Archive of Our Own

The Pale Sea is still and quiet.

Atop the hindren's back, as ever, lies a comatose charge.

Resting where the Shore of Songs gilds the Sunderlies all down its western edges, two eyes in base six stare down parallel. Rightward, scant waves break deep, and to the left horizontal plinths of lithic honeycomb extrude in great mass. This traveller kneels in a parasangless speck of microforever.

Here they are recessed some bare handspans shallow into a dry-fired cavern, glass walls a thick refractive timbre. Their transparency belies a thin headland sheet of rock core, which in turn blocks the sharp perpendicular glare of the sun over the sea's horizon. Sand stirs beneath a laying hindren's furred lower chest, lifting and pressing soft in animated sub-hertz motion. Only a leg's reach outside the mouth of the cave, the edge of the long light is low, its volume shattering in descending powers and reflections about silicon surface normals.

Blinding.

The waves softly lap. Two eyes in base six close and listen.

"Et," the hindren mutters.

"What is it?" the hindren replies.

"Why is it called the Hindsun?" she asks.

"The folk etymology that we know," they respond with little hesitation, "is that a Hindriarch of the most ancient times sought to dictate order to day and night, and to that end walked the length of the continent with the sun led behind her. Thus, wherever she set hoof, her hind was the sun's hind, as both would recess into the horizon, and thereupon it was the Hindsun."

"But that's not true," ryewa muses. "It can't be true. That's not how the sun works."

"It's myth," Et sighs. "We wouldn't know the true etymology. We imagine it naturally arose from some sense of hind as in being the hind end of the day, though that might be a false cognate in and of itself."

"False cognate?"

"There are a few senses of hind. The hind in hindren and the hind in behind are two different hinds."

Two eyes in base six open once more. The waves turn from soft pianissimo to humble piano. The scenic drenching of photonic amber and stillest whisper of breeze and gold noise pacify the hindren's nerves. The air is fresh. Fresher than they have ever known, in a way.

Et breathes in. "What were the words for hindsun in Hymmnos, again?" They hold their breath, let the question linger in the air for their askee to think.

ryewa breathes out. "I only remember one word, I don't know how old it is—bengnuih." She stirs, lifts an arm from idle rest.

"Mm. Very literally beng nuih^†."

The hindren's finger traces concentric arcs in the sand as she distracts in cant, naturally strung syllables wrought in pitches wavering to reach where she wants them to.

"Ceku dauane, sol savath en morto lgn weak flare en re firle.^††"

It is a shaky, untrained singing voice, foreign intuition no match for the reformulation it is subject to. Nevertheless, or perhaps aided by that quiet yet straining earnestness, it moves.

The hindren sighs in response. A lament. "That was beautiful, ryewa. Thank you. We're..."

Sorry you can't sing in your own voice anymore? Would that ryewa could disown that kneejerk thought. "I know. Th... thank you for listening, Et."

The salt sun stoops lower.

An ocean bird calls, far away. Is it someone's name? Is it a plea for action? Is it a declaration? It is a birdcall, timely auditory brushstroke on the shoreline nature recited in the language of processes. The honeycomb bluffs swim in the colour of their namesake. In the empty air and hints of the evening breeze here, Et smells the salt and hallucinates the sweet.

It has been a long trek to the edge of the sea, out of the jungles of Qud, through the flower fields, past the great Moghra'yi, and thence where few sane persons of the land inscribe purpose, over the southwestern thousand-lattices of the Sunderlies. All the way over.

Long and lonely. Free. The worst of the journey, the thirst, was mitigated through the consolidation of fresh water into potential. A healthy stock of desalination pellets still resides somewhere in the journey's fuel, only a few consumed in seasalty drams of sixty-four scooped into canteens from along the channels, where the caves' waters coursed past by and southwards to continue the digging of secret tunnels in the salt marshes.

Two eyes in base six close again. Laminar motion grows. A cervine mouth inhales deep. Ears prick and quiver and listen to the whir and the will of the wanton wind. A stowed breath is pressed in firm meditation out through the nose. The flaws of the air caress antlers grown around each other in morphological inextrication.

