The sheets were soaked too with her sweat. She hoped to God that it wasn’t more than sweat because that would be annoying to clean up. She sniffed for the ammonia scent of urea and was relieved to detect none.
Well, she had drunk a lot of water in preparation for this psionic moment, so- she was okay. Other than a lot of sweat, Gods bless sweat. Really, physically, she was perfectly fine. She did not have a scratch on her body.
And Talisa Talauth, Doomed Former Rogue Queen, was sitting at her cotside, smoking a cigarette.
“Permit me to self-hallucinate one of these before I go,” she wasn’t even looking at her as she talked, she was staring into space. She closed her eyes and took a long drag.
When she exhaled, she said, “Hah. Not that the secondhand smoke will get you anyway.”
The smoke hung frozen in the time stop, the spirits ceasing complicated fae calculations of smoke trails, but Talisa, now soon to be no more than just a hallucination, was unaffected by it and could move freely through frozen time- she just had to have a conversation with Vilithe before she technically died.
Vilithe, stunned, did not say anything, just folded up to a cross-legged position, and sat straight up, knowing she had to sit down, because was about to learn something or two from an unexpected mentorship. She could read Talisa’s mind just as Talisa could read hers now. It felt interminable just to sit straight and listen because they were in a time stop. The irritation of a stiff back could not even be felt, with the perception of time so dilated.
A puff this time instead of a drag, but still no eye contact, instead she bent now, looking at the floor, defeated hard, “I’m done now, aren’t I? My last little switcheroo gambit didn’t work. You really are too strong.”
“You will make a great Rogue Queen, Vilithe.” And she said this with sincerity, and softness.
“Ah-”, her head still bent, she nodded, “Still doesn’t beat the real thing, does it?” She flicked the cigarette away and it hung in midair, a burning ember hurling through space.
“You killed Kwandriss’s dream. Which was really my dream.”
Finally, she raised her head up, turned it, and looked directly in Vilithe’s time-stop frozen black dragonrider lensed eyes. At her beautiful white cornrows, in the purest fair elvan albino white. Her porcelain albino cheeks, her epicanthic folds, her aquiline nose. She looked upon Vilithe’s eyes as if they were her own daughter’s.
“So let me ask you Vilithe, what is your dream?”
Vilithe, even more stunned now by Talisa’s empathy for her, remained silent.
A single tear rolled down Talisa’s face and hung mid-cheek. Then another, on the other cheek. And yet another. Talisa didn’t want to die. But she was already dead.
Wow, depressing. Perhaps a bit of levity was in order.
“And don’t tell me it’s riding dragons again. That’s your teenaged broodling self. Little Villi. Oh yes I saw that little, heh, musical with Mal and Heyshush.” Oh, how Talisa hated sappy Disney bullshit. Yes bullshit. Not taurus’ shit. What they were originally called. Bulls. Even when she was young. Talisa never cared for a charming prince. She wanted to kick ass. She wanted to slay. Charge. Run these realms. She wanted to be a Queen. “You’ve been there, done that.”
Talisa was born destined to be a Queen. She was a Princess. One of the youngest to promote to Queen in fact. She let the young one pry into her mind as much as she wanted, bemused by her curiosity, her empathy.
Empathy. Epistemology. Mindfulness. Gratitude. Love. These were the true pillars of psionic power.
She was precocious, this one. She really had always been underestimated- even by her own clan as much as they loved her so. Perhaps they underestimated her only because they loved her so, they didn’t want to see this innocent, pure spirit – for she really was as innocent and pure as a spirit itself, who had never left Phyros, and was yet to be corrupted by the darkness of the universe.
Please answer my question instead of scrying my mind Vilithe.
Vilithe was still stuck in the time stop that had triggered from the emergency psionic sequencer that would trigger upon the imminent death of the Glorious Queen Talisa Talauth, may her name ring forevermore throughout the stars, who died honorably in battle against the Evil Empress.
The greater hallucination of her simulacrum was designed to impart to whoever close who was the best candidate for taking up the mantle of the Last Rogue Queen who could stand against that cunt Maetra. This last one for insertion, the secret Ninth Simulacrum with no body of her own, was simply floating in the psionic web, and as easily manipulable to actual users, as a normal spirit was. Ordinarily protected and ensconced within one of the nine bodies, including the prime, but those had been slain now. So, she had better win Vilithe over, because the insertion had failed. Talisa's fate was entirely in her hands.
