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Chapter Text

Mother Aughra kept her distance. The two Gelfling didn't need her to connect them, that much was clear. Prophesies don't control destiny, after all, they merely see what will come, and intervention can cause more harm than good.

But this was complicated. This was the entire future of Thra.

When Aughra had first set her eye on the two -- the young castaway Stonewood and the impish, headstrong Grottan -- she could hardly believe it. Surely, the prophecy that the Gelfling to save Thra was of both Stonewood and Grottan stock was a mistake, she'd thought. Such a thing didn't happen. Stonewood and Vapra, perhaps, Drenchen and Dousan, not unlikely, but Stonewood and Grottan? Ha.

And yet, she sensed the pull between them. They sensed it too, though they hadn't yet admitted it. Not to each other, at least.

Rian's impulsiveness had not served him well as a member of the Guard, but out in Thra, and with Deet, it showed itself as courage. He wasn't willing to let Deet, swallowed by darkness, walk away, no matter how dangerous.

Aughra only followed because the fate of Thra depended on it.

From her position on an old stump, shielded by a nettil tree, she watched as he approached her. He reached for her, but she didn't respond to his touch.

"Deet," he pleaded, "It's me. It's Rian."

She turned slowly. Minutes before, she'd had the wherewithal to warn him to stay away. Now, she was gone. Aughra had never seen a creature so taken and still have breath.

Hours passed. Maybe days. Aughra's sense of time was her own. Rian never allowed Deet -- what was left of her -- to stray more than a few meters from him.

After going too long without eating, Rian reached into his satchel for food. Nothing was left but a clump of moss from Grot.

Aughra knew the moss, of course. She knew all of Thra. When consumed, its creatures glowed. Sometimes just the one. Sometimes more, if they were connected.

Aughra expected to see Rian start to glow blue after he consumed the moss.

She didn't expect Deet to glow as well.

Aughra noticed it before Rian did. He turned toward her, expecting to see her as she'd been, consumed by the darkening, but she had changed. She glowed.

"Connected," Aughra whispered to herself in awe. "It's all true."

Rian was focused on Deet. She still wasn't lucid, but the dark purple veins on her skin seemed to be fading.

"Deet?"

She faced him. He couldn't quite tell if she recognized him, until she opened her mouth and let out a single word.

"Rian."

"I'm here," he said, moving toward her.

She didn't move. Her mouth opened again, but this time it wasn't a word that escaped. Instead, a wisp of what looked like purple smoke escaped her lips.

The smoke became thicker, billowing out if her mouth, her nose, her ears.

Rian could only watch as she was overcome.

"Deet, no," he pled, before his own breath hitched. He coughed. Looking at her, he felt his body's capability to breathe break down. His coughing turned to choking. As Deet became consumed by the smoke, Rian, unable to find air, collapsed beside her, both unconscious to Thra.

***

Thra had turned to mist. Rian looked around. Wherever this was, it wasn't That.

"Where am I?" he said aloud.

Deets ears perked up. She turned and saw nothing but mist, but she could feel him.

Rian.

It didn't seem possible.

"Rian?" she called.

"Deet? Deet, is that you?"

Her heart swelled.

"I can't see you," she said. "I can't see me…"

She reached out the the direction of his voice. The mist swirled. Was that a shadow? Were her eyes (did she still have eyes?) playing tricks on her?

"Say something, Rian," she called out. "Please."

"I'm right here." His voice was like a salve on her battered soul. He was close now, she could feel it. She could feel everything -- his fear, his relief, his embrace, which she returned with everything she had.

She couldn't feel him in a physical sense, but it was every bit as real as their embraces before. Maybe more real. She didn't wonder if she was imagining an affection that wasn't there. It was love.

Her feeling of bliss was interrupted by the memory of his face, the last thing she'd seen with her own eyes as the Darkening engulfed her.

"Wait," she said. "Rian, what did you do?"

There was a pause. "I don't… I don't know…"

"You're not supposed to be here," she said, in confusion. She didn't know if she was dead, but she suspected she -- now they -- existed in some kind of oblivion space.

"Are we dead?" he asked. There was no fear or sadness in the question.

"I don't know."

"Hm." Rian considered. "It's not so bad."

"What did you do?"

"What makes you so sure I did something?"

"Rian."

Moments passed.

"I was following you in the forest," he said. "You were… gone. But you still wandered. I didn't want to let you out of my sight."

"What did you do?"

"I was hungry. All I had left was some of that moss from Grot."

"So you ate the moss."

"Yes. And I started to glow, just like you showed me."

"I've eaten that moss all my life. It's not poisonous. Even to a Stonewood."

"And then, I remember -- then you started to glow."

"So you had given me some?"

"No, I didn't."

She paused. "Like the creatures that live in the trees," she said.

"What creatures?"

"They were connected."

Chapter Text

Deet awakened with a gasp. She looked around in desperation. It was dark. Something lurched and churned above her.

"Where am I now?" She asked. He eyes adjusted quickly. She turned, and, to her relief, Rian was laying next to her on a makeshift cot. He looked peaceful, and almost different somehow. Before she could reach out to stir him awake, his eyes opened in a jolt, meeting hers.

He gasped. "Deet? Are you there?"

It took her a moment to remember that his eyes would see nothing but darkness.

"Of course I am," she said, moving close and placing her hand on his arm.

He sighed and looked down, placing his hand on hers. They were both strikingly conscious that they could touch.

He blinked quickly, turning his gaze upward. "What is that sound?"

They stood up together.

She looked up. "I see… circles. Like the suns, but not bright. Moving."

He thought for a moment. "Like… Mother Aughra's observatory?"

"I don't know."

He turned toward her, barely making out her silhouette in the darkness.

"Do you see anyone else?" he asked.

She turned and looked around. "Not that I see."

She turned back and faced him, closer now.

"Do you see a door?"

She didn't look around this time. "No."

"No? Are you sure?"

She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek.

"I missed seeing your face, Rian," she said softly.

He smiled. "I'm still… mostly… missing seeing yours." He brushed his thumb against her lips, causing a tiny sigh to escape them.

"Can I --"

"Yes," she whispered.

He pressed his lips against hers, lightly at first, then, after a breath, deeply.

The system churned above them. Then, a new sound emerged from the darkness.

A voice.

"Gelfling? Awake?"

They broke their embrace and faced it. With a flash, a small flame settle into a flicker on a candle, illuminating Aughra.

"Mother Aughra," Rian said.

She held the candle up so she could see them.

"Can't leave Gelfling alone for…" she looked around. "Can't leave Gelfling alone."

"That sounds about right," Rian said under his breath.

Deet sighed, and shook off her embarrassment. "Where are we?" she asked.

Aughra held the candle up, as a metal sphere glided by above it.

"Mother Aughra's observatory," she said.

"Oh," said Deet. "Oh! You were right, Rian!"

"Why did you bring us here?" Rian's voice turned forceful, but inquisitive.

"Hmph," Aughra huffed. "Only to care for you. Only to bring you back to Thra," she said. "No thank you necessary. Hmph!"

"We're sorry!" Deet said, following her as she began to retreat.

Aughra stopped.

"Thank you, Mother Augra," she said, solemnly, bowing her head slightly.

Rian stepped forward. "Where are our friends? Where is Gurjin?"

Aughra shrugged. "don't know."

Deet gasped. "Hup?"

Aughra shook her head. "Don't know."

"Brea?" Rian asked.

Aughra paused. "Ah, Brea," she said. "Brea took the Shard of Truth to gather the Darkening. After you two set it free."

***

Aughra rooted through her library. "It's got to be here somewhere…"

Rian followed her every step, frustrated. "What do you mean, Brea took the Shard to gather the Darkening?"

As Deet looked on, Aughra picked up book after book, scroll after scroll, throwing each down like garbage.

"It must be here."

"What are you looking for?" Deet asked. "Can I help?"

Rian huffed. "She's not looking for anything, Deet," he said. "She's just trying to avoid our questions."

"This one!" Aughra exclaimed. "You're not ready for this one."

"What does that even mean?" Rian said.

"Some things have to happen naturally," Aughra said. She flipped through the pages.

"You read ancient languages?" Aughra asked.

"No," Rian said. He looked at Deet. She shook her head no.

"Good," Aughra said. She handed Rian the book. "Take this and…" she turned around, her eye darting around the shelves.

"Now where is that map?"

Rian started to open the book. Aughra turned quickly and slapped it shut in his hands. "Didn't say open it!"

Deet wandered over to the corner, where a narrow scroll leaned against the wall. Not wanting to have her fingers slapped by Aughra, she simply pointed at it.

"Is this the map?"

Aughra turned. "Ah! It is!"

She picked it up and unrolled it, nodding. "Yes, yes. This is what you need."

"What is it a map of?" Rian asked.

Aughra rolled it up again. "Parts unknown."

Deet blinked. "How can there be a map of a place that's unknown?" She asked.

"Oh." Aughra glanced at Rian. "She's the clever one. She'll carry the map."

She handed the scroll to Deet and stepped back, looking at the two of them.

"Now you can go," Aughra said.

"Go?" Rian said. "Go where?"

"Well, where do you think?" asked Aughra.

Rian sighed in frustration. He looked at Deet, who appeared to be considering the question.

"I'm not playing this game," he said, seeing the book down on a shelf. "Let's just go."

Deet gasped and picked up the book quickly, her eyes never leaving Aughra, who seemed nonplussed by Rian's reaction.

"Wait, Rian --"

She wasn't following him.

He stopped.

"We should at least hear her out!"

Aughra shrugged.

"What we should be doing is looking for Brea," he said. "We still don't know what happened to her and the crystal, we don't know where our friends are -- we have a book we can't read and a map of a place that doesn't exist!"

"Well," Deet said, "Brea can read almost anything, maybe if we found her, she could tell us what the book says."

"Hm," Aughra chimed in. "Eventually."

"It makes sense," Deet said, stepping toward Rian. "Everything so far has been about you and me and Brea."

Chapter Text

A book, a scroll, and some dried rations were all they had as the left Aughra's observatory.

They didn't know where Brea was, but Ha'rar seemed the right place to start. Vapra preferred to stay close to home. Especially princesses.

They walked quietly, breaking occasionally for a drink, as they followed the brightest star for a full day, until the three suns started to set.

It wasn't an uncomfortable quiet. They had come to a point where they didn't need to talk all the time. Sometimes, the silence felt more intimate.

When they came across the clearing, it seemed almost too good to be true -- a mossy patch, some dry wood for a fire.

"I think this is the place," Rian said. He looked at Deet.

"It's just right, " Deet said. She sighed and looked into the forest. She could just glimpse the mountains through an opening between the trees. Sometimes she still stood in awe of the beauty of Thra's topside.

She paused, her ears twitching. The forest was beautiful, but much too quiet.

When she had first set foot topside, next to the sunlight, the sheer number of living creatures surrounding her everywhere she looked was the most overwhelming. She had thought Grot was brimming with life, but it was nothing compared to the surface.

And yet, since leaving Mother Augra’s, she hadn’t so much as seen a skitterer cross her path. The sound of squealers and flycatchers in the trees had nearly given her a sensory overload at first, and now, even if she tried, she couldn’t hear them.

If Rian noticed, he hadn’t said anything. He was focused and determined, partly on the task they’d been given, but mostly — it made her flush just to think about it — on her.

She watched him light the fire effortlessly while chewing on a piece of rusk — the same stuff he’d declared inedible when Augra had given it to them the day before. He was barely the same Gelfling he’d been when she’d first seen him looking lost and alone in the woods.

She looked down at her hands. Had she changed as much, too? Part of her felt exactly the same as the happy young nerloc herder who’d never been above ground.
Part of her didn’t remember what is was like to be her at all.

Rian stood, dusting his hands off on his trousers. Deet was still standing in the same spot she had been since they’d gotten there. He noticed how still she was, almost as if she was dreamfasting by herself.

It happened sometimes. She had been through a lot. They both had. When he saw her like that, he was torn between wanting to share her trauma and wanting to be the one to make her forget about it.

He approached her quietly. "Are you Ok, Deet?" he asked in a low voice.

She turned toward him with a smile. "Of course. Was I acting strange?"

He shook his head. "No." He reached out to her as he moved closer and took her hands in his. She smiled lightly and squeezed them, her dark eyes gazing up at him.

"I worry that I could lose you again," he said.

She slipped her arms around his waist and laid her head on his shoulder. He waited for a verbal assurance that he never would, but it didn't come. He knew it wasn't something she could promise.

They stood in that embrace until the last sun set and the moonlight bathed them.

Deet kissed him, finally, and he returned it enthusiastically, cupping her face in his hands. No one was going to walk in on them now.

She pulled back slightly, her cheeks and lips flushed, a hand on his chest.

"Your heart's beating fast," she whispered.

He was hoping she thought his arousal was a good thing, but he couldn’t quite tell.

"Maybe we should stop," he suggested.

Her lips hovered close to his.

"Why would we do that?"

It was a sincere question, not teasing. Rian didn't have an answer. He kissed her again, his fingers undoing her dress for the first time.

***

Daybreak on the surface was something Deet was sure she’d never get used to. The sky turned every color imaginable as the first sun breached the horizon — some mornings pinks, some green, some orange. This morning, the sky had it all — lavender clouds and coral streaks, hues of turquoise and gold.

She nudged Rian lightly. “Isn’t it incredible?”

She looked at him. She’d known him to be a light sleeper, eyes open at the slightest sound. This morning was different. He was soundly asleep, looking more content than she’d ever seen him.

She tucked her throwover around him and pulled herself in close so it covered them both. They were both still unclothed. She had no real urge to put her clothes back on, even though she was wide awake. She nuzzled him under the blanket for awhile, and took advantage of the chance to look at his body for the first time.

He stirred and draped his arm across her, and settled back into sleep. The sky was settling into blue now, as early morning became daytime.

She shifted, and realized that her shoulder was lying on the book Mother Augra had given them. She pulled it out carefully, making sure not to stir Rian.

The cover was ornate, but she couldn’t decipher it. She opened it and started to page through, her finger stopping on a familiar symbol.

***

Rian opened his eyes as Deet shifted, her attention fixed to Aughra's book. She was still unclothed from the night before, as was he, the thin but surprisingly soft throwover she carried barely covering them.

The memory of their first night together -- really together-- came back to him. It had been intense, to say the least. He'd had his share of sexual experiences in the Guard. Spending hours on alert doing nothing would lead to that. He'd had experiences with other guards, both female and male -- pleasurable, but there was always an invisible line between recreational sexual activity and mating. There had been no such line with Deet. No fear, no shame, no guilt.

He'd thought about it with Mira -- she was the first one he'd considered crossing that line with, but the rules of the Guard were strict, and he knew that he was expected to return to Stone-in-the-Wood to find a wife in just a few months. Mira was Vapra. Stonewoods married Stonewoods, and that was that. Mira accepted it.

Looking back now, he was angry at himself for ever agreeing to go through with that marriage.

It had kept him awake many nights, wondering if he could feel for his future wife what he'd felt for Mira. And yet, he never thought of a different path.

He looked at Deet, focused on the book as she absentmindedly stroked the arm he’d draped over her.

When he'd thought of his path, never in a million trine had he expected Deet.

She sighed, her breasts rising and falling. His eyes fell on them and stayed there for a few moments. It had been dark when their clothes had come off. He didn’t blame himself for looking.

He blinked, finally.

"How long have you been awake?" he asked her.

Deet shifted her focus toward him and smiled.

"Oh, not too long," she said. "You slept so soundly, I had to check you were still breathing."

He smiled and shifted, pulling her closer. "It was a good night."

She settled into his embrace and kissed him lightly. Muscles in her thighs she didn't know she had were sore.

She wished they could stay like that all day. She knew they shouldn’t, but she didn’t want to be the voice of reason.

“I feel like this is home,” she said.

Rian glanced around. “This forest?”

“The forest, the plains, the mountains,” she said contentedly. “If I’m with you, it’s home.”

Rian nodded slowly, nuzzling her hair. He’d lost the only home he’d even known, his ancestral home, and his father in a short span of time. Lost without a family. And now, he had a home and family in Deet, and she felt it too.

He reached back and unfastened the clip from his hair. He held it in his palm, a quiet presentation. He’d thought about doing it before more than once, but this seemed like the moment.

“I want you to have this,” he said.

Deet sat up and looked at him, looking a bit confounded.

“It was my mother’s,” he said. “It’s not much.”

He gauged her reaction. Had she been a Stonewood, she would know what such a gesture meant instantly. But the Grotten’s culture and traditions were almost always different from what he was used to.

She blinked. “Your mother.” Deet said. “You’ve never told me about her.”

He paused. This was probably one of those times. “I don’t have many stories about her to tell,” he said. “She made me happy." He paused. "She made my father smile.”

Deet had only seen Ordon for a few moments before he had been taken, but her sense was that he hadn't smiled in a long time.

Rian ran his fingers through an unbraided part of her hair, pulled it back loosely, and clipped the clasp to her.

She touched the clip and shook her head. “No,” she said. “This belongs to you. A memory of your mother.”

“It’s ours now,” he said tenderly, catching her eyes. “And I want you to wear it.”

She blinked back tears. “Ours,” she said, understanding. “I like that.”

She thought for a moment. It hadn’t occurred to her to make a symbolic gesture to acknowledge the bond she shared with Rian. She’d considered him her life partner ever since he’d come to her when she’d been consumed by the darkening. Maybe even before, if only to herself. But the exchange seemed to mean a lot to him. A consummation, not unlike giving themselves to each other physically.

She looked at him. “But I have nothing for you,” she said.

Rian didn’t hesitate. “There’s nothing more that I could want,” he said. He put his arms around her as she lay her head on his shoulder.

After a moment, Deet had an idea. "Oh,” she said, “I know!"

She pulled the binding out from the back of Rian's hair and let it fall. She pulled a small section out the side and ran her fingers through it.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"A Grottan braid," she said, her fingers moving quickly. He held still while she worked.

Deet had spent years mastering the technique — Grottens wore plaits similar to those worn by Stonewood, Vapra and Drenchen, but this technique created a finer, hollow braid that was rarely seen topside. She only wore one in her own hair, meticulously done by her father. Once it’s done, tradition says it’s never to be removed.

It took some time, but she was satisfied with her work when she was done. She leaned back.

"There," she said. Now you have something from my family. From Grot."

Rian smiled.

Chapter Text

It didn’t take long for the days to start to blend together. Traveling a long distance on foot would do that. Days were mostly the same -- walking, eating, sex, and sleep.

Walking, though, was the part that took up the most time, a necessary labor. Sometimes they talked while walking, sometimes they didn’t.

Even when they did talk, it was rarely about why they were walking, where they were going, or what they expected to find when they reached Ha’rar. If she mentioned it, Rian would turn it into stories about the past, not the future, usually about Gurjin. Deet enjoyed the stories thoroughly — she couldn’t believe they’d managed to get away with so many shenanigans in the Crystal Castle. It reminded her of where he came from and how far he’d come, and it made her realize that the stories she’d grown up with of the brave Crysta Guards were really about just regular Gelfling.

Rian and Gurjin were brave, of course. But to hear the stories compared to what she’d seen them do after freeing themselves from the Skeksis, being members of the Guard had nothing to do with it.

Then, inevitably, she’d tell a story about Hup. Usually one he’d heard a hundred times. He always laughed as if it was the first time.

Still, Deet thought about what was to come often.

"I found something interesting," Deet said suddenly, one day while they were taking a break from walking. She was holding the book Aughra had given them.

Rian eyed the book suspiciously. “In there?”

She nodded, and opened the book to a random page. After a moment, she pointed to a symbol.

"That's the ancient symbol for Grottan," she said.

Rian looked over her shoulder and nodded. "Hm."

"And this," she said, pointing to the symbol next to it, "I think this is the ancient symbol for Stonewood."

It looked familiar to him. "I think I've seen it on the wall of the temple in Stone-in-the-Wood."

She looked up at him.

"Every time I see these symbols, they're together," she said. "Like it's one word." She flipped a few pages ahead and quickly found them again. "And they're everywhere."

"So?"

"So, that must mean something."

“It.... could mean anything."

Deet sighed. "But Mother Aughra gave this book to us. You and me. Don't you think it might be about us?"

"No."

"She said we weren't ready --"

"It's not about us," he said. His voice was calm, but firm. "That's impossible. We're just supposed to deliver it to Brea."

"But that's not what she said."

"Deet." He sighed. "The prophets didn't write about you and me thousands of trine ago."

She blinked. "Well, they prophesied that you would take up the dual glave."

"They prophesied that a Gelfling would," he said. "I just volunteered."

She shook her head. "No," she said. "Your father wielded the same glave," she said. "That wasn't coincidence."

"Yes it was," he said.

Deet was confused. After everything that had happened, how could he not believe the Prophecies?

"Why does this upset you?" she asked.

Rian took a swig from his wineskin and didn’t respond.

"Rian?"

He sighed. "Just -- when I escaped the castle, I thought maybe for once I could not be controlled," he said. He turned his eyes to her. "I was cast out with nothing, but I made a choice. And when I met you, and…"

Deet looked into his eyes. "And what?"

He paused. "I was told what my life was supposed to be, and it wasn't you."

She nodded, looking hurt.

"No, but…" he touched her chin. "I decided that you would be. I made a choice."

"You didn't choose the people you cared about before? Not Gurjin? Not even Mira?"

