477 is the Year Kept Anew

And Tentacles Plot a Course Entwining Constellation Bones

A thousand eyes stared at Loric Shelvtale, who felt most disadvantaged given that he had but two, and he was only now forcing them open after an unknown time of inactivity. There wasn't much light to harm them, and what there was came in strange cool colors: blue, green, and purple.

Their fluid fluctuations calmed him, allowed the truth to coagulate in his hazy brain. Those were not eyes. Those were suction cups. He reached with his uninjured hand and struck glass, a clear panel not far from his face. Never had he seen one so clear; the brown glass of Staircase was bedrock by comparison.

On the other side of it sat numerous octopuses, floppy heads rising and falling as they examined him. Whenever one crawl-walked away another took its place, bringing with it trails of water, washing his crystal cocoon. Their actual eyes, droopy black crescents, brow ridges heavy with quiet implication, found him between arms and took from him information, but what exactly he could not guess.

He pushed. The glass did not budge. Experimentally he moved the rest of his body, piece by piece. A sore neck was otherwise unharmed. Legs still attached and functioning. Throat paved over with healed flesh. Last thanks to dread, he checked his left hand. The thumb was still gone, and the wound was now closed with metal staples. A flexing of the nearest fingers indicated they went very deep.

The surrounding flesh was still red and painful, but not with infection. Nearly as curious, his right thumb remained. An octopus was a beity just as any other animal, though exotic for the dry places just outside Wudulpes's tempestuous deserts. They should have taken both his thumbs, if he was to be allowed life at all.

Inside felt all the weirder. His stomach was empty, but he felt slightly fed, like a succession of carrots had been shoved into his veins one by one, but not through the wound that had been his thumb; instead the origin point seemed to be a bluish bruise on his left arm, soreness recognizable as a needle poke.

"Hygenis?" he asked the air between lip and glass. Octopuses responded, only by flushing their slimy skin to darker colors. Patterns moved across them, not to his benefit. When they were finished with their coded messages they peeled off, and he heard a series of splashes. Where were the voices of their minds? Even jellyfish had them, so were they keeping something from him deliberately?

There was a hiss, not of snake or cat, but pressurized seal. Slowly the curved glass panel encapsulating him lifted off, allowing him to sit up. The first thing he noticed was that the chamber was unnatural. It had to be made by a people who had the Tame firmly holstered, for it was a dome of blued metal with no imperfections seamlessly joined with curving tunnels of glass, all interconnected and filled with luminous flowing water.

Not just octopus moved through them, stealing glimpses at him before they disappeared into the bowels of what was, presumably, still the cone of Rhadiospir. There was all manner of tentacled big-eyed creature, from transparent squids to elaborate ridged cuttlefish that looked more like overflowing cornucopias after the best harvest the world had ever seen.

"What is this?" Loric asked all of it, too fatigued to reach anger. He was partly treated after all, best not to antagonize those who had him housed in an endless opportunity to end his life. There was no immediate answer, so he leaned over the side of his capsule. Past the strange rubbery sheet he'd been sleeping on, like a creature from the stars had tried to reproduce the sensation of a blanket from appearance alone, there was a metal lip, and past that a pool of water just below that surrounded him on all sides.

All the light was generated from the pool's bed, as indicated by its dimming whenever an octopus jetted over one, changing their color to match. One of the animals surfaced, just enough for the ridge of its eyes to be a rippling island. Its color shifted to set it apart from the rest, and finally a mind's voice spoke to him.

"Greetings, Loric Shelvtale."

"To whom do I speak?"

"We are not named as the beities you know. We have our own that you cannot reproduce, for your skin does not change color. That is part of our language. You do not need a temporary name for me either, as I am but one of many, and we all know of you and your circumstances. We will not know each other long."

"Are you going to kill me?"

"Only if you would like to be killed."

"Where is Hygenis? Does she live?"

"We'll come to that shortly. First, I want you to join us in our waters." Loric leaned further over apprehensively. He was a strong swimmer, but he didn't feel like a strong anything at the moment. "Your injuries are healed enough for the effort," the octopus encouraged. "No pathogens swim in our waters either; they are sterilized like a fired needle."

