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VI. Timeless
Tavirr gaped at the band of fire that was still streaked over the sky like a child’s clumsy painting, and all he could think of was the day he’d met h’Jasse.
The dancer with wings of flame.
Her hideous screaming.
The other dancers, hurling themselves like chunks of flesh in the wake of a burchar warrior’s vicious spear thrust.
This cannot be, he thought. He heard a strange mewling, felt a sharp pain in his knees, a tug in his back as his wings fought to right him.
There was only the timeless fire burning the sky. Only the screaming sound of the khiai.
They found them. Somehow they got them working, he thought. Then, How long have they had khiai? How long have they held them in reserve? And why—by all the winds!—why now?
There was pain in his hands. He finally pulled his eyes away from the hellish bow to find that he’d fallen to his knees, wings akimbo, hands fisted so tightly that his talons had dug bloody grooves into his palms.
Khiai, the terror weapon of ancient history.
That was all he knew. He tried to breathe, but he could not stop mewling, like a child crying for its mother.
He looked around himself, numb to everything except that the world beyond Drusik, the world he’d once dreamed of exploring, was no place for a lysk.
Tu’yet and wind madness—and now even forbidden weapons! H’Jasse’s ancestors should have left all mine in the care of the damned kriuulu. We’d have been safer!
Why—why?!—had those brave h’adbani of old come to the kriuulu for what was left of the lysks, so long ago when poor, destroyed Inur was still freshly Hatched, and Earth had yet to dream? Were burchars and lysks not ancestral enemies?
We all chose peace, as Adba commanded. Why have the khiai returned to scream their evil?
He wanted to go home. He wanted Vala to tug his ears the way she’d done when they were children. He wanted to have been able to congratulate Zassik, to say goodbye to his bravely blooded nephew.
He wanted the simple pain of merely being the wing-mad shadow never spoken of.
The sky finally ceased its endless banshee-shrieking rage.
When he looked up, the burning arc was beginning to dissolve, its infernal tongues silently flickering down to lick at the air, exploring the taste of the world below.
The screaming began again, but it wasn’t the sky this time.
“Get it off me, get it off me!!!”
Zoe lay struggling on the grass, wrestling with nothing. Rene was trying to help her, but her flailing limbs knocked him away.
Tavirr could smell smoke now, and the first crackle of singeing greenery reached his ears.
Winds forsake you, Tavirr ayv Drusik, he thought angrily, you are not a flopping minnow!
Springing up, he glided quickly to his Zoe. He hauled Rene to his feet, then carefully picked Zoe up, wishing he could retract those brutish talons of his. She calmed instantly, though, pressing her face against his keel bone, hands clutching the fur of his shoulders.
“We must leave!” he yelled. “Rene! I do not know these lands, you do! Where are we to go?” Tavirr looked around for the pallicorn, but she had already lifted off, gusting away from the falling flames.
Shielding his face from the rising brush fires, the big man tried to make out any landmarks but shook his head.
Then pallicorn thundered overhead, her great bell flashing like lightning.
“Follow her!” Rene shouted.
Zoe lifted her head, pushing herself out of Tavirr’s arms. She struggled for balance for only a moment, but then pointed. “No! Look! That way!” She indicated a break in the rapidly shifting flames. Behind it, another patch of fire went out; then another was snuffed out. “It’s making a fire break for us!”
Tavirr didn’t question what “it” was; that could wait. He took Zoe’s hand in his, then grabbed Rene’s as well, keeping his wings open to shield both humans.
The big man guided them through the darkened path as the brushfire grew, he and Zoe both holding their shirts over their noses.
Sudden pain seared down his right wing and dripped over his tail, and Tavirr screamed and nearly fell—but Zoe was under the charring wing, and he could not risk her injury. Rising smoke smelling of his own flesh made him cough, and he tried to hold his breath, but the burns were causing him to pant in agony, and the choking convulsions of his lungs only made it worse.
