“This school is an absolute treasure for research on anything historical,” Aryennos said. “I found a book I’ve never heard of. Someone wanted to know more about the Moss Queen, this was before the Zombie King showed up, and went through everything avaible. Anything written by her companions or by someone who had interviewed one of her companions or, in a few cases and clearly noted as such, stories someone had been told by someone who could pusibly have encountered her even briefly. They were able to map out her route. And she did go to all five sites.”
“But she is still here,” Heket said, her ears halfway fttening. “That is... worrying.”
“I’m refusing to panic,” I said. “For all we know, she chose to stay here with a lot of neat powers over going home, or something like that. I’m not taking Zombie Boy’s word for it that there is no way home. So, what did it say about her?”
Aryennos flipped open his book. “Since I had limited time, I wasn’t able to cross-check primary sources much, although one of the librarians did check a few at random and was able to confirm that it seems accurate. That makes me much happier than a book of random unsourced articles, even if it is a summary of a summary. Mostly.”
“Understood,” I said. Aryennos would be both delighted by and horrified by the Internet.
“When she first arrived, she introduced herself as Carol. No one knows if she still uses that even to herself. She did not act aggressively the way the Zombie King did. In fact, she decred this world to be perfect. She kept using another strange word... yoo-toh-pee-ya.” He pronounced it carefully.
“Utopia,” I said, and it sounded odd even to me, after so long here. “It’s an imaginary and probably impossible culture where all conditions are ideal for the people in it.”
“Who determines what’s ideal?” Terenei asked.
“That’s the problem. Everyone has a different image of what a utopia would be. This world is amazing, so many of the worst things from mine just don’t exist here, but there are people from my world who would still consider this to be a terrible pce to live because it’s missing things they consider essential. There are things I miss other than my family, personally, but nothing I consider more important than the good parts here, so I can see why she’d call it a utopia. Was there anything about what specifically she was basing that on? I’m probably not that lucky, but it would say a lot about her.”
“You are certainly that lucky,” Aryennos said brightly, checking his notes again. “She praised the complete harmony of the natural wilderness—are people unnatural or something? And also the ck of violence, and that thing about not killing and eating dead animals, and the number of women in positions of authority. She kept talking about a ck of... another odd word she used a lot. Pay-tree-ar-kee.”
“Patriarchy. Which is the idea that the people in charge are always men. I told you a bit about that before. There are some problematic factors that I am absolutely not getting into, but it’s hard to argue that all else being equal in my world, a man is going to have some significant and subtle social advantages over a woman.”
“That is a thing we do not have,” Serru said. “I am absolutely certain that I have never in my life been treated differently because I happen to be a woman. Heket?”
Heket nodded. “That’s hard to even understand. Why it would matter, I mean.”
“Or why there’s a difference,” Terenei said.
“She said repeatedly,” Aryennos said, “that the creator of this world must have been a woman, or a feminine being of some sort, because the emphasis was on harmony and growth.”
Not a good sign, but I might be reading too much into it. “Right,” I said. “So it’s a utopia of genuine gender equality on all levels and the air and water and wildlife and pnts are all healthy. I happen to like those things too.”
“There are differences,” Aryennos said. “But let me start at the beginning. She was first encountered in the Greenelk Forest, by several friends having a picnic. The entire group tried to help her, but she responded best to one of the women, who took her home for the night. The next day the woman, Annoris, arranged time off work to talk to the local librarian and then to help this confused stranger at least start her journey, by showing her to the nearest Quincunx site. They passed through a small settlement on the way, and Annoris noted ter that this newcomer who praised equality was suspicious of, and easily offended by, men, while treating all women as friends. It was such a consistent pattern it was impossible to overlook. It’s jumping ahead somewhat, but that pattern continued. She said things repeatedly that suggested that being a man means wanting to force all women into sex? And automatically expecting women to do all the work? And a lot of other unpleasant things. And her expnation is that all men are like that, it’s just how it is?” He sounded dubious, to say the least, and kept checking his book.
“Oh.” I heaved a sigh. The goddess-equals-goodness thing wasn’t a false arm after all. “Okay. Yeah. There’s been a social movement for over a hundred years at home trying to challenge that concept of patriarchy and demanding equality for women. Obviously, that’s a good thing. But the movement fractured because there were different opinions on how to do that and what was most important and whether some specific things were good or bad. One of the fractures involved some women basically concluding that all men are inherently violent, and that all women are inherently peaceful and mutually supportive. I understand someone who’s been hurt having bad associations with whoever did the hurting, and I understand that it’s a deep problem that affects a lot of men but all women, but that kind of generalization is... not helpful.”
“She honestly thinks that?” Heket said. “Or used to, at least?”
“She still does,” Serru said. “That is not a surprise. Obviously they did reach the Forest site. I doubt it was difficult. There were only environmental threats, not zombies or mosslings, and the worst danger in the Forest is leaving the road.”
“Ah, yes,” Aryennos said, looking at his book again. “They did pick up a second female companion on the road who was travelling in the same direction. The accounts given by her companions have always been hard for anyone to make any sense of, but we have additional information. She came back from the first site positively euphoric and told both companions that she’d been chosen to be the voice of nature and the mediator between pnts and animals, once she finished her initiation journey. She was significantly better at helping with gathering food after that, and one companion swears that she got three times the red berries off a bush that should have been on it.”
“She got pnt powers,” I said slowly. “But she was keeping them to herself.”
“And perhaps another form,” Serru added thoughtfully. “Perhaps finding herself as a florian, which seems to fit better than felid, fed that belief. From what you have said of your world, Nathan...”
“Oh, that feels sadly pusible,” I sighed.
