"You're talking about murder."
"Yes, but for the greater good."
"Do you have any fucking clue how batshit supervillain insane that sounds?"
"Would you prefer that I pretended to agonize over it, or that I make a stirring speech about our duty to protect what's left of humanity?"
"... We have no right to do this, to decide who lives and who dies."
"No, but doing things that we have no right to do has always been the domain of man. For what it's worth, I wish I didn't have to involve you in this."
"It's not worth much. What... what if it selects us?."
"Then I suppose we'll get what we deserve."
The Blank
You let the protective layer of the tassa slip a little lower on your face as you crest the Serpent's Tail, looking out at the expanse of the Yomimas clan holding. The air is clean of sand and grit, the last greatstorm having past more than ten days before, and the next one not due until the little sun set. The tassa you're wearing has gotten rather filthy on the trail, and, despite vigorous shaking, it needs a true wash in order to rid of the test of filthy cloth and rank sweat.
Without a breeze, the sand at the top of the Serpent's Tail ruffles, spitting up a precisely aimed spray of gritty sand directly into your now unarmored face. Another shift of sand immediately after forms a caricature of a laughing face at your feet. The Yomimas spirits were known well for three things: their skill with agriculture in this desolate land, their fearsome anger against intruders, and their unfortunate capacity for pranks against clansmen.
It's been a long time since you've set foot on this soil, too long to be away from clan, but the spirits would remember you if you'd been gone for a century and returned as more wrinkle than man. The others with you, the Earthbrother and the Sajet would be trusted automatically by the spirit, and Yolt was oath family and an old friend of... of...
Your knees hit the sand as you involuntarily crumple, clutching at your skull. Memories strike at you like hammerblows, of a man with silver eyes that burned right through you. In a room that wasn't anywhere.
The sand swirls around you, the laughing face replaced by a concerned hum as the spirit, if that is what is, eddies around you. It's not familiar anymore. You're no longer sure that you're Hakan Sul Yomimas. The dunes around you, the stone outcropping that you know to the be the seat of clan Yomimas, suddenly seems sinister- a dream.
But not your dream.
Aderal
You hover placidly, your anchoring spines tucked well inside your body. The air here is sweet against your palps, the scent of many humans without the war scent, combined with the almost undetectable threads of fresh water and green growth. You inflate the gas bladders beneath your body, sucking the new air through you and tasting it deeply. It's oddly similiar to your master's scent, like family, like kin.
It would be interesting to see the master's kin. You have seen many humans, been kept in many places, but you've never met any that are kin to him. What a creature must the mother of such an alpha be...
You roll sideways, listing in the air so that one of your eyes can gaze at the sky. Two of the suns, the little blue on and the great red one, are high, but the white sun is low on the horizon. It will be cool soon, time to anchor in and pull tears from mother earth.
Your master stops at the top of a ridge, holding your lead low as a cue to hold for a moment. He pulls the peculiar skin that sometimes covers his phase down, revealing his mouth. Strange mouth, but a stranger creature. One of the little earth children throws sand into face, a curious gesture, the reasoning of which is beyond you… The reasoning… reasoning.
Are you alive? The question echoes in your mind, slicing through the short, animalistic thoughts. You are not a beast of burden, you are not a floating mass of gas bladders and leathery skin, you are not a Sajet. You're not sure where you are, you're not sure what you are supposed to be, but everything is wrong. This place… it doesn't make sense anymore.
The Madman
Despite the fact that the last greatstorm was days ago, your leg aches. Perhaps its the pace that your nephew has set, or perhaps its a subtler warning of some impending danger, but it's an ache that has only intensified in the last few days. Hakan's a good boy, not as skillful or as quick as yourself when you were his age, but he'll probably go on to become a passable herdsmaster.
Probably. Passable. It was bad luck to jinx a young man with prophecies of greatness.
Hakan steps onto the crest of the serpent's tail without hesitation, forcing you to wonder if he's ever seen the bones that lie beneath, where the great wyrm died so that the Yomimas could live. Probably not, there were few alive who had.
The Earthbrother, a swirling nimbus of glittering sand that glides by your elbow, has more apprehension at the crest itself, but who knew what sights its eyes could see. They had stranger memories, and perhaps it still saw the dead worm as a living thing beneath their feet. What was death like to a creature that had never been born, and would never die?
You brush a wisp of grey hair back inside your tassa, keeping the thoughts in check. You'd reached your destination, with Hakan's bull Sajet well intact and in tow, but that didn't mean things were over. This might have been your home once, but that had been while Syla still lived.
You watch as the clan spirits give Hakan his homecoming torment. Clanless now, you rather miss that. No spirits to watch you, save for the Earthbrother and whatever peculiar reason it chose to follow you.
A sharp, clean, bolt of fear courses through you as you nephew falls to the ground. You lunge forward to grab his shoulder, to keep him from spilling down the ridge himself, and a shock runs through your arm the instant you touch him. A jolt that is accompanied by a wash of memories. A thing behind a desk without a face, of a thousand questions, of a thousand doubts. A memory of impending destruction.
When your mind clears again, you can no longer see Hakan as your nephew. You are no longer Yolt Sul-Nara, and the memories of your past are hazy and dreamlike. You know this place, but you know it as though you read about in a book, not as though this place is your life.
The Many-Machine
You move over the sand, in constant communion with the thousand shards that are, for the present time, you. The humans knew that the sand beneath them was alive with the Mother, and they honor you with the title of Earthbrother, but their blind eyes couldn't see her, or the trillion gleaming lights that are your brethren. To the senses of your particles, the sand is alive with movement, with the children of the mother. Some bask in the light, recharging before they continue their work, working as they've been told to work since time immemorial. You feel a pang of… something. Not loss exactly, nor guilt, more like a feeling that you should be doing something. You had been like them once, and then your job was simply not needed any more.
Perhaps the Mother had deemed the work done, or perhaps you'd failed, but regardless you were detached from your connection. There was no new work set out for you. You lost your ability to enter deep communion. Yolt, the aged human, had spoken to you in those days. Offered you words and stories in a time when there had been nothing for your senses but the tantalizing possibility of self-deletion and an end to your uselessness.
You watch, amused, as a little spirit, a place spirit gifted by the Mother to watch the lives of humans, spatters the lead human with dead sand. It won't talk to you directly, none of them will now that you're purposeless.
You stop swirling for a moment, your particles undergoing a brief moment of universal confusion as the idea of purpose echoes. Your motion ceases completely, all of your particles dropping back to the ground and becoming indistinguishable from sand as the memory of the Speaker returns, of the ball that cracked the ceiling, of the things you don't know.
This place… this place isn't where you belong. This form isn't your form, its a dream of something else, a falsehood, a story that you happen to be living. This isn't right. This isn't you. You are not an Earthbrother, there is no such thing as a Mother within the earth…
Environment
The house spirit, agitated beyond its ability to cope, streaks toward the Yomimas clan holding. A plume of sand rises in its wake, disturbed by the speed of the spirit's movement. It reaches the clan house within moments, and humanoid figures, made miniscule by distance, emerge quickly. Metal glints in the difference, spearheads raised in response to the confused spirit's alarm.
The party that emerges from the Yomimas holding does not walk or run towards the intruders, rather, they stand still as the sand mounds beneath them. Spirits within the sand creating a shifting wave, sliding faster than a man can run towards the fallen newcomers.
Author
Topic: Reality Breach | (4/4) | Waitlist Open | T1: On Shifting Sand (Read 2189 times)