Pylo could not follow the point of this whole story.

“To see and to hear are metaphor. Even here in the living flesh they are illusions and words but pale shades of truth that tell only the slimmest similarity. To say that before I saw is as close as to say that I tasted and touched, that I perceived and heard and became and was not.”

And it did not help that of all the terrans the eldest was in some ways both the easiest and hardest to read. She was wonderfully precise and eloquent in her diction. Compared to Aleph and Omega who were mumbling muttery and imprecise, she also heard Pylo with really almost no misunderstanding at all. Often managing to...

She could barely stand to even acknowledge it but Quarti was able to TRANSLATE Pylo to the others.

“From Obbie I had been given a thing we call sight, a single sense, grown out of a dulled half sense of the human spirit. A fumbling worm squirming blind is what us departed, And I was given a slightest of fine tuning ability. ”

Pylo could watch Quarti’s senses firing as she said these things, watched the language form in orderly chains. And yet at the same time she practically was throwing these things up from effectively nothing. There was a howling chasm of meaningless gibberish noise in resonance and then suddenly the pre-impulses of words.

“A single sense grown from a half realized one. That is what I and obbie and many of the spirit forms we had known used.”

Pylo could follow in Aleph how the pre-words of impulse grew and spiraled, they CAME from specific places within the brain, then spun momentarily into chaotic resonance noise. And looped back into presence again.

“All of speech and sight and touch mashed into a single sense. That is what we had grown to know. From this great spirit we survivors of humanity had bought two more.”

Omega was different she sort of echoed herself into a coherent pre-word impulse and drive. Fresh ovum planted inside the terran’s cortex that grew into impulse and then thought and word. Like she was doing right now. They were all very different and strange, She had never noticed before...

“But what was the PRICE you paid? You had to promise the flesh of your soul after the final death for the senses Obbie gave you right? Or something else even more important you don’t even remember. What did this THING ask for?”

Pylo had just done what she usually did, read up the locals knowledge base on anatomy and psychology. Spent some time identifying any roots of communication that she might recognize from an earlier venture or her lessons at home.

Then applied it for the brief encounter needed to get the trade done or the uplift finished and left with her cargo. To be quite honest she was practically speaking on the verge of forgetting most of the Terran lingual-physiology by the time they left.

It wasn't like verbal single channel languages like Terrans used were very stable. The destination would have mutated to barely recognizable permutations of dialect if Pylo was even slightly delayed.

But now she had them as passengers and she was starting to suspect something was amiss.

“Obbie had supped and grown thick and fat on all the prayer and thought I had funneled them over the many many many years of my family’s renewal. My friend and partner was thick with the spiritual nourishment enough to tempt even the interest of this colossal beast”

Pylo huffed, she was letting the very thing she was trying to get away from sneak back into her cortices. She was here to relax and stop chewing at the translation problem of the terrans!

“It’s been my custom in this tale to call the spirit sense we had acquired so far sight, but it is as said as much touch and taste as anything like light. For there is nothing akin to light in the world of spirit and soul and the departed lands. I say this because of the new senses I shall liken it to hearing.”

Silly nomenclature, air pressure wave sense associated too strongly with language centers and spatial orientation. Accidents of their-

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Pylo was going to stop thinking about this.

“I call it such because it is indirect, a way to feel shifts in the wefts of those more directly contacting the soul-body. To infer something without putting oneself in direct contact with it. And in doing so know if without revealing oneself to a subject of this sense. By crudest measure I had used the ear of a spirit in vaguest facsimile when I had suffered the first death at the end of days.”

Pylo tilted her head, trying to connect the reference, when had the Terran eldar been describing a sense like that? She could not resolve the association reliably. It was frustrating, but she would let it go, the meaning would either be important and become clear in the tale teller, or it would be unimportant and sail past Pylo like the idiosyncrasies of most conversations with none-siren.

“It was by the dull and near deafened use of that sense as a fledgling of the dead lands that I recognized the death and consumption of other souls and the weft of horror in the other-land of association and sympathies. And by that did I thwart Obbie’s attempts to lead me to a final death all those years prior.”

Quarti took a heavy breath, then mustered associations and emotions for the next step. The storyteller poured context and wonder into mingling awe as she mustered her words.

“The ‘sound’ after being near deaf and muffled was like a symphony, echoing out and into us from all directions and more. What had at first seemed the solid threads or even the very space of reality as we spirits and departed souls were suddenly granular, chiming and singing with unique voices in numbers that remain even now uncountable for me. A mesh of tones and notes wrought out in every direction, growing thin and ephemeral in one twisting turn, thick and searingly warm in another. It was like we had dropped into a vast sky of song that encompassed vastnesses we had never known before.”

[https://i.imgur.com/G0XPKzW.png]

Pylo was lost again, but it was a pleasant ride and not a bad moment to be lost in. It reminded her of the few times she had gone out onto Tunie’s hull when they were moving close to a star. When she was young and reckless and before she had lost most of her face to a dust mote impact in transit.

“It was then that I truly could apprehend the vastness of the creature we were ‘beside’ and begin to sense its place in the realm of spirit and dead. It was at once more vast and smaller than I expected. It stretched out in four and five and six directions of association, wide and fat where the song was hottest, wispy and slender and bifurcating to hair thinnest in the twists that were colder and emptier. All in all despite subsuming volumes on volumes of space to my new ears it sounded incredibly flat and squashed to a thin sliver of being compared to the full scope and range of space in which sound could traverse the dead lands.”

That tickled a lesson, a thought. Something remembered remembered Aunt Morrigan describing but the memory was weak and Pylo did not have any caches of pollen to remind her of precisely what. But it latched and itched at her trying to connect this moment in the story to something. But the feeling left her with nothing but loose threads of memory and no substance. Frustration she focused on ignoring to try and take in the next step of the befuddling story.

“Yet that was not even the start of our revelations, for there is still the third sense which we traded the great trade beast for. Which I have no clever association or metaphor for. It stands apart from all mortal fleshly senses”

Pylo inclined her head to another side, the shape of this one was suddenly brisk and familiar to her, a bright and obvious commonality emerging that she could just barely understand as something she did not even think of.

Quarti’s words flowing over as she continued.

“So I will simply call it Enlightenment or Insight.”