CHAPTER 1 - Untitled Chapter

“Are you there?”

I think so. I feel myself standing, or at least upright. The rest is fuzzy. Legs move of their own accord, back and forth like treading water.

“Merion, can you hear me?”

I can. A familiar voice entering my dream. Soft, warm, and just a little nasally in that way most Welkandic accents are.

“Nym?” I say. Or I try to. The sound of it registers, but I don’t feel my mouth move to form the words.

I do, however, feel the intake of elated breath and the wag of a singular tail at the end of an unbranched spine. 

The vague shape of the space I now occupy, or perhaps spectate, begins to fill in. Well-furnished but small, with a large standing mirror taking up a corner. And there he is, outlined in whatever light makes it through the thinly curtained window. His hands are clasped together in front of his slender frame, and ears perk through an effortlessly just-woke-up-like-this kind of swept-back mane of silver fur. He stares into our reflection through corrective lenses on articulating tendrils extended from the back of his neck.

“Nym!” I emanate again, and I can feel him exert conscious effort to fight the impulse to form the name with his own broad tongue.

“Merion!” he returns. He’s jovial, but fidgets awkwardly. “I… don’t know what to do with my hands in this case. Should I just sit?” 

“Do what’s comfortable,” I encourage. “Where are we, anyway?”

“It’s a little apartment I maintain when I need the secrecy. It’s not so secret now though, Leonov showed up with company right here.” He turns, and our shared field of view whirls accordingly, vision landing on familiar company experiencing a range of bewilderment and amusement.

From left to right, a scarred-up yet serene hyena, missing limbs supplemented with self-made prosthetics, as augmented as a living body can support. A human with a sharp metal crest fixed at the base of a long braid; her comparatively simple attire matches that of the long-bodied aberration whose lap she sits on, minus the abundance of pocket flaps he sports. Now that I see his leather face again, the resemblance to Kesler is unmistakable, more like a lizard with the suggestion of skin his leather gives him than the odd bony visage of his designer. In order they are Dahlia, Jori, and Leonov: Yhana and Nym’s comrades and crewmates.

Finally, and most surprisingly, a Sarric black-furred jackal, her missing arm replaced by a trio of tendrils culminating in a hand. Kyra, Yhana’s cousin. No affiliation with Nym, rather she’s got such an intense disdain for authority it’s a marvel she’s even here. Even if Nym holds no authority himself, his relation to Jen, prince and admiral, makes him a symbol of it.

With all that observed, there’s not really anywhere else to sit, leaving him to pace the living room while the others watch.

“Sooo you’re actually receiving them?” Kyra asks.

Nym smirks, I feel the lopsided curl at the edge of his mouth like it was my own, involuntary but nonetheless welcome. An odd sensation, less like I’m a guest in his body, and more like I’ve inhabited him fully and he is puppeting me right back. “Merion, what’s something you know about Kyra I shouldn’t have any way to know?”

“Nah we’re not doing it like that,” Kyra asserts. Just as well; she’s a secretive person and what little I know already feels like too much. Instead, she offers her own solution. “I’ll pick. Who carried me when the sanctifiers helped escape the gas attack in the subway?”

Everyone looks at her with a blend of sympathy and horror. It’s a good pick though, she definitely hasn’t mentioned it yet. And it’s not like I could forget that day.

Nym echoes my answer, those prickly feelings only getting pricklier in his head. “Nobody. They made you run.”

She crosses her arms, metal twining around flesh. “Okay. Next question.” The relaxed posture she had just taken on breaks as she stands, grabbing Nym by the scruff and glaring into his eyes. “Where the fuck is my cousin?”

“Kyra, take it easy,” Dahlia speaks up. She’s not the closest, but she reads accurately that Jori is too taken aback to seize the moment. As the hyena reaches out, Kyra’s metal hand crosses behind her back, its extended reach allowing it to strike like a snake at the offered hand.

“Don’t fucking tell me to take it easy,” she spits. “Isn’t she your friend too?”

“She’s here!” Nym blurts. “I mean there. Next to me- to Merion.”

“I wanna talk,” she insists.

Fuuuuuuuck. That’ll be hard to facilitate in my sleep.

“Shall I be waking you up?”

Nym’s ears flick as our new ally inserts himself into the conversation. “Kesler, I presume?” he asks.

“Hey.” Kyra’s softer hand forcefully pats the side of Nym’s face a few times. “Don’t ignore me.”

“Kyra, please sit?” Jori asks.

The jackal glares at her. “Why’d you bring me here with this—” she gesticulates convulsively at Nym, “—this yuppie fucking… GILFtwink if I wasn’t going to get anything out of it?”

