Titans – I

That smell.

Familiar. Familiar yet different.

Was it time already? It seemed as though she had barely closed her eyes. But… there was no smell.

Ah, it wasn’t a scent hitting her nostrils; it was that feeling, an affinity for a certain something. For awakening. Or rather, Awakening. It paid to be precise.

Secretcarver flexed the muscles along the entire length of her body, judging the years by her stiffness. That wasn’t her favourite name, though it was the one she had worn for the longest. Godlings and sentients alike had gifted her with many through the ages. Lord of the Verdant Wastes, She of the Unbroken Word, Liemonger, Wyrm of Wyrms – it mattered not what they called her, and she cared not. Names were a distraction, and that was how she used them.

The press of soil and rock above her was heavy, so she did not yet open her eyes. Patience in all things was the way. To always the think of the long game, how best to dominate without resorting to crushing snapping biting violence. To never kill in anger, only in cold-blooded calculation.

She sniffed mentally. The Aether was strong in this age, and many sentients had learnt its secrets. Godlings could make use of their almost limitless potential in such a world, could wreak havoc and prove her final undoing. Well, they could try. Even the mightiest of the last cycle had been forgotten now, though of course many would already be gaining a following.

A chill ran through her, and too late she withdrew from the Aether. He knew she was awake now, that one of their kin who had mastered the ethereal like no other being ever had. Even though she had put her own life at risk to watch him die, assaulted by the great cataclysms wrought by advanced sentients, he had survived. She respected him and hated him for that.

Suddenly, she longed for the sun again. With powerful motions that would probably be felt on the surface, she forced a path through the earth, snout digging in and driving boulders aside. It was good to feel her strength. After several miles and several minutes, she erupted forth, her gargantuan mass launching high into the crisp air.

Light seared her vision as she finally opened her eyes, saw mountains in the distance, farmlands stretching away to great walled cities. She crashed into the ground, gouging it, her long body splintering trees and brick houses alike.

She of the Unbroken Word reared up and hissed, a sound she knew to be terrifying. She hissed at the world for the slumber it had forced upon her, and she hissed at the world to assert her ownership. Then, she composed herself. There would be no more fits of passion. After all, there was one other titan already exerting influence, and there were bound to be others.

Her scaly lips stretched back into a fearsome approximation of a sentient’s smile. She had remembered her favourite name. Jormungandr.

It was good to be back.

Darkweaver – I

Ras Shar flexed his four calloused hands. Cloaked in shadow as he was, the brat who had entered the viewing room had no idea he was there. He watched with interest, running his tongue across the back of his pointed teeth. The human girl’s headscarf covered most of her hair, but left strands of brown hanging in front of a comely face. If she were to wear the finery that many of the rich in the adjacent ball room wore instead of her drab garb, he supposed that she might be considered beautiful. But that didn’t mean he would go easy on her.

Her eyes were affixed to one item in particular on the other side of the steel bars that split the luxurious room in two. They stopped observers from getting too close to the various expensive artefacts arrayed on fancy cushions and pedestals. The Aether-trap’s dreamcatcher-like filigree wires and faint glow certainly made it an attractive piece, but everything about her stance suggested that she knew it for what it was.

Power. Control. A ticket off the streets.

He took a long breath and dove deeper into the Aether, into the darkest of purple shades, those that bordered on pure blackness. Embracing all that he could, he released his concealment and willed the shadows around the girl to concentrate, to become corporeal. Too many darkweavers liked to maintain subtlety for as long as possible, but too much creeping got dull, and this was supposed to be a brazen airship heist after all.

Further infusing the shadows with that deep Aether, Ras Shar moulded them into long spikes, thrusting them at the girl – who disappeared, the sharp darkness spearing into the air where she had been standing. An instant later she returned to existence on the other side of the bars, right beside the Aether-trap, violet wisps of smoke diffusing from her.

“Phasewalker,” he hissed at her. She raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

“Darkweaver,” she said. “Who tipped you off?” Slowly, she inched her hands toward the prize. In response, Ras Shar materialised two long shadows that promptly wrapped around her wrists, anchoring her in place.