It is so, so lonely here. It is so, so lovely.

Windwhipped against their egress from the cave, Etymology's Cousin begins to cry in the waning rays of violet as horizon and Jeweled Dusk take hold of the salt sun, and ryewa sings a headbound folk lullaby of somewhere's divers in a hanging land.

Katabasis from atop the bluffs crashes down and stabs invisible icicles through one flank of hindren and everpassenger; their other is caught in the thick of the foot of the easterlies howling against the face of the Sunderlies. The resonances of countless adjoined geological reeds expulse an overwhelming froth of fever pitches, whose overtones clash and cancel and sympathise in incomprehensible auditory phase. The cacophony threatens, effectively, to split the tympanic membranes again the moment they regenerate. Et holds a free hand to a matted ear, and it comes away sticky with blood.

"You won't fill anything with that, will you," murmurs ryewa in a borrowed voice caught only in low rumbles by the cochlears further inside, though they too beg to shake apart from the pressure. Nevertheless, Et's gait is a steady trot. Beneath a mantle of plastifer whose firmly pinned collar would almost strangle the throat, a pair of wings folds tight to the back such that their spans don't catch in the warring currents and tear away the hindren's shoulders.

"Nothing to fill," Et murmurs back in the same voice. All is a hellish muffle and a battering that might well dash them against the cliff-face or the surface of the water if either piteraq or seashear should relent at the wrong time. It is, paradoxically, reassuring in Et's chemistry.

Out here in the winds, all that is on Et is on their person. Twined strands of inexplicably coaxed n-ary wood form a handblade's three-holed topology for a three-fingered grip against the palm, an echo of an echo, forever held on the move by pariah's habit and only rarely the culprit of self-maimings. A willowy nanoweave vest clings tight over their upper torso's form where aerodynamics are bid not to refuse beauty around its curves, and Et's two hands and ten slender digits are likewise sealed in sleek, gripping elastyne whose refractive polymer and sheen catch the light when subjected correctly or incorrectly. Blown out in violent ripples from their back is the mantle under which their wings sheath and tremble, and under it trot two sets of shoes, sowers to the rear and rocket skates to the front, though Et would really rather not ruin a perfectly brutal walk by turning on something so garish and liable in these conditions to set themselves on fire.

Their travelling supplies are stowed back deeper in the dead-end of the fired glass cave, entrance sealed by a step-sown height of plant matter to mitigate what buffeting might reach through and knock loose. This is where they will be for the time being, time being presently mired in the depths of a brutal Jeweled Dusk.

Two eyes in base six catch and glint.

"There truly is no time like the present," ryewa whispers, quietly taking hold of Et's body. Her ears hurt so very badly. She just about continues the automatic gait, steers with far less certainty towards the towering bluffs and away from the high crashing waters of low tide downslope. Sand grains whip in a millionth-order system around her four hindren legs, blown away by crashing windfall and then back again by ocean noise.

Some paces ahead, she kneels and sighs in inaudible relief at the base of a small sunken cut in the bluffs, where erosion has buffed the concave edge of a crescent's top. The impulse that espied this recess now draws her handbladed fingers to its surface, tips feeling through elastyne the sediment-abrased and tide-buffed rock. Then hand turns handblade, and trembling with kinetic cold, she sets about carving, scrape by shave of sedimentary dust fallen to the touch of nature's newest sculpting force and whisked away by turbulence.

Lines are traced, scored, gouged and wiped, again and again, in the same symbolic concentric arcs as her arm drew in the sand back in the cave. A glyph takes form after some breaths. After some breaths more, another.

<Does Hymmnos have a word for jewel?> rings Et in ryewa's head.

"I'm not... sure," ryewa mumbles absently, lost in work. "Maybe you could say... bale^† is close... and if you mean treasure..."

Rapid regeneration kicks in and recoalesces the broken membranes of ryewa's ears. For a brief moment, all is not a muffle. "...then ptrapica."

The ongoing cacophonic barrage of all audibility at once ruptures said membranes again even as they still attempt to knit. The sudden splitting trauma and fresh wringing of blood from body into earfuzz jerks ryewa away in unaccustomed, decidedly unnumbed pain response.

