Aida's existence summed to fevered snatches of darkness and movement, pain and nausea, disorientation and confusion. And an angry octopus trying to eat its way out of her guts.
At some point they returned to the Vale, her rational mind wondering “to where?” before washing away again in a tide of misery. At another point she became aware of her nakedness. In her detached state it came across as a clinical statement of fact not a point of embarrassment or shame. Her wrinkled, sagging old body wouldn't draw much more than aversion or pity anyway.
Everything grew markedly worse in the Vale, the whites so white they hurt, the always-slightly-off feeling amplifying the tortures inflicted by whatever they'd forced into her. She began to share Fallon's hope for her death. In a moment of lucidity she asked where they were going, but if Fallon bothered to answer his reply drowned in a sea of discomfort, disorientation, and confusion.
Strangest of all, at times she understood what the Valeer was saying. Perhaps teetering on the edge of madness herself tipped her briefly into the realm he occupied wherein he babbled pure truth.
A gradual awareness of her surroundings: rotting stench, a strong breeze carrying it, warm, red-gold light spilling into her squinted eyes. All so beautiful to she began to cry.
Heat still radiated from her core, a mere ember of the inferno she'd been certain would consume her. She looked around slowly so as not to make herself nauseous again.
Bone.
A massive extent of yellowish-white bone surrounded her, clearly and unmistakably bone though she couldn't put her finger on why. She lay inside a huge, roughly ovoid room on a broad floor pitted regularly with depressions ranging from pothole to sinkhole. The dome of the room arched high overhead, broken directly above her by a roundish hole the size of a minivan through which bright light streamed in spite of a sky heavy with black cloud. Two more holes the size of small houses flanked the... nose hole. Eye sockets!
What she'd thought of as floor shifted in her mind to a broad expanse something between lower jaw and beak, the huge domed room reclassifying to an enormous skull. Her mind reeled imagining how absolutely massive this creature had been in life. Big enough to gulp a whale down whole?
Someone covered her with a blanket during her fever. Under it she lay naked. Naked and new.
Feral squatted nearby watching her with dark eyes.
Springing to her feet sent her head spinning. Only Feral's quick reactions saved her from toppling into a sinkhole deeper than she was tall.
The movement initiated cascades of cracks and pops up and down Aida's spine. At the end of the seemingly-endless profusion of crunches she stood tall again, almost a head taller than Feral now as her spine shed its mass of atrophy, arthritis, and fused joints. Aida planted an exuberant kiss on the smooth surface of Feral's mask. The woman released her, jumped back, and unleashed a fury of angry sign language.
"I feel amazing!" Aida said. And gagged.
Worn-out old teeth and dull crowns spilled out into her hand. Probing her mouth with a finger scraped free a few others and found all her teeth back full, healthy, and straighter than they'd ever been. After staring at the unpleasant handful for a moment, she threw them into the sinkhole like runes in some ancient ritual. "The bones say you'll be young, strong, and beautiful again!"
Stretching her long limbs to their full extent, she luxuriated in her renewed flexibility and her skin's smooth, dark vibrancy. As she caressed the her jaw, cheekbones, and forehead, she discovered a knife-thin indented line running across her brow and all the way around her head. Leaning over the edge of a mirror-smooth sinkhole, twenty-five year-old Aida stared back. The band in her forehead luminesced faintly white. Even more bizarrely, the newest few millimeters of her hair grew thick and black from her scalp, with brittle, silver hair fraying out from it.
Staring at her reflection, she marveled. As good as she looked in that old photograph, she looked even better now. Impossible but true, young Aida's body had returned free from a single ache, pain, or catch, her breath full and unrestricted.
A cough from behind her. A dry male voice. "Oh good, you failed to succumb. We are all so relieved."
She turned to find Fallon approaching with a bundle of dark fabric hugged to his chest, regarding her with his usual disdain but marred by a hint of curiosity. How long had it been since a man looked at her with anything resembling attraction?
"How long was I out? I'm hungry and excited and horny as hell and where do I pee?" She eyed Fallon with a new level of appreciation as he circumnavigated the deep sinkhole Feral saved her from visiting earlier. Even in those scrubs so utterly out of place in this fantastic environment, he embodied the tall, dark, and handsome stereotype: shaggy black hair and the stubbled line of his jaw presenting masculinity softened by reserved carriage and fine cheekbones.
And he hates me, she thought, stalling that train in its tracks.
"Who can tell time when crossing Vale and verse?" he said. "A few days perhaps?"
