped each other with more interknotting tentacles, stared eyestalks deep into each other, and exchanged breaths.

“Is this the end of everything?”

Whether it was or not, the two medusa, rooted the the ground, held each other in the dark, and peace existed at in their hearts.

Somewhere distant, a raven cawed.

Chapter 6

There had been a sort of general store in the greater bog reef, when I lived there. It was a run down business in the expendable part of town, the district that seemed to be nibbled at by sinkholes eclipse after eclipse.

You knew it wasn’t doing well — it let ephyra bounce around inside. I hadn’t thought much of it, back then. Instead I simply luxuriated in having another building to play around in. I didn’t see the guards who watched my every move; i wasn’t tall enough yet.

Before long I noticed all the shiny trinkets and curios that tended the shelves of the store. I knew I wanted. Hadn’t pent down the specifics yet, but of all treasures of the store, one of them would be mind. That much I assured Friy.

There was a molding of gold there. Shape of a swamp cat’s ridged skull, tarnished by time. (It wasn’t gold, I realize). I would come by each day the shop was open, root my little body down in front of it, and just stare it.

I must have picked up on a vibe or something — seen how none the other medusa were grabbing all they wanted, perhaps, and mimed them — because I stared at it without picking it up.

A span of days went by like this, and my obsession must’ve have kicked up in intensity somewhy, because I told Friy, as we bounced toward the shop that day, that I would have the skull.

She was keener than I, because she completely halted at that, asked me if I was sure. It took me a long time to learn how not to be sure, so of course I replied the affirmative.

She sunk down out of the air at that, and spun round twice. Then she left.

I had to go to the store on my own. Built my courage up for a few moments before the gold skull, then swipe it.

All of this is coming back to me, because what happened next then, is exactly what’s happening now.

Jellies see all around them, so about everyone in the shop knew immediately what I’d done. The guards Coiled first, like cats ready to pounce. And pounce they did.

It was luck I came late in the evening, with all the people that entailed, it really was, because I when I was escaping I was missing a few eyes, at least one tentacle, and I had been lucky.

I was counting on that same luck now, hoping it could use the confusion of the crowd to make my escape.

I absorbed in a few breaths, and let all the distant corners of my mind catch up to what all had happened.

I lured the green jelly guard over into the shadows by the raven, and finally activated the gift death had given me. Aimed right at the guard, my first test pointed at a medusa. Couldn’t have been the recommended procedure, for sure.

Nevertheless, I fired, and the jelly froze. Not in shock or fear, but bodily, entirely.

I reached out now, with a feeler tentacle, and felt the cool hardness that once was flesh.

Friy had never read of a Gift like this. I had never tangled with it.

It felt nice. I felt a match to the obstacles stacked up against me.

My brain oozed liquidlike out of it’s utter focus on the image of a few eyestalks, and I regarded the rest of the space surrounding me.

Time seemed to slow in monumental moments like these, and The guards were just react. The red guard was still stuck motionless, gestureless at my betrayed — I had to call it betrayal — but the medusa of shifting colors (some kind of prophet, I tried to remember) was started to strafe, tresses lifted to fire.

I didn’t move. I had decided my next action, and affected some kind of shock seemed appropriate.

I called out to the civilians that dwelt in the space, who had just come for a bite to eat the diner. Tried to feel their confusion and fear, and reached for the puppet strings.

I said, “Get out of here! Run! We don’t know who’s next!”

Without any idea what’s going on, without anything to hold on to, this first impression counted for a lot.

Now I berated myself for deciding to do all this in the center of the diner. Farthest from any exists.

I dodged — my body dodged, rather (I wasn’t paying enough attention), and a few of my eyestalks watching a glass orb strike down, penetrating where I had been. It shattered and released a cloud of dust. It couldn’t have been good to touch, or breathe.

The nearest medusa were the waiting staff crossing the space between tables. Whatever they’d been holding, plates with or without food, was dropped moments prior. When one searched their visage, tho, you didn’t see terror or bewilderment. There was some long suffering in the sigh of one, or the way another rooted down and deflated themselves.

They wanted to be over, I imagined.

I darted over to one, the deflated, rooted.

“Let’s get out of here.” I reached out with a grasper tentacle and with force yanked them from the ground.

I darted over to another, and another, along the path toward the table. The more medusa around me, the better. One of them had just been a customer enjoying the shade here. The other had held a broom.

We were the center of all the attention in the diner. Some of the civilians had heeded me, and were fled or fleeing. But some stayed to gawk, or moved away slowly.

I lifted two tresses, found two targets, and dither for a breath, and then I fired.

Two more medusa turned to stone. Screams flying up from the jellies around my victims. They pulled attention toward them.

I angled all my eyestalks away from the red guard, lest I glimpse some new species of betrayal growing there.

Panic, disarray, pandemonium.

It but dimly matched the chaos of that day as a ephyra so many years ago (I’d costed the shop far more than a golden skull.), but it was a nice hit of nostalgia. And it should be enough to carry me out of the diner, then orient myself toward the sun spire.

It’s the little things that get you — I said that, right? I wish I had the dignity to say it was some small oversight that cost me, this time.

I forgot about the colorshifting guard. She was some kind of prophet, I’d assumed. I’d written off her gift as something entirely passive, of no use in a fight.

But why else would she be a guard?

All I saw was one, two, three tresses rising in my direction. The four, five six, and gone was any possibility of dodging.

I saw light gathering there at the flutes of her tresses, and my eyes were dazzled, and I saw no more.

It was like the darkness before the world was created. It was like a warm snug cave from which a god might rise and make a world.

It was, I realized, night.

There were dazzling points of light scattered like the [sand of beach] and they covered the sky entire. I was reminded of the sun, but these lights were tiny.

Below me a a massive cyclopean reef of a straight lines and squares encrusted the land, and spires rose out of it like teeth gnawing the sky.

There were forms that ran, flapped, perched, all across the expanse. They were not alien, for all their motion perplexed. Any medusa could recognize these forms. The tall avian forms limned in the ruins of the ancient folk. The people of the ruins to which we clung.

It was a — special, to see the them in motion, in the flesh.

And then a light issued from nowhere in particularly, and it was all

Motion ceased. An entire civilization was sealed in stone, sprawling, bustling cities turned as if with a snap, to ruins.

It hurt, on some philosophical level, to see the avians become the statues we knew.

I looked up, uncomprehending, at the sky, and lost myself in that sea of light.

I awoke in darkness. Across my was stone, and before my eyestalks everted my tentacles were reaching outward, and were stopped by the curving walls of stone.

I opened my gaze, and decided this must be a prison.

Not every angle was a wall. To one side, higher than I stood rooted, the stone gave way to a fine mess, and on the other side, a red medusa looked down upon me.

“Why did you do it, Ruwene?”

I looked away, traced again the rooth stone of this carven pit. I must be in the dungeons beneath Avelt. I must have been captured.

I must have failed.

“You could have worked with us, Roo. You’re innocent — you were innocent. You could have stayed that way.

“What happened now?” I pulled the strings to ask, but it was not a question born out of a inciting desire to know. I had failed; what else was there to do?