She whimpers, clutches at her hindren ears as if this will somehow dampen the new throbbing stings they scream outward from their burst points, and falls to her side just to feel the security of the cold hard ground bracing her upper torso, the human one.

Above her loom the blaring Sunderlies in sharp asymptote. The sky that stretches across from their edge is gauze over a sheen of infinitely gradated amethyst, an analgesic of cirrostratic beauty in the key of hue, saturation and contrast. Just as soon as she'd fallen, though maybe minutes more in the maelstrom of windwhip and fluttering mantle, ryewa slowly lifts herself to allow an eye in base six to look to the sea. The process is slow and heavy in this body, but it is ultimately worth it.

Day is crushed below the horizon into stardust. The sun is passed in a scattering of gemstone. In bare seconds, though time is swept away as much as distance in this here and now, the constellations flash awake and begin to yawn of night.

Air stolen by air, a breathless voice is a faundren entranced by her own devouring. "Is this why it's called the Jeweled Dusk?"

<It seems like the obvious answer. We know of a few folk etymologies about who or what put the jewels or their colour up there, but...>

Windward, asphyxiating, the words are only mouthed, but their song is crystal clear—the bluffs are singing it, too. Rrha yant gagis vit vianchiel ptrapica hagol ware, rre fhyu bansh maun mea enw stel hynne mea.^††

ryewa gasps down a violent spear of air and is impaled upon the beach once more, lost of any true assurance for footing between the press of the clashing fronts. The empty bluffs continue to sing, there high above her.

The sky fades. Tens of thousands of years have passed here, far more than she will ever be. The passenger curls as much as a cervitaur can, a pathetic hurting ball bereft and still on the belt where the tides will soon exhale. She is smothered in vast sensations of palms the size of nature. She cannot cry nearly as the sea can, though she tries all the same. Her smallness is overpowered until tens of thousands of years are more fifteen minutes. Surely the sea should know her. But not this one. No, not this one. She is not this sea's.

The winds collapse, and eardrums finally heal to the sound of deafness. Two eyes in base six snap open in lost sensationlessness.

The sky is transmuted from amethyst to cobalt ink. Above twinkles the evening map of untold rowboaters. Soon yawns the Waxing Beetle Moon.

^†"ball, orb", possibly "jewel" by analogy.

^††Et's rendering: "Entranced and scared but accepting whatever comes of me, I watch the pure treasure elapse, where the wind throws open these eyelids mine and steals my voice."
ryewa's rendering: "Given in fear, I gaze as purest treasure passes on, and wind pries eyes wide and takes my voice."

On the Beetle Moon Zenith, the hindren meditates. The meditation goes thus:

Etymology's Cousin is a named catalogue of traits.

At the conclusion of her carving of new words into the entropic gradient of geology's canvas, ryewa marks time with a melody sung in empty lyrics, verbiage lost under a field of flowers, though the emotion, remarkably, still pulses even in her untrained voice.

She looks back, and sighs. "The moon is up."

<Do you remember who the two of us met along the way here?>

"Someone of Karst. She had a fever."

<It reaches this far out. Perhaps it's just a universal affliction.>

ryewa shrinks away, done asserting her domination for the time being. Et crumples momentarily to the ground. A quarter, an eighth, then they pick themselves back up again. The tide walks on beside them, n steps forward, n-1 steps back.

Et continues the walk out, away from the fired cave, enjoying the onset of dead night chill and the scarce optical hums of grey on a watery sheet of black. "Does Hymmnos have a word for beetle?"

"You're very curious today, Et."

"Mm. Well, you asked first, our captor."

"I'm not... sure. Oh. lyafre is butterfly."

"...Close. We could imagine some tongue somewhere in Qud named the Beetle Moon after a butterfly instead. A body lune and quartered wings."

Et's step falters. A leg kicks upwards, shakes sand from a boot, and the same for its pair, then the coordinate leg, and that coordinate's pair. The night is dark, streams of high clouds lit by broken moon lux to pen paper shorthand in an ink canvas.