He tossed the bundle her way, his attention casually drifting to examining the skull. She looked around for any of her things. "Where'd my cap and toiletry stuff go? Emergency TP in there."
Feral stared at her blankly while Fallon stared anywhere else. She walked to Fallon's discarded bundle.
A long, light, linen-esque dress, its threads dyed deep purple and red. A pair of sandals lacing half-way up the calf. Two rolls of cloth held by bone clips that she assumed made for underwear when wrapped correctly. A narrow, leather belt threaded through the brass rings supporting a wide belt pouch.
"It's pretty." She lifted the dress with a hint of reservation, the urge to cartwheel around and luxuriate in her new body stirring.
She glanced at Fallon. "Dynast is something like queen, right? I passed your horrible test without dying so now I'm the fairy princess or something."
"Verser Lords and Ladies rule at the whim of their Dynast. You are that Dynast now, for good or ill."
"So I'm the Empress or what have you? Screw it then." She tossed him the dress and half-strutted, half-pranced to a relatively pothole-free area. "Last time I looked this good it was wasted on me. Spent all my time worrying about how I looked, didn't appreciate what I had in the slightest."
As Fallon stared half-aghast and half-male, she attempted a cartwheel for the first time in eight or nine decades. The first few failures left her a bit scraped and bruised, the next saw her rescued again by Feral with a look that may have been amusement. Eventually, she got the feel for it and spun end-over-end, her muscles stronger than she ever remembered. She pulled off a handspring followed by a leaping aerial she never could have pulled off when she was younger. Excitement and pure physical joy pushed her on until she fell gasping with laughter, exhaustion, delight.
"And here I thought serving an uncultured barbarian would bring naught but embarrassment." Fallon tossed the dress down beside where she lay delighting in the after-exercise glow she hadn't felt in too long to remember. "What an ease on my mind."
Impulsively, she grabbed his wrist and pulled him down next to her. He fell to one knee and stared in shock.
"If I ordered you to screw me right here, right now, you'd have to do it, right?" She ran a finger across her hip.
It took a while for his mouth to work right. He tried to pull away but she held him with surprising strength. "Dynast, I, it would... I do not think-"
She laughed and released. Fallon fell backwards, scrambled to his feet, and brushed himself off indignantly.
Slipping the dress on seemed a shame even if Fallon's relief was obvious. She wasn't sure where the garment originated, but whoever gifted it possessed a good eye for her size, picking a color and wear accentuating her skin tone and limb length. After a giggling twirl flared the hem and produced a sighing eye roll from Fallon, she turned to face him.
"Okay, horny for later then. How about food?" She thought for a moment. "Plus where the hell are we? Plus what the hell is going on while we're at it? Plus what's this line around my head mean? They do it while I was passed out? It's like a permanent crown or halo or something."
"It is the First Thread of a Primus. Now that you have awakened, we can finally get on with the business of establishing your verse." Fallon walked towards what she supposed was the neck hole of the skull.
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"Thanks for all the answers." She stopped still. "Oh my God! My mother said my father had a tattoo on his head like an angel. This is what she meant! My father was a Dynast."
"Only the children of Dynasts can survive the Partaking. Everyone knows that." Fallon tapped his forehead. "Every Dynast's First Thread appears at the brow. The position of each Century Thread thereafter varies widely."
Aida mused at that, fiddling with her amulet; the only item she now retained from Earth. She glanced at Feral, the woman regarding her back flatly.
"I keep thinking of you as 'Feral' even though apparently you're 'a Feral'. Do you have a real name?"
Fallon stopped and turned, his expression a mix of shock and disgust. "Ferals are damned, their names purged! They are weapons, not people. The proper address is to issue orders. The who and how of compliance is their issue."
"You don't even know what she did, do you?" Aida stormed over to stand face-to-face with Fallon. "'Something bad' you say, but according to who? You make it sound like she murdered a hundred people but for all we know she's a political prisoner who wouldn't keep her mouth shut in the face of oppression and so They removed it along with her personhood."
She grabbed his arm. He shrugged away angrily and thrust a finger in her face. "Do not be so quick to accuse. 'They' is now you. How the Blood managed to manifest true in an uncontrolled, uncultured barbarian like you I will never know, but it did. You have become the Dynasty whose wisdom you challenge."
"You keep calling me ignorant and uncultured, but you won't explain a single goddamn thing to me!"
They reached the jaw's hinges to find an arch of stacked vertebrae rising towards the looming expanse of a turtle shell the size of a football stadium, its bulk slammed down into an expanse of cracked earth. An especially-large football stadium framed by craggy volcanoes belching fire and thick, black smoke on the horizon. The sky beyond lit with ruddy glows: more volcanoes or maybe dim suns.