Exile, again. Avelt could do things too differently than the greater bog reef. I suspected. I hoped.

“That all depends on your gift. It’s not listed on your records. What is it? Can the jellies you froze be recovered?” I was silence. What was the point in answering, really? I felt my own puppet strings, but I didn’t venture to pull then once more.

“Answer me, Roo.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

Silence. I decided to speak. “I just got it.” Damn it, I didn’t want to release that info. I gripped my strings. “I mean, this is the first time I’ve used it.”

“Death gave it to you.”

“I”

“Don’t lie, don’t shit on my trust any further.”

In silence, I complied. I went through the motions of considering escape. I fired a stream of telekinetic at the ground. The stone just absorb the flow. I couldn’t levitate out of here; I didn’t expect to levitate out of here. I Sighed.

“What did death say to you?”

“I told me the story of the gods — how it really happened. What the sun god sacrificed for the all this. He’s going to free them all. I’m going to help him do it.”

“WAs going to, I mean,” I quickly added.

The red guard peered down at me from beyond that mesh net. He had the look in his eyes like hw as looking at me without seeing me Or at least it felt that they.

I saw his bell membrane tauten once or twice, like more melodies would come spelling out more questions or [criticisms]. It was for nothing, in the end. We were both silent.

My eyestalks couldn’t stop tracing the walls of my prison, against and again.

It was smooth stone, polished enough that even in the stickiest tentacles could find no purchase. They were tall. From his bobbing, I guess the red guard was levitating to be able to see me down at the bottom.

I cast my gaze around the bottom of the pit, and saw no help items sitting around to solve this puzzle. Anything I might’ve had — the friendship band, the sunshield — was confiscated.

I had nothing but my flesh and essence.

And the Gift death had given me.

Would it help at all if I put the red guard into stasis? Would I have done it if it could have helped?

My conscious mind was starting to sink into the familiar loop – vaguely, abstractly anxious, knowing something was wrong, something was going wrong, and yet there being nothing I could do about it. Yet still it was an object of fixation, something thought spun around like satellite some star.

Whatever lower mind really animated my body, though, didn’t give up so easily. I felt in a seat in my mind, watching my body like images projected onto a screen. Panicked eyes cast around against and again, search for some crack, some erosion, some intruding moss or vine, some bug or rat scurrying about, some water dropping down, some tapping like a prisoner sending a message, so sign from the gods, some magic twist of fate that might deliver me from this prison — anything that might possibly restore some control into their grasp, something he could pin a hope one.

He didn’t find it, at all. He was stuck in here with me. Not just in the prison, but in my body too. He’d get the message eventually, give up like I had. For now I was content to let him exhaust himself.

I watched on my seat at the back of my mind, looping in horror or dread or nihility, and i figured his puppet strings, and wondered what to do with them.

He didn’t tire out. Still he searched around, but it must have been [dawning] upon him that this quest was futile. Some of us take longer than others, I didn’t really hold it against him.

Time passes on, though, and there eventually did come some exterior change that might break the loop.

It was a deep, commanding voice from above. Ignorant, uncaring at me, only carry down into my polish pit prison as an accident.

Still, I heard it.

“A rogue Gifted individual is approaching the reef. All able​-​bodied gifted guards, after me.”

The red guard lurched away at that. I’d forgotten he was up there, truly — even my lower mind knowing that he wouldn’t, couldn’t help me out of here. Sensing that letting him even know we were planning some manner of escape would betray the plan, in spirit.

He was gone now, though. Didn’t even say goodbye. Maybe the rogue Gifted was that important. Maybe he wouldn’t have said goodbye anyway.

I had forgotten he was there, I had. But why did it feel so … empty without the red guard on high, staring down at me.

Why did I feel a new depth of helplessness and isolation rise up and engulf my like an abyss?

The nihility was becoming unbearable. I should have remembered, I”d learned it at some point, for sure. That pointlessness, meaningless, worthless existence, devoid of any guiding purpose, it wasn’t something my mind could linger in for long. It was a poison or acid eating at away and whatever was submerged in it.

That wasn’t a bad thing ; it could be used for good. Dissolving chains and walls, aimed at the bad things, destroying them with the might of an uncaring universe.

But you shouldn’t dunk your whole self into it. I should have learnt that.

So I rose from my seat at the back of my mind, my lower mind’s puppet strings firmly in my grasp, and condescend to act again.

It was glorified surveying, really. I was doing the same futile striving as the lower mind, but I decided to be a part of it.

It should have made a difference, it really should. I was trying. That was all i could do, wasn’t it?

The source came to me after some thought, like a splinter lodged in me. It still believed it was futile, that I could never escape. I still didn’t dare to look into the future, for fear of what I’d see.

Once I’d named the fear, it was easier to just negate it. The future, what did it contain?

What I’d really wanted, following after Death, was something to cover up the hole where meaning should be. I was a tool in service of some higher purpose — that’s what we all wanted, wasn’t it? That’s what we were searching for. Some end that we would be a tool, a cog, for.

But right now, I was a broken tool. I could not meet the end ordained. I decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt. But what was a decision you couldn’t act on?

I felt — I felt like a traveller, solitary, in search of some vast promised land. Seeking, and then I come upon a high cliff past which I cannot proceed. I haven’t found the promised land, and but two choices remain for me.

I could give up the search, and return to wherever it was I came. But I knew that choice. I had no home, there was nothing waiting behind me but the acidic nihility.

Or I could throw myself over that cliff, and let the unfelt winds of fate whip and wuther me, and deliver me to some doom or destiny.

There are a lot of choices that aren’t choises at all.

I looked around me, again. It seemed I saw with fresh eyes, cleansed by some revelation. I saw, of course, the empty, secure prison I hadn’t left. That hadn’t changed.

And a spinning around, and upturning of the gaze, and I saw nothing else had changed. It was the same empty, inert prison. No escape, surely.

There was something I missed, of course.

AFter all, it’s always a little thing you overlook.

The guards had taken everything from me, hadn’t they? All the things I’d brought with me, or been given.

No, not all.

Death had given me that Gift. That power which would endlessly even the playing field, balance the scale.

I stared down at my tresses oozing with the cold Gift of death’s power.

I thought a long time, looking at those tresses.

Considering, reconsidering the options.

But some choices weren’t choices at all. I said I’d throw myself off that cliff, didn’t I?

(When you piss life off, it really doesn’t give you the easy way out, does it?)

I took a breath, and I knew what I had to do.

I decided.

Chapter 7

You remember the slow days, root out in the wild bogs, when there was nothing to do, and you reached for the spiders and scorpions and scuttler bugs, and, for no reason at all (or for dark reasons), you decided to pull off, one by one, the legs of the creatures?

Same principle.

The pit was deep, but not too deep. Crouching with my stalk, I could leap up high enough to see the opening to another pit across from mine. Still, I couldn’t reach the ledge even throwing out a grasping tentacle. It was just too high.

I”m reminded of where this all began, back in the cliffs. My levitation was as useless as always, and to climb back up the canyons I just had to do it the brute way.

But these walls were too smooth to gain any purchase.

