Aleph was amazed, struck to a stillness by what she was seeing.

Her remaining momentum let her drift slowly giving the entire feeling even more of a dream-like quality.

Dodderamanooie reached out to the window and brushed over it with a twist to his hand. Fingers rolling. And from it a rippling, furling texture expanded, growing like waves as he moved his hand around and around again. Spreading the effect out away from his touch until the entire skin of the interior was roiling in a rustling soft hiss like stones whispering off the cliffs.

The walls had shimmered, fluttering like Tunie’s feathers and seeming to dissolve away entirely and then re-emerge. Expanding in rippling spirals of flipping foamy tessellations until they finally reached back over each other and stabilized into near total transparency with a last gesture from Dodderimrim’s fingers.

The light of the outer envelope of the feast tent poured in. all the starlike glimmering of little camps and nestled smaller scale festivities. Even now after so much time preparing this structure, eating non-stop. It had been going on for weeks.

It had struck her once before but somehow in this revealing moment it hit all at once again.

Aoria.

The valleys she had grown up in. Camps and houses and travelers along the many trails up and down the cliffs.

The other villages and the high top monasteries above them.

The stepped and terraced fields of the crops. There was even the faint haze from smoke and distance she had never even seen since leaving Terra.

So long looking out into the near vacuum of most of the reef had denied her something she had never even realized she missed.

Somehow this tiny little tent with its accoutrements framing the view through a magical window material was what it took to tell her the full scope of scale.

Not redweed and the vast cavernous docks.

Not the teeming city of Squidgie’s ancestral home.

Not standing in the naked void outside Tunie, or the window showing the vastness of the forest.

Not even quite the experience of coming into this vast fairtent as it was pulled together around them.

It all read as a little fake, a little too close, too sharp.

She laughed a little even as the tears welled up and blurred her vision and got all over her face.

Terrans needed air to know how far away something was. She wiped the water from her face but found her arm was poor at catching and it just smeared it all over. That got a laugh from her as well and a snorting cough as a bit of tear got up her nose.

“h-Hey uh, dods? c-Could you g-h-get me a sponge or a towel? This dress doesn't have any sleeves.”

DodoDodoodohdo obliged with something fuzzy that wicked up the water off her face and even dragged a line of snot OUT of her nose and magicked it off. That made her sneeze but the thankfully clear vision was worth it.

“Th-thanks, Sorry about that. It was all so much... It reminded me of home. It’s been a long time since I left.”

The big creature, large enough to swallow her, shaggy and yet distinctly froglike. With four eyes and no proper front or back closed his eyes in a sign of understanding and kindness that still lingered in her mind from Pylo.

Then slowly he performed a terran nod, not quite as smooth and scoopy as they had been so far. Firm and properly abrupt in how it tilted down and up.

Followed by a more natural to his kind’s gaping of the jaws.

The voice of accented deeply resonant aorian was soft and kind though.

“I understand.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He turned to the view she had been so struck by. Eyes wide and considering before he continued.

“When I was still a Commoner, young and barely into my first coat. I was taken on my first expedition with the Righteous Gallants of Lower Middle Sky Trackers.”

They were both silent for a bit. But Aleph’s curiosity got the better of her.

“What was that like?”

He laughed in that spiraling blink before attempting a very flat and artificial chuckling croak.

Honestly she preferred the natural flow of their winks for amusement.

“It was exciting at first, I had a proper duty, One of my first. I was assigned to carry and tend to the supplies under the training of a Least Novice. It was fearful as well. There were many fewer elder to me and they would sometimes be much further away if I needed them.”

He got an expression on his big wide face that Aleph was starting to think meant he was struggling for the right Aorian words.

“It was very troubling that I would not know what to do. What I SHOULD do. But I had a duty, a proper duty to a proper path.”

Aleph laughed and nodded.

“Yeah, I felt much the same when Omega started training me for our trip with Pylo. Before we left.”

He got that confused look again and there was a faint rumbling bass buzz that made his fur tremble. She considered that he'd been doing it more often. She had no idea what it meant. But curiosity pressed her past that to the story at hand.

“What happened next?”

Dude-orinimo croaked something in his own language before speaking. There were many timbres and rhythms to it, deep rumbling bass and faint tweeting chirps.

“From here I can see it was a very typical expedition. Troubling in its lack of misfortune. Ill omened perhaps but not uncommonly fortunate either. None of that was apparent to me in my youth and lower station. There was the thrill of my duty, the terror of uncertainty. I was not harshly tasked, I was trained a few times to aid in tasks too menial or risky for the Novice.”

He grew silent almost long enough Aleph asked him to continue. It was a bit difficult talking with him. He seemed stilted and prone to simply stopping in the middle of explanations.

It had happened several times through the tour, he would begin telling a tale, reach some concluding fact on his story and then STOP in the middle.

It required needling and prompting from Aleph.

But suddenly he voiced on his own the next step.

“Then after long but not so long even by the life of a Commoner we returned, and we first beheld the branches of -” He called into the air in the voice and language of his people, a call she had heard before, a rising from deepest bass to highest chirp in one long smooth howl.

It was the call they made whenever they referred to the Tree that they were even now nestled between the branches of.

It had never been translated even by Pylo.

A sudden jarring musical howl peppered into conversations.

Aleph was pretty sure none of the Terrans except maybe Quarti could hope to approximate that sound.

“- and I felt my body still and such a tension was loose from my arms and legs. The least Novice I was attending had to strike me to bring me back to my duties lest I be left behind.”

She winced at that, she’d seen a kind of casual violence among The People. Also a lot more contact in general, they would slap, embrace, punch and grip at one another often. There were numerous ceremonial seeming details to each touch.

But sometimes it was rather cruel looking. Especially to those that they called ‘commoners’.

It reminded her uncomfortably of Squidgie and the Clerks.

“To return to our place as The People after so long away. The first time I saw the boughs and the creches I had grown in. It was powerful.”

He did that sharper, more authentically terran nod, joining it together with his own parting lips in the gape of ascent.

“I recognize this honor. That you could see enough of your home in these walls to be so struck is a great boon to all the masters who toiled for it.”

Aleph nodded and wiped at her face with whatever strange fluffy frondy thing he’d handed her to soak up her tears.

Then paused and got a very good look at it.

It was looking back.

Aleph boggled.

The fluffy wipe faintly wiggled back at her and blinked curiously with its numerous round black eyes.

https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2F6mE9Une.png [https://i.imgur.com/6mE9Une.png]

“Uh, What is this?”