He flinched. He tried not to talk about Mira with Deet, out of fear that Deet might feel jealous of her. Yet Deet said her name without pause or the slightest hint of resentment.

He took a deep breath. "If… everything... hadn't happened, I would have married someone else. A Stonewood. I didn't get to choose Mira, because she wasn't one.”

Deet’s eyes turned sad with empathy.

“But then I was free and I met you, and I chose you." He picked up the book. "But if this book prophesied us, then we haven't really chosen, have we?"

Deet shook her head. "That's not how it works," she said. "Prophecies don't control us." She searched for words. "When I lived in Grot, I was happy and I never thought I'd fall in love. I had my fathers and brother and the nurloc. I love them all, and that was all I thought I would ever need." She paused. "I believe Thra sent you to me. But that doesn't mean I had no choice."

"Doesn't it, though?"

"Not at all," she said.

“OK, then,” he said. “Then the prophets are just watching us. In their crystal ball or something. All the time.”

Deet considered. “Not all the time,” she said, with an unseasy voice.

Rian started back on the path. “Either way, I don't like it.”

***

The day seemed to have drawn on forever, but it the suns weren’t low enough yet to justify setting up camp for the night.

Rian shook his wineskin.

“Only a few drops left,” he said. He offered it to Deet.

Deet took the skin, but didn’t drink. Instead, she listened, her ears perking.

“There’s water near here,” she said.

She handed the skin back to him. Rian watched as she wandered away from him in the wrong direction.

He sighed. “The brightest star is that way,” he called.

She turned. “Yes, but the river is this way,” she said.

He followed her. He trusted her. If she said there was water that way, she was probably right. And they couldn’t go much longer without it.

She disappeared into the thicket. He looked around.

“Deet?” he called. “Where are you?”

“Over here!” she called.

As he followed her voice, the sound of moving water started to fill his ears. He pushed through to a clearing to find Deet facing a river, bouncing on her heels in joy.

“See?” she said. “I told you!”

It was a relief. Rian pulled the cork out of his wineskin and swallowed the last bit of water before approaching the river’s edge. He submerged the skin to fill it.

Deet had other ideas.

She pulled off her dress, and then her underdress, and waded into the river.

“Deet, what are you doing?”

“I need a nice cleanse,” she said. She dove underwater, her backside appearing before she disappeared under the water.

Rian straightened, his eyes following where she’d been.

“Deet?”

Alarmed when she didn’t come up right away, he dropped the skin and started following her into the river without even taking off his boots.

After a few moments, she popped up meters away from where she’d gone under.

He sighed and walked back to the edge, realizing he’d just rendered his boots unwearable for at least a couple of hours.

“We don’t have time for this,” he said under his breath.

“Come in, Rian,” she called. “We’ve been walking and walking and walking. A swim will make you feel so much better.”

He sat on a rock and pulled off his wet boots. “I doubt it,” he said, but he knew it was true.

Deet noticed his wet trousers and laughed. “You’re supposed to take off your clothes first, you know!”

She turned and swam away gleefully. She loved to swim. Back home in Grot, water flowed through underground waterways, from nearly still pools to winding rivers and falls. Feeling the water flow across her body and through her hair made her feel like her old self.

She felt something brush against her side. Before her imagination could conjure a nightmarish underwater sea creature, she realized it was was Rian.

He caught his breath. She’d swum halfway into the river.

“I didn’t know you could swim,” he said.

She laughed. “Why wouldn’t I know how to swim?”

He reached for her hand under the water. She looked exuberant, more in her element than she seemed in the forest. The feeling was contagious. Life had been a confusing and honestly terrifying for some time now. But it was also, in a way, the happiest time of his life, when he remembered to embrace it.

They were newlyweds, after all.

Deet put her arms around his neck and wrapped her legs around his waist. She drank in the scene. “Isn’t it lovely?” she asked.

He nodded, and brushed a strand of hair from her face, not taking his eyes off her.

“Beautiful,” he said.

Deet clicked her tongue in mock embarrassment. She pushed off his shoulders and swam away.

He sighed and followed. He was a good swimmer, too. As a child in Stone-in-the-Wood, all childlings were taught to swim, tossed into the river that bordered the village under close supervision until they were able to tread water on their own. That way, if a childling wandered to the river's edge and were to fall in, they could swim to shore.

It wasn't a skill he had used often. Guards had communal showers and rarely left the Castle. The last time he'd had a swim it was for survival, after he'd jumped from the Castle tower to escape the Skeksis.

He shook off the memory and came up for air to see Deet pointing to something with excitement.

"Look, Rian," she called. "A waterfall!"

He looked. He'd followed her into a cove, with a waterfall sat surrounded by flora.

The water in the cove was shallow, less than waist deep.

Deet walked up to the waterfall.

"Be careful, Deet," he said.

She reached a hand into the falling water and smiled. She looked back at him.

"Come on," she said.

"What?"

Before he could stop her, she jumped and disappeared into the falls.

"Deet?"

As he made his way to the falls, a hand -- Deet's hand -- extended through the falling water.

Rian hesitated. He’d never been this close to a waterfall, let alone even consider jumping into one. He looked up. The top of it was about three times taller than he was. Not huge, and the flow wasn’t especially strong.

Deet’s hand waved about, motioning for him to take it.

After a moment, he took it. It one swift motion, he was pulled through the sheet of water and found himself next to Deet in a cavern behind the falls. He looked around, stunned, though he didn’t know what he’d expected. He peered out through the water, its sound muffled but vibrating through the ground beneath him. He could see that it was daytime on the other side, but little sunlight streamed in.

Deet knelt beside him, a smile across her face, her wings unfurled.

“Isn’t it breathtaking?” she asked, her voice pitched loud enough to hear.

Rian pushed his wet hair out of his face. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

He paused and looked around at the cavern walls. Actually, he had seen something like it. “It reminds me of Grot a bit,” he said.

Deet smiled at him. “Me, too.”

They sat in silence for several minutes. Rian started to shiver. It was a warm day, but the cavern was markedly cooler. Deet didn’t seem bothered.

“Come here,” he said, pulling her close. She was quick to face him, arms around his neck, her body pressed against his, her forehead touching his.

He quickly forgot about the chill. Her wings lifted and lowered as her leg hitched around his waist.

“Hold on to me,” she said.

He looked at her with wonder and trepidation as she lifted him from the cavern floor.

When Deet was spontaneous, she was very spontaneous.

Chapter Text

It had been two days, and Rian and Deet were still camped by the river, the brief detour becoming a respite where nearly all focus on the task they were given was lost.

Rian had feared it would happen the minute Deet had taken that carefree dive into the river. Once he let go and followed her, he began to feel like himself again, and hated what he was becoming -- a stern and focused adult, instead of the impulsive and fun adolescent who always found a laugh, even when trusted with serious work as a Castle Guard.

He never thought he'd ever have that much of his father in him. 

Rian missed his father desperately and mourned the fact that their relationship had mended only moments before it was ripped away forever. But he didn't want to turn into him. 

"Rian?"

Deet's voice cut into his thoughts, and he realized that he was staring through the flames of the campfire into nothingness.

"I think your boots are done," she said as she lay across from him, motioning toward the makeshift contraption he'd put together to dry them over the fire.

The smell of burnt hide filled his nose. "Shit," he said, grabbing them and pounding the embers out on the ground. 

He stuck his hand inside one of the boots. Dry.

"Are they still damp?" Deet asked, shifting to a sitting position and pulling the blanket tightly around herself.

"Yes," he lied. "A little."

"That's strange," she said. She didn't believe him for a minute. 

"Well, I learned my lesson about wet boots," he said. He wasn't sure why it was so hard to tell her he needed this break.

Deet poked at the fire with a stick. "I like it here," she said. "It feels right."

He blinked. That was exactly how he felt. 

"I still think we should go back to Grot after this is over," he said. "It's not like we can raise --"

He stopped himself from saying the next words -- a childling -- as Deet straightened, her eyes wide. They both knew there were signs that one was coming -- her appetite had increased notably, her sense of smell had become unusually acute -- but neither had said a word. It was too soon. Speaking of it now tempted the fates.

Deet stood abruptly. "I think I'll go hunt for moss," she said, hastily pulling on her dress.

She looked nearly in a panic.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Yes, he thought, I’m definitely feeling like my old self again.

Deet sighed as she trudged the forest looking for moss. She hated the taste of forest moss, and forest roots, and most forest berries, but they needed to eat, and it was, she figured, her fault they were almost out of rations.

She looked back at the camp, where Rian sat by the fire, staring into it as he did sometimes. He'd seemed to not notice her new eating habits, but his near slip betrayed him. He'd noticed, and he was thinking about how they would raise a childling when their task was done. She hoped he wasn't thinking about it too much and getting attached too soon. 

She put her hand on her stomach. She couldn't blame him if he was.

Quickly, Deet turned her attention to the flora -- there was virtually no fauna -- surrounding her. The trees were turning brown. There was no moss, even the prickliest, worst tasting kind. 

She considered flying, but was afraid that she would get lost and become separated from Rian. She looked up. Maybe if she just went straight up, looked around, and came back down again?

As she considered, her foot hit something strange and roundish. Too big to be a berry. Sweet smelling, but possibly inedible.

Rian would know if it was safe to eat.

"It's an alfen," Rian said, with a note of incredulousness in his voice.

"So… edible?"

Rian looked at her " Of course," he said. "It's just a regular sweet alfen. But I wouldn't expect to find these in the middle of the forest."

Deet took a bite out of the fruit and was struck by it's sweetness. It was sublime. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and pointed in there direction she'd found it. 

"There are more that way," she said. "Rows of trees."

Rian followed in the directing she pointed. "Rows of them?" he asked. "You mean, like…"

The forest opened up, only a few meters from the clearing. Neat rows of alfen trees stretched out before them.

"An orchard," he said, in disbelief.

Deet marveled at the sight. "I've never seen trees grow in such straight lines," she said.

Rian looked at her, realizing this was one of those things they didn't have in the Caves of Grot.

"Gelfling planted them like that," he said. "It's a farm."

"Oh." Deet considered. "Well, then there must be houses nearby."

They walked up to the nearest tree. Some of the fruit was rotten and mushy, but plenty was still good. Rian started picking the firm ones. Only a few fit into his satchel.

"Hm, I guess this is why we travel with dried food," he said.

Deet was on her third fruit. "Maybe we can dry these?"

Rian shrugged. "I think that would take too long," he said. "Just take what you can carry."

Deet set alfin pit number three in a crook of the tree and gazed down the row.

"What kind of farm do you think this is?" she asked.

Rian took a bite of fruit. "Alfen?"

Deet laughed. "No, I mean, is it Stonewood? Spriton? I know it's not Grottan…"

"Oh," he said. "Well, we've been walking toward Har'rar. I'd say Vapra."

"A Vapran orchard," Deet said, as if to herself. Suddenly it seemed a bit more fancy to her.

Rian walked ahead of her down the row. He had all he could carry, but he took note of how many good fruit was left on the trees. "Maybe this is the place," he said, turning to face Deet. 

"Hm?"

"Maybe this place feels like home because it is. There's food here, there's water, it seems safe."

Deet looked around. "If it's so safe, where are the gelfling?"

Rian shrugged and kept walking. 

"And anyway, what about Brea? Why are you acting like we don't have an important job to do?"

Rian stopped. 

Deet stopped too, a few steps behind him. At first, she thought he was cross with her and was about to turn to her and tell her she sounded like a nag, something she suspected he thought -- but had never verbalized -- whenever she reminded him that they were on a mission.

“Look,” he said.

Deet looked. Not far from the end of the rows sat a small farm cottage. It was tidy, but looked as if it had seen better days. 

They looked at each other in silence. They hadn’t seen a sign of civilization, or even a wild animal, since they’d left Augura’s. It was almost as if a bubble burst and they were suddenly facing reality. 

Rian reached for Deet’s hand and squeezed it.

“Should we go see?” he asked.

Deet looked hesitant. She’d seen things, terrible things in visions brought on by the Darkening. She had told Rian about them on rainy nights when they huddled together under a palima leaf, struggling to stay dry. Sometimes, when a vision struck her suddenly and Rian would comfort her, she would dreamfast with him. The images, which were not her own memories but something else, were unclear to him, but left him with the same feeling of dread. 

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Do you have a feeling something happened here?”

“Do you?” she asked back.

Rian shrugged. “I think we should go see. If there are gelfling there, maybe they can help us the rest of the way.”

Deet nodded. She gripped his hand as they walked toward the cottage. It felt like the whole journey was about to change.

The cottage was perfectly intact, but as they came close, it became clear that something had happened here. The ground was disheveled, with what could be called a ditch dug into the ground between the orchard and the cottage.

“What in Thra could have done this?” asked Deet, as they crossed it. “Arathim?”

Rian shook his head. “No,” he said. “Whatever did this was much bigger than the biggest arathim.”

“Bigger than the biggest arathim?” Deet said, trying to comprehend.

The door to the cottage was ajar. Rian looked at Deet. She nodded for him to knock. He was sure no one was there to answer, but he did it anyway.

“Hello,” he called. “We’re gelfling. We’re safe.” He paused. “My name is Rian.”

Deet glanced at him. “And I’m Deet,” she called. 

They paused, waiting for an answer that didn’t come.

Rian pushed the door lightly.

“What are you doing?” Deet asked.

He turned to her. “It’s open.”

“We can’t just go into someone’s home!” 

Rian sighed. He had wanted to hope that there would be gelfling there, but deep down he knew they were gone, and most likely drained by now. Deet knew it, too, he knew she did, but she appeared to refuse to consider it. 

“We’re low on supplies,” he started --

“You want to steal from them?”

They faced each other in the doorway. 

“Deet.”

She shook her head.

“Deet, they’re not coming back.”

“You don’t know that.”

Rian shrugged, and peered through the crack between the door and the frame. “Well,” he said. “Maybe someone’s in there, hurt.”

Deet crossed her arms. Rian was almost definitely right, of course. The gelfling who had lived there were not coming back. She glanced at the gashes in the ground only meters away, the unidentifiable, impossible tracks. The possibility that they might find an injured gelfling inside the cottage seemed remote, but the idea was hopeful. 

She adjusted her pack, nearly overflowing with alfen fruit. 

“OK,” she said, finally.

Rian pushed the door open with his foot. Deet noticed he’d put his boots back on while she’d been foraging. Maybe he, too, sensed that it was time to move forward, as much as his words said he wanted to stay in place.

The door opened into a sitting room. It was modest -- more modest than Deet imagined any Vapran home -- and looked so cozily lived-in it made her uncomfortable. A flute and a sanza were laid on a painted footstool near a pair of cushioned wooden chairs.

She imagined a Vapran couple sitting next to each other, playing a song. She could almost hear it. 

The stove had gone cold, but a pot of broth still sat on top. Empty bowls sat on the supper table.

“They were getting ready to have a meal,” Deet said. She grasped Rian's arm.

Rian looked around in silence. It was different from his childhood home in Stone-in-the Wood, yet eerily similar. His mind conjured an image of his own mother at the stove, smiling and stirring the broth. 

“Father will be home soon.”

He shook it off. 

Deet exhaled, still holding onto him. She had seen it, too.

“She was beautiful,” she said, staring at the spot where the memory of Rian’s mother had stood. “You’ve never shown me her face before.”

“I couldn’t remember it before,” he said.

The pantry was far from bare, but for a farmhouse, it seemed to have only what they might need immediately with nothing stocked up -- a few roots and nuts, a small bag of grain, and, to Rian’s relief, a sack of dried sweet alfen fruit. He debated to himself whether he should take the grain, which would need preparation to eat. 

Deet wanted nothing to do with Rian’s looting, even if the Vapran family wasn’t coming back. She inspected every item in the sitting room -- the drawings of smiling silver-haired gelfling, the tiny animals carved from wood, the painted nutshells and woven cushions. She wanted to keep every object she saw, desperately, but it felt much too sacred. A shrine of sorts. 

“Well,” Rian said, entering the room from the pantry, “We have enough here to last us a while, at least.”

Deet was sitting on the floor, looking up at him with a combination of disapproval and relief. 

“What do we do now?” she asked.

Rian tossed her a bit of dried sweet alfen. “Finish our way to Har’rar.”

She looked at the leathery strip of fruit and took a bite. Sublime.

“If Har’rar’s even there anymore,” she said. 

“Hey,” he said, offering her his hand and pulling her up to her feet. “You’re supposed to be the optimistic one.”

By the time they gathered what they had left at the clearing and refilled their wineskins, the sun was setting.

“Maybe we should stay here one more night,” Deet suggested. They’d have to set up a new camp before long anyway.

Rian looked at her. “Or we could go back to the cottage,” he said. “There’s a bed there.”

Deet shook her head. She hadn’t completely accepted the idea that they might not come back at any moment.

“A bed, Deet. One night of comfort.”

She didn’t budge. “I think the ground is very comfortable.”

Rian huffed playfully. “I’m sorry, but it’s daywalker rules. We don’t sleep on the ground when there’s a perfectly good bed at hand.”

Deet cracked a smile. “If they come back, I’m blaming you.”

“If they come back, I’ll show you the Stonewood dance of rejoice,” he said.

The empty cottage seemed creepier in the dark. At least to Rian. To Deet, the darkness made it less creepy and more homey. 

She lit a lamp in the front room and handed it to Rian. The bedroom sat behind the sitting room, unexplored during their earlier visit. 

For such a modest home, the bed looked huge to Deet. 

“It feels strange, sleeping in someone else’s bed,” she said.

“You won’t feel strange when you’re sleeping,” he said, pulling off his boots. 

“OK, well, no sex,” she said.

“What?” Rian looked incredulous. “Why?”

“It’s disrespectful.”

“I... don’t see how.”

Deet climbed onto the bed and pulled her own blanket over herself.

"It will be fun," she said. "It will be like before."

Rian laid back beside her and sighed. "Yeah, that was great," he said flatly.

She slapped his arm playfully. "Remember that night we all paid tribute to the All Maudra?"

His muscles relaxed. "Yeah."

She propped herself up on her side and offered her hand to dreamfast.

He paused for a moment and took it.

Flames swirled between them.

 

“...It's ok, Rian, you can sing for your losses….”

 

“....thank you….”

 

The flames grew, and died down to embers. Only Deet remained.

“I don’t know why you were so nervous,” she said through the dreamfast. 

 

“You were nervous too,” he answered, as the memory took over.

 

"May I sit beside you?"

 

"Oh. Yes."

 

"I hate sleeping outdoors." 

 

"Where do you usually sleep?"

 

"Nowhere. I used to sleep In the Castle barracks.”

 

"What you did was very brave."

 

"It wasn't that brave. I had no choice."

 

"Rian, you always have a choice."

 

"I wanted to thank you…"

 

"For what? I should be thanking you."

 

"For seeing me when no one else did."

 

Gurjin's voice broke in. "That's all very sweet, but we're trying to sleep…."

 

Gurjin was looking at them. And Hup. And Brea.

 

Deet leaned in. "We don't have to talk," she whispered. "We can just… sit."

 

She laid her head on his shoulder.

Deet pulled her hand away gently.

"You know," Rian said, "I was really hoping you would go for a tumble with me that night."

"I know," she said, settling onto her back. "The time wasn't right."

"And now?"

She leaned over and kissed him softly on the lips.

"Goodnight, Rian."

Chapter Text

Sunlight streamed into the room, its brightness stirring Deet awake. She remembered falling asleep on her back, not touching Rian in her determination not to “disrespect” the bed, but she awoke as usual, nuzzled in his arms, her body half-draped over him. 

The angle of the light seemed to suggest that it wasn’t daybreak -- when they’d planned to get back on their journey -- but more like midday. 

She had to admit, the bed had been incredibly comfortable.

She nudged Rian lightly, then firmly when he refused to wake.

“It’s getting late, Rian,” she said. “We have to get up.”

He opened his eyes, then closed them, shaking his head. “Just a little longer,” he mumbled, half asleep. “It’s so nice.”

Deet looked at him with frustration that quickly softened as he curled up against her.

“A little bit longer,” she whispered, and kissed his forehead before climbing out of bed. She, for one, was hungry. 

As she sat up, her eyes caught an object in the far corner of the room. 

“A cradle?” she whispered with a gasp. She looked over at Rian. Sound asleep.

She crept over to it. It was lovely. Someone had spent a lot of time carving it. The blankets and toy fizzgig inside it were painstakingly made, too. Not as soft as a simple nurloc rump blanket, but more beautiful. She could tell by looking at it that it was not unused. The Vapran couple she had conjured in her mind had a childling. A baby.

Deet steeled herself silently. 

“They made it somewhere safe,” she whispered, as if to the cradle itself. “Of course they did.”

She looked back at Rian, curled up in the bed, still sound asleep.

When Rian opened his eyes, it took a moment for him to acclimate. He had not woken up alone since he and Deet had become a couple (how long had it been?), and hadn’t woken up in a real, soft bed since he lived with his mother in Stone-in-the-Wood, before she was taken and he was sent to the Crystal Castle to train to be Guard and follow his father’s footsteps. 

The train of thought sent him into a brief, crushing memory tailspin. He took a deep breath. He was with Deet now. 

He paused, looking at the spot where she had slept beside him.

“Deet?” he called.

“In here!” she replied without missing a beat.

Rian slid out of bed, the smell of the stove and simmering grain hitting him. A residual memory, he figured.

