"That which creeps along the ground, eaters of litter and possessing too many legs, are not fit prey for the Children. Among them are animals not large enough to be proper meals. They are burrowers of the ground and undergrowth who feed on the creepers even smaller than they. Only the young hunt those, for only they can be satisfied by their meat."
--Fable of the Creepers.
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Hundreds of golden tendrils caught Rae up and carried her into the dig. He laid her gently down on her bed, as he must have done the last time he visited her. Tendrils continued to pass over her wounds, finishing her healing. "Wha… what is your excuse… for being here… this time…?" she rasped.
Krueger spoke softly. 'I was told to visit you when you need healing. I can be here physically, unlike the projection of your teacher.' He shrugged his tendrils, 'At least as physical as an energy being can get.'
Her forearms bore new thin scars, and her hands crusted with dull grey blood. They began to tremble as she stared at them, the twitching traveling up her arms to her torso as she broke into full-body shudders. Her emotions spiraled out of control, and she wrapped her arms around herself tightly, but she still felt herself shaking apart. Rae lurched over to the golden felid's form with a groan and clung to him convulsively.
She lost herself to wild sobbing while pressed against the silky fur, feeling a forepaw and many tendrils wrap securely around her to hold her close. She didn't know how long it lasted, but when she began to quiet, she heard Krueger say, 'I can only come to you here one more time.' She nodded roughly into his neck, then felt her consciousness dim as she slipped into a dazed state. She let him go, and he faded away. She stared off vacantly, already missing his companionship.
'Rae,' came a soft voice. She lifted her eyes to see Gryphon standing at the dig entrance.
She held out a hand to him, 'Gryph…' He approached her, settling near her bed and opening his wings wide. She moved to swing her legs over the side and leaned against his dark feathered breast. He closed his wings around her as her arms embraced him. Her tears were quiet this time, pulled painfully from the depths of her soul. 'I wanted to believe you were exaggerating. You weren't.'
'No, that was only the truth. But Shadow won't be able to manifest for a while; you're too drained.' He craned his neck to smooth down her hair with the sides of his beak.
'I don't know if I can do this,' she thought to him. 'I dread his return.'
'Don't be discouraged, child. Believe in your potential, as I do.' She sighed and shook her head, her self-confidence shaken. 'You can be so much stronger if you train diligently. There will come a time when Shadow won't be able to claim the whole of its half of your energies because of its limitations, and then it will be you tapping the unutilized potential and your own.'
Rae had her doubts but kept them to herself as she buried her face in his feathers. She jerked awake sometime later as one of her hands fell limply from her hold on him. Gryphon opened his wings and gently pushed her back. 'You should sleep now,' he said.
Yawning, she nodded, heavy with weariness. She crawled under the heavy fur on her bed. Gryphon retrieved Aggie from where the plushy had been flung across the room and gave it to her. Hardly had she put her head down when sleep claimed her.
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The Gryphon totem watched Rae as she slept. Her suffering was difficult to bear, but he had restrained the fell creature that she called Shadow for billions of years. He had long desired to Embrace the Wind and finally be at rest, but until now, he was the only one who could hold it back. Finally, his successor was strong enough to take up the burden once she finished reaching her potential. She was still little more than a child in his eyes, but she was learning quickly.
His predecessor looked in from the entrance. Preferentially feminine, her totem was that of a great silver eagle with a brass beak and talons. The edges of her wing and tail feathers were trimmed in deep blue, and her eyes were amethyst. 'I fail to understand why she allowed that. She didn't seem to enjoy it…?'
'She grew up among a young species of dimorphic monosexuals, and sexual violence often happens among them. In our society, matta, adults don't have such profound physical and psychic imbalances.' He left Rae's side to join the eagle's projection in the doorway's sunlight.
Meeting his elder's eyes, he said, 'And I don't understand it all either, but with her background, she knows far more than we do about the kind of abuses and perversions the Questioner wants to unleash on our descendants. Neither of us was ever as vulnerable as she has been in her life, so all we can do is offer her our support.'
'Do you think you might have shifted the full burden to her too soon?' the eagle asked him.
He glanced back inside the dimness of the dig. 'I most certainly hope not.'