"faura^†," ryewa says, holding empty hand to now bloodcrusted ear. She feels it along and then up, over an antler, combing its forks and turns and junctions. Two eyes in base six close, shuddering at the ministration. "Yorr wis faura, shellan mea. Wis lyafre ween yor, dhezeall eazas.^††"

Et responds in a low chant. Not to moon, but to ocean. It is a low chant that wells from the rarest of all places, not Et themselves but Et themself. It is baleful, a bray. The hand slackens in respect; it's been a month since Et last tried this. Pariah seizes on an infected voice. The great plains of the Pale Sea would spurn all walkers on their salted crests and the hindren sends an ego along the waves to sink with.

There is a call and a response. The slackened hand descends facial contours and abseils the chin to rest above the thorax. The hindren closes around their fragile tonebox's shell, a grasp vicious, almost piercing. Their silhouette is tall in the early moonlight, familiar digits visiting a more searing lack of air than even the winds had done.

The chant is strangled. For fractions, it struggles, then gives way to a stripped beg. "Just let us," Et pleads.

"That's not me," ryewa gasps—and the hand obediently frees itself. The hindren chokes again on newfound air. A waking dream of a mind in the waves is mist just as soon as it had begun. "That's... that's you."

The moment is spoiled. An ego, dyed irrevocably in another's colour, bruises in a third blossoming shade, coring ever deeper.

"It is us, you fucker." The words, too, are bruised. An old spite is gnawed on. "Why do we have to be you?"

"I don't—I don't hate you, Et." Not anymore. "I don't hate your—"

<Forget it. We know.> You have the freedom to be you, away from the part of you that's part of us. How does it feel to see you, a tint of your most despicable, self-ruining reflection, ruin us? How does it feel to see a you you cannot learn to un-be? <We know. It must be miserable. We're sorry.>

"Don't—don't apologise, Et, I'm the one who should be... You're my protector, it's my fault you're..." Whispers falter in sentences she cannot bring to their ends, ends all the more shameful for the means they truly are.

<...> The hindren turns back, the fired cave far and fading from vision's scry, two eyes in base six but one of but the collection of tools the everpassenger is enspirited in. <It's never been too late to realise. It's always been too late to do anything about it.>

You made this out of us, forever.

A mood is fractured in a violent differential's instant, and without those words spoken, Et, hindren pariah, Warden, protector to ryewa, twists the knife as deep as it will go using naught but the silent trot back.

The named catalogue of traits contains the following traits:

• Do we hear that, Et? The sound of the waves. Each and every fold of foam. Pop, froth, wash. Don't we dare flaunt our song in front of us.
• Our antlers feel so smooth, we know. So... weapon-like. It's our fault they grew like that.
• She tried to curl up, you know. We used to be able to do that. Our back is too long. At least we let us ride us.
• It frightens us how far we see. Keep our eyes closed. The dark turns dark for a reason.
• Do our ears still hurt? They hurt for her, we saw that. Poor us.
• We're so soft. So warm. It must be so comfortable for her in our eternal sleep. It's our fault.
• We can't even keep balance when she controls us. Everything reaches too far for her. Can bend too far. We bend wrong, Et, did we know that?
• We should've let the wind tear our wings just so some part of us could fly free for once—
• Do you know what ryewa means, stranger? Overgrown. Abundant. Luxuriant. Somehow, it feels like my name's become the greenery that's thick all around us. I still don't know where I am, but I'm so glad you found me, stranger. What's your name?
• Et, you know it's your duty to protect me. Weren't you glad to find me? So why won't you save me? I can feel your mind, it cares for me just as much as I care for you, just let me in... You can't let me die, can you? You didn't do all this just to let me die. Et. We don't know what dying means.

The named catalogue of traits contains the following trait:

• Don't remember anything else. Remember me.

Earliest morning, the wan before the faint before first light. A passenger's ego stirs on the Shore of Songs. Her ripples rouse her carrier.

<Et. Um.>

Et's voice is hoarse after scant hours of sleep, and croaks slowly through a reprimand. "We're still mad at you. And us. Don't get cute by shrinking yourself away."