He walked out of the bedroom to find Deet in the kitchen, hovering over a pot on the stove.

He stood for a moment and stared.

“Deet, what are you doing?”

She looked up. “Oh, hello, sleepyhead,” she chirped. “I thought I would cook some of these grains, since you said we weren’t going to take them.”

He nodded slowly. “I didn’t know you cooked,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Well this is actually my first time. We don’t exactly do a lot of cooking in Grot.” She looked over at Rian. “But you know what they say, there’s a first time for everything.”

He smiled and went in to hug her from behind. The contents of the pot looked… interesting.

“You know you don’t have to cook for me,” he said, nuzzling her neck.

“Why would I have to cook for you?” She turned to look at him with genuine confusion. She was famished, and it seemed rude not to make enough for both of them.

He pulled back and shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought maybe when you saw my mother cooking in the dreamfast that… I don’t know.”

Deet considered what he was saying. “Did she not like to cook for you?”

Rian slid into a chair at the dining table. The truth was, he’d never thought about it before. “I don’t think it was that she didn’t like to, it was just...” he paused. “My parents were traditional. We’re not.”

She nodded slowly while stirring the pot. “Both of my fathers made meals,” she said. “Sometimes Bobb’N did too. Which could be a bit of a mess.” She laughed. “One time, he put teema root with orange moss! Can you imagine?”

Rian smiled at her. He didn’t know what either of those things were beyond what he could deduce, so he really couldn't imagine.

“What happened?” He asked.

“Well, what do you think happened?”

He blinked.

“A big orange mess is what.” She pointed her wooden spoon at him. She began carefully spooning her concoction into two bowls. 

Rian straightened himself, preparing himself for the worst.

“I couldn’t find any herbs, so I put in some cut up alfen,” she said. 

He nodded and looked into the bowl. It smelled ok, but it looked awful.

He quickly shoved a spoonful into his mouth. No need to draw things out , he thought. He considered for a moment as he gave it a chew and swallowed it.

“This... is actually lovely,” he said. He wasn’t lying.

Deet smiled and tried some.

They ate together quietly, their eyes meeting here and there. It was a meager meal, the kind gelfling ate near the end of a long winter when the food store was running low, a tastier version of what Castle Guards were served when they were under penalty. But it was magnificent. It was hot and served in a bowl and Rian had the odd realization that they had never really had a proper meal together.

Deet offered him more, and he accepted. He glanced over the kitchen. The house was starting to feel familiar. Warm. He knew that was thanks to the stove, but it was getting harder and harder to think about walking for miles again. 

And with a baby they weren’t speaking of yet on the way.

“Did you see the cradle in the bedroom?” Rian asked, finally, his eyes fixed on his meal.

Deet hesitated over her bowl. “Yes,” she said. “It’s beautiful handwork.”

He nodded. “I’ve been thinking, and I’m sure the Vapran family who lived here made it somewhere safe,” he said.

Deet smiled. “I am too.”

“I know if it were me,” he said, “I’d make sure of that.”

Deet gazed down, her throat hitching. The journey had been more difficult than she’d realized. They hadn’t had a moment of a real life together since they’d found each other, other than the temporary escape coupling during the few restful moments they'd had.

They had tried so hard to do what was asked of them. But coming across the cottage had changed things, she had come to realize. In her mind, she had always imagined covering distances on landstriders, arriving at Ha’rar and being whisked in to see Brea, who would hug them and tell them everything was going to be OK now that the book and the scroll were in the hands of the Maudras. Then she and Rian could return home…

She wiped a tear and stood up. 

"I’m sorry --” Rian started.

“Do you think Ha’rar still stands?” she asked, abruptly.

Rian thought for a moment. If he were being honest, he didn’t understand why they were putting themselves through so much when so little seemed to be left. He resented it. He loved Deet, but at the same time he missed his old life, until he remembered that his old life was a lie and no matter what, nothing would ever be the same. Every day, Thra grew dimmer, the ground dry and cracked, no birds or bugs or critters. 

If Ha’rar stood, it was no longer what it was. If Brea had survived, a musty old book and a faded map weren’t going to do her much good.

“No,” he said.

“Then where are we going, Rian?”

He didn’t have an answer.

They sat in silence for a while, the fire in the stove crackling, the cold, brutal outside world unable to touch them, at least for the moment.

If their journey was futile, she wanted it to end here, in the cottage, and not cold and starved in the woods. She put her hand on her stomach. As if by instinct, Rian placed his hand over hers.

“I want to stay,” she said, finally.

It didn’t take long for domesticated life to set in at the orchard cottage. Days were spent gathering food and wood, eating, and spending copious amounts of time in bed together. But unlike before, they spent time on things that had less to do with survival and instinct -- they would talk by the hearth for hours, and sometimes played music together, just like the Vapran couple Deet had imagined the first day they had set foot into the cottage. 

Rian picked up the sanza easily. He wasn’t a bad lute player at home, and once he figured out which tines went with which notes, he was able to play almost any song he could think of. 

Deet took up the flute, the same kind she’d seen Kylan play. She figured out some simple notes, enough to play along with Rian. As time passed, she became quite good, even creating her own songs.

Soon, there was no more unspeakableness about the fact that a childling was coming. There was no single moment when they began speaking about it openly. It just was, and it felt right. Rian would find himself gazing at Deet as she knelt in the garden, the sun bathing the new curves of her body. The suns didn’t shine as bright as they’d used to, except when they shined on her.

Some days, Rian would go to other nearby cottages behind her back to loot whatever stored food he could find. Deet didn’t ask questions. He kept a close record of what they had and how long it would last. The alfen trees were dying. He didn’t expect another harvest of anything, but the pantry was overflowing with enough food to last at least a trine. 

By then, who knew what their world would be like.

Every day, they would take the small walk to the river to fill two large woven waterskins for drinking, cooking, and, now that it was getting colder, bathing indoors. Rian had stopped trying to insist that he do all of the work himself. She found the suggestion ridiculous.

“I’m carrying a childling, why would I be too weak to carry a waterskin?” she’d asked. The notion that she was somehow more fragile in her current state baffled her completely. She’d never felt so strong. 

Rian couldn’t have disallowed her to do it if he tried. 

They were filling waterskins when they heard it. A bit of a *whoosh,” a bit of a flap, definitely coming from the sky. 

Neither had heard a creature flying above them in ages. It had been so long, the sound was jarring. 

They stared at each other as the water rushed into the skins. 

“Was -- was that a bird?” Rian asked. 

Deet shook her head and pulled the skin strap over her shoulder. “No,” she said, her eyes fixed on the dimming sky. 

It was a sound she knew well. “That was definitely a bat.”

Chapter Text

Brea caught her breath, the crystal shard still warm in her hand.

“It was them!” she called out to anyone who would listen. “They’re alive!”

Rian watched as Deet gathered her things, confused.

“If there are bats out there, that means the fauna is coming back. It’'s a good thing,” he said, as she grabbed their few belongings, along with a couple of found items she didn’t want to part with like the baby blanket and the flute.

She turned to face him. “It wasn’t any bat,” she said. “There was something… unnatural. Something dark, Rian.”

Rian looked over at the food store, sorry that they could only take a small amount. “Did you see something, did you actually see something?” he asked.

Deet checked that the map and scroll were in place, and pulled the satchel over her shoulder. She looked at him incredulously.

“You said you wouldn’t allow what happened to the family who lived here happen to us,” she said. There was no accusation in her voice. She repeated it as a flat fact.

“That family found somewhere safe,” Rian said.

“”No they didn’t,” she said. “We both know they didn’t.”

Rian blinked. Deet had been able to switch from a normal afternoon to a state of emergency so quickly his brain was still catching up.

This was the kind of thing he’d been trained for ever since he’d set foot into the Crystal Castle for the first time.

He remembered his father smiling down at him, telling him he was lucky, that only the most special gelfling are allowed inside. That he would one day have the most important job in the world: to serve the Skeksis and protect the Crystal of Truth.

He remembered catching a glimpse of his father’s fading smile and bowed head as he turned the corner.

“Rian, please.”

Rian’s eyes focused on Deet, her fingers brushing his cheek, her eyes fixed to his. “I need you to be here right now.”

He paused, his mind processing the moment, then nodded.

“Let’s go.”

The first thing Deet and Rian saw as they left the cottage were spira beetles -- first one, then ten, then a steady stream.

“First bats, now bugs?” Rian said, as they picked up the pace. A clicking sort of sound, first faint, now growing louder, seems to flow over the critters.

“How are they so loud?” he yelled.

Deet grabbed his hand as he turned to look, just enough to see them: Large, bug-like creatures with glowing eyes and enormous claws. They were bigger than any arathim he’d ever seen, and moving twice as fast.

They were running now, panic blasting through their veins. Rian tried to keep Deet in front of him. If these creatures were going to take anyone, he thought, it would be him.

In a flash, Deet spun around him and grabbed him around his chest. Before his feet could make another step, they’d left the ground, seconds before a pair of enormous claws would have had him.

Rian looked up at her as she flew. Her expression was hard and resolved, her wings were larger and stronger than he’d ever seen them.

The land below them was flat, with little serving as a safe place to land, until the edge of the Ha’rar mountains came into view.

Rian looked down and the cracked ground far below.

“If you think you can’t carry me that far --”

“We’ll make it,” she shouted, without looking down. “I’m not letting you go.”

Deet steeled herself. It would be a push, she knew. But with every flap of her wings, she felt stronger.

When they touched down on the cliffside, the magnitude of what had happened to Thra came into focus.

To the south, the direction of the Crystal Castle, the ground churned and quaked like a pot of boiling grain. Only it wasn’t ground. It was those creatures, thousands of them.

To the north, they could glimpse Ha’rar, in flames.

“We’re too late,” Deet said quietly staring at the city. Despite the arduous flight, she was barely out of breath.

Rian shook his head and threw his sack to the ground. “No,” he said. “Aughura knew about this, and she sent us out anyway.”

“Mother Auguhra didn’t expect us to stop for so long.”

“Those things got to the cottage before we did,” Rian pointed out quickly. “It wasn’t safe when we left.”

He paused. “Do we even know how much time passed before we woke up?”

Deets eyes widened for a moment. “I never thought to ask,” she said.

They stood in shock and silence. It was still broad daylight. Deet looked around anxiously. The fatigue of carrying her family from the cottage to the cliffside was starting to set in, coupled with the realization that the doom she had prepared for, had tried to avert, may have already happened. After everything. The hopes she’d had for their child was dissipating like the milky smoke rising from Ha’rar.

She took a deep breath.

In one motion, she pulled the map from her pack and unfurled it on the ground.

“Do you really think that old rag is going to help us now?” Rian asked.

“It’s not an old rag,” she said, her eyes following her finger across the parchment. “Mother Aughra gave us this map of parts unknown. Maybe because we can’t stay in parts known.”

“But there’s no map *to* the parts unknown.” he said.

Deet straightened in her kneeling position and looked up at Rian. “Well, it must be somewhere across the Silver Sea.”

He sighed. “Do you have any idea how vast the Silver Sea is? Gelfling have searched the seas for hundreds of trine. Many have been lost --”

“Lost?” Deet stood up.

“Never to be seen again, Deet.”

She nodded slowly. “Or maybe they’ve just never been found,” she said. “Even by the Skeksis.”

Rian’s expression turned to resignation. Then, as his eyes shifted to the distance over Deet’s shoulder, to fear.

“It’s another bat,” he said urgently, “get down.”

Deet dropped to the ground, and looked behind her.

What she saw wasn’t a bat.

“It’s a crystal skimmer, Rian!”

The massive animal glided right toward Deet and Rian, as if with purpose. Behind it, two, three, then four more skimmers came into view.

“The Dousan,” Rian said to Deet as the approached. “Of course. The Dousan survived.”

Deet looked at him. “What are they doing out here?”

As the skimmer came in for a landing on the cliffside, a gelfling slid down one wing and jumped to the ground before them.

His hair was a fiery auburn, unlike any Dousan they had ever seen.

“We are searching for Rian of Stonewood and Deethra of Grot,” he announced, so formally they were taken aback.

Rian stepped toward him. He had known gelfling who looked very much like this one in the Guard, all Sifa, but he didn’t recognize this face. “I’m Rian,” he said. “This is Deet -- Deethra. Who sent you?”

“I am Bi’jan, once Sifa.”

“I didn’t know the Sifa rode crystal skimmers,” Rian said, trying not to sound as if he was suspicious.

“Once Sifa,” said Bi’jan, curtly. “There is no value in dividing ourselfves into clans in these dark days.” He glanced at Deet’s curved belly. “I would think a Stonewood with a Grottan mate would see that.”

Deet huffed, feeling a bit demeaned.

“Who sent you?” Rian asked again.

“High Admiral Brea,” Bi’jan said, his stance easing slightly. “Everyone thought you had been lost.”

“Our Brea?” Deet asked, stepping toward him.

The brush rustled around them as the other skimmers hovered and glided around them.

“We will tell you everything, but we must hurry,” Bi’jan said. “Crystal bats lurk everywhere in the Fallen Territory.”

They climbed on the skimmer quickly, as the other gelfling riders circled.

Rian held on to Deet, partly as protection, partly out of his persistent fear of flying.

“Tell us,” he called to Bi’jan as the skimmer lifted off, “where are we going?”

“Have you ever heard of the Omerya off the coast of Cera-Na?” Bi’jan asked.

Rian nodded. “It’s the largest vessel in Thra.”

Bi’jan laughed. “You’ve seen nothing yet, my friend.”

The crystal skimmers took off over the Silver Sea before taking a turn and gliding through the massive Claw Mountains, beyond the Crystal Desert toward the Sifan Coast.

Deet had never seen anything like it. It was a sight too magnificent for words. The waters sparkled, the mountains were immense and swirled with snow, the desert sand danced.

“You see that?” Bi’jan called back to them, pointing to the sand. “There isn’t a garthim yet that can cross through that!”

“Amazing!” Deet said.

Rian glanced down at the whirling sand just long enough to see without getting dizzy. “What’s garthim?”

Bi’jan looked over his shoulder at them. “What’s garthim?” He turned forward and lowered himself as he steered the skimmer. “It really is a miracle that the two of you are alive.”

The squadron of skimmers climbed and dipped as it made its way toward Cera-Na. Unlike Ha’rar, the Sifan city wasn’t in flames. Neither was its great coral vessel, the Omerya, which sat docked in the city’s port. The skimmers flew toward the vessel in unison, then turned up and over, heading away from the coast.

Rian turned to look back. Cera-Na was the farthest a Stonewood gelfling could get from home, or so he’d been told as a child. And now the farthest place was behind them. It was almost too much to comprehend.

That is, until he saw the Prodigious.

Chapter Text

The Omerya was the vessel to end all vessels, the pride of the Sifa Clan. Rian recalled, when he was little, hearing his father and other Stonewoods talk about its construction, thought to be a folly at best. Who in Thra, they said, do the foolish Sifa think is a threat to them? Good riddance to them, they said. Let them disappear into the sea if they want to. And then, in lower tones: “Perhaps they’re heretics. Perhaps they should be dealt with.”

The thought of gelfling going to war with gelfling sounded appalling to Rian, but he would come to learn as a Castle Guard that the greatest enemy of the Skeksis was the Gelfling who didn’t believe in their benevolence. He hated to admit it to himself, but he would have punished a Sifa or anyone else for heresy if he’d been ordered to. Fortunately (as it were), he himself had become a “heretic” before he was asked to commit atrocities against other gelfling.

Rian had never actually seen the Omerya before gliding over it as Bi’jan whisked them to the place where they would find Brea. It was every bit as impressive as he’d imagined, a coral ship that looked as if it could hold an entire clan.

If the Omerya was a ship, the Prodigious was an island. It had trees and rows of crops and hills, but it wasn’t land. It had been constructed, somehow, out of the same coral as the Omerya, as if the Omerya had been simply a trial run.

Rian tightened his grip on Deet, who sat between him and Bi’jan atop the crystal skimmer.

“How long has that been here?” he called to Bi’jan, who was steering the skimmer toward an open space near a small but impressive-looking citadel.

“The Sifa have known about the end of the age of gelfling for hundreds of trine,” Bi’jan called back. “Some chose to forget. Some chose to find a way out.”

“Prophecies can be changed?” Deet asked.

Bi’jan looked back at her and smiled. “Oh no,” he said. “There was no stopping the eradication of gelfling from the lands of Thra. But this --” he motioned toward the massive coral mass, “this is something else.”

The crystal skimmer ascended gently to the ground, with barely a thud. Once it had landed, streams of gelfling came toward them, from around the citidel and out from nearby caves.

They were cheering.

They heard ‘Thra is saved!’ and ‘The Prophecy will be fulfilled!’ Most disturbing, at least to Rian and Deet, who hadn’t so much as set foot on the Prodigious yet, was “The child lives!”

Rian leaned toward Bi’jan. “What are they saying about a child?” he asked. “What child?”

Deet scanned the faces for familiarity. To her dismay, she didn’t see any family or friends or even any other Grottans. There were Sifa, Drenchen and Spriton, mostly, with a few Stonewood and several Dousan who appeared to be making sure the crowd didn’t get too close to them. Or maybe they didn’t want them to get too close to the skimmer. It was hard to tell.

She remembered the cottage she and Rian had called home just that morning and the pale smoke swirling out of what was left of Ha’rar. She didn’t see any Vaprans among the gelfling.

Suddenly, one familiar face came into view. It was Rek'yr, the Dousan sandmaster who had helped them find the the Circle of the Suns. He extended his hand toward Deet.

“Do you have the text and scroll?” he said, without so much as a greeting.

Deet nodded. She was feeling overwhelmed and more than a little nauseous.

“I’ll take you both to High Admiral Brea,” Rek’yr said.

Rian helped Deet down, ignoring Rek'yr’s hand. “Isn’t ‘high admiral’ a bit formal?” he asked.

“It’s the highest position in Presidious,” said Bi’jan, dropping to the ground beside Rek'yr.

“What about the Maudras?” Deet asked.

“Come,” Rek'yr said, leading them toward the citadel. “They’re waiting.”

Deet positioned her satchel across her stomach and began to follow. She had heard the crowd yelling about a child. She didn’t know if they meant the child she was carrying, but she felt the need to hide it.

The citadel was only a few dozen steps away from where they’d landed, but it seemed much farther. Bi’jan called back answers to questions as he took up the rear behind Rian, Deet and Rek'yr.

“They were near Ha’rar, just like the High Admiral said,” he called. “No. I don’t know. We will all know everything soon!”

There was a bit of a commotion as the door to the citadel opened, and then silence, as the four of them were pushed inside and the door slammed shut.
The inside gleamed, but appeared empty.

Deet and Rian looked at each other. Neither had ever imagined that they would find themselves in a place like this. It suddenly began to dawn on both of them just how very near death they had been. As Rek'yr and Bi’jan chattered about Brea, Deet leaned into Rian’s embrace.

“It’s OK,” he said softly. “We’re OK.”

“Rian? Brother?”

Rian was busy comforting Deet. When he looked up, he could hardly believe his eyes.

It was Gurjin. He looked different somehow, a bit more haggard, but it was definitely Gurjin.

Before he could react, his old friend had scooped him into an embrace.

“I thought it had to be a mistake,” Gurjin said, nearly sobbing. “Oh Thra, I thought you were gone forever.” He pulled back to look at Rian, as if to re-confirm that it was really him.

Rian looked quite the same, but more mature somehow. His hair looked different -- it didn’t cover his forehead, and there were more braids. It was a far cry from his former more traditional Stonewood style. But he hadn’t aged.

“I like it,” Gurjin said. He turned to Deet and gave her a hug. “Lovely Deet,” he said.

Deet had not known Gurjin well, but she felt close to him after so many stories about him by the firelight.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” she said, smiling. She caught his eyes pausing on her stomach. She placed a hand on her belly. “I think it’s coming soon?”

“Wow,” Gurjin said. He gave Rian a fake punch on the shoulder. “Wow. I mean, we all heard the stories, but --”

“What stories?” Rian asked.

“Oh, you know the Once Sifa and their prophecies,” Gurjin said. “They can’t mean Rian and Deet, I said. Not after ten trine.”

Rian blinked. “ten trine?” He turned to look at Deet, who looked just as confused.

Before they could say more, Brea -- the High Admiral -- appeared.

Brea appeared in simple, practical clothing, her hair cut short, just below her ears. It was an unusual look for a gelfling, to be sure, especially one of the Vapra, who so valued their long silver hair, but it became her. She had spent her life a princess, with the trappings of a princess, and through her journeys had come to find trappings unnecessary.

She wasn’t entirely without adornment, though: around her neck hung the Crystal Shard, the most powerful object in all of Thra next to the Crystal of Truth itself. It was the shard that showed her Rian and Deet near Ha’rar, their image having been caught by one of the Skeksis’s crystal bats. Like everyone else, Brea had pretty much given up on finding them, or any other gelfling survivors, in the lands of Thra. Still, she kept the crystal close. It saw what the Crystal of Truth saw. And no one -- no seer nor soothsayer -- had ever had visions of her friends’ deaths.

According to the prophecies, they had to be alive. And so, she had never fully called off the search.

Deet exhaled as she saw Brea. “You look beautiful,” she said, and she meant it. Brea looked like a breath of fresh air in gelfling form.