He heard Zoe and Rene, felt small, sure hands forcing his wings closed, excruciation making him momentarily black out.
Tavirr concentrated on keeping ahold of his friends, on putting one foot in front of the other, shutting his tearing eyes against the heat and smoke, and trying his best not to breathe despite the pain. But he wheezed and rasped every few moments. Soon he was thinking only of keeping himself moving, and then not even of that.
He didn’t feel himself fall, didn’t hear Zoe’s yells or Rene calling out in relief; he was senseless to the sudden crowd of strong hands and urgent voices.
The world was nothing but agony.
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There was pressure first. His keel bone ached with it. Something was curled against him, pushing, pressing on him till he felt he must be flat. Chest, ribs, knees, all feeling as though there were a solid weight atop him, crushing his back and wings into—
His wings! Why was he lying on them? Was that why they burned so?
Suddenly, Tavirr’s senses flipped, and he discovered that he was prone on his stomach, as abnormal a sleeping position as was possible for a lysk. He tried to shift but discovered heaviness lumped under and around him.
His wings lay useless on his back, feeling disconnected from the rest of his body. One was securely wrapped, but the other’s claws were hung up on something, nerves howling in torment.
Movement was possible, he discovered, in his left arm. The right arm also obeyed. With great difficulty, Tavirr explored the lumps around and under himself, discovering that thick pillows had contoured what must be a human bed to his nonhuman shape.
Tavirr rose to his feet and looked around.
He’d been mistaken; there’d been no bed, only a familiar cliffside. The wind called to his strong wings, and his tail swung from side to side in agitated need for flight. Someone was whispering, though; someone else stood behind him, painting his wings with fire.
He would fall on the world, shrieking in endless rage; somewhere, a child would look up and wonder what could make the sky drip flames.
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“Tavirr!” Zoe yelled. “Stop struggling! You’re safe, you hear me?”
The lysk’s eyes rolled, sightless, staring into whatever dreams were torturing him.
“Hold him down,” the kind voice beside her said. “He’ll tear his wing if he keeps moving like this.”
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The tu’yet had gotten into the cavern where Tavirr lay recuperating. He could see it, almost, especially when the agony was beyond his ability to process.
At first, he hadn’t understood the pain in his body, not until he finally stood outside of it. He could see Zoe doing her best to hold him down without putting her weight on his good wing. The left wing had been carefully tied into its resting furl to protect it, just like his ama had taught him to do when Vala was a baby, with a baby’s fragile little winglets. The right one was open against the wall, but he couldn’t see what held it up.
A handsome young burchar, perhaps only as tall as Rene, began to swab the raw, angry membrane of his right wing; even watching from outside himself, he could still feel an echo of the pain.
Like claws down my wing, he thought. His spirit felt a prickling horror at the thought.
And did you, at any point, wonder whether the injury to your wings was maybe a warning from the very thing that took mine?
He saw the long crest of fur on his body’s scalp stand on end; the brief pang of his tail twitching followed like an echo.
Something moved in the shadows.
Tavirr spun to face the thing, but it was already gone. He could hear a high-pitched scratching sound, though, like metal scraping against stone, and he chased the sound through the halls of his dreaming mind. He caught glimpses of it, a many-jointed tangle of spindly black limbs, whiplike feelers, and a long, clawed tail. It disappeared into a shadow, and Tavirr dove after it.
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Zoe glanced at the young burchar man, looking away before his strangeness broke her concentration. H’Dlava gently cleaned Tavirr’s wing, then rubbed a numbing salve on the burns. His blunt horns kept threatening to scrape the cavern ceiling, but somehow they never did. When he was done, he dropped the soft rag into the bowl of strong spirits, washing his hands in an untouched bowl of the same noxious stuff.
“Where has little Sara gone off to this time?” h’Dlava asked.
“Her dad sent her out to help Rene see to Mama. She’s still got smoke in her gills.”
