Cobbled streets, jam packed with shadowy forms, ascension capsules going up and down in the buildings around them. I feel like I was in one myself, going up and then down, then up and down again in a dizzying and endless repetition, but still crushed between the men and women in the streets around me.
Nothing really makes sense. The sky is dark, a tapestry of stars that shine brightly and then dim and repeat. With each pulse, new will and emotion changing the world I'm in.
Another pulse and I find myself on the shores of a lake, water crashing on the banks beneath my feet.
There is rain falling all around me, heavy and wet. I look up at it and feel sadness but also caring and comfort.
Then, the lake rises, like a giant wave, or an emerging flood. But I don't feel alarm as its surface swallows me, bubbles dancing in the darkness, the last vestige that I was ever in that world.
I struggle to escape the current, but am caught in the crushing weight of the undertow. I need to get back to the safe place I was in, but there is no more strength in my ethereal limbs, no more will in my fading mind, only new direction.
The bottom of the lake is shifting sand, or maybe the tremors are caused by an earthquake. A fissure swallows me, and then, just as I fear my end is nigh, a searing pain burns life across my skin and bursts of sound pound against my mind, raw like a cold shower's blast. All memory of comfort will never again be the same.
I manage to open my eyes. Weren't my eyes open earlier?
The city haze, all its bright glory amidst the buildings and streets, a solid sheet of occulting whiteness is now in front of me.
"Gaaaaagrrgr"
I try to stop gurgling, but how do you switch off nozzles again? Wasn't there supposed to be a switch? I was going to choke. Help!
Panic fades as before me, slowly, mysterious lines become a meaningful smile as I trace them with blinking eyes.
But soon even memories of visage are replaced by the unfamiliarity of internal discomfort.
I feel so... hungry?
"Gaa, gaa, gaa"
Cramps in my stomach clench and unclench and strange sounds come from somewhere. I wonder if I hit my head. My skin is all tingly.
I jolt stiff, something I just thought... hitting my head... something important. But I can't remember.
Ah, my stomach, my throat.
The world shakes and then the bright haze blurs as I'm brought down to rest on something soft, something beating.
Then my mind is invaded by the sweetness that flows from the soft yet hard button placed to my mouth.
I float up above the soft cotton clouds. I am a butterfly fluttering about, splashing hither and thither in the sweet, delicious nectars of the dryad of the trees.
Oh, of the nectar from which I drink in this melodious plot of beechen green. Let it not end, let me taste the flora with my purple stained proboscis.
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The world bobs from side to side.
"Gaaaaaa."
From time to time, I catch myself drooling, gross. Gross, hmm, gross.
"Grooooossse."
Funny word gross. Nice body to it, almost a rumble, oh no, rumble... not again.
"Ughkuku."
A grunting and splooshing seem to happen in concert but then my whole body shakes and more sounds erupt. But what is this pleasant sense of accomplishment?
"Ugii?!"
Spare me, no more. I just want more sweet squeezes and ripples.
Ripples! Those calming, concentric circles that cover the water of life that flow in the burbling stream.
A feeling of discomfort suddenly overpowers that stickiness left on my behind.
"Nnngghhaaaaaaaa-?"
A wail bursts out as suddenly as it halted and the world starts bobbing in yet another direction.
No. Not the world, the giant face of the goddess above.
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"Sout, sout, are not esseis mou pretty morow. Mama here, sout, sout."
The goddess who held me whenever I awoke was dark haired. She is beautiful, like the sun and a stream and mountains and...
Something intensely animalistic lights me in joy whenever her visage smiles down on me.
The sounds she makes sometimes seem to tickle at me.
Overlapping with her face, I see others, so different, that pop into existence where nothing but air was before.
They are different from the goddess, with fairer faces and white coloured hair. They speak a different language than the goddess too, one that seems so much more familiar. If only they had her divine smile and comforting hands.
The other faces want to tell me something, teach me their secrets. Their whispers are sometimes like the goddess's but different in cadence, as if adding harmonies or cacophonies to the goddess's simple tone.
Then, as suddenly as they appear, the white haired spectres vanish and I'm left with just the goddess, smiling down at me.
Was it a week or a day? I don't remember sleeping.
Not all at once, but with each blink, touch, or bump, meaning trickles slowly into me.
I reach out a chubby hand and try to grab at that meaning, but it eludes me.
Where are my wings, and the beechen tree?
Eyes constantly swapping between faces and fantasy, I live each day learning bits and pieces from each until my more rational thoughts are overridden by biological urges and imperatives.
I live in a wilful body that sometimes feels like it owns itself instead of being owned by me.
