"The Children of the Stars track the times when the Mother sleeps over the course of the seasons. Twelve times after the dark of the year, Her great white eye cracks open, slowly widening until full. She looks down upon us to see that we are well, then gradually closes Her eye so She might rest awhile."
--Fable of the Mother's Eye
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Of all the ways she could reach the ground, Rae decided to use her skyboard. It was two and a half meters long and over a meter wide. The sally port of the equipment bay was open, and she braced there on it against the cutting night winds as the ship approached her destination. Wearing a scanning helmet and with the rest of her gear strapped to the board, she watched the moonlit landscape whipping past under the Question's belly. Through the amber visor, she spotted the dark buttes and plateaus of her target area as it swelled closer in the distance.
The helmet was a relic from an earlier phase of her life. Like a motorcycle helmet, it was painted brightly, a base of teal with feathered wings of gold on each side. A central stripe of silver went from the chin to the nape of the neck with blue crystals at either end. A smaller silver stripe went across the top of the visor. When she used to wear it, she'd still had illusions that she could meaningfully connect with humans and that she could make a difference in her life and theirs.
The ship's trajectory was aimed at one of the narrow ends of the trailing plateau, and when they were only a few kilometers off, she launched. Relying on her momentum to carry her forward the rest of the way, she kicked on the hover thrust to keep from plummeting down like a stone. Like a bullet, the board pierced the night skies as she balanced it down on its belly, nose tipped lowest.
The fierce air pressure and velocity made her bare her fangs in a toothy grin under the helm despite her malaise. Her path swerved as she leaned from side to side like a skater in a halfpipe, then executed a 360°. The river below flashed briefly with reflected moonlight as she slowed her descent. Rae wanted to land on top of the rocky elevation, after all, not inside it.
'So you want to Embrace the Wind like he did, do you? This method will hurt a lot more, which is only what you deserve, pathetic failure….'
Rae's eyes widened as a crescendo of disorientation swept her up into a series of tumbles on every axis. Her vision blurred as she spiraled wildly out of control. The skyboard clung to her feet gravitically, its weight throwing off her sense of balance and making things worse. No longer able to tell which way was down, her heart raced as panic gripped her.
An aborted shout set her coughing, the scent of blood filling the helmet. The darkness around her was only relieved when the mostly full orb of the moon streaked past her eyes, revealing trails of wetness on the inside of her visor. How long had she tumbled? She felt suspended in a chaotic void, but she knew the ground was leaping up to meet her plummeting form. Imagining the results of that encounter, she curled in on herself, cringing, as she waited for the moment of impact.
A wide, dark shape blocked out the cartwheeling ground and sky, enveloping Rae. The air went still, and the gibbous moon swam over her head again. She was pulled back into a comforting embrace, and she leaned heavily on the warm shape behind her while catching her breath. Blood streaks still obscured her sight, so she set her visor to auto-clean. Rhythmically moving blurs to either side resolved into a great pair of dark wings that slowed her yet still propelled her forward.
She looked down and saw what held her was the talon of a giant bird of prey, with another stretched out in balance on her other side, gripping the skyboard. The limbs' width were nearly as wide as one of her legs, which meant the creature had to be huge. She looked over her shoulder and met the fierce blue eyes of a black feathered raptor… with upright, feathered ears. Leaning a little more to the side to look behind the creature's shoulder, she saw the beast had the flanks and hindquarters of a big cat—a gryphon. A gryphon, of all things, had pulled her out of her tailspin.
It had to be a totem, the unique alternate form each Qard had in the likeness of a real or mythical animal. The black gryphon totem seemed familiar, but she couldn't quite remember whose it was. It isn't Chayse, she thought. His totem is a leopard. Jeol's is a bronze lion, and mine is a black jaguar, so who is this? The big beak preened against her helmet as she wondered.
When she felt stable, she leaned forward, away from the gryphon's breast, and it moved further back, now only lightly gripping the bundled packs behind her. The plateau was very close now, and as she tilted the nose up to land, the beast let go, beating its wings to hover near her. Rae turned to face the gryphon, her intended demand for privacy going unsent when she saw it was translucent. Someone was projecting their totem to her, but they weren't really here. It nodded to her once, then slowly faded away. She stared where it had been, finding herself doubting if it had even been there in the first place.
But, she still smelled blood… She pulled off the gaudy helm and looked inside. There were smears of silver on the lining and more on her hand when she dragged it down her face. All that proved was she'd coughed while wearing it. She looked inside and connected the visor to the skyboard's computer memory. She projected the journey down in front of her, showing the steep loss of altitude, while gyro readings revealed the tortured tumbling on the way. So at least part of it happened, but... how much?
Rae shook her head and tucked the helmet under her arm, not wanting to think about it anymore. Toeing the controls, she touched down on the black granite. Stepping off, she opened her top pack, and released a few dozen computerized drones, and perched a stand-alone set of goggles on her head. She wedged the full helmet between the packs and ordered the board's autopilot to follow her. Sending the drones flying off to map the plateau, she clambered over the rough rocks for a first-hand investigation.