“Poor beast. Rene must be capable, though, or she wouldn’t have kept him.” As he spoke, the blue scales on his crest warmed to lavender; he turned away, and Zoe wondered if he was blushing.
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Look, Song! something sang in his mind. This one is whole!
Where was he?
He could smell kriuulu now, the dusty tang of old feathers rather than new, and he could hear a fluting whisper.
Tavirr opened his eyes, seeing only the cloth cushioning his forehead.
The field. The weapon. The burning sky! Flames licking down to taste his wing and part of his tail.
“No, son.”
He closed his eyes against the memory.
Instead, he saw two kriuulu standing in the cavern. Not vo’ai, though, not with that violet plumage. Did any kriuulu race look like that? Maybe once, too long ago to count the eons.
And—around him—it must be some lost crystal palace of the ancients, jeweled within like an enormous geode. The pair of kriuulu stood, chisels in hand, whispering together over a pile of stones.
You see? Eggs! said one, pulling something broken from the wall. Inside were more jewels, blood red and glistening with an oozing moisture.
Not alive, though, Hush… said the other, but… not truly dead.
Rich with magickal potential. Perhaps enough to escape the Abomination?
The first one spoke again. Let us commence. Bring it.
A third kriuulu appeared, cradling what must be an eklil. It crooned to the spider-like creature, which muttered and chuckled mindlessly to itself. It was eyeless, but Tavirr could nonetheless sense a gentle, primitive curiosity from it. Its handler stroked its body, petting and tickling, and it began to twitch.
Tavirr had never seen an eklil before, but he’d heard tales of their oddness. He took a step back, but talons dug into the back of his neck. “Watch, son. Do not turn away.”
When the kriuulu set it down, all three began crooning and making much of the thing, like a newly discovered pet. The eklil seemed to enjoy the attention, though, giggling like a child as it danced. Finally, as it seemed to reach the height of its insane amusement, it froze.
“They are coming for Inur-Before,” his father’s voice snarled, and Tavirr realized his dreaming mind must have reached into the ancient past.
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Cracks appeared around the eklil’s carapace. With a final spasm, it broke in half, releasing hundreds of little round beads, before its twitching body shattered into ragged stones.
“Winds! What have they done?!” He struggled out of his father’s grasp and turned around, but there was no one there.
Only the echo of a snarl, the fading gleam of eyes that had never been his father’s, and an unthinking void of eternal hunger.
Something like a thundering roar given form rose up behind him. When it touched him, it burned like icy wind down his throat.
Wind-mad, it whispered, and hurled him into the storm.
He tried to steady his wings, but the fury of the gale snapped them back, and he thought he felt something in the muscle tear. Folding them tightly against himself eased the burning pain, but he had only a vague impression of his dwindling altitude.
Idiot! he swore at himself. Flaring his tail spines, he steadied his chaotic drop until he finally tumbled out of the clouds entirely—and then his instincts took over. His wings spreading out full against the speed of his fall, Tavirr screamed in pain.
When he hit the ground, he felt the talons on several of his toes crack. In that brief moment, all he could think of was his annoyance that he couldn’t remember where he’d left his filing rod—a broken talon uncared for would be trouble later on—but then his crashing speed flipped him over, and he landed hard on his wings, and it took him several agonized moments simply to recall how to breathe.
Zoe had seen him fall, he knew. She would help him.
Had there been a burchar with her when she’d found him?
He remembered seeing her speaking to a burchar, a good-looking young man who might have made any lysk proud to bond to him.
No, Tavirr recalled, he’d already healed from that. He could still taste the unspent magick of the kriuulings he’d eaten to speed his recovery.
Kriuulings. No—kriuulu, adults, long since flightless. A dream? Hush, he thought; Song. Where—?
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“You can let go now, Zoe, he’ll be all right.”
H’Dlava made a show of grinding a new batch of dried egg-flesh into powder, though Zoe had already watched him do so not an hour before. She burned with curiosity about where he could have found a supply of the dearly guarded stuff.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Hm. Not quite a year. I would have made the young man’s acquaintance soon enough, I suppose.”