Up at the top of the pit, by the ledge I so desperately wanted to reach, I was closed in by a mesh, a net of wires. Tightly woven, but (near as I could tell), with holes more than wide enough to wiggle a feeler tentacle around in.

All of these facts came together in my plan.

AS much as I balked at the execution, I knew it was a pretty damn good plan.

Mentally, I recalled the image of that yawning chasm beneath the cliffs, the winds of fate howling, the sun tending the horizon behind me.

Throw yourself off the cliff.

I should be easy, simple. A single deft action. There was no resistance – no real resistance — out in the real world. It was all imagined. Difficulty you assigned because a part of you doesn’t want it.

BUt I want it. I need it. I had decided.

So I reached for the puppet strings of my body, and I pulled them. It should be easy, simple. A single deft action.

I grabbed one feeler tentacle in another.

I absorbed a breath. I said a prayer — to death. I wondered, distantly, if I was entirely braindead, and my plan couldn’t work for some small reason I missed.

I did everything to push away that single blistering hot moment of blinding, incinerating fire that came next.

There are definitions of the fire of pain.

I agnnized them in their entirety. My bell was aching — and then I realized I was screaming and atonal cacophonous roar, and I stopped that. But the pain didn’t stop. The socket where my tentacle used to attach to my muscle ring, it still screamed. And if I didn’t let it out, it just build up inside me, bloating me until there was no room for other thoughts.

A screamed a moment more, raw, by membranes near sore.

I pointed eyestalks at the ground, and saw a slender, squishy mass, squirting blood and writhing mindlessly. There was something uncanny, that that meat was once attached to me, was once a part of me, was once me.

I absorbed another breath.

One might be enough. But I did not want to get to the climax of my plan to be thwarted by a few inches. This was magnificent. This was genius. It would work. I /had /to work.

I don’t care if I’m tempting, taunting fate with that. I had to. I assure you.

I absorbed another breath. Said my prayer. Wondered if I was wrong, and the plan would fail despite everything. If I had ruined my life for –

Nothing.

It couldn’t be. I couldn’t accept that. It was all for something. I had a purpose, and I would fulfill the purpose even if it meant tearing myself apart to do it.

Some time later, there another something slender, squishy mass on the floor, squirting blood and writhing mindlessly.

I feel back on the floor of my prison, and just stared up at the ceiling, overflowing with an exhaustion I could not quantify.

There was a ring of eyes painted on the ceiling. I wondered why.

I had to keep going forward. I was losing prodigious amounts of blood. That exhaustion — could it be lightheadedness?

Was this the small thing I missed?

I stood up straight on my stalk, and moved forward.

I put the hard part of my plan first. The arms would be the most difficult, and I knew once I got past those, ripping out feeler tentacles would be easy to work myself up for.

I neede four. I’d just pull out four. Then I could move on to step three.

The feelers writhed on the ground for a lot longer. I wondered about that. It worried me how alluring these backpaths of thought were. The lightheadedness? I didn’t want to fall into a loop now, this close to the edge of the cliff.

Even if it felt so peaceful, so relaxing, to just lay down and deform like goo, and should let the darkness in. Sleep the sleep of the suns.

I would not.

Step three. I arranged the tentacles on the ground. I stuck the first grasper into the second, at the part where it used to attached to me. At the end of the second tentacle, and scraped holes into the dead flesh, and stuck the feeler tentacles in like candles in a cake.

I fiddled for a moment more, to align the two grasper tentacles as straight as I could managed.

And now, step four. The part that was all out of my control. I slid back, just a tad, pointed a tress at the mass of dead flesh around on the ground, and I let the coldness fly.

The strange line struck a grasper tentacle, and there was a wave of desaturation flowing out from that spot.

I held my breath with the wave reached the boundary between the first and second tentacles (even if, probably, it happened in instants.)

It cross the boundary, and the desaturation continued.

I swelled. I swelled immensely with a kind of dark joy which I suspected was a dark shadow of what the gods felt, making medusa.

I was one step closer to the edge of the cliff.

Tremblingly, I reached out and took the cool stone implement from the ground.

The other end of it did not deform under gravity. I remained as rod stiff as I had labored it.

I, gingerly, tapped the rod against the walls of my prison to no effect. Then, with increasing strength until I was satisfied it would not break.

I was dithering, just a bit. Some of my eyestalks were starting to go dark, the blood loss situation is troublesome.

I crouched once more at the base of the wall beneath the ledge, and then I leapt.

Just before the apex of my jump, I swung out my implement, and with pureest glee saw it catch on the mesh of the doorway.

I gripped the rod with my other remaining tentacle, and held on for all I was.

And then, I began to climb.

I threw myself off the cliff, and now I would climb to the top.

A momumental step toward the brink, a step towards fulfilling my purpose against all the cunning of fate. It had been thought impossible; escaping the prison pits was not a known thing, it was not heard of.

I had it easy, I knew; there were special prisons for colored jellies, drugs injected that suppressed magic.

In a fair world, my story would have ended here.

Would have. It was unfitting, cocky wording. As if the mountain I had just climbed were the last, as if climbing to the top of this ledge were all i needed for my victory to be assured.

I everted my eyes, and gazed opposite the ledge, and the woven fibers of spider silk, the uncuttable mess that sealed me off from the world. It was glued down unpullably to its frame; the only breaks were up at the top, and on the opposite side. Only a guard could let a prison in or out.

My thoughts deflated palpably. It was a reaction, it wasn’t an emotional thing. I felt it like the key substance going suddenly missing. Blood. I was bleeding out, and I was starting to feel it. It was starting to hinder me greatly.

My gaze was blurry, and my eyes couldn’t seem to cooperate to resolve the world into a panoramic image. I took too many tries, but at length I focused several eyestalk pairs on the room beyond my cell.

It was dark like only a spaced walled in could be. It had that unmistakable alienating air of a prison, of a building with a single entrance or exit.

This air was complemented by its emptiness you could tell there was some great emergency pulling all the most qualified guards away; I spied two in the room visible from here.

Both had eyestalks trained me. Both held spears in their graspers there were lower.

Bother were floating closer, and then with greater speed.

I appreciated that the primitive side of me was in ultimate accord with my mind.

I called out, “Help! Help! I’m bluh bleeding!”

Perhaps there was something else informing the words, but the weaved into my plan.

The closest guard was colorless. Of course; the only kind of guard that wouldn’t have been called out to handle whatever was going on.

“What the heck happened?”

“The,” I paused breathlessly, thought whirring, turning themselves to words, “one of the colored bastards, used their ma ​-​ magic on my arms. Froze them solid. They fell off. They fell off.”

I stared hard to see their reaction. There was thought behind my words; they were colorless, like me. Emphasis that connection. They must have felt slighted by the colored too, right? It had to be at the forefront of their mind, having just been left behind.

“I — helped me please. Please. I can — it cant be good to be bleeding this much.”

They were still there, staring at me. I tried to move one of my ripped off arms — blood spurted up instead.

It was what it took to lurch them into motion. I saw them float up, put graspers on the latch where the spidersilk net hooked in.

My tresses raised almost without me. Pointing at the helpful guard, pointing at his just​-​now​-​arriving companion. It would be simple, it was be easy. Still them both, and throw myself first.