<I dreamt about your sister.>

Et abruptly snorts in clamped-shut laughter, the noise like an oilless hinge in the back of their throat. Two eyes in base six blink open. The sky is almost no different to when they shut, but almost is all the indicator two need. An ego quickens. "Is that how you apologise to us at... three in the morning? By telling us you..."

<...>

"We forgot her name."

<V-Void. Void of Property, Et. Is her name. Did you... really forget?>

"We've forgotten names before. Tell us what it actually is."

<I... I did. That's her name. Why would I lie?>

"Because you would patch our brickwork with nonsense. Because you have." An ear flicks in irritation. "If you need us to explain that, we wonder just how much so-called reflection you've really been doing."

<I just... I just don't want you to forget your own sister.>

Deep sigh. "Alright. 'Void', then. In-character enough for her. We'll find out what it actually is next time we talk to her. Now, use your voice."

<...> The sheaf of implicits in that statement engender her ensuing tone of resignation. ryewa's cough clears an open throat. "She was killing me."

"How?"

"Do you... remember her weapon?" ryewa uncertainly ventures.

"Two-handed fullerite long sword, steel buckler named some stupid long name we're not going to give her the dignity of reproducing with our own breath, single-weapon fighting style. Dual laser pistols. Geomagnetic disc." Et confidently reels off the entire list from memory.

"I... I forgot about the last two. Sorry. I meant the sword—"

"We're not ready for sorry yet. Do you want nonsense? Did you know she named her old stupid steel long sword too? Guess what she named it."

"I—"

"That's right, 'I'll Cut A Slit In My Own Clothing If You Ask Nicely Enough'. Everyone thinks she's such a serious Warden and then every single thing she's ever had the bright idea to name ends up being a perversion."

"I... no, I didn't know that."

The sarcastic hair in Et's voice rises, a harsh vibro edge through any courtesy of matching content to intent. "So, dear captor, why do you think it's so important that we know a dream version of her ran you through? Because let us tell you, the part of us that's you would really, really like it if she actually did that to you—"

ryewa interrupts with the hindren's own speaking mouth by ugly force of habit. "I dreamt you... took it from her, and tried to kill me with it. And she was so, so upset, I don't know if it was at me or at you, or, well, probably... and she turned to me, and she... suddenly she was you now, she was in your place, holding her own sword, I know that doesn't make any sense, but, and then she swung it down on me and just... I could feel myself cleaving in two, but it didn't hurt at all... I just kept thinking to myself, 'I deserve this', 'I deserve this', as she carried on splitting me, and..."

There ryewa trails off not for desperation but for a genuine processing perplexion;

"How did it feel to be in your own body again?"

A bolt's non-instantaneous journey as it loads into a chamber before it can shoot.

"..."

"..."

"I didn't notice at all. I think, not until Void was killing me... and I could feel myself falling out by the end of it, and I still deserved it."

"All we're learning here is you'd admit you'd rather she get to kill you instead of us."

High tide roils cycle against a local maximum perimeter over the beach outside, observable through the hole torn in their own makeshift plant-matter barricade, stretching far until a small curve around the bluffs eats it on the horizon. The same birdcall as the hindsun makes a plaintive voicing on an acerbic conversation. The Shallows draw near. The waters are deep. The hindren needs another walk.

Ungulate river-wives' sandals take the place of boots. A speck of the Pale Sea gives way to a chilling wade.

The hindren frees a slow, raggedy shudder of spent air. It twirls as warm mist, fleetingly, and then is one again with the sky. The waves play two-over-four in largo. Et wordlessly thanks each wave for holding them where they are.

The bindings that lash ryewa's vacant body to Et are an improvised sparseness of molly netting, twine of watervine hemp. For a handful of years now, the passenger has been a permanent atrophic fixture, her daemon of breath a warm comfort on the spine, a naturalised part of Et's body. What would be the alternative? Leave her to waste away somewhere, perhaps, until there is no body to call an origin anymore. Set the stranding of her ego in stone.