She had not expected to want to listen to her successor, or rather, that her successor would not want to listen to her, at least not for long. That she thought she would just impart some wisdom and then bounce to the afterlife after her deletion, whatever that might be. Talisa assumed it was oblivion. Non-existence. But not existing wouldn’t be so bad now, at this point, wouldn’t it? What she really hoped for was to be reincarnated back in time to some extinct lower life form, something for all her bad karma, a bird, and free as one, a pigeon in the Lost Age, flying around a big city, feasting on whatever delicious scraps the humans – yes, that’s what they were called, that long forgotten word, human – wastefully threw away. Some simpler, more adventurous lifetime, not so monotonous as ruling.
Really Vilithe, that’s quite enough scrying into my mind, don’t you think?
Vilithe could not move her lips through the time stop, she was not fae. The distinct lack of ability to express herself left her feeling quite powerless to the fae Talisa, even though in actuality it was Vilithe who had all the power over her. Without the ability to speak at near light speed, it really wasn’t that different from paralysis. So, she had to telepath.
I want to be with your son for the rest of my life. I want to marry him. I want to start a family with him.
Talisa cracked up into a giggle. Then outright laughter. But it was not mocking laughter. It was joyous laughter in the face of the absurd fact that this was Vilithe’s dream, and now how dearly Talisa wished she could have shared in that dream too. To be a grandmother. A Grand Queen Mother. Heh. As the youngest promoted Queen, she’d never had her own dare promote against her, nor did she assign the station of Princess to any of her daughters. So, this she hadn’t experienced- this moment. And she thought she’d been there and done that.
Well, every Elvan Queen needs to grow up some time. She gave Vilithe the warmest smile. Fae Talisa spoke.
“Let me tell you something that only Queens know, and Princesses must learn. You are not yet a Queen. You have yet to go through the Rite of Coronation. And that is closely tied to how elvans breed. And there appear to be some gaps in your knowledge, Phyroan. For your Queen Dannelle - she went the unorthodox way, and from whom she profited is unknown, but in my opinion, the answer is obvious- to the astute. And you’re astute.”
“But how can you figure out something if you don’t know that you should be looking for it? And of course, she kept the secret from you- we all keep the secrets from our own Princess daughters until they’re ready. You have proven you are ready.”
Still Vilithe stayed utterly silent, but completely mindful, absorbing every word.
“You understand that elvans are bred from cocoons, but not where they come from. The dreadful secret. The secret kept by us elvans- even before the rise of the God Empress.”
Vilithe really, really wanted to nod, but she couldn’t.
“Do you want to know the secret? It will change you. You can stay innocent, but your dream will fail if you do.”
Vilithe didn’t really feel she was that innocent. Maybe by elvan standards. Or at least, Elvan Queen standards. She didn’t know about that.
But one thing that curious Vilithe did know is that yes, she really wanted to know what this hyped-up secret was, especially if it meant the key to becoming a Queen and starting a family with her love.
And then Queen Talisa gave Vilithe the Birds and the Bees talk, something that as a simple worker and not a Princess, Queen Dannelle never thought to give to Vilithe. Or, well, they just called it the wyverns and the pollinators now, but those were all dead, so most who tried to do it – both orcans and elvan Queens – didn’t really know what they were doing and just improvised their way through it. The destination was always simple though, wasn’t it?
“The secret to the elvan cocoon is that they are orcan wombs.”
The thought was so bizarre to Vilithe, she did not immediately absorb the gravity or impact of the words. Vilithe had never thought about orcs before. They weren’t on Phyros, that’s for sure.
“Before the orcans, we harvested the mutants. Harvest - there was another name for this procedure in the Lost Age. Hysterectomy. But that word meant the removal of a womb that could hurt the body, not to take a healthy one for personal use.”
“The reason is simple, you know it yourself- When lithiated spirits enter the elvan body, and that is since before birth as the printed, or in-vitro fertilized, embryo is molded and crafted, the new homeostatic environment is toxic to the embryo in its pure organic form on conception. Our wombs can’t sustain embryos because of- the spirits.”
