Two stars danced, halfway across the sky now; a golden aura flaring bright enough it almost touched the blistering red.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” The high voice rang out; but it seemed murky in the air. It had to fight too much to carry far. But I was nearby.
I kept my silence. Eyes fell from the suns above — my lenses only did so much — and I contemplated the burning grasslands. Tongues of flame rose up all across the ground, a meadow of fire. We sat atop a tall boulder to protect us, but only one of us needed the protection.
Say something. It’s rude to leave them hanging.
“I don’t miss the smoke,” I said, and left it at that.
“Why are you breathing?”
To remind myself I’m not in the void? Because I didn’t smile and nod when everything anchoring us was ripped away? I had missed every so-called vestige, and I never stopped missing this familiar plane. I never got used to that.
But I was the only one. And it meant I needed the protection of the boulder.
“I have to,” I admited.
“But the eutechne—”
“I need to.” A growl from my throat. Ending the conversation before it broke me further.
The others were swallowed whole. You survived. Don’t think that makes you weaker.
But I knew what strength was. We all saw it. Some of us did more than see it.
Why are you romanticizing those things? They swallowed Rikte. Gerna. Yula.
Worse than swallowed, I think. I saw teeth. Lots of them.
Besides, isn’t romanticizing the void-things exactly why we exist?
I looked. Beside me, she clung to the surface of the boulder (fricticious with dead lichen) with three corded legs, wires of vine-muscle twisting around themselves like pale rope. Wouldn’t be pale for long. I can feel the ichor pumping a tension-beat within. The legs joined to a slim body, thin like a knife and sharpened to a point about as cutting. Thin ridged down the front and below; it thickened up top, because that was where the head emerged.
It was a mouth wearing a crown. Lips engorged with ichor, round flesh beaded with something viscous and acidic, and shielding so many teeth I could still see the sharp indentations already poking through. The crown was bright like tongues of frozen fire, but that was just the luster reflecting the world-flooding light of suns. The jewels of the crown were eyes, multicolored and mismatched.
Purple and slitting. Deep blue and tri-pronged. A pair sea-green with round pupils. Somehow, I still recognized that gaze.
“Sorry, Ampe.”
It sounded like I was apologizing for needing to draw breath. Maybe I was. I was really apologizing for looking at her and seeing what she was. We were remade to descend the void. Our kind wasn’t made to. How else to change that, than to gaze upon a reference, a model, an existence proof?
Ampe didn’t like it. The annoying voice in my head didn’t like it. Stars, I didn’t like it, but I could still acknowledge it. Of course we were an imitation, of course there’s a family resemblance between those things and that painful list of names the voice had dredged up. It made that ‘swallowing’ an act of cannibalism, and forcing that move was a small victory over the void.
(Or maybe it thanked us for it.)
“I know you missed this.” Those lips moved — we’d mapped out what our new mouths could do, and labelled this one a smile. “It’s why we came back. It’s— what kept me going, you know? I held on for you two.”
I looked back up at the suns. I held on for that. The light, the air, the world turning beneath me. Ampe’s company just felt like behind me followed the void.
But that was true, wasn’t it? When I led the way, it walked behind and in front.
And inside, too? Is that what you think? the voice finally thought. I’m sorry as well, Silte.
“Flames are guttering. Let’s keep moving.”
Ampe opened her engorged lips, then closed them. Her corded legs rose from the lichen-crusted rock, and she slid down. Vines twisting, knife-torso bending, claws digging into ashy mud. Stalks of grass died where they touched Ampe, a faint and fading kind of death — she left a translucent trail, as if her victims didn’t fully exist anymore.
I could only watch so long. Soon enough that crowned mouth looked back, all expectant. Eyes blinked out of sync.
Soon enough I’d have to move too. That’s how going somewhere worked. And when I’d move, I’d feel — I’d be inhabiting this body again.
I could do it for you.
But I shook my head. I wanted to feel this. Still, as I rose to a high stand, I threw my eyes distant, ignoring three legs crawling beneath me. Not much to see in the distance, with all the smoke, but I thought I saw angular shapes breaking up the horizon. Was there life, civilized life — or was that more hope?
“Just realized,” Ampe was saying. “You should be leading, I think. Right? Dunno where we’re going. I was always following you.” Her legs spun her in place. She had a neck flexible enough to look back fully, but she had turned to face me.
Still walking forward, but I said, “I don’t know where, either.”
“I trust your dunno more. You know?” She was pointing at me with one claw, before pointing up.
I exhaled something throaty enough to be a growl. “I don’t.” I kept walking forward, and Ampe turned as I walked past her, then she fell in step.
“Are you still breathing?”
“Why?”
“Just figured it might not be the idea. You know. With all the smoke.”
Ampe, like the others on that painful list of names, could do things I couldn’t. Eutechne, the art that brought us to that void, that was sure to be our secret to survive. Rikte didn’t need his claws to pick things up. Gerna didn’t need their dozen eyes to find us — they never lost track of us, not until we lost track of them. Yula didn’t need words to talk to us — either of us.
Relevantly, though, none of them needed to breathe. A basic skill in the void.
I sighed again, pushing smoke through the air. The black, sooty curls danced in the air, casting faint forms across the ground. They wreathed our darker shadows. Two suns meant two shadows, though the umbras overlapped enough.
Ampe must’ve seen me looking, because an arm snaked out and swiped through the air — totally ineffectually, but her shadow-claw pierced my shadow. She gives a low ‘heh’ of a laugh. I roll six eyes.
Between the shifting shadows and hazy air, it escaped my notice at first. But ours weren’t the only dark shadows. At first, I thought they were uprising slices of land cutting shadows. Rocks or equivalent. But there were too many, and they were getting larger. Getting closer — from above.
I halted, and Ampe bumped into me. My eyes were blinded by the light of the sun above. The haze and the glare meant I didn’t see more than matching triangles of shadow. But it confirmed it wasn’t an illusion. We were surrounded.
A halo of uncertain origin, tightening like a noose.