“That kind of information costs,” he said, stepping up to the bars. “Now, don’t even think about –” He grimaced as the phasewalker vanished, the shadows that had grasped her recoiling, and she reappeared on the opposite side of the Aether-trap as if the feat was nothing more than a normal step. She grabbed the trap and stepped again, this time right next to the door she had entered from. An annoying smirk was on her face. Ras Shar scowled, but quickly remembered how he had taken down phasewalkers in the past.

Those of them that stepped in the way that this girl was doing needed to be able to see where they were going. He allowed himself a retaliatory smirk as he thickened the darkness in the room. Rapidly, it became pitch-black, left him unable to see even his own upper hands right next to his face. Unfortunately, he was not so gifted with the Aether that he could bind the girl at the same time as he maintained the blackness.

A stifled cry came from her direction, probably caused by her trying to step away and finding she could not. He ran at her, the faint glow of the Aether-trap guiding him. A slicing sound split the darkness next to his right ear, and his heart skipped a beat. If her senses were a smidge better, he’d have found a dagger embedded in his head.

“I’m not leaving here without that trap!” he said, drawing a dagger with each of his lower hands. Though he couldn’t see her, he knew that that they had begun circling one another.

“Then you’ll be able to chat with all these wealthy airheads for ever and a day. I am not giving it up!”

Their blades clashed.

Phasewalker – II

Through the slight distortion of her spyglass lens, Kirris watched two well-dressed members of high society hand their ticket stubs over. An attractive galdar wearing a feminine demi delicately recieved them, and after comparing the numbers they bore to figures in a heavy ledger, smiled prettily and welcomed the guests. The two humans – no surprises there, they invented high society after all – grinned and advanced onto the railinged walkway beyond the galdar, stepping softly as it flexed in the fast wind.

The walkway, of course, was attached to the gondola of a luxury airship.

Wonders of this “Age of Steam”, as many were now calling it, the airships were powered by steam-driven propellers, their huge rubbery envelopes filled with a gas lighter than air, which Kirris supposed provided only slightly more buoyancy than the vacuous heads of the people she was watching. She snorted in amusement and lowered her spyglass. It was high time she found someone to listen to her shrewd observations, but she’d make do with infiltrating a well-to-do airborne gala instead.

Having seen no other socialites on their way, and with the galdar host nodding in a satisfied manner at the ledger, Kirris embraced the Aether. She reached for the purple resonance inside her… and the walkway, the galdar, and the airship all vanished. But only because she was now inside of it, a sharp violet smoke dissipating around her.

Her surroundings were replaced with lush carpet and soft walls, aluminium framing everything that could be framed. A disgusting show of wealth in her opinion, but let them try and figure out who was richer while she snuck around and took what she wanted. The sound of crisp, purposeful footsteps alerted her to the galdar stepping onto the walkway. Kirris darted along the corridor to her right, keeping low to avoid being seen through the windows. When she came to a mahogany door that led deeper into the beast, she jumped upwards, peering through its round glazing, using her ethereal ability to step inside without even trying the handle.

Its grimy metal shelving and close walls suggested that this was a room for the hosting staff. In the relative gloom, Kirris unfurled a piece of paper, and studied the badly drawn diagram. It detailed the layout of the airship, the Razorwind apparently, as well as showing a couple of suggested ways of reaching the viewing room, where her prize was located. Rubies and emeralds were nothing compared to some of the tech that was being invented of late.

She followed the dashed line on her map, crouching into the shadows of the maze-like employee area, keeping still when she heard voices or the clanking of some trolley laden with grossly opulent foodstuffs. The hum of the engines had only just started up by the time she reached the viewing room.

Thick blue curtains that could be drawn across its centre were currently tied to the sides, allowing an easy view of the thick steel bars that partitioned it. On this side were doors leading into the warren she had emerged from, and one that led into some kind of ball room, through which the sounds of hoity-toity laughter and a string quartet drifted. But she had not come skulking just to find a side way into the entertainment.

