The Wyrms of &alon

Interlude 3.8 - Der Abschied


Turning toward the sound of wings humming not far behind him, EUe was greeted by the sight of a cleric landing by the reflecting pool.

There was no mistaking the cleric's dashing head-crest, nor the way the patterned streaks on his ruby gorget decorated the ultraviolet spectrum.

"Udo-an?" EUe said.

The cleric nodded. Udo-an wore the traditional red robes, with a dainty piccadill around his neck, the ruff edged in feathery lace.

"Has something got you on edge?" Udo-an asked.

EUe glanced nervously at Uka-yen's name on the wall. "I'm, uh, just paying my respects to Uka-yen," he said.

"You have my condolences," Udo-an said. "I won't say that I'm not glad that I found you, though," he added. "I've been looking everywhere for you."

By EUe's reckoning, when he'd last seen Udo-an—three days before—the bird had been an orphan freshly arrived as a seminary student, intent on joining the priesthood, even though he was barely fledged. Even as a kid, he'd had his dashing looks, and it seems the Gods had allowed him to keep them into adulthood.

How time flies…

EUe shook his head. "I'm never going to get used to this." He stuck out his hand and lowered it to the ground. "Last time I saw you, you were this tall."

The cleric bowed. "It's one of the Great Dream's many mysteries, I suppose." He whistled. "It is good to see you again, EUe."

EUe felt awkward, to say the least. He wanted to be happy for his young—well, not-so-young—friend, but Uka-yen's death still weighed on him. It was as if, every time he blinked, he saw the old Gatherer being murdered at the hands of hUen-dE's magic. EUe gently raked his talons across the stone, folding his tail feathers down in discomfort.

"Is something the matter?" Udo-an asked.

EUe was not about to tell a cleric what had transpired back in the Great Dream.

"It's, uh… a long story," he said.

The clergyman nodded. "That's fine. We can exchange pleasantries later. It will be several months, at least, until your next harvest. We'll have plenty of time to get you caught up."

EUe noticed the anxious undertone to Udo-an's mellifluous voice. The cleric hadn't even folded his wings against his back, as politeness would have dictated.

"You said you had been looking everywhere for me?" EUe asked.

"Yes, I have."

"At the risk of, well… something… what's going on?"

Udo-an opened his beak in shock. "You haven't heard?"

EUe didn't want to say he'd been spending the past day in a lugubrious stupor, too distraught even for porn. So he didn't.

"Heard what?"

Udo-an beckoned EUe with a wave of his hand, his robe's loose sleeves fluttering from the motion. "Come, it's on the Philharmonium."

EUe followed the cleric over to a nearby Philharmonium dial. You couldn't fly for so much as a minute without passing by one of the things, and from what EUe had heard, you'd be hard pressed to find a household that didn't have one of their own.

The dial—so named, supposedly, for how it resembled a sundial—was mounted on a slender, chest-high column, with a surface like a stormy sea, rendered in stone. Trickles of not-light sloshed between the troughs, crackling up and down the sculpted spikes and crests, powered by a sliver of dreamshard embedded beneath the stone. Even if the shard fragment had been out in the open, you would have needed a magnifying glass to get a good look at it, it was that small.

The not-light quivered as Udo-an waved his arm over the dial, and then burst out in a massive, crackling bouquet, communing with the air to form a space filled with holograms and twinkling light: the Philharmonium. Geometric forms floated within, studded with glowing text.

Stepping back, Udo-an reached up and rapidly flicked his fingers through the Philharmonium several times over. Shapes zoomed by, until the movements stopped with a spread of the cleric's claws. Then, reaching forward, he grabbed an ellipsoid, pulled it close, and stretched it wide.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"It happened several days ago," he explained. "An Ua-la scribed this record of it."

Ua-la: artisans, and skilled workers.

The Philharmonium's space faded as it was replaced by a simulacrum of the city—a moving picture.

EUe gasped.

A handful of shooting stars streaked through the sky, blazing white hot as the atmosphere burned around them, smoke trailing in their wake. They shot far past the city, impacting somewhere beyond the edge of sight, sowing explosions at the horizon.

EUe winced at the bright flashes. He briefly shut his eyes, but when he opened them again, Udo-an had dismissed the Philharmonium.

"What was that?"

"I wouldn't be here if I knew," Udo-an answered. "An astronomical observatory on the moon was the first to notice the objects. That was several months ago. By all appearances, they originated from deep space."

"Was anyone hurt when they made landfall?" EUe asked.

"Thankfully, no," Udo-an replied. "They landed in the middle of nowhere."

"Didn't anyone try to redirect it?"

"Yes, once it was in range of the dreamshard projectors, but…"

EUe stared intently at the cleric, shaking his hand, as if to will him to complete the sentence.