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A stab in her shoulders roused Rae as her bones rubbed together, shifting inside her. It seemed to be near noon from the light coming in the entry, but she hurt too much to check for sure. Her groin cramped, and she rubbed it gingerly. The Change caused parts of her skeleton to change their shape and alignments. Her collar bones were lengthening, forcing her shoulder sockets further apart. It was coming on hard, taking minutes to enact alterations in her form that generally took hours. A process that generally was mildly uncomfortable was instead agonizing. Rae breathed deeply to cope with the pain and turned her mind to think clinically about what was happening.
Three things influenced the severity and frequency of a Change. Firstly was the monthly hormone cycle, rising and falling like clockwork. Then someone's conscious gender self-image played a factor. Lastly was the individual's emotional state and stress levels. Rae was moderately happier to be in her preferred feminine phases, which is why they lasted a little longer than her masculine. But internal stresses could create a potent brew of organic chemicals that affected the orderly rhythms, triggering Changes out of turn and speeding it to a nearly incapacitating rate. After the day she had yesterday, it wasn't surprising that this happened.
Her hips bones were moving now, narrowing, the bones getting denser in response. The groin pain was from her pelvic bones realigning and the soft tissue of her sex organ moving from being mainly inside her body to now being exposed. There were ancient and clinical words in Conté that would describe how this Change was different from usual and the exact gradient of gender presentations she was passing through. They didn't use those terms anymore, as most of the present Qard were either born or created alongside monosexuals or were one at birth. Now, she referred to herself as 'her' until she could take herself in hand, as it were, and from there, he considered himself a 'him.'
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Rae staggered to the shaft that plunged deeply under the plateau and called his skyboard when the worst of it was over. Straddling the board because he didn't trust his balance, he descended to the lowest floor and glided over to the lava pool. He didn't so much step into the thick, viscous fluid as fall into it, globules of molten stone spattering the area. The heat of the lava enveloped his pelvis as he sat and then sank until it covered his aching shoulders. He sighed in relief as the tension and stiffness began to fade.
Letting his mind drift, he thought of a couple of new projects. He had enough of the colored oak to build the great doors that would close off the dig when he wanted. He felt a nervous prickle in the nape of his neck at the inability to secure his sleeping quarters. With a deep breath, he knew that it wouldn't keep out projections or energy beings, but on some level, it would make him feel safer if he could shut out the outdoors.
Soaking in the heat reminded him he was tired of bathing in a cold river. He'd mostly cleared the gryphon sculpture's left side of scree during his training. He could undercut an area along the belly that he could put a bathing area in, tapping on underground water reserves below. Rae thought about where he'd carve a corridor from his current excavation to the baths. After a long soak, he returned to the surface and started a page in his journal, describing the assault he suffered on Thorne in as much detail as he could recall. Repressing those memories hadn't done him any favors, and the stark honesty he practiced on these pages often helped him achieve a measure of distance from his traumatic past.
He'd just had a fast, rough Change, as he had nearly a thousand years ago after waking up from the rape on Thorne. Rae described how Shadow evoked that event and weaponized it against him. He could deal with the shame from the memories by acknowledging that what happened wasn't his fault. He certainly didn't seek the experience out, but he would have done the same to save the already traumatized women from additional abuse. The fear that had given the memories away to Shadow was more problematic. In the intervening years, he'd consoled himself with the knowledge that he wouldn't be vulnerable again to the likes of the bandits; they were only mortal, after all. But he had to remain wary of Shadow's whims, which he could not evade or prevent.
Saving and closing the page, he went to the pathology shed to feed the ground digger, a creature akin to a gopher or mole. Refreshing its food and water, he noticed it still stared intently at him. It went into an angry fit when the drone he introduced retrieved the daily sample. The mammal scrabbled furiously at the surfaces of the container, splintering its long claws. He pinned it with his teke and trimmed back two-thirds of their length so it wouldn't hurt its claw roots further.
His secondary lab unit was out here, and he used analyzer chambers for the daily biosample and the claw trimmings. The lab examined the molecular, chemical, and genetic makeup and then destroyed them. The primary lab was in the dig, running the survey program. Autonomous samplers would dock to it and deposit the biological or mineral materials to be analyzed. Any inconclusive analysis result would trigger the program to collect more samples of the same sort until the lab resolved the error.
Going back into the dig, Rae sat at the computer server to watch a stitched together animation of Fire-eyes's growth pattern. After the most recent frames, the computer estimated the future growth by adding outlines of progressively older Edomere cubs up to young adulthood. A felid notification went off, and he switched over to the latest video. He sat up as a bedraggled group approached the river from the southeast. The oldest was a fem old enough to bear young, and the youngest was a fem scarcely older than Fire-eyes and the smallest cub he'd seen outside of a pride's home territory.