She talked softly and gently.
“This is what separates us as a species from our ancestors. The moment our lifecycle changed so fundamentally different from theirs, it was impossible to say we were the same species. It granted us our psionic power and magickal ability, but we paid a terrible cost, a cost we did not know we would pay at the time.”
She spoke as if she was really trying to help Vilithe understand something important, even though she knew Vilithe was smart enough to get it all. Not robotically, she spoke with great care in her pedagogy.
“It’s kind of a sick joke, isn’t it? What we thought solved all the problems instead caused a big fundamental one. In other words, you could say that the home of the embryo was poisoned. Sounding a bit familiar?”
You’re comparing this to the problem of forbidden fire? The problem that my mother was trying to fix? Or, rather, adapt to? She didn’t even bother telepathing anymore. She knew Talisa could hear her every thought with utter clarity.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Exactly. Except we fixed this one. Take a mutant or orcan womb and plug it into a spirit-crafted organic system mimicking an orcan body to nourish it, and it thrives, and then you can plug in as many embryos as you want. Or at least up until the womb – cocoon, or chrysalis – is used to its limits. Roughly eight broods of eight. Then you just swap it out and plug in a new one. These are the brood mothers.”
“When the mutant that created the Soldier Template” – and then jumping back to the hectic battle scene, totally frozen in time, fae Talisa pointed for Vilithe’s psi projection to the desiccated body in the tank – “And gave us our first y-chromosome, things got even easier. After all, our first fertility bottleneck was simply that all the gynous outlived all the androus. Now chrysalids have become somewhat portable, because you could just activate them elsewhere. And thus, the soldier subtype, the drone, was used for fertilization. When you started an embryo’s growth in a cocoon there was no stopping it.”
The soldier gender was just for convenience. And for, well, meat. They were meat shields. They were meat clubs. And meat- “Vilithe, chill, he’s still my son, you’ve won, you will see Eidren in person soon.” Sorry, Auntie Talisa. “Oh child, at fifty-six revolutions, you are still so young.”
“You should know then, on that note, that this production streamlining did lead to ghastly, unfortunate lives for our poor brood mothers. But the capital return on this new production process was just too high, we could not afford the opportunity cost of discontinuing this new way of breeding. Especially when we needed to sustain our fertility due to casualties from the orcan exodus.”
Vilithe pieced it together quickly and felt despondently bad for Zitra. She regretted every bad thought she ever gave to the broodmother in her sad little staging chamber constantly caught in crossroads between shifting highways, at the whims of scheming psion overseers each competing for favor from the Princess.
“Then Maetra took it all for herself. For Maetra, more was never enough. She has the collected stores of all the cocoons from all the clans. All of them. And still she wants more. Since the beginning, Maetra has been obsessed with taming the entirety of the Orcan Horde- bringing them all to heel, enslaving every single one of them as breeding cattle. Oh, but you wouldn’t want to know about what really goes on in Vyredia, if you were ever unlucky to find yourself being an orcan taken there.”
Having learned the secret, and the full cosmic horror of it finally beginning to dawn – the elvans are parasites by intrinsic and absolute necessary nature, they would go extinct as a species if they stopped – Vilithe most certainly did not want to know indeed.
“One thing I must emphasize: we need the orcans. Yes, you scry into my mind, I see them as a resource, but I also see that they are life. They are our life. And so, now finally, we come to the Rite of Coronation.”
“The orcans have a saying. Lok Tar O Dar. Run to victory or death. You need a cocoon. If you do not have a cocoon, your lineage will end. What do you do?”
“You just take it.”
Timeless stillness. Vilithe understood why she couldn’t remain innocent now. She couldn’t remain innocent, without accepting that she would fail if she remained so. Her dream, such a basic and natural need, of starting a family with Eidren- it would be over if she did nothing. It was a crinkling, crumbling, corrupting feeling.
“You take it. You just take what’s yours. Someone else must get hurt.”
“You have the orthodox way. You find an orcan gurl. You kidnap her. You rip out her womb, or you be gentle and make it nice and easy with spirit surgery. Your choice, future Queen. You have one more choice.”