She stared at the shell's grimy arc. "For a start, what the hell is that?"
"Home." Fallon sighed as he turned to a crude rope ladder dangling down from the first vertebrae.
"We have to climb up that whole thing to get to the shell? Why the hell did you bring me all the way down here?"
"Safer to stay down here than risk letting you slumber inside." He began to climb. At the top he held the fin jutting from the top of the vertebrae and looked down at her. "Though your verse appears to be mostly vast, empty, and dead aside from the volcanoes, what life it does contain is hungry and unpredictable."
She approached the ladder and tugged at it, trying to remember the last time she'd even been capable of climbing. "My verse? Why are you... oh my God. By 'verse' you meant 'universe' this whole time? Are you saying, this is my world? All of it?"
The elaborate gesture he made to encompass the bleak, sulfuric wasteland surrounding them would be better suited to show off a bounteous and beautiful land packed with riches and promise. "Dominion over the land and all the people thereupon. The people being us two."
"Two? What happened to the others?"
Aida delighted at the strength in her arms as she scrambled up the ladder followed closely by Feral. The chain of vertebrae curved steeply up from the skull at first, leveling out somewhat as they reached the shell. Safety lines and rope ladders threaded between them.
"I speak of people, not slavants and the damned. Here is the second of your persons' handiwork." Fallon pointed at the next ladder as he scrambled over the precarious, bony surface. "After encountering the sights, smells, and predilections of the locals within, you will see why he focused his time here on securing the path from the skull."
"So the Valeer and Feral, er... the Ferals aren't people to you?"
He appeared too occupied with his climb to reply.
Though her body felt flexible and agile, her mind chugged and churned, struggling with the constant rejiggering of her understanding as each new information wave crashed into her.
After an exciting, occasionally precarious climb, they faced a final traverse across a stretch of neck bones traced with taut ropes; some for the feet, others for the hands. A glance down injected an adrenaline rush. Her heart pumped as she crossed with reckless speed.
That final bit cleared, they leaned against last bone's ridge where it fused to the shell, catching their breath in the hot, acrid air. Fallon doubled over gasping for breath while she bounced from foot to foot like a boxer, feeling ready to climb ten more necks. A cave-like opening yawned into the shell, gusting out a miasma of damp rot.
She turned to Fallon. "Don't make you work out in Seneschal school, huh? I think I may have made at least some sense of this. Stop me anywhere I'm wrong. You're good at that."
He nodded, wiping his forehead with a scrap of cloth, then covering a coughing fit with it.
"So the long lost father I never met, the one who this belonged to-" she fingered her silver crescent amulet and brushed her forehead "-was a Dynast slumming it on Earth and I got his genes or blood or whatever."
"Most likely 'is' not 'was'." Fallon arched his back, still gasping for breath. "Dynasts are ageless and remarkably hard to kill."
She filed those bits away for later processing, pushing on before she lost the fragile line of reasoning she'd managed to assemble. "Okay, so the Black Court sent you off to nab me and bring me back to see if my blood was pure enough-"
"Which, unfortunately, it was."
"-so now my body is twenty-something-but-better and I'm the Queen of the Universe."
"This verse's Dynast, yes. You have largely avoided falsehoods in your recapitulation thus far."
"So this Book of Verses you mentioned back whenever, it's not just poetry?"
He smiled. "Poetry, yes, but also all the realities found within the Dynasty's dominion. Many copies of the Book exist within the Book if you wish to acquire one."
"I'm looking forward to reading now that my eyes work again." She entered the neck opening, walking towards a faint golden glow emanating from a huddle of canvas tents under the thickness of the mountain-like shell.
He stopped to lean against the shell. "Your eyes? You mean fingers? I am not used to such exertions and this thick air. I feel absolutely terrible."
"Well, I feel great and my fingers are fine. Why would I need my fingers to read, weirdo?" Aida sniffed. "Maybe you just need to work out more. The air stinks but isn't kill-you bad."
Feral jogged ahead, hand on a knife and body-language wary.
"What's with her?" Aida said as they passed into the darkness.
"This creature has not been dead so long as you may think. Ah, there is your skinscribe, Parathas."
Fallon gestured ahead. A man garbed in a faded orange smock hunched over some task, his head ringed by a fringe of brownish hair. Beside him stood what looked like a metallic dowsing rod jutting from a faintly-blue-glowing, misty jar. Maybe that held the special water stuff? A bright-shining thread stretched between the rod's prongs.
