Stormcloud capable of great vertical depth
Scene 8
He’d thought he’d be known here.
Tr’aedis tried sitting down on air, and kept stumbling.
He kept sitting normally, like the kind of being that he was back in the Sector—perhaps in Sector II, they could do this—children, some appearing as if they’d only yesterday emerged from birthport, yes, some were stumbling but he was over ten years older, surely. The children were floating.
Some of them were wrapped partially in thin but nearly opalescent coverings that swept upwards from the soft, pliant floor he sat on. The last thing he could remember, that reminded him of it, was the water that’d swept up with the whales. But this wasn’t water, or at least not in the way he’d understood of the whales, and perhaps closer to the ‘water’ that he’d stepped into when coming here. It was thin but also dense. Practically see-through, but only showing a silhouette of a baby, neatly roiling in its half-covering. It reminded him severally of other images, back in the world he himself had been born in. But soon he forgot them, as he wondered why he didn’t have such a covering of his own, and was merely sitting on an empty space laid out for him on the soft, pliant floor.
Tr’aedis watched the babies and very young children for a time.
Soon, one of the portal-like windows through which they had first floated or crawled through opened. It was rough, but circular; he could distinguish it as a circle, and not a square like the window on the right, or the diamond on the left. An older person walked through. His head nearly brushed the ceiling of the circle, and as the babies and young children saw him they nearly jumped or cocooned out of their holders, emitting various squeals, shrieks, and susurrations. Tr’aedis only then realized that the babies showed no distinctive markings, designs, or colors between them as the adults in the food-place had; they were, essentially, all the same.
He felt the clothing he had; he touched his skin again. He remembered the beautiful water that they had given him for washing; Laconica had nothing to it.
The newcomer reached down with his hands, which were so long that they almost brushed the floor, and very grey, gnarled, and smooth at the edges. The children reached for his long fingers. He seemed to behold Tr’aedis, from twin green eyes that emerged from deepset sockets. They stared.
Tr’aedis expected him to say something, once again in the lines he didn’t know. While the babies continued to mutter indecipherable lines, the individual spoke back to them, but not in the heavily connected speech he did not know, but in deep, raspy reiterations of what came out of the children’s mouths. He seemed to be attempting to speak in their baby-speak; but babies didn’t speak, he couldn’t be saying anything. But the babies seemed to understand him, and their incoherent squeals seemed to gain the confidence of adult speech, some more intonation, tighter tones, tinctures even in the tongues that on occasion lolled out of their small lips. None of the babies paid Tr’aedis any attention; the old man noticed this, and continued staring at him sharply with those deep, jade eyes.
This again continued on for a time; but not too long, as the man with the gnarled arms and hands came over to him, and as the babies floated and crawled back to their containers, Tr’aedis now saw that what had been before a cloak or jacket all in grey, was striped in a multitude of colors, and Tr’aedis found himself reaching out. But the individual brushed his arm away, and his cloak returned quickly to its grey canvas. The individual pulled his arm across the front of his cloak—and as his arm moved across, his hand came to open his fist and hold out a small grey tassel. He held it out.
Tr’aedis, his arm still hanging in mid-motion, felt the tassel fall into his palm.
He looked at it.
It was soft, and felt like flynder. With his other hand, he reached over and pulled; it could stretch, and, his movements nearly unconscious, he found himself tying it back into his hair, making it sort of a knot or ponytail, the grey tassel hanging out. It was just long enough that he could see it hanging by his peripheral. He shook his head and saw it swing.
“Thank you,” he said, meeting those green eyes, and the individual nodded, turned, and left the room from the same circle, and Tr’aedis watched him go. He now saw that what the babies had in common was grey on their clothing, and so were the containers holding them. Some of the babies now turned towards him, and so the grey in their eyes flickered, although in one’s he saw blue, in another’s yellow, and some seemed to acknowledge him, speaking in their way, and he nodded his head in some way. He sat back down and watched; he waited, until the door shaped like a diamond opened—
—And another individual entered, stepping through carefully, using his hands to steady himself on the sides of the wall surrounding the entrance. His hair was long and wet, of a brown so dark it crept into black, water tickling off and dripping into his shirt, his teal blue eyes glimmered. The children all said the same word, or perhaps a name, “Koko!” and Koko gave an uncertain but very clear smile; he had his own spray of tassels tied into his hair, three of them, all yellow, and he saw Tr’aedis and his smile faded, but he quickly concealed his dismay, but Tr’aedis noticed, he was not supposed to be here.
