image [https://www.art-of-fanfiction.com/ladyelaine/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMG_2913.jpeg]
IX. The Children of Tsiru
She didn’t know what was normal in anything anymore. If she ever had. Surely it wasn’t normal to find those wings and talons attractive? To hope for the touch of his fangs on her skin? The rasp of his tongue, the spicy scent of his fur?
He was a carnivore. Nature said she should have been his prey. Instinct said she should have been frightened.
Maybe that was it, though. It had been so long since she had felt anything other than fear that, when a fearsome creature became her friend, it was inevitable that he would become more.
At first, they’d simply been learning about each others’ people, but eventually they had each begun to learn the way to the other’s heart.
Zoe discovered how the smooth fullness of his fur felt, gliding through her fingers. Tavirr carefully explored the goosebumps his talon tips could raise on her bare skin.
She loved the way his eyes shifted, the pupils subtly changing shape as he looked at her. He loved the way she moistened her lips with her tongue, and then he loved tasting them himself.
His wings mantled over her as he lowered her to his nest, and for at least that night, they flew.
----------------------------------------
Tkkk.
Tk… tk.
Tkkk. Tk.
Tkt.
Zoe woke slowly, not sure whether the odd noises were real or from a dream. She listened, but heard nothing but Tavirr’s slow breathing.
It was pitch black in the room. There was warmth behind her, Tavirr’s thick-furred body cradling her. One of his wings was draped over her, and as she moved, his hand slipped off her shoulder.
She wondered if she ought to have qualms about last night, but the delicious ache in her body was too pleasant to regret. She fumbled to find the glow bulb she’d brought, lying on the floor beside the nest of blankets, and rolled it gently in the palm of one hand to wake a low light. As she set it down again on the floor beside her, her fingertips brushed something lying on top of the pile of her discarded clothing.
Picking it up, Zoe saw it was the thing the atterlim had brought her the night before. She studied it, running her fingers over the edges. What she had first thought was a leaf looked more like a feather, she decided.
Fossil, that was the word Tavirr had used. She didn’t have her Common dictionary with her, but the etymology of the word pulled at her. Time-frozen, it meant. As she thought about it, she remembered a childhood visit to the museum she had loved, and the strange bones in some of the rooms. Her teachers had never given her much history, natural or otherwise, but there had been that one science book, the same one with the picture of the wolf. She had read and copied that book so many times as a child, but so much of what had occupied her then was trying to perfect the shape of her letters. Finally, she dredged up a memory from the book, a carefully hand-copied picture of the skull of some long-dead beast whose bones had turned to stone.
Finally, she remembered the Human word.
Turning the stone over, she peered at the shape on the other side. This was no fossil. It looked like someone had taken a tool to the stone, etching a series of strange circular symbols into it. She wondered what they meant.
Tavirr stirred, letting out an inquisitive chuff. Beneath the wing covering her, his hand slid up her arm, raising fresh goosebumps on her skin. He started combing his fingers through her hair, his chest vibrating against her back in a resonant purr.
Zoe sighed, turning over to drape a leg over his, and showed him the fossil.
“What is that?” he asked.
“There was an atterlim in my room last night. Came through the wall. Creepy fuckers. It... disassembled itself. Its head just walked right over to me and dropped this. Then that head walked back and reattached itself somewhere in the middle of its... bodies. Who the hell can I submit a complaint to over the existence of things that can do that?”
Tavirr chuckled. “They are a strange folk. I’ve only ever heard of them, never seen one. When I was a boy and listened to our tale singer, I was sure they must have come out of some poor soul’s delusions.”
“Or some deranged god’s experiments.”
“What is ‘god’?”
Zoe sighed. “Humans used to believe in invisible, all-powerful, supernatural beings who could, I dunno, fix things when awful stuff happened.”
“I… that makes… not much sense?”
She laughed. “Yeah, and then old Earth got mostly destroyed, and the happy survivors found themselves beached on the world that destroyed us. That’s why you’ve never heard the word before. ‘God’ became the foulest curse word, one nobody will say.”
“Hm. We have no ‘god,’ but lysk tales often overflow with the unseen. Tu’yet—I told you about seeing one. The word… ‘bad minds,’ I think you would say. My sister, whose wings were destroyed by a tu’yet of the wind, said that speaking of them would cause more evil. I did not believe her. And now,” he sighed, “I can no longer fly.”