“Another odd detail,” Aryennos said, “is that apparently it took her three to four cycles at each site. It seems unlikely that it took her so much longer, so presumably she was using that time to adapt and experiment alone before returning to her companions. So there must have been something to adapt to and experiment with. So. Annoris went home, but the other companion, a musician called Lineva, promised to help her reach the Shallows site. They met up with a trio of other performers Lineva had been expecting to join, two other musicians and a singer and dancer. On the way, in Coppersands in fact, they lost track of her. In a specialist alchemist shop, she started lecturing him on how his potions were unethical and should not be allowed to exist. No one was quite sure which potions she considered unethical. She didn’t get a chance to finish. Other customers and even passersby who heard the confrontation through the open door all intervened and then her companions found her and made her leave. She refused to discuss it with them beyond muttering something about the world being less perfect than she’d been led to believe.”
“Did anyone tell her that the world is perfect?” Heket asked.
“I doubt it? Maybe someone did? I don’t know. She also objected to farms, multiple times, both dry-nd and aquatic, ciming that they damaged nature and disrupted local wildlife.”
“A well-run and sustainable farm does neither of those things. It allows people and domesticated animals to stay consistently fed using a limited area, not stripping the wilderness of everything edible.”
“Anyone sensible knows that. She took exception to domesticated animals as well, by the way. She cimed they were being taken advantage of and used.”
I looked at Myu, lying in her basket but still semi-awake, her forepaws crossed and her eyes half-closed. “Do you feel taken advantage of, Myu?” In response to her name, her ears twitched, but that was all. “Yeah, I’ve heard that kind of thing before too. I’m not getting into it. All right, so she made it to the Shallows site despite bad behaviour.”
Aryennos nodded. “There’s no mention of it but we can probably guess she gained an aquian form. There are references to her going off by herself and coming back with information she should not have had. What the weather would be like the following day, or when they were approaching a settlement or other travellers. Her knowledge of pnts increased noticeably. Lineva said, when asked about any small odd details, that she’d noticed that her hair was wet after those little disappearances and once she had a bit of seaweed in it. When they got to the Highnds, on the other side of Crystal Pass from here, twice they found unexpectedly convenient vines that made it possible to tackle a slope more safely, even though the vines in question are uncommon in the Highnds and very rarely get that rge. She found fresh edible food surprisingly often when gathering alone but less so with company. She cimed it was further proof that she was specially chosen.”
“That definitely sounds like her fundamental abilities lie with pnts,” Terenei mused. “The way Nathan’s fundamentally lie with healing.”
“However, half of the musician group chose not to go into the Highnds with her, and detoured to take the lownds road. Lineva and the dancer Nimre stayed with her but insisted that they could not go any further without a guide familiar with the ground. Nimre being jotun wasn’t enough for them to feel safe, only for them to appreciate the dangers.”
“Sensible,” Serru said. “The Highnds are not good ground to be in if you don’t know what you’re doing. It might be possible, along the ring road in order to reach the Quincunx site, but it would still be risky. Unless Zanshe is with me, I prefer not to go far from the main roads.”
“Lineva and Nimre found a gatherer couple, who were going back into the Highnds and willing to take that particur route. That did create some difficulties because the Moss Queen, I suppose she was simply Carol at the time, objected to travelling with a man. The couple had been together, apparently, for years, and were quite a successful team, and they absolutely refused to separate. They also had a dog, one trained to recognize the scent of some otherwise hard-to-spot finds, and she also objected to that. Lineva and Nimre pointed out that it would not be reasonable to expect the gatherers to split up because she found it distasteful and the two of them were not willing to go any further without a guide, so she’d be on her own. She gave in, but apparently she was persistently rude to Teriven, the male of the pair.”
“Doesn’t she sound fun to travel with?” Heket muttered.
“Nimre dressed up in one of her dancer costumes because the settlement they stopped in was having a celebration with music and dancing and a community meal. Teriven complimented her on how fttering it was, to the general agreement of the others. The Moss Queen accused him, and only him, of treating Nimre as an object to fantasize about and of projecting his values of beauty onto her and of wanting to have sex with her behind his lover’s back. When Vashana, the female of the pair, pointed out that she would personally be more than happy to toss Nimre into bed right along with him, if she were so inclined, that made the Moss Queen accuse her of a lot of confusing things that no one understood but seemed to be something about putting his desires ahead of her own. It was all very strange. Once she’d finished the Highnds Quincunx site, the two gatherers got the party on the road towards the Midnds and then left them. Lineva and Nimre both said they were grateful the pair tolerated the situation as long as they did, but they absolutely understood why they left.”
“That sounds exhausting,” Serru said. “For all four travelling with her.”
Aryennos nodded. “It does. So much so that when they met up with the other musicians again in the Midnds, at the Bridge of Flowers, Lineva and Nimre basically passed her over to them and went in a different direction as quickly as possible. I can hardly bme them. The other two were unwilling to just abandon her so they took her towards the Grassnds site.”
“No one was actually with her the whole trip,” I said. “One was with her until the first site, one joined just before the first site and stayed past the third but left just after that and one who was with her for second and third left at the same time, one pair were only there briefly to help with reaching the third, two others were briefly around for the second and then stepped back in towards the fourth.”
“That is not friendship,” Heket said. “That is kindness she could not see as such, stretched to the breaking point by rudeness.”
“Correct,” Aryennos said. “That’s part of what made it such a challenge for someone to put all of this together. In some pces there isn’t much more detail avaible than I’m giving you. In some pces there are minor inconsistencies between accounts but mostly things like the timing or order of incidents or small details about them. Overall it’s comfortably reliable and more complete than I expected.”
“I didn’t know we knew this much,” Terenei said.
“Nor did I,” Serru said. “Continue, please.”