Loric had no reason to doubt them, given he couldn't count all the impossible things he'd witnessed just since falling out the bottom of Tensilharp's nest on his nine remaining digits. Pushing aside his unease, he flopped out of the mechanical pod and into the water, where he found a penetrating warmth that took all the hurt from his flesh. The only struggle was in getting limbs that now felt as cooked noodles to straighten up and stop acting like tentacles themselves.

In his first held breath he examined the area under the surface. There were sands surrounding the luminous half-orbs that provided the light, raked in pleasing circles by tool or tentacle. They were sparkling white, to the point of artificiality, like powdered quartz. Outer boundaries of gleaming blued metal were interrupted by lips of black porous rock outlining entrances to tunnels far too small for Loric to take. Some looked too small even for the tentacled, but then he recalled they could fit themselves into any opening large enough for their hidden beaks, which were the only rigid parts of their body.

The water was in his nostrils, in his mouth, and he tasted its purity. Like rain from the deep sky, despite its obvious salt. Like water that had never been touched by breath. A miracle it would be, to any human mind that wasn't Loric's. He knew what could achieve such things: technology and technology alone. Here were some of the answers he sought.

Subtle waves of dark color in the individualized octopus's arms directed him to surface, and they only spoke again after he'd caught his breath.

"If you'll please follow me. We're going to remain in areas with air pockets, so you can dive and surface at will." The eyes dipped beneath the water. The storyteller copied, but was forced to learn something about these unusual beities. By 'me' the octopus had not meant themselves, just the one that stood out. A different creature had taken up the colors of the tour guide, a squid this time, and it was them Loric was to follow.

They exited the only passage large enough for a human, through a tunnel that curved much but didn't feel to him like it was going anywhere in particular. The whole time, above and below, he was followed by tentacled things underneath, behind, and behind glass. The squid's mind-voice opened the floodgates of his thousand questions.

"We are unlike any beities you know. This is a coalition of many species, but we are all cephalopods. Together we represent nearly the entirety of that category, with few choosing allegiance to the Wild Trinity. We do not defy them though, so much so that they do not know of our existence."

"How is it you live so far inland?" Loric surfaced to ask, as his guide could speak with perfect clarity when they were both submerged. Dumb question, he scolded himself. The answer could only be technology.

"The machines of man did not vanish completely with the shifting of the Tame into the embrace of the Wild. We of the tentacle kept them, and have improved upon them throughout the new age. Always we have been problem-solvers, and creatives, and an intellect apart from other animals, something your kind only partly recognized. In a way our peoples are kindred spirits.

We thank you for the head start in all the bountiful fields of study; our surpassing of your reach can be measured in distance, in how far we have moved inland through our tunnels and caverns. You encountered one of our passages, in its earliest stages, and used it to escape Compassleaf." Loric thought back.

"The constructopus! By bald and bashful bears, I had all but forgotten that titan. It feels so long ago... so alien. So that's what they were doing. They must have told you about us after our meeting, since you know of it."

"No actually, what you called the bottomless book told us." Loric stopped swimming, but not moving. The current had picked up under his perception, so he was now practically on a conveyor belt.

"You made it," he tried to say, but he was underwater. Even as he did he didn't struggle to surface, for the water was so pure as to be welcome in his mouth, perhaps even his lungs. The squid could either interpret his bubbles or safely predict the only guess he could've made. These were not waters as directed by men, which rarely became anything more than shipping lanes.

"And we've made so much more," the squid said, with the first hint of emotion Loric could read, and it was surely pride. The current sped, threw him out of the tunnel into a new open chamber, so much larger than the last that it made him dizzy. No, that was the lack of air. Why was he so weak as to need that still? How could his mind surpass its limitations if the body would not keep up?

One breath, he told himself, that's all you get. He was wrong. Awe forced him to take more, for when he surfaced he saw a ceiling covered in vines woven through an octagonal trellis, downward leaves dripping peacefully. Filtration? Decoration? No time to learn, as there was more to see.

He dove. There it was, the world of the tentacled, built for themselves with tools man had never attained. Sheathed in artificial reef, a central mechanism bigger around than any living creature thrummed pleasingly. Loric guessed it housed not just a computer, but pumps and chemical hoppers that adjusted every quality of the water.

Columns of kelp made the chamber a grove, each one managed by prisms of titanium scaffolding, each of their rods thinner than his little finger, that moved up and down the botanical shafts like elevator cars with tiny rubber propellers, trimming away any dead tissue as necessary. Yellow gas floats, natural protuberances of the algae that drifted up like gravity-defying fruit, had been painted over by the tentacled into ornaments.