“GILFtwink?…” Nym murmurs incredulously.

“Yeah, now, Kesler?” I implore.

Jori raises her voice to match Kyra, it’s the first time I’ve ever heard her come even close to shouting. “I didn’t know Leonov had a mission, I didn’t know where he got up to wander to, and it seemed better than leaving you in my apartment on your own, and don’t you dare talk about my friend like that!”

Kyra croaks out a cold, joyless laugh. “Oh, like I asked any of you for support.”

“Well excuse us for caring!” Jori erupts. Leonov gets to his feet, hoisting his companion to eye-level with the angry morph.

“Both of you, sit down!” Dahlia bellows, grabbing Kyra and Leonov by the shoulders and forcing them back onto the sofa harshly enough to stir up the scent of dust and disuse from its cushions. She turns her full attention to Kyra, teeth bared. “You have a problem—”

“Sweet of you to notice.”

“—but it’s an explanation, not an excuse! Take some damn responsibility and manage yourself without taking it out on us.”

“Now, Kesler?!” Nym reiterates for us. He’s turned away, slightly parting the curtains to look out the taped-up window onto the marginally less stressful scene of another riot beginning to surge down the street, powder from the last one still piled on the sill outside. I guess things are going badly back home too, it’s the same kind of scene Yhana and I departed from.

I study its afterimage for several moments before realizing I’m conscious, tiny electric lights in the peripheral vision breaking the perfect darkness which had been the canvas for Nym’s projected experience. I stir, finding the reflective lenses of Kesler’s eyes right beside me in an initially haunting sight I have yet to acclimate to.

I’m about to ask if I lost the connection when it comes rushing back into my head, like a vivid daydream over which I have no control. Hardly anybody has control of it for that matter; Nym is on the floor, Leonov’s spikes are extended, Jori is doing her best to soothe him, Kyra is halfway to pouncing Nym but she’s suspended, monochrome in the air and in time, as Dahlia circles between her and Kyra, her scars aglow with a fluxreader’s stellar blue radiance. Those not frozen right now start to compose themselves, and I stop paying attention to it for the moment. It’ll do for now, it should give me time to rouse Yhana.

As I start to lean up to do so, I note the weight on my chest. Switching vision modes, I find her right there; she must have tipped over in the middle of the night and gotten cozy. A little too cozy even, she’s drooling all over my chest, but it’s not like I haven’t been coated head to toe in the stuff and worse enough times to call it anything less than routine at this point. I gently nudge a shoulder a few times until she begins to wake, a stretching arm grabbing my snout in half-slumber and tipping my head all the way back by the time I can shake her off.

“Too early, no…” she drowsily protests.

“Yhana, I’ve got Kyra on the other end and she’s…” Let’s be polite about this, there’s no need to add to the already unmanageable agitation that discolors this whole thing. “…she really really needs to hear from you.”

“Oh shit, really?” Yhana asks, giving into a yawn. “How’s this work?” She grabs my jaws, parting them to the sound of my flummoxed gurgle. “Hello?”

My eyes shift over to Kesler in a plaintive stare. I reach out to paw at him for help, feeling the coarse curls of his fur rise and fall in a little shrug. 

“You must be telling them what you want to be saying,” Kesler explains. “Or, I can be giving you a small dose, to be lasting a few minutes.” He reaches for a cart with a tube monitor on it, wheeling it over and handing me a pair of clamps. “Be affixing these.”

“To what??” I ask.

Yhana is moving right along though. “I can get my own dose, but thank you,” she insists. She presses my mouth closed again. “Lips together and blow, okay?”

My eyes momentarily widen; I’ll do it but isn’t this a little bit forward? A second later, my uncertainty melts onto her tongue as she instead slips her jaws right over my whole snout to take a nice, deep drag of my misty breath.

My attention does not, and perhaps cannot split evenly, but as it snaps back to the other side of our transmission, Nym is instinctively wiping at his muzzle, trying to force away the disagreeable ghost of morning breath. He brightens up immediately though, at the sound of Yhana’s voice, though it overlays threefold in her mind, and the ears of both Kesler and myself to the point of unintelligibility. While she figures it out, I feed the clamps down the back of my light jacket and secure them to the rim of one of the plates on my spinal apparatus.

“You are not needing to be saying it with your mouth,” Kesler projects. “Just be thinking about it with some deliberation.”

“Right right right,” she triplicates, before settling into totally mental conversation, joining the experience, though hers must be a little fuzzier with the less concentrated dose she inhaled from me. “…Did someone freeze Kyra?”

“She’d really like you to say something,” Nym transmits, unable even this way to hide how frazzled he actually is.