“C’mon.” the guard was saying. “We’ll get you bandaged up.”

That was what stopped me. I could still find use in them, couldn’t I?

I reached for the puppet strings, said something like, “they dont care, they didnt care. Just threw me in like this. I didnt have much with me, they probably threw that away too.” I checked myself there. I hadn’t meant to say that. I was lightheaded. I needed to stay in control.

The other guard spoke up. “Settledown, friend. We keep your things safe, we always do. Even if you pissed off whoever brought you in, they dont throw away possession.”

“I want to see them.”

“There you are. Try to move slowly, alright? Could only make the bandages so secure without immobilizing you completely.”

We were in a brighter room, walls of coral instead of tentacle shell, and sunlight stabbed inward. It was harsh light, but it gave the room a sense of reality and connection to the rest of the world.

It was long moment I spend, watching the doctor tie the spidersilk cloth around my bleeding stubbs, urging me to down glass over glass of water, and assuring me that it would all turn out ok.

I went through most of those moments staring at her bell, turning over the possibility in my mind. I could still here. Should I? It would make my path so marginally more convenient.

Did it matter in the end, if one more jelly lost everything, if i fulfilled my purpose? I sacrificed my arms. Would I sacrifice other people?

The doctor most of thought i was just some particularly angry criminal. Perhaps I was.

The guards sat in the room with us. They were at the table beside the tunnel own into the prison shell. They had rocks on a painted board, and played some game.

At a word from the doctor, they were escorting me back to my cell, and my time was running out.

“What did you do?” It was the first guard. The slender one. The one, I imagined, I made an impression on. “Why were the coloreds after you?”

“So called ‘prophet’ was in a bad mood, i reason. They told me she foresaw — something. She didn’t want to say what, just knew i was bad news for sun knows why.”

“Are you?”

My time was running out.

I looked at the two guards. I stopped floating forward, and their spears tentacles were already twitching, already on edge.

I raised my tresses. Realization might’ve flinched in their eyestalks.

I answered, “Yes.”

Chapter 8

I had to be outside the prison quickly. There were still guards about, and they’d noticed my lack of [uniform]. They’d noticed my bandages, and wonder. They’d notice — other things about me. Something off, that the doctor was reacting to.

Had to get out quick. But there was something more important than that. Something I couldn’t keep going without. Not without sacrificing something invaluable.

The guards had shown me the room where they put all the prisoner’s belongings. It was the room farthest back in the building. A small circular closest with a little slit that let in the sunlight. IN my mind I could still see it, still see what I needed out of it.

So I darted away from the two stilled guards, left to eternity in a guise of pure surprised, and floated that line towards the closest. I paused a moment, then screamed out for help. Any other guards would here it, start over here.

They’d see the stilled guards, and then what would they do? I couldn’t say. Couldn’t predict every bounce of the puppet.

I left at speed, the calcinated floor of the shell blurring beneath my tentacles. My body must’ve forgotten in clumsiness in my hurry; I hardly wobbled.

Bell stretched taut with exertion, i heard just in time the sound of the guard’s armor rubbing together. A burst of magic took me up to the ceiling, and I wrapping my last two feelers around a support.

Below me, I watched a guard hurry past, unbreathing. They were just past a bend in this chamber of the room when they bell tilted just slightly.

They caught a glimpse of me hanging there on the ceiling, were stilled, and knew no more.

I felt stilled myself for a few moments. Would the lesser canyon reef be nothing but statues when i stood victorious atop the sunspire?

Well, there would be one jelly who not be stilled, at least.

At the threshold to the closet, i stood, and saw my things. I didn’t have much; my sunshield, my tiny travel pack, and a the friendship ring.

The travel back hand nothing but some plankton balls. The sunshield was nothing I couldn’t grab off the next medusa i encountered.

But the friendship band?

We — meaning me and Friy — had had our friendship bands stolen from us once before. Slept in a dirty alley we shouldn’t have, woke up missing anything nice we’d kept on ourselves. Friy was green with grief.

It was an adventure that day, and because of that I don’t even think Friy remembers it as a negative experience. It took negotiation and cunning. We needed sniffer snails, tracker stars, and so many swell​-​belled medusas to pull it all off. We couldn’t count all the dead ends on both our feelers.

But, when the sun was tended toward the horizon, we followed a tentative trail to a copse of trees with all the intensity our little ephyra bodies could muster bursting from our membranes.

We walked away that day with the sun to our back, the copse of trees all aflame, the bodies of our first casualties turning to ash, and all the ill​-​gotten riches of thieves.

But most importantly, we’d gotten the friendship bands back.

They meant something to us. And even now, at the end of everything, with purpose looming over me, I couldn’t turn away from that last vestige of friendship.

I snatched at it, and felt it settled into the depressed ring of flesh were it would sit forevermore.

Even if it had taken four graspers to climb out of the pit, I couldn’t have ripped this arm off. The band belonged here.

It perhaps doesnt speak highly of me that I paused there for some time, wrapped up in that sentimental tide of nostalgia.

At the very least, it means that what happened next was entirely my fault.

I heard that all​-​too​-​assured voice speak up from the threshold of the room.

“I have to stop you. You know that.”

My focus left the pair of eyestalks focused on that band, and four other pairs were talking int he constant shifting, roiling mass of colors in the shape of a medusa.

The seer.

“You could stand aside. We both know how this ends.”

“We’ve seen it play out once before. You could stand aside. You aren’t innocent anymore, I can’t promise you still have a place in this reef. But if you step off this doomed path — I promise I will let you have your life.”

“And if i step off my only path — what life will I have?”

“I can’t imagine it was easy, living in isolation, doing suh menial work. But there are other outlets for it. You don’t have to destroy. You don’t have to kill.”

You don’t have to kill. It was such a reflection of the speaker — she stood at the doorway, she had me at her mercy. And she decided to talk me down. All of her problems would be gone with one motion.

I lifted a tressed aimed at the seer.

And already she was making one motion. I flick upward from a grasper resting on a belt around her bell. A knife. It was coming right at me.

Magic flooded through my other tresses, and I bounced up.

But the knife at already reached me, was already tearing into the fluted flesh, flaying it.

Still I floated up, and that’s what saved me from the knife piercing my membranes and punctuating my story right there. The knife lost momentum, fell, and clattered on the ground.

“The [god of knowledge] gave me sight. I can see you truly, and every move you consider and every move you make.” She regarded me silently for a moment, bobbing in levitation. You are a twisted wretch of medusa. But still there is hope for you. Still you could decide otherwise. Make the right choice, please.”

I took another good look at the seer. Squeezed my bell in thought. I affected a tone like begrudging consideration (but i imagined the game was up at the first word.) “You say that you have to stop me. But you don’t. Your god needs you to stop me. You can decide otherwise. You can step off their path.”

“Do you think me any more likely to betray my god than you to betray the god of death?”

“We’re mirrors then. In another world, in other lives, maybe we would have met on opposite sides.”

“No. No. I fight for order, peace. To save people. You stand to destabilize everything we worked to build.” The seer spun around. “You would think you’d know to expect that from the god of death, but someone that missed you. Or do you want to see the world burn?”