Early interpretations of Et were tempted to do just that, had ryewa not wrested their mind away in displeasure for each and every automatic attempt at rebellion. In modern parlance, Et is lathered indelibly in ryewa's self-hues, and cannot seriously begin to consider that anymore. Forsaking themselves.

All else equal, now is a fine occasion for an occasional ritual.

Et unhooks the netting from either side of their low cervine shoulders, just behind the top of the forelegs, and sloughs ryewa's body to one side; gravity carousels her in her bindings such that now she lies upwards, hanging away beneath Et, gazing at their torso.

No ropes come loose from the indents they skate through her pure monotone. Under them, she is surely a paucity of unfading blemishes. A Reyvateil defiled by artisanal pragmatism.

Focus on the water.

One hand holds the frontal lashes; the other reaches back, almost too far back, and takes care that handblade doesn't nick rope while it slackens her rear bindings. Her lower body drops comfortably from their hind.

ryewa rests in a simile of a trawler's net.

In slow, processional stride, a hindren skims their dismounted passenger through the saltwater.

Focus on the water.

Et hums. Their hands itch at first, but a solemn ego shakes them into stillness, takes over. Her grip becomes firm and silent on herself. This is no apology, only a reconciliation.

Focus on the water.

Neither remembers the most important words.

Was ki wa chs fwilla won zaarn...

Et strides;

<Was ki wa sash rol iasien ween re pomb sheak...>

ryewa washes.

"Oto ni nari, awa ni nari, tagai wa tagai ni..."

A focus ripples on the water.

"*[        ]^†."

From an otherage, from an otherwhere, the sound of kagura-bells begins to ring. A hindren's breath is caught, replete in base three. Focii spread. Rain patters, drips through fur. A stranger's lips are gently wet with fresh water.

Soft drizzle brushes minutes in the manner of an estranged childhood memory. Its palette is warm; the beach it falls on is cold.

"Couldn't you ask someone?"

Far down the shore, ryewa rests against Et, peaceful head leant on calm vigil's shoulder. Around her lies her dishevelled vinerope.

"Next we meet our sister, perhaps. Void." The name feels foreign on the tongue; no hint of right, no intuition of wrong. "We can... you can perform it with her. If she'll take you. And we'll learn the words again then."

Two eyes in base six look out to the western sea. Tranquil rises and falls animate a chest of synthetic weave damped in mist. The soundscape is one neither will fain disturb; their murmur shelters meek under the pink noise of rain.

"That'd be nice," ryewa dares to whisper.

A long quiet settles in.

Far over the horizon, birds circle in the coming light; the sun is not yet over the bluffs behind them; all the morning is too diffuse for shadows to hold their shape. Perhaps half a parasang or so out—though measurement bleeds away in a place so remote and leaves only bones of intuition—out there, the tips of protruding stumps can be seen lapped by waves. Eroded sentinels of the southwestern Sunderlies, some sedimentary, some silicate, all dim in the hour.

"Is it the sun that's shallow? Is that why it's called that?" she muses. It's been months since ryewa was last in a position to tend to her own body like this; one elastyne glove tugged off, she absentmindedly strokes her passenger's sored shoulder with a gentle hand.

"Mm." Their gaze is distant. Their voice, far-flung. "Perhaps. It is the doldrums of the day, in a way. The gap between today and tomorrow. When all is bathed equally in thin solar ambivalence, and most who are awake are either up too late or early. We don't know of a specific or folk etymology for it as a time of day. If we were to speculate... perhaps it was named in analogy to the tide."

"Even though it's high tide right now."

"Even though. The word 'shoal' is, if you go far, far back enough, the same word."

Striations of overcast muffle the stratospheric blush; the fuchsia of the morning resides in the suggestions of bars and spits and lagoons, a slow transitory map of a heavenly sea in the negative space of cloudspotting. 

"The Harvest Dawn?"

"Simply when the farmers set out to begin harvesting for the day, we would imagine."

"Like what your village was growing, um..."

