The Misshapen had gathered next to the north edge of the protective circle. Some sat upon the humid litter of the jungle floor. Others clung to some branch of a nearby tree. One without arms or legs that looked like a snake hybridized with a Felsian, had climbed upon a hut to have a vantage point from which he could watch the show.
And what was the show? It was Ald testing his contraption. Several tests had failed in the day prior, and this one seemed to not go any better. Whether The arms had a burst of catastrophic incoordination, or they used a bit too much force and tore some of the bindings apart making the transport become partially undone, or they failed to form as arms instead of stumps, or sprouted in the wrong places, the spell used in The Menagerie was not simple to adapt to traversing the land, much less the treacherous terrain of the cloudcryforest. And Ald wasn’t the best runic scribe in Felsia. At least, he could take solace in knowing he was the second or third best in this side of the Worldvein, after Father and, possibly, Unkindness.
They laughed at his failures, and he cast towards them glares full of disdain, yet carrying a speck of amusement. Their behavior was not so different from that of his siblings. Still, their mockery was annoying.
“If I fail, your little society will eventually collapse due to the shortage of fresh Felsian blood,” he Reminded them.
As the others giggled at Ald’s words, Nails stepped forward from the crowd and out the circle of runes. He approached Ald while putting on a serious face. “Do we look like the sort of society that builds things to last to you? Are we all pale with copper eyes and hair? Do we erect statues and walls and high towers of ivory?” He pointed at the hovels as he spoke.
Ald raised his upper lip in a grimace. “No. But every society, real of fictional, should seek to perpetuate itself in time.”
“Why? Do Felsians seek to perpetuate themselves? Or have they been handed their survival as a heavenly stipend until now? Animals, their flocks or schools or packs, they die off if they don’t reproduce. Yet Felsia dies off if you are forced to reproduce. Don’t you think, that, when speaking of aberrant societies, you need to name the one you hail from first and foremost?”
“A society that doesn’t renew its blood dies off. Animals born sick die off to not pass their sickness on. Don’t you care about your little… pack perishing?” Ald’s eyes fixed into Nail’s with the firmness of lances pointed at a prisoner.
“Sometimes ducks come to this side of the Worldvein. The same ones you see on your city. So, say, were I to decapitate a duckling without a good reason, what would be your reaction?”
“If I were still in Felsia?” Ald broke eye contact, lowering his head, observing the back of his hand, how the swollen veins irrigated his fingers. How they weren’t that different from those of some of the inhabitants of this place. “I would surely consider you a monster.”
“Why? If a duckling that didn’t live long enough to perpetuate itself should hold no value in your eyes.”
Hearing that, Ald grunted. It was such a cheap metaphor. “Animals and societies both can have inherent value, Nails. That doesn’t mean that survival is optional for them.”
“Do things exist only for you to witness them today, Ald? Are you that solipsist?”
Ald bit his lip and to his hand to his mouth. The obvious answer was no. But he needed a way to justify his previous statement. “it is clear it’s the vision of the All Carver for living things and their societies to persevere. The very existence of the soul is a natural consequence of it.”
“And things being alive today is a natural consequence of things reproducing. It doesn’t imply they are meant to. I don’t see continued existence of my society as a worthwhile end in and of itself. The Lady in White, however, cares about my people and the little hamlets we form.”
Ald considered his words slowly, and realized there was one he didn’t know. “Hamlet?”
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“Far few individuals than in a city living together. The Lady came up with the word to describe our little settlement.”
Ald stopped paying attention to Nails when an idea came to him. He turned towards the disk with painted runes that crowned his creation, from the center of which a bloodied stake jutted. He stared at his fingertips, tinged in blood all the same. “Maybe I could use a neologism in the script. Now that you mentioned Unkindness giving a name to this settlement and others of its kind, I I think I may have made a mistake when copying the script of The Menagerie. I think the words were not “leg” and “fin”, but a sort of… botched portmantologism of both.”
Nails stood in place, arms crossed as his bodily fingers curled and relaxed rhythmically. “Beg your pardon?”