“Tell her cousin Kriias is a jackass!” she offers.

“Uhh right,” he responds, then, picking himself up from his sprawl on the floor with an ungainliness I had once thought unique to newborn deer, says aloud to Dahlia, “Go ahead and let her go?”

Dahlia gladly does so, shoulders slouching as she releases Kyra, who hits the floor in position to pin someone no longer there.

“Fucking Lurrah, which one of you froze me?!” she demands, turning as she stands ready to fight.

“Cousin Kriias is a jackass, cousin Kriias is a jackass!” Nym spouts, hands up placatingly.

Kyra holds still for a few moments, and begins to chuckle, though as she storms toward the much-shorter fox with her shoulders squared, she exudes enough of an aura of terror to put Dahlia on guard again. She does not intervene this time, however, as Kyra grabs the sides of Nym’s head, more gently than she might have just seconds ago from her perspective.

“Yhana!” she says, her tone warm, even to the point she’s smiling a little. It lasts for all of two syllables, predictably, as her expression hardens once more, violet eyes glowering from beneath the edge of her hood. “What the shit are you thinking?”

“Don’t ‘what the shit’ me!” Nym parrots for Yhana, ears flattening in intense mortification at himself. Fortunately, Kyra does not immediately move to thrash him, though she snarls right in his face. Nym continues, “You disappear for weeks at a time without notice and I never get on you about it.”

“That’s me!” Kyra retorts. “You never pull something like this. You’re at sea, you’re at home, you’re back at sea, you’re at home again.” Nym sways in her skullgrip, before being pulled nose-to-nose, a position Kyra has to bend far down for. “But you always tell me when you’re leaving again! You never do this! Are you safe?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Yhana replies through Nym’s straining voice. “Everything is under control.”

Nym’s view, our shared view, momentarily shifts nervously to the other three in that room, whose earlier bewilderment has metamorphosed into visible discomfort, sharpening as Kyra shakes him a little. “When are you coming back?” she asks. “I mean fuck, I thought you might have died.”

“Actually I’d like to talk about that a little,” Nym says on his own behalf, wrestling himself out of Kyra’s hold and re-fluffing his cheeks.

“Yes, much to be discussing,” Kesler chimes in. Shifting back to his room, I watch him back off from the couch to rummage for something.

“One question?” Jori asks.

“What is it, Jori?” Nym invites.

“How did you know this would work?”

He’s suddenly regretting having opened himself up to this. “Just a hunch. …And a kiss.”

“Nym!” Dahlia’s tone is nearly a delighted squeal, as if she’d been hoping for that. If only she knew how much he was watering the true story down.

“How long did you go to even swap enough fluid??” Jori grins.

“Hey, can we get back on track?” Kyra pleads, anger creeping back into her voice as she sits down between the two others, reciprocating their glares.

Nym takes the opening. “Yes, yes, I don’t want to waste this dose. Merion, Yhana, how much was Samsara able to tell you before… before she…” Nym can’t even finish the thought. Even though he had continued aloud for the sake of his guests, there’s a fog between his mind and mine now, willfully manifested, where its conclusion should be. 

This silence carves space for itself, infectious and somber, shared by everyone in the room with him. Even Kyra, who was never Samsara’s comrade, seems to stifle herself in observance.

“We don’t know anything,” I reply, only after several moments. “Only that this is important.”

“Right. Well, I’m sorry to say it, but I must ask you again to participate in someone else’s scheme.”

“Nym!” Dahlia interjects again, this as sharp admonishment. Even with only half the conversation, it’s enough to put that scolding edge upon his name.

He gives her a guilty glance, and I can feel the hollow shape of his shame form in my chest as well. “If you are not willing,” he continues, “I take it you’ve met Elekse already. He’s from the Olewelawele fleet off the southwest coast, right between where you are now, and Directorate territory. He travels frequently. If it’s too much, you’ve got a way out right now.”

It’s true, I don’t particularly appreciate being led in the dark like this, but I was already willing to travel all this way like that. And I’m more inclined to trust Nym than his brother.

“What’s the scheme?” I ask, prompting Kesler to quietly clap in excitement. He quickly shifts back over to the monitor, unclamping me and shoveling it into the bag found in his clutter.

Nym’s relief almost sinks me even deeper into the armrest I’ve yet to remove myself from. “It’s about what we saw in the Archivists’ tower. And Suraokh.” Now that does interest me. Nym can feel it, so he proceeds. “Samsara had been investigating him and Jen for some time, and their connection to the Starfields where they found him. They think he’s one of them.”