“Hey,” she said, stroking his face. “You survived one wing injury. You’ll get through this one, too.” She moved closer to him, running her fingers over the arch of his wing. He closed his eyes with an appreciative purr. If she’d known his wings were so sensitive to the touch, if he’d managed less self control when she’d massaged them so many times—but he could take revenge now.
He nipped at the side of her neck, rumbling.
Someone knocked on the door, and Zoe cursed.
“What is it?” Tavirr called.
The door opened. Zoe scrambled to disentangle herself, pulling a blanket over herself as a man she barely recognized ducked his head in. He saw the human in the lysk’s bed, blinked, and said, “The mayor needs to see you. Both of you, that is. At, uh, whenever you’re… decent.”
The door shut firmly behind the man. Zoe curled into a ball, mortified, and buried her head under the blanket, too.
A taloned hand peeled the cover off her head. “Do humans make an extra effort to be so strange?” Tavirr chuckled.
“Ugh,” she groaned as Tavirr swept the blanket off of her entirely. “Humans… can be weird about seeing other humans… like this.”
“Odd. Is sleeping something to be hidden away?”
She groaned again. “I need to get dressed if we’re going to see the mayor. I don’t want someone else gawking at me.”
Tavirr watched Zoe dress, enjoying the way she moved, her oddly straight legs; her lack of either fur or a tail made him intensely aware now of exactly what her clothing covered. She clumsily tried to finger-comb her hair, but Tavirr must have had plenty of experience grooming his own unruly mane, and his talons managed the untangling more quickly than she could.
Zoe took a deep breath, opened the door, and resolutely ignored the stares.
The room was quiet after they’d left. For a time, at least.
A slow clicking sound traveled over the floor.
The glow bulb abruptly went out.
----------------------------------------
The mayor’s office wasn’t small, exactly, but it was cramped with shelves of books, records, architectural diagrams, and more than a few children’s drawings. The faint chemical odor that Rene associated with atterlim was mostly drowned out by the smell of paper and leather.
The desk off to the side was just small enough to fit between two overstuffed shelves; the rest of the open space was taken by a maze of chairs.
Rene didn’t want to be here, sitting on his ass and arguing with one of the only two family members he had left.
“Why do you even have a kriuulu contact?” he yelled. “What about Sasha? What about—”
“Dammit, Uncle! I have no choice. When the Society contacted us, they made it very fucking clear that Fthelis and the local suulon grove already knew that we were here and in breach of the mandate. They’ve sent in representatives from every species except the d’vog—and God knows those things could be hanging around, too, this close to the bay, and we’d never even see them.”
Julius sighed at the bleak look on his uncle’s face.
Sagging back into his cramped chair, Rene rubbed his scalp.
“God only knows when,” Julius began, but stopped at Rene’s flinch of distaste. “I am sorry, but I will not censor myself. We’re believers here, most of us, trying to rebuild human culture—our culture, what the vo’ai took from us. And that includes belief in something more. We have hope here, Rene. That’s part of what the Society is: hope that maybe someday the cataclysms can end, that we, all of us together, can put a stop to the chaos, the disasters—and yes, the fucking cultural custody mandate.
“Hope is a good thing,” he continued. “You should try it sometime.”
The door creaked open as Fthelis slipped in.
“Apologies,” the kriuulu said. “I heard shouting and was concerned. Brother Rene, you are right to worry. My people are not trustworthy, and the vo’ai are the worst of us. Whom else may we send that will reassure you?”
Rene stared at the kriuulu, overwhelmed with old memories of being chased. He ought to be over this, he told himself. He knew he never would be.
The door swung open again, and the office was crowded with two more bodies.
“Damn,” Zoe said, looking around the space. “This is more books than I’ve ever seen in one place since I left home.”
Fthelis turned and bowed to her. “Home, yes. That is the other piece of news, I’m afraid. Please sit down, sister Zoe. This will be hard to hear.”
----------------------------------------
After Fweyu told her, after she screamed at him, Tavirr stepped between her and the kriuulu. His wings ruffled out in warning, but before Rene or Julius could speak, he stared at the kriuulu, low thunder rumbling from his chest. Fweyu backed up until he couldn’t back away any further.
“Rene,” Tavirr snarled. “Fetch h’Dlava. We are leaving.”
“But—”
“Now.”
After they were gone, Julius turned to Fweyu. “I’m sorry. That could have gone better.”
The kriuulu took a chair with a long sigh. “No, my friend. It could have only gone worse. Khiai unleashed again, d’vog on the move—”
“Damn it! Where?”