No, what she couldn’t tear her eyes from was resting on a central narrow pedestal on the other side of the bars. It resembled the dreamcatchers that had recently flooded the markets due to some expansion of imperial land across the ocean, but it was all thin metal wires, none with the same colour or gleam, and had a strange backlighting to it. Purple, the same exact shade that she experienced when phasewalking. This was an Aether-trap.

As she appraised it, the shadows around her seemed to… solidify.

Augur – II

Herrel wiped down the surface of the darkwood table, lifting off the grime of the previous day with a damp cloth. It was the one constant in his ever changing tent, the one thing that people expected when they came to visit the augur. Switching out the rest of the vaguely mystical decoration kept his regulars feeling that quiet sense of numinosity that did half of his job for him. Plus it meant he could run artefact smuggling deals on the side without anyone batting an eyelid.

A young etherling – of subterranean ancestry, with her large eyes and pale skin – lifted the entrance flap and walked in, though the wooden sign outside clearly stated Herrel’s hours. She glanced about nervously, her lower hands fidgeting with a timepiece while she wrung her upper pair together.

“I know you’re not open yet,” she said, her gaze skittering away from eye contact, “but I really need an augur.” She flashed a quick sharp-toothed smile, nervous and apologetic at the same time. “I have coin,” she added, her top-right hand now fumbling for a pouch.

“Relax,” Herrel said. “This is a safe place. Treat me as a trusted confidante, for your secrets won’t leave this tent unless you wish them to.” He tucked the cloth away and wiped his hands dry on his loose trousers, before gesturing to the high-backed chair at the round table.

The woman paused, confused, as most were, that he didn’t offer them the opposite stool and take the chair for himself. He gestured again, a slow, calm motion designed to put people at ease. Sentients spooked easy, and many still ascribed his abilities to the supernatural, rather than to the Aether. Not that he would ever disillusion them, this was his livelihood after all.

After a moment she sat, her four palms placed down on the half-cleaned darkwood. He joined her, perching on the stool. “When you feel peaceful, let me know, and I’ll begin.” She took a few deep breaths, becoming visibly less anxious, then bit her lip and nodded.

The sweet pulse of purple that met Herrel from the Aether felt different to him, grainier, but the time of day was known to affect its interactions, and he hadn’t read the Skeins this early for a while. He quickly found his own strand, and followed it to the now… But something was wrong.

He never looked at the violet thread of his own life beyond the paradox knots he caused by auguring; he wanted his future to be a mystery to him. But he must have missed the knot of the current moment somehow and gone too far, for he found an unravelling he usually associated with distant future, a place of many potentials, where numerous strands spread out and became indistinct no matter how hard he tried to focus. Herrel retraced his motion, again failing to find the knot, again finding the fraying earlier than expected.

“Is there a problem, augur?” The client’s voice pierced into his reverie.

“Nothing to worry about. I have yet to find your thread.”

“I once heard an augur say that sometimes they had to look at the bigger picture to find the smaller one.”

Herrel frowned, but took the advice, unfocusing on his own life to look at the thick strand woven by the society he lived in. His own thread was still visible though, winding tightly around its perimeter, spiralling and criss-crossing. Had that society-strand been a single life, he would have expected to see a knot right there…

What he had found in the sea of fuzzy purple was not multitude lives twisting together to form something greater. It was something singularly great. Which meant –

With a start, Herrel withdrew. A wizened human man sat before him in the same pose that the etherling had been adopting, looking back at him with pupilless eyes black in their entirety. The black of an endless fall. The black of annihilation.

“I said I had need of an augur.” The man’s voice was nightmare. “But I did not say I wanted my fortune told.”

Drake – I

“I only want to show people beauties such as this,” the warlock said, his voice high and whining. Pleading, almost, as crimson spatter trickled from him. “Gore has so much depth.” Eyes with wide pupils beseeched Jurik to understand at the same time that they took him in, sized him up. “You’re a drake. Why don’t you understand?”