“You’ve got to see that the world as it stands isn’t — it’s not stable, not truly. You can’t understand what it cost to give us this. That’s what death side. The the foundation of this world stands on the corpses of thousands. Are you okay with that?”

“I dont care whatever myth death spun up for you. I care about real people, right now. The very same people you are a threat to.”

“And if I promise not to use my Gift on any other medusa?”

“Why would I trust your word?”

“Can’t you see that?”

“I only see trickery and deception in you. Even know you’re trying to deceive me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you asked without promising.”

“Then I’ll drop the charade. I’ll ask straight: what would it take to sway you to my side.”

“It won’t happen. It’ll never happen. So long as you stand opposed to the gods, you stand opposed to all I am.”

“I would hope there’s more to you.”

“Don’t insult me; there is. But I have faith. I will not forsake the gods for you, or anyone.”

“Faith.” I word I spoke with the venom I could nurse. Finally, she’s offered up a chink in her defenses. “Faith is just an additive to make the poison of ignorance slide easier down your throat. If I dance in front of a snapper snail with faith he won’t eat me, he yet will. If I throw myself in front of the sun with faith he won’t smite he, he yet will.”

“I don’t have faith in such trivial matters. They are obviously false. Do you mean to tell me you have no faith in anything?”

“Faith is not knowledge. Faith doesn’t come from outside yourself, it’s just a loop of believe, the mind curl in on itself in comfort.” [Earlier, the seer had rushed up upon me in a lunge.]. “Faith is the gentle touch against your bell to distract from the knife about to plunge.” As I said this, I brushed the seer with one of my remaining graspers.

She immediately flinched, and I saw eyestalks evert and glance at my other grasper. But I was lifting it to gesticulate. “Tell, how to do know that the gods are to be trusted? That I am the demon who will destroy everything, and you are the savior to stop me? How do you know?”

She just twisted her bell tight, half in skepticism, half in disgust. It was too obvious a rhetorical trick, of course it was.

“How are you so confident that it’s so? Confident enough to act with the world in the balance?”

“I was born with this Gift, this Sight. The god’s confidence is my confidence. You’d question the gods themselves?”

“You were born with it. You were born chained to their will. You never go to choose, to decide. I’ll give you the choice now. Deactivate your gift. Silence the voice of the [god of knowledge] in your head. And decide if you really should continue on this path.”

The seer hung there for a moment, thought flexing in the contractions of her membrance. Her bell was still twisted, but it had relaxed a single notch.

“I — You are my elder. All else being equal, you do have more experience, a more mature mind. I — I am willing to submit to your unclouded judgment. But it has to be your judgment. Not the gods. Deactivate your gift.”

I believed it. I meant it. The same dearth of guidance that had seen me out to death’s demesne in the wild canyons was yawning here. I could submit myself to the purpose ordained by death — I had — but by that same mental flexure, I could submit myself to the path ordained by the seer.

I suppressed any wild buckling of my primitive self, the part of me that felt the engagement limned by the seer blocking my path out of this tiny closest. I couldn’t be chaotic, I couldn’t give in to my impulses.

“I can See you reigning yourself in, struggling for calmness. A part of me wants to believe that you’re speaking some truth.”

I lack another absence yawn open.

Half my arms were gone.

I had pushed those feelings down, strangled them and left them rotting in the corners of my mind. I didn’t need the distracting phantoms on my mind.

But — the absences of the most familiar things, the things that define ordinary, that absence is most profound.

“I’m tired. You — You can’t understand how hard it was. What it took to get here.” Something like a laugh vibrated across my bell. “I must have payed the toll on this doomed path, right? Ha.”

“The gods could make the pain go away. Help you deal with whatever it was that pushed you to this. Healing. You can heal. I want to see you heal.”

“I — yes. I’d like that. I feel like there’s something missing in me. Like whatever there is at the end of the road — it won’t be enough to heal that emptiness.”

“Yes Now you’re getting it.”

I cut her off. “But that doesn’t change what brought me here. It wasn’t just spiritual problems. Death — death has a point in all of this. How the gods are controlling us. How we’re like — like slaves to them. Do you think that’s all right? Please, you answer.”

“I –” she got my meaning about then, I think. I saw the colors leach out of her membrane, until she was just a dull pink. I felt no glow of magic from her. Whatever Gift she had, she’d had some aspect of it active for most of her life. Were the gods feeding her the energy to maintain it? They could do that?

“I think –”

I saw her eyestalks upturning to get a good look at my bell, which was growing contorted under the labor of my thought. It was growing pale.

I absorbed a breath, and reached out with a tentacle, brushed softly it across her bell. A relaxing touch.

In my other tentacle I grabbed the knife from the floor, and plunged in deep in her center, piercing the brain, killing her quickly.

I let out a breath. And felt the tension bleeding me body as I gave control back to my primitive self.

How did she find me? She must have come when I hollered to attract the guards. Seen the stilled jellies, and known it was me. Saw the other guard, and that put her on my trail.

I was stupid, and I deserved it.

But my path was ordained by the god of death himself.

I decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt.

I assured myself I would.

Outside, there buzzed a battle like a wild star attacking a beehive. A flying, chaotic mass of defendants all gathered to fight backa single foe.

But here, the wild star was a single medusa, no bigger than those who he faced off against.

It was a black figure high up in the air, almost orbited by a whole contingent of armored, colored medusae.

I thought myself blessed. I thought this the perfect distraction for my final journey up the sun spire.

But as I started to move, I saw th vaguest hint of that black​-​clad jelly’s eyestalks move and focus on me.

And he came down after my like a bullet, the whole contingent of guards flying after him.

That primitive terror welled up, and once again I wondered about a death from above.

Chapter 9

The lesser canyon reef — any reef, really — was perfect for getting yourself lost in. Groves and copses of coral grew in knotted bunches, curled around each other, reaching, spreading, and turning it all into one excellent maze. It was trimmed and managed for medusa to go through, but the highest priority was ease and quickness of motion, and keeping every last spot shaded.

What that meant was a unpredictable network of spaces and spans connected any two points, like the webbing of cracks in rock. But sometimes proper holes where open up.

It was fitting, really, that the devil​-​shelled prison would be a shaded island sealed by the punishing light of the sun.

But I couldn’t dwell on a the layout of the town. Even I couldn’t fall into a loop with the cloaked medusa coming down like a lightning bolt or comet, angled directly at me, trailing behind me a wake of angry guards.

If I didn’t suspect this the next in the line jellies to try to kill me, I’d feel a resonation. Partners in [crime]. The both of us on the mortal run from the law.

I glance both ways, lifted up my sunshield, and darted into the greater canyon reef.

Even with gravity accelerating him downward, it would take him moment to get here. And it would take me moments to get into the reef.

It sparked a line of thought, a perplexing observation. Why was he up in the air? What use did it serve?

If I were pursued by guards (and i am), fleeing skyward would just make more of a target of me.

I heard the crashed of metal hitting the glitter dirt. Opposite my vector, I saw the cloaked medusa had took for himself a guard’s sunshield, and on it he landed in a spray of dirt and massive crack.