“That is to take the unorthodox way. That’s how I did it too, like your mom. You take it from another Queen who has one. Usually your own Queen Mother. A limited resource. A scarcity. The primitive accumulation. How do you get your initial capital? How did you first make it?”
“You must extract. You must take. From others, or from earth, now full of death, now reath, now wrapped in a funerary wreath.”
“Or you dream that maybe you could find some new place to take what you need to live. Like here. Aryss. The Abyss. The Planet of the God of War, Ares. Mars.”
“Mars is what it was called until Clan Mars, the inheritors of the Mars Guild fortune, yes the maker of Mars Bars, or, as the Morquarrans would call it, Milky Way Bars, took umbrage that their marketing was being ruined by how horrid we three clans – the Triumvirate – had made things here, with our infighting.”
Vilithe didn’t know that etymology, for it was a secret sealed by Queens. She had no idea it was so petty and vain.
“You’re ahead of the game you know, you have an advantage you need not yield, and you can mislead now.”
“I’ve learned from my spies that Amefrid and Senjya- though they know the secret, they do not know the Rite. They know orcans must be harvested, and they know why, but they dare not take what belongs to their mother, to commit to the unorthodox way. And they don’t dare use the cocoons to raise forces of their own against Maetra and commit to the orthodox way. They don’t understand what the Rite of Coronation requires from them. They haven’t figured that one out for themselves yet, and here I am telling you. Maetra could not abide if the future Empress did not commit to the Rite of Coronation by her own merit. She expects no less. Here now, you are not even my own daughter, and I am just telling you. Maetra wants the Princess to prove herself. I think she got the wrong lessons from watching Succession.”
“Oh, well. She won’t change. The problem is that they are just too terrified of their own mother to even want to know. They’re afraid knowing will mean they get punished. They are afraid to take even a bite of fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
“You do have to kill the God Empress of Elvankind, you know. Or at least confront her. If you want to fulfill this dream, you must go across the void, to Reath. There’s nothing for you here. I remind you that the responsibility of avenging our race rests with you now. This onus has passed from me to you.
“I would suggest going to the Tunedic Archipelago and reuniting with your sisters. Why don’t you check your memory dear.”
Quick contract back- to a long time ago:
Imprinting detected:
She could see now that this memory was false.
But nothing lay behind it. It was real imprinting, not redaction. The flip side of every inception was a deletion.
The memory was deleted, Vilithe thought. She couldn’t access it anymore.
“Oh, you doubt yourself. Never do that. What a silly way to dampen your own psionic ability.”
Vilithe realized that not only sharing the memory with Eidren meant that she had revived the strength of the memory – simply by remembering it so vividly she had reconnected – but in the Archon state she could unwind psionic tampering itself and actually return bioelectrical neural connections to their original state. Their original positions. Though the Archon state had faded, some of its power remained. Just enough. And so, with just a little bit of effort – they had all the time in the world now – she could now remember that:
The rows of dragon’s breath cut down flight after flight of dragons. But five escaped. She felt Villi’s heart soar because she knew each rider intimately. Sylvah, Kanai, Hayima, Princess Essthe, and Princess Allanah. The rest of their family now ruptured to radiant and rapidly buckling globes. The last five surviving Elite Callethean Dragons and Dragonriders and their one surviving sister who was just a regular old gas huffer, the worker Vilithe Callethe, Dragonrider of Quetzacoatl, formed up in the void.
Sisters, I cannot join you in going across the void to Reath. It is too far. Quetzal cannot make it, he’s too badly hurt, and we were never designed for such range.
Vilithe, the revolutionary paths of Phyros and Aryss are in sync. Survive there, so many refugees are there, I am sure you will find allies. We will come for you when we regain our strength in the Tunedic Archipelago. Seek us there if you should ever build forces that could assist in the cause of avenging elvankind. They thought this all in unison, more than unison, for the five of them had formed a psionic gestalt.
Farewell, sister, may fortune follow your path. And they blinked away in a silent flash of light.
Farewell, sisters. Vilithe thought, trying to hide her great melancholy and despair. She knew they were already too far to scry the thought though.
It was remarkably like how she had erased Kwandriss’s dream. Just flip the ones to zeros and flip the zeros to ones. Once the entry to the memory was cut off, the rest of it dissolved, decayed, like a limb with blood cut off. But so too could a memory be revived from stasis, once just a drop of recollection returned.