The group looked gaunt and exhausted, with a few exhibiting signs of infirmity. Rae recorded their color combinations, speculating from their behavior that they were related, perhaps a displaced pride? Curiously, the adults and near adults each carried a rock on average the size of a baseball. They moved tiredly through the area and rested when they reached the riverside. Thirsty, the cats drank deeply, then a few moved off to hunt while the majority bedded down to sleep. Rae entered commands to sample each of them while they were nearby, on the chance the illness was from the spores.
Another notification came up with an update to the survey catalog. Rae looked at the pictures of dozens of different types of creatures as they scrolled by. Something clicked in his mind as he watched them. Pausing the slideshow, he looked to the other screen at the group of felids. Setting the slideshow to a slower speed, all the lifeforms pictured had something in common: a bone or cartilage mask. The only exception was the felids. He spent the next few hours looking at every animal or insect in his database, and only the felids lacked a bone mask. He was unsure why that was the case. It seemed highly unusual that a single branch of evolution differed from the vast majority of life he'd cataloged on this planet.
Rae put on his goggles when the sun dipped below the tree line to the west, scattering golden light. He had the feeling something was missing with his logic, but he was a bit too scattered to figure it out. He made a note to investigate the matter further. Giving up on abstract thinking for the day, Rae went out to do his daily training, starting with the current set of physical exercises and progressing to the psionic ones, which were less successful. Gryphon didn't show up to teach him anything new, and it was just as well because he didn't think he could retain a new lesson.
He sat on one of the rock walls and played his harmonica. He recorded different tracks into the goggle's memories and then played them back as he layered more on the previous layer. When Rae finished, the glow behind the trees was mostly faded, and he went back into the dig to rest. He paused at the entryway, turning on a light to look at the sides and think about the hinges he'd have to set into the rock to hang the doors. Maybe he could put glass planes around the outer part of the doors to let in light around them? Something to think about.
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In the morning, Rae created a quick graphic of his plans for the doors. He'd have to incorporate a pair of curtains at the entrance, one diaphanous and one light-blocking. While working on his pad, he sighed and opened his journal, starting a page on Thorne.
> Jeol's son Kardán was eleven, and he'd lost his mother two years earlier in a street accident. His mom was descended from ancestors that on Terra became the Romani. Karl Daniel was named after Karis's grandfather and Jeol's favorite uncle. They called him Danny, but Rae was the one who combined his names, after a word in Conté meaning 'traveler.' The boy was set to spend a month over the summer with Jeol's brother's family.
>
> His dad and Rae would spend the time on a shake-down cruise in a new short-range interstellar spacecraft they'd jointly designed. Halfway to a nearby star, their ship was caught up in a wormhole that led them to the icebound planet known as Thorne. They were displaced in time and space and would spend the next four years there but be missing from Tellus for only about one year. After a hard landing in a snowfield, she had scarcely made it down the ramp when she got the first inkling of trouble.
>
> The Crysfire Gem and ring flared up its blue-green prismatic fire. The Gem burned through the skin on her forehead. There was a still scar from that injury under the nail scratch marks she had gotten recently. Meanwhile, the sword ring around her right index finger burned through her fingerbone just below the knuckle. She screamed and plunged her burns into the snowdrifts, not understanding what had happened.
>
> When Jeol checked on her, he found her usually grey skin turned a pale olive, and her silver blood was as red as his as a kind of carbon-based version of a Qard. He got her back inside the ship suffering from profound shock. Using some heavy grade steel sheeting, he scooped up the hot jewels and bent the metal into a protective packet, surrounding them with ceramic insulation pellets. Luckily, her powers of regeneration were still strong, and when she was assaulted later on that first year, her index finger was almost wholly regenerated.
He didn't want to go on with the page today, but that was enough of a start that he could pick it back up later. Taking his pad with him and putting on the goggles, he went to the entrance and modeled the exact measurements. He drew up a diagram for the hinges he would carve out of granite and connect to the plateau by titanium rod axis pins. The pins he would first forge down in the lowest level of the shaft, so he could use them to check the fit of the hinge knuckles. When he assembled the hinges, he'd go back down to make the glass panels he'd used to frame the doors in titanium strips. After all that, he would start working with his stores of cured color oak. He felt his mood improving as he concentrated on the designing process...