The guards weren’t slow coming behind that, but already I saw his tresses flexing. He was bulleting right at me.

I threw myself into the lesser canyon reef, and took the first turn that came to me.

Never had I seen this medusa before. He was new to the reef, then. He didn’t know the twists and loops like I did. He’d get lost.

I took the most inscrutable route I could. Slithering down into pits, vaulting up into high walks, spinning around in spirals and intersecting curves.

I was going fast, and I was going erratic. The jellies who hadn’t already evacuated saw all this, and it was worrying, I knew. Word would spread about the suspicious medusa heading towards the sun spire –

They were heading toward the sunspire too. Medusa were being evacuated – and where else would you evacuate then the temple wherein you had the defense of a living gods?

I went down a solitary path. Wall corals had grown this into an alley. I knew at the other end of it was a small part centered around a nest of vipers. The way was notable for how disconnected it was. It wasn’t the spider web of cracks and connections.

(This was a trap.)

It occured to me, then, why the other fugitive had decided to stake his struggle far above the complexities of the reef. He didn’t know the environs. It was slow, inscrutable going.

And (some of those jelles had been colored, some of them had been armored) it was crawling with guards.

At the end of the path, when the curve had just winded to a point where the part itself could be seen, a red bell strafed into few, holding two spears and three tresses pointed right at me.

(The red guard)

I could see behind me the pursuing guards found a second wind, and two rushed up just then and completed my entrapment.

I lifted a tresses –

But a dart was already flying from the pair of guards, already striking me, already feeding poison into my mesoglea.

I fired out of my tress, but the magic never came.

I absorbed a breath. Fine, I’ll do this the hard way.

Three guards. Three alert guards. Who hadn’t just ripped their arms off to climb from a pit. Who hadn’t had to outsmart a jelly with god whispering in ear. Who hadn’t had a long, long journey to even get here.

The red guard stared at me.

I was ready to throw myself, if only I could find the cliff.

“Stand down, Ruen. It’s over.”

It wasn’t over.

About then is when the coral ceiling exploded.

Well, that’s not quite it. It dissolved, it disintegrated, it melted.

It wasn’t there anymore.

I tilted my bell up. We all did.

The cloaked medusa (who else?) was coming down just like that. Tresses pointed at the guards trapping me.

One, two three. Tresses aimed, it was a second of anticipation and then the guards exploded.

Dissolved, disintegrated, melted.

They weren’t there anymore.

I found my mind focusing on the absences toward the park.

The red guard.

It was an obstacle knocked down, wasn’t it?

I fell down to my stalk.

The cloaked medusa descended. In the end, I had delayed, but not escaped, the death from above.

“You looked like you needed help.”

“I could have figured something out.”

“Really?”

“I’d have to.”

“Determination. That’s a good quality. But you need sense, also.”

A beat of silence. I everted some of my eyes to rest them.

“You would have died. That’s all. No trick you could have trumped up. I saved you.”

I remained silence. I’d said all there was to it.

“So be thankful, ephy.”

“Name’s Ruen.”

“Can’t imagine I’ll need to know that.”

“Why? Are you leaving like that? Did your good deed for the day?”

“You’re going to the sunspire, aren’t you? I am too.”

“Of course.” I said. “There’s not much else here, is there?”

“Come here,” he said. “I’ve got an antidote for the magic disjuctor.” He was reaching into one of the bags slung about his form. Eyes inverted, gazes firmed searching the pack –

Abruptly, obviously, it was then that the explodes wracked the coral walls about us. It was an explosion of the kind favored by an angry species of beetle native to the forests. One had to try in order to raise them here.

Explosions. I was launched off my rooted stalk, and the figure was abandoning his search for the antidote. We were moving — but where? I went toward the den of vipers, my previous destination. The figured floated off toward the explosions.

Again I was interrupted. A trio of cyan jellies descended like one more death from above. They had a curious likeness about all of them, as if they’d all stobilated from the same polyp. But it was an exact likeness, infected across each of them. Clones, replications — even polypmates knew subtle differences, erosions from time.

They wielded spears, and threw them all at once. It had become my instinct to apply my gift — but still the poison stopped me. I dodged. Floating was too slow, and still my magic flight was wobbly. One spear stabbed into me, and was grazed an eye.

The clones descended, still with they same symmetry of movement. Cyan, not colorless. Was this the working of some gift?

I everted eyes opposite the clones, and saw the cloaked medusa dealt with their own trio, moving at the same rhythm as mine.

I glanced even more upward, at the space between us. High, where it wasn’t our instinct to look, where I would hide if I were the one cloned.

The cyan jelly was there, bell brighter, glowing with life the clones lacked. I saw a dozen tresses orchestrating the symphony of movement, jostling up and swiping and stabbing, pulling the animating the clones –

Like puppets. A medusa whose own gift was to be a puppet master.

Caught up in observing, I’d made a target of myself, and another spear flew right toward me.

A tentacle had seen this, and was shoving against a wall, knocking me away. Saving me.

I had to do something, act, decide.

What did I do before I had a gift?

Knives. I had them in my bad, and a thoughtful tentacle had already retrieved one. Look at the puppetmaster medusa, take aim,

Throw.

It didn’t strike true. The puppetmaster had seen me notice him, he was ready, he was dodging.

But the motion caught the attention of the cloaked medusa where a shouted warning wouldn’t have been heard over the explosions and shouting and distance.

The cloaked medusa looked upward.

He saw the puppetmaster.

The puppetmaster knew dark agony.

He was screaming and thrashing and falling like a smited star from the sky. All I knew was the dark treses the figure had aimed and the darker bolt of magic which had issued from it.

I decided I would not make an enemy of the cloaked figure.

Not before they had been removed as an obstacle, at least.

The clones all turned to dust and wafted away on the wind. But our battle was a conspicuous, loud thing and we could see and hear the guards tripping over themselves to get to us.

We had to move. I was at the lead, the native, at a slow pace so the foreign medusa could move through the knotted labyrinth of the lesser canyon reef.

A tentacle slapped me and I everted and the cloaked was press a glass orb to my face and it was sloshing.

“The antidote. Drink it quick.”

It was three gulps, and we were moving again. I sung, “Why are the guards attacking you? What did you do?”

“Chaoswright. Desert exile. I am welcome in no lands, this one among them.”

“The cannibals in the desert? The godpiss heretics?”

“Not everyone would have recognized me as such, of course. If I were a more agreeable sort, I would have allowed the guards escort me here. I could have completed my pilgrimage with a minimum of violence.”

I nodded. If I had allowed the guards escort me — where would I be?

We had to take sudden turn here, and crawl through a wet tunnel up to a higher district of Avelt.

Behind me, the traveler was continuing, “But death told me that this commotion would be useful for you. The god of death told me a few things.”

“You’re an ally, then?” Are you his new champion? Had i already failed? Would it not be me to usher in the age of darkness?

“Of sorts. Our goals intersect more than they align. Death told me a lot of things, but I believe none of them. He’s a terrible fucking liar.”

A knife, already tight in tentacle, was there just in case I wanted to make a rash mistake.

