“Don’t speak of the fifteenth age, for mistakes can teach where regret only hinders.”
-Bequastish adage
Ktsn Wdondf Daephod snapped awake like the closing of a rugfos trap. She was comforted at first, relishing the feeling of her bed against her legs.
Then her eyes widened when she remembered the circumstances that had led to her unconsciousness.
Broken bones.
The farmer darted a look around her cabin, and saw absolutely nothing different about most of her home. One notable exception came in the form of the human figure on the ground by her door. Eihks’s head drooped, elbows on his simple knees, and his legs seemed to be doing that same knotlike under-over thing his arms had done earlier. It was the kind of posture she might have taken a hundred times as a child before realizing it was the opposite of comfortable. He didn’t move even when she rose, and stepped back, and loaded her sling with a particularly heavy stone she remembered collecting four days prior at the brook.
She took a careful step closer once she realized he wasn’t going to leap up and throttle her. She still felt uneasy, though.
Ktsn wasn’t completely and totally sure that he’d personally brought her back into her house after she’d collapsed, but she was absolutely certain that he’d removed his head, using her pickax, and remained conversant afterward. Maybe humans were like some of the field pests that lived for quite a while without some parts of their bodies? Or maybe they didn’t actually require their heads at all in the way that her own people did?
That was beside the point, of course; not a trace of scar or blemish was on the straight pale neck. She distinctly remembered the off-color vista she’d seen when her pickax’s blade got to the center of his being, and revealed some of his inner workings and tissues.
Now that she thought about it, she realized, he hadn’t bled a bit. Or maybe he had, and it only started after she fell, senseless. Still, it didn’t explain how he could have grafted his head back on without so much as a trace.
Either biology, or something far more fundamental, was different about the world she now occupied compared to that very morning.
Then her unease shifted in a slightly different direction, as it signified that the biped wasn’t breathing.
“Hmm?
The head of the human went upright, and she tensed as his legs drove him to towering above her. Two eyes, glancing at her, moving over the rest of her house, jittery with whizzing whirls and hardly staying on any one thing for more than a tenth of a heartbeat.
“Welcome back to the world of the waking,” he said, when they both settled on her once again. She really couldn’t shake the sense of wrong, having a person look at her with two eyes while speaking. There was the occasion when watching a play, when she had the opportunity to see an intelligent and bright soul put together a stage with mirrored walls. Allowing both the eye facing the audience and the farther eye to be seen was the objective, yes, but that was for dramatic effect. When you exercised that irony, you were quite deliberately subverting the basic fundamental principle that when looking at something straight-on, one eye was always hidden.
“Are you alright?” asked the human, arms crossing.
“No,” Ktsn answered.
She sat down, haunches flexing.
“Well, take your time.”
“You are not like what I expected a human to be,” she said, without having meant to say it.
“Ah? Yes… about that. Earlier, you alluded to my not being the first of my kind you’ve encountered. I’ve got to ask, under the circumstances, where that might’ve happened.”
He stepped back, his head nearly brushing against her ceiling, and his neck quirked.
“You have to understand that that’s a bit concerning, for several reasons.”
He stopped, and Ktsn suspected that the way his mouth moved, and his teeth showed, were not meant to be the same strange positive-attitude manifestation she had seen in her encounter with Thomas.
Internally she resigned herself to the ridicule she somehow knew was forthcoming, and replied, “I saw one in a dream last night.”
“A dream?”
Tone of voice meant little to her, especially given his other eccentricities, when coming from her uninvited houseguest. Nevertheless, he started making a rolling gesture with one hand, that she watched with flummoxed curiosity until he said, “Apologies, that means ‘continue.’ I’m listening.”
“There was a dream that I had, in which I was supposed to tell you… ah. I am going to help you, and you are going to help me, it seems.”
“Another human was going to help you?” asked Eihks, and his voice went softer than the coat of a baby rugfos.
“No. I was told… I suppose, to keep a watch for you. Eihks Richard. Your name, specifically.”
All the little twitches, tics, small spasms of unnameable muscles, everything flew away and left the human a bipedal statue.
“Ooooooohhhh?”
Unless she was mistaken, that was the sound of disbelief, or at least skeptical confusion.
“You were supposed to be… someone with ‘good intentions,’ and… who is sick, and who apparently wants to find a compatriot or partner, or something.” At his violently catalyzing face, she hurriedly added, “I am just saying what Thomas told me.”
“... Thomas?”
“Thomas the Librarian, he called himself,” she half-snarled, getting ready to walk away in a huff. HE was the one who’d asked, and she was approaching her capacity for frustration.
“Thomas!?”
She couldn’t have possibly predicted the man’s level of upset. Eihks literally fell to the ground, mouth gaping, eyes getting wider and wider. Three times he started to make sounds, speech stillborn, before he finally asked, “Are you sure that was his name?”
Dumbfounded, she clapped an affirmation.
“He said he was… a Being of Old, unless memory fails me,” she muttered.
Blinking furiously, Eihks grabbed something from… somewhere on his person. Brandishing the thing hidden in his grasp, he pointed at her table, looking between her and the place he indicated on the flat surface.
“Did he look like this?” he asked, before an image conjured on the tabletop like a portrait done in light instead of paint. It was precisely the same manifestation that she’d seen with the pohostinlat back in the village. Carving itself out of the air in knife-edge swaths and filling the whole scene with vivid unreal colors, the picture showed a sunset against the foreground of an unknown locale. Even closer in the foreground, a colossus of a statue defied the dictate of gravity. The image it captured was that of a human holding a slate in one hand and a quill or stylus in the other. The figure stood tall, and staring ahead with only one eye open. A strange glow vomited forth from the bared orb, fuchsia and indigo wrestling each other with bladed fury.