He reached up to his hair and held out the tassel. Koko saw, and as Koko sat himself down, seeming to concentrate for two seconds, began to float off the ground like the others around them; giving Tr’aedis one of the wing-gestures, a hand waved over the breast, and Koko began to address the babies and young children.
“Charis. Nex Koko,” he said, but speaking slowly, slowly enough that, finally, Tr’aedis could comprehend within the listener in his mind. “CHAR-ree. NO-esh KOH-ko,” providing emphasis on the first syllables, keeping light eye contact with the young listeners, now all still and rapt, only their feet moving slowly within their wrappings.
“Charis! Dyen, Koko!” they then replied, in perfect unison, likewise articulating the first word CHAR-ree, and the second Dee-YAH, or Dee-YAHN, KOH-ko.
If only he had his receptor!
Oh, he did still have it—it was still cupped around his left ear.
Well, he recalled his days of memorization, back in mediary, each of the members of the play gathered in a circle, reciting everyone’s lines between them so they could all remember. Each part was connected to the part before, the part after. But here: he didn’t know the words, he could only surmise… CHAR-ree had to be a greeting, Koko was the greeter, No-esh was I am, My name is or something similar. But then what was Dee-yahn?
Silence before him… they were waiting…
“Charis, nex Tr’aedis,” he enunciated slowly.
Koko beamed, a movement that effaced him, causing the tassels to shake.
“Trix! Dyen, Tr’aedis!” he said. It almost sounded like his name. Then Koko turned his attention back to his quiet and attentive audience, and he continued speaking. “Tr’aedis torr tr’aenim!” he enunciated, and the listeners echoed, and Tr’aedis felt that he had been given an epithet, as the one true newcomer here.
Back home, back at school, he didn’t have to learn languages. All he had to do was act. But here, they seemed to lack any fast reference to his own; and here he was, learning with the ones who chose, or did not choose, their names. The one named Koko continued speaking, looking his way and pointing to various parts of himself, holding the tassels tied to his hair, making the children laugh. Tr’aedis soon found himself forgetting again, as the words connected and slurred together, forming interconnected words of laughter and innocent teasing, he was sure, from the ones born here.
He soon lost himself in the slur of syllables and names.
Ahead of him, the others laughed, led by Koko, who didn’t appear older than he was.
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Skylark, sitting on the piece of cloud, watched her feet hanging over the edge. It still felt so surreal.
And whatever it was she was eating. It was so good. Again, not for the first time, she envied all the people who lived up here. All her doubts had washed away like the rain.
“It’s good, isn’t it!” said the young girl sitting two pieces of cloud away.
I just thought that, Skylark thought. “Yes, it is,” she said.
The girl smiled, her food spread on her chin. Clinging there, it was like a small mountain, with the clean, they called it, but pronounced “clan,” made of clens, being the misty cloud just in front of it.
“Thanks and clear! I made it just before you alter people came!”
Skylark nodded, noticing that the clean-stuff that had plopped into her hands just a few minutes before was all gone, and she couldn’t help herself, and licked the few sprinkles left off her fingers.
“It’s so good,” she said again. She couldn’t describe the taste.
“I’m glad,” came a voice, and she turned around, it was Ultramarine. The girl with way too much blue and green on her was holding a bowl. Skylark slowly brought herself to her feet. Soft inside, she asked herself why she wasn’t screaming, she could fall just like that, and neither Cerise nor Jaceus was there to catch or slow her. But she stood up and turned, extending her arms. Ultramarine deposited the bowl, it was quite big, and it was full of the clean.
