Quarti looked at the beautiful beast that had been taking care of her and hers for a year and a half. She could speak with the full breadth of language and experience from her long lives and the time between to Pylo and yet she was always understood.

She could speak in things beyond words and ideas that had never known meaning in syllable form for millenia and for the first time in ages she was known. Her heart was heard. And the way that the siren spoke BACK?

It was exaltation and delight and the deepest most intimate tingling tickles of meaning and purpose. It was a voice that wrote over her mere flesh with every utterance and left it warped into the complete wholeness of the ideas presented. And the feeling just grew deeper and stronger when she asked for more.

Every sentence and statement from Pylo now was like being reborn anew and living a whole childhood of life in a blinding rush. She could feel her head burning with the ache of it and her stomach growling with hunger.

She stuffed her face with some kind of baked protein patty and swallowed like a ravenous beast. Quarti drank heavily from a canteen and then took twenty seven heavy breaths in sharp rapid bursts to help clear her head. She had to do it, her body was searing with the trials she was subjecting it too.

Wiping the hot sweat of exertion from her brow before she finally felt ready to address what she had ‘heard’ and then weather a response.

“Truly I see and know how you have suffered so much indignity with this struggle Pylo. But at the same time though you sought joy in your enthusiasm for it’s resolution you must admit it was in poor taste yes? It is by no malice or judgement of any of us that Aleph spoke as such, but though Omega is her elder she has made parts of herself stunted, letting other spirits lighten her burdens leaves parts of her weakened that you would not expect.”

She held up a hand to pause the siren from pouring another torrent of joy and ecstasy into her head. She took three deep breaths and drank another long drag from her water.

“But even so she is slim and slick and flexible because of this in ways even I cannot manage. It is a lumbering kind of strength and grace I hold in my soul, where as Omega is a deft thread which can be woven intricately through others. She is young and her craft and creed comes with many dangers and weaknesses but it is a marvel of training and self honing to accomplish nonetheless. Think not poorly of her, merely appreciate her limits”

She cracked a smile for the siren slipping a few last word in edgewise before she is washed away by Pylo’s response.

“She is a better example of the heights of HUMAN spirit then this thread bare soul of mine, she has not mutilated and misbegotten herself anywhere near as much as I”

And there it was, a rising light, a medley of sound, a shocking lashing across every fibre of her nervous system and then a searing heat and cold. Muscles wrenching against each other.

Every thread of her body seemed an instrument tuned and played by the Siren’s whims. The messages, the details, the almost self referential circuitous layers of conversation were almost secondary to the sheer depth of the sensations and emotions that coursed like molten metal in her head.

It made her instantly fevered and half crazed after the seized muscles stopped. Her lungs burned as she gasped and breathed as fast as she could. Her heart ached and trembled a little out of pace.

Then like a memory the details unfolded enough in the overtaxed meat in her head that she could drink and cycle the details.

It was not really anything like speech. It was knowledge, it was a map of her moods, of the things which had motivated an alien mind. Of the details and trials, the condolences, the sense of bonding.

Thankfulness and relief, delight and frustration, contemplation and all the more. It was libraries of details, mountains of idiosyncrasies, floods of specific cases. Branching forests of potential avenues the discussion could go down. Quarti was aching from her muscles spasming during the transfer and the hotness of her blood as she gasped in an almost panicked panting to bring the temperature in her nervous system down.

She sipped the water that once again tasted like ice until it was threatening to make her puke. Wheezed and gasped and waited for it all to settle and make sense. For the heat of the activity to cool so she could think with her meat again and fully apprehend the information given her. She could feel the hints of exhausted aches in her symbiotes and ancillary circulatory systems. Quarti could feel the natural thrum of her body’s own sustaining activity waning a little in her soul.

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This was too much, and she could feel and recollect that Pylo also acknowledged that they could not keep this pace up. They would have to stop or slow down or she would literally burn part of her brains out in the rapturous inferno.

She took a few more heavy breaths before exhaling. Speaking in her original mother tongue just for the simple joy of it.

“Ah, Yes sweet Pylo, to ride your voice until this flesh bursts in a conflagration would be simply divine. But I cannot leave these tender young ones alone for so long without my guidance. There are dangers of this expanse beyond nurturing gentle Terra they are so unawares of as to be less then children.”

She wiped the sopping hot sweat from her brow and gasped in the air as it tried to leech the humidity of her body out, laying back upon the cushioning of the bubble’s control chairs in a near boneless heap. Her toes and fingers brushing the almost fizzy tension of the bubble’s membrane.

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Her ribs hurt from breathing so hard.

Cartilage flexed heavily as she tried to fill her lungs enough to match the acidic burn through her body.

“Yes you are gentle with them, and I appreciate that I do. But we cannot coddle them overly so. You know even better than I in my many a year what horror lurk free in the dark. Beyond gentle blooming terra and her kind. We are going to a raw and open plain where anything may sup upon us. ”

She huffed continuing to unroll Pylo’s many comments and counter comments to that sentence before picking the path of this discourse out of the multitude poured into her.

“They need to be shown how to grow, to keep the core of them strong and ready in these times to come, how to bend and not break. We can’t let them wander into the dark like I did and come out of it by mere fortune and happenstance alive, torn and twisted. They need to be able to be better than that at least. You do so much for us, can you accept to help me do that?”

Quarti already knew the answer it had been burned in her brain, forged along brand new connections with the fierce intensity of a first kiss or a mother’s touch. Pylo had carved into the meat of her head complete ideas and concepts as if her entire mortal life had been honed too receive their discourse.

She just had to discover it and voice her own response to it for Pylo’s and her own sake. She thrummed and counted through her soul and began to slowly put the thoughts and memories back in order. Letting the flesh bend and twist. The meat loosening and tightening as it was shaped.

Make the motions of limb and thought return to the familiar and comfortable toolset she had grown fond of. She had nurtured long bloodlines of mortal children for this. Tailored and tamed diseases and maladies. She had traded with other souls the trick of riding them. Of growing their thoughts first from the soul within instead of letting the world without impose.

She tried to forget the terrible broken things that had been made of those souls that germinated within such vessels for their first lives.

Too loose in the meat, too free. They grow spiraling off into broken madness and decayed ruins of spirit.

And the transitory half shaped generations too. It was an unpleasant chore she paid many an old secret to younger souls to ride those lives the minimum amount required to mature and winnow the desired traits.

Still it was worth it for being able to do what she did and was doing now.

To be able to let the intensity of the deeply grooved impressions of the Siren’s song melt back into a functional plasticity. To let the flesh of her brain recover after a fashion.

Although she suspected that they would have to dial it back a bit. Too many a session like this in close succession and she would have to deal with the meat going prematurely senile.

And she’d not secured any of the necessary means to care for a replacement.

“Ah, I think I’m almost recovered and that is just about the right time for dear little Aleph to shout some sense into her Partner. Shall we return with me reeking and sweaty with exhaustion so intense they come to all manner of of lascivious and profane conclusions?”

She laughed at the ready response nestled inside her, even as it was fading like a most beautiful dream in her poor overworked head her soul would treasure it with a crystal clarity.

“Yes, I understand but you cannot tell me the impression is wholly dishonest. Yes, Yes I should not stereotype you so I apologize. Speaking of you really must tell me about your mother some time. She sounds like quite the fascinating woman”