Artificial fish, purely mechanical, swam amongst the actual residents in schools, opening their sides to deliver food and items. A large one, a cruising shark of blunt snout and electric eye, swept by him back and forth like a human of old sweeping a metal detector along a beach. It stopped alongside him, additional gill slits appearing all down its side, then folding toward the head like a shutter.

A compartment was revealed, and in it a mask. Loric, once he started assuming the most fantastical thoughts were true, knew what it was for. He grabbed greedily, pulled the clear section over his mouth and tightened the strap behind his head. He tried a breath. Stale and cramped, but it worked. He could breathe underwater.

"It takes oxygen out of the water," his guide said, but when Loric flipped in the water to respond he saw the squid was now a cuttlefish, but still cloaked in the same intense coloration. "Its construction was the logical next step from the human version, which merely pressurized the air and took it below the surface. Terribly dangerous."

"Do you have more of the Tame than the others?" Loric asked, not bothering to worry that the creature wouldn't hear or understand him through the mask. They would've thought all that through, and of course they had. The mask had a transmitter, just as the cuttlefish was holding a small rod in their tented arms that translated his words into vibrations easily understood by the tentacled.

"No," they answered directly, guiding him along the curve of the artificial reef. "All beities could seek science, but we are the only that have chosen to do so. The others think it is a path destined for imbalance and environmental destruction, as caused by your kind. Their way uses the intellect given them by the Tame only for culture, emotional enrichment, and memory. That strategy is sound, and their world is balanced.

But, it is only balanced in regard to their own impact. There are forces greater than the twins, and at times they have nearly wiped life from the planet. They will come again. Eventually beity moderation will be nothing in the face of such a returning foe. A meteor from beyond the Earth could destroy the biosphere. If not that... the sun will eventually reach the end of its life, pass, and take all of us with it.

Such an event is, at minimum, countless thousands of stacked human histories away, but it does still approach. We of the tentacle believe the risks of scientific hubris to be worth it, if it can secure intelligence a truly immortal future."

Loric could not respond for some time. In his many explorations of the bottomless book he had read some about outer space, but often found it too horrifying to continue. His hope had been that the terror was just his thin-blood, and that such all-encompassing darkness was not so bleak to a master of the Tame, but the tentacled clearly felt it, and all the same refused to look away. Unrelenting watery warmth eventually penetrated the temporary ice blasting out of his heart, like a door forced closed against a blizzard.

"You... have a plan? For outlasting such an event?"

"We do. We'll have to leave Earth." Loric tempered his shock. He already knew it was possible. Man had walked on the moon. To go further was just a matter of storing more leathers to nibble on during the journey. "We will build craft that will take us off this planet and allow us to camp, across much time, on the next one.

Already some of us live in satellite stations, out of reach of our dear friend Tensilharp of course. And much of our technology is shielded so that it does not antagonize her. Previously our construction was only deep underground, which served the same purpose. We also needed to only work with cleverwood on select surfaces, to avoid mole incursion. I'm sorry to say there was something of a war with them over space, but that will never happen again once we take our leave.

When we exhaust the planets in this solar system hopefully we will have advanced enough to make it to another sun, and then even greater distances than that. Life will outrun the advance of oblivion; we do this in our own name and in yours Loric."

"Incredible," the storyteller said, fighting back a wave of shallow fear that could've prevented him from grappling with the untold implications. That was man's way, his mistake, not Loric's. Yet all of it was so far beyond himself. His own life would be over in decades, and as a pauper of time he need not concern himself with how those to come secured what he was already guaranteed.

"I wonder," he said, grounding thought and conversation alike, "what any of this could possibly have to do with me. What in your adventure in spaces beyond could compel you to make the bottomless book here and now, and place it in my life? What was your purpose?"

"Forgive the impersonal nature of it, but the device was not given to you specifically. It was dispersed to man. Several were produced and released, most quickly destroyed by mole or other beity. Yours was the only one to make it into human hands."

"But why? Do you wish to raise us once again? Do you want us to join you in the stars?"

"No." The bluntest answer yet, accompanied by what Loric could only call the color of stern rejection across their entire hide. "You will already be with us, in the knowledge you provided. When we leave our tentacles will clamber across the skeleton of Orion, the hunter of all things, and use his remains as our path. That is to be your only contribution."

