Light didn’t know how to find one more surface where to reflect itself inside Aunara’s shiny vault. It nearly blinded Samari when she crossed the silvery curtains at the end of the staircase. The bookcases stared at her from every corner, smiling with tomes like teeth. The place had enslaved clouds to use as tiles, and they thundered under her feet as she walked inside the expansive room.
A marble statue of Aunara, one hand gracefully extended forward, as if offering her mercy, had been erected at the centerpiece of the room. It was a depiction that showed Samari’s mother in her natural state: wearing her unconventional Arcagnostic’s attire, a dress that behaved more like a robe than anything, full of creases and hidden pockets, with feathers hanging from loose sleeves a collar of jewels that, through a delicate chain that coiled loosely around her left arm, joined a bracelet made of animal teeth.
Samari despised that look. It was but smoke and mirrors: an Arcagnostic’s power rarely had to do with what they wore. Some covenants required a particular attire to work but, if she knew Aunara, she would have never struck such a pact.
“May you live forever, Aunara ‘Findona’ Stradeajo”, she cursed her mother and quickly bee lined to a set of sylvan drawers. She opened the first one, rummaged through, closed it, repeated the action with the second one, then the third and, in the fourth, she found what she had been looking for since long ago. “Eureka!” she said, raising the training whistle high in the air, even extending her spirit to elevate it beyond her physical height.
She quickly stashed both of them in her traveling satchel. The loot whore deep inside was hollering in ecstasy. That’s when she tensed up, because there was a hand touching her shoulder. She turned slowly, trembling.
“Welcome back, Aunara,” said the statue, whose movement was flawless and lifelife, as if the stone had turned to flesh and bones while retaining its luster and hardness. “Or maybe you are… yes, I believe she called you Samari.”
Samari had forgotten how to blink, which had nothing to do with the fact a living statue was talking to her, despite what those dirty Whovians may claim.
“Don’t be afraid, I am a replica of your mommy, just as you are. I am Aunara and so are you.”
Samari curled her hand into a fist and, before punching the statue’s face, she remembered she was made of soft flesh. For just an instant, she wondered if she was as delicious as the breedshifting puppies. She concluded having a brain was some sort of cruel prank evolution had pulled on the bilaterians and had gone too far.
“Okay, then…” Samari tapped her lip with a single finger. “You serve me now, Am I right?”
“To admit you are right — in the widest interpretation of the term — would be a disservice to truth, dear.”
Samari’s face crumpled like a paper ball. “You definitively are my mother’s creation.”
The statue returned to her original position in the middle of the Vault. “Don’t wander off too far. A vault is as big as a planet and has only one entrance, and only one exit.”
“It ought to have a fire exit. By law.”
The statue glanced at Samari over her shoulder, every carefully chiseled muscle of her neck admirable under the bright lights of the vault. “You want a place that exists outside of space to have a fire exit?”
“Burning alive is not counted among my hobbies,” Samari said, and then wondered what, besides learning and being a little annoying bitch, could be considered a hobby of hers.
“Nature has no fire exits, Samari.”
“Yet another argument against intelligent design.”
Samari began searching through the bookshelves, who felt nude under the child’s eagle gaze. She wanted to find some easy-to-fulfill covenants, and there had to be at least one lying around. Her mother intended for her to follow her footsteps… no, she intended for her to become Aunara anew. But in both cases, it was only logical that she had prepared for a possible early departure, leaving something behind to aid Samari. Besides the statue. She hated the statue.
But maybe the statue knew.
“Hey, you, you are a sort of a butler of the vault, right?”
“Like you, I was made to please your mother’s titanic ego.” The statue made a dramatic pause. “But mine’s bigger.”
Definitively, it took after Aunara.
“I am looking for study materials. I don’t have the patience —I am nine— nor the time —I am nine— to sieve through all of these bookshelves checking barely marked books.”
“There’s a rainbow-colored book, that has the guide for the guides of color codes. The little bar-shaped stickers on the book backs.”
Samari blinked twice. A guide for the guides, how… typical of her dear mother. She wondered if she would have preferred to be born in Valelike Vale, instead of as Aunara’s “daughter”. The half-life of this doubt was so short that he would never get a genuine match on Tinder.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Samari picked up the rainbow book, gazed upon its ugly pages filled with a font so pathetic that it put Comic Sans to shame; grimaced in fear when she saw the words “Magenta”, “Purple”, and “Lavender” on the same page; let out a painful, drawn out “No”; and then, as it was natural, gave up, because she could face all sorts of horrid monsters, but wasn’t woman enough to distinguish subtle changes in hues yet.
She snapped her fingers and regarded the statue with a seriousness not often seen on her visage. “Screw this. You, fetch me the ten easiest covenants and five intermediate Arcagnosis manuals. It’s high time I submerge my delicate cutis in the waters of study and self-sabotage once more.”
“Or what?” The statue crossed her arms and waited on place, sporting a smile of self-satisfaction.
Samari raised the spirit whistle like an edgy serial murderer would a Knife. Then, she activated it, causing it to proffer a scream long and high-pitched.
After almost a minute of torture, the statue kowtowed at Samari’s feet, “…I aim to please, Fair Mistress.”