“Northward, inland toward the devastation.”
“Hunting what, survivors?”
“They are probably not after human survivors.”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
“What’ll the suulon do?”
“My people have no love for the vo’ai, brother Julius. Any the d’vog do not kill…”
----------------------------------------
Zoe didn’t remember much of the race out of the inferno and into Deep Haven, but she knew they’d walked for hours after being found by village hunting scouts. Those men and women had supported Tavirr until a runner had brought h’Dlava to carry the wounded lysk the rest of the way. She knew the burn line had stopped a ways from the village—berms of bare earth must have been frantically mounded for miles around in the days after the holocaust—but she hadn’t thought about how far outward it might have extended.
From the air, it looked like a devastating wildfire had consumed the countryside. Now it was nothing but miles and miles of ashes, a bullseye of ruin around Deep Haven’s meadows stretching as far as they could see.
It had been raining when they’d left Deep Haven that morning; low clouds still hovered, trapping the few remaining cinders. They could still smell the burned landscape below them. Zoe tried to imagine what it must have been like, whether the people of New Providence, the people who had once shunned her, had known about the approach of the weapons. If they had heard the same hellish shrieking, seen the fire trails of what Tavirr had named khiai.
Standing on the lip of Mama’s outer shell, secured by safety straps around her waist and shoulders, Zoe realized she was freezing. She tried to make herself go back inside, but she suddenly felt that if she took even a single step, she would fall, the harness no proof against what must be thousands of vengeful ghosts.
She thought of the cavern beneath Deep Haven and shivered. Would this, too, wind up time-frozen somewhere deep underground? Would the burning bodies of the townsfolk, the burning groves, the fallen vo’ai—would some distant descendant stumble on the remains of this disaster someday, as far below ground as she was above it? Would the khiai still be screaming in silent, ghostly voices that only the dead could hear?
Something tugged on her safety line.
“Come back,” Tavirr pleaded. “Zoe, please. Come inside.”
Zoe took one more look at the ashes of her former life, shook herself, and fled into the warmth of Mama’s shell.
When she was inside, Rene unhooked her from the safety harness with practiced skill, and Tavirr wrapped her in a comforting embrace. The dread she’d been feeling uncoiled as he curled his arms and wings protectively around her until she felt cocooned against him. Despite how tightly he held her, Zoe finally felt that she could breathe again.
A claw from one of his wing thumbs snagged on her hair, and by the time they were untangled, they were both laughing at the absurdity.
H’Dlava bent to grip Zoe’s shoulders gently. She smiled up at him, took his hand, and dropped a kiss on one of his thick knuckles.
Finally, Rene swept her up in a bear hug.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what?”
“For rescuing me, for helping Tavirr when he needed it. For everything. For… just being you.”
Rene pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Anytime, anywhere. And besides,” he said, wiping a tear from her cheek, “who else would I be?”
----------------------------------------
Over dinner, Zoe dug out the little rock the atterlim had given her.
Rene swallowed a bite of savory fish roll, then took the rock, turning it over in his hands. “It’s basically an invitation to get your marching orders from the Society.”
“The Society?” Zoe repeated in confusion.
H’Dlava had devoured a bowl of dried fruit and was following that with several ears of squall bread, crunching through the hard cores with delight. “These are delicious! I can’t believe I’ve never had them. Where do they grow?”
“We farm them,” Zoe said, then stopped. “Farmed them,” she amended.
Sobered, the burchar set the last ear back onto his plate. “With your blessing,” he stated, “I would like these seeds to be donated to the lifeprint rooms at the Library of h’Gauril.” He set the plate beside her. “Even more, I would like yours to be the hands that deliver them.”
Lifeprint? Zoe turned the word over in her mind, attempting to make it into something that could translate to Human, but she couldn’t do it. “I—what… lifeprint?”
H’Dlava grinned, showing his flat herbivore teeth. “A bit of salvaged knowledge dug up and recreated by that Society Rene is so proud of.”
“How did you…” Rene stared at h’Dlava. “When did the Society do that?”
“Ha, you think everything worth happening waited till after your human cataclysm? Before Inur burst out of old Earth, before Yuina hatched into Inur, before Takk sundered Yuina, the Society already existed. Before a thousand thousand worlds emerged again and again, or so the legends have come down, to be preserved in the great Libraries—”
Tavirr coughed pointedly.
