Iri walked between the halls of brightness and stone, remembering ages of infinity. Broken memories, half complete, but nonetheless… she remembered the immense windows, eyes to realms beyond understanding. Brightness.
Darkness.
She remembered Polarity Light, that ethereal tone and how it had sung through the whole of ship when everybody except her, Polarity Arctic, and the Eternity Falling and its mind had gone to sleep. Those were cold days…
They remembered the cold.
It was, beyond… brightness. Shaft after shaft of brightness, falling through human-wrought windows that were both so warped and so fragile. They were not the perfect of clarity… even humans could break them. She thought of how it felt to break glass, thought about herself, broken…
Memory.
Looping, infinitely, it played itself through the long stone halls, the dark shafts of memory that extended through the secret mind of the Eternity Falling. She remembered speech, and then speech- incredible power. Deepness…
She remembered- shattered. Glass. A vision of Polarity Light, its pure tones and the power of its being… she remembered what the Eternity Falling had been like as she slipped quietly into one of the many sickrooms on the isle. Remembering…
Brokenness. It spread itself out before her in a very human form, shattered bones and bent bodies, lacerated flesh and humanness torn asunder. All she remembered from those early days of her childhood were the humans who had been, as gods- spoken. Someone beside her spoke and she glanced up, gently adjusting the brightness of her eyes to show attention. As was polite. “It’s sunny outside. It was sunny outside, once.”
“I don’t get you.” Siqxhe, the human that had resurrected the dreams, killed them, and made them greater, stood beside her- gentle hand on her arm. Comfort. A very human emotion… but then, the sibilant had always been modeled after humankind. “Can you fix some of these people? They need attention desperately, and I don’t think they’re picky enough to tell you to go away.”
“They don’t remember the Eternity Falling.” It was more than a name. Once the ship had not been called that- names represented things. They were the epitome of meaning, because they meant- one. A person, named, and the name was reflected back on them. Polarity Arctic for his cold gaze. Polarity Iridescence for her iridescence. Eternity Falling for those long years, too long years, spent…
Falling, she remembered the true darkness, the things that had been so hungry. Humankind? Perhaps… she set about stitching together the humans in the hall, deft hands working quickly with needle and threat and other various surgical tools. She was better at it than Siqxhe was- the whole of knowledge was behind her movements, shattered capacity brought to the forefront of her mind and slowly, slowly healed.
She did it better than Siqxhe. Nobody could do it as good as Siqxhe did. He cared… that was what she’d been trying to do, right? Iri tried to remember, but it was hard, amidst a shattered mind. There were too many possibilities. Too many things that looked in on her and said die- the memories of Eternity Falling. They were cruel thoughts.
She did not like remembering her time beneath the Eternity Falling. It reminded her of scale-
It was dark, then and the last of the men were getting stitched up, crying in pain but not too much, because she’d remembered to give them laudanum this time. There had to be a better painkiller than that- she knew it. Remembering all the technologies and medications and possibilities that had made surgery nigh instantaneous. The hospitals on the Eternity Falling could turn near-death to full recovery in seconds.
She was not on the Eternity Falling.
The Eternity Falling hated her. It had told her that while it had scoured her mind, shifting through glass and broken dreams for hints of Polarity Light. Memories she’d shattered more so than any other memory.
She’d broken herself. Standing up, in a room that wasn’t dark, she saw the moon. The lanterns, and the light of eyes reflecting off the windows… she wandered through the various hallways and winding corridors, across the earthenworks and to the small city built into the side of the hill, that beautiful city on the volcanic island that was, to her memory, a young sister. Something to remember and cherish and hold in the hand so gently, hoping that they’d flourish one day. She’d put various trees and… memory failed her, and she was outside Siqxhe’s door.
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They’d offered him a townhouse but he’d decided to stay in the cramped, one and a half story hut on the military base for an officer. They’d offered him a lot of things, actually, but he’d denied most of them. All of them except the title-
They’d offered him the title of Surgeon in Chief of the naval medical department, and he’d accepted. So now he was the person who ran everything, all the sick people. Everyone on the isle of Gallant depended on him. All the wounded, at least, but humans were just wounds waiting to happen. Even this one, despite how much he liked him, would become a wound and then dust.
All but the old ones beyond the stars were like that. The humans who had built the Eternity Falling when it was not the Eternity Falling. They were different… She didn’t remember why. That wasn’t something she’d ever been told, a child on a moon-ship sailing across the blackness. “The sky. The stars are beautiful today. I finished with all the people you told me to help.”
“Already? And they’re probably better off for it. You’re incredible, have I told you that?” Siqxhe shook his head in one of those peculiar human gestures she’d picked up before and would again, respect and disrespect. Especially with these history-men, these people of the farthest past, their cultures evolved so fast. Unlike the sibilant.
The sibilant should protect them. The Eternity Falling should protect them, had to protect them- it was their job. It was their right… She walked upstairs, laying on the pallet Siqxhe had hauled in for her. It was a place to relax, even if it was cramped. She was no human, who required room to move and stretch and breathe. This was a place of beauty for her, unknown through people who looked out and could breathe.
Darkness, but not the oppressive kind. The type that was a caress… she let her eyes dim until she was adrift on a black sea, an eternity, and she could almost imagine that she was back on the Eternity Falling before it had been called the Eternity Falling, those old days when she’d… she’d… there was so little she remembered. It was disjoined, mixed, made unintelligible flashes of light and grains of sand. A tone. She remembered the pure tone….
“...Iridescence? Are you… did you get the message about the… Polarity Arctic goes too far. The Lord of Cold Places attacks them.”
Still. It was a response, her first in so long. It… felt, to stretch her mind across the distance and dance with those who were faction-friends, helping. The humans… they would protect the humans. They would make sure that the Eternity Falling protected… it was her mantra. Before the white-stone walls, it had been her life. “Do not respond unless he forces your hand… the world would…” Fire. She had to concede that… It was tempting. To sweep herself up in the search for Polarity Light and say that nothing else could. Matter. Dirt and stone and pure elements and the subatomic parts of the universe… it was something that was.
Again, the message. “So… let him be. Arctic hasn’t made any more moves. He fears… wrath, the Eternity Falling’s power…” Iri didn’t think that was true. She didn’t know, the Eternity Falling really cared… It was cold. It’s mind, those words spoken between young-Iri and young-Eternity Falling, the ship when it was not the Eternity Falling…
“Make sure that Arctic remains in his place. Also, convey to…” She felt a presence. A true immensity of presence, incredible and powerful and beyond all aspects of what could be, what should be. It was the mind destroyer, the deep delver, the ender of things. It was them-
Shadows over mind, it loomed over her like power-
“Polarity Iridescence. You know. Tell me.”
“I can’t. Not until I know your promise. Not until I can make sure-”
“Polarity Iridescence. Where are you?”
“I will not-” and then the force, the blackness and the sheer of power as it crashed into her mind, deep hands that stretched back all the way across the planet searching her brain at impossible speeds for their location, and if it had their location it would come for them, destroy Siqxhe, destroy humanity and All of Things. A force that was forced- something beyond possibility. Even without Polarity Light it would come. It needed-
She screamed her denial, white walls and barriers, shattering- and a comforting hand rested on her arm, waking her. Siqxhe’s face looked beside her, comforting. A soft hand, human. Someone who would not remain, but in this moment, this fraction of so many years, she felt at home. Eyes burnt with happiness, adjusted to the fullness of gratitude. Twice he’d saved them. Now, to fix that shattered memory… “Where are we?”