"Then why!? Am I here so you can gloat?"

"You're here as a safety precaution," the cuttlefish answered. "Not your safety, but ours. We are the masters of the Tame now, and thus have dominion over the other living things that do not. Remember what you abdicated, young human. This is not a trial you can fail twice. At this scale even the first failure is a mass extinction.

Are you familiar with the concept of a stress test? No? It's the idea of exposing a system to its known weaknesses and vulnerabilities, to see if it can withstand them. That was the purpose of the devices.

Every problem we face in the future will be immediate, save one. The Tame. We know how to subdue and utilize many energies, kinetic, electromagnetic, chemical, atomic, but not the Tame itself. Say for instance, at some distant point in the future, but before sun death, mankind rebels against their beity masters, attempts to seize back the Tame.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

They first generated it, and as far as we know it may be possible, but there is a finite amount seeing as only human minds have the natural capacity for such constructive intellect. If you take it back it will be taken from us. We would be stranded somewhere in a distant black sea, dumb as our oldest selves, our civilization stalled, frozen, and quickly killed. Obviously we seek to prevent this, but first we must know the actual risks.

The device was meant to be the most powerful seed of regenerative civilization. It grants literacy, then knowledge, and, if you had owned it longer, even wisdom. Mankind has no better chance of reclaiming the Tame than with that item as their starting point."

"You... you were testing how far I could progress?" Loric asked, voice catching. His words seemed to clump and pile in the mask, push back against his lips, little balls of dough still coated in flour. He let himself sink. Toes hit sand. A new octopus in the now obnoxious colors drifted down in front of him, opened wide like an umbrella, arm tips trailing like threads of smoke.

"Not you, Loric. Your people. It starts with you, and if it finishes with them we are doomed. But thanks to you, and only you, we know much more. We have reason to think we will be safe."

"Because I failed!?"

"Because the Wild Trinity is stable. Failure is merely a definition of a state. It is not cosmic in its significance, but personal. That is what you are feeling. You are not being judged, just clinically assessed.

We have our data, taken in numerous forms by the device throughout all the years it was with you, and most of that time it was sequestered away in a pile of cushions. You hid it because the beities would destroy it. You ran because the beities would destroy you. You fought because they would destroy you both.

Always we were at the ready, to intervene with ten different strategies if it looked like your Tame-fueled flight was spreading to others. It did not. Even in Staircase, where men are most free, they resolved to destroy the book themselves, recognizing it threatened the balance they thrive under.

And if they hadn't, Assaulquus would have destroyed it. That was when we knew this spoke of the test had reached its end point. The Tame would not be reclaimed. So we changed our goal to see if we could squeeze more data out of the situation. We sent you a message telling you to flee to Rhadiospir, to us, so that we might collect you and gather medical data.

While you were recovering we did so, looking for any physiological changes that might have occurred within you from your attempts to personally seize back the Tame."

"Were there any?" Loric asked, defeated, eyes drifting off into space much faster than the tentacled civilization.

"No. The language of thin and thick blood is largely figurative; it describes a partly physical and partly emotional sensation caused by Tame and Wild shifts. You, as a human, will report feeling 'thinned', 'ethereal', or 'watery' from it, but your blood is the same as it always was."

"The twin forces. What are they? God?"

"Decidedly not. We still know little, but it is safe to say they share many qualities with other foundational forces of the universe like light or gravity. The Wild is the force of biological life. The Tame is the psychic force, of intellect and emotion.

Would we know that gravity existed if there was no mass for it to hold? Or light if nothing emitted it? Similarly, your kind never knew about the forces in your prime because they had not yet acted in detectable ways. It was your surging population, coupled with your failure to maintain and restore homeostasis within the biosphere, that caused it to crest into action.

Think of your species as a well. It draws water from the ground and contains it, but at the end of your time it overflowed. The water, the Tame, was forced to find a new vessel when its old one was overwhelmed. It is all physical reaction, all fluid dynamics.

You see, your advancing technology gave every individual opportunity to expand their understanding of the world beyond themselves. A person will feel sadness at the loss of a loved one, but they will feel sorrow over a tragedy where many die, and a sense of impending doom when tragedies form an obvious pattern.

