“Zombies always upset you deeply,” Serru said. “And you were awake very early the past two mornings. Being tired makes anything feel worse. This is not as rge an issue as it currently appears to you.”
“But you did talk to the Zombie King today,” Aryennos said. “What happened? Aside from you stopping a raid by freeing zombies? Maybe if you tell me it’ll be easier to stop thinking about it?” He pulled out his notebook and opened it, watching me expectantly.
I sighed, and told them about my encounter in the park. My toy was too small to do any damage and I couldn’t hurt a zombie that way anyway, but I did fantasize briefly about swinging something rger that would connect with one part or another of the Zombie King. Not a zombie avatar, but the actual King.
“He knew your name?” Serru said. “And some of what he said was rather strange.”
“And he gave you a portable house?” Terenei said. “They’re known but not common, they’re difficult to master. I’ve never heard of anyone in Ottermarsh making them, but people move all the time. That does not, however, account for knowing your name.”
“I might have a very strange suggestion on that score,” Aryennos said, not looking up from scribbling rapidly in his notebook. “But it will take some expnation. I found something today I would otherwise not have taken seriously. Give me just a...” He trailed off, intent on his task.
“As I understand it,” Terenei said, “portable houses are rather compact inside but designed to be efficient and comfortable, with the enormous advantage of being able to close it and move it somewhere else if you fancy a change of scenery or have some other reason to relocate. It would be harder to find a pce to open it than to just set up a tent, but it also won’t disappear the next morning.”
“He said not to put it in a bag,” I said. “Or to leave one that isn’t empty in it when it shrinks. Something about it already doing things to space and putting it in a bag could have bad consequences.”
“Helpful to have a wagon, then, so you don’t need to carry it bumping against your side,” Serru said brightly.
Aryennos finally id down his pen. “There’s no one here with the right specialty,” he said, “and the librarians are busy, so I just dug around on my own with their blessings. I found another zombie raid survivor journal and read through it quickly, just looking for anything unusual. It was more or less the same horrible story, with one twist: it mentioned a healer teaching at the school who had an ability that allowed her to protect an area from contagion. The zombies couldn’t enter the protected area and she kept as many people safe that way as she could. Mostly that ended up being the students and school staff since they were the closest, but some of the townspeople made it to her. They were crowded pretty tightly since it worked on a limited area, but who cares at that point? So that was a nice change.”
“Definitely,” Terenei said. “I honestly feel sorry for the healers who turn up abilities that work on them or mosslings, they must feel so bad about not being able to help everyone, but it’s certainly wonderful for the ones they can help.”
“I found a book that was a lot more interesting but frequently frustrating. It was hand-written all in one hand, not printed, which might be why it was so annoyingly idiosyncratic in multiple ways, but still...” He shook his head in exasperation.
“Not everyone has a schor’s attention to detail,” Serru said.
“They could have included author credit, at least. There were obviously different authors and not one of them was named. Or a date, for that matter. It had a summary of a variant creation myth, which wasn’t that different from the common one that there was an unknowable being who had a dream and the world came into being out of that dream. This one said that the creator wrote everything down, spelled out in a special nguage how the world would look and how it would work, all the rules about things falling down and the sun and moons moving and how life exists and everything, and then gave it power to turn it from a vision into reality.”
Wrote it down and then gave it power? In a special nguage?
I know this world resembled a computer game in many ways, but...
No. That was too much of a stretch.
Right?
Yes, it definitely was.
“That’s an interesting way of describing it,” Terenei said. “Presumably a metaphor, since any being able to create a world is unlikely to be sitting down with a notebook and writing ideas in anything we’d recognize as nguage, but I like the image. Maybe because it’s a little like being able to draw in a notebook and give an object reality for a short time. But I don’t think I’d want to try to create a complete functional world. I’m sure I’d forget something important.”
“Deliberately created or instinctively formed from a dream,” Serru said, “it could be describing the same incomprehensible metaphysical event in a different way. Was there a source for it at all?”
