"What is carved in rock remains, not subject to age or forgetfulness. The Shaper depicts the Star Children's history and the band's memory to pass on to the younglings. Using rock to shape rock is a difficult thing, requiring strength, skill, and vision."
--Fable of the Shapers.
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Waves of heat from her made the air ripple before Rae wrestled her revulsion under control. The same reflex sheared a boulder in two, and half of it tumbled from the mound where she stood with a clatter. The diseased wilderbeast was disgusting, but she needed to study it before destroying it. Changing back to her humanoid form, she accessed her visor, ordering her drones to film it from every conceivable angle. The no-seeum sampler drones headed for it before a scanner caught a cloud of particles coming off the creature, and she pulled them back. It staggered forward another step, and she put up a wall of force to contain it.
She set down on this world knowing there was some kind of sickness here, and she came prepared to find and study it. The data from the plague beacon mentioned skin growths and tissue degradation, so she suspected this was an infected victim. Casting her perception back to her camp, she summoned a case where she kept the infectious tissue containers and surgical supplies. Her tiny sampler drones worked by snipping bits of tissue and banking them into analyzers, but they had a limited use span. Rae had to continuously replace them, as they couldn't be repaired with what she had on hand. Flagging the group of samplers closest to being scrapped, she sent the rest back to camp.
She undressed and apportated her clothes to the dig, as there was no sense getting something potentially infectious on them and having to burn them. The no-seeums were the only things she kept that could not withstand great heat to cleanse them. None of the ones she used today would survive. The analyzing containers were more advanced than she'd be able to manufacture here for decades. Each miniature lab provided the best environmental factors to preserve or culture the samples sealed within. She started by sending in a few drones to chase the airborne particles emitted from the subject and fly through the ropes of saliva. An ear twitched on the animal as the drones buzzed around it, then its sides heaved convulsively.
The samplers deposited their loads to several containers before she slagged them to bits of molten metal and glass. The wilder splayed its legs and dipped its gaping jaws in the streamlet. Rae expected it to drink, but it just held its gaping maw in the water, still drooling. One of the camera drones recording its heat-map caught a wave of coolness traveling in a wave from the head to the rest of the body. Penetrating scans detected an unusual capillary system transmitting the liquid directly instead of swallowing it into the stomach.
The following samplers took bits of hair and skin, as well as hoof and horn. The subject's mangy coat shivered as if to ward them off. Again, Rae destroyed the drones after the samples were sealed away. The next set of tissues she wanted could only come from inside the animal, so she entered the telekinetic enclosure with the case and her tools. As she approached, the wilder's head came up, and it clumsily tried to gore her, but she grabbed the horn nearest to her and used it to keep it at arm's length. Legs scrambled as it tossed its head, still trying to reach her. The rotten odor closed in on her, and she pushed a little harder to keep it back. The animal suddenly crashed to the ground as the horn broke in her hand, showing a porous and irregular cross-section.
Ignoring its efforts to rise, Rae opened her tool kit and took out a steel stylus and a digital caliper. Turning the chunk in her hand to an unfractured side, she pushed the stylus into the horn, easily penetrating with a crunching sound. The caliper measured the tensile strength of the horn, her visor showing the material was unusually brittle and chalky. The wilder thrashed spastically, wheezing. It convulsed again, hacking up a withered mass that her visor told her was leathery lung tissue. She put part of the horn chunk in one analyzer then used the stylus to put the slimy piece of lung in another. She expected blood to color its spittle, but instead of turning red, it went milky, with only a trace of pink.
She reached out with her empathy to see if it was suffering and was taken aback. There was nothing. No sensations, no thoughts, only primal thirst, and mild aggression. She grabbed the good horn and stared into its remaining eye. Nothing... there was nothing there at all. Deliberately, she also took hold of what was left of the broken horn and with a sharp motion, broke its neck, almost tearing off its head. The scrabbling rear legs stopped, but it kept on wheezing. Whatever life it once had faded slowly, something else still animated it. She took out her scalpels and started butchering while it kept twitching...
Hours later, she had her scans and samples. She heated her tools and the case to sterilize them before sending them back. Rae increased her emitted heat to catch the nearby grass on fire and stoked it hotter while containing the blaze within her force wall. She consigned all inside to the flames, ensuring that the subject animal was turned to ashes. A pervasive fungus had colonized the wilder, keeping it upright and moving while devouring it from the inside out. The animal was literally rotting where it stood, like some kind of fungal zombie. When the patch of grassland was thoroughly charred and no sparks remained, she drew her heat back and translocated to Monkey. She needed a dip in the volcano after all that.