Even stylized in the essence of stone, Ktsn couldn’t fail to recognize her supernatural visitor.
“That is him,” she affirmed.
Eihks stepped away, hands knotted, and said something likely vociferous in a language she couldn’t understand. He tromped around the room for a few heartbeats, looking like a ledhuk that was about to start kicking things, before he clasped his palms together and came to a standstill.
“This’ll be more interesting than I’d anticipated,” he growled in a low, dental register.
“Is there a problem?”
“Not as such. Or rather, this is the sort of problem I don’t even know where to begin finding a solution.”
He blew a sudden burst of air through his downturned nostrils, and they expanded.
“Tell me everything you remember about this dream,” he said.
Something about the way he said it, perfectly deadly serious, was just hilarious. Ktsn, despite the very real sense that he was on the cusp of some incredibly grave territory, couldn’t help but rattle her claws at him.
“Well. He asked if I was interested in having adventures. He gave me a carpet and pillows for a seat, before we began talking. He told me to not be alarmed when he appeared. Actually, the whole thing felt like a memory from somebody else, in a way; dead emotions and distance.”
She paused a moment again, considering.
“He told me that he would give me a gift, but that he would not - or perhaps could not - say what it was.”
“A gift?”
Oh, dear.
The tall creature almost slithered over, leaving space between them yet exuding his presence so heavily that it was like a violation of her personal space. He still did not breathe that she could see - assuming that one could normally see one of his kind breathing - and yet he was almost vibrating.
“What, precisely, did he tell you about that? As specific as you can get.”
She wracked her brain.
“I was in a bit of a daze for this whole dream-thing - and I have been more than passingly disturbed for most of the time since - so forgive me if this is not precisely perfect. He said that he needed to give it to me, and that… telling me about it would be problematic in some fashion. It would malfunction in some way.”
“The Way preserve us,” Eihks murmured. “A run-in with an Old. This is exactly what we needed. No, no; it’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known. It’s just…”
His eyes closed, and he began rocking back and forth. It gradually accelerated and gentled to a thin vibratory blurring.
“What was it that was giving you consternation earlier?” Ktsn found herself asking the shivering figure. “Something was upsetting you - or am I wrong about that?”
Eihks dropped down to her floor again, silent except for the rustle of his clothing. He sat there, unmoving, until she was certain he’d fallen asleep. Eventually, just as she was about to repeat her inquiry, he replied in a faraway manner.
“Let me tell you a story.”
He shifted around on her floor, leaning back against the wall beside her spare pithoi, hands coming around to his front.
“Once, there was an interesting place occupied by an interesting people, which had interesting properties that were worth studying. A foreign nation took notice of that interesting people, their interesting home, and - inevitably - grew intrigued. Trying to generally be minimally invasive, those foreign nationals decided that yes, investigation was called for in this instance, and began making studies, taking notes, observing those curious properties that had fueled their intrigue. It turned out that the locale in question had an odd… architecture to it, if you will.”
He shifted again, head bent around in a curling serpentine crook as though for protection.
“These studies were eventually expanded, by slight degrees, to include more and more metric-gathering. It wasn’t long before the observers discovered the presence of several deities and deity-like entities in the environs being observed. Beings, according to the tongues of the locals, called things like Gegaunli and Do-Ag-Dr-Susup and Taralngegeshet. The foreigners’ scientific minds decided to delve into the matters of these strange beings, and in so doing drew attention to themselves that they had not bargained gaining.”
The dual fore-facing eyes flickered open, stabbing Ktsn.
“The simple truth of the matter was that they had the ability to curtail the activities of these entities, or at least exercise some caution that would keep the deities’ interactions from causing trouble. The foreigners decided that they could certainly do such things… but in their avarice for knowledge, procrastinated just a bit too long. Instead, the one called Gegaunli exerted her will, and turned some of the studious individuals into thralls. Not out of malice, as such. For that matter, we cannot say for absolute certain precisely what those individuals underwent, besides the fact that it wasn’t voluntary.”
Dipping a digit upward into the air, Eihks’s mouth ripped open briefly, showing those mixed sharp-and-blunt instruments of its toolkit.
“Sadly, that was not the end of it. ‘The just desserts of meddling are meddling and more meddling,’ as some of my countrymen say. So when the entity’s understandable desire to convert more believers to her cause led her other thralls to ‘spread the word,’ the thralls in question began creating disruptions in their organization. Some basic disturbances like trying to proselytize their colleagues, and some less basic disturbances like sabotaging some of their own work. One of the side effects of this chain of events was what we call a ‘type nine event.’ Specifically, an uncontrolled type nine event.”
Eihks stopped talking, then, his outstretched hand curled into a fist.
“You’ll learn about type nine events soon enough. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that an uncontrolled type nine event is close to the worst thing that could have possibly happened to the natives. It was with some contrition that the foreigners, once they’d managed to free their people from Gegaunli’s clutches, found that the situation had spiraled far out of the intended progression, and decided to do what needed to be done. They gathered up a planet and all its inhabitants, and uplifted them.”
A gritting sound followed, as his jaw worked his teeth together.
“Therein, you see, was justice served. In part. The natives could, theoretically, have been given reparations in the form of completely nullifying - as though having never happened - the preceding chain of events. Get set back to before any meddling minds started drawing Gegaunli’s attention. That might have happened, except that the necessary precautions hadn’t been observed. Those little missteps couldn’t be repaired. The next-best thing was for the perpetrators to make their misused victims part of their own elevated social clique; that, they did. But - and here’s the sticking point - although they implied their guilt and contrition by way of making that effort to remedy their victims’ misfortune, nowhere did those fateful foreigners explicitly admit to their folly being the sole root of the fiasco.”
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