Aryennos shook his head. “The same book did have some other unusual things in it. There was an essay specuting about how worlds come into being, with no conclusions but most of the theories it presented suggest that there are a lot of worlds and probably there’s at least some traffic between them. There was a discussion about newcomers, and that was really interesting because it said that the Moss Queen and Zombie King aren’t the only ones who have ever come here as adults but it’s rare. It didn’t give sources on that, either, which is annoying. Always cite your sources so they can be verified.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him so deeply irritated, but then, this was his thing. “At least the mention of the Zombie King tells us that the whole collection was put together less than a hundred and fifty years ago, and probably less than a century given the nguage and some small details. It mentioned someone who came here after the Moss Queen but before the Zombie King, who went through two Quincunx sites and then decided to stop and build a new life here as an artist and sculptor who became very well-known even though very few people knew their full history. No name, no location, no species, nothing I can use to try to track down more.”
“Pause and take a breath,” Serru said. “You’re speaking quickly and running out of breath more often. We’re not going anywhere.”
Aryennos obediently took not one but two deep breaths, but when he continued it wasn’t notably more slowly. “It specuted that some of the really old legends of people who did incomprehensible frightening things might only make any sense as newcomers who thought in alien ways.”
“Examples?” I asked.
“There was supposed to be one,” Terenei said, “who had the goal of killing at least one of every animal in the world and somehow collected and kept their skins, although that shouldn’t be possible, of course. An even older one was supposed to bring bad luck to anyone who had sex just for fun, and would do even worse if it was sex with someone of another species or the same sex, although I don’t know how that would even work with some species. They turn up in creepy stories as something to make you shiver, but as far as I know, no one believes in them.”
They had boogeymen hiding under the bed. Did not see that coming.
“There’s nothing documented about them,” Aryennos said. “But a lot of words written trying to figure out how we even invented those ideas. Another essay was about children born with no old memory and an empty bank account, which cims that the author tried to gather more information. This author had a very sceptical mind and described attempts to verify that they genuinely had new bank accounts, rather than lying about the contents for some reason or their previous self leaving it empty, and that they really had no memories that could be evoked by common stimuli and were telling the truth. That one made references in the text to sources that were listed in detail at the end, but that part wasn’t copied. Someone made an effort ter to piece together what they could from what information there is, and was able to confirm a few sources and make tentative guesses at others, but some are a mystery and no one has tracked down the original.”
“It sounds like someone’s private collection of anything on the subject of worlds and newcomers,” I said. “By someone not too concerned about being able to follow any of this up ter. I could see someone doing that while trying to get home.”
“That’s extremely pusible.”
“What else was in it?” Serru asked.
“An essay that sounded unexpectedly thoughtful and well-reasoned considering the subject, which was that we don’t just explore and find new parts of our world, those parts didn’t exist before, and that there are other things that just appear and no one can trace where they actually started. One day they weren’t there and then they were around as something new and usually useful or beautiful or both. If you ask people where it came from, they’ll tell you where they got it or heard about it, and you can track it back a few steps but it always comes to someone you can’t ever find any trace of who taught some people or sold the first seeds or whatever.”
“That’s a very peculiar idea,” Terenei said. “Many things require trial and error and practice to learn, like the most expert potion formus. Someone discovers them and makes note of them, and the information gradually spreads, usually between schools, but not every discoverer feels like they want their name formally attached to it so the trail would go cold without some very intense research and possibly even then.”
Aryennos nodded. “Sometimes people get strange ideas but it’s less common for them to then be able to expin them as clearly as this. I don’t know how it connects to the rest, either, unless it’s suggesting that people aren’t the only thing that can move between worlds. It didn’t offer an expnation for the observations. At the very end, there’s a page with just apparently random individual statements.” He flipped back in his notebook. “A work of art mirrors the soul of the creator. Every garden needs attention to thrive. I saw the caretaker working under the moons and they knew my name. Does a home exist if you aren’t in it?” He flipped one further page back and scanned down it. “Mmm... yes, that’s everything that I found in it. I spent most of today on that book, trying to understand it, after it was clear that there was nothing else that was out of the ordinary. This is a smallish school and doesn’t seem to have a strong focus on theory and metaphysics.”
“Life sciences,” Terenei said. “With a few individual mentors or small groups of mentors oriented towards other subjects. It’s not Ironcrest or the Blue Cliffs, and I doubt we’re going anywhere near them.”
“Ironcrest isn’t unthinkably far from the Highnds site,” Serru said. “But the Blue Cliffs are in entirely the wrong direction. I’ve been keeping Ironcrest in mind in case the Quincunx began to look less feasible.”