I'm not gurgling anymore, or baaing and gaaing, I'm not a bleating sheep, well, I can't guarantee it though.
As time goes on, I start to control excretions to some extent, and call for the goddess more eloquently when stomach cramps or a raspy throat wars with consciousness for control of my mind.
Fortunately, instinct wills me towards comfort and comfort, my body is not always better at providing. Sometimes it will give way to my gentle pleas, allowing my rational sense with my body to meld.
Watching again one of the spectral faces emerge beside the goddess, I hear the secret it whispers to me.
Morow... baby.
The words are different but the same. I realise, in that moment of epiphany. I am a baby.
The goddess's pretty baby. Or as she says, "mou pretty morow."
A moment of enlightenment seeps into my being, yet another foothold for the thinking me.
But a moment later, the other me triumphs, seeing its treat above.
Ripples! And liquid nectar!
Oh, gods help me, but I have a rumbling stomach.
... for more than one reason. Yuck.
Maybe one day, I shall restore my authority over where I piss and shit.
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A simple touch of hands on me can set my heart on fire with delight. A scrape of changing linens can make me cry in loud complaint.
Even as I see the goddess walk or lay beside me, when I try to imitate, my limbs just splay.
But instead of being frustrated at my lack of control, I'm just happy that now, at least, my head is free. I can look around and smile too.
As time passes, the air that used to be so cold grows warmer against my skin. Sometimes, I feel it's too warm. I push my hands out and turn myself, to find the cold spots on my bed.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"Kiii" I squeal as the other one pinches me again.
Other than the goddess there is a second real face that will not fade away.
It is the face of whispers and giggles and nose pokes.
Today she pinches my hand and waves it up and down, smiling, like the younger white haired mischief who fades into the air beside her.
All the visions and immaterial faces have white hair, while the goddess and this sister have black.
She came again, bringing me nearer her face. Black hair swept over her shoulder, giving me purchase to grab and climb with.
She didn't like that, swatting my hand away.
Her other hand under my bum, she abandons the speech both the goddess and the white haired folk to baa and gaa and bubuuu back at me.
As she puts me back and I watch her turn away, I wonder when I'll be able to see where it is she goes. How long will it be before I can stand upright and not just grab my toes?
But for now, until I can stand, for yet another day, I'll roll and fart and with the goddess and angel play.
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"Pick up! Pick up!" I shout innocently, holding my hands up to the angel.
It felt like all eternity had passed, and yet even now, my legs don't support my weight, nor my mind my thoughts. Where I stand, I fall and where I listen with my ear, I ache my head.
But I'm bigger now, and more sane too.
Not only can I listen now to the faces, both permanent and immaterial, speak, but I can now make my own meaningful sounds.
Broken words and simple phrases stitched together from both the faces with black hair and white.
Unfortunately, not only is my vocabulary mostly holes, but whenever I want to say something, I forget which words to use, face hard decisions over which of possible words with a meaning and sometimes am left as confused as who I'm talking to when all I can think of is meaningless gibberish instead.
Fortunately, my goddess and angel are forgiving, responding in slow spoken questions, tickles or my own made up babbling to me.
My mother, I correct myself, now knowing who the goddess is.
"Pick up!" I repeat.
It's not mother, but the angel who bends down to embrace me, and then swoops me into the sky, to plop me belly down on her shoulder.
"You little tarachopoios. You just want a snuggle, don't you." The maid whispers impishly. I only missed one word that time, I note in satisfaction. She hadn't called me tara-nachos before.
As she turns around, my head still on her shoulder, I see behind her a basket. From here, so high, it seems so small, but that place, until now, was all the world to me.
As she moves, I watch the familiar window and room behind.
As the door closes behind us, a white haired figure appears just inside. Something about his smile sends goosebumps rippling across my skin as it dabs at its clothes with a small polkadot handkerchief.
"Aah!"
A loud whining spooks me further, along with the shutting door.
"Whati traichey? Why are you crying?"
I cling to the angel's neck as she tries to hold me up and bounce me up and down.
The smirk of that angular faced phantom triggered feelings I never knew to boil up within me. But they are feelings that come reflexively, making me whine and snarl.
"Ow, Tilly!" The angel says and I know I did bad by biting her shoulder.
"Aaah!" I cry, not knowing how to say sorry.
Snuu
My nose sniffles as the raging emotion cools and turns to snot and snivel.
"Okayltera now? You want to go exapo, right?"
I shake my head, not wanting to go back to the room where the smirking phantom could still be waiting behind the door.
I rub at my eyes with balled up fists and chase away the gooeys while the angel waits, and then finally turns around and only the stairs remain in my bobbing sight.