“Young!” Zoe laughed. “Rene’s old enough to be my grandfather!”
He turned to her, slapping the floor in gentle amusement with his thick tail. “So am I, little one—yet I am also as young to my people as you are to yours.”
“How long—” Zoe started to say, before swallowing the rest of what she suspected would have been a rude question.
“How long do burchars live?” H’Dlava filled in her unspoken words. She nodded, and he sighed. “As long as we can bear it. This is the way of this world and its magick, little human. I’d wager your people already have a longer lifespan than when your Earth was whole.”
Zoe frowned but nodded.
“I’d also wager your folk once dreamed of immortality, yes? Hah. Yes, we can live to see many things, but only the kindness of the young can ease our elders when that curse becomes too heavy to carry.”
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Tavirr fled the roar of the wind, only to find himself in that haunted cavern of fossilized eggs.
Open the Dread Gate, the dream-kriuulu called Song said. Let us feed the Abomination to its dead Cathedral.
Something that had perhaps once been a kriuulu was dragged in, its sickly, featherless flesh black and drooping wetly over its bones. Around its skinny neck, a metal collar hung, attached to long poles held in the wing-claws of more of the violet-plumed folk.
Hush scooped up a beadlike eklil egg, plucked one of its feathers, and breathed its spores over the tiny thing and watched it begin to glow. Song presented a fossilized egg-fruit, the unbroken shell only pitted stone, but radiating a sullen, foul magick.
Tavirr knew this wasn’t real, wasn’t truly happening now, but he still flinched back when the two eggs—one large, one small—met with a clamorous non-sound that made his spirit ache.
For our once-world, the ghost of a kriuulu sang. For Yuina-Ruined.
Existence cracked open, and Tavirr woke up with a shout.
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Zoe had fallen asleep leaning against Tavirr’s makeshift bed. Trying to get a body not at all built for lying on its stomach supported by haphazard pillows would have been a comedy of errors—except the circumstances weren’t funny at all. Not when she had to see his charred wing propped gently against a wall, the wingtips secured by hooks keeping it as still as possible.
Unfurled, lysk wings were far larger than they appeared otherwise. The smith and the tanner of this hidden little community, composed mostly of humans, had together mocked up something like a paint roller on a pole for getting the burn salve on all the hard-to-reach places, especially where part of the membrane had needed several holes stitched. Zoe hoped they could keep the scarring to a minimum; she liked the dashing look of Tavirr’s marbled fur, and she hoped it would grow back once the angry, blistering welts healed.
The rumble of his voice woke her, but he was only muttering in his sleep. She liked his voice, though she’d only heard him speak Lysk a few times shortly after she’d found him. Not a language made for human mouths, Lysk was full of chuffs and clicks and a warm growl-purr that did odd things to her stomach, which she steadfastly ignored.
One heavily furred arm hung off the makeshift bed; Zoe had propped it up against her shoulder, hoping to keep her friend as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.
She studied his hand. A thumb and three fingers, the palm pads made of roughly scaled hide. The talons were huge, each one longer than any of her own fingers, gray keratin darkening to black at the dagger tips. The underside grooves were clean; she’d often seen him fanatically scraping out the slightest bit of dirt, making her feel self-conscious of the ink stains beneath her own short nails.
His thumb wasn’t set off to the side of his hand like a human’s, though. The base joint was further down and more towards the center of the wrist; she wondered how she’d never noticed that before. No wonder lysks had no written language—those hands hadn’t been made to hold a stylus.
He gasped, yelled something dream-garbled, and one of the pillows cushioning the sharply cambered keel bone shifted. She pushed it back under, then stood to check the rest. Two thick cushions, one on each side of his chest; another two, lashed together and wrapped in blankets, under his lean stomach. The oddly jointed legs needed a more inventive setup. A pile of cushions under his waist let his knees keep their natural frontal bend, while another pile supported the strong, spring-loaded ankles. Those legs seemed anything but weak, but h’Dlava had warned her that improper support of his skeletal structure could cause long-term damage. The only reason they had to keep him like this was to protect that wing.