“You look positively glowing,” said Brea, her steps quickening into an embrace. Brea thought she had cried all the tears she had since seeing them in the shard, but more began to fall. She hugged Rian, and remembered them as the friends she had once had, not as characters in a high stakes game of survival. “I’ve missed you both so much,” she said into his shoulder.

When she pulled back, Rian looked at her inquisitively. “Has it really been ten trine since we defeated the Skeksis?” he asked.

Brea hesitated. “What do you mean?”

“We left Mother Aughra’s no more than seven or eight unum ago.”

Brea looked confused. “She kept you there all that time?”

“It felt like,” Rian turned to Deet. “Didn’t it feel like--”

“It felt like no time had passed,” Deet said.

“I don’t understand,” Brea said. “But we’ll sort it out. Bi’jan will show you to your rooms and get you fed -- you must be absolutely famished.” She motioned to Bi’jan, who looked mildly annoyed to be acting as some kind of butler after he’d been the one to find The Wellspring, as they been referred to by the prophets.

“I didn’t want to assume, so we’ve prepared two rooms,” she said.

The room -- Deet and Rian had accepted just the one -- was comfortable, with a large canopied bed and a table and chairs.

“This is like I imagined a Maudra’s bedchambers were like,” Deet said, touching the canopy. “Well, not Maudra Argot.”

Rian sat on the bed and laid back. “I feel like I could sleep for days,” he said.

Deet sat down next to him. “Me too,” she said. “I have a feeling they won’t let us.”

Rian sighed and sat up. “What’s happening, Deet? How did the gelfling get here?” He thought about the crowd. It had seemed big at the time, but thinking about it now, it was probably no more than two or three hundred gelfling. What if that was all that was left?

"It's as if they think we're going to save Thra," Deet said shaking her head.

Rian turned to her and put his hand on the hand she rested on her stomach. "Not us," he said. "Our childling."

She looked at him tearfully and nodded. She knew.

Brea had knocked three times with no response, and was starting to get worried. Gently, she pushed the door to the room Bi’jan had taken Deet and Rian, afraid she’d find it empty.

“Hello, hello, it’s just me,” she called.

She glanced over at the bed and sighed with relief. They were laying crosswise on the bed, sound asleep, a light snore -- she wasn’t sure from who -- assuring her that they were OK.

She knocked again, this time on the back of the partially-open door.

“Knock knock!” she called, louder this time.

Deet stirred first, opening her eyes and shielding them from the late day sun streaming through the window.

Brea shut the door behind her. “I brought you a change of clothes,” she said, holding up two sets of unassuming-looking clothes.

“Thank you, Brea,” Deet said, sitting up. “But no thank you.”

Rian groaned, the only indication that he, too, was awake. “Just leave them,” he said.

“Oh,” Brea said, stepping toward the table. “Of course.” She laid the garments down and turned toward them. Rian was propped up on one elbow looking at her with annoyance. Deet just looked sad and tired. It was starting to occur to her that they no longer trusted her, and it broke her heart.

“You probably think you have no choice but to be here,” Brea said. “But I would never allow you to be kept here here against your will.”

Rian sat up. “So, we can go back to the place that’s been taken over by massive insects?”

“Garthim,” Brea said. “They’re called garthim. The Skeksis created them to wipe us out.” Her eyes moved from Rian to Deet and back. “Seven trine ago, they succeeded. All except those of us who made it here.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Deet. “Seven trine ago, I was just a girl in Domrak. My brother hadn’t even been born yet.”

Brea paused. “Seven trine ago, three trine had passed from the Battle with the Skesis,” she said. “The one you both fought bravely in. That’s how long it took to eradicate us from Thra, even after I was able to contain the Darkening in the shard.”

“Three trine?” Rian asked.

“Except for you two,” Brea said. “Where were you?”

Rian shook his head. “We were in the woods one minute, the day of the battle.” He paused. “Or it may have been the day after. Two days? Then we woke up in Augura’s observatory and she sent us on some kind of quest with no real goal.”

“She gave us a book and a map,” Deet said. She glanced at Rian. “The goal was to bring it to you, I think.”

Brea smiled. “Well, they’ve been delivered to the right place.”
“Have you read them?” Rian asked.

Brea shifted. “I haven’t had the chance to yet. They’ve been sent to the soothsayer, Onica.”

“Brea?” Deet asked, as her eyes bored into her. “Are they going to take our baby?”

Brea shook her head and approached Deet, still sitting on the bed. She took her hands in hers and lowered herself so that she was looking up at her friend. “Nobody wants to do anything like that,” she said, her voice cracking. “That’s the last thing anybody wants.”

Chapter Text

Admiral Artjan paced in frustration. The once Sifan seafarer had been Maudra Ethri’s unofficial second-in-command. Now that she was gone, he was the highest-ranking once Sifan; Brea, the High Admiral, was the leader of the gelfling refugee vessel, but the vessel had been Sifan. In his mind, that meant he technically outranked Brea, a conceit that had not gone unnoticed on Brea’s part.

“I don’t understand,” said Artjan, “what is the point of the text?”

Onica looked up at Artjan and Brea in frustration. “Well,” she said. “If it hadn’t already happened, it might have been of value.”

“There’s nothing in it about the stand against the Skeksis, nothing about the Garthim war or the Great Exodus.”

“It’s about the Wellspring,” Onica said. “If they recognize the story, then it would have to prove it’s really them.”

Brea huffed. “Well, who else could the prophets be talking about?” she asked. “And how would this text prove anything?”

Onica flipped to the back of the book and held it up for Brea to see. “It ends here.”

Brea took the book and blinked. “Here?”

“Literally here, at the Citadel on the Prodigious.” Her eyes moved from Brea to Artjan. “Yesterday.”

Brea sat at the desk in her quarters and took a deep breath. She opened the book to the first page, a block print of suns and moons being held up by what looked like sticks. She understood it to represent Aughra’s observatory. If you squinted, you could see two tiny figures.

She understood the two figures represented the Wellspring, the mother and father of the one who would heal the Crystal of Truth and bring light back to Thra. She hated thinking of Deet and Rian in such detached terms. They were her friends, two individuals, not a mythical unit.

Still, when the gelfling survivors debated over years -- and they debated a lot -- about the identity of the Wellspring, she knew it was Deet and Rian. She had felt it. In the beginning, she wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but the prophecies left little to doubt or to the imagination. There was but one son of the Stonewood warrior and Crystal Castle Guard, and Deet -- well, any description of Deet wasn’t going to apply to anyone else.

Brea turned the page. The text was ancient and challenging to read, but she had read enough ancient texts that once she started reading it, it started to flow.

It was a very important quest, it said. It would bring them to the Hidden, as they called the Prodigious survivors, at just the right time, and not before. The Wellspring crossed rivers and hills. The text didn’t portray their feelings or points of view, it was simple, matter-of-fact, and, frankly boring. Artjan wasn’t wrong. It did seem pointless.

She read about her friends coming across a mossy patch, and before she could stop herself, she’d read a matter-of-fact description of them having sex.

She slammed the book shut. “Why did I read that?” she moaned to herself. Why in Thra would they need those details? After a moment, she went back and checked to see if the point was that it confirmed that the healer of the Crystal had been conceived.

Nothing. She began to skim ahead, looking for the ancient word for the healer, for an indication that he was created during the quest. Still, oddly, nothing. They seemed somehow mythical, but the pregnancy was written as little more than a footnote.

She closed the book again and threw herself on her bed, exhausted. She sighed as she stared up at the coral ceiling. As what she’d read sunk it, she began to yearn for the companionship Deet and Rian shared. She had put her calling before family, just as her mother had, but at least her mother had children.

Children who inadvertently led to her untimely death, she thought. She covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. Morbid as it was, thoughts like that, the ones that made her darkly happy to be alone, made her feel a bit better.

To Rian’s surprise, he and Deet really were allowed to leave their room and roam freely. There really wasn’t anywhere to go -- as far as one could see on all sides, it was nothing but open sea. He wondered how they could possibly have any sense of where they were in relation to Thra. Even a map of parts unknown seemed like it would be less than helpful.

There was more flora and fauna on the Prodigious than they’d seen on Thra in all of the time since they’d left Aughra’s observatory. A herd of crystal skimmers lived on a part of the vessel made to mimic the desert, minus the sand. There were fizzgig and windsifters and small, shelled sea insects that seemed to be everywhere. The sea was alive with creatures. They watched a group of once Sifan fishers haul in enough fish to feed the entire population of the Presidious for a week, by Rian’s calculations.

A skimmer passed overhead, low enough to see that it was Rek’yr riding it. Deet waved wildly until Rek’yr brought the animal down to their level.

“I know you!” Deet said, approaching the skimmer. “You’re Bennu.” She held her hands toward it in a gesture of greeting. Rian had forgotten her way with animals.

“You remember,” said Rek’yr, smiling.

“Oh, I never forget a face,” Deet said, looking into Bennu’s eyes.

“She’s helped to save many gelfling,” Rek’yr said. He nodded at Rain in acknowledgement of his presence.

Rian nodded back, but his mind was spinning. He had so many questions about this place, the fake desert, the sea bugs. He wanted to know what had happened to the Grottan and Vaprans. Were there any safe places on Thra left? Were there prisoners at the Crystal Castle?

But he kept his questions to himself.

Deet pulled herself away from Bennu and watched as Rek’yr lifted off again with a wave. She turned and faced Rian, all smiles, the breeze catching her dress and hair.

She took his hand. “This place is --”

“-- weird?” Rian said, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes.

“I think it’s kind of wonderful,” she said.

He shook his head. As captivating as he found it, he wasn’t prepared to let his guard down. “We can’t trust anyone,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But they’re gelfling, Rian. They saved us.” She paused. “It’s Brea. And Gurjin --”

“I didn’t say I didn’t trust Gurjin,” he said. “But you have to admit, Brea has changed.”

“She cut her hair.”

“It’s more than that,” he said, puzzled that a little fresh air and animal interaction had seemingly earned her trust. “She believes all of that prophecy rubbish.”

She nodded in thought. “I think,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “at some point you might have to accept that they might be real.”

Brea watched Deet and Rian from the window.

“Do you think we should tell them what it says?” she asked Onica.

Onica looked up from from what she was looking at -- one of the many sketches Brea had taken upon herself to draw based on passages from the book the night before.

“I do,” she said. She held of a sketch of Deet and Rian swimming near a waterfall. “This one is very nice,” she said. “Did you really do all of them last night?”

“Most of them,” Brea said. “The book made it all clearer.”

Onica nodded.

Brea sat down across from her. “What happens to the healer?”

“The childling?” Onica asked. “Well, he will have to be kept safe.”

“And this is the perfect place to keep a child safe,” said Brea.

Onica paused. “It would need to be safer than here,” she said bluntly.

“What’s safer than here?”

Onica sighed. “You know the answer to that,” she said. “And you can’t change it.”

“But what if --”

“Eventually the child will arrive, and they need to be prepared.” Onica got up and walked away, leaving Brea feeling lost.

“Onica,” she called. “Ask them to come in, please.”

Rian crossed his arms as they made their way back into the citadel.

“I feel like I’m being sent to see my father for sneaking out of the barracks,” he said.

“Me too,” Deet whispered. It was one one the many moments of his life she’d dreamfasted. She didn’t really have that kind of frame of reference from her own life.

Brea was waiting for them near the door, looking nervous, her arms wrapped around a stack of loose paper. One of the leaves fell out and floated to the floor.

“I’ve got it,” Deet said, picking it up. Before Brea could say anything, they were looking at the drawing, the same one Onica had commented on with the waterfall.

Rian stiffened. “What in Thra --”

“It’s just a drawing I did,” Brea said, “I can explain --”

“It’s really good,” Deet said.

Rian looked at her. “That’s not the point, Deet,” he said. “We never told Brea about this.”

Brea had planned to take them into the chamber, but the hall was going to have to do. She set down the stack of drawings.

“The book you brought,” she said. “I thought reading it aloud would be a lot to process, especially with the ancient tongue, so I did a few sketches of what it said.”

Deet knelt down and started taking drawings from the top of the pile, looking at them, and passing them to Rian. “All of this was in the book?” she asked, looking shaken.

Brea nodded. “All of it.”

“I don’t believe you,” Rian said. “It’s impossible.”

Deet handed him a drawing of him affixing his hair clip to her hair while she braided his. Although Brea had kept it modest, they were clearly unclothed. He remembered that morning as if it has been yesterday.

He felt violated.

Deet was crying now. She handed him a drawing of the two of them standing in the woods. He was holding the book, looking cross.

She looked up and touched his hand, triggering a dreamfast.

“I was free and I met you, and I chose you. But if this book prophesied us, then we haven't really chosen, have we?"

"That's not how it works. Prophecies don't control us. When I lived in Grot, I was happy and I never thought I'd fall in love. I had my fathers and brother and the nurloc. I love them all, and that was all I thought I would ever need. I believe Thra sent you to me. But that doesn't mean I had no choice."

"Doesn't it, though?"

"Not at all,"

“OK, then, the prophets are just watching us. In their crystal ball or something. All the time.”

“Not all the time.”

“Either way, I don't like it.”

Chapter Text

“Maybe you were right,” Deet said, staring up at the canopy that hung over their bed. “Maybe we didn’t choose. How is it that we had that book with us the whole time, and we didn’t make one decision that wasn’t in it?”

Rian was silent. She turned to look at him to make sure he was awake. His eyes were open, blinking.

“We must have made a thousand little decisions every day,” she said. “Any one of them could have changed everything.”

Finally, Rian broke his silence.

“I was wrong.”

Deet sat up and looked at him. “About the prophesy?”

“No,” he said, then hesitated. “Well, yes. But I think I was wrong that we didn’t have any choice.”

“Oh?”

He propped himself up on his elbow. “I feel if the prophets could control it, why didn’t they warn the gelfling about skeksis rule? Why did they allow it for a thousand trine? Why did they allow Mother Augra to make a deal with them?” He paused. “If you had that power, why would you not stop the decimation of Thra?”

Deet considered. “I think you would.”

“I would,” he said.

They had been talking through it for hours now, with a couple of light naps in between. There was rationalization, denial, and anger. There was paranoia. And now, everything just felt sort of numb.

“Let’s go outside,” Rian said. The suns had risen. He needed to breathe the air and maybe clear his head.

Deet pulled the bedcover up to her chin. “I think I’m going to sleep a little more,” she said. “You go.”

He nodded and kissed her, wondering if there would ever be a time when he didn’t feel like he was being watched every time he touched his wife.

The day was in full swing as Rian walked outside, a warm breeze causing the flora to sway. There were gelfling about -- fishers, farmers, a handful of once Dousan tending to the crystal skimmers -- but the crowd of gelfling he’d seen the first day were nowhere to be seen. Occasionally, he’d see someone disappear down a tunnel beneath the vessel’s surface. He wondered what the world was like down below.

He’d been warned not to go near the edge of the vessel, so he wandered toward a wooded area and the comfort of the dappled sunlight streaming between the leaves.

The ground was mossy. He knelt down to feel it, wondering if it was edible, and if so, if it was something Deet might like. He tore off the tiniest piece and rolled it between his fingers.

When he looked up, a young silver-haired girl was standing before him, not ten feet away.

“Hello?” he said. “Are you lost?”

The girl shook her head and giggled lightly. She was clearly Vapran, the first he had seen on the Prodigious aside from Brea.

She came and sat next to where he still knelt.

Rian wasn’t sure what to say. “Where is your mother or father?” he asked, and regretted it immediately.

“They died,” she said, simply, as if she’d said it a thousand times, which he imagined she had.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “My mother and father died, too.”

She nodded and ran her fingers across the moss.

“My name is Rian,” he said. “What’s yours?”

She paused, and held out her hand in a handshake gesture. “My name is Tavra,” she said.

He blinked. “Tavra is a pretty name,” he said, taking her hand. “My friend had a sister with that name.”

“Did her sister die?” Tavra asked.

Rian shifted as he released her hand, uncomfortable with the ease at which she was able to talk about death at such a young age.

“She did,” he said. “A long time ago.”

“Before I was born?”

“I think so, yes.”

Tavra nodded and stood up, apparently finished with chit chat.

She walked away without another word, leaving Rian confused. The distraction was nice, though, truth be told.

He stood for a moment, thinking about young Tavra, the little wandering Vapran. It was a minute before his thoughts were broken by a familiar voice.

“There you are!”

It was Gurjin. “I should have known,” he said. “Stonewoods are always drawn to stone.” He looked around at the trees. “Or... was it wood?”

“Why were you looking for me?” Rian asked. “Is Deet OK?”

“She’s fine,” Gurjin said. “I just heard about that book and the drawings and thought you might want to talk.”

“I’ve been talking it over with Deet,” Rian said, and, for the second time in about five minutes regretted his words when he saw Gurjin’s crestfallen expression.

“Oh,” Gurjin said. “I get that.”

“I didn’t mean --” Rian looked over his shoulder, then back at Gurjin, changing the subject: “Do you know of a little Vapran girl called Tavra?” he asked.

Gurjin nodded. “Of course. Seladon’s daughter.”

“What happened to Seladon?”

Gurjin shrugged. It was less of an I-don’t-know shrug and more of a nothing-could-be-done shrug. “A couple of trine ago, the Vapran decided to return home.” He paused. “They disappeared without a trace a few unum ago. Brea had seen them through the crystal shard before it happened, but the skimmer warriors didn’t make it in time.”

Rian soaked it in. He and Deet had been living near Ha’rar for unum. It was only now occurring to him that the orchard and cottage were far too lived in to have been abandoned for ten trine. His heart sank at the realization that these gelfling had been safe here on Prodigious before being taken by garthim.

“Why did Tavra stay?” Rian asked.

“Seladon was leading the homestead,” Gurjin said. “She had promised to bring her there when they were settled. If you ask me, Seladon had her doubts. She was willing to risk herself, but not her childilng.”

“But what about the other childings?” Rian asked.

Gurjin shook his head. “I don’t remember them taking any childlings with them,” he said. “But the plan was to repopulate.”

Rian nodded slowly. “That’s a terrible story,” he said.

“Brea has never been the same since,” said Gurjin. “When she heard they were gone, that was when she cut her hair. We rarely saw her, until she saw you and Deet in the shard.”

Brea rapped on the door to the room where Deet and Rian stayed, steeling herself to be turned away by Rian. Instead, Deet opened the door, looking tired yet ethereal.

“I thought you might be hungry,” Brea said, motioning to the dinner cart beside her. “I brought you some soup.”

“Oh,” Deet said. “Yes. Come in.”

Brea badly wanted to see Deet smile at her, but she drifted away from the door and stood by the window as she quietly set up a bowl.

“I didn’t know if you ate fish, so I brought you some without,” Brea said.

“Thank you.”

Brea nodded. She didn’t know whether to apologise or leave or act like they were still friends.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, finally.

Deet didn’t turn to look at her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I feel like I’m very far away.”

Brea nodded. “We’re quite far from our homelands.”

“Not like that,” Deet said. She turned, finally, and approached the table. She looked down at the bowl. “What is this?” she asked.

“It’s a root broth soup,” Brea said. “I didn’t know if you ate fish.”

“I never have,” Deet said. She paused, looking at the single bowl laid out. “You’re not having any?”

Brea drew back slightly. She hadn’t expected an invitation. “I hadn’t planned to,” she said. “I thought it would be you and Rian.”

Deet sat down and tasted the soup. It lacked the seasonings she preferred, but it was satisfying nonetheless. She motioned to Brea to sit down.

Brea sat down and looked at Deet for a moment before filling the second bowl for herself. “So much has changed,” she said. “I missed you. Both of you. Everyone thought you had died a long time ago.”

Deet nodded as she sipped her soup. “Mother Augra told us you captured the Darkening,” she said.

“Yes,” Brea said. “It seems like a lifetime ago. Seladon and I traveled to the Tree of Knowledge and captured as much of it as we could before it completely corrupted the Crystal of Truth.”

Brea pulled the crystal shard out from under her tunic and showed it to Deet. When looked at closely, there was a swirling universe that resembled the sands of the Crystal Desert, if the sands were in the night sky. Deet touched it, and quickly pulled away. She knew the feeling of the Darkening. She caught her breath as she remembered it overtaking her.

“It’s safe here,” Brea said. “At least for now.”

Deet felt the baby move, almost as if it were doing somersaults. She held her stomach, and took a deep breath.

“Are you OK, Deet?”

Deet nodded. She couldn’t take her eyes off the shard. “Did it leave me, or did I let it go?”

Brea picked up the shard and cradled it in her hands. “It left you. I think it…” She paused. “I think the Tree had it take you to where you needed to be.”

“But I didn’t stop anything.”

“I don’t think you were meant to.”

“On the bright side,” Gurjin said, as they walked back toward the citadel, “you know your childling is going to live. Like a really long time.”

Rian blinked. He had never heard anything about the future prophesy beyond healing the Crystal. “How long?”

“Hundreds of trine, I think.”

“Hundreds? Who said that?”

“I don’t know,” Gurjin said. “Gelfling.”

Rian considered. He doubted the childing would live hundreds of trine, but at least, if the prophecy held, he knew he would live beyond the Great Conjunction and into the new age. It was mildly comforting.

“And he'll probably be super smart and strong as anything," Gurjin said.

Rian shrugged. "I kind of just want a regular son."

"Well," Gurjin said, "I think all of us wish things could be regular."