The plateau's roof wasn't all black stone. There was a layer of thin soil that supported grasses and scattered scrubby bushes. She paused at one bush, looking at a snarl of pale fibers caught in the bramble. Pulling down her goggles, she reached out to examine some when she had a sudden feeling of being watched. Looking up to a nearby crag, she saw a horned face looking back at her. The type of horns reminded her of Terran mountain goats, if they had three horns instead of two. There was one on each side of its head and one in the middle. But the whole forward part of the head was bony, like it was wearing a slightly larger version of its skull as a mask.
The goat analog shuffled uneasily on the crag edge, letting Rae see it had three hoof-like toes on each forefoot. She slowly straightened, and its shaggy body suddenly launched over her head and scrambled away across the rocks, followed by a half dozen others. After they disappeared into the darkness, something drifted down in front of her. She plucked a long pale fiber from the air, seeing more raining down in its wake. With her goggles, she identified them as thick hollow hairs and verified that the fibers in the bush were from a similar source. Getting a case from her packs, she put a sample of the hairs away. Maybe she could make wool thread with them?
Finding an edge of the plateau, she started to trace her way around the top. Looking down the steep sides, she could see graduations of crumbled rock picked out in the moonlight. The skirt of scree rock that concealed the base of the elevation started several hundred meters below. Movements along the sides proved to be more small herds of the goat-kind, showing the group she encountered weren't the only ones up here. If their wool was useful, she might be able to shear them periodically for a renewable resource.
When Rae reached the eastern edge, she spotted the river in the distance. Pulling up preliminary results from her drones, she saw the river came from the northeast, passed near the plateau then headed away to the southwest. As she continued clockwise to the south, the river came closer until it approached the southeast corner of the plateau, near one of the short ends of the elevation. The river shore was a bit less than half a klick away at its closest, and she teleported down midway between the plateau and the river.
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Sitting on a stray boulder, she started to tease out the drone readings into a cohesive picture as her board flew down the slope to catch up to her. She could build a log cabin in the nearby woods or a rammed earth and straw home in the grasslands, but it made her nervous to sleep in homes that were so... flammable. Any slip of her adaptation could lead to a disastrous wildfire at the best of times, so she preferred to stay within the more forgiving shelter of solid stone.
Pre-dawn began to lighten the sky as Rae modeled the plateau that loomed beside her. It mostly consisted of black granite, and she ported a fallen, fist-sized piece of it to her hand and took a big bite, chewing as she analyzed the tastes. It was fairly dense for igneous rock, rich in minerals like hornblende and biotite. The metals in it were iron, magnesium, and hints of titanium that made it approach being basalt rather than granite. The scan data showed voids and caves throughout the stone and traced the locations of water sources and mineral deposits.
Deeper underneath were some promising lava pockets. Having a chamber of Inferus native environment nearby would be nice when it became colder. If she felt another explosive fit come over her, she'd have to relocate quickly not to damage this location. Stopping what she was doing briefly, she directed the orbiting satellites to chart the signs of volcanic regions within 100 klicks, moving out another 100 kilometers each time no significant surface volcanism was located.
Dismissing that screen, Rae looked at the elevation model, turning it around and imagining what she could make of it. It reminded her of a beast on its belly, curled slightly to the left. The right forelimb would be outstretched, and the left foot tucked close to its breast. The plateau was tall enough for the head to be upright and face squarely at the river. That same height also lent itself to wings, giving a winged yet four-limbed beast. In the days she'd worn her helmet unironically, she was associated with dragons, maybe…?
'How arrogant and self-absorbed,' sneered her inner voice.
She scowled, pinching her nose. Maybe a wyvern? But no, a wyvern didn't have a proper haunch. Focusing on the scans again, she tried to see what else would work. Filtering up from the back of her mind came a flash of the beak of the Peregrine high over her head on Qardos, followed by a memory of the beak of the blue-eyed, black… gryphon.
Pulling a stylus from a pack, she started sketching in the details on the projection. She brought up a 3D rendering of the classic ink drawing of "Alice in Wonderland's" sleeping gryphon as a style guide and morphed its position to something matching the dark plateau's outline. Curling the lion's tail up against the left haunch, sizing up the wings, and uncrossing the forelimbs was a start. Lifting the head to an erect, forward-looking posture that stared off to the southeastern horizon with alert, pricked-up ears was even better.
Transferring her work to her goggles, she walked briskly to the riverside, then turned and digitally overlaid the design over the dusty plateau. She inserted the colors of the morning sky at places to simulate what would be carved away. Rae caught her breath at what she saw. It was still a rough depiction, but there was a lot of potential. 'Yes! I dub thee "Waking Gryphon".'
It would take a long time to clear the exterior of scree and crumbling, weathered rock. More to carve the exterior and excavate the many levels and chambers within the body of the beast she envisioned. She would trim any usable stone she extracted into building blocks to refine for paths or out-buildings. It wouldn't be the first time she'd built a monumental structure. Her homestead on Deltia was much larger than this would end up being. Here, then, was a worthy project to occupy her days and quiet her mind, something she could bury herself in for many years.