It explains a lot about him. Or it would, I mean. And those threads, dry and ruby-red sinew, razor-sharp and writhing. Nym feels my realization, as well. Everyone in the link does.

“You think so too,” he says. He takes to pacing again. “It was too risky to discuss it under his nose, but he’s preoccupied with whatever Jen’s got him doing now. But, that’s all I know, so… Kesler?”

“Yes!” he exclaims, seamlessly picking up the rest. He wheels a cart with his collected things over my way, but doesn’t fuss with them in the moment. “The Starfields are containing high-security research facilities, but these are not being as interesting as the dig sites they are being concerned with. The way down is being dangerous, and even the island itself is being very monitored, but! Good things can be happening too. Yhana, your backpack?”

With a stretch, Yhana sits up, feeling around for it by the opposite armrest, opening it up and feeling around blindly through its contents. But there could only be one thing Kesler is interested in inside. She produces it, a muzzled helmet cast in brass or a similar-colored alloy, a pair of conical horns set horizontally opposed, like hollows for ears. There are no eyeholes, however, which made it impractical to wear at any point during our journey.

“May I?” Kesler asks aloud, taking it from her. “The original owner of this helmet had been known to simply…” his free pair of hands draw interlocking circles with one another, “…be showing up where a watchful eye should have been able to catch them? As if being sitting in the vigil’s blind spot.”

“Go on?” she prompts, forming a hypothesis of her own.

“The runework on this has been made intentionally bad,” he says as he thumbs over the inscriptions. “Anti-clairvoyant, nobody can be seeing you as long as you are being even nearby this, but it cannot be using the eluent from the sun Uayiol like most runes,” he explains.

“Hello?” Kyra interrupts, taking us back to the apartment. “There’s a whole lot of nothing happening.”

“I’ll fill you in later,” Nym says, waving dismissively, and we’re back in Kesler’s basement.

“It is needing all four casting frequencies,” Kesler continues, “and in great excess. Yhana would, in theory, be able to be recharging these, but the amount of energy it is needing is far surpassing what either you or Merion can be producing. But it is not spending it very quickly, either, it should be lasting you a little while longer. Maybe even long enough to be getting all the way to the Starfields undetected?”

“Sure sure, I’m hearing a lot of tenuous language here, but go on,” I prompt. “If it all turns out the way we’d like it to, what do we do when we’re there?”

“There is being a source,” Kesler replies. “You will be breaking into the secret beneath their secret, and you will be laying eyes on it. You have done something like this before, yes? Yes. You will be well suited to be doing this.”

My emotions speak for themselves, a simmering wave of something like shock, frustration, disbelief. Still, I speak too. “You… have seen how the Dominion handles its enemies, yes?”

“Are you not being one already? Since you already had been killing a vigilant,” Kesler points out. Even with their teeth on the outside, Jath’s lips are loose.

“You killed a vigilant?!” Nym asks, unable to keep himself from uttering it as a harsh whisper aloud.

“You killed a vigilant?” Kyra asks as well, though her tone indicates something like admiration.

“We killed a vigilant!” Yhana corrects, though her cousin is not privy to it.

“I— Accidentally!!” I sputter. “You made a big old stink about it afterward too...”

“I’ve started to warm on it; I guess you’re just a big old bad influence,” she says, ruffling my mane.

I have no articulate response, devolving into a little ball of static electricity and grumbling. I reach for a throw pillow and bury my face in it in a pointless endeavor to compose myself.

Yhana clears her throat, giving her full attention to Kesler. “So I agree if there’s a source, someone should probably do something about it. The one encounter I’ve had with those things shows me they’re a danger Paliputra isn’t ready for. However, there’s one more question you haven’t satisfied.”

“Yes?” he prompts with a tilt of his head.

“Why’s it have to be us?” she asks. “Clearly you’re well-connected. You don’t have anyone closer?”

“It is being exactly the way we are speaking now, is why,” he replies. “Merion is being a private, untraceable chatterer.” He turns to face me. “Between my talents and your sensory link, we are having the perfect spy. What you are seeing, I am also seeing.” Back to Yhana. “But they are becoming sick. I am not believing they could be accomplishing this on their own anymore, but you have been showing yourself to be very capable. Your dowser’s helmet is only making it even better. You will be my witnesses.”

“So, here’s the thing I’m still caught on,” I interject. “This is the Starfields, right? Home to probably the most-restricted sites on the planet?”

“There is being no probably,” he follows.

“Oh, cool, I was hyperbolizing but…” My fingers flex out of sync, trying to articulate an anxiety words fail to express. “You think we’re even going to be able to get inside?”