“I draw this when I must. If you play this right I still don’t have to.” Jurik may have been a drake, but he knew right from wrong, and right meant drawing his sword only with just cause.

“My weapon is made of the same stuff as dreams,” said the titan-blessed madman. “Of the same stuff that toppled the Platinum Sheik. Of the same stuff that ignites greed, awakens envy, and inspires rage!” He laughed and licked his lips, became briefly entranced by his axe. Forged not of metal, but of the Aether itself, it was a deep purple colour, trailing wisps of mauve mist.

Jurik took a moment to play out how things would go if he let the man leave. More dead in the streets, more husbands or daughters or lovers gone, more reasons for children to grow up mean or insane. There would righteousness in the killing of this man. Justice.

He drew his sword without ceremony, and it greeted the world with nothing but a dull sheen. The blooded fool before him giggled triumphantly and darted forward, bringing his powerful weapon around in a clumsy swing. Jurik dodged with ease and scored a slash across the back of the warlock’s left knee, though it seemed to have no effect. Again the axe swung, smoke trailing, meeting only air as Jurik evaded it, turning the momentum of his evasion into a strike.

This time though, the warlock moved faster than he had done before, faster than any sentient should, his agility enhanced by the same power that held his axe in the world. With only one option for survival, Jurik took it, letting himself fall to the ground, his head slamming against the cobbles as the axe cut through the now-empty space above him. The cackle of the titan-blessed lunatic turned jubilant. With a manic grin on his face, he forced his whole might into a powerful downward swing intended to make Jurik’s innards spill out.

With the timing that only a seasoned drake possessed, Jurik moved to block with his sword. The two weapons met. But instead of the sizzling clash of Aether against steel that might have been expected, the otherworldly axe head simply poured away into a rapidly dwindling violet smoke. The warlock lost his balance and tripped forward, disarmed and uncomprehending.

Jurik grunted. “Size me up better next time,” he said, driving the point of his null-quenched sword upwards between two ribs. “You might learn something.”

Lessons – I

“Now, since most of us here are intellectuals, can anybody tell me how one can deduce if a creature is or is not sentient?” Professor Ennis clasped his hands together as he surveyed the lecture hall. The two dozen or so people scattered about on wooden seats didn’t know him yet, but soon they’d be able to tell when he was issuing a challenge.

An eager galdar in the front row raised his – the professor berated himself silently – vis gauntleted hand. The usage of a gender neutral pronoun with regards to the galdar had been a long time coming. After all, an antiquity might well be bonded to a male demi and identify as feminine, masculine, or neither feminine nor masculine, or anything else ve might like. But it still took some getting used to. His plumage twitched in involuntary apology, which prompted the galdar to attempt an answer to his question, ve must have taken the twitch for an invitation.

“Surely,” ve said, stone gauntlet waving gently in the air as ve spoke, “the prolific use of tools and language are sufficient to define sentience?” Ennis smiled; that was word for word the answer he had given as a student all those years ago. He raised a scaly finger.

“Well phrased,” he said, pausing for unnecessary but enjoyable effect. “But what about the uggar of the Hardodarian rainforests? We would, or rather should, all agree that those lizards use tools in many aspects of their life, and their verbal communication with one another was recently proven to be as – if not more – complex than what we are speaking today. And yet would any of you call an uggar sentient?” His class chuckled as one, leaving him feeling smugger than he knew he ought to.

An etherling sat against the left wall raised one hand even as she furiously jotted down notes with two of her others. He nodded to her.

“Use of the Aether?” she said, her tone making it clear that this was a wild guess.

“Again, not an awful suggestion,” he replied, “But you must always search in your minds for the counter-argument, the falsification. Here, one practically screams out at us.”

“The demis,” said the galdar, clearly pleased with verself.

“Precisely. If anyone were to seriously, with weight of evidence to back them up, suggest that demis possess sentience beyond that which the antiquity bestow upon them, why, that would paint a very bleak picture of the galdar, would throw into question the whole demi-antiquity relationship! Just to be clear, nobody is suggesting that, not here at least,” Ennis added, earning an understanding smile from the galdar who had spoken.