I was interrupted, however, by seeing the attack snails slithering at us from further up the tunnel. Their eyes were glowing with a bioluminescent chemical, and their razor sharp teeth lining their verticle slit mouths were out and gleaming.

I stopped. The knife would be put to a less rash purpose.

Or would have been. The cloaked medusa spied them next, and his black Gift turned them to dissolving puddles of life materials.

Even the shells. Even the shells were puddled.

“We should turn around,” I said.

“They must be up there expecting, yeah.” [Maahi] squirmed up next to me, eyes looking close. He said, “Listen, this can’t be the quickest way, is it?”

“We have to avoid the guards.”

“You’re doing a pissing job of it.”

“I –”

“Look, they know we’re both going to the sunspire. It’s better to assume that. Why not just go straight there and quit the dance?”

“We can trick them, make them think we’re somewhere we’re not.”

“Buy us pointless moments of freedom. Buy them time to surprise us just when we’re settled in thinking we pulled one over on them.”

“It’s safer, cautious. There’s too many gifts out there to counter them all.” The puppetmaster appeared in my thoughts. She stuck with me, like some idealization of myself, who I should be. It stung a little.

“You think you’re some manipulating type, don’t you? The world is chained to [something] and you can move that? Or do you fancy yourself one to put the chains there?”

The cloaked medusa didn’t wait for an answer and he was gone.

I didn’t think Maahi was really upset or splitten with me. We had disagreements on where to go, but I imagined at the gates of the sunspire we’d meet back up and continue our journey its conclusion.

I didn’t think he was ultimately upset with me. Judging me, perhaps, but not upset.

Still, I didn’t think it the best course to follow after him. It wasn’t a good idea to go up the tunnel with whoever sent the attack snails presumably still waiting, but it was perhaps not the best idea to follow after Maahi without conceding to their idea that brazenly assaulting the sunspire was the best course.

I’d drunk the antidote and felt it seeping throughout my mesoglea. I wiggle my tresses and felt experimental currents of magic spark up and down them.

I could through myself off one more cliff. With my magic back, I trusted myself to handle a few guards.

At the mouth of the tunnel waited a deep blue guard and at one side a red guard and at the other a certain disturbance to the grass i knew to be the invisible guard.

“Ruwen,” the red guard said.

Chapter 10

[describe how Oeara’s pane are formed]

“There’s no reasoning with you anymore, is there?” The red guard spoke almost quietly, I just heard him. I stared at him with idle rhopalia. I didn’t spare the air to respond; my mind was wrangling itself around this problem, feeling out it’s angles and holes, chewing on it. I assuredly didn’t have long; couldn’t rely on my obstacles making the same mistakes again and again.

They’d say a few words, and demand I come with them. They’d fight at the slightest opportunity. I might could win. I assuredly wouldn’t.

Before then I would have a out, I’d have to.

(Death had crowned me a worthy champion, after all.)

“I don’t know,” the blue medusa was speaking up, the biggest among them (was she the one who’d left? back already?) “what under the sun allowed to escape from the hornshell prison –”

“Determination,” I barked.

“– but I’ll guard you myself, this time. You won’t escape.”

The guard paused abruptly — I might not have noticed if my faculties weren’t straining for details.

If any among them (or the squad of colorless guards making the rear) had said anything, it was swallowed by the gentlest.

“Or, I suppose, I could put this sorry story to an end, and kill you.”

I pulsed, rose a fraction. Felt magic crouching at the mouths of my tresses.

“No one escapes death, after all.”

“Don’t.” It was a slow and hesitant syllable that the red guard spoke.

After all of this, the fool was still standing up for me?

The blue guard might’ve latched on the same thought. Three rhopalia were staring wide at the red guard, confusedly twisting as they considered his nonsense.

“There’s no reasoning with you anymore, is there? I hope — but I don’t think there is.”

[illustrating Ruwene’s thought processes, his considering of options]

The deep blue medusa said, “He’d stand down now if there was anything at all good in him.”

I could do it. Bow down right now, hope I could escape imprisonment once more, hope I’d have better luck flying the the sunspire next time –

Hope I’d have better luck without the chaoswright. I wouldn’t. That’s…

“Ridiculous.”

“Can you speak more than one word, honey?”

I lifted a few more rhopalia, met her gaze. “Ridiculous to think I’m driven by an absences of good. It’s what is good in me that has me here at all.”

The coordinator flapped feelers and rose up, bell tightening something serious.

“See, [red]? No getting through to him. [Stuck in a loop.] We ought to kill him.”

I knew how it’d play out. The other guard, the invisible Gift, was here, had to be. She’d lunge out of nowhere and stab me, and that’d be it.

I saw a disturbance in the grass, but perhaps she’d seen me looking, or perhaps it was just caution — but I didn’t see it anymore. She’d moved. I didn’t know where.

[foreshadow that she can only use her power on one thing]

Then if I somehow struggled out of that, I’d have the force wielding coordinator, the fiery red guard, and another invisible stabbing to contend with.

I could take them out with one good shot, but they knew that too.

Was I getting stuck in my head again? Should act?

My running was near its end, I knew. I saw the grip shift on the red guard’s spear. I saw the coordinator tentacle their mace.

I saw, in a sudden flash of expelled light, the purplish guard terribly appear.

She had a single tress outthrust, and it was all instinct, what came next.

My tresses, which were already impatiently buzzing with the death god’s gift, flew up in a mirror of the invisible guard. I fired out stasis –

And there in midair the magic struck home. Expelled light flashed out again, and the invisibly was ripped from a knife.

Time was all out now.

Act, or perish. All I could do now.

The coordinator flew upward first and light sucked in where the purplish jelly had been and the colorless ranks were stirring into motion and slowest of all, the red guard lowered his spear and began to come at me.

I took a good look at where the tunnel had spat me out at. It was the walled garden outside of another, higher brow restaurant. It sat at the edges of the inner districts and from here it loomed over the the way we’d come.

Tables had been tossed away and sitting pools had been dried. Hasty walls of tough ferns had been thrown at the fringes as walls, and a single path lead away, where half a dozen colorless stared at me.

It was a circular arena, and I was at one edge, and between me and the colorless ranks floated [red guard] and Oeara.

[Someone had used Oeara’s name]

A tentacle tugged and I threw myself west like it hinted. Breaths later, I saw the reason: a bright blue lance stabbed past, Oeara’s missile.

Fire was spraying down in a circle around me like a [line[ barring my way.

I knew the invisible knife was coming, but not when.

A tress rose aiming for the blue guard, and she was swift levitating out of the way.

I pointed one at the red guard and he didn’t move, confident I wouldn’t still him.

I didn’t. That faith could be useful.

So few pieces in place, so many strings cut.

“Hey,” I shouted. “Colorless guards. Why are you fight me? Why are you listening to these pretentious assholes?”

No response.

“Do you not wonder why they get to fly in front of you, why you have to take the rear? They don’t even treat you like you matter. You’re afterthought, deterrents. Treated like walls to block me than allies to assist your superiors.”

“We aren’t their superiors. The guard is a flat hierarchy.”