"Where we were Warden?" Et blinks. The memory shakes loose and reveals itself. "Vantabuds, you mean?" Channels of permanent moonless irrigation, where horticulture was writ in expert blindness and passed down by sound and touch. Teas and other preparations of the petals were elusive in the actor's sense upon the consumer, seeming to ambiguate one's edges away from the opinions of wave-particles. Cities and freeholds would import them; their uses were often utilitarian, defensive, sometimes defense as offense, but in the most beautiful cases, they might come alive in syntheses of pure cuisine. Those stories of where each dried bundle went were for the dromad caravans to tell whenever they next stopped by.

"I miss those..."

"You couldn't even see them."

"I could see where they weren't."

"Du-lu-lu-lun, du-lu-lu-lun..."

Dried vanta petals steep at a near-simmer in a warmed kettle infused with a dram of dream smoke; the air about the stove suffuses with the emotional contours of deep sleep, cast in wakefulness.

"Du-lu-lun lun, dun-lu-lu-lun..."

To the side, a crusty loaf, baked two days ago in the depths of the Sunderlies' comb-caves and still barely retaining its claim to crispness. Two palm-thick slices await a pâté of mellow voider gland, cut with croc liver.

"Du-lun du-du-du, lu-lu-lu-lu..."

ryewa is the one providing the singing; Et has always been the more mindful cook, though it took some time before they started learning to say the least. The everpassenger is back on the hindren, lashed on in her familiar way once more. Et prepares their modest breakfast in the mouth of the glass cavern, just out of reach of the drizzle. Outside, the tide is receding.

A practiced hand first wicks the curve of the handblade through a portable tin of silvered saponic wax. Then, hand holds blade out to the rain, letting its clemency usher the disinfectant away in tender droplets. Next, Moon Stair material abides the heating element beneath the kettle while any lingering damp frees itself from surface tension. Finally, a cleaned knife takes from a jar of faint lavender paste and gives to the bread, imparting it with a faint meaty aroma. The voider-croc pâté is a deliberate blend to avert metabolism from receptor and leave only the arresting taste; should needs actually call and Et cannot run, a pure teleportative paste of voider gland lies somewhere deeper in a pantry crate of their supplies.

With that, breakfast is complete. The hindren sighs with mental content as the passenger's song fades, and they fold down on their haunches. With a press of a switch, the kettle's flanges conveniently collapse back in and clad around its body, transforming its form's suggestion into an insulated travel mug.

Liver pâté on bread, and lumeless dream tea. ryewa mutters a platitude for the meal, and recedes so Et can partake.

The tea is almost too hot, but as the hindren lifts it to their face, the aroma alone overwhelms like a blindfold. The first ginger sip slips it over the head and tightens, contracting the loop inward, and sinking it through their eyes. Though vision remains unperturbed, a wash of calm dark makes an inverse glint at the vanishing point, and Et feels afloat in their own body.

No. Not their own. This body's inhabitant is one that no longer quite exists. The smoke, in an incidental way, is a solemn attestation of identity drift; permanent unseating, a self forever crept out of the socket. Yet as Et digests this in a physical way, all feels simpler, lighter. Ah. Okay. The interoperability of egos attenuates the noise of a waking dream.

Few can say they have dreamt of possessing themselves, Et ponders, in quickened comfort, continuing to sip.

Meanwhile, the bread simply tastes good. Solid, filling, hearty and savoury. Little else can be said. Hindren and passenger thank it and cast their combined thoughts to the day's journey ahead. Perhaps it won't take as long as they might have feared.

<Can I try?>

"...Go ahead," Et murmurs with flask to mouth, allowing ryewa to inhabit, stretch herself and feel her elevation in her limbs and nerves; she makes small haste to tip back her entwined antlers, then gifts herself her own unhurried moment with the tea.

A ritual of drink Eater-old languidly winds down in shared, meditative contentment. Before they realise, the rains have lifted. Somewhere shallow and east behind the Sunderlies, the Salt Sun is casting out grand lilts of crepuscular rays that seem as though they might never even tangent with the Pale Sea. Two eyes in base six open and look.

"Was zweie ra weel. Et dauan, presia houd mea.^†"

It's time to go.

