1

Tana had managed the transferral of the girl to her house quite well, although she had expended certain resources to ensure she was to be treated in one of the guestrooms as opposed to the ugly clinic. It had been an intricate affair of bribing guards and pretending to be really scared of Aunt Mina now. That part felt manipulative and bad but it was a little bit true, any good lie is after all. There was a medical center under the house anyway, since the interior ring of the house was built as a somewhat secret fort, with Vinn-reinforced steel beams climbing across and over bland concrete walls. At least the Vinn added a bit of colour and fun angles. This, as it would turn out, was exceedingly fortuitous. When the successfully bribed guards had placed the girl in the very nice bed in the very nice guest room, overlooking Tana’s very very nice rose garden, one of the guards had said that the girls tank-top like shirt was ruined and dirty, and that they should cut it open so they wouldn’t have to move her arms to take it off and Tana had found herself agreeing.

They had cut from the waist up, through the middle, and when they started cutting around the arms, the fabric covering the right side of her chest up to her neck fell to the side. The right side of her body seemed to have been painted a light blue, which was odd but kind of fun. There was writing in some odd script, large, intricate letters seeming more like pictures depicting odd shapes and forms. The writing itself was dull against the pale blue background which continued down under her tight black trousers. Her recently acquired retinue seemed startled at it, but Tana found it mesmerizing. The script reflected light somehow, and as she moved her head it seemed to go from a pale, shallow grey to a bone white and then finally murky and for some reason she felt it was translucent. At the top of her chest was a symbol, which definitely was not the same as the picture-like script, a tree parting at the middle into twelve small branches which separated and reached up, to then intertwine again at the very top. As she was admiring it, she realized something, and it was very important.

She grabbed the scissors, held out in front of her by thin, dark red fingers and tried to project mom’s toneless professional voice, the one she used with the trade delegations.

“Wait outside please. I would like to preserve some of her dignity and the winding thistle on her chest assures my safety.”

She knew that at least the owner of the red fingers attended the town services, and that she carried iron thorns in the secret pocket behind the holy emblem which adorned the left side of her citizen uniform.

It took some further convincing, but eventually she stood above the girl again, trying not to panic. She was a woman of faith, but she wasn’t stupid. That wasn’t a thistle and, further, at its base the girl was asymmetrical. The pale, unadorned side of her chest had a tiny, rose-coloured nipple and the blue side had nothing. It should be exactly at the base of the tree but it was perfectly smooth, no scarring, no old wound, just an obvious absence.

Tana should let seers and priests and old hands interpret and punish this, but the girl was so small, and her ribs showed on the pale side of her chest. She was barefoot and the soles of her feet were cracked and irritated and blackened. Without thinking, she moved the scissors to her left hand, as the right drifted down, and soon found herself interlocking her fingers with the golden-haired girl’s. When she looked down, she realized they were not as thick as hers but they were just as long.

Tana stood there for too long, she knew that. She needed a plan and she needed to make sure that any and all negative reactions to the girl passed through her personally. She moved to finish cutting the shirt, and carefully lifted her almost weightless body to pull the tatters of cloth from the girl’s back. When she was certain she had completely exorcised the shirt from the thin waifish frame of the alien, she made a stupid decision, one which, at best, made her a hypocrite and at worst a tyrant and a heretic. In the final stages of the long siege, when the war had turned really bad, they had burned those on top of the ever expanding fractal fortification that shielded the home swamps from imperial incursion. Mom had been there, and watched.

After a few moments of internalizing that she was abandoning the right to fair treatment under the city charter, she took a breath and then stepped out into the hallway, swiftly closing the door to the hallway. First, she dismissed the bored looking guard she had bribed with promises of a key to the wine cellar. Off to the kitchens with the unbeliever. Then she turned her lying face to the righteous, red-skinned one she had enticed by invoking the sisterhood of faith.

“This situation needs to be resolved by the closed circle of faithful, dedicated to the final state of Gilbe and the new world. You are not inducted so you must swear yourself to the house, and the edict of silence. You are to guard this door with your life until my return, and let no one enter, not worker, soldier, farmer, clergy, sage or queen.”

While speaking she felt taller than the guard, but when silence filled the gloomy hallway, she felt herself shrink and her mother’s voice leave her. Looking up at the guard however, she saw a determined and proud gaze in her eyes, fixed on the long horizon of the people. She pressed her hand hard against the emblem on her chest and the white field behind the embracing twin thistles slowly turned a pale red.

“Same blood.” The guard swore, and Tana answered in a relieved and somewhat quivering voice

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“Same skin”.

2

The natives were impressively elusive, and had remained so for the past forty years, ever since the first settlement which had eventually grown to become the city-state of Thulin. They were largely uncontacted, their scant settlements were shrouded in a thick black petroleum fog that stung the nose and was certainly incredibly flammable. It had been decided pretty much unilaterally that they should be left to themselves until they grew comfortable enough with the new arrivals that they would come out and recognize themselves as Tolvoi. Anna had gathered from her sister’s report that the girl was stable, did not require further treatment and would wake soon. They would not be able to speak, but if Tana went missing for a few days, only to turn up alive and well and happy and talking really fast about the little girl that had saved her from a certain death in the tall grass, well. Maybe they had different concepts of motherhood, most of it back home wasn’t singular like it was for her, most did not have or seek privilege like that and Anna did sometimes feel guilty over it. The diffuse nature of Vinn convection made single-line pregnancy a luxury as well as a tool of the wealthy, noble, and royal. Regardless, returning a lost child would be appreciated be it singular, binary or communal.