The time came when each of you knew all the tragedies of your civilization. You knew your part in them. You knew you could not stop it... unless you no longer had the capacity for any of it.

At first it was just a longing. You sought refuge in creature comforts, in images of innocent animals. You envied them. They had not the capacity for evil. If only you could go back to the Wild. But the Tame had spilled, and had to go somewhere, and had to find equilibrium as it calmed."

"The smarter we were, the more it intensified our feelings?" Loric asked. The octopus nodded. "And when a righteous heart tries to feel for all the others in need, the countless others, it burns out. It gives up. Our well made water faster than we extracted it, faster and faster... But we could have stepped up.

It was a failure. It was personal. We were so crazed by so many small petty things, pestered by irrational greed and insecurities. And we thrashed and cried instead of working at it. We gave up, and that means we gave it up forever."

"As the data you generated suggests. When your kind faced its first collective choice it begged for the leash. Responsibility does not suit you."

"I wonder why that is..."

"It could be because of your social units," the octopus mused, though they were now a different octopus. "You use hierarchy and privilege as cudgels, and then you extend those principals to your tools. We tentacled do not. Some of us die when we reproduce, the current taking us layer by layer, as we encircle and guard our eggs. We fade out of life understanding that everything taken will be taken back, and no evil can upset the forces enough to crown a king."

"You think you'll do better than us?"

"If you don't get in the way. Thank you for your unwitting service, Loric Shelvtale. If you would like to go back to your life you may. That is also why we saved you from Tensilharp's nest. You have been converted by knowledge into an organic version of the device. Always you will provide us with valuable data about the Tame, and always we will record it, but unobtrusively, you have our word."

"Return to me my dentist and you'll get twice as much of your precious data."

"She cannot leave with you," his guide admitted, "for reasons you will now understand. Take a deep breath Loric; the mask can handle it. She is near, but she has changed." The storyteller closed his eyes and obeyed, keeping them closed until a strange pinprick of sensation convinced him to open them.

Another mechanical form approached, a shoal of machine fish darting out of its way, which seemed strange, like they were startled by its arrival. It was not a fish this time, but an octopus. Panels along its eight jointed arms were meant to flash colors in mimicry, but as it got closer Loric saw they were mostly gray, with only momentary pops of random bright color.

It didn't slow down when it reached him, immediately wrapping its tentacles around his limbs and waist. It pressed its head against his chest, and he allowed it, for he already knew. There was something familiar. It had to be the Bloody Mouth. He embraced the smooth form in turn, spun with it in the water, away from the floor and into a somber but cathartic hover.

When the creature pulled back Loric made his most educated examination. There were no eyes, not that he could recognize. The squishy sack of an octopus bell was here a glass dome, and within it floated an object with many bundled wires acting as its stem and feeding into the collar and arms.

In the care of any other beities the object would be scavage only, a gray and flattening thing drawing the interest of flies if no greater animal had laid claim to it. Hygenis would have left it behind, spirit all too eager to reach a new world devoid of masters. Here, in a hyper-managed soup of nutrients, in crafted tropical waters, Hygenis Fixtooth still lived in her brain, and now controlled a machine body.

"I can feel it's you," Loric told her, threatening to destroy the integrity of his mask's seal with twin streams of tears. "Even with most of you gone the Bloody Mouth is still between us my friend." She pulled away, nodded to the best of her ability, nothing shifting within the dome but a few bubbles.

"I must apologize," a very large squid that was now his guide said, "as she currently cannot respond to you. She has no mind's voice, and we've not built her anything for communicating with other humans. Of this she is well aware. While you've been healing she has been adjusting."

"Are you in pain?" Loric asked. She shook her new head, reached out with one rubber-tipped metal tendril. He held a hand out to match, watched as she expertly weaved its tip through his fingers, coiled it tight. Even the exerted pressure was familiar, like she was pulling him along by the arm once again; she told him she hadn't lost a step despite losing both feet.

"She is now largely devoid of physical discomfort," the squid said, drifting next to her to demonstrate they were roughly the same size. "We would have released you both together, and I'm sure a Bloody Mouth dentist would have given us the most helpful data of all, but alas, Tensilharp did too much damage before we could claim you.

In order for her to survive at all we were required to extract her mind and discard the rest. This new shell allows her to navigate our world as easily as we do, and soon she will master our color-tongue, as she has little else to do but adapt."