“All for me?” Skylark asked. She wanted to ask for more…
“No. As we take from them, we must return,” Ultramarine responded. “For the rain, please empty it over there.” She gestured to where Skylark had been sitting; where the other girl still sat, watching them.
Skylark nodded. She walked back to the tip of cloud; slowly, turning the bowl over on its side, she poured the wet, silver clean, as she peered over; the stream of white and silver soon trickled into a fine aura of dust as it touched the cloud below. But at that point she couldn’t see it make contact.
So it rains from here, she thought. Another came about the clens, and how the weather control here was probably different, and what their Government was, or the schools, did they teach kids to grow these binds on evas, and was the entire Sector on the clouds?
She turned back to Ultramarine. Behind the green and blue girl, a vast swathe of blue and the clearest, most silver extremes of white, streaked by long bands of cloud, lay beneath the reaches of the sky far above; she looked up, and even though she knew that she herself was standing on one, looked up and couldn’t see the end of it all. It was a very high sky, blue that kept going up and up and up—and all she had to mark any kind of distance were the clouds that followed it, and while a part of her expected them to grow thinner as the sky ascended, they grew wider—it just—it just didn’t end.
She brought her eyes back down to earth. Or, well, the cloud they were standing on. Ultramarine was looking back at her with what could have been a knowing smile.
“The higher up you go, the closer to our government,” she said.
“Oh,” was all Skylark could make out in reply. Think—what does this remind me of? She thought back to v-Worlds. Many of the ones with magic had those civilizations where farmers were the lowest, like they’d be in Lowers, and here it was Ultramarine and Calamus (and probably many others) who grew their binds, but didn’t go below, so… they were farmers. Sky farmers. So it made sense that, if their evas were the lowest of the clouds, that their version of High would be way, way higher. Higher than she could see.
“How do I go up there?” she then asked. I found myself asking.
“You’re really flurried,” came the reply. “I don’t know. I’ve only lived on two residuals. The one we’re on—everything we see at this level—” Ultramarine said, making a sweeping gesture with her arm, her hair flapping over to match direction—“and the one just above, where you all dropped down from.”
Skylark reflected that she’d only seen three people so far. Ultramarine, Calamus, and the girl who’d made their food. If they used birthport or something else, or maybe they didn’t even have parents—or siblings—she was up here, surrounded by very strange folk wielding large flying keys, and in reflecting she began to accept what she’d been denying, that there was something about Cerise she wasn’t telling them, maybe ever since that day showing their traits, it was Cerise who stopped them from falling, but Jaceus was able to make them walk on it, and Mr. T had been instantly stunned by a bind, and she liked Agate and Luke but wasn’t sure they could be really helpful. She was standing on a cloud.
She looked at Ultramarine’s eyes.
One green, one in blue. Whenever she looked at Jaceus’s eyes she marveled at what they could have seen before coming here—to Sector I. But looking at the eyes of Ultramarine, Skylark felt rapidly uncertain. She bit her lip. She looked up again, up past the girl—at the many slow-moving clouds, concealing what more strange people and governments.
Washed away like the rain—and it was all coming back. Like a window, the one outside her room, with the water falling down it from the rain, and just as quickly absorbed for the house-system. She would be staring out the windows of school, past Falara’s drooping hair, at the raider players running by. She’d be staring at the shrouded sky, high above and into the unknown.
What am I doing here?
She opened her mouth… but then—a flash, no a streak, of blue—her eyes seized upon it—and it was gone. Just behind that cloud.
She closed her mouth. She reopened it—and remembered what Jaceus had said back in his house—
“Do people fly here?” she asked.
The two eyes, not touching but distant, reflected back at hers.
Ultramarine nodded. “You saw. Keep looking Skylark.”
Skylark nodded, keeping her eyes focused on that exact spot of sky. Between the cloud on the left, shaped like a nexus tube, tall and surrounded, she now noticed, by much smaller, level clouds; and the one on the right, one that she was almost certain was moving in a ring, over and over again, so at that distance, it was very fast—and in between them, suddenly darting a group of similar flashes of blue, pushing through the smaller clouds in a passing wisp, and avoiding the one spinning in a disc. And then they were gone.