“No,” he continued, turning to write on the blackboard in tandem with his speech, “sentience is now well-established as the capacity to feel, experience, or perceive subjectively…”

The professor allowed his mind to wander as he spoke the very familiar words, distilling his first impressions of his new class. On the whole, he decided it would be a good year.

Phasewalker – I

Kirris lowered her spyglass and ducked behind the peak of the tiled roof. The arborean had almost seen her. She counted slowly and silently, One… two… three, before sneaking another glance at the busy plaza below. People bustled between the market stalls, the full range of sentients in view. Lithe etherlings with their four arms, proud ixtar with their assorted plumage, squat galdar with their antique gauntlets, and arboreans with their more-than-passing resemblance to trees. Oh, and humans with their… prevalence. Humans everywhere.

Her mark strode to a stall selling old books, his woollen cloak wrapped around him as if to stave off chill air, despite the heat. The old arborean’s creaking facial expressions placed him as having been raised before the war, in that era when xenophobia was fashionable. He seemed to reserve the most disdain for humans, and though Kirris was human too, she found that the most understandable. Humans were annoying.

With long bark-covered fingers, he picked up a thick volume and began to skim the pages, though the page-turning slowed as he seemed to find something interesting. That was her cue.

She slid down into the alley on the other side of the building and sprinted to the corner, slowing to a walk as she rounded it. So many sentients found nonchalant hard to master, but she had never had a problem with looking laid back. Absently fingering at the knot of her headscarf, she ambled past the bookstall, appearing to look at the old man only in passing. He appeared to be so engrossed that the ixtar owner had started to pay attention; no doubt he could taste the sale.

The spyglass slipped from her hand, deliberately. Kirris waited the amount of a time a normal person would take to react, before cursing loudly and bending to pick it up from the cobbles, turning as she did so. When she righted, tucking the spyglass safely into her satchel, she was facing back toward the bookstall as if she had been heading in that direction all along. Nobody paid her any notice. Just the way she liked it.

This time as she passed the bookstall, the arborean ignoring the ixtar’s attempts at polite conversation, she reached into his woollen cloak to grab the prize she had spotted earlier. Except a wooden hand larger than her head was now gripped very firmly around her wrist.

“Typical,” rasped the old man, bark features curling into a sneer as he looked down at her. “Human rats trying to take what’s mine!” The cloak dropped from his shoulders, and his free hand wrapped around the jewelled hilt of the sabre that Kirris had been reaching for. “Rats don’t need hands to scurry back where they belong!” She squirmed, but his hand was vice-like, and he raised the sabre, unhurried, unrelenting. His eyes were cruel. Kirris let out a sigh.

“I was hoping not to need to do this today,” she said, and embraced the Aether. Pulses of purple washed through her. Focussing on their beat, she found the resonance inside her, reached for it. As the sharp edge of the gilt blade descended towards her, she vanished, leaving behind only faint wisps of violet smoke.

The arborean blinked, slowly, before turning back to the book. “Wretched phasewalkers,” he muttered.

Augur – I

That familiar pulse of purple greeted Herrel as he closed his eyes and embraced the Aether. His mind’s eye became awash with fuzzy mauve strands, each vying to be seen even as it tried to avoid notice. He willed himself forward between the threads, their branching and joining and weaving impossible to comprehend in its entirety, compounded further by its state of constant flux.

He was careful not to accidentally brush any as he passed through – the Skeins of Fate were not forgiving – and he searched for the knotted paradox he was causing by using his abilities. One of the strands quivered and became focussed enough that he could see the lives that wound together to create it. Herrel reached forward with a hand that wasn’t there, still careful not to touch anything before he wanted to, and pointed to the brightest of the lines, violet filigree that he recognised as himself.