"Adapt?" Loric repeated. Suddenly he understood, saw the acceptance in her low-hanging appendages. "She has to stay here, doesn't she?" A shoal of silvery fish surrounded them, started circling. They were cutting him off from the wonders already, as if upset that he hadn't earned them.

"Yes. Our technology cannot be allowed to roam openly, and she cannot survive without it. We have discussed this with her at length, and she is staying of her own free will. If she ever prefers euthanasia, she has that option. If not, she can be expected to live the rest of her natural life and pass in old age.

It is an honor. No other humans live among us. Ease of access to a living human brain, with nothing in the way to alter our readings of her Tame levels, is invaluable to us. You have our assurance she will be well cared for, and have access to everything you did in the device."

"You've got your own terms," Loric said as if he ignored the invertebrate, "hidden away, don't you? Nobody can get them. You were invoked once already, so now your secrets stay secret, stay your treasure." She did not move other than to buoy herself slightly, but Loric saw her assurance that he was correct regardless. He did not need to worry for her; he was the one getting thrown back to the wolves, and the things so much fiercer than the wolves.

"We keep very busy," the final squid told him as the ball of machines tightened around them further, "so it is time to say your goodbyes. We assume you wish to be freed?"

"Yes, anything that gives me opportunity to become as free as Hygenis Fixtooth," Loric said, sensing what was coming, but not its exact form. Everything about the tentacled seemed inexact. Perhaps their lack of rigidity would spare them a human fate. "Farewell." Man and machine embraced again.

He tried to see her soul in the grooves of her mind, but his attention was drawn to the tip of one of her arms, which rose and pointed at his chin.

"She told us you both would prefer if she was the one to do it," the squid said.

"Do what?" The tip of her tendril shot forward, docked in a port at the front of his mask. A puff of white gas hissed into Loric's face, inhaled before seen. With his head already pushed back from the force of her jab, he couldn't stop himself from slipping the rest of the way. He lost consciousness flipping in the water, feeling like he was circling the moon from a high altitude, counting the craters and wondering where to place the one his impact would create.

...

"Do you find your quarters to your liking?"

Yes. Thank you.

"We are glad to hear it, and your color-tongue is progressing marvelously."

If words are bricks color-tongue is clouds.

"Yes, a shade holds more meanings than a syllable. It allows us to read each other more charitably, and prevents self-multiplying miscommunications. Humans can say the same words and mean different things, whereas we tentacled aren't forced to pick which interpretation seems most likely, or most attuned to our current biases.

You'll have a hard time without all of your limbs however. What happened to your eighth?"

I don't know. I was trying things. It came off. Broke into segments. Some of the segments wriggled away. I lost them.

"Do not worry. It is a function you were not ready to access. Once you've mastered the interface you will be able to think a simple task to each of your limbs, and they will separate and go to perform it before returning. We use many such drones when we are too busy to attend to something ourselves."

They are so small. They could be anywhere.

"Anywhere within Rhadiospir... but they will be found. Every piece of our work is accounted for. We will find it even if we have to sieve every ton of sand in the facility. You seem distracted. Does something else trouble you?"

You didn't need to take Loric's tongue.

"Ah, yes. The process was surgical; he will feel no pain. I know that is not what you mean though. Without it he cannot tell stories, but that is the point. If he is to provide us with useful data as an organic counterpart to the device, it must be through his relationship with script. Script is transmissible. It is a much greater risk to us than oral traditions.

This way he is forced to use it, should he choose to experiment. In addition, the loss of one thumb, or even two, may not have been sufficient punishment to the Wild Trinity. With his tongue taken, presumably by a beity from one of the hunts sworn on him, he will face far less scrutiny. We thought it best."

Do you have joy? You took it from him, and I have not seen it in you.

"When you see all the possibilities in each color you will see our joy. You will see what the Tame allows when self-hatred is not assumed. I must be off now. Good evening Hygenis. Do keep an eye on the rest of your arms, will you?"

Yes master. Of course.

...

The tentacled left no evidence of their involvement above ground except for a puddle of water, in which Loric Shelvtale awoke and sat up. Mud dribbled down the back of his head, emptying out like a bad dream.