People. Those were people—and they were flying.
Without traits.
Beneath her feet, without her noticing, the clens began amassing in delight as the feet left them, without the use of leave.
Scene 9
“Noht Tr’aedis,” he said, although of course what came out to him sounded like “Nyaw Tr’aedis,” as if he were heralding to Fayar Gaebus’ Crystal Sundance V-movie series, and the man standing before him was not a man who roared white light, but the Light Rider, light filling his face, unseen to all. But it was Puræ.
Puræ, moving his hands over his empty head, shook his head.
“Nët Tr’aedis,” he said. Then, moving his hand down over to his breast, he made as if to make the wing symbol; but smoothly changed it to his index and middle finger, pointing to himself.
“Nex Puræ,” he said. I am Puræ, he must be saying. Just as Koko had. Tr’aedis thought also to the gathering of Myodors, where Herceus and Apolluceus had used nex before their names, followed by tae Myodor. Nex, then, indicated the first name, and tae the second.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Tr’aedis nodded. “Nex Tr’aedis,” he said, pointing to himself.
Puræ released his hand and smiled. “Moëret, lvvo tr’aenim.”
Tr’aedis, not for the first time, wished he had his receptor. He’d left it in his bedchamber. He could easily Thoughtnote all these new words, record for later study. Of course, it hadn’t worked at first. In the Sector, only Neo English was spoken, and all other languages were translated into it. And as far as he knew that was true for the other four Sectors as well.
But he could not do that here. All he could do was remember the lines.
Tr’aedis was good at that, at least. But memorization was rote for any actor. And he could deliberate over each and every word Puræ told him. Ask for a sturdy Lowers—no, Earth—style notebook, paper or whichever material they had, and writing implement, and at least write the words out as they sounded. Elementary practice.
So, for now—all he could do was act.
Alter acting, he thought. As Puræ stood silent, waiting. Tr’aedis remembered the Performance classes at Blazon, to act is to alter yourself, imagine the subsequent changes you’d make by Alterface to reach, become the character, and keeping his eyes focused on the character before him, he Thought—no, thought—for Face first, and he noted how the lines across the sides of the nose were sharp enough to accentuate the upper portion of the cheekbones, which stood out as he looked, but stood out not enough so as to destroy their contour down, down to where the chin tapered, which he hadn’t noticed before, but he did now. Face—CONTOURS—NOSE—LENGTH—there wasn’t an option for those precise angles of skin, only COLOR, SHAPE, and OTHER, so he chose that, and thought for shallower cut besides cheekbones.
One year.
Tr’aedis imagined the change, his body-maintenance prescriptions working overnight in the year 2238, his cheekbones, or the upper portion, now accented by the sharper cut. 2239—he looked to the chin turned, only slightly upwards, of Puræ.
It was—
Alter beautiful crescent came to his mind.
“Wa,” he uttered.
Puræ was—he was smiling, Tr’aedis thought, or nodding.
The chin—so close—too.
Tr’aedis closed the Thought-feed, no, there was no Thought-feed, or Alterface, or anything, but he let the thoughts slip away like water. Slip away—fall. Plummet; dry. Shatter; wet. Sync of nothing.
Thoughts ended…
And so he, Tr’aedis, seemed to stand there, still, as the water closed.
Puræ watched him, with both a curiosity and a pitying sort of humor, until the people he had called by dipping his semblance into the madrigal, came about, through the viaducts of the sky, passing through the Element’r vareau, until Tr’aedis, finished and returned to the world, opened his eyes, and looked up.
Tr’aedis looked up and saw a break in the clouds.
Two figures came through it; they were high up, so Tr’aedis couldn’t see them clearly—but one of them had wings like those far-off winged figures he had seen upon entering this place, and the other seemed to be falling.
They were moving around each other as they descended.