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The amount of fishes in the room and outside Kalon, thanks to the heavens, surpassed the amount of fishes inside Kalon by a wide margin. The same couldn’t be said for the local Dipnoi, who seemed to be cosplaying as an inflated pufferfish, and ruled supreme over his tank, his power attained by size-supremacy alone. In the tank immediately to the left of this self-proclaimed king of the aquarium, an Astronotus like a droplet of magma that had come to life loomed ominously over a subservient pebble. This was the natural order of things, thought the pebble. He would outlive the fish, so entertaining it for a geological blink was only polite.
The surgeon fish — who wasn’t fond of her generic epithet — on the saltwater section across the hall distrusted the neon lights. Blue both in color and mindset, she plotted for the day that the night demon would come for her, with his ugly head, countless arms and flesh-rendering maw. She needed to get out, but the force-field was impenetrable, impervious to the attack with the shell fragments that made the ground of her habitat. Jumping, she had seen from others, led to a horrible death by asphyxiation. The water beyond the water was hostile, thin, unswimmable. And yet the Night Demon moved through it, with his innumerable changing spots, with his unfathomable shape.
Around the corner, inside a tank with the most secure and expensive lid in the whole aquarium, the local octopus patiently counted the minutes until every problematic employee up to the last one would go home. His nocturnal escapades always netted some delicious catch. Today, maybe, he would taste the neon tetras. They lacked a bit of salt, but he loved exotic foods. River fish were a delicatessen his wild brothers and sisters would never sink their radulae into.
Kalon sat in front of a tank three times as wide as his mother, whose waters, greened by varied algae, contained several species of colorful fish, with the numerous Carassius at the bottom of the pecking order, the haughty and shiny Macropodus at the top, and the Corydoras at the bottom, period. They frolicked and marked their territories around an ornamentation of a sunken fish and rocks filled with holes. Some moron had sunk a coral on the freshwater aquarium, and the fishes didn’t mind. They even liked it. I did. I minded. Corals are only for saltwater environments, even as mere decoration. The only coral you can naturally find in rivers is fossilized. Most, if not all, corals cannot tolerate the fluctuations in salinity, pH or temperature associated to continental waters. Furthermore, they cannot tolerate my digressions: this prose bleaches corals.
Where was I?
Ah, yes, Kalon.
He was entertained by the fishes, by how they pursued each other or had small bouts. He had never seen them in a tank before, for him fishes were something you saw from above while in the water, not from a side. This point of view endowed them of new dimensions, of a secret life one couldn’t admire while casually looking down at them.
Kalon’s mind had to process all the new information the Aquarium’s clerk had given him, about fish coming out of the water and becoming… what was the word he was using? Tetra Briks. Probably. His mind, trackless, often wandered to thoughts about what Samari and Jagger could be doing. They presumably existed while out of sight, and even did things while he wasn’t aware of them.
“We are closing soon.” Informed one of the zookeepers, a girl with her black hair tied on a bun and a shirt depicting a rhinoceros with golden teeth and sunglasses.
“But the fish are here. Are you leaving them alone?”
“Overnight? Yes. Someone keeps stealing a few of them though. It cannot be an employee so it’s either a c-word or… Armando.”
Kalon regarded her like he did things he couldn’t understand: with cautious fear, a bit of apprehension, and the security that both of those feelings were unfounded.
“Armando is the octopus. His tank is sealed off in every imaginable way possible, but he is resourceful. For all we know, that animal could win a chess game against everyone working on this zoo. At the same time. And, if you don’t believe me, know that once we cut sardines from his diet and that caused him to kidnap the zoo manager. With a gun. Filled with anthrax,” she barely exaggerated (The gun was loaded with normal bullets. The anthrax was on the letters he sent to ecologists that opposed sardine exploitation).
“Sounds like a nasty critter.”
The girl slapped the air to dispel Kalon’s suspicions. “Nothing like that. He just gets bored. Besides, I am almost sure someone else must be framing him as we have no proof he can leave his tank now.” The girl made a pause and put a Han don Kalon’s hair, tousling it. “But, anyway, visitors need to go before we can close the precincts. So, please, would you be so kind to leave?”
“Guh, I like watching the fishy. What if I stay in and try to catch the thief?”
“Do you think people in this city go around giving side quests to the first moron who asks?”
Kalon nodded slowly.
“We don’t! out, or…” A wet tap on her shoulder stopped her on her tracks. She turned swiftly. “Ah, Mister Armiño, is it already your shift?” She saluted the sweaty guard, with his globular head, his stiff legs and his wet, slick hands.
Armiño, with his wide forehead and doey eyes, made a gesture of approval. He was a male of few words.
Kalon noticed something weird was going on under the police-like hat. “Oi, you are bald!” the boy said.
Armiño, not distressed by facts, nodded. Something shifted under his uniform, but neither cultivator nor zookeeper cared.
Noticing something was amiss, Kalon looked at the smelly water trail left behind by the guard. “You need diapers,” he said.
Armiño raised his sucky arms and made it understood that he couldn’t afford them.
“Guh, sorry to see that. Anyway, I wish both of you good luck on your endeavors.”
And so Kalon parted, head low because he would miss the Carassius, and night guard Armiño never stopped looking at him, his pupils thin lines, always horizontal.
“Oh, come on, Armiño, you find everyone suspicious. The boy was stupid, but he was a nice person.”
Armiño considered how she would look with a face tinted in black. It wasn’t worth it. Not yet. He needed this job. For reasons.
Yes, reasons.