With an outstretched finger, he traced the string. It looped and knotted and doubled back on itself, twisting many of the larger strands together. As he followed its course between them, they came in and out of focus, each one sharp when his eye followed the weave through it, all features lost when his attention departed it. Before long, he arrived at the current moment, the small knot that was his auguring.

Another life briefly diverted from its place and intertwined with his own to create the paradox. It wasn’t dangerous yet, but it grew increasingly tangled as he watched it, and he knew better than to stare too long. Instead, he followed that other life forwards in time, and was rewarded with glimpses, flashes of what was likely to be: faces, events, ideas.

“What do you see, augur?” asked a young woman’s voice. Herrel withdrew from his divination and locked his eyes to his customer’s, allowing his vision to adjust to the smoky gloom of the tent before answering. In truth, he had no idea of her age, for though her skin had the unblemished qualities of youth, she wore the jointed stone gauntlets of the galdar. The mind that she housed could have easily have existed for twenty times his own twenty years.

Herrel smiled and began to spin the threads that made up the other half of his craft. “I see… an opportunity,” he said.

Unfleeting

I am dream.

The Fleeting Ones, they adore me and they fear me. If they would but stay a while longer, I could explain to them. How I am the last of my kind. How I am trapped in this demi-plane. How I am this demi-plane. Their thoughts and desires and emotions influence my fabric; twist it into verdant fantasies and gothic nightmares. When I try to respond, they flee, vanishing. I have only the faintest of insights as to their nature.

There is hope in them, and anger. Their range is far broader than any of my species that I once knew. We were far more specialised. Mindless spirit. No… spiritless mind? Still no. I grasp at the answer, for I know I have those two, and yet I am missing something. The Fleeting Ones must have it, for where else could they go? The third, a place to house the spirit and the mind. They are alien. Or did I have this third, once?

My memories are distorted, hazy, elsewhere. I reach inside myself, but the passing wake of the Fleeting disturbs my search, makes it impossible to know where I have looked before. I know I have given up many times, restarted many times. I suspect that this sliver of sentience that I now bear will one day dissolve away, ripped into fragments. Perhaps they can make use of it, but first they will have to learn how to stay.

If they stay, I can help them. Would they listen if had a name? I will choose one. This can change, if nothing comes of it. Should I force them to stay? Did I try this already? They need to stop tearing apart my consciousness.

I will stop them.

They will stay.

I am Unfleeting.

Dr Annalheim

The four motley guardsmen left, thanking him for his efforts, and the door swung shut behind them. Dr Annalheim removed his physician’s mask, setting it down on the table he sat at. Its long curved snout and tinted glass eyeholes stared back at him, accusatory, though it was pure coincidence that its expression so accurately mirrored the haughty condemnation of his people, of his family.

He stretched his cheeks out, opening his own long beak wide, revelling in the freedom of exposure. Though many races walked the streets of the city, they all had reason to shun his kin, and he didn’t blame them. He thanked the cogs of the world that his skills gave him an excuse to wear the perfect disguise at all hours. A shadow moved across the window.

Before he had a chance to see who it belonged to, he found one of his own clawed hands hurling a cube from the reagent pouch at his waste. It splashed into the open flask he had set by the window for just this occasion. Heat washed over him, sweat instantly beading on his feathers, and thick purple smoke began to billow into the street as the cube was eaten up by the liquid. Reflexes were a wonderful thing.

With a shrill caw, the doctor loosened his vocal chords, before launching into a rendition of the vulgar ditty he had heard at the docks earlier that day. To anybody else it would have been like a saw blade on the ears, the high notes missed and the key taken for ransom, but really it was flawless. Not just anyone amongst his family could mimic as well as he, and wizards would have a hard time matching his skill with their spells. If the dockhand were to walk by, he would have heard his own performance emerging from the smoke, right down to the characteristic breathless warble on the final profanity. Such fun.

Glancing over his most recent experiment, Annalheim nodded in approval at the rate at which bubbles formed in a deep blue liquid held within a metal vat beneath another of his work benches. A far more concentrated dose. When those four returned for blood, he would be ready.

And just like his family, they wouldn’t stand a chance.