Tr’aedis chanced a glance below, and the clouds there were already parting. They didn’t change color, but he felt a wave of something, warm, emanate out of the column of air, and though there was no sound besides the rushing of wind, the way it rushed past his ears felt like music—
And in a vivid, convoluted and mixed conflagration of sound and vibrant lines they passed by him, turbulence of laughter and the air filled with luster, joy and pearls and enshrined moments, moments that bring two together. Two people, together, and Tr’aedis had been alone before the Dorrs brought their daughter, and Eleanor had taken months to try out his house, too and, and—and then the clouds began sifting back, back to their present, unruly demeanor, and the two beings arose to hover in the air around him.
As he watched, the one without wings bent her head slightly, to kiss the other’s exposed neck—the lines of silver sky that ran through it, markings that went everywhere through his body, and a damp, tireless light emanating from it. In turn he stroked her hair, concentric waves of scarlet and black, that made the garments she wore grey in contrast as they billowed softly in the air, gradually begun to still.
Puræ was, Tr’aedis dimly saw, crossing his arms close to his chest and bending forward slightly. The two in front of them ceased their contact and as Puræ pulled Tr’aedis aside, moved onto the grassy cliff to face them. The lines on the winged one’s skin faded and merged with the rest. The color left the other’s hair or rather seemed to drip down into her light robe.
She turned to Tr’aedis and, her eyes slowly widening, used her fingers to make her mouth into a smile; one broad enough that when Tr’aedis moved to imitate it, he found that he’d already been making that expression.
“Trix, vela dær,” she uttered, her face, both pale and dim, nearly contorting in a burst of laughter (and a feigned, but wholly real, seriousness). “Vela, nex Emeli. Dyen, riel ri,” she said to him, and he recognized that she had said her name, it sounded like “you melee.”
The one besides her, his wings still fully extended. Seeing them this close. Tr’aedis made out blue-cerulean swirls along their—they weren’t feathers, they were—he couldn’t understand what they were—the winged one extended a hand, palm upwards, and as Tr’aedis placed his own upon it, the skin of the other’s felt a touch serrated, not like really anything he knew other than some of the items in that Lowers bakery, rough but also smooth. Just rough in comparison to everything else.
“Nex Avien, tae di Wae,” he said softly, making it sound like a question, even though he’d said also his name, but it was harder to catch. Tr’aedis again wished he could see their script.
But in—in everything else, their demeanor, their nods to Puræ, he knew them as he knew Ila ce, and “Havie” had wings, he was a winged individual, with rough hands and clouds instead of feathers. He had just come down to earth. He and You-melee had been descending a cloud-shaft together and they were basking in the afterglow.
Tr’aedis stumbled, and dropped himself to the grass. He sat; he limited himself to staring at the newcomers’ legs, Havie’s which were thankfully clothed in some thin material, Youmelee’s in some kind of extended sock. Arching lines of red, or ochre, vibrated along hers, as she curled her toes.
He faintly heard them talking amongst themselves. He stopped trying to piece together words he’d only been remembering “niche-a”. He closed his eyes and touched grass. Just the grass. It felt like bioterra. The three above him, they generally seemed polite and familiar with one another but for all he knew, they could have been arguing, in the most fervent of debates, and—
A hand touched his shoulder.
Tr’aedis looked up, and the one named Havie suddenly cupped his chin, Tr’aedis’s chin, with two of his enscaled fingers—his thumb and index. Up close, the silver and white bands that dominated his hair were so interconnected they seemed like a new color or a mix or a chiaroscuro. Havie still holding his chin leaned in close and before Tr’aedis could react moved just short of kissing him, his lips further away.
Havie stayed there, and mouthed something in their language but it was too soft for Tr’aedis to hear. Havie let go and stood and shook his head, turning away to walk to the edge and look down below past the cliff-face.
Tr’aedis felt warm, he felt a glow, a glow was surrounding him. A glow instantaneous surrounded him. Blue and bulbous. Large and vast. Uninhibited. Colourous, colorific, colorized, 2237 ver.