Ghillie nodded to her from where she squatted beyond the light jar, busy dropping rice or maybe maggots one-by-one into a cage holding several of the six-eyed dragon flies. The girl's ghillie suit now matched the scenery: filthy and flecked with bone fragments.
As the kneeling figure rose, Aida looked down on a pale, mousy man. The man's left sleeve bunched up at his shoulder to reveal an arm half-covered by tiny black bumps like some hideously-virulent plague. His right hand featured only a few bumps across each finger, said fingers clutching a bronze needle. At his feet sat a small clay bottle.
She walked closer. "Are you sick?"
He flattened himself at her feet.
She stopped, mouth falling open. "Um, please don't do that."
Face down, he spoke in the other language. She looked helplessly to Fallon.
He broke from rummaging in a wicker basket. "A journey to Heaven's Tread is in the offing. Get you some strings and a balm for my aching legs and back."
"Why do I need string? Is that what he said? "
"No, that is what I said. You will be the first Dynast in history to wear them, but I will be damned to a Feral if I have to translate every bit of drivel that spills from your lips." He shook his head. "He presented the entire stretch of his surface for your use."
"His surface?" She looked at the bumps on his arms, wondering if he'd been ritually scarifying himself in worship. Of her? They just met. "Um, tell Parathas he can keep his surface. You called him a skinscribe?"
"Yes, a flesh scholar. His specific purpose is to learn and know your verse by heart that you may ask him anything about it, but he is clearly useful with rope as well for it was his work that assisted our climb." Fallon gestured back out the neck opening before doubling over into another coughing fit.
Parathas rose to kneeling, extending both hands out palms-down like a Catholic schoolboy waiting for the ruler. Aida glanced helplessly at Fallon.
"Do I help him up or kiss them or stick them up my dress or what?"
"Up your dress?" Fallon stepped back in horror. For all his good looks and having stuffed his hand into her nightgown right after meeting her, her Seneschal could be a prude.
She sighed dramatically.
He bristled up with an affronted look. "If you had any manners you would know to place the backs of your hands touching his, then motion for him to rise."
"If you had any manners, you'd realize that not one of the seven billion people where I come from would have known to do that." She complied.
Parathas remained kneeling before her with his head bowed.
"Seven billion?" Fallon snorted. "In one verse? If I even understand that number it is truly impossible. I am not an Assessor but I doubt an entire Book census would amount to even a tenth... Dynast!"
She'd gazed past the tents towards the vast, dank space filling the rest of the shell cavity and walked towards it.
Fallon and the others rushed after her.
The shell hosted a stagnant swamp, its discolored water lit only by the reddish light shining in from the holes through which the creature's six limbs plus tail and head once extruded. Irregular, fleshy mounds ranging in size from VW Bugs to small buildings rose from the muck. Each swarmed with creatures resembling mutated variants of maggots, centipedes, mosquitoes, sized anywhere between cats and hippos. Distance and gloom made exact estimates challenging.
"Its inner organs, in various states of decay," Fallon said disdainfully, staring out beside her.
"It's a giant shithole!"
"I believe the hole opposite served as the excretory orifice." Fallon pointed.
"Okay, it's one-eighth shithole. Does this verse of mine have a name?"
"No verse has a single name, not exactly, as the whole verse comprises-"
"Okay, I'm naming it 'One-Eighth Shithole.'"
Fallon paled, staring at her. "You cannot be serious. That is the worst possible name."
"As serious as whoever thought this place was worth putting me in charge of. They don't like it they can give me another one."
"But we have only surveyed a tiny piece of-"
She turned to the skinscribe. "He's the guy who makes things about this place official, right?"
"Yes, but that name will only cause problems-"
"Tell him the name."
A long moment passed as Fallon waited for the punchline. She crossed her arms. "Now."
Slumping, Fallon turned to Parathas and spoke. Immediately and without question, the skinscribe found a bare patch of skin, dipped his needle into his little pot, then deliberately inserted it into his arm.
"You kidnapped me away from three squares and air conditioning for this?" She thrust a finger at Fallon. Before he could reply, she turned and waved her arms at the insectoid activity teeming across the shell.
"Behold, my minions of muck and rot! Bow before your great ruler; long live the Queen of One-Eighth Shithole!"
Feral grabbed at her to pull her back, but Aida shrugged her off, feeling simultaneously rebellious, pissed off, and indestructible.
Until one of her new subjects swooped up from the muck and sliced a few of her fingers off.