She began drawing guidelines in the scan data, indicating exactly which direction the beak would point and where the middle of the chest would be. That middle would define the centerline between the great double doors Rae planned to make as the interior's main entrance. Retrieving a handful of marble-sized holo beacons from her packs, she used the goggles to dispatch them as guideline markers.
Retracing her steps to the edge of the scree pile at the centerline, she began dividing the rock jumble into what was usable and what was worthless mass. Most of the stones here were only good for mass, fuel to stoke her internal engines. As she shifted through the rock, she found an increasing amount of solid stones that she piled to the side for later refining. When she wasn't brute-forcing the larger chunks by hand, telekinesis hurried the work along, allowing her to shift and sort a half kiloton of smaller scree at a time.
The physical and mental exertions burned into her mass reserves, prompting her to heat a pile of waste rock to top herself off. Her kind didn't require calories for their nutrition; instead, they needed large amounts of molecular mass of any type to keep up their physical density. She had to consume more volume of the rocks than if it was made of denser matter, like metals, but there was enough around to satisfy her hunger as she worked.
Hours passed. Day turned to night and back again as she unceasingly cleared a broad swath of scree, her mind emptied of everything but the present moment. Centering on the guideline, she reached her first goal; uncovering the foot of the plateau that faced the river. Letting herself finally notice her accumulated fatigue, she piled up short walls of squared stone at the elevation's base. Clearing the skyboard, she put the packs down in a layer over the rock underfoot. Then, she pulled the board over them as a temporary roof. Rae stretched hugely and settling under the skyboard, and she rested her eyes for a while.
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THWANG!
The skyboard rang with impact, and Rae jolted back to full awareness. Sitting up abruptly, her head impacted the still vibrating board. Hissing curses, she pushed the board further above her and looked around. A string of bone-faced goats scurried to the river, the few nearest giving side-eyes in her direction, seemingly as bothered by the noise as she was. She stared after them as they rushed to join the others in their herd. She looked up the side of the crag and blinked, thinking about what happened.
One of the… Crag Horns... must have mistaken the board for a shelf of rock and hopped onto it on their way to the ground. She watched them as they watered and headed back to the plateau. She huffed in amusement when they split up, half of them angling out to either side of her. As the two groups got further apart, they slowed until one group of them sprinted across the field to join the others before they disappeared past a heap of scree rock.
Dismantling her temporary shelter, Rae looked at the vertical rock around the holographic centerline and refined her computer model. Using a combination of her scans and her sense of perception, she planned where to dig into the granite. She first surfaced the stone flat with her energy sword in sections wider than the doors would be one day.
Using segmented rods designed to conduct extreme temperatures, she heated them to glowing hot with her hands and pushed them deep into the rock as if it was clay. When she made a series of the holes in a line, stresses built up between them when she reabsorbed most of that imbued heat. The rock quickly cooled back down, creating squared horizontal columns a meter across and two meters deep. When the columns fully cooled, she'd telekinetically grab them and apply shearing force at the deepest part, snapping it free. In this initial effort, many of them fractured unevenly but were still somewhat usable.
She worked until she'd dug an opening four meters wide and four meters tall in the center, sloping down to three meters tall at the outer sides. When the excavation reached several meters deep, she went inside and used a pick and a pry bar to clear the loose rock and trim off the uneven places with her energy sword. Once she drove in a particular shaft or cross-shaft, it was easier to do the work because she could access more sides of a volume of stone to sever it from the belly of the crag.
It was nice having shelter from the elements. She could bring her gear underneath and work undisturbed from the local fauna. She drew on the living granite with light-colored chalk she fetched from her supplies, marking areas to excavate with an x, and drawing vertical lines on the places she would refine into support columns. As Rae gained a clearer picture of the space, she'd pause to update her 3d model.
The ceiling and the tops of the columns would be at four meters, like the top of the doors. If she encountered pockets of weaker, less solid stone, she could graft in good stone taken from elsewhere and melt it in place, cooling it slowly to fuse it permanently with the greater mass. But it was easier to take away material than to add it, so the procedure would be a last resort.
She used her goggles to even out the contrast of light and shadow after she went behind her first planned column and left it on. The passage of time blurred for her without the cycle of day and night to reckon by. She lost herself in the labor until the pick quivered in her grasp as she lifted it. Staring at the trembling motion, she loosened her hands from the tool with an effort.
Leaning the pick into a corner, Rae sifted through the blocks and shards littering the dig until she had enough broken rock for a batch of mass to consume. The influx of molten slag hit her system hard, and she found a place to sit before she fell. Her upper stomach began breaking the mass down into subatomic particles, spreading warmth within her. Embracing her knees, she stared at the digging blankly, unable to critically consider if the work was done well or not. Finally, she pulled the goggles off and laid her head on her arms until darkness stole up and took her.