Rian nodded. He understood that what had to be done was for the greater good. They had all lost -- parents, friends, lovers, children.

At least he knew his son would live.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Rian wanted to know everything that had happened, including his friend's losses, but he was afraid to ask. He noticed the absences of some Gelfling -- including Naia. He hadn't seen Kylan either, or any of the maudras.

And still, not a single Grottan, save for Deet. He had to know why that was, at least.

"Did no Grotten come here?" he asked.

"Very few," said Gurjin.

"But some?"

Gurjin looked at him. "Not Deet's family, I'm afraid."

Rian exhaled sadly.

"But," Gurjin said, "we don't know how many remain deep in the caves. Even other Gelfling can't navigate them, let alone the Skeksis army."

Rian nodded. "That's true."

"So I wouldn't give up hope yet."

When the door to the chamber opened, Brea noticed a light flash on in Deet’s eye, along with the smile she had wanted for herself, and was reminded that, while she was surely less alone with Deet and Rian back, she was on the outside of their unit. And why wouldn’t she be?

She turned to see Rian, his gaze fixed on Deet’s welcome, and, hanging back behind him, Gurjin, whose half-smile suggested he was feeling much the way she was. She caught his eye and smiled, but he looked away.

She deserved that, she thought. Gurjin had once given her comfort and affection -- all of the things she was pining for now -- and she had shut him out. It had, at the time, made sense to her. When she lost Seladon, she concluded that she couldn’t face any more loss. She hadn’t thought that her decision would mean more loss for Gurjin. They were friends, she’d told herself. But deep down, she knew it had been more.

“I’ll be going, then,” Gurjin said, trying not to glance at Brea.

“What?” said Deet, but before she could protest, Brea got up and headed for the door.

“I’ll be going too,” Brea said. She turned to Gurjin. “If that’s OK.”

“Suit yourself,” said Rian. He was oblivious, but Deet wasn’t.

She looked at Brea and gave her a smile. 

Chapter Text

Onica was scritch and clacking -- she would read a passage, scritch down a note, then move a bead on her complex abacus. Sometimes it went on like this for hours. Since the return of the wellspring, it was nearly constant, or at least it felt that way to Onica’s wife, Dovra.

Once-Spriton Dovra ran her brown fingers through young Tavra’s silver hair, preparing a braid. As one of the vessel’s only midwives, she had cared for Tavra since before she was born. Brea -- Thra love her -- was in no position or mental state to take in her orphaned niece, and Onica stepped up to take her without hesitation. So little did she hesitate that she didn’t confer with Dovra, and simply brought her home one day, announcing a new addition to the family.

As it happened, Dovra had hoped that they could take in Tavra from the moment Seladon had announced the Vaprans were returning to the Fallen Territory. She and Onica were a true match.

“Scritch, clack, scritch, clack,” Dovra said as she twisted Tavra’s hair into flawless braids.

Tavra giggled. “Every day, it’s scritch clack.”

Onica looked up at them. She had been far too focused on what she was doing to come up with a snappy comeback. Instead, she said, “every day, my darlings.”

The problem was, things weren’t adding up, and she was afraid to mention it to Brea. Brea had been fishing for loopholes, looking for ways to keep Rian and Deet’s family intact. She was afraid the whole thing could implode if they found out that things were not exactly as they’d been told.

Deet and Rian snuggled together beneath the bed’s canopy, skin to skin, the way they had during the journey in Thra. Deet had not disrobed completely since they’d gotten to the Prodigious, due to a mixture of feeling like someone was going to walk in at any time and her own feeling of bloated awkwardness. Rian treated her curves with respectful awe. Still, when she looked down at herself, she often wondered whose body she was inhabiting.

The baby kicked, right in the spot where Rian had rested his hand.

“I really felt that,” he said, shifting. “Gurjin was right, he’s going to be strong as anything.”

Deet sighed. “I guess he’ll have to be.”

Rian looked at her. “Gurjin says he’s going to live for hundreds of trine,” he said.

Deet tilted her head. “Gurjin’s going to live for hundreds of trine?”

“No, the baby, our baby,” he said.

“Well, who told him that?”

Rian shrugged.

“I think Gurjin is telling tales."

"Well," Rian said pulling the covering over them in case of another sudden walk-in, "what part of our life doesn't sound like a made up story?"

Deet laid her head back into the soft pillows. "The part where we lived in a cozy cottage on the edge of an alfen orchard," she sighed.

"Mm." Rian thought of the story Gurjin told him about Seladon and the doomed Vapran returning to the very same place not long before they'd stumbled on it. It didn't seem the time to talk of tragedy. It was quiet and calm and the feel of her skin made him feel somewhat normal again.

"The Great Conjunction," Onica said, laying down her writing instrument.

Dovra glanced at her as she finished Tavra's braids and sent her to play.

"Yes?" Dovra said.

"It will happen forty trine to the day, tomorrow," Onica said.

"Forty?" Dovra considered. "I thought the healer was young male."

Onica nodded. "The prophesy says he will be."

"Is forty young?"

"Maybe," Onica said. "If he lives long enough."

"Or maybe we're making assumptions about the wellspring," Dovra said.

Onica nodded. "I think we are."

The morning sun streamed into Deet and Rian's quarters. Deet was looking forward to breakfast. One thing she liked about their sudden new life in the Prodigious was being brought meals regularly, with no preparing or cleaning up.

As she sat up, she felt a new sensation. A rumble of pain that started in her lower back and spread around to her front. It wasn't a stomachache. She didn't feel nauseated. It was something else.

She sat still for a few moments, and it passed. She looked at Rian, sleeping peacefully. It was probably a reaction to a new root vegetables, she thought.

She looked down at her belly. It was big and churney, and she knew she had to accept that giving birth was imminent.

She sighed and walked over to the window. After a few minutes, the wave pain returned, and then stopped, as it had done before.

"Rian?" she said, without an ounce of urgency in her voice. "I think the baby is coming."
He didn’t stir.

“Rian,” she said, her voice rising.

He moaned and rolled over, facing her. “What is --”

The look in her eyes cut him off. He sat up quickly. “What’s happening?”

“I think the baby is coming.”

He pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the bed. “What do we do?”

She exhaled sharply as another wave hit her. She started to pace.

Rian quickly pulled on his trousers. “I’ll get someone.”

“No, Rian, I don’t want you to get someone,” Deet said. Her breathing was calming down as the pain passed.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“Just --” she started pacing more quickly, “Just be a father!”

He stood there, frozen. “This isn’t part of being a father.”

She held onto the back of a chair and leaned forward, anticipating another wave.

“What are you talking about?” She said, her voice starting to sound agitated for the first time. “Why would you say that?”

“This is a midwife’s job --”

“What? I don’t know what that is.”

“You don’t know what a midwife is?” He blinked. “Who delivers babies in Grot?”

She looked up at him with her eyes, her head still down. “The. Fathers,” she said, nearly growling.

“Oh.”

“What did you think was going to happen when the baby came at the cottage?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I thought nature --”

She doubled over, still gripping the chair, and let out a stifled wail.

“OK,” Rian went over and put his arms around her. “Let’s get you to the bed.”

She turned and looked at him with confusion. “What?”

“Just tell me what they do in Grot.”

She took a deep breath and held onto him as she lowered herself into a squatting position.

“Put your hand here,” she said. She leaned back into him. “In a little, when the pain comes back, help me bear down.”

He wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but he nodded. “Are we ready for this?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’re not.

By the time Dovra busted into the room, birthing chair in hand and followed closely by Onica and Brea, an answer to the call of Deet’s wails, she was shocked to see Rian on the floor tending to her as the baby started to emerge.

“Deet, this is Dovra, the midwife!” Brea said urgently.

Dovra held up her hand to silence Brea, her eyes fixed on Rian.

“I don’t think they need my help,” she said. She set the birthing chair down and sat on it. “Look.”

The final push came, and as Dovra, Brea and Onica watched in awe, Rian lifted the squirming infant up to Deet’s chest.

“The healer,” Brea whispered.

Onica shook her head slowly. “Not yet.”

Brea looked at her. “What?”

Dovra knelt before the baby and clipped the cord before handing Rian a small cloth and a blanket.

“Oh,” Dovra said. “What a beautiful baby girl.”

Chapter Text

Brea stood in shock. “I don’t understand,” she said. She looked at Onica. “I don’t understand. Everything else was so on the nose.”

Onica wasn’t listening. She took the baby in her arms as Rian lifted Deet and moved her to the bed. Dovra prepared some wet cloths.

“I’ll clean her up,” Dovra said, nodding toward Deet, now taking the freshly-swaddled infant from Onica.

Rian looked at her suspiciously. He’d never seen this gelfling before, and she was suddenly very much in their space.

“I’ll do it,” he said, extending a hand to take the cloths.

Dovra gave a skeptical scowl, but handed them over. Rian stepped over to Deet hesitantly, a cloth hovering over her ankle.

Dovra gasped. “Work your way down!” She motioned madly in the air. “Down!”

He sat down on the bed and rested an arm on her knee. He would have rather been lying next to her, drinking in these moments, but he had a feeling this was what a Grottan father would do.

Deet looked up from the baby for a moment and caught him staring.

“Hi,” she said, sweetly.

“Hi,” he said. He glanced back at Dovra, still motioning at him. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Onica,” Brea whispered, as they walked out of the room, “why am I the only one who’s surprised the childling is a girl? And what do you mean, ‘not yet’?”

“The Prophesy didn’t say this childing was the healer,” Onica said, facing her.

“No, but,” Brea paused. “If Deet is the mother and Rian is the father --”

“Then nothing has changed,” Onica said. She crossed her arms. “Brea,” she said, risking opening wounds, ”you have sisters. Older sisters.”

Brea considered. “Well,” she said. “Yes.”

“We were assuming, because Deathra arrived pregnant, that the Healer was their first born,” Onica said, her voice quiet. “But the math doesn’t work. The Healer won’t be born for several trine yet. He’s not their oldest child. He’s their youngest.”

Brea blinked. “Of course,” she said.

Deet was riding on high, still somewhat shocked that she had actually given birth to an actual gelfling that was now swaddled in her arms. She had tried not to think too much about what the baby might look like -- if it would have her eyes or Rian’s nose (she had both), or if it’s hair would be pale or dark (it was too soon to tell). She’d imagined a boy, of course.

Everyone since they’d arrived at this place had talked about the prophesy of the Healer -- her and Rian’s child, they were sure -- but always referred to the healer as a male.

Rian settled down next to her, his attention as fixed as hers on the infant.

“Look at her,” he said.

“I can’t stop,” she said. She turned to Rian and it was almost like seeing him for the first time. He was someone’s father now. She looked down at the baby again. It was still just sinking in that she was someone’s mother.

“Maybe they were wrong,” Rian said hopefully.

Deet wasn’t convinced that the baby wasn’t the Healer, or that someone wasn’t going to come and rip their child away.

“You can’t always tell, you know,” she said. “My father was born with wings.”

Rian looked at Deet. “Really?” He gave it a thought. “But don’t you think the prophets would have said something if that was so?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Hm.” Rian preferred the idea that the entire prophesy was false, and they could live their lives, albeit on this strange vessel. He stroked the back of his fingers against the infant’s tiny cheek. Her dark eyes blinked at him, sending his heart into a tailspin.

“You hold her,” Deet said, realizing he hadn’t yet.

Rian drew back. “I don’t know how.”

“You always manage to figure it out,” she said, smiling.

He slid his hands under the swaddle that had been expertly done by Onica. He held her there, against Deet’s chest for a moment, until she softly pushed her into his own arms. She was tiny and light but solid and real and beautiful.

In a rush of emotion, he felt a deep longing for his own father. He wanted to be different, so much different as a father, but he knew that in the end, his father had been willing to die for him without hesitation. Rian had spent long nights awake wondering why he’d chosen his own death over his.

His daughter stared up at him, then settled into a nap.

He understood now.

“Brea!”

Brea spun around to see Gurjin, out of breath. Her heart skipped, but clearly he wasn’t there for her.

“Are they OK?,” he asked. “I heard Deet gave birth this morning.”

Brea nodded. “They’re fine,” she said. “Rian delivered the baby.”

Gurjin gave her a look of surprise.

“Who knew?” she said.

“Can I see them?” Gurjin asked. He considered Rian to be every bit his brother. He was anxious to see the new addition to the family.

Brea looked at the door to the room. “We wanted to give them a moment,” she said.

Gurjin shook his head. “You know you can’t take him from them over this prophecy nonsense,” he said.

She looked at him. “It isn’t --” She stopped herself. “I would never,” she said. “And it’s a her.”

“A girl?”

“The older sister of the healer we’ve all be waiting for, apparently.”

“Well,” Gurjin said. “That’s… unexpected.” He paused. “So, nothing happens now?”

Brea shrugged. “I mean, everything has been happening for a reason.”

Chapter Text

The sound of muffled voices floated into the chamber, and Rian didn't like it.

"What do you think they're talking about?"

Deet was curled up beside him on the bed, her concentration focused on nursing.

"Us, I'm sure," she said.

He sighed. Everything since they had arrived here had been jarring, leaving them without many moments to think about the future. He hadn’t thought past Deet giving birth much, except to consider possible loss. Now that it had happened, he felt his anxiety drop dramatically, and a sense of peace -- almost hope -- was taking over.

“Maybe I can work as a farmer,” he said.

“You want to be a farmer? A real farmer?” Deet asked, turning to him.

He shrugged. “I think I’d be good at it.”

She nodded, sensing he was in a mind space where he was desperate to find a purpose. “I’m sure Brea would allow you to join the guard here,” she said.

He sat up, shaking his head. “That’s the last thing I ever want to do again,” he said.

There was a knock on the door. They glanced at each other, not sure who or what to expect next.

“Come in,” Rian called, gettup up off the bed.

He was expecting Brea and Onica. Instead, Gurjun walked in with a smile that was more muted than anything he remembered.

“Gurjin! I didn’t expect to see you!”

“You know better than to think I’d stay away.” He embraced Rian warmly before looking him in the eye.

“It’s going to be OK,” Gurjin said. “For now.”

Rian blinked. “What do you mean?”

Gurjin glanced over Rian’s shoulder to see Deet nuzzling the infant in her arms.

“The childling,” he said, “is not the Healer. Brea told me everything.”

Rian winced. “Brea told you everything already, did she?”

Gurjin shook his head, realizing it sounded like he was somehow working with Brea. It was sad, Rian seemed not to trust Brea at all anymore. But then, his faith in her had been shaken, too.

“She told me you and Deet had a little girl. She told me you delivered her yourself.”

Rian’s expression softened. “I didn’t do much of anything,” he said. “It was all Deet, really.” He paused. “Do you want to see her?”

Gurjin smiled the kind of smile Rian remembered. “Why do you think I’m here? To look at you?”

“Onica,” Brea said, in frustration, knocking on the door. “Onica!”

Onica opened the door and pushed a flow of fabric drapery aside.

“What is it, Brea?”

Brea straightened her posture. “It’s High Admiral,” she said. “And I don’t know what to do now. What do we do?”

Onica sighed. “What do you want from me?”

“You’re the seer. You know the prophesies.”

“The prophesies change as we find new texts,” Onica said. “The prophesies aren’t just --” she clasped her hand in front of Brea’s face “-- floating in the air!”

“Fine,” Brea said. “But you knew more than you said. You weren’t even a little bit surprised that that baby isn’t the Healer. I should have known about the math.”

Onica shook her head. “I had only just done the math, Bre-- High Admiral.”

“You don’t have to call me that,” Brea said. She’d regretted throwing out her rank the minute she’d said it. “I just -- what should we tell them? I don’t know if I can bear telling them they’ll go through that again.”

“That’s not my area,” Onica said.

“Onica, please. I have no one else.”

Onica paused, struck by the sadness she saw deep in her eyes. Some of that deep sadness, over the loss of Tavra, was shared between them.

She put a palm on Brea’s cheek. “It shouldn’t be that way,” she said. “Rian and Deet came back. Your friends came back."

Brea held back tears. "It's not the same," she said. “They think I’m not on their side.”

“Well, of course you are,” Onica said. “But keeping them in that little room isn’t helping anything.”

Brea considered and nodded her head.

“There is plenty of home space below,” said Onica. “Treat them like any other gelfling.”

“But they’re not any other gelfling,” Brea said.

Onica clicked her tongue. “Well, no one wants to live under the nose of their leaders. Especially not former Castle guards.”

Brea was many things, but immovable wasn’t one of them. Onica had had a point. She’d never asked if Rian and Deet wanted to live in a room in the Citadel. She never told them about the laws of the Prodigious, how the infrastructure worked, or the expectations of every gelfling who lived there. She didn’t tell them about life there -- where they lived, how they acquired food and drinking water, what kind of defense system they had.

She’d just put them in a room. No wonder they didn’t trust her.

Deet recovered quite quickly, as Brea imagined she would. The baby -- they named her Ashona, a Grottan variation of Rian’s mother’s name -- was healthy and robust. There was no reason not to introduce them, finally, to Prodigious society.

The down below made Brea uncomfortable, if she was being honest. It was difficult to shake off her princess roots. Seladon had called it a refugee city, and, technically, she wasn’t wrong. Brea had reminded her that they were all refugees now, including them. Seladon and the other Vaprans couldn’t accept it. They believed they belonged in Thra.

Maybe if they had waited longer, they could have gone home safely. But longer, realistically, meant many trine.

Maybe that was why going there made her so sad.

Rian and Deet had packed their few belongings, with Ashona strapped to Rian’s back, Grottan-style. Gurjin came along, too.

The opening to below was cavernous, with steep steps that led to the underground city.

At first, it felt still and lifeless. But, as they drew closer, it opened up, and there were what looked like hundreds of dwellings stacked many stories down along the sides of the vessel, each with its own pathway in front. In the middle, it was wide open. If you looked down, you could see activity down below -- gelfling selling wares, strolling, childlings playing.

“It’s a bit… dark,” said Rian, straining to see.

Deet was awestruck. “No, Rian,” she said. “Wait until your eyes adjust. It’s wonderful."

Chapter Text

The Below was simultaneously frantic and calm, cavernous and intimate, dank and invitingly warm.

It was nothing like what Rian had imagined, but, as his eyes adjusted, he could see why Deet thought it was wonderful. It reminded him of the caves of Grot, what little he’d seen of them, only this place was full of gelfling from different clans, all living together.

Young female gelfling flew in the open center of the vessel, some recreationally, others delivering baskets of wares to the different levels.

A freckled, auburn-haired girl hovered into their space and extended a basket of yellow fruit toward Deet.

“Oh,” Deet said, unsure of the etiquette in this new place. She lifted two fruits from the basket, gauging the girl’s reaction. “Thank you.”

The girl nodded without a word and flitted away.

“Well, that’s dinner sorted,” Deet said with a shrug.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about food here,” said Brea motioning them to follow her. “Everything we grow and catch is shared, and everyone contributes to running the vessel.”

“How do we contribute?” Deet asked.

“There is no shortage of jobs to do,” Brea said. She stopped and faced them. “Of course, you wouldn’t have to do anything too menial.”

Rian frowned. After ten years and the apparent unification of the clans, Brea still had a classist streak. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing,” Brea said quickly, realizing she’d sounded more like a princess than a leader of revolutionaries. “With the new baby, of course, you and Deet won’t be expected to contribute outside the home for several unum.” She looked at Deet. “Or whenever you’re ready.” She looked at Rian again. “And when you’re ready, you can come serve as a paladin at the Citidel.”

“No,” Rian said, without pause.

“No?” Brea looked genuinely surprised. She looked at Gurjin.

“Rian,” Gurjin said. “We can use a trained soldier like you.”

“I’m not a soldier anymore,” Rian said.

“You’re the best warrior on this vessel,” Brea said.

“I’m really not,” Rian said. “Look, if we have to fight, I’ll fight, but I’m not signing on to be anyone’s soldier or paladin or whatever you want to call it. That’s not my life any more, and it’s not going to be ever again.”

His agitation stirred Ashona, who let out a chirp.

Brea processed what he was saying. “I’m sorry, Rian, I thought you’d be honored.”

“I’m more than willing to contribute,” Rian said, as Deet lifted the baby out of the carrier on his back. “Just not like that.”

The houses came in different sizes, but originally they were identical small units, enough to house 10,000 gelfling.

It had been a few trine since they had held out hope that the vessel would come close to capacity. Before Rian and Deet arrived, they hadn’t had a new member of the community in nearly seven trine. Including them, and baby Ashona, there were one thousand one hundred seventy two gelfling on the Prodigious.

Most homes were made of three to five units, with inner walls knocked down to make them bigger. Brea didn’t spend time overseeing the housing situation. If someone wanted a bigger home, they could find someplace with empty units and make it themselves. The residents rarely fought over housing.

Seladon and the other Vapran had built some comfortable homes on the upper tier. A few had been claimed, but most stood as relics of the lost Vapran homesteaders -- a reminder that they lived in a world where hubris served no one well.

The former home of a Vapran called Shio and his family seemed a nice fit for Rian and Deet, Brea thought.

When she led them through the door, they looked taken aback.

“It’s… really lovely, Brea,” Deet said.

Rian looked around. “Do you have anything less… ostentatious?” he asked.

Brea blinked. “Ostentatious?"

“This looks like the home of royalty,” Rian said. The space was vast, with tapestries and c and chandeliers and shining things everywhere.

