Inheritance startled up, turned frantically to the sides, and then regarded the patient Ald for a few instants. “Nightmare. Would you prefer we soar? float? Trot? At my disposal there are forms that can cross the air in a thousand and one ways.”
A wound opened in the grey and gouted morning light, dense and foreboding, splattering on an irregular patch over the calm misshapen that had been born in the wild without reluctance accepted the denominator, and the denying misshapen that had been born from Mother and believed himself ever so slightly above his nieces and nephews.
“Well? Ald Elvisatcaught? What do you wish for?”
Ald stood at the edge, his black claws sending little lumps of rubble tumbling down the riff, into the desert of shadows like fangs. “Something that won’t lead to me falling down there.” He pointed with a little jerk of his head, only enough movement for the misshapen to notice it. “Can you get me to Father safely?”
“No such thing as safety out here. But with the Lady’s blessing, you needn’t fear, brother.”
“I am not your brother,” Ald said.
“Brother of the form I wear.” He corrected without hesitation. “Kalam was a Felsian through and through, so I think like one while I incarnate him.”
“I don’t feel comfortable with you calling me brother, knowing how different we are. You crawled out of a crack in the ground.”
The raven grinned with teeth. “And you did not, one would assume. And one would be wrong.”
Ald ignored the raven and laid his attention onto the distant little dot that, in the light of day, had lost its likeness to a star. “I’d love to walk there. But the desert’s maw is dark, unwelcoming, and only a fool would enter it willingly. So, any suggestions, Inheritance?”
“I can make you walk there,” he said, and with a little pirouette and turn he stepped off the cliff, plummeting into the void, back first. And in a screeching explosion, the Felsian form got obliterated, a dissonance that made Ald’s hairs stand on end and his pupils to turn tiny in the instant before he closed his eyes. An intrusion of sound violated his ears and his mind, the shrill gusts quickly becoming unbearable, subjugating to the point he let himself fall on his back as he tried to occlude his ears with cramped up hands.
As suddenly as it began, the screeching stopped, among the ringing of his ears Ald heard steps to his side, and when he turned to see the new form of inheritance, he found naught gracing his eyes. An empty spot, a bit of dandruff kicked to the side by a lump of nothingness.
“Invisible?”
“No. Composed solely of sound,” Unkindness answered, taking fly off of Ald’s shoulder, black wings fluttering in sepulchral silence, and circling far above his head like a vulture would have.
Letters were drawn on the dandruff, old Felsian words that reminded Ald of the way some of the oldest elders spoke during his childhood. “Ride upon the slabs of song in front of your very self, towards the prison over yonder.”
With a little scrabble he positioned himself next to the edge, and squinted, trying to notice any alteration in the air in front of him. He steadied his breath and listened, a shy hand got extended forward, fingers spread wide, as if trying to caress a dangerous beast. Soon his fingertips met an impassable, but rather cushioned, parcel of air. It let out a pained musical note when he pressed onto it, making Ald instinctively withdraw his hand. Once again he touched it, and once more it cried.
“I should not find the magic of the misshapen unnerving by now. And yet...”
“It’s not magic,” the raven said with caws, but they reached Ald’s mind as words. “The Ratchet twists our essences as far as it twists our flesh. What Inheritance does is no different from you shaping a vase with your very hands. It’s our nature; we are not drawing from the All-Carver’s power to modify The Masterpiece when we merely exist, Ald.”
Ald touched the slab once more, this time resisting the urge to pull his hand off the dissonant thing. It didn’t feel hard nor soft, but granular and stinging. Caressing a cactus made of sand would have stirred similar sensations. “You two pretend me to walk over these? Over parcels of mangled air?”
“Parcels of sound,” said unkindness, landing back on his shoulder. “As many as you need, whenever you need them. Imagine the particles that make up the soil that so many times you have had under your feet are instead made of song, screech, chime or whistle. Or if the sword you wield were made out of an oath in lieu of steel: just as malleable at the moment of being struck, and just as rigid in the moment of truth.”
“I am cold. Can you give me a cape made of sound, Inheritance?”
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Ald’s wish seemed to become the misshapen’s command. His shoulders were suddenly burdened, the feeling of soft fur greeting his skin and a constant hum crawling into his ears. He spoke, and the fabric waved as if battered by a gust of wind.
Onwards he intended to march, hiding his lameness the best that he could. He was a proud son of Father, wood leg or not, and the savior of Felsia could not arrive there hunched and hobbling. So he extended his hand, palm up, like a Felsian who awaits a payment. “Sing me a walking cane.”
The weighted melody manifested, clear and soothing, upon Ald’s hand, and in his grasp he imagined a concatenation of wooden ant automatons, rushing back and forth over a carbon core. But his eyes and hears didn’t deceive him, unlike his hand. He was holding onto a string of sound, and when he pressed on it, I mewled pleasantly. Trying to put a finger on each end of the stick he tested its length, and failed to place a fingertip on each end. Then he stuck it on the ground and with his hands, putting one above the other, searched for the top. The thing was about as tall as he was. It would work wonders.