“—and to be sung, of course, by our most gifted brothers and sisters—”
Rene moved a jug of wine out of h’Dlava’s reach, handing it to Zoe.
“—there was the great work of the Society.” He reached for the jug, which was no longer at his elbow. “Why, I’m suddenly feeling parched.”
“You, my friend, are cut off,” Rene announced, “until you explain how the hell you know about the Society.”
When h’Dlava eyed Rene and then the wine, Zoe refilled her own cup with a flourish.
“How,” he whispered loudly to Tavirr, “do you put up with this creature?”
Zoe took a sip, staring innocently at h’Dlava.
“Hm. It helps that she tastes better than the wine does.”
She spluttered and coughed, spraying wine everywhere.
----------------------------------------
The Society, h’Dlava explained, was an organization predating every species on Inur.
“Just how old is Inur?” Zoe asked.
“That’s the trick,” he said. “We do not know. How many times has a world… hatched—” he made a bursting gesture—“out of another world? We know it’s happened at least three times, yes? The Cataclysm of Earth, the Hatching of Inur, the Breaking of Yuina—but before that? There were worlds and catastrophes of worlds before that. My clan mother, damn her scales, keeps a list of them somewhere in the Library at h’Umua. When I refused to take my place among the warrior clan, she refused me entry to the Library.”
Zoe reached across the table and squeezed his hand.
“I am quite interested,” he assured her, “to find out how much history the Society has stored away.”
He handed the strange rock back to Zoe. She studied it again, the way it looked like smaller wheels orbiting progressively larger wheels; for the first time, she saw tiny, faint whorls that seemed to be dancing around the central array, and she wondered if those represented worlds that had been broken and forgotten.
“How many worlds, do you think?” h’Dlava mused. “How many peoples, how many biomes, animals, cultures... how much knowledge has been lost over how much time?”
There was a tug at her thoughts, some alien awareness creeping slowly down her spine. Zoe’s eyes followed it, watching papers riffle in an absent breeze, a jacket hung over a chair swaying as the whatever-it-was that had followed her displayed more boldness in its uncertain presence.
“And there goes our other little problem,” she said to h’Dlava. “Ghost, tu’yet, or Inur’s own sense of humor. It may have saved us when the fire fell, but I will never get used to the damn thing. Whatever the hell weirdness it is.”
h’Dlava’s face went from blue to ashen gray. “I am not a praying man, not like Julius and his people. But in this, I can only pray we find the truth of it, and soon. If your unseen companion is what I suspect it to be...”
She stared at him. “What do you suspect it to be?”
He only shook his head, mutely refusing to say what he was afraid of.
----------------------------------------
Apple trees were common among the suulon groves. Kriuulu everywhere loved them, but the suulon had developed a passion for creating new strains. Unlike the vo’ai with their fanatical devotion to their mother and grandmother trees, the suulon enjoyed being rooted among trees originally native to many worlds, while their unrooted children savored all kinds of fruits and seeds. Apples especially, though, had become wildly popular, with pruning and harvesting having become a lifelong joy for many suulon.
Fthelis had spent the last several days and nights walking back to his own beloved grove, where his forebears had rooted, where they produced egg-fruits for nourishment, and only occasionally, when a traveling suulon molted, fertile egg-fruit ripened into kriuulings.
A kriuuling had brought him word from the suulon council, cowards all. They may have not held a mandate over any human settlements, but they had no intention of pressing for the end of it.
They were a peaceful folk, by and large, the suulon—but humans! Unruly and unruled, humans out of mandate meant... possibilities that Fthelis did not enjoy the thought of. Humans chafing in the bonds of cultural custody, though. They were ready to explode.
The suulon council had decided humans were too dangerous to be freed. Fthelis, though, knew they were too dangerous to be left in custody. If the council had walked through the devastation that he had…
He halted that line of thought. He was not one of the murderous vo’ai. He was suulon, and that meant something.
It had to mean something.
He stroked the mouthvines of a dear old friend, long since gone to root. “Tsiru,” he whispered. “You were right, my friend. I have need of your specialized apples, after all. The ones you planted long ago, after we argued. I am so sorry to be wrong, but as usual, you saw what I could not. The knives are being sharpened. The harvest must be today. It is time.”
Tsiru stirred. Her roots hummed beneath the soil, and a sudden fall of ripe, red fruits from two trees shook the ground nearby.
Fthelis. Voices rustled, his name whispered by many tongues.