Youmelee and Puræ stood by. They did not query him, they were not lambasting at all his inability to understand. But he felt, he still felt solitude, this lingering, wavering jade, crescent-shaped miasma that piqued his entire being. But he still, tremblingly, felt that bright gray tassel above his hair, that didn’t really belong there, and yet, he felt inhibited without it, were he to take it off, throw it down onto the awaiting grass. He felt lost without it. He felt lost wearing it. He felt lost.
Lost… there was too much color. So much, in this world before him… if all the world was a stage, and all its people merely players, then where was the color, in this strange, eventful history? Where was the color, in life’s walking shadow, or the world bereft of its chrysolite? There was too much! Too much here.
But he wanted—
—Recognition[1].
Tr’aedis put his fingers up onto his chin—his index and ring finger on each hand—and moved them upwards.
Satisfaction.
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Savior was confused, more confused than they had ever been; their three minds were at war. Or maybe it was a mind, a face and a body; or the soul, the spirit, and the flesh. Or three parts trinity, corporation subsidiary startup, factory car commercial. They were a car, they were a vehicle, they were Savior.
Hector kept whimpering, like a poor dog forced to read the canon of Joyce from the Paris candlelit conventions, or the ongoing visionices adaptation of Hunter x Hunter’s Dark Continent arc, ridiculing itself with the rewrites by a likewise poor editor, especially after Ging Freecss revealed his Nen ability. But Savior wasn’t here for mere abilities, they were here for—POWER?
Reify kept laughing, like the antagonist conglomerate of the sixth saga of the MCU, based on a basement strip exploring the Stan Lee Universe, especially when Larry Bird became its founder, throwing dry canisters of sandpaper paint alabaster onto the walls of the basketball court. But Savior wasn’t here for basketball, a sport that died out to the raider revolutions of the 2190s, about the same time that a certain Scion began to wreak—POWER?
Rev—
Power UP! Like the car engine. Like that bodiesified Long. Like that old fic, that one with the cute white mouse in pajamas who voiced the movement and the car moved, or the motorcycle, or the medicine. Dragon Up. Reification. Hectoring the process of existence. #TrustTheProcess. We sit here dillydallying, but really we’re all confused
Get in the fucking car. You’re not a boy weeping over imaginary wings.
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Time, like
Its soulless passage, unbound
Container for arts.
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The phoenix-cuckoo-basilisk-cockatrice-clown-memerager-dowager imagetics—It squawked.
Something in the draft Inmortalis’ mind shattered,
And now he could see. Unification. The glory but orange. Post raum, or post-r.
Savior flew, and he came upon the fiery kingdom, that known as the MÀHA, and settling his wings alit upon a porch. It was a hot wood but his talons were burner, and he came to know it. He looked upon the pillars of fire that stalked the land, distant and tall, keeping his bulbous eyes open, clear and distinct. They made out some children. The children were playing with fire.
They were far below him but from this distance, the orbs and spinning wheels they tossed at each other made fringent contact with them, hitting their skin and the strange clothes that covered nearly all of it. The parts that burned burned, and the children yelped but it was not with pain. Savior wanted to join them, but he was much reduced in size. The perch he had was comfortable.
Sitting there observing, after a few seconds, he lost interest. No master of an art was there to bring him deeper into the miasma of unknowledge. Only the children. Only the children played. And Savior found himself chirping along.
Eventually Savior realized that the tall winds surrounding the enclosure were falling apart; some soft hands were pulling them away, letting in air. The children ceased their tossing of fire and clamored. The hands, which were far larger than the children in their bright uniforms, sprinkled shards, which the children lapped up, using their winged forearms to crane open their protruding beaks to deposit them, down through the crop. Savior looking on from his tree, saw something flashy, and felt a bulge in his neck ripple. He was hungry. He opened his beak and squawked.
Scene 10
Tr’aedis walked after Emeli, watching her tread. She walked slowly and with care, as if she were marking a design upon the ground, even if no colors or shapes swam the soil that they walked. The soil simply let her feet, bare, touch it, and Tr’aedis felt that his bare toes were rough and only adulterating the path that they were creating.