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It took several phase Changes to pass before Rae exhausted the experiments he could do with the wilder's samples. After typing 'zombie fungi' one too many times, he'd coined 'zomgi' as a name for the condition. A thorough search of his database revealed he'd already cataloged the source. The spores of the small purple mushrooms that grew by the river were nearly identical to the particles shed by the infected animal. Their purple glow at night matched the faint light he saw in the wilder's eye. The manner of transmission still eluded him.
Exposing small mammals to the spores, he documented the stages of the sickness. The condition was difficult to identify until fatal, and not much of the animal's original tissues remained. Before that, the skin fibroids first showed up as scattered pustules, and as they grew, the natural epidermis gradually paled to a dead grey. When detected early, the condition might be treatable with antibiotics. But as he searched for the causes and effects, another missing piece of the research puzzle was the germination of the spores. Once, he managed to get the mushrooms to grow, but didn't know how and he couldn't reproduce the result. There was some trigger in the wild environment that made them sprout, but he had yet to find what it was.
He now had three journals; one collected his thoughts about the disease, another documented Gryphon's training regime. The last one was for his 'issues.' In this journal, he looked back at the second entry on Jon Giles, and he remembered his confusion about the human with a nascent Qard aura.
> The Crysfire Gem couldn't, or wouldn't tell him how it happened, so Rae asked his parents. They told him Rae wasn't their firstborn. There was an elder sibling born a few years before. Something went amiss on Tellus when they tried to teach Jonai how to acclimate to an earthlike environment. A Qard could transform to hide such things as their extra fingers and metallic teeth, something Rae often did.
>
> Infant Jonai did this without prompting, but the baby screamed when they took him back to their native environment bubble. He seemed 'stuck' in human mode, unable to revert to Qard normal. Danel and Perin were heartbroken. They had chosen the opposite roles for this child, and Danel had given birth to Jonai but could not hold the child in his proper form. Raising him as a human would deny what they were, and it got worse when the boy matured at human rates.
>
> Effectively, he was human, with all that implied, like mortality. Their parents could not bear to watch him grow, then wither and rot. They found adopted parents for Jon on Tellus with a moderately well-off couple whose business was in technology. He would have a good life while they returned to Terra and tried again. Things worked out for them with Rae, their second child.
>
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> Rae was overjoyed; there were four Qard in the universe, not three. Except Jon didn't really count, Perin explained. He could never reproduce like a Qard, and in the half-century that it would take Rae to finish growing up, his brother would become old and start to decline. They hadn't told Rae to spare him the pain of watching his sibling die a final death.
>
> Jon didn't even have a proper bier in the Qardos Catacombs, just a stretch of wall near Rae's niche in the fifth circle with his birth name on it, Jonai Starn. Rae refused to give up on his sib. There must be an answer somewhere, but what Jon needed was enough of a lifetime to see it. So Rae researched a course of treatments to give him long life. It seemed Immortality had its own pitfalls. A quarter to a third of the mortals Rae granted it to eventually committed suicide, or asked him to take it away so they would once more grow old and die, which amounted to the same thing.
The words [Bucket List] were marked with a box drawn in thick, angry lines. It was a theory he had about the unacceptably high rate of loss of those she wanted to keep near. That would also be an entry, or maybe a rant.
> Jon and his wife Leyana took well to the treatment, settling into a stable condition. Later, Jon asked why he'd done it for them. Rae told Jon what he really was and that he'd find a way to restore him. His sib cocked his head and said, what if that wasn't what he wanted? It seemed to him that being a Qard came with even worse setbacks than being an Immortal. Jon had a spouse and a family. And no offense, but that didn't seem to be in the cards for Rae.
>
> The bitter truth of his words cut deeply, because it did hurt to see Jon have what Rae wanted so badly. But Rae was a Qard, and to go Jon's path would be to give up on the future of the race. It would betray the oath to serve the Light he took when he was made an adult, and the Chief's vow to put the welfare of the race before his own.
>
> Rae wanted a family as a Qard, and he still had no idea how that might happen. His parents planned no future children, and Rae burned with an impossible duty to save his people. He wondered how Jon was translated to be carbon-based and still be recognized by the Gem, and whether his human children would also have nascent auras.
With a sigh, he saved the page. Honestly, it never occurred to him that Jon wouldn't want to return to what he'd been born as. But he couldn't blame Jon for his choice, as given the same circumstances, Rae would've done the same. Jon's condition established an equivalency between Qards and humanity that would prove crucial later when Rae learned to make it work in the other direction. It was hard to relate to those old worries. Rae had made things work out in the end, more or less, so why should he still care?