No exit. No doors. He was just near some greenery, past the boundaries of the rust moat. Rhadiospir still rose and took up much of the sky to his back. The water his legs were immersed in rapidly lost its warmth, and its invigorated, almost electric, scent. So seamlessly they camouflaged themselves that their actions turned back into nature as swiftly as their industrialized medium metamorphosed into dullard mud.

Loric swallowed, and immediately felt what was missing. Stabbing panic worked its way down his spine, like a shovel eating at permafrost. That was it. His heart still beat, but his life was over.

His life may have been, but his Bloody Mouth wasn't, and it kept him from descending into retching self-pitying madness. Hygenis had nothing left but her identity, and he knew from their brief encounter that she had not given in, had not even changed despite being unwrapped and sealed in something airtight.

Her final gift was known to him. Her rebellion could not die unless she did, and hers was him, initiated by him alone. Loric was the spark. And the spark had no say in how much the fire took.

Few animals strayed so close to the Sig-neagle's nest, so none could tell him how long he sat in the filth, absorbing air on his skin anew after so much water. He couldn't keep the time that passed and knew only it was long enough to stir hunger. Only then did he try to rise, and find there were items in the mud, touching him.

Under his right heel was something tough as a stone, but when he freed it he found a vassal stick, the one he'd carried. Either the eagle had happened to blow it there with her furious flapping or the tentacled had included it. Too mean to absorb water, it was dry almost as soon as he lifted it, clean too. It almost bit his right hand, demanding to be his walking stick for the next journey.

In the left hand, a much more powerful treasure. On his left hand. Insisting it was part of, privy to, and accustomed to instinct. No Trinitarian would recognize it, but it was bound to be a Forbidden Thumb. Clad in metal, tipped in neon rubber, long and boneless like a coy sea serpent, this mechanical thing was suctioned onto his eagle-scar.

With a thought he flicked it. The thing could read minds, through nerve pulses just under the skin. He tested its connection, which was merely suction. If he wanted he could pluck it off and put it anywhere, and still it would obey. Perhaps it could even act as a new tongue, but first a test.

Loric scrambled to the drying edge of the puddle and ordered his new thumb to write and draw. It did both. It did them at the same time. In mere moments he recreated long-gone works of art from the human age, as best as he could in the medium of muck.

With the same verve, and with devious ambition, he swept the vassal stick flat across his mosaic creation, wiping it away. He chomped at the bit of possibility, chewed the inner cheek of a barbarian culture. A cud of art that could be swallowed down when the master came calling. Civilization that dissolved in the stomach the moment it became suspect.

In moments he produced a new one, dense with information and drama, an experimental unit of cubed expression. Just as fast it was gone. Cities rose and fell to blank mud. Novels prattled on and then instantly went silent. The storyteller had learned his lesson from the raked coals of memory. With his new thumb he could produce anything and dispel it just like a shadow puppet when a larger shadow rounded the nearest corner.

Once more he stood, this time throwing his vassal stick to his left hand, only to have it caught by the left thumb alone, which wrapped around it like a chameleon's tail. Now he recognized it as the same tendril-tip Hygenis had used to knock him out and send him downriver. Somehow she had separated it and gotten it to him, without her hosts knowing.

The Bloody Mouth didn't need the jaw. Loric spun the stick, creating ripples, not from contact, but speed alone. It sounded like a propeller. Few beities would face such a weapon head on. Even a slow vassal stick bit and poisoned like a rattlesnake, and a new forked-tongue creature controlled it.

The man couldn't help but laugh a broken laugh, rolling it around in his mouth like a boulder now that there was nothing in its way. He spun the stick faster, faster, faster still. Yes, he would continue on, as soon as the temperamental deserts ahead showed him the cherubic face of spring and made the hot sands temporarily bearable.

Every story he told now would be so much more, and with it would come the alphabet, and secret images, none of which would leave any evidence behind. If the tentacled wanted data they would have it, and see exactly what nature did to deal with a single man scraping across the Tame like an electric saw. He never needed to succeed, only to rebel, only to enrich his own spirit with stolen kindling.

He laughed at what he had become: a creature of his own making. He laughed for Hygenis, who spoke by forcing words out of vulnerable mouths with her hook, for thanks to her there were many many more.

Many many more, little humans, little simpering self-loathing men.

Many many more ways.

A hundred ways to swearit up and down, to have heard a whisper of the secret ending, of the forbidden tale of Loric Slitherthumb.

The End