Pylo was utterly lost trying to follow Quarti’s tale.

“So I was stood apart from my family then, advising and speaking only lightly to them most times. I recall, a few I think? The soul of my grandson, great great granddaughter and a few descendants besides that. We were a small family and most were fresh souls to start, the rest returning to life again and again.”

Well, she was mostly lost anyway. She knew it was a story about a lot of things happening. And even what those things were in the moment at each step. But as for why any of it was happening?

She had no clue.

“Me and Obbie did our best to teach them what I knew, but some that tried to stay with us in the unbodied life were ill suited too it. They would wander and stumble blind into danger and be eaten by scavengers. Some became lost and starved for lack of prayer before I could find them.”

But it is pleasant to listen too. The relationships are fun and hearing people talk about themselves and show how they think and behave is always entertaining. But as for the rest?

If she was following along correctly most of it was drama that was about the weird aggregate symbiosis anatomy that the Terrans had for their cognitive functioning. She’d read their literature on the subject already. There was the (by her experience) extremely hyper-sensitive cerebral receiver in the skull that acted as a sensory ganglion and output motor bus.

“So, me and those descendant souls that would council with me for a time took to a tradition of steering the young and fresh souls close to the family, to cling and coddle where prayer and thought and safety was assured.”

Then according to the terrans they had a resonance facilitated symbiote which acted as cognitive coordination, memory storage and identity perception. Quarti’ story seemed to be about her early larval stages as that symbiote and the various times she had been implanted into a developing fetus.

Well the first two times?

“And we tried to keep their lives straight for them, remind them of themselves, I and others would whisper to them. We sang songs of the lives of ancestors and friends to children, let them spark remembrance.”

Apparently the memory storage was lossy and ill functioning compared to what the literature had reported during early ‘soul’ development.

“This was the way of life for my descendents and theirs for some time. I and Obbie the spirit advisors and elders, watching close over the souls of my people.”

It also sounded like Terra, or as the Terran (Gaian?) at the time called it: Gaia had been subjected to some kind of polisivoric grazer encounter? Maybe.

This was apparently very traumatic for the local culture and pushed them WELL below what Tunie or Pylo would consider an uplift candidate? That was about all she could really make sense of about it. The rest just blurred together in talk about what apparently the experience of being a resonance symbiote unconnected from their host was like?

Pylo thought she understood that.

“So then I think you see how our peoples were living then? Just barely scraping together anew how to build, how to learn. So much of us lost and forgotten, just memories of memories in my soul. But we were dragging it back together. Families moving into neighboring valleys. Digging out new camps, smoke of our fires drifting into the sky from distant horizons. I thought we had weathered the horrors from the sky.”

But the whole dealing with what she presumed were other things like the symbiote?

She was lost on that part of things.

But that was pretty normal.

She rarely followed causes, it was much easier to just judge what people meant at any given moment. And besides she might be a siren but even she had limits.

Pylo as a rule never dealt with these things if she could help it. It’s hard to have conversations with people who don’t even bother to pay attention to ideas like spatial dimensions, or physical matter as more than metaphorical concepts. Most of her Family and as far as she knew most of the Siren Families she knew of didn't deal with it much either.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Well except Aunt Morrigan and those like her. But she was rather weird and Pylo and her sisters rarely spoke much with her outside of family polen swaps.

Then again Aunt Morrigan was VERY soft spoken when not using the native family genomic dialect. Maybe if...

Blegh no!

Pylo tried to focus on the here and now of the story, she was doing this to distract her from her frustrations with language and skills she swore she remembered being better at than this.

“But then the rot began to take hold.”

Pylo found her attention snapping into place. There were a lot of connotations in that meaning.

Very disturbing ones at that.

“It started with the leaves growing strange. The trees would die and rot black and white sap even while they burst with new leaves and branches.”

The voice of Quarti was sombre, pained and strained.

“Then the beasts grew strange. It was slow, over generations. Some died young, others gave birth to malformed spawn. Or some times entirely different animals entirely. Those that eat the flesh of the rotten no matter how carefully prepared or how hotly burned would grow sick”

[https://i.imgur.com/6GDeRGW.png]

Pylo was staring, intently dissecting every hint of the story, trying to drag the description and memories fluttering along Quarti’s wrinkled ganglion into something more in depth.

“Children grew sick, Valleys were abandoned. The wood of the trees became unsafe to burn, the waters became poison. The Air stung and finally the beasts became cruel and their hunger unending. ”

She shivered and looked up at the green panels of Tunie’s light baffling.

“The families fled once more into the caves where we had been sheltered from horror before. But by then it was already too late. Children would be born dead, or contorted, one in three would survive and manage to nurture and hold a soul. I admit I and obbie knew not what to do, I was lost and helpless as my children simply wasted away. Many died in trying to reincarnate and finding their bodies twisted to inhospitable monstrosity.”

Pylo could only frown, trying not to bare her teeth. It was not specific enough, it did not clearly distinguish this from any other of the many terrible fates that could befall ports. But it writhed in her flesh and made her distils twitch and writhe in frustration.

“In the end the last generation perished with barren bellies. Unable to beget children that would not tear them apart”

Pylo whispered as softly and carefully as she could. Barely anything at all. Like she feintly remembered Aunt Morrigan spoke.

“What did the creatures born of the animals look like?”

Quarti turned to face her for a long moment before sighing.

“Dear beautiful Pylo, I must beg forgiveness but I can’t recall clearly. It is all a blur of black and white ichor and sharp angles... This was a very long time ago, and as I will explain soon I and mine changed so much right after that I have doubts of the clarity of those times”

Pylo huffed heavily and in frustration, running her tongue along her teeth to try and clear the writhing uncertainty and disgust. It was a long time ago, probably long dust and barren. When she had arrived at Terra after all there had been no sign of any such foulness.

The story continued.

“Of the families and descendant souls of mine only a few hundred survived to see the last generation. And it was then that I and Obbie knew that bereft of flesh and mortal bodies we would need to seek aide if anything of our people was to survive.”

Quarti tilted her head forward so that the cloud of black strands obscured her face again. Voice thick with omen.

“So we departed, a caravan of souls for the deep places of Terra. Where we hoped to barter for sight and knowledge of living in death that we might survive somehow. However altered we might be. In hopes perhaps that there might be some hidden survivors on Terra tha we could be reborn among as I had been. ”

A deep sigh from the terran.

“There would be few survivors”