He paused, and a mouthvine circled his shoulders, caressing him, little lips pulling at his feathers suggestively.
“Yes, love. You’re right. My legs ache to root themselves in your soil. I have walked this world long enough, and I long to be still and drink the sun. But give me tonight.”
The vine shifted away, and he shivered. A scattering of feathers dislodged themselves, dissolving into spores. He watched, mesmerized, as Tsiru’s mouths sucked them up greedily.
Bring meat, she whispered. Bring blood. Bring them all.
He closed his eyes, more feathers dropping away, but he shook the ecstasy away. As much as he wanted to simply molt on the spot, there was still work to be done first.
Fthelis walked until he found a dying sickle tree. Yanking it easily from the soil, he carried the small tree back to where Tsiru stood vigilant.
He peeled the bark away, and the thin trunk split into long, fibrous cords. “For sundered Yuina,” he murmured.
Sundered Yuina, Tsiru’s many voices echoed.
These he laid on stones to bake in the sun, except for one. He hammered the cord between two stones, letting the rich sap soak into the ground where Tsiru’s roots could drink it, while the fibrous cord split further into long threads.
“For the threads that bind us still, suulon to tchy’et to oailu to mihyari to fallen vo’ai. We are all kriuulu.”
All, Tsiru echoed.
He paused for a long moment, then grasped one thread in both wing-claws and snapped it. “Let the vo’ai be unnamed and forgotten.”
The huge, leathery leaves were already dead and dry, and the curved thorns that gave the tree its name served well as needles, each seeming to last precisely as long as it took to stitch a single thread into a single seam.
Every time a needle broke, Fthelis breathed on them, saying, “Rest well, forgotten brother.”
Rest well, never-sister.
Dozens of leaves became five bags as the day stretched along. The rest of the leaves, he left waiting. The broken thread, he placed in the center of a small, unlit fire pit, among the rest of the waiting kindling.
Tsiru gave Fthelis two mouthvines, dropping them to the ground already straight and strong. For the journey, she whispered to him.
When the sickle tree cords were dry, he wove the stiff mouthvines together, closely at the tips but wider and wider until only the ends of the vines, which had curled over as they died, remained.
“For the journey’s end.”
When the travois was satisfactory, Fthelis loaded the apples into the bags, picked up the curved handles, and turned to Tsiru. A small flock of kriuulings had alit in her branches. “Call your elder brothers,” he instructed them. “I will return tomorrow with news.”
Prune their souls, Fthelis, Tsiru hissed. End the misery.
He nodded sadly, turned, and began to walk.
Later, at the edge of the council grove, he plucked a fresh apple, its skin a pleasing blush of pink and green, and ate. He had brought specialty apples to the council, a new breed just developed of course, and he knew the council would be dying to taste them.
----------------------------------------
The next evening, he returned, the five bags laden with a very different harvest.
There was a fire in the center of Tsiru’s grove. The sweet scent of applewood heartened Fthelis.
He bowed before Tsiru first, then nodded to each young suulon in attendance. They had brought gifts, everything from dried roots to woody fungus already roasting over the fire. There was even a fresh honeycomb, a gift for Fthelis that he ate on the spot.
It would, after all, be his last.
They’d picked up the discarded sickle tree leaves and dusted them off, and now the children of Tsiru—her many Eyes, Hands, and Voices in the suulon groves and beyond—sat on those leaves, celebrating their own mother tree.
“How did our council find your harvest of apples, brother Fthelis?” one of the young suulon asked.
He tore a bag open, letting the feathered body of a dead kriuulu fall to the ground. “Not to their liking,” he replied.
That night, he stood tall before the children of Tsiru, his feathers molting, floating away into spores to be lapped up by Tsiru’s mouthvines. He closed his eyes for the last time, shuddering as Tsiru’s many mouths lapped against his bare skin, as his rooting legs dove deep to twine with hers. Fthelis ate flesh for the first time, Tsiru sharing in the bloody feast, their mouthvines tearing into the dead.
In the morning, Tsiru’s children looked at the two trees, side by side, their mouthvines tangled together.
“Our new mother tree.”
“She is beautiful.”
“Fthelis will bear strong fruit.”
They heard her voices for the first time then. The vo’ai are dead and dying, Fthelis whispered. Let it be known to all kriuulu. Let it be known to burchar and lysk, atterlim and d’vog. The time of the mandate is ending. The suulon will see humanity freed—or humanity will see all kriuulu dead.