“That’s what you tell yourselfs. But look around you with fresh eyes, and tell me this isn’t the look of a hierarchy.

Knife. It felt whispered to me. A tentacle flailed out and felt the cool, invisible bell just beside me.

Another tentacle already have a knife swingin toward –

An entire pane glowing bright blue sweeped past between me and the now​-​visible jelly.

I would have lost a tentacle if it didnt have the mind to snatch back. As it stood, the knife’s handle was split into by the sheer edge of Oeara’s magic construct.

I couldn’t do anything.

“I fight for your freedom.”

I dodged another stab from the purplish’s guard’s knife. I saw the glad through her bell, so it glowing dimmer. She had to be low on vril. Good.

“Hua, get away from him.”

I could still her. She’d grabbed a bunch of my feelers in her tentacles, and I couldn’t take the chance that I would be stilled along with her.

At her word the guard — Hua — lunged away.

Her advice sealed her fate. I lifted a tress, glad to be rid of one obstacle –

The magic flow was zapping through the air but was intercepted by a spear of glowing bright blue.

The blue didn’t dissipate in a mist like the other magic constructs did. I saw the coordinate float over on swift levitation, and tentacle slapped down and the spear was in her grasp.

“Thanks.”

She threw the thing, and she could still control. Even when I dodged, the spear sought after me.

My only escape was throwing up my bag and stilling it as a shield.

My fleeing took me past the red guard, who swiped with his spear, no chance of hitting me.

“You aren’t doing anything, [red]. Are you trying to help him? Are you traitor?”

“As I was say,” I called out, a tentacle swaying to point at the crowd. “I fight for your freedom. I want to talk to the sun god about liberty, about how the Gifted step on us colorless medusa. I want us to be equals. That is why they oppose me.”

The red guard jolted. “We oppose you because you are carving a path of destruction across Avelt!” He stabbed his spear for emphasis.

The purplish guard. “Don’t let him spin this into some kind of noble quest. He is a monster, a murder. He’s a chaoswright!”

“I defended myself. That’s all it was.”

“Defense?”

“All the guard who have been stilled attacked me first. They aren’t even dead; I am no murderer. I can bring them back!”

The red guard lowered his bone spear.

“You cannot be taking him seriously. I forbid it.”

The colorless ranks were hesitating too. They still spread out, and floated up blocking all escape by the hard fern walls, but that was all. For most, one colorless guard was circling around dangerously, rhopalia staring me down, and another tended closer subtly.

Nevertheless, the distractions were working. I still had reign of he puppet strings.

Oeara lanced another bright blue spear at me. I dodged. Then she lifted all tresses and hit me with a whole volley, more than I could ever dodged.

A tentacle pulled me down and swung me to the very edged of the stabbing cloud, and the other tentacle lifted, pincushioned with burning bright blue lances, but nothing vital was risked.

“I am not attacking you. Why are you still trying to kill me?”

“I know your tricker. I’m not the only one here who doesn’t drink your lies.” There was a certain pressed surety to those words — as if saying them would make them true.

I saw a sudden motion to the northwest. I turnt, and saw nothing. Scores in the dirt floor where Oeara’s constructs had landed, my bagged still stabbed through with her larger lance, and the swinging shadows of the floating guards.

I marched my gaze around until I saw Hua. She was far on to the east, keeping her distance from me like Oeara suggested. A colorless guard was near, partially between her and me like a protector.

My mind latched onto her. She was like the last obstacle between me. Well, her and Oeara. But her most of all — she alone could follow after me unnoticed, strike me dead when least i expected it. I had to ensure that would not happen.

Oeara and Hua. I couldn’t get [red] and the colorless to attack or hinder them, they didn’t trust me enough for that. So what could i do?

I had left a rhoplium evert to the northeast to catch whatever that movement earlier had been, and I did.

The bag!

The large lance, which I’d stilled, remained embedded within it, and still the coordinator could compelled it.

It stabbed back and forth in the air to loose the clutching bag and I was fleeing backwards, putting myself behind one of the colorless guards.

“Please,” I said, tapped the guard with a tentacle — the one bleeding from lance holes — “I dont want to die. I dont want her to kill me.”

The larger lance was coming now, stabbing forward ineluctably.

I looked the Oeara,bell taut with frustration. I looked to Hua lingering in the east, edging forward just barely self​-​restrained. I looked toi Oeara flushing with worry at my looking at Hua. I thought of how she protected her, earlier.

I knew what I would do.

I fled past the guard, abandoned the trick of asking for protection. I lifted three tresses.

I waited, just a beat, for the larger lance to draw near.

I fired out of my tresses, one toward the red guard, one toward Oeara, one toward Hua.

Her reflexes were as sharp as ever. Panes of bright blue were flying in threefold formation. Two of them intercepted [red] and Hua’s still beams, and she dodged the one she’d missed.

I hadnt been idle. I was bulleting forward, trying to get to Hua before she used her last magic to go invisible again or some other trick.

Oeara was readying another volley of lances, I could read it on the blue glow in all of her tresses.

This last part would be the most delicate.

Hua ripped a spear from the colorless guard beside her (who looked so affronted), and stabbed toward me, I smacked the oncoming blade with a tress and point blank turned it to stone.

The purplish jelly dropped the thing like it was diseased, and started backwards.

I fired another close range stillness.

Oeara shortcircuted her growing lance volley and made another pane which slice by, biting into the dirt between me and Hua. The stillness ineffectual hit the pane, and froze it.

I threw myself to the side, and did it again. Another pane came down hard between me and her, biting into the ground, even biting into the other pane, and again stillness splashed useless on the pane, keeping it there.

I put out a scream of frustration, and floated up. Flying over Hua, I tried to fired again.

Oeara must be getting better. Already the pane was there, slowing to a stop about Hua. It froze there.

[A tentacle had stickily grabbed the dropped spear earlier], and I was stabbing towards Hua with it.

Maybe the coordinator had dimly realized what my game is.

But it was too late. At the point the last side of the triangle was facing her, and I was between her and Hua.

I pressed forward with the spear. I threw it.

Oeara could try to kill me, of course, but she’d be giving up a chance to save Hua.

I knew she was low on magic.

The time come, and the last pane sliced down into the ground. quickly did I fired a magic bolt at it, and seal hua inside.

“You are a cruel [bastard].”

“A clever plan, isn’t it? If killing her had been the goal, don’t you think I’d have had just as clever a plan to do it?

Oeara snarled. She had her mace and was lunged forward, swinging, missing, swinging again. I was dodging, dodging.

“I am not the enemy. I am not a monster. I’m trying to save. We’ll restore what was lost.”

I flew toward the restaurant at the end of the pathway the colorless ranks had been guarding.

“You can still dig her out,” I said to Oeara.

“I will kill you for this. You’ve made an enemy like this.”

I started away again. Eyed the colorless guards, who weren’t all pursuing. The one who’d been planning attack still had his bone sword lifted, but I saw him looking at his restrained companions. Dithering.

I tried to look at all the spread out guards at one. Not an easy task. “Here’s a token of my good will…”

“I’ll tell you where Mahii the chaoswright is going. Where he’ll be waiting for me.”