And the Darkling Reefs Abide

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 Friiya, after growing bored with the field of horrors, when we took it upon ourselves to explore every last twist and loop of the Great Bog Reef.

It took us surprisingly long to find the entertainment district. We’d been into trash heaps, to sultry red‍-​colored alleys 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, so many cries of enjoyment issued.

Though perhaps the crowds were 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, details elude me. I recalled the center of the story was a jelly quite a lot like me, triumphantly proud and determined clad like a shell around a core of utter anxiety and dread. That detail stood out to me then‍ ‍—‍ but it was almost prophetic how much I’d curled into being just like that fictional medusa.

It was a tragedy, that much I knew, that much had been clear from the beginning. In the story, the gods had spoken, charged him to act, and our hero would have to carry 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.

In the opening acts, it was a masterfully woven tale, that much stuck 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 things that slipped past a little half‍ ‍—‍ no, less than half‍ ‍—‍ developed brain…

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

But you’ll see that for yourself.

The hero, he was a swordmaker. He fought in wars before he lost a tentacle and reconsidered. Then he simply switched to continuing the fight at a distance: through proxies he armed.

He found himself 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 saw it as senseless and destructive, and strove to stop him.

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

And the wife was able to rescue the brother.

But the reason.

Ugh. I sigh just remembering it.

Our hero 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 cloth bags prancing on the stage, and deduced that these were simply little medusa living out little lives and little struggles. It was the mostly likely explanation, my young self thought.

The world was a queer place‍ ‍—‍ you’d be surprised how reasonable silliness can sound in the beginning.

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

There was 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, bell‍-​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 thumping and swishing of the cloth bags seemed utterly unrelated to what they were saying.

While their bells could swell or deflate, there was none of the subtlety of experience you so easily discern.

And the tentacles, the eyestalks, the rhopalia, they never seemed to move, just swaying limply beneath the cloth bags.

It was all subtly uncanny, I’d admit, but I didn’t focus on taht. After all, 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 there, a 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… this broke me for just a little while.

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

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

I ended up somewhere high and far away‍ ‍—‍ a mound in the field of horrors, probably‍ ‍—‍ and I stared up blankly, vision swallowed up in 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 such a long time.

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

I was nothing but a puppet.

I stood rooted to the reflective metal scales, the floor of the diner. To me, the diner was a blessed marriage of best and cheapest.

A breath absorbed into my bell, difusing into my mesoglea, and then let a stale exhale dissipate out of me. The guards were still here, in a loose circle around me.

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

I saw she had 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 ground; buildings were defined by having shadeful awnings 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 distressing regularly of lines and squares, the single open doubling as entrance and exit.)

A grasper wrapped around a pouch of fruity liquid, 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 the guards, not realizing they weren’td floating (in the air, such collisions are routine.)

Flow. It was easy‍ ‍—‍ to me‍ ‍—‍ to divorce jellies from their individuality, analyze 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 snapped suddenly free, and levitating medusae jerked instantly away.

Instinct was another puppet string.

It hadn’t been the first time the ravens here had made some noise. Few of the jellies present got used to it, not really. To their credit, not everyone here had been here 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.

One sat underneath the thickest pillar‍ ‍—‍ what might’ve been the building’s grasping tentacle uplifting the ceiling. I hda tossed the bird a few dead 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 again and again pulled at my attention, the 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 so subtly 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 trained long, hard stares on them. The nearest circle of tables was entirely empty save two brave souls.

Two godstinging 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, seeming bereft of the gods’ endowment. All three guards were colored. Empowered.

I knew 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-​belled guard.

I had already decided he would be first.

But I was getting caught in a loop again, weren’t I? Anxious indecision.

I should act.

A ever‍-​persistent failing of mine. A problem would rear its head, roaring with hot breath and spittle for me to face up or fail.

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

After all, when you were trapped in a loop, it was always something from outside that frees you.

The raven cawed once more.

And I decided. More than decided, I acted.

“Hey.” I gestured at the green guard beside me.

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, not twilight or overcast, so the torches around the pillar weren’t lit, and yet 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 piercing calls 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, to weigh the decision. I was a puppet. I reached for my own strings, and pulled.

A cnidae‍-​tipped tress rose up, pointed at the green jelly.

The raven cawed. Ruwene.

I felt the coldness wriggle down the length. Turning to pure black dust at the fluted opening of my tress.

A different flavor of power forced its way down the length. That coldness without tempereature I’d begun to feel after the god of death had stung me, assuring me it would halt defeat in its tracks.

I let a breath dissipate, and, while this all felt very slow, it 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, stood now a another statue seeming carved of that curious, pure black stone, another piece by wrought by design of that the sculptor who authored the field of horrors.

Then the raven who freed me cawed some terrible word that started with M, and it flew far away, gone in a flutter of preened feathers.

The momentary stasis that had gripped the rest of the diner seemed leave. The world lurched into motion once more. My path wasn’t clear yet.

But I looked hopefully, dreadfully to the spire of the sun and knew my path clear of one obstacle, defeat halted in its tracks.