In the distance, as few times Tr’aedis looked behind them, the students named Namdoe and Zhenu, whose violet tassels—tucked into Namdoe’s shirtneck and a series of bracelets on Zhenu’s left arm—gleamed as they walked, not approaching but staying just in sight. Tr’aedis had not been able to speak with them after the event where Ila ce spoke; she had spoken and left, just like that, Triomphe further demonstrated to the crowd’s emotion and a myriad strangers approaching Tr’aedis and talking to him, making numerous, different motions with their hands: there were so many. While everyone in the world—well, until now—spoke Neo English, as he was taught, Tr’aedis hadn’t heard of anyone communicating so frequently with their hands. Not since the various nations’ sign languages lost their purpose after the River Styx Ennoblement act just before—just before the Edicts. He could wave or motion back but was afraid of making mistakes. Most of them were the slightest variation of the palm, with the wrist directing it.
Barely catching himself, he almost walked into Emeli. She raised a hand—just her index finger, pointing up, and then bending forward—and Tr’aedis looked and saw a face in the sky.
It was vast and shining. It wasn’t just a face—it was an entire body, full and below the large face glowing with golden hues, showing limbs and a wide torso, but it was significant enough in size that Tr’aedis realized it was still distant, sitting with the clouds, and Emeli had stopped at the right point for them to envision it at a comfortable horizontal gaze. It was, he thought, like a constellation, but of clouds instead of stars. He recognized the face as belonging to the one back inside the green prism, the one they had pointed out to him as Jaceus, the one whose name everyone had been saying to him this entire duration.
And below it, some faraway smaller figures were visible. But now Emeli resumed walking, and behind him he heard the steps of the ones following, and soon they were just beneath the vision, and before Tr’aedis could take in the descriptions of those below it, he had to look up and see the image.
It was too bright. It was too close.
He looked back down, and saw a sudden grouping of color, dizzying tints of the various colors of the rainbow, spread out, singly, on the hands and arms, legs, necks and wrists, tucked into so many styles of hair, and he’d seen this back in the amphitheater-like space but there were far fewer here, and up close, he could see that some were clearly older than others, some younger, some really young, the oldest appearing older than he, but it became harder to distinguish.
One of them, a young teenager with flowing hair of silver-gold—that was the only way he could describe it—a thin green band almost invisible in some knots on the back of his head—had his palm out; as Emeli beckoned, Tr’aedis stepped closer, and he saw inscribed on the hand an array of flickering dots. They were emitting light. And standing above him was a young teenager, with golden hair as well but all the bangs tipped in jade, moving her right and left hand in and out of something invisible in the air, above the hand, and Tr’aedis saw that she was focused, not noticing him, and that, as he brought his gaze up, the two were creating or conjuring the image of Jaceus high above, and that the others with various tassels or markers on their bodies were, like him, just observing.
“Gaudie, fri,” urged the one below, his green band glinting.
“Mayre,” the one above replied, grimacing, as she moved her hands faster; there was sweat on her forehead. This was the first time Tr’aedis had seen any of the kind here…
Emeli smiled and nodded as she watched, her frill of hair, was it hair? As it swayed. She was, he realized, not wearing or showing a distinctive single-color marking like the others. He fingered his own grey tassel; they were distinguished from each other that way, and she did not need that distinction. She was now staring up at the vision above, seeming to track its creation from the palm, up through the two hands, and up, up, up, to the sky.
Jaceus must have been as well-known as Charles Restor…
“Aeros,” came a voice, one of the students watching, and she came to stand somewhat near Namdoe and Zhenu. She had hair so bright that Tr’aedis almost thought it was white. But it was still yellow, almost silver, like a far lighter shade of the student creating the pinpoints of light. Tr’aedis looked instinctively for her color identifier and he found it, purple insignia imprinted onto her hands and wrists.