It was time, she decided, to mop more salve onto the wing membrane.
“Zoe? Why can’t—augh!”
“Stop! No, don’t move, Tavirr! Let me—Dlava,” Zoe yelled, “wake up, I need your help!”
But the burchar had sprung up and cantered to her side before she could even finish calling for him.
“Stay still and calm, please,” h’Dlava said. “We will adjust you so that you may sit up.”
Rearing onto his hind legs, the burchar braced his foreknees and one hand against the wall. With the other hand, he gently lifted Tavirr’s wingtips off the hooks they'd been resting on.
“Knife winds!” hissed Tavirr in what sounded like a curse, “what happened? Why am I…?”
“Your wing is still burned pretty badly,” Zoe said, “so try not to move it much. Part of your tail, too.”
He growled something quietly in Lysk, then said, “Help me sit up. I need to use the, ah…”
“I shall take him, Zoe. Perhaps you should find Rene. I’m sure he will want to know his friend has awoken.”
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Rene had stood in the medic’s cavern with them for a long, silent moment after h’Dlava finished breaking the bad news. Then he’d shrugged in clumsy, wordless apology and followed the tired burchar. Zoe thought she saw him wiping his eyes as he left.
She knew there wasn’t much to be said after the possibility Tavirr had been hit with.
Her lysk friend sat near the foot of the bed, his useless wing draped clumsily over it, legs crossed in the only way that could be comfortable for sitting.
“We’ll find something,” she said. “You healed up quickly enough after—”
“I was eating kriuulings.”
“You—wait, what?” She stifled a giggle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… it’s just, I had no idea where the little bastards they sent after me had gone, I thought they must have just gotten lost!”
He flicked an ear, glaring at her. Then his whiskers spread in a helpless smile as he began chuckling. “Oh, yes, the little spies get lost often enough. In Drusik, we feed any we catch to our injured.” His smile vanished as quickly as it arrived, though. “Most years, we find none. We live above the snow line, though; the downslope clans seem to have more luck.”
She touched his hand, but he pulled back.
“I will be useless, Zoe! How can you bear to—”
“Your wings aren’t what’s important to me, Tavirr.”
He sighed. “I cannot hunt.”
“You couldn’t when I first met you, either.”
His eyes, full of questions, met hers. “Why…? Why did you help me? I know how dangerous it must have been for you.”
Zoe closed her eyes and leaned the back of her head against the wall. “There wasn’t much left for me back home anyway. Tavirr, I—I’ve hurt people I loved. I didn’t know that was what I was doing, but that doesn’t make it better.”
He let her take his hand, then waited for her to speak.
“What do you know about the eklil?”
Looking at her sharply, Tavirr said, “Very little, only that their eggs are like tiny beads—why?”
“Eggs?” she asked in surprise.
“Yes.”
“How do you—”
“When they die, they crack open, and a bunch of little eggs fall out.”
“I saw one die, Tavirr, and a bunch of little eggs were definitely not what came out!”
He stared at her in confusion. “What did?”
Pointing across to the opposite side of the little cavern, she said, “The thing that climbed out of a dead eklil is sitting right underneath that table.”
Tavirr made a thoughtful sound, his eyes skimming the shadows that were obviously only shadows to him. “I wonder if I can only see it when I’m dreaming…?” He caught her confused look. “No matter. Please.”
“We mine them.”
He jerked, then hissed in pain.
“Sorry! No, we don’t dig them up and kill them! It was—fuck, there was this asshole I used to be friends with when I was little, and… look, can we go back and start this conversation over?”
He nodded.
“Okay. So. We mine the stones that are left over after they’ve already died. They’re magickal. Most Earth animals can just, I don’t know, adapt more quickly, or maybe they’re just better at absorbing magick, I don’t know. But humans—we need help. The vo’ai taught us how to mine the stones, how to drill holes to loop them onto necklaces without breaking them, and how to wear them so the stones can safely channel magick for our bodies to use.”