"Oh," Brea said. "Shio wasn't royalty."

"I have a feeling he thought he was," Rian said.

Brea looked around. “Of course, you can make it your own,” she said.

“I’d be afraid to touch anything,” said Deet, gently rocking the baby on her shoulder.

“Oh,” Brea said. She found the place warm and inviting, herself. Clearly their definition was different. She supposed it made sense -- Rian had spent most of his life in a Crystal Castle barracks, and Deet was from the caves. Still, she’d imagined they’d want to live a bit more comfortably. They were still the Wellspring, after all.

“There’s a bed chamber with a crib,” Brea said, pointing in the direction of the room. “And when she’s old enough, she can have one of the other chambers.”

“How many chambers are there?” Deet asked.

“Bed chambers?” Brea said. “Six.”

“Six?” Rian said incredulously. “Who in Thra needs that many rooms?”

“Families,” Brea said.

“That’s a big family,” he said.

“Everything you’ll need, you can get in the square below,” Brea said. “Gurjin will show you how to get there.”

Rian nodded slowly and looked at Deet.

“I think we can make it work,” Deet said, as if it were a fixer-upper and not one of the fanciest homes on the vessel.

“The chandeliers will have to go,” Rian said.

Deet nodded quickly, her eyes wide. “Definitely.”

The route to the square was another tunnel, with a wide path, one side for walking, the other for gelfling who rode wooden carts being pulled through a shallow trench using a complex rope system.

“These were built about three trine ago,” Gurjin said, motioning toward the carts. “It’s amazing how much time they save.”

Rian watched a couple climb in one and roll away without even pausing their conversation.

“Are they safe?” Rian asked.

Gurjin shrugged. “There were some accidents at first,” he said, “but it’s better now. Do you want to try?”

Rian shook his head. “Walking is fine with me,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” Gurjin said. “Once you try it, you’ll never go on foot again.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes, the sounds of life echoing around them.

“You know,” Gurjin said, “I was really hoping you’d join us at the Citidel. It’s not like the Castle.”

Rian continued to walk in silence.

“Because I understand completely why you wouldn’t want to do that again,” said Gurjin.

More silence.

“But at the Citadel, you would be important. Maybe as important as Brea.”

Rian nodded, looking straight ahead. “You know,” he said, finally, turning to Gurjin. “When I was a baby, my father was appointed to the most important position a gelfling could have in service to the Skeksis.”

“Are you comparing Brea to the Skeksis?”

“No,” Rian said. “But I don’t understand why you think I want to be important. ‘Important’ took my father away when I was a baby. Now I have a baby, and --”

“You’re nothing like your father, Rian,” Gurjin said.

“Exactly.”

Deet stood alone, except for her nursing baby, in her new home. Her waist swiveled as she looked around, trying to put her finger on what made the space feel so cold.

She closed her eyes and imagined her home in Grot. When she opened them, she still couldn’t place it. She closed her eyes again, taking a deep breath, this time imagining the cottage she and Rian had shared near Ha’rar.

Ashona unlatched from her breast, but instead of slipping into sleep, she started to fuss.

Deet held her up so they were eye to eye. “You feel it too, don’t you?”

She rested the baby on her shoulder and patted her back lightly.

“Maybe if we put out some of the light,” she said.

She walked to the main bed chamber. It was bigger and fancier than the room they’d lived in at the Citadel -- and she’d thought that was fancy. Like the rest of the home, it all felt like too much, but the cradle, the cradle was perfect. It was painted green with gold and white accents, not too big, not too small, with rockers on the bottom.

“Look at this, Shoni,” Deet whispered. “Look at how pretty.” She set her down and rocked the cradle lightly. Ashona kicked and sputtered and looked up at her with big blinking eyes. Sometimes Deet felt self-conscious staring at her when other gelfling were around, and she quickly realized that she could indulge all she wanted at that moment. It was strange, seeing such a resemblance to both herself and Rian.

She imagined what some of the gelfling of Grot would say about her increasingly tawny skin and the wisps of blue in the hair that was starting to come in. She looked at the back of her own hand. Just living topside had changed the hue slightly.

She looked around the room and took in the surrealness. After a moment, she stood, shivering.

“Let me find your blanket,” she said, trying to remember where she had laid her satchel, but her mind wouldn’t clear. She stood still, not sure if she had the ability to move.

She looked down at the cradle. She called out for Rian, knowing he wasn’t there to answer. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine something, anything to drive the feeling away.

When she opened them, she saw a gelfling, a male with long silver hair and tattered clothes, sitting on the floor. He appeared to be in chains.

It was a vision, she knew. She’d had enough of them, though she had hoped her visions were a thing of the past.

He looked up at her. “Thra is lost,” he said. “Thra is lost.” His head lowered, bobbing as if in a state of delerium.

“I know,” she said, unsure if he could hear him. “Tell me, where are you?”

“I am lost,” he said. “Tavra.”

“I’m not Tavra,” she said. “My name is Deet.”

“Deet,” he said, to her surprise. “Protect our Tavra. The future of Thra depends on it.”

Before Deet could respond, he was lifted to his feet by unseen entities. His body was carried upright toward her, but the image didn’t get closer.

“What’s happening?” she called.

His chest thrust forward, his arms restrained.

Deet gasped. She knew exactly what was happening. She tried to look away, but couldn’t. The man’s eyes looked straight into hers in pure terror before filling with light so bright it brought her to her knees.

When she looked up, he was gone.

Chapter Text

At the end of the tunnel to the bottom of the vessel, Rian stepped into a world that was simultaneously startlingly familiar and like nothing he had ever seen before. It was a marketplace, primarily, with Gelfling selling all kinds of food and drink and other necessities. But it was also essentially a town square with musicians and revelling, like the celebrations in Stone-in-the-Wood that went on deep into the night after a long hunt.

A raven-haired Stonewood girl spun past him before grabbing a laughing, dark-skinned boy. Rian recognized the boy as Dousan, but he’d never seen a Dousan act so carefree.

Then again, he didn’t know many Dousan.

As he scanned the revelers, he was surprised, both by how happy they seemed, and how gelfling of different clans mingled so freely. He was used to it to some extent, having grown up in the Castle, but the divide between the clans was still stark, and reveling certainly wasn’t accepted.

Rian turned to Gurjin, who had already accepted a mug of ale. “Is it a holiday?” he asked.

Gurjin laughed. “Not at all,” he said, handing Rian a mug.

Rian took it, hesitantly. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “Deet’s at home waiting with Ashona.”

“Exactly,” Gurjin said. “We haven’t raised a glass to Ashona yet. We haven’t raised a glass to you and Deet.” He paused. “We haven’t even raised a glass to you coming back from the dead. You owe me at least one drink.”

Rian smiled, and raised his glass. “I suppose I do.” He looked around, taking in the scene, and noticing new things every moment. Just as many people were working as were playing.

“So how does it work?” Rian asked. “It looks like only some are working.”

“Well,” said Gurjon, “The Prodigious is like the Castle. Everyone takes shifts.”

Rian nodded. At the Castle, they were confined to their barracks when not on duty, or at least those were the rules. He liked the idea of finishing a shift and just being able to go out and have fun. As he sipped his drink, his mind went back to Ashona and he remembered that his time as a carefree youth who could do such a thing had, for the most part, passed.

“We should go,” Rian said.

Gurjin turned to him. “What? I haven’t even shown you around.”

Rian shifted. He didn’t know if it was the guilt or the fact that he hadn’t had an ale for who knew how long, but the place started to look strange. Different. The music started to slow down. The laughter started to sound like screams.

“Gurjin?”

He looked, but Gurjin wasn’t beside him any more. The gelfling had changed, brown and auburn braids had turned silver and wild. Coral turned to flames. The screams were horrific.

And then it stopped.

He looked down to see the mug he’d been holding on the floor, its contents spilled. Before he could pick it up, a Spriton woman dressed like a Stonewood barmaid rushed over and started to clean it up.

“It’s OK, I can do it,” Rian said, still shaken from the vision.

“It’s my job,” she said, matter of factly. “I don’t try and do your job, do I?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m new here.”

“New?” she said crossly, looking up at him.

As she set her eyes on Rian, she caught her breath and looked at Gurjin. “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling herself to her feet, damp rag in one hand, empty wooden mug in the other. “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know?” Rian asked.

Her eyes darted from side to side nervously, clearly unsure what to do. Finally, she gave an awkward curtsy.

Rian and Gurjin looked at each other in stunned silence.

“Oh… kay,” Rian said, finally.

She nodded and ran off.

“This is the weirdest place I’ve ever been in my life,” Rian said. “And I’ve been to Aughra’s observatory.” He started back toward the tunnel.

“What happened?” Gurjin asked, following.

“Hm?” The curtsy had distracted him.

“You looked like you were dreamfasting, but by yourself.”

Rian stopped and looked at his friend. “That’s what it felt like,” he said.

Gurjin nodded. It was a strange thing to happen, but they were living in strange times. “What did you see?”

Rian shook his head and continued toward the tunnel. “I don’t know.”

Brea stopped abruptly, halfway up the steps leading into the Citadel. The shard around her neck didn’t feel different, it wasn’t hot like it was when the crystal bats had spotted Deet and Rian near Ha’rar. It wasn’t cold like the day she last saw Seladon in it. She just had an odd feeling. She yanked it off of her neck and looked at it. It was darker than she had ever seen it -- shockingly opaque and nearly onyx. There was no image to be seen in it.

She looked up to find Rek’yr standing at the entrance observing her.

“What does this mean, Rek’yr?” she asked.

He approached her. “I’m a sandmaster, not a shaman,” he said. “But I could take you to Rauhl.”

Brea shook her head. “I’ll bring it to Onica.”

Rek’yr nodded skeptically as she walked past him. “The Sifa are wise,” he said, “but they don’t know everything.”

She stopped and turned.

“The Dousan have been here helping to sustain this place from the start,” he said. “Teaching gelfling from other clans how to herd and fly crystal skimmers. We’re fishers and farmers and vendors, and yet we still don’t have a seat with the soothsayers in the Citadel.”

Brea blinked. “Well, I didn’t know you wanted a seat,” she said.

“I don’t want a seat, High Admiral,” he said.

“It sounds like you do,” she said.

“At some point it would do you well to consider that we have insights that you don’t. Before the Great Exodus, our clan was not inclined to share them with you. Not after the way we had been ostracised.”

Brea was stunned. She thought she, as the leader of the Prodigious, had been nothing but inclusive of the Dousan. She considered Rek’yr her top commander, and yet, it was true that, with all of her work studying ancient texts and prophesies, she had yet to consult a Dousan shaman.

She looked down at the obsidian shard in her hand.

“Take me to Rauhl.”

“I feel guilty,” said Deet tearfully, sitting cross-legged on the bed beside Rian as he cradled the baby. She had told him about her terrible vision, and he’d told her about his. Both had waited until Gurjin had departed, and shared what they’d seen in whispers.

Deet had experienced visions before, remnants of the Darkening that had decreased since her pregnancy but now seemed stronger than ever. Rian was prone to flashbacks, but had never before had a vision of something he had not experienced. They had put it together that the visions were probably connected to each other and to the failed Vapran resettlement, and were likely from the past, not the future.

“We couldn’t have stopped it,” Rian said.

“Maybe if we had traveled faster,” she said.

“Then we would have been captured and drained, too,” he said, looking down at Ashona.

“And what about Tavra? Do you really think he meant Seladon’s daughter?”

Rian was silent.

“We should probably talk to Onica and Dovra,” she said. “They’re her mothers.”

Rian got up and laid the baby in her cradle gently. “Tomorrow we’ll talk to Brea,” he said. “You know how easy these things are to misinterpret.”

Deet nodded. She watched him take off his tunic, and felt a wave of comfort as her heart skipped a beat.

He noticed.

“What?”

“Remember when we were out in Thra, just the two of us, alone and scared. Homesick and grieving and not knowing if we’d ever see another gelfling again?”

He slid next to her on the bed.

“Yes.”

“And then every night we would build a fire and make love next to it and everything would fall away? Just for the night?” She moved in closer, her hand touching his arm.

He hesitated, processing the fact that she was sending him the cue that she was ready for physical intimacy again.

“Yeah,” he said. He touched her hair and leaned closer, his nose grazing her cheek before she kissed him completely.

The fear, they knew, would be there tomorrow, but for the first time since they’d become parents, they allowed it to fall away.

Chapter Text

Brea had never been to the faux-desert area where Rek’yr lived and tended to Bennu and the other crystal skimmers. Many of the once-Dousan lived among the other gelfling, but a small number remained in this area of the vessel, suspicious of the others. Brea didn’t fight it. The Prodigious survivors were free, after all, and the Vapra had certainly kept to themselves.

The ground looked like sand and it felt like sand under her feet, but it wasn’t made up of tiny grains like the ones that swirled in the Crystal Desert.

Brea couldn’t resist. She crouched down and felt the ground curiously.

Rek’yr, several steps ahead of her, stopped and turned. “High Admiral?”

She looked up at him. “What is this?”

He ran his foot cross the surface “It’s stilled,” he said. “In the desert, the sand can dance into the sky and return to the ground. On this vessel, a gust of wind would blow it away into the sea.”

“It feels like it’s real,” Brea said, fascinated. “Does it occur naturally?”

“Well,” he said. “We have our ways.” He smiled lightly.

Brea stood. “Of course,” she said. “You’re a sandmaster.”

Rek’yr nodded and turned without another word. She followed, resisting the urge to ask more questions. He had been right, the Dousan certainly had insights the other clans didn’t.

He led her to a tunnel near the edge of the stilled desert and paused. “I will go and see Rauhl first,” he said. “He chooses, still, to live isolated from the other clans.”

“Oh,” Brea said. “Will he welcome me?”

“Rauhl is kind,” he said. “He just needs to know that you can be trusted.”

Brea nodded and watched him disappear into the tunnel. She sighed and looked around. The morning suns shone down on the vessels, as three skimmers circled overhead. She had always imagined that they were tethered to the vessel somehow, but they were free, appearing to stay with the gelfling by choice. The view overlooking the rest of the Prodigious was quite breathtaking from her high vantage point.

She turned and looked out over the gleaming sea. It was beautiful, but vast. Nothing but water as far as she could see. She suddenly felt impossibly small and lost, somewhere in parts unknown.

Rian peered into the empty cupboard. He could kick himself. The whole point of his excursion to the market with Gurgin the evening before was to bring home food for the family, and he hadn’t returned with so much as a crust of bread.

“Deet,” he called. She didn’t answer. Probably because this thraforsaken house was bigger than anyone needed. “Deet!” he called out again, louder.

“Why are you yelling?” she asked, appearing seemingly from nowhere.

“Why didn’t you answer me?”

“The baby’s asleep,” she said, her voice dropping a decibel.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I thought we might all go to the market for breakfast.”

Deet’s eyes narrowed just enough at him that he knew she knew he’d failed the easiest mission he’d ever been given. She reached past him and opened the cupboard.

“I had that vision, and it really just threw me,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, barely missing a beat. It wasn’t like him, though. Rian had been obsessed with their food store at the cottage, adding to it daily. It was a reminder of how much had changed since they left Thra. An empty cabinet or a dry wineskin wasn’t something they had to worry about anymore.

“So this is Brea.”

Brea straightened and nodded curtly at the shaman before her. She had imagined a very old gelfling, but Rauhl appeared to be around the same age a Rek’yr, and was just as striking. His skin was dark brown with a bluish tinge around his eyes and a pattern of white swirls tattooed across his face in a stark contrast to his skin. His head was wrapped in colorful, beaded cloth.

She glanced from Rek’yr to Rauhl and fleetingly thought about asking if they were brothers, before thinking the better of it. The question, she thought, implied that all Dousan looked the same.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Brea said.

“The pleasure is mine,” he said.

She held out her hand toward him, palm down.

Rauhl looked puzzled. “I’m not familiar with this custom,” he said.

“Oh,” Brea said, pulling her hand back.

He smiled suddenly, realizing that she had been offering her hand for a kiss. “Don’t mistake my brother’s flirty nature for Dousan culture,” he said with a laugh.

“Oh, you’re brothers!” Brea said, relieved to change the subject after her gaffe.

“Twins,” said Rek’yr. “Don’t tell me you don’t see a resemblance.”

“No, I do,” she said, even more relieved that she had.

“Rek’yr tells me the shard of the Crystal of Truth is sick,” Rauhl said. “Even sicker than before.”

“Yes,” Brea said. She pulled it out from her tunic and looked at it. Still onyx. She held it up for him to see.

“Oh my,” Rauhl said, a tinge of alarm in his calming voice. He reached for it. “May I?”

She nodded and handed him the shard.

“Oh my,” he said again, as he inspected it.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

He circled the room, and then, finally, set the shard down on a round table with painted markings. Out of his pocket, he pulled a clay flute.

Brea watched in awe as he played the most beautiful, haunting melody she had ever heard. The shard began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, until a wisp of what looked like purple smoke rose out of it and began dancing, like the sands of the Crystal Desert.

The market was full of life and revelry, as it had been the day before. Rian pretended to know just where they should go to buy food, even though he hadn’t let Gurjin show him around properly.

“This is the place,” he said to Deet, motioning toward a random market.

She nodded, and put her hand on Ashona, swaddled against Rian’s back.

The shop was full of all kinds of food. It was impressive, actually.

Rian picked up a yellow tubor. “Oh,” he said, lifting it and inhaling its scent. “I thought I’d never have one of these again.”

“Let’s get two,” Deet said. She looked at the offerings. Moss was sorely missing, but there were some igot roots. “And these.”

Rian nodded. They took their finds to the counter. Rian was nervous. He still wasn’t sure how it worked.

He looked at the shopkeeper. “I’m new here,” he said.

The shopkeeper furrowed his brow, then looked at Rian and Deet with sudden recognition. “Oh Thra,” he said. “It’s you!”

Rian looked at Deet, then back at the shopkeeper. “I was told I had credits -- ticks? -- for these?”

The shopkeeper looked beside himself. “Of all the shops, you chose ours,”he said. “Lidi,” he called to his wife, “Of all the shops, the Wellsping chose ours!”

“What?” Rian said. “No, we’re just regular customers. I’m not sure how to buy this --”

The shopkeeper shook his head. “No charge, no charge,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” He went over to the bins with a sack, and started filling it with fruit and vegetables. “It’s an honor,” he said. “We wouldn’t dream of charging you.”

The shopkeeper carried the sack, full of more food than Rian and Deet could eat in a week, back to the counter. “Take all of this,” he said. “It’s an honor.”

"Just the two tubors and the two roots is fine,” Rian said. “How do we pay?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” The shopkeeper said again. “Out of all the shops!” 

Rian looked at Deet with discomfort. Admittedly, the bit of him that had become a food hoarder while they lived in the cottage welcomed the shopkeeper’s generosity, but it felt wrong. Then, it was just the two of them facing an uncertain winter. Now they lived in a community where food was produced and distributed constantly. It wasn’t the same.

The shopkeeper presented the sack to them triumphantly.

“I… thank you,” said Deet, hesitantly taking it.

“It’s my honor,” he said.

“OK.” She glanced at Rian. “There’s only two of us.”

The shopkeeper nodded. “Enjoy!”

“Let’s just go,” whispered Rian.

The other gelfling in the shop looked on, whispering to each other excitedly.

One woman, looking especially anxious and tired, stepped forward. “Can I… can I see the baby?”

Rian looked at Deet. “Um.” He didn’t shake his head, but she knew his expression, and his expression said no.

“Of course,” Deet said. Rian sighed. Of course she did. “Only for a moment.” She lifted Ashona from the carrier on Rian’s back gently and cradled her as she stirred. She clicked her tongue at her quietly as she opened her eyes.

The woman stepped closer. “Her name is?”

“Ashona,” Deet said. “What’s your name?”

“Dor,” she said. “Oh, she’s Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.” She beamed, the hardship seemingly disappearing from her face. “My first baby was so beautiful, too,” she said, her smile fading.

“I’m sure,” Deet said. “How many childlings do you have?”

“Six,” Dor said, then paused. “Well, three now.”

“Oh.”

“We were lucky,” she said.

Deet swallowed. She glanced into Dor’s basket. It contained half a loaf of bread and two green fruits, hardly enough for a family with three children.

Dor looked in the basket and covered it with a cloth. “It’s easy to run out of ticks at the end of the cycle.”

Deer’s face fell. “What do you mean, ‘run out of ticks?””

“Deet,” Rian said, nudging her. They were entirely too new to be criticising the system, he thought.

Without a word, Deet handed Ashona to him and pulled two yellow tubers and two roots out of the sack of food and stood, facing Dor.

“Here,” she said, holding the sack and all of the remaining food to her.

Dor blinked, and looked around, as the onlooking gelfling murmured. “Oh, no no,” she said, stepping back. “I was never trying to ask for charity!”

“It’s not charity,” Deet said, as Rian looked on, a smile forming. “It’s a gift.”

“I can’t accept all of that,” Dor said.

Deet shrugged her shoulders and picked up the food she’d pulled out. “Then just give away what you don’t need,” she said, matter-of-factly.

The small crowd of shoppers stood silent as they walked out. Deet glanced back and caught the shopkeeper’s eye. He nodded at her, humbled.

“Everyone take what you need,” he said. “Only what you need, like Deethra and Rian.”

They stepped out into the square, no longer the sole focus of the other gelfling around them.