"…it used a counterspell," Udo-an muttered.

All of EUe's feathers stuck out at once—or, at least, that was what it felt like.

"What!?"

Udo-an nodded.

The revelation made EUe's head spin. Had the Door accidentally delivered him into some kind of sci-fi story? He made no effort to hide his genuine shock and interest. Something exciting was happening! A guy couldn't have asked for a better distraction… even if it reminded him of how much the old bird would have enjoyed it.

Even as a fledgling, EUe had been mystified by the stars. His father used to sit with him on the roof of his family's nest, telling him stories about the forms and lights that dusted across the vault of heaven. In ancient times, twEfE believed the stars were drops of nectar spilled by the Gods in their feasts, with the galaxy's sweeping arm being the worst of the spill. EUe had asked if people lived on the moon, and if its oceans were as salty as UlU's.

EUe never would have thought he'd live to see the day when people had gone up to the moon. Growing up, watching the first generations of atmospheric islands getting built at the sky's edge and sent out into space, EUe knew at some point, twEfE would take the leap from there to moon, but he'd figured he'd be dead by then.

Obviously, that prediction—like so many other of EUe's childhood thoughts—turned out to be dead wrong, yet that had never dampened EUe's enthusiasm. If there was one thing he knew with absolute certainty, it was that the broadening and deepening of scientific knowledge didn't banish 'magic' from the world, it just pushed enchantment and fantasy up into even higher, loftier reaches of the imagination. Wonder was in the eye of the beholder. And he knew it because he'd done it; he'd become a runetic engineer, and a damn good one at that. He'd seen wonder everywhere then, and nowhere more so than in the love of his life, and in the son that he and eUna had brought into the world, and when misfortune took their lives, it broke his eyes, making everything seem like mud and straw. That was why he'd dedicated himself to the Gatherers: at the back of his mind, the explorer in him had held out hope that, with the help of time dilation, he might live to see twEfE discover life on other worlds, somewhere among the stars. Dead family or not, that was something worth seeing. After that, he could die without any more regrets.

"But why me?" EUe asked. "Why not—"

—Oh.

Uka-yen was dead, that was why, and Udo-an's next words confirmed as much.

"Ever since we noticed the Impactors," he said, "the leadership boards of every Ua-enla castebund from here to the moon have been hovering inches waiting for Uka-yen to return from the Great Dream and lend his assistance." Udo-an's feathers gleamed behind the ruff of his Utal-a as he shook his head. "These last few days, people have been in a furor. The Academy sent out an advance team to investigate the crash site. Funnily enough, because the nectar grants you got for your research were still on file, and since you are still—technically—alive, your name got floated as one of the candidates for the advance team before someone pointed out your Gatherer status. Apparently, no one had updated the file. But then, yesterday, not only did you return, but the higher-ups also got the news that Uka-yen did not survive his latest journey into the Great Dream." The cleric clacked his beak. "Obviously, that ruffled a lot of feathers, but then somebody—I think it was a reporter—pointed out that you ended up becoming the closest thing Uka-yen ever had to a protégé, and then one thing led to another and then this morning, the High Priest woke me out of torpor at the crack of dawn and told me to find you, so… here I am."

EUe sighed.

While he certainly appreciated that his colleagues (or, rather, their successors' successors (etc.)) had acknowledged his research for its merits, he couldn't help but feel that his association with Uka-yen was doing quite a bit of the lifting, here.

"Let me guess, you want me to go with them?"

"Guilty as charged," Udo-an said, "and the High Clergy has already voted to approve your temporary re-entrance into society," Udo-an explained. "You're currently the only runetic engineer among the Gatherers. With your established skills and expertise and the dreamshard power behind it, workers' councils across the Ecumene have decided to put their faith in you." The cleric nodded hopefully. "I know you swore an oath to put the past behind you, but just this once, please, EUe… your people need you. Besides, aren't you the least bit curious? We might finally have the answer to one of the great questions: are we alone?"

There wasn't much need for EUe to think about it, but he stood there and thought about it anyway. His mind kept flashing back to Uka-yen's final moments, and kept daring to believe that, maybe the Gods really had finally answered his prayers.

He hadn't prayed to be happy. Praying for happiness was a bad idea, because it got you invested in the happiness rather than the moments and people that made you happy. That's why, whenever he prayed, instead of happiness, he prayed for a reason to keep on living; a reason to give himself the permission to just be, and then hope against hope that he'd find a way to squeeze happiness out of that.

Maybe, now, the Gods had finally answered. Yeah, he wished they'd intervened earlier, but, as the saying went: better late than never.

EUe nodded. "Alright, I'll go."

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