“Blend, the long word means blend. A combination of words. Synonyms are never exact, not in runic scripture. Words have very particular meanings for Mother.”
Nails retreated, entering back in the protective circle and casually kicking one of the rocks out of formation. This made Alf Freeze in place. “Do you want to kill your people?”
“No. My patroness is not as haughty as yours. The circle of rocks is there as a promise, as a marker. It keeps up no spell on its own. WE sometimes use the stones on it to throw at monkeys or at the treeslitherers.”
Ald went back to examining his runework. “What are those? The fluffy snake-like mammals?”
Nail’s lips pressed tightly against each other. The memory of the taste was enough to make his stomach turn. “Yes. They are… edible, in times of need. But offer me any other alternative besides starvation, and I won’t even take a peek at their meat.” Something rustled among the leaves of a nearby tree, catching Nail’s attention. “Come into the circle. Have your weapon at the ready. She is fast and deadly.”
As it often happened, a dove came out of seemingly nowhere and landed on Ald’s shoulders. “No need for that, she doesn’t attack purebred Felsians.”
Nails turned away and walked deeper into the town. Some wild misshapen fostered a hatred for their own kind… or a love for hunting their own kind, depending on how one looked at it, that rivalled Wintertoll’s. If not for The Lady in White, every misshapen would be alone in the world, or only briefly colluding with their equals for a hunt, at most. Better le the Felsian work and go away at once. Whether he killed Father or not, he wouldn’t see the direst of consequences in his lifetime. In the end, if the Felsians survived, all that would live would be Masterworks.
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A phantasmagoric arm sprouted from under the roughly hewn logs and grabbed onto the coarse bark of the nearest tree. The skin showed a sickly green tone, and its nails were black. And soon, as more of Ald’s blood dripped from the wounds in his fingertips, more arms sprouted and Joined the first one. Like an agile hybrid of monkey and caterpillar the vehicle (Which Ald named with a pun untranslatable to our tongue, but which could be explained as replacing part of their word for “death march” with the word used for “fingers”, so, from here onwards, it shall be referred to as Fingermarch in text.) clambered onto the tree, as Ald embraced the central column and, with it, its runic disc, where he had painted the spell over soft forgewood. The painting was temporal: once he arrived to a fully functional incantation, he would engrave the characters onto the very surface.
Ald smiled as, pull by pull, the ground fell away from him. After three days of trial and error, Fingermarch was not only walking, but climbing up a thick tree nigh effortlessly. HE had to take care not to do it on leaner trees, as the vehicle could prove too heavy for the frailest of them. And no forgewood trees at all: While the ones growing in the jungle seemed to resist slightly higher temperatures than the ones back in the Felsian forests even in death, he had learned long ago that their support was only to be trusted in winter.
He turned his head to look at the silent crowd of misshapen that had gathered, as they often did, at the limit of the protective circle. Not one of them hollered or mocked anymore, and rather watched calmly, taking in the beauty of Felsian magic, more than one of them knowing that they would probably never see it in action again after Ald left their little Hamlet.
Finally, Ald willed the arms to climb down, and they did, until he committed a mistake coordinating the movements of the arms, causing them to entangle and making the whole structure lose its grasp on the tree when he desperately tried to correct it
He fell at the tree’s foot and rolled away immediately, despite the pain on his back, to avoid being crushed by the falling construct. Fingermarch collapsed in the ground without any grace shortly after, the impact popping a few of the sinew bindings. To this, Ald felt a bit weary. SO many times he had repaired this thing already… and yet, a laugh sprouted out his mouth like scalding water out a geyser. The enchantment worked! He had been a bit clumsy with its management, but it obeyed him perfectly. Missing his lost youth, he scrambled to his feet, a hand against his spine as he painfully stretched. “It’s ready, folks.” HE told the surprised Misshapen. “Tomorrow I will engrave the disk properly and repair the damage done by the fall, and the day after tomorrow, I part.”
Most misshapen cheered. Some did it despite feeling a bit sad at the eventual departure of their guest. Telesa, however, did not: she stood in silence, trying to become unaware of the world once more, as she often was due to the extreme weariness that permeated her body and mind.