A reequipped hoversled negates only what it can fit of their supplies. To it, the rest is bound in rucksacks and tethered like failing balloons, barely buoyed by a few spheres of negative weight. It's not the most elegant method of transport, but it means the hindren can manoeuvre freely with their passenger on their back, straggling inventory's inertia kept at the other end of a theoretical retractable leash.

All no problem for the former Warden's strength, though in the case of abrupt stops and sufficient momentum, they do have to take care the hoversled doesn't crash into them. (Or, in the case of taking emergency flight—graceless and uncertain on Et's wings—that they don't crash into it.)

The Salt Sun waxes. The waves lap at low tide once more. The Shore of Songs is absent its breath of life.

"What did you carve last night?" Et asks to themselves through respiration moderate and regular, the pace of a fast clip on four legs.

<...Just graffiti,> ryewa replies, not wanting to mess up Et's breathing. <Where are we headed now?>

"Headed? Past Perth, perhaps. Wherever it is, it's along here. But... probably just past it."

<We aren't going to stop? We've never been here before. Aren't there people there? Like the one who had a fever.>

"They're not the point. The point is the sea."

ryewa lapses into mental silence, and Et into physical exercise. They are fleet-footed on the morning's breakfast, each beat of shoe against sand a lighter one, each cycle of gait lithe and assured.

<Et?>

"Mm?"

<I know the moon waxes and wanes. Why does the sun?>

"...Why shouldn't both? The sky waxes with both their light, and then both wane." Et looks overhead in their gallop, two eyes in base six cast to their symposium's subject. "Mm, but the etymology is the Beetle Moon's, you're right. In that sense, we believe it's said to have finished waxing when it's full, and finished waning when it's new. It'd follow that the usage for the celestial bodies' rise and set is an extension by analogy."

<You're not sure?>

"We're not an astronomer."

Coming up to another headland, Et begins to pick their way over the slippery rocks with assured ease, taking advantage of the thin tide to circle the jutting cliff without risk of being washed away. The breeze is merely the stillness as the hindren moves relative through it, but the oxymoron that is the scent of fresh salt keeps them more than refreshed.

<This is nice. The ocean. It's not like a lake.> The air is definitely doing good things for both their moods.

"Who needs convalessence?" Et offhandedly jokes, rounding the tip of the cliff's base and stopping at a high vantage to peer down the next stretch of coast, which much resembles the one before it. There along it the Sunderlies run, cragged and porous as ever. If the Salt Sun could weep, each drop of its solar drams would find this place perfectly sized to soak into like sponge.

<Maybe it's called the Salt Sun because you dry off and get salty in it?>

"One folk etymology we've heard from the Issachari is that an ancient salt kraken once sought to catch the Beetle Moon, and swam so vigorously for it that when it leapt out of the Moghra'yi's sands, it flew straight into the sky and never came down, and the glitters of the great salt pool in its mouth together were a trillion crystals of sunshine. Hence, the Salt Sun."

<That must be just a tale.>

"It must be. If that kraken crashes back down on us and swallows us whole, that'd be a stupid way to die."

From here, the Salt Sun is finally visible over the high bluffs, its light filtering through the grand canopy of cloudy rivers. To the west, waves roil with slow, dignified motion and birds call through the great grey-blue above. This vista in which they are a centred speck is a farflung, desolate mural of all nature, theirs since the last travellers along these rocks surely a thousand years ago, and theirs until the next in surely a thousand years more, or maybe never.

"...Thank you, Et," ryewa whispers.

"Infel yor^†," Et replies.

Far, far behind them, fresh characters do not yet threaten to fade.

=> MA WAS TOUx QUEL GA WAKA
WA LLIZZ NUM LAUx RAKx TICA
LYA OMN SOS OMNx ESS PAT
MEA ELNA ENEx ENDIA SSE NA
DEN KVx NA YEIx RE COL
WHOU NEL CHS WE WERLx KNAWA
LRA Ux FORx BITx IO GANx
DAL WARE RETE PAGLE WHAI NOES
EXEC hymme 2X1/0>> 010110010101^††

The Pale Sea is deaf to the song, and sings anyway.