Not long after, the angel brings me to the great beneath the big blue. Above us it stretches, white fluffs breezing through. I tried to look towards the ball of brightness, but my eyes close shut and a stinging appears behind my eyes, a new pain making me forget all about the one from just moments before.
I squirm to get rid of the unpleasant hurt and my angel shouts catching me in her arms.
She shouldn't be so clumsy. I am all of maybe the size and the weight of a pumpkin, so my angel should be able to carry me around no problem.
As she taps me and moves me around on her shoulder, I notice her face turn red, and giggle at my angel's new colour.
"Cianna vis quirios," she bobs up and down and I bob up and down with her. I turn my head away from the door we had just come out of towards whoever is in front of her.
"Ivian," my mother responds, "and my little pumpkin," she pats my still bald head.
See? I really was a pumpkin. She just said so, didn't she? What do you mean, wipe that silly grin off my face?
I feel good again, as mother is here and the pain recedes from behind my eyes.
Then, a whisper reaches me, a half forgotten memory of trauma to the head.
The world shifts within me and without, mother and the angel suddenly gone, disappearing as usually only the white haired figures do.
Instead of mother, there is yet another of the faces with angular curves.
I'm not sure why some of the white haired faces look different, unlike mother and the angel, they have hair growing out of their chin or sharper lines framing a grin.
This one does not make me angry, like the one upstairs, but instead, his smile is a whisper of fear.
Around us, the world is changed.
I can no longer see the big beneath the big blue, the trees or the stone of home behind me.
Here, all is made of pure whites and greys. Transparent cups, shaped as thin as a finger, countertops, smooth and white and long. A hard light fills the air, unlike the sun that just a moment ago burned my eyes.
The angular face spoke in a deep and serious voice, "I am impressed that you have progressed so far in a theory to reconfigure the pristine runes. Perhaps your theory might even make it possible."
Each word he spoke seemed familiar and filled with meaning, but like a meaning that was just out of reach.
Pausing, the figure shrugged its shoulders. His gesture seemed to say 'it can't be helped'.
"The problem is those results are not the ones I need."
"Then what..." a voice, to my surprise, came out of me. I was speaking in the language of the white haired ghosts.
"To make pristine runes, the results already stand before me," the figure's eyes looked me up and down, "Let me share a secret with you. There is no such thing as time magic."
"Do it!" the figure barked, just before a wave of pain flooded my head.
"Troma, troma," I shout my fear and discoveries to a smiling Ivian, as mother named my angel.
But Ivian didn't understand that something was wrong. She just seemed happy to pinch my cheeks.
"Not troma, mama," she told me, her not understanding making me mad.
"Not mama, troma!" I argued, but she just sighed.
Why did she sigh? It was me who should be sighing! Why didn't Ivian know what I meant?
My mother just smiled at us and walked away. She was going back into the house.
I stared longingly over Ivian's shoulder and wondered why mother wouldn't stay with us.
As mother opened the door to the house, I saw a dress beside her, fluttering in an unfelt breeze.
"Ah! Mama!" I shouted, as a hollow fear pressed into my stomach, the fluttering figure turning around to leave and never reappear.
No, it wouldn't be like that, I told myself. Mother was not the same as the disappearing white haired ghosts, she would come back. And I had Ivian right with me.
Mama would come back, right?
"Aww, don't cry, Tilly." I don't cry. "Let's go see your lord father."
"Lard barber!" I repeated, the words meaningless to me.
The land is bright. There is a full sun in the sky, vivid colours in the hedges that tower over the maid's head to each side of the dirt path.
The air smells of pine and something else good. Overpowering them both, however, is the smell of thick smoke. A bend around the road reveals it to come from a big wooden barrel.
There, a black haired person, the second I see with an angular face and a beard, is sitting on a log, tossing scraps of wood from a bucket full of water into a giant candle underneath the smoking barrel.
"Energy of flame," a new figure with white hair speaks only to me. "One of the simplest energies a mage might conjure."
A mage, I think, is what bearded, angular faced people are called.
The white haired mage talking has a beard that flows down from his face all the way to his waist. He waves his hand and behind him, symbols appear jumbled in the air.
"Like the other two known consumption magics, pestilence and life, it destroys certain types of matter to sustain itself, completely independent of mana. But it is also like the corrosive magics, acids or decay. Like them, it leaves a poisonous bi-product behind. Be careful, both to avoid its burn and to prevent it form escaping thy control."
"What's the mage doing?" I ask Ivian.
"The maju?" Ivian asks me back. "You mean the man? That's old Mr. Barker. He's kapnozing some of the meat from the quineegi."
Hmm, was a mage here called a man?