“Well yes.” His agreement comes across as a low, growling croon, even mentally; he couldn’t be happier getting to flex all the intricacies of his plan. “To be missing, and to be holding a thing Jen cannot be letting go of under any circumstances right there in your chest? If someone were to be returning this most vital runaway, well, they’d be letting you be walking right in, yes? Yes. Sneaky on the way, sneaky once you are being inside, but at the front door? Simply be knocking.”

Yhana’s starting to come around to it. I’m not sure if I am yet, but she transmits before I can. “I mean it could work. What are you getting out of this?”

He holds both pairs of arms out in a great, slow shrug. “What has anyone been able to be telling you? Are they being some kind of cryptid from right at home in the Ravel, or are they being aliens, from some far off place we are not knowing of but is knowing us? Why is there something bigger than intersystem war happening right under our feet and nobody of any authority is wishing us to be placing our ears to the ground to be hearing it be breathing?”

“And you just want to… look at it?” she presses.

“No, I want to be showing it,” he clarifies. 

“The images are dangerous,” I say. “Supposedly, anyway.”

“Captured images, yes,” Kesler corrects. “But you two, and Nym, have been seeing them with the naked eye. Coincidentally, this is the only way we can safely be showing. It is not by coincidence I am figuring out we can be using this link, in this way. Necroharmonic plasticity is my specialty. Samsara’s sanctifiers have placed relay points for me, runes to be extending a signal, in essence; very basic psychic announcement system. When you are seeing it, I will be seeing it, and I will be projecting through Nym who is already Iyakamraa, reaching the relays, and showing everyone in the most populated city in this world or any. And around Muan, of course. Jath is placing relays for me, when they can be bothered to. This secret will be secret no longer.”

He echoes what Suraokh had told me before, or rather, very conspicuously not told me. I’m on his hook, and yet… “We’d be taking a hell of a risk, Kesler,” I transmit.

His fingers tent, and he bows his head, giving the impression of a grin. “We are worried it will be nothing, hm? You are needing more incentive? What are you wanting?”

What do I want? A month ago, Jen’s carrot on a stick would have done just fine. Reunite me with my family. Get us set up far away from Paliputra. A promise he was never going to make good on, but for a time it kept me in line. Still…

“Find my family,” I say. “If they’re alive, take care of them like you took care of Samsara.”

“But not you?” he asks.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to solve my condition?”

“I would not be knowing, no,” he confirms, with a surprising flicker of shame.

“Mm, thought not. I’m not going to be safe anywhere as long as the Prelature wants me. And…” My shoulders heave with a heavy sigh. “…I’m tired of having so much decided for me without knowing the truth about it. Now, neither of you have clean hands in that regard,” I assert, my indication tangible in Kesler and Nym’s heads, “but I could actually learn something. So that’s good enough for me now, with the caveat I get to choose something later.”

“Agreed,” Kesler says. “Yhana?”

“Spaceship,” she transmits.

“Is that all?” he asks.

“What do you mean ‘is that all’, that’s something you can get?” Nym interjects.

“I will be contacting my network in Velhik to be beginning the process to be marking an Alefsef craft to be retired. Mistakenly. Once it has been moved off the records, who is knowing where it will be turning up?”

“And so, I am satisfied,” Yhana concedes.

“Are we all being satisfied, then?” Kesler asks.

“I have one other concern,” I add.

“So you do.” Kesler turns to me.

“I’m on the verge of falling apart. How do you want me to manage my coagulant schedule and stay in contact?”

“The coagulant is not fixing you, is it?”

“I don’t think so. It’s just slowing things down, it’s not strong enough.”

“You are dissolute enough already, it should be fine. We can be testing this tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I offer aloud. “I guess I’m satisfied too.”

“Hopeful, even!” Nym chimes in. “It’s starting to get a little fuzzy over here though, I think it might be wearing off?”

“Be taking a little bit every now and again to be checking in,” Kesler advises.

“Of course!” Nym affirms. He turns to his guests with a little shrug. “Wave goodbye everyone, we’ll do this again in a little while?”

“Travel safe!” Jori cheers, Leonov mirroring her wave.

By contrast, Dahlia is silent and nonchalant, raising her fist to thump her chest. And by contrast to her, Kyra is already getting out of her seat again.

The jackal runs up and grabs Nym again, speaking right into his face even as he yelps. “Get back here in one piece.”

“Stay safe, Kyra,” Yhana bids her, and it’s the last thing Nym can relay.

Kyra continues, but whatever she’s saying is already starting to distort and grow distant, like all senses succumbing to tunnel vision that closes into a soft oblivion.

“Well, I guess that’s settled?” I shrug.

Kesler stands. “So it will be. Let’s be getting you ready for the road.”