“Deethra,” Rian said, a slight playfulness in his voice. “I forgot how you are.”

“How I am?”

He shifted Ashona from one shoulder to the other. “Around other Gelfling.”

“How am I?”

“Nice,” he said. “You’re selfless. It’s nice.”

Deet considered. “I’m not nice with you?”

He shrugged, still smiling as they walked toward the tunnel. “You are,” he said. “Sometimes I just forget.”

Chapter Text

The mist that had risen from the crystal swirled until Rauhl stopped playing the melody, then it stopped, frozen in mid-air.

Brea looked on in wonder. “What does it mean?” she asked, looking at Rek’yr.

Rek’yr put a finger to his lips.

Rauhl looked at the stilled mist, his eyes moving over it as if he was reading. He stood like that for a long time, then, abruptly, he made a gesture with his hand and it dissipated.

Brea looked at Rek’yr. “What does it mean?” she asked again.

Rauhl turned to face them, his expression unreadable.

“Rauhl?” Brea pleaded.

Rauhl’s eye’s scanned the floor behind Brea before meeting her eyes.

“I need you to take me to the soothsayer Onica.”

It was deep in the night, and Deet was awake. Her body ached for sleep, but her mind was running like a skitterer escaping a cave snake. She remembered back in Thra, after the Darkening had left her -- if it ever fully had -- days where she and Rian would trudge through hills and mountains until they felt broken.

There were no mountains anymore, unless you counted Ashona.

She sighed and looked at Rian, sleeping soundly beside her. He had been quite affectionate after they’d returned from the market, cooking the supper and putting Ashona to sleep early so they could share a few moments alone before the night’s cycle of waking and nursing started. She’d let him sleep through the night feeding. The early morning feeding would come soon.

She turned toward him and nuzzled herself into his arms, her face buried into his neck. She felt him stir lightly, and instinctively wrap his arms around her.

“You OK?” she heard him whisper, his fingers grazing her cheek.

“I was just thinking about Dor,” she whispered, sitting up slightly to look at him.

He’d fallen back asleep, if he’d ever really woken up. She smiled and settled back in.

Daybreak had barely passed when Rauhl slid down Bennu’s wing and faced the steps leading up to the door.

Rauhl had never been to the Citadel before, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be there for the first time. The tall structure in the middle of the vessel’s topside evoked a castle to him, as if the Gelfling needed a new system that in any way resembled the old system.

He’d supported doing away with the Vapran monarchy, and it wasn’t lost on him that Brea was still the leader, only with an even more militaristic title.

He and Rek’yr had argued about it many times. Rek’yr supported Brea and called Rauhl a separatist for not assimilating into the new Gelfling community. But then, Rek’yr lived just below the stilled desert, too, having refused accommodations at the Citadel himself.

Having met Brea, he could see why his brother was fond of her. She was headstrong, and her concern for the Gelfling seemed to have no bounds, regardless of their "once" clan.

He looked around once inside. The inside of the Citadel was ridiculously opulent, he thought. How many Gelfling on the vessel could have been fed with the resources it took to build this grand hall? He shook his head in disgust.

The door to the Citidel opened behind him suddenly, and a young Gelfling entered urgently. She appeared to be Grottan, a race that he had never seen before. He knew of their struggles, though. Many trine ago, the Grottan had been driven out from the land near Stone-in-the-Wood into the caves. At one time, their skin had been dark, darker than the Dousan. The caves had sapped their color away, leaving them, to his eyes, a pallid green, their hair nearly white, a contrast to their ancestors.

She paused, and looked at Rauhl, her large, striking black eyes blinking at him, as if she recognized him, but didn’t.

“Have you seen Brea?” she asked.

Rauhl shook his head. “I’m due to meet her here this morning,” he said.

She looked in the direction of Brea’s quarters, back at him.

“You look like Rek’yr,” she said.

He smiled. “I should think so,” he said. “I’m his brother, Rauhl.”

“I’m Deet,” she said. She eyed his clothing. “Are you a priest?”

“A shaman,” he said. “And you are the maternal half of the Wellspring.”

Deet blinked. “Did your berries tell you that?”

Rauhl laughed. “It doesn’t quite work that way,” he said.

“Hm,” Deet said, turning to look to see if Brea was coming.

“You know, to the Dousan clan, The Wellspring is an oasis, anchored by the great Oszah-Staba.”

Deet was looking at him with interest now. “One of the seven Great Trees,” she said.

He nodded. “The Wellspring is a place of tranquility and peace, and a source of life in the desert.”

“It sounds lovely,” she said.

“It is,” Rauhl said. He paused. “I shall miss it.”

Before Deet could respond, Brea came up behind her, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Deet, what are you doing here?” Brea asked.

Deet turned. “I need to talk to you.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“Who is in charge of ticks?”

“Ticks?”

“Ticks,” Deet said, motioning as if she was marking a page in a book. “The… what is it called?”

“Currency,” Rauhl cut in, matter-of-factly.

“I don’t know,” said Brea.

“How do you not know?” Deet asked, exasperated.

Rauhl’s eyes moved from Deet to Brea as they talked. He didn’t know if he was meant to witness it, but it was playing out in front of him.

“Do you know that Gelfling are hungry?” Deet asked.

Brea looked shocked and drew back. “That isn’t true,” she said. She looked at Rauhl. “It isn’t true. How can that be true, there is plenty of food.”

“It needs to be fair,” Deet said.

Brea winced as Rauhl nodded in deep, knowing agreement.

“Look, we have bigger things to worry about right now,” she said.

“Bigger than hungry childlings?”

Brea deflated. “Tell them they can have more ticks. Tell them whatever you want. I give you permission.”

“But --”

Brea motioned for Rauhl to follow her as she turned and rushed away. Rauhl paused and nodded at Deet before turning. “Imagine that,” he said with a smile, “a Grotten woman with the power to make a change.”

Deet smiled, struck by this Dousan, who seemed to be on her side without even knowing her.

“Rauhl --” she called, as he began to walk away. “Did you come here because of the Darkening?”

Rauhl stopped and turned his head toward her. “Yes.”

“Did you have a vision?”

He turned his body to face her and nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“I’ve had one, too,” she said. “Well, I’ve had many visions before, but I had one recently for the first time in a long time. We both had visions, Rian and I. Rian really never gets them, though I was thinking --”

“What did you see?” Rauhl asked, cutting her off.

“Death,” she said. “And something about Tavra.”

“And Rian?”

“More death. Flames, I think.” she furrowed her brow, trying to remember exactly how he’d described it.

“Have you told Brea?”

Deet shook her head no.

Rauhl considered. “But you’re telling me.”

She nodded.

Behind him, Brea stood at the far end of the hallway, calling for him impatiently.

He leaned in toward her. “You should have a seat at the table, Deet,” he said. “Of all of us, you should.”

She blinked, and watched as Brea started walking back toward them. A seat at the table? She thought, wondering what he meant by that. She knew Brea only consulted Onica on matters of prophecy -- was Rauhl here to be part of some kind of committee of seers? And if so, did she belong on it? She didn’t even understand her own family’s future.

She gasped, remembering the time. She had slipped away, leaving Rian with the baby. Which would be fine, but for the fact that Ashona was still nursing, and nursing frequently. She had gotten sidetracked.

“It was good to meet you, Rauhl,” Deet said, quickly turning and bouncing away toward the tunnels. “Say hello to Rek’yr and Bennu for me!”

Rauhl smiles as he lifted a hand and watched her retreat.

Brea, nearly out of breath, stopped by his side and looked at him. “What in Thra were you talking about?”

Raul’s eyes didn’t leave Deet as she disappeared into the distance. “I was just telling her about the Oszah-Staba,” he said.

Brea looked at him, confused. She had read about the Great Trees many times over. She scanned her memory until it clicked.

“A source of life in a barren world,” she said. “Do you think they have something to do with the tree?”

“Don’t we all have something to do with all of the Great Trees of Thra?” Rauhl looked at her with a shrug. “Let’s get this done with, then.”

Chapter Text

"I don't understand," Rian said, sitting cross-legged facing Deet as she nursed Ashona, his forehead nearly touching hers. "She told you that you could just… change the rules?"

Deet shrugged, her eyes fixed on the baby. "I think she was just trying to get me to stop embarrassing her in front of Rauhl."

"Who's Rauhl?"

"A Dousan shaman," she said. "Rek'yr's brother."

"What was he doing there?"

"I guess he had a vision," she said. "He said something about a table."

"A table?"

"I think Brea is bringing in more Gelfling to put things together. For the future."

Rian nodded. Ashona unlatched from Deet's breast and curled up, satiated. Deet held her up to her shoulder and patted her back gently.

"Anyway," Deet said, "I feel like I should do something before Brea changes her mind."

“Don’t these things require some kind of --”

Rian was cut off by the sound of a knock on the door.

They looked at each other. “Who could that be?” Deet aked.

Rian shrugged. Without another word, he went to the heavy coral door and pulled it open.

A young dark-haired girl, no more than eight trine, stood before him, her wings still up as if she had just landed. In her hand, she held a large ring that seemed to be made of paper.

“Yes?”

The girl gasped, and looked as if she wanted to run away. She clutched the paper ring to her chest and gave an awkward curtsy, not unlike the woman in the marketplace that first time he’d gone there with Gurjin.

Rian looked back at Deet, who was headed toward the door behind him, Ashona on her shoulder.

“May we help you?” he asked, turning back to her.

The girl saw Deet behind him and gasped again. “Deethra,” she whispered, bowing her head and bending her knees.

Deet looked at Rian with confusion. “What is she doing?” she whispered.

“I have no idea,” he whispered back. After a moment, he spoke to the girl in a normal volume. “Stand up,” he said. “Tell us why you’re knocking on our door.”

The girl shifted nervously.

“What is your name?” Deet asked.

“Thari,” the girl said.

“Well,” Deet said. “It’s nice to meet you, Thari. I’m Deet.”

Thari giggled.

“I think she knows who you are,” Rian said, taking the infant from Deet’s arms.

Thari nodded. “It’s a blessing,” she said. Another young girl landed behind Thari, then another, and another, all barely at the age of cognition. She held out the paper ring toward Deet.

“Oh,” Deet said, accepting it gingerly. “It’s lovely.”

“We made it,” Thari said.

“How wonderful,” Deet said. “What… what is it?” As she examined it, she realized the paper appeared to be scrawled with those accursed ticks, like pages from a ledger.

“It’s a crown,” said Thari.

Deet blinked and looked at Rian, who looked more amused than concerned. The crown appeared too small to fit her, having clearly been made on a childling’s head.

“It’s beautiful,” Deet said. “But I…”

Rian cut her off. “It’s beautiful,” she said. He glanced at Deet “leave it at that.”

“My father said you were going to be the new Maudra,” Thari said. “The Maudra of the Lost,”

“There are no Maudras anymore,” Deet said, lowering herself to Thari’s eyeline. “We’re not divided into clans. We have a High Admiral now.”

“But she doesn’t care for us down here --”

“Of course she does, Thari!” Deet said.

“Not like you,” Thari said. “All the gelfling say so.”

Deet stood slowly. She looked at Rian, then at the crown in her hands. “Well,” she said. “I may not be your maudra, but I will see to it that there are going to be changes.”

The girls looked at Deet in awe. Then, in a fit of giggles, they up and flew away, descending into the below.

“According to Mother Aughra,” said Rauhl, sitting across from Onica in her quarters, “Thra itself --”

Onica looked at the blackened shard, then up at him. “You can communicate with Mother Aughra?” she asked. “Why didn’t you say?”

“Clearly, you didn’t ask,” Rauhl said.

Onica clicked her tongue. “Well, if you’ve spoken to Mother Aughra --”

“I didn’t say I spoke to her,” Rauhl said flatly. “She sent a message through the shard.”

“I didn’t see any message,” Onica said. “What did it say, exactly?”

Rauhl stood, and pulled out a small satchel. As Onica looked on, he poured its contents -- fine sand -- onto the table.

She had heard that the Dousan used sand as a form of dreamfasting called shalfasting, but she’d never seen it before.

He closed his eyes and lifted his head as if he was looking up toward the ceiling. The shard in Onica’s hand became warm. Then within a few seconds, it became so hot she dropped it on the table and watched as it rolled toward the mound of sand.

With a lift of his finger the sand began to swirl, the tiny grains moving in a tight pattern, then spreading out so wide they nearly filled the room. It felt, to Onica, that she should have been inhaling it and coughing, but the dust was well-controlled, hovering in front of her without getting on her at all.

At once, the grains of sand came together to show images -- stars and planets whizzed by in front of them. The three suns of Thra. Lightning. Rain. Cracked, dry land and dead crops. Once vibrant villages, completely destroyed. The Castle, pitch black and seeming to be sucking every last bit of light left in their world. The image circled the Castle, then scattered into swirling randomness. Then, gradually, a new image began to come together.

“Mother Aughra,” Onica whispered. She looked at Rauhl. His eyes remained closed, as if in meditation.

Before the image of Mother Aughra, the shalfast had been entirely silent. Now, as if she was hearing it inside her own head, Augra’s voice rang out, as clear as day.

“Gelfling… wherever you are,” she said. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Somewhere far. Space? Beneath the sea? Don’t need to know, as long as you’re still alive. And I know in my bones, you are alive and listening.”

She paused. “The Darkening is with you, wherever you are. That’s not a bad thing, no! It’s the Darkening that will lead you back home. The shard, like Thra, has gone dormant. Saving its energy. When it’s time to return, it will tell you. The Thra you knew is gone. But the gelflings who will heal the Crystal of Truth will spring forth soon. In the scheme of things, soon. It will be done.”

Onica’s eyes widened. She looked at Rauhl again. He splayed his fingers, releasing the vision, and the sand fell to the table.

“Gelflings?” Onica said, bewildered. “More than one? I thought there was one healer.”

“Oh no,” Rauhl said. “There are two. A man and a woman.” He said it casually, as if he’d known it all along.

“The woman, is she Ashona?”

Rauhl shook his head. “The Wellspring will bring forth the boy. But the healers are not siblings. They are the Second Wellspring, the ones who will help repopulate the gelfling after the Great Conjunction.”

Onica considered. “But if the girl isnt Ashona, who is she? If we’re the only Gelfling left, her parents must be here somewhere.” She thought about the hundreds of Gelfling living down below, some of them in questionable conditions.

Rauhl paused. “She will be the daughter of Tavra.”

“Tavra?” Onica sat up straight, shocked to hear him speak her daughter’s name.

“Do you know a Tavra? A vapran woman?”

Onica looked at her incredulously. “She’s five years old, not a woman” Onica said. “She’s the only surviving Vapran other than Brea. She was born from Seladon, but she’s my and my wife’s daughter.”

Her heart was beating fast, her throat tightening. She had spent so much time focused on the Wellspring and the tragic prophesy that their son, the healer, would grow up not knowing them under the tutelage of the Mystics.

“The other healer, will she know her mother?” Onica asked. Will she know her grandmothers? She thought. “How did she get back to Thra?”

“I believe she’ll be born there,” Rauhl said, calling the sand to return itself into its satchel.

Onica put her hand on her heart. How would she tell Dovra? How would she tell Brea? How did she not see?

Rauhl stood, pocketing the satchel. He looked at her pointedly. “We can only see what we’re able to handle,” he said.

“Tell me,” Onica said, as he turned to go, “is my daughter going to die?”

He stopped, but didn’t look back at her. “All Gelfling die,” he said. “Your daughter will be remembered as a hero.”

Deet and Rian were out on top of the Prodigious, walking, rather leisurely, toward the Citadel, as Ashona napped against Rian’s back. They had gone to the marketplace only to find that merchants had already stopped requiring ticks, but were starting to have shortages of food and other necessities.

“Maybe the tick system needs to be flipped,” Rian suggested. “Instead of having a limited number of ticks for goods that you can run out of, what if the goods are limited in how many we can take?”

“Well, that’s still not fair,” Deet said.

“Why not?”

“Remember Dor?”

Rian gave her a puzzled look.

“The woman at the market who struggled to feed her three childlings,” Deet said.

“Oh,” he said. “Of course.”

“Well, if we say a person can have only two alfen, that wouldn’t be enough to feed her family.”

“Well, you just add up the number of gelfling they have to feed.” He looked at her. “There has to be some kind of system.”

Deet shook her head, looking frustrated.

“How did you do it in Grot?” Rian asked.

She shrugged. “We just shared.”

“So the nurloc rump, you just gave it away?”

“After we kept what we needed, yes,” she said.

Rian blinked. “OK, but the other clans, most of them, at least, have trade cultures. And some of them were starving before they came here, you can’t expect gelfling not to hoard food when it’s unlimited.”

Deet sighed. “This is why I don’t envy Brea,” she said.

“Only because of that?” Rian said, smiling. He glanced at Deet, but she wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. Her eyes were wide as she looked off over his shoulder.

“What is that?” she asked.

Rian turned. There was a gathering in the wooded area. “It looks like a party.”

They walked toward the gathering. Usually, the wooded area was pure nature, but today it was strewn with glittering orbs hanging from branches, musicians, and revelers. The revelers, appearing to be all Stonewoods, weren’t dancing. Instead, they sat on the moss in neat rows facing a tapestry held up on four wooden rods, each held by a gelfling, two women and two men.

“Oh,” Rian said, finally. “It’s a wedding.”

“A wedding?” Deet asked.

“A wedding,” he said. “A traditional Stonewood marriage ceremony.”

“Oh,” she said, blinking.

“They’re very long and very boring,” he said, starting to walk away.

“Wait, Rian, let’s stay,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’ve never seen a marriage ceremony.”

He sighed. “We’re not invited.”

“We’re not going to do anything,” she said. “We’ll just watch from here.”

Rian glanced toward the gathering. “I’d rather not.” He could tell Deet was fascinated by the idea and loved experiencing new things, but Stonewood weddings were still a sore spot for him.

“Please, Rian,” she said. There was an excitement in her eyes he hadn’t seen in a while.

“Ok,” he said finally. “We’ll watch until we get bored.”

It would be nearly three hours and the setting of two of the suns before Deet got bored. She marveled at the clothing, the prayers, the rituals. She drank all of it in, asking questions periodically.

“Why did he give her a sword?”

“It’s a wedding sword.”

“That sounds violent for a marriage ceremony.”

“They’re not… going to use it, it’s a gift.”

“It’s hers now?”

“Yes, when he goes away to battle, she would use that sword if she needed to fight.”

“Oh. Why doesn’t she go with him to battle?”

“I don’t know, Deet, it’s how it is.”

“What battles are they fighting here?”

“It’s just the tradition.”

“Hm.”

After such a lengthy detour, and with the light fading, they decided to return home rather than go to the Citadel.

Besides, there was something about a wedding that stirs feelings of affection. They held hands as they walked toward the tunnel.

“So,” Deet said, finally, “was that like the wedding you were supposed to have?”

He stopped. “It wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.

Deet blinked, aware she had touched a nerve. “I know it wasn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Rian, was it wrong of me to ask?”

He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t wrong,” he said. It was complicated, though. The wedding didn’t make him feel guilty about marrying Deet outside of all Stonewood traditions, but it did unearth some unresolved guilt over not refusing to marry a Stonewood when he was with Mira, and the grief that went along with that.

“Well, you were right,” she said. “It was too long. And boring in parts.”

“Yeah.”

“Why did they do that thing with the water?”

He laughed lightly. “I don’t know.”

“It was very beautiful, though.”

He nodded and looked at her. “You don’t feel cheated that we never had a ceremony?”

“Grottans don’t have marriage ceremonies,” she said.

“Oh? What do you do?”

Deet shrugged. “You just… choose each other. Oh, and exchange something.” She paused. “But not a sword.”

“That sounds like what we did,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I think it was a perfect wedding.” She started walking ahead of him.

“You know,” he said, “Sometimes I think you've turned me to the Grottan way.”

She looked back at him playfully, “It’s called growth, Rian,” she said.

Chapter Text

Deet sighed and nuzzled Ashona as she yawned and curled up on her shoulder. Rian was already sound asleep against her other shoulder, an arm draped over her and the baby.

She had gotten used to it, especially since she and Rian had resumed intimacy. Ashona would sleep for a couple of hours after the evening meal, a window they often took advantage of. At first, it felt unfair that she had to get up and nurse as soon as they started drifting to sleep. Now she loved it. Especially this moment, when the two of them were asleep, both sated and nuzzled against her.

In an odd way, it was the only time she really had to herself.

Back in Grot, she spent the majority of her time alone, allowing her imagination to soar as she herded nurlock or hiked the riverbed.

She didn’t miss spending time alone, or so she thought. But in these moments of silence -- except for a the sounds of their breathing, occasionally punctuated by a brief, light snore that Ashona had inherited from Rian -- she could let her mind go free, whether she wanted to remember a favorite song or think clearly about something.

She thought about the ticks, and what she would say to Brea, before her mind recalled the songs of the Stonewood wedding and she drifted off to sleep with her family.

Deet was awakened by a low, familiar tapping sound. So familiar was the sound, she was surprised to open her eyes and find herself, not in Domrak in Grot, but in the bed chamber she shared with her new family.

Rian was facing her, on his side, still soundly asleep, Ashona's back to her as she slept nuzzled into his shoulder.

Deet smiled. While he didn't verbalize it, she knew that he had fatherhood anxiety. She understood why. But fatherhood suited him.