“That seems reasonable. And that was a very strange book.”
“That was what I thought,” Aryennos said. “Unfortunately, it’s the best I could do.”
“You can’t make information appear if it isn’t there,” I said. “You checked. That’s all I could ask. And you found the story about the healer who stopped Zombie Boy’s raid. That’s great to hear.”
“There’s a chance that if they had time and I could ask the regur librarians, one or more might remember some volume that’s kept in an archive somewhere that talks about the subject, or a book that someone borrowed and maybe I could go ask them if I could see it for a few hours, but they hardly get a chance to sit down right now.”
“It’s all right. But you said you might have a suggestion about the man I met today. Wait. I saw the caretaker working and they knew my name. Are you thinking that I met... some kind of creator or someone working for a creator? He didn’t seem exactly divine. He’d lost a leg somewhere called the Wurmheights, which was a lesson in the limitations of healing potions that I need to remember.”
“Who’s to say how a creator or their assistants might appear?” Serru mused.
“You don’t have any kind of beliefs about who it was who created your world, or why, or what they want you to do, or rules they’ve dictated, or what they do, or... anything like that? Just the creation story I’ve heard a couple of times now, about someone dreaming it into existence? Or writing it?”
“No,” Terenei said. “How would we be able to understand what motivated any being able to imagine a world and make it real for others to live in? I suppose they might be generally unaware of us, or indifferent, but since the world on the whole is a pleasant one that supports and promotes life of many kinds, it seems reasonable to believe that we have at least permission, if not encouragement, to make use of that. Since it doesn’t belong to us, it should be used responsibly and with respect, of course. I suppose if they dictated rules for use we’d have to make an effort to follow them, but to the best of my knowledge they haven’t.”
“Someone did try to cim once that there were rules the creator wanted everyone to follow,” Aryennos said. “I can’t recall the details but I do remember thinking that they added up to a restrictive way of life with ideals that would be difficult to achieve and it would likely mean constant anxiety over which rule was being broken by virtually any decision. What’s wrong with just being thoughtful and otherwise doing what makes you happy?”
“What happened to that person?” I asked. I didn’t think a prophet was likely to have much success around here.
“No one who looked at the list of rules believed they were really from our world’s creator, and the person who wrote them down got more and more agitated. They were gently confined so they couldn’t hurt themself or anyone else, and encouraged to get back in touch with real things like gardening and pets and, um... was it cooking? Something practical and creative, anyway. I think they kept following those weird rules themself, or at least some of them, but that’s their right. They stopped being a danger to anyone including themself and stopped trying to convince other people. Unfortunately they never quite seemed to be genuinely happy, despite all efforts, and no one could figure out why. I mean, they were part of a community that tried to support them and respected their choices, they had... it was some sort of shop, I think, I don’t recall what kind, but it was what they wanted, one doctor in particur from the town’s school built a strong connection with them and spent a lot of time with them. What’s not to be happy about?”
Possibly, being in the wrong world?
But I was too exhausted to get into a discussion of religion, and people with lists of rules considering people following different lists of rules to be fair game for horrible behaviour and trying to bully others into following the same list of rules.
“Odd idea,” Serru said. “But I feel sorry for them. I told Nathan that we don’t have what he calls mental illness here, but I think I was wrong and it must happen occasionally, for someone to create rules for themself that interfere with their ability to be fulfilled and enjoy life. Worse, rules they feel driven to try to persuade others to adopt.”
“I think it’s rare,” Aryennos said. “The book I read on anomalous behaviour made it pretty clear that they were all exceptional instances in which something was causing actual distress, all across the provinces and with the only time limitation being that the author could find at least one person currently alive to talk to who was involved. If someone wants to believe that new nds and species and such are appearing in the world, that wouldn’t have been included because it’s not doing any harm to that person or anyone else. I think most people would say that this kind of disordered thought doesn’t exist because it’s so uncommon and they’ve never encountered it.”
“I think it’s so close to nonexistent that it might as well be,” I said. It was possible that the local systems just swept up anyone with aberrant behaviour and re-educated them somewhere in some sort of dystopian mind-control scenario, but that struck me as highly improbable, and wouldn’t account for the gentle treatment of the would-be prophet. That gentle treatment struck me as more pusible than eborate coverups.