He stepped off the cliff, but not without testing the seeming void with the cane beforehand. The slabs of sound bobbed slightly when loaded with his weight, analogs of the segments of The Menagerie, floating over the river, chained together. In a way, this was another Worldvein he was to cross, another Felsian shore he was to leave. He plucked along the crying path, the sounds of his left and right legs radically different. Pain when the claws touched the sound, and muffled complaints when the wood did. Nothing when the cane stuck the slabs. Unkindness remained perched on his shoulder, staring forward and not below, just like he was doing. The gentle wind didn’t affect Ald’s cape, but his grunts did, and even made his feet sink a little bit and only so briefly into the slabs, a transitory quicksand consistence conquering the seeming solid.
It was like walking over a dry dirt road. The noises but the clouds of dust raised by one’s feet as the path is founded anew. Below, far below, the sands watched with envy how they hovered high above, how they stepped on clouds of music, out of the reach of the hungry jaws of the shadows. Shadows that stirred down there as much as they did in Ald’s mind. “The creatures below us, Unkindness, are they misshapen? A masterwork? Sons and daughters of nature?”
“They want to eat you, Ald. What do you think they could be? What do you think could cast shadows so hungry they want to eat the real things, that which grants them their very existence?”
He thought for a moment. “Father’s shadows?” His eyes peladed for Unkindness to give a negative answer. Sadly, his mind knew she wasn’t one for lies.
“Unchecked, nervous, orphaned. Father’s, indeed.”
“That means this place wasn’t a desert four years ago,” Ald realized, annoyed, more than angry. “In my humble opinion, the air is not dry enough, there are patches of dirt between the sands, and it doesn’t seem to be stirring from the coldest of nights. What I have read about deserts, the explorer’s accounts: it doesn’t match them. This… isn’t meant to be a desert.”
“‘Meant to’, meaningless words in this case. The shadows modified the environment, consumed everything that lived down there. But to say a place is meant to be a desert and another a jungle... that’s incongruent with the shifting nature of The Masterpiece. Why should on pick a desert to jail the shadows, disrupt a natural place teeming with interesting life forms, less variegated but just as valuable, or as worthless, as those of a rainforest? There used to be a valley with its colorful shrubs and its frolicking hares. The shadows ate the last fruit, dug out the last lair. Why would them devouring each thick-leaved plant and sucking the lonest of lizards out of their burrows would instill in you a greater feeling of loss, Ald?”
“Because then I can say they at least left the dunes intact,” his voice was a muted thing, for he was afraid of breaking the bridge of sound, of falling down to a horrible death, to the howling and drooling blotches of darkness that stalked the valley.
Saddened by the images under his foot Ald kept on trudging forward, holding onto the cane with both hands, yearning for a silence that each step broke. Twice he stopped and sat upon naught, letting his head fall back to stretch his neck muscles. Sometimes he lay on the sound, and he cried, staring at the sky, that was the selfsame that hung over his farmstead. More than once he got tempted to extend a hand and try to reach for something that wasn’t there, for a fleeting memory. But soon enough he turned and peered down, and saw them hungering, shifting, crawling and desiring for him to fall. He would not. The slabs cried under him once and again as he advanced though the invisible road, surges of pride straightening his back now and then. The hero of Felsians, the liberator of the progenitor, Unkindness’ chosen one couldn’t present himself as weak before Father. Yet Father was who had engendered everything vile down there. What was he hoping for? Why expend such effort in seeming as he was not? He was not carrying Felsia on his back, only a duty. And duty is a demanding symbiont. Nobody who had known one so heavy would demand for it to be fulfilled by one who looks refined and flawless. Duty, however, ought to be alien to Father. And if the opinion of a duty-spurning brother or sister didn’t matter, why would that of his progenitor? Gradually he returned to his hunched pose, to dragging his good leg to not burden the bad one. His appearance would shame Father. And maybe Father deserved to be shamed.
The star in the distance grew as he dragged closer, and its features became appreciable. It was like an arthropod made of chalk. Antennae, curled inwards like greedy fingers, rimming the dorsal of the massive circular body. Paddles the size of cathedrals swatted up and down — not necessarily to keep it afloat, evidently, as it hovered flawlessly, still except for a so slight rotation over a vertical axis. The back of the creature fostered vegetation: lush trees, high segmented canes, flowers white and black. Ald held a breath, basking in its magnificence.
“I expected to be met by something uglier.”
“In the central point of my sibling there’s a hole, a cave if you will. And inside it, Ald, awaits the end of your journey. Are you ready to save Felsia?”
“No, Clivanaratea. I will never be. But neither is anyone else. I may rest tomorrow.”
Ald resumed his walk across the bridge, faster this time, eager to reach the flying Masterwork, to land on its back.
To meet Father.