So what if Jon was still a carbon-based Immortal all these centuries later? Why bother going through this old news? It wasn't like it mattered. Rae frowned and shook his head. There was something wrong with his train of thought… Shadow! Stop it! It was getting better at sounding like his inner voice, but when it contradicted his natural impulse to never quit, it gave itself away. He rubbed his pounding head as he tried to mentally push back against Shadow's influence but couldn't tell if he succeeded. Rae couldn't get a handle on psychic duels with a presence he shared a brain with.
He stomped out of the dig to get some sun and stopped still. Shambling towards Rae on the dark granite stones was a zombie gryphon. It was a grotesque combination of traditional zombie characteristics with the local zomgi victims. He sighed, unimpressed. "What am I, a child? Go show your boogeyman to someone else." It wasn't even a clever illusion, as it only showed up after he encountered the dying wilderbeast.
Sticking out his chin, he walked towards the image. They usually disappeared when he made physical contact. The hideous visage raised a talon to ward him off as he tried to walk through. Rae was knocked to the ground with a brusque shove by the real Gryphon that the illusion concealed. '...ae? Can you hear me, child?'
"Oh," he said, getting up. "Sorry about that. Shadow put one of those illusions over you, and I didn't think you were real."
Gryphon cocked his head, 'You couldn't hear me either, until I had to push you off. It's trying to be clever, but that was never one of its strengths.'
Rae sat on one of the pathway walls. "Tell me what you know about it."
Gryphon looked down. 'It is not a Qard, but its history is tangled up with our people. We didn't understand its evil until it had already struck a cruel blow against us. I… was instrumental in making it a ghost. But that didn't end its villainy.'
"I suppose you're here to put me through more training," Rae said tiredly.
'You don't seem enthusiastic today.'
Rae sighed. "That's because I'm not. I've been getting stronger, but so has Shadow. It's like all I've been doing is making myself a better vessel for it. What's the point?"
Gryphon moved in front of him, looking Rae closely in the eye. 'You are correct, to a point. What you don't realize is that Shadow has a fixed upper limit. Once you reach that point, it will lag behind you in raw strength. You can go much further, hopefully far enough to destroy it for good. It won't be easy for you, and it will depend on your willingness to stretch your own limits.'
"What, really?" Rae said.
Gryphon lifted his blue gaze to the distant sky. 'As we were made by the Light, Shadow was made by the Dark to torment and destroy us. Since the Dark, by definition, is not a creator, it chose a member of our kind to copy and corrupt. Shadow cannot progress beyond the best that the copied individual could achieve. Your purpose now should be to reach and exceed that best.' Gryphon turned back to Rae. 'Once you have done so, you will be taught techniques to combat Shadow's greater experience. That is how you will win.'
Rae covered his face with his hands and took a deep breath, then slapped his knees and bounced to his feet. "Let's do this."
Gryphon sent him on a set of exercises, occasionally adding new wrinkles, like random psychic attacks during the plateau run. When he finished, he reported in, wondering what would be next. His teacher sat upright, shrouded by his wings, his eyes twinkling. 'Next, we will play tag. You will pursue me in the air, with telekinesis or levitation. You may not teleport yourself or the item you must touch to win. I will also be using teke and psi blasts for defense.'
Rae nodded. "What do I have to tag?" The dark wings slowly peeled back, revealing Gryphon holding something indistinct against his feathered breast. He turned his wrist and held it out for Rae to see. It was floppy, mottled, and gray, with orange stones gleaming in the light. "Aggie! Give him back!"
Gryphon hunched his head between his shoulders and spread his wings as he drew the plushy back. 'Come and take him.' He launched with a downward wind buffet, beating his wings to climb steeply. Growling, Rae took off after him. He wasn't as natural in the air as the totem, but damned if he was sleeping without his toy tonight...
After a strenuous chase, he claimed his prize and assured himself Aggie was unharmed before he fell asleep, holding him closely.
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Rae found himself back at Edomere, walking to the dens unafraid of their reactions. It was hushed and still, with a stale odor in the air. Maybe the felids had moved on? Stooping, he peered into a den, turning on his visor light. There were lumps in the back and a smell of rot. Covering his mouth, he turned on the magnification view to see cat skeletons visible under ragged, dusty hides.
Backing up, he heard a wheezing sound near the river. A dull-colored felid swayed, drooling into the waters. It was a smallish cat, splay-legged from the fibroids. Sensing him, it turned its head, the once orange eyes turning muddy brown from the purple light within. It glared at him, silently blaming him for not finding a way to treat the plague. Step by step, it advanced, and Rae retreated until he heard growls behind him. Glancing back, he saw more zomgi felids, preparing to pounce…
He woke with a start, and found sleep far from him for the rest of the night.