“I’ve heard such things were done, but why…”
“A baby in the womb can absorb magick from its mother’s body, but after that, the custom is to hang a necklace with a freshly mined stone on a wall near the baby’s crib—their sleeping place—until they’re five. Then they get to wear it.”
“Why not before then?” asked Tavirr.
Zoe frowned. “Okay, how old were you when you stopped putting every random bit of junk in your mouth?”
He blinked at her. “Having both a younger sister and a nephew makes me confident in the assertion that small lysks are better at life than small humans are.”
“Fair enough.”
“Why not simply swallow them?”
Zoe froze.
“That is what the tales say my people did in the early—Zoe?”
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered. “It just… My mom and dad let me start wearing my stone, and I was so happy about it. I felt so special. I remember how my stone always felt tingly against my skin, and one night I put it in my mouth… and I don’t really know what happened next.” She sighed, feeling an emptiness around her neck where her mother’s eklil stone no longer hung.
“Dad… he quit teaching. He took a job in the mines. He’d come home covered in the dust of dead eklil, and he would just hug Mom, hoping the dust had enough magick in it. Grandma told me later that it seemed like it was working. But there was an accident in the mine, and twelve people died in there. Dad… died… trying to get them out. I… If only I hadn’t…”
Squeezing her shoulder gently, Tavirr watched her tears in silence.
Zoe dug out her handkerchief and wiped her face, leaving faint marks from old ink behind. “The vo’ai don’t like anomalies in their humans, and I guess Mom stayed home all the time after I… after she lost her stone. If anyone saw her without it—well, there would have been too many questions. After Dad… after the accident, she started getting sick. She had to eat egg-flesh, and that shit does things to your mind.”
She was quiet for a long moment. “She went out one day. Didn’t tell us anything, just left before dawn one morning. By the time Grandma and I knew she’d gone, they already had her. They fucking kept her in the tree-damned med center, feeding her egg-flesh, until Cathedral Day was right around the corner, and then the tree-fucking parrots Chose her. And… and I was still too little to know what was happening, I still believed all the fucking lies—I was happy for her, Tavirr! It was my fault, I was just so stupid!”
Tears were streaming down her face. She blew her nose, huddling into herself, too conscious of Tavirr’s hand stroking her shoulder.
“Do you think your mother blamed you?”
“I—what?” She looked at him, confused. “I don’t…”
“I do not believe my mother’s spirit ever blamed me for what happened to my father, even though I was there when he was taken. She was kind. Most mothers are, I believe.”
Nodding, Zoe shut her eyes, feeling more tears spill out.
“Why do your eyes do this?”
“They’re just tears. Humans do that when we’re upset.”
Tavirr caught a drop on the back of his talon, startling her into looking at him again. He examined it curiously, smelled, tasted. A pleasant shiver went down Zoe’s back.
He looked back at her, pupils wide and dark. “You have the sea in your eyes.”
He has a mate, she told herself, but what came out was, “You matter to me, Tavirr. You do. Not your wings, not your claws, not whether you can hunt.” She tapped his keel bone. “What’s in here.”
He caught her hand and pressed it to his chest. His whiskers twitched in a smile as he said, “You want my innards? I’m afraid I’m already using them.”
Exasperated, Zoe tugged at her hand, but he didn’t let go.
“You matter to me as well, my Zoe.”
He has a mate, she thought again.
He touched her brow gently. “Your mind, your stubborn spirit, the winds of your heart.” He laid his palm carefully over her chest, feeling her heart beating as she felt his.
He has a—she thought again, and then simply didn’t care anymore as she leaned into his embrace.
They fell asleep that way, a human whose hands flexed in sorrowful memories, and a lysk whose wing twitched with nightmares of flame.
The thing huddling in the shadows watched them as they slept.