"Mmh, I'm getting hungry just looking at it." Ivian lifts me from one shoulder to the other, "it's a bit noris for you, but maybe you should start eating semolina soon. You're so big already, asking questions so egsipnotically!"
"Mmh," I repeat. It smells good if Ivian says it smells good. I want to eat semolina. Is that what was in the barrel?
"Come, let's stop thinking of food and go welcome your lord father back."
A voice cheers from behind big and creaky wooden doors. "A good one, Saul, we'll make a ipotis of you yet."
"Thank you Quirios Feles. I'll take to heart your encouragement during proponisi."
Ivian stops a few feet from the stables and calls out, "Quirios Feles, brave ipotists of the fief, welcome home."
The boisterous exchanges from the stable stop and the door is opened by another mage in ugly clothing. Or at least, I think it's a mage, but he has no beard. Maybe a man isn't a mage, but they aren't men and not mages.
I ponder to reveal deep truths through experience.
As the door opens, a smell of poop and grass and something else surround me.
I rest my head against Ivian's bosom as she holds me in arm to show to the man in front of us.
The man smiles and walks a few steps forward, but waits for a slightly older man to walk out. Ivian bobs up and down again.
"My lord."
I had seen the quirios before. Quirios was another word for lord, I think. He was there with the goddess, mother that is, in some of my waking dreams.
Short hair frames his severe face that looks at us with but a thin smile.
"Ivian," he spoke, "my son."
Is this really the same bright voice we heard in the stables? Is that all he had to say? Doesn't he know I'm a pumpkin that needs a pat on the head to grow up big and strong?
I stare at my father silently, as we walk back home.
When he and his man strip off the metallic arm bands and chest clothes they were wearing, I scrunch my nose at the smell of leather and sweat.
Despite my father's seemingly cold demeanour, as he walks in, he melts in mother's company. They briefly hold hands before he goes around the back of the manor. Probably to have a bath, like the ones mother or Ivian give me.
Meanwhile, Ivian whispers sweet things in my ears while she brings me up the stairs to change into a miniature shirt complete with lace around the neck and frilly cuffs.
"I talked to Cianna vis quirios gi a food, and she even said you could smigo at the althousa."
All these random gibberish words were somewhat annoying. Why didn't the white haired ghosts have anything to say when it would be useful?
If only I could understand instead of this endless guessing. Cianna vis quirios was what Ivian called mother earlier? Why did she need two names?
I continued to listen but only with half-hearted attention.
I was keen on eating though. As much as my body yearned to suckle, I knew from the scenes of the white haired men and women, that grown ups didn't have their mother's milk. Then again, the ghosts told me that mother's milk was best for babies so I felt conflicted. Can't always get straight answers.
The dining table was shaped like a shield.
At the tapered end sat my father, and to his left, my mother. Ivian held me to mother's left and seemed to be sitting very straight.
My father smelled much better now, and was dressed in a much nicer tunic. I wonder what happened to the other man.
"Is it really proper to have our son at the table already?" My father expressed disapproval to my mother, but she waved down his protests.
"Well, it is true that 4 months is a bit early..." Mother said, scrunching her eyebrow as she looked towards me. "Perhaps we should wait a few more weeks."
I was curious about all the new things and the dining room, but didn't really pay attention to what they were talking about until a beautiful light painted the room in a new kaleidoscope of colour.
No, not a light, it was a man. What he was carrying on a big silver plate. It was not a colour at all, but something I innately felt curious about, bringing new feelings and flushing my cheeks.
"Ah," I opened my mouth and looked back and forth between mother and the man I had never seen before bringing yummies for all.
"Tilly? I think maybe we should wait-" mother started to tell me, but I felt words leap to my mouth, so fluently, unlike the usual hesitance with which I translated between the white haired and black haired gibberish.
"No, me too, pleazpleazpleazpleaz??"
I grew anxious as the man lay down slices of something that smelled oddly like the kapnozing from earlier on outside. It was browner outside than the pink interior and seemed smoked or charred.
At the same time as my calculating self whispered that smoke was toxic and that I shouldn't eat it, my stomach dismissed those concerns, until an unlikely resolution was lain down in front of me.
"Here Tilly, I went to get you a bowl of semolina." My angel spoke, a white-yellow cream in a small bowl that looked neither toxic nor any less appetising.
"Ivian!" I think someone said, but it was too late. I was burning my tongue on semolina for the first time.
But as I ate my semolina, my eyes kept darting to the plates and jaws of mother's repast. Maybe I could stomach something so smelly after all, it looked juicy too. Ivian said she got hungry just looking at it. I think I now understood why.