But then the return to binary logic gave Vilithe a puzzling thought. Something didn’t add up.
Didn’t Eidren say you grew him in these tubes? Doesn’t that mean we can just skip this whole nasty business?
Queen Talisa lay on her cot, just leaned back and let herself rest, flicked her hand, psionically dashing away the visual obstruction of the reaver’s belly. With vision through one of the reaver’s eyes sticking out its back, she looked at the Aryssal sky, that had now become night after all the bloody work was done.
Although the Aryssal dust could not reflect the light of the stars, this did not stop the Rogue Queen, who could see the stars – for she knew what they looked like – as she wished. So she saw the stars. And without any light pollution – not that light pollution could have interfered with her senses anyway – oh how glorious it was, to behold the Milky Way.
Still staring up, “You may think Eidren’s existence negates the fact that an orcan womb is necessary for elvan reproduction, but what he said simply isn’t true.”
“I designed his memories. Yes, I stole his childhood, but I didn’t create him from nothing. Those bacta tanks aren’t for creating bodies wholesale, they’re just for aging.”
“Or, rather, de-aging was the original purpose, but it was incredibly easy to program for the reverse direction. For reasons I’m sure you find obvious, Vilithe. But it’s funny, isn’t it? When it comes to psionics, it is easier to create than destroy. When it comes to physics, it is easier to destroy than create. Entropy.”
Vilithe was truly struck by Talisa’s wisdom. She had never thought about it that way before. In the mind it was indeed easier to experience than to forget. But outside the mind was an entirely different matter.
And then Talisa gave her a memory.
She had finally found it hidden somewhere in the reaver, crumpled up and shoved into a rack, after much digging, and she wondered which elvan had left it there before her.
Freshly washed and dried from the convenient dual-use machine built into the reaver’s ribcage, same tumble design as it ever was.
What did they call it? ‘Rek Tang’? But Talisa had been stranded on Aryss for so long, she couldn’t remember the last time she thought about orcans.
Michael Jordan! Now there was a Godlike Being – no fictional ‘princess’ but a real person – that Talisa could look up to. Just like His Airness, Talisa found spite a very effective motivator. She took the Betrayal of the Traitor Empress personally.
The five pillars of psionic power correspond to the five pillars of Islam. Profession of Faith, and the Love of God - Love. Prayer - Mindfulness. Alms - Empathy. Fasting - Gratitude. Pilgrimage - Epistemology.
All the psionic energy required would be loaded up before the sequencer was triggered, ready to cascade when the condition was met, meaning it would not take up any psionic energy in the moment of the casting. But it took a very powerful psion with much training and great resources and talent to hold many sequencers, especially more complicated ones with many psionic techniques queued up, at once.
It had failed. But had it failed completely?
Talisa didn’t like that they were called wyverns now. ‘Bird’ was preferable.
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
Not that it would have rendered any intelligible sound, being faster than sound.
A Princess, or… a Pawn that had reached the opponent’s back row?
But there were some possibilities, obvious as they might be to some, that even Vilithe just didn’t ever want to consider. Intelligence didn’t matter sometimes. The intelligent find justifications and excuses to stay in denial, the intelligent will always find an excuse to justify that they are right. They were intelligent, after all. Emotion is truly the only real psionic reality.
Praise end your days, Flora 717, your wild dark young daughter, whom you fought so hard to birth, is a Queen. Long Live the Queen.
She didn’t even know that the thought-word ‘orc’ was offensive. Oh, child. You have much to learn.
At the time, there was ‘natty in vitro’ – we didn’t have soldiers then – or ‘pure immaculate designer premium plus’, it was up to you, Queen. One was clearly more heavily marketed than the other.
All eight broods together, sixty-four elvans in total, would be called a Bokanovsky Group.
Continuing the analogy- a new realm? Like Phyros, or Aryss?
The fact that ‘activating the cocoon’ was a euphemism for sex and fertilization was not lost on Vilithe, she just had no idea how bad it really got, and if she did, she might have chose to be a little less abrasive towards Zitra.
Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual, it threatens Society itself.
o7
And no, not the confection. Although it would certainly make for an excellent treat, if this is the end.