If one ignored the fact that a child had been injured in a way that must’ve been both terrifying and incredibly painful, this was a good distraction from the current state of affairs. When the sealanes first opened the world was just reaching a state of peace, not from a decisive victory or heroic conquest but sheer attrition and exhaustion. Its throat was choked with corpse dust and the sealanes were fresh air, dust cleared by salt. And on the other side, something new without mass graves and guilt. The first exploration teams found long plains and fertile fields of yellow grass. There were dangers, sure, predators unlike the ones back home, but they stuck to deep woods and the long mountain chains that stretched from the coast inland. For the first few years the exploration had gone like that, settlements were established on the coast, farming communes in the fields and teams of methodic explorers braving the mountains and forests. The task eventually became to find the end of the yellow grasslands, as they stretched further inland than the early supply trains or convection could accommodate. And when they inevitably found it that frantic, life-affirming seven years of exploration came to an abrupt stop. Each of the five sealanes from the old continent of Tolvin lead to a massive bay, separated from one another by the mountains first, then the deep woods, each had the same yellow grass, even in the far north. Across the whole continent it ended in exactly 100 metres of sand, then tall green grass, always swaying, regardless of wind.

Gilbe was the final sealane to open, far south of the others and the only one in firmly Imperial waters. It wasn’t a bay, just the dogtooth range to the north and impenetrable mist to the south. The water itself stretched much further inland here than anywhere else, and the actual land past its shores was barely worth mentioning, just a few kilometers before yellow gave way to the green.

Anna did not really like being an old woman staring out a window and doubting herself. She found herself drawn to it these past few months though, her purpose here was logical, it had firm basis in hard science, and when it paid off, which it would, she would be sitting on the single most valuable plot of land in the known world. She said these kinds of things many times, a few years ago in charismatic, confident tones to backers and friends and turncoats and spies and even bloodwood orders. Now she said them to herself, looking out a window, as a prayer.

A small and exceedingly polite knock at her large white door brought her back to the real world like a gentle splash of ice cold water. Normally Tana would knock once and then just enter, usually after eavesdropping and with a well written little screed or soliloquy that she would oftentimes launch into before she had even turned the door handle. This time, she waited to be let in, which was worrying. When Anna opened the door, she looked down on the top of her daughter’s head as her eyes were planted firmly on the floor. Tana was about a head shorter than Anna, which placed her around 175 cm, and she was growing quickly, while Mina was both much taller and wider, Mina wasn’t singular, and Tana would be almost exactly Anna’s own height. Tana was a bit more plump than her though, and while Anna was never a beautiful woman, Tana definitely would be.

“Did you drop something darling?” She asked in a warm, jocular tone while stroking her daughter’s raven hair.

“I would like to come in, mom” A small voice came from under the curly black hair. Anna had been worried, and now she was panicking. Internally of course. So, accepting the inevitable ache in her back, she bent down slightly and picked Tana up in a hug, carrying her inside, eliciting no protest which was another cause for alarm. An elegant heel turn and kick saw them both inside and the door firmly shut.

“I need help and you have to trust me.”

It wasn’t really right to feel proud of Tana for not crying but Anna did anyway. She had been older than Tana when she first had to leave home, and those few years that lay between thirteen and seventeen weighed heavily. Tana wasn’t her and that was important, and she knew the severity of sin that came with certain aspects of singular reproduction.

”Take your time, Tana. I’m just a useless figurehead, everything runs without me, I promise.” She said, in a tone that she knew Tana would recognize as a comic exaggeration of her normally diplomatic and slightly distant bearing. Her daughter’s face was placid as she set her down, and the girl walked over to what she had once referred to as the chair of tactical discomfort. It was carved and intricately adorned from beautiful, oiled darkwood. It was horrible and the girl sat down, facing Anna’s desk, waiting for her Mother to assume the place of deliberation opposite her.

As she sat down, Anna felt clearly that they had moved away from the first, familial part of the interaction, and were now firmly at the opening of the second act.

”Something was revealed to me about the native girl, my body spoke for her, I am certain, beyond any doubt that she is crowned.”

Sitting where she was drew out the inquisitive, searching part of her, the one that had served the tribunals after the war. And invoking the older, blood-slaved sacraments of the larger faith drew it further still. Neither of them believed in the prophetic import some very old hands still placed on the random peculiarities of the body. It went against the central thesis of the new faith; all are Tolvoi, they all share the same blood and they are all born from the Vinn. To say that a certain attribute makes one skin holier than another was close to treason in the Communes of trade and to the secret roots Gilbe gave it’s true allegiance.

“I’m not going to insult your intelligence, Tana. You understand why that is a very stupid statement to make here.”

A moment of hesitation drew a slightly pained expression from her daughter. Practised, Anna noted. “She has markings on her skin and deformities in the shape of holy symbols, bloodwood and twelve leaves of the thistle. The markings are pictographic, and I have been chosen to interpret Her. No one else must see her.” She looked small now, a chosen zealot pleading against the new world of observation and study. Also practised.

“Who have you spoken to? What have you done?”

The hurried rapping of fine Imperial leather against her very expensive wood heralded the end of the second act. Quicker this time, tac-tac-tac.