Then he realized that it extended past that… glowing faintly throughout the part of her skin that showed, but then he couldn’t tell which was skin or clothing or something in between, as he hadn’t for Puræ. There were those here who wore clothing. There were those here who bore markings. And perhaps ‘clothing’ itself wasn’t known in quite the way he knew it on the Sector; but he knew that, without a doubt, he himself was wearing clothing, which included the grey tassel.
The student holding his hand out gritted his teeth. “Jaceus aeros! Emeli-turen, noht vent, stym-li,” he struggled to get out, and Emeli clapped her hands. “Pletmayr, pletmayr,” she replied, laughing, and Tr’aedis wasn’t sure if she was teasing, instructing, or genuinely responding to… the joke that was made.
“Taenim-hol Eikō! Pletmayr,” came the response. The students marked by purple nodded. The girl moving her hands shook her head, taking a glance up: something seemed to change in her expression. Tr’aedis had no idea. She nodded, and then steadied, slowed, stopped moving her hands. Whispering something to the somewhat frenetic one below, she moved her hands away, and moved her arms towards Emeli, palms out.
Emeli inspected them.
“Mayre,” she said, without giving any clear emotion. She walked over—she took a step to her left, and beckoned for the other to hold his palms out.
Flustered still, he turned his head away, or rather somewhat lowered to the ground; Tr’aedis couldn’t see his expression. But he raised his palms, and Emeli took his hands by the wrists, bending her face over his palms, and though Tr’aedis could discern nothing different about them from the other’s, something, perhaps the briefest flash, or the barest of a flicker, passed across Emeli’s eyes, and she took her hands away.
“Nohmayr.”
Tr’aedis couldn’t help hearing the emphasis on the second syllable, the “maer.”
The one with the silver-gold hair, green band, looked quickly at his evaluator, but looked away nearly as quickly. He muttered a few indecipherable words to himself, and his partner of the image they had been creating, who had received “Maer,” simply nodded.
Emeli looked up once. In that one moment she seemed to study the conjured picture of Jaceus with all the time available in the world. Her eyes appeared to create a formless depth in them, barely reflecting the pinpoints of light.
Then, she looked back down, at her two upraised palms—
—without saying anything, her left glowed the slightest silver,
—and her right became the boundless plateau for many lights.
They were thin and very small. As before they had been on the student’s hand, but Emeli put her right palm over her left, and closing her eyes slightly, her lips pursed, she slowly retracted her right hand. Upwards—and as she did, a field of thin strings, or drawn-out lines of the light, followed her palm, and with a brush-like movement, then a single sweeping back of her right arm, threw her hand out, and a series of lights exploded into color flew over the sky, now empty, now not, and the vision of Jaceus became anew.
Tr’aedis followed it. This version of Jaceus was clearer, had more depth, felt closer to the original, even though he knew he’d never seen it. The Jaceus in the sky, his golden hair shimmering, seemed to sit down on some surface, leaning back on something comfortable, staring off into the distance—but soon another figure entered the horizon, equally as large, one with no hair of any color, but with eyes that shone equally bright—and undoubtedly, it was Puræ. The other students watching seemed to gasp with shock—no, it was laughter, and Emeli watched them. Now her expression had changed, Tr’aedis thought, changed because of the image she had created, and maybe Jaceus wasn’t Charles Restor to them after all.
But he wasn’t Charles Restor nor Jaceus, and Tr’aedis realized once more that, here, in the new world, he could start over, and as he watched, the students conversing among themselves, the vast image above glinting away, their various colors made out to him—he looked beyond them—and imagined himself, long afar, without the pallid nervousness that he’d been clandestinely propping below his pretend performance, without the lines that he’d call from a poet from another world, another time, but with perhaps something of his own, his own—and he realized it now, what he had really been seeing all this time—was magic—words.
“Mayr,” Emeli said, and he nodded.
“Nex.” I am.
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[1] Tr’aedis’s theme, one day, shall be Hiroyuki Sawano and Yosh from SURVIVE SAID THE PROPHET’s “BELONG,” released on the 2014 BEST OF VOCAL WORKS [nZk] 2 -Side SawanoHiroyuki[nZk]-