She turned, quickly, as the taps -- not a dream, it turned out -- echoed in the room again.

She slid out of the bed as carefully as she could, but Rian stirred awake.

"You Ok?" He asked hoarsely, squinting despite the lack of daylight.

"Do you hear that?" She asked, approaching the coral wall. She was unclothed.

He sat up slightly. "I don't hear anything." He reached for his linen and pulled it up to his waist, just in case the mysterious sound forced them to escape. "Put something on," he said.

"There it goes again," she said. She put a palm against the wall and concentrated.

"What is it?" Rian asked, lifting the now-stirring childling to his shoulder.

Ashona blinked and cooed, her ears twitching.

"Do you hear it too, little one?" he asked, smoothing her rapidly-growing dark hair with his thumb.

Deet held up a finger as she listened. "It's… it's finger talk," she said in a loud whisper.

Rian blinked in surprise. He had heard of finger talk in a couple of his dreamfasts with Deet. It was an obscure non-verbal language of Grot, made by tapping the cave walls.

He slid out of the bed and approached her, shifting Ashona from one shoulder to the other.

"Does this mean there are other Grottan on the vessel?" he asked.

Deet shook her head no, still concentrating. "It isn't a fluent speaker," she said. "But I can just make out what they're saying."

"What are they saying?"

"Hm." She looked as if she was trying to crack a code. "Something about the prophecies."

Rian groaned. "Can we have one day?"

"I think…" she looked at them. Ashona's arms were stretched toward her, her cooing beginning to hitch into a cry. Rian passed the childling to her, and in a single motion she tucked her into the crook of her elbow to nurse.

"I think we should tell Brea."

Rian sighed. "Just one normal day?"

Onica was in a panic. With the swirling of a handful of sand, she had gone from an observer of prophesy -- a sympathetic soothsayer who watched Deet and Rian navigate a world where they faced unimaginable expectations -- to a part of it, more deeply than she ever could have imagined.

Part of her wanted to just disregard what Rauhl had said. The ways of the Dousan were far different than hers. It would be easy to reject it and move on.

Only she couldn't. She needed to talk to Brea, she knew, but she wasn't ready. For the first time, she didn't know what to say to Dovra. And little Tavra, what was she supposed to say to her? Anything at all?

She tried to separate herself from the situation and think of what she would say to another mother in her position, but she came up blank.

The only Gelfling she felt she could talk to were Deet and Rian. She didn't know them well, beyond seeing the many chapters of their life together after she had released the Darkening. She knew them better than she should, really, and they knew it. It had made their exchanges awkward. But Onica always felt, genuinely, that she was on their side.

Going to see them without Brea was out of the question. Onica rarely left the Citadel, and had never left to go down below by herself, ever. It would be too conspicuous if she started now.

She had heard of finger talking during one of her travels. It always fascinated her, the idea that Gelfling could communicate by tapping their fingers, a resonation that could reach others far away. It worked in caves. Why not on the great vessel, with it's winding tunnels?

She had been tapping for a while now, kneeling in the corner of an empty room, desperate to be heard.

It felt useless. She lowered her hands, her head bowed in defeat, when she heard a simple, clear response.

Onica's finger talking skills were rudimentary at best, but the response translated to one of the most basic words in any language:

Hello.

"I don't understand why Brea would use that language," Rian said, as they once again made their way to the Citadel. Today, Ashona, increasingly aware of her surroundings, was wrapped and perched on his side, her little knee and foot sticking out.

"Well, who else could figure out how to use it?" Deet asked.

"I don't know, Deet, there are a thousand Gelfling on this vessel," he said.

"It was definitely coming from above," she said.

"Maybe it was that Dousan shaman?"

Deet shrugged, and looked around, taking in the trees. Theoretically, the below was similar to Grot, but it lacked the flora she loved so much. Nothing could compare to the natural ecosystem of Grot in her mind, but the top of the vessel felt more like Thra.

Rian eyed her and was tempted to tell her not to get distracted, as she had the last time they came up and got sidetracked by the Stonewood wedding. After a brief consideration, he decided against it. He didn't really want to go back to the Citadel, and the distraction of the wedding had been pretty wonderful, actually. It was rare, even now that they had their own dwelling, that they were just in the moment together like that. As they turned a corner overlooking the spot where the couple had exchanged promises, he was a little disappointed to see it empty.

"Is it wrong that I miss my old life sometimes?" Deet asked, her eyes drawn to the ground in front of her.

"Of course not," Rian said. "Why would that be wrong?"

"Well, I didn't know you then. I didn't have Shoni."

"Oh. Huh." He looked down at Ashona peering out at the world. "I don't think that's wrong. You miss your family."

"I miss my whole life," she said. "I'm sorry."

Rian let her apology sit in the air. No doubt the sound of the obscure Grottan language had triggered something in her. The two of them had each experienced enough trauma that these kinds of moments weren't uncommon, and he knew that most of the time talking one another out of their feelings didn't help.

"I feel that too," he said, taking her hand. "And my life before was objectively pretty awful."

She nodded, with a hint of a smile.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow what?"

"Tomorrow we'll have a normal day."

Rek'yr stood at the bottom of the Citadel steps, seemingly confirming that Brea was expecting them.

"You came," Rek'yr said with a nod.

"Did we have a choice?" Rian asked.

Deet shot him a look. His demeanor could change on a flint.

"Leave if you want," Rek'yr said. "Onica has no power over you."

"Onica?" Deet asked, looking from Rian to Rek'yr. "What does Onica have to do with -- "

Rek'yr turned and walked up the steps away from them before she could finish. He paused at the top and turned, his expression questioning why they hadn't followed.

Rian shook his head as Deet pulled him to follow.

"This should be fun," he said.

Rek'yr didn't lead them to Onica's quarters or the committee room where Brea held closed meetings about prophecy and the future of the Gelfling. He took them farther into the Citadel than they'd been before, up a spiral staircase that led to an open air platform surrounded by a parapet.

Rian looked around, uncomfortable with how similar it felt to the battlements he'd spent countless hours on watch at the Castle.

"Curious that we escaped the war only to build our own version of the Castle," he said.

Rek'yr smiled. "You sound like my brother," he said. "And neither of you are wrong."

Onica appeared, as if she had been hiding. "It's actually based on the Ha'rar citadel," she said. She clasped Deet's hands warmly, and nodded at Rian, whose expression was as suspicious as ever.

She turned her attention to the childling blinking up at her.

"Oh my Thra," she whispered, holding out a finger, which the baby grasped without hesitation. "You're growing!"

"What do you want, Onica?" Rian asked. "And why are we hiding up here?"

Onica looked at him and straightened up.

"We've learned some new prophecy," she said. "Something that changes things."

Rian widened his eyes in a bemused "well?" expression.

Onica took a deep breath. "There's not just one, but two," she said. "The boy we knew about, and a girl."

Rian stepped back, clutching his daughter, shaking his head.

"No, it's not her!" Onica said before they could get a word out. "She hasn't been born yet. And she is not related to your son, the healer."

"We didn't have a son, did we?"

Onica looked at them. "Well. Not yet."

As Deet glanced at Rian, Onica caught her giving him a look of "I told you."

"OK," Rian said. "That's great. We're leaving."

"The girl in the prophesy is the child of my daughter, Tavra," Onica said, as he started away.

"Oh Onica," Deet said, still standing where she was. "Are you sure?"

Onica nodded. "I didn't know who to tell. I don't know what to do."

"Well," Deet said, her brow kintted in thought. "I think it's better to know."

She glanced at Rian, his back still to Onica. He looked at her, and saw hope in her eyes.

"Is it true that they will live hundreds of trine?" she asked.

Onica nodded. "It's said they will rule for many trine."

"What would happen without the healers?" Deet asked.

Onica shrugged. "Surely the Gelfling would go extinct for all time," she said. She paused. "But they don't. We won't. Our children will be the mother and father of the future of our species."

Rian turned, looking at Onica. He'd never thought about it quite like that. It was a massive, overwhelming thought. It wasn't really about them. At the same time, the thought that they might be a part of this future hit him like a blade.

The three of them faced each other.

"Maybe it's time to work with the prophesies, and not just ride along on them."

Chapter Text

Deet listened. Then knocked. Then listened again.

"What are you doing?" Rian asked, looking up at her. She had pushed some of the sitting room furniture against the wall and had climbed up on it, knocking and pausing every few seconds.

It looked dangerous, but he knew better than to tell her the obvious.

"I'm looking for tunnels," she said, her ear pressed against the coral.

Rian lifted Ashona off the blanket he'd laid on the floor and sat her on his lap.

"Why?"

Deet didn't pause. "What do you mean why?"

"Well, where do you think the tunnel you're looking for goes?"

She shrugged. "I don't know."

"Then what's the point?"

Deet stopped and looked at him. "Because it's fun."

Rian considered and pulled himself to his feet, slinging the baby onto his back in one motion and tightening the knot.

"Fair enough," he said. "But don't you think we should go to the Citadel today?"

She looked down at him. "Today is supposed to be a normal day, Rian."

He smiled. They had agreed to that. "Searching for tunnels in the sitting room isn't exactly what I had in mind."

Deet paused, then slid down to the floor in front of him.

"Were you not aware I'm Grottan?" she teased.

"What?" he deadpanned in fake surprise, running a finger down one of her braids.

She smiled and laid her hands on his chest. "Back home, I loved to explore after feeding the nurloc," she said.

"What would you find?" He asked. They had talked about everything, or so he thought, but he hadn't heard much about her explorations.

"Oh, all sorts of things," she said. Hidden passages. Wonderful ancient drawings on the cave walls. One time, I found an ancient wine jug that had been used in rituals before the Grottan went to live in the caves. At least, that's what Maudra Argot said it was."

"No reason not to believe her," he said. He paused in thought. "Sometimes I would get curious about all the things that must have been in the Castle." He paused. "Before I knew."

Deet nodded and kissed him lightly, as if to kiss away the pain that had reached his lips.

Ashona chirped and kicked him in the side, making his slight smile broaden.

"No one's forgetting about you," he said over his shoulder.

"Remember when we used to play songs together at the cottage?" Deet asked. "You would come back with cold water and sweet Alfen and we would sit by the fire and make up songs on the firca flute?"

"Mm," he said. "That was nice."

She nodded. "I still have it. The flute."

"Really?"

"Maybe we could do something like that for a normal day," she said. "Go down to the square --*

"I don't know, Deet," he said. "Everyone treats us so strangely down there."

"They're just being nice," she said.

"They think you're the new maudra."

Deet shrugged. "Well," she said, "I saw someone down there trading lutes."

Rian blinked.

"I remember you saying you used to have one in Stone-in-the-Wood."

"I did," he said, surprised that she'd remembered. He mulled it over. His own father had played music for him when he was a baby, and taught him from a young age. It was one thing from home he could pass on to Ashona.

"I think that sounds lovely, actually."

Dovra and Tavra were in the corner, Dovra on the floor sitting within a pile of pillows she'd made over the years, Tavra curled into her lap, her silver hair getting the last few braids in an intricate pattern on her little head. She looked up from Dovra's knee as Onica entered through the tapestry.

"Momma," she said, but she didn't sit up or reach out for her.

"Are you feeling OK, little one?" Onica asked, pulling up a pillow and settling in.

Tavra nodded.

Onica smiled at her, drinking in her daughter's face, her hair, her long fingers. It struck her that even if Tavra had felt ill, she didn't have to worry that she might die.

Not yet, anyway.

She noticed Dovra looking at her curiously.

"Are you OK, is the question."

Onica nodded. "I've just been thinking about the future."

"You've been listening to the Dousan shaman, you mean," Dovra said.

"He's wise, Dovra," Onica said. "The Dousan can see things we haven't."

Dovra shifted. "Like what?"

Onica glanced down at Tavra. "Why don't you go play, little one?"

Tavra shook her head, clinging to Dovra. "I don't want to," she said.

"We've been out playing all morning," Dovra said. "She's had her bath. She's tired."

Onica sighed and nodded. As she stood up, Dovra caught her eye and kept her stare fixed on her.

"What things, Onica?"

Trudging down the tunnel toward the square, Rian started to see how a secret private tunnel could be useful. They'd been stopped twice already on the way down to the square by admirers, who increasingly seemed to think that Deet, in particular, was going to change things, even help them return to Thra proper.

"These Gelfling gossip more than Castle guards," he said to Deet when they were finally alone.

Deet looked at him inquisitively.

"That's a lot," he said.

"Oh."

They walked in silence as they neared the end of the tunnel, the sounds of laughter and music growing louder with every step.

"I think that we should try and fit in," Deet said.

"I know you do."

"It's like," she stopped walking and grasped his arm, "we're… fancy? In a different world? Do you know what I mean?"

Rian nodded. A class system was one of the things Deet struggled with, as it hadn't really existed in Grot. Even Maudra Argot has lived in the same kind of home as the rest of the Grottans, ate the same food -- if the Grottan went hungry or cold, Argot did, too.

It was strange for her to live above others in a larger dwelling, never having to worry about food. Not to mention, their closest friends essentially governed the community, or the fact that they had been identified through prophecy as being somehow more special than everyone else.

"I don't think fitting in is going to be easy," he said. "They bow to you, Deet. They've even bowed to me."

"When I first came topside, and Hup and I went to Stone-in-the-Wood, everyone was so rude to us," she said.

Rian cringed at the thought.

"And now, everyone is too nice. I just want to be --"

"Normal?"

She nodded.

"I don't think you'll ever be 'normal,' Deet," he said.

Her face fell.

"But that's what I love about you."

She looked out into the square.

"Will you love me less if I try to be?"

He laughed. "Of course not."

She looked at him. "OK, then, let's try."

Rian looked out into the square. "I guess we'll follow the music?"

Deet beamed, nodded and grasped his arm. The square looked as it always did, deep below the surface where no sunlight indicated time of day. It was comforting for her, even as it remained strange and foreign. It was a bit like Domrak, but with many more Gelfling with a range of different cultures.

Her eyes scanned the small groups, some talking, some drinking, some trading.

When she saw a familiar face, she gasped excitedly.

"Dor?" She waved at the woman who, in her mind, had become her friend the day they'd met at the market and Deet had given her the sack of food.

Dor froze in her tracks and looked behind herself, clearly surprised to be addressed by Deet so casually.

Deet let go of Rian's arm and approached her.

"It's so good to see you!"

Dor nodded and smiled, still looking somewhat stunned.

"It's wonderful to see you, Deethra. How is your little one?"

"Oh, she's right --" Deet turned, expecting Rian and Ashona to be beside her, but Rian had already wandered over toward a pair of nearby musicians.

"Nevermind," Deet said. "She's amazing! And yours?"

*

Rian approached the musicians casually, hoping to get some advice on getting his hands on a lute. He couldn't help but notice that one of the musicians, a Spriton with dark brown skin and his hair pulled back in a knot, held one of the most beautiful lutes he had ever seen.

Before he got to them, they stopped, abruptly, and stared at him.

"Dammit," Rian whispered under his breath.

"It's him," said one, a fiery-haired Sifa with a band of fabric tied around his forehead.

Rian took a deep breath.

"Hey, guys."

He immediately cringed internally.

"You're him," the Spriton said, in a thick accent that reminded him of Kylen.

"I'm Rian. Of… or… Once Stonewood."

"The one who saw the first Gelfling drained?" The Spriton asked.

Rian blinked, jolted momentarily. Usually when he was recognized, it was for the prophecy. For the future. No one other than Deet had asked him about the past in a long time.

He felt a lump in his throat.

"The same," he said.

"That's terrible," the Spriton said, laying his lute on the table.

"Can we see it?" the Sifa asked, leaning forward.

Before Rian could answer, the Spriton gave him a whack across the side of his head.

"What kind of question is that? It's not some parlor trick!"

He turned to Rian. "My name is Ollin," he said. "This is Rerrit."

Rerrit nodded, rubbing the side of his head.

"That's a beautiful instrument," Rian said, motioning toward the lute. "I'm looking for one myself."

Ollin looked at the lute, clearly a prized possession, and lifted it gingerly. After a moment, he held it out to Rian.

"Take it."

"What?"

"Please."

Rian shook his head. "No," he said. "I don't want your lute, I meant I was looking to acquire a different one."

Ollin pulled the instrument back slowly, a look of consternation mixed with relief on his face.

"Why does everyone think we want to take their things?"

"Well, you are royalty," Rerrit said, as if it was an obvious explanation.

"I'm literally not," Rian said. "I was a member of the Guard."

"Your son is going to be a king," Rerrit said. "Everyone knows that."

"And your wife is the New Maudra," Ollin said.

"Well, not yet, Ollin, not yet," Rerrit said.

Rian looked from one to the other and shook his head. The square was exhausting.

"I just wanted to know if you knew of a craftsman," he said.

Rerrit and Ollin looked at each other and shrugged.

Rian turned and adjusted the wrap that held Ashona on his back. She squirmed and started to fuss. He didn't mind. It felt like she knew when he was frustrated and complained in solidarity.

He looked over at Deet, still chatting with Dor, looking completely at ease even as more Gelfling women came over to join the conversation.

He sighed.

"Let's see if we can find a craftsman," he said over his shoulder.

*

It was easy to tell what most of the shops were for -- they clearly sold food or ale or clothing. A few were less obvious. One sold herbs grown in the forest up above. Another was a toymaker who proudly presented Rian with a small doll with shining wings, silver hair and green skin. His bestseller, he said, as he insisted Rian accept one for the baby. It was a beautiful doll, and Rian didn't resist. He thanked the toymaker and tucked it into his satchel.

The last shop in the row was tucked behind the weaver's den. The symbols on the door were cryptic, at least to Rian, but that only made him more curious.

Ashona kicked him in the side from her position low on his back, as if to goad him forward.

He pushed the door, expecting it not to budge, but it opened easily. He froze as it swung open to a room filled with parchments and papers and strange gadgets. The last thing he saw was a stern-looking Spriton with greying hair.

"What do you need?" the Gelfling asked, in that same familiar accent.

Rian swallowed. "I, uh…"

"Well?"

"I'm looking for a shop that sells instruments," Rian said.

"Instruments?"

"Musical instruments," Rian said.

The man huffed. "Does it look like I make musical instruments?"

Rian paused, his fingers gripping his childling's linen-wrapped foot lightly. It didn't look like he made instruments. He couldn't tell what in Thra he made.

"I'm sorry,' Rian said, turning to leave.

The man stomped his foot. "You interrupt me just to leave?"

Rian turned back to him slowly. "I'm sorry I interrupted you." He paused. "What do you do, if you don't mind my asking?"

The man sighed gruffly. "I am the mathematician." He stared at Rian for a few moments before his glare, barely discernably, softened.

"My name is Gorel."

Rian exhaled. "I'm Rian."

Gorel nodded slowly. "Do you have a problem?"

"Where to start?" Rian said.

"Ha!" Gorel chortled.

"So, you solve problems with math. And science."

"I try."

"Well," Rian said, "It seems to me that the Gelfling rely on prophecy and superstition." He stepped forward and pushed the opened door shut. "Brea has seers and shaman working to save Thra, but no mathematicians."

Gorel nodded. "And what do you think a mathematician can do?"

"I don't know."

Gorel paused. "I'll show you," he said.

Rian watched as the mathematician rooted through the piles of parchment until he came up with the scroll he was looking for.

"Ah!" Gorel unrolled the scroll and laid it on a table as he waved Rian over. "Have you heard the prophecy of the Great Conjunction?"

Rian nodded. "Yes."

"Do you believe it will happen?"

Rian blinked. "I… think so."

"You don't have to leave it to faith,' Olled said. "I know it will happen. Down to the minute."

Rian looked down at the scroll. It was covered in symbols, lines and circles that meant nothing to him but seemed to fill Olled with a great deal of pride. It reminded him of Mother Aughra's observatory. He had never thought of her explorations as science.

"You see? Proof!"

"So you can prove that the Crystal of Truth can be healed by a Gelfling when the suns align?"

Gorel looked up at him. "Oh, no no no," he said. "That's for prophets to see. Mathematics and science, prophesy, it all works together."

Rian nodded. "Then why is there no mathematician serving at the Citadel?"

Gorel smiled. "That's not a bad question."

"Could we learn even more?" Rian asked.

Gorel stood straight, looking Rian up and down. "It's possible."

"Could you teach me mathematics?"

Gorel scoffed. "You?"

Rian shrugged. "I'm a fast learner."

"With a sword, maybe," Gorel said. "You're much too old to learn mathematics."

Rian looked deflated. "But -- how did you learn it?"

Gorel paused. "Well, I had a mentor who was mentored by a Mystic --"

"You could be my mentor," Rian said.

Gorel rolled up the scroll and shook his head.

"The Childling, maybe."

Rian looked back at Ashona, sound asleep.

"She's only a baby."

"Well, in a few trine."

"I don't have a few trine," Rian said. "We don't have a few trine."

Gorel looked resigned. "We have 35 trine."

"I don't know that we'll be here in 35 trine. My son --" Rian caught himself, a catch in his throat. He'd never said the phrase "my son" before. He turned away and looked at the door. Deet would be wondering where he had gotten to.

As he reached for the door, Gorel called to him, motioning at Ashona. "As I said, I will teach your son."

"My son isn't born yet. This is my daughter," Rian said, pulling the door open and disappearing into the square.

Gorel watched him go. With Rian long out of earshot, he responded.

"I will teach your daughter, then."