Vilithe sighed morosely at how kafkaesque life was on Aryss.
She had broken out of the remembrance. No longer inside another’s mind, escaped from that dreadful memory inside the glacial mine. So now she was back here, in the dark little cell, sitting with Kwandriss Talauth.
It was even worse to sit here imprisoned, wondering what the next punishment would be. At least once you knew what the problem was going to be, you could start taking steps to deal with it. She scooted closer to Kwandriss, still totally silent and deadly still, and mimicked her huddled position. She could sense now that Kwandriss held her back from leaning against the wall, the simple comfort of a supported back denied to her, for her back was still so fresh from the whip wounds. Vilithe lay back, her own back, bearing a few whip scars of her own, though healed, resting against the roughhewn rock wall as comfortably as she could. She was thankful that the wall had at least been coated with a layer of acrylic, softening the sharper edges of rock. Black spirits must now be crawling all over the whip wounds that Kwandriss suffered, desperately trying to stitch them back together, but Kwandriss simply didn’t have enough glucose, cellulose, and protean in her liver to make the full repair. Vilithe wished she could have shared some of the gruel she ate for breakfast with her. How long had she been stuck here?
She reached into Kwandriss’ mind again. Sinking into sync came easier now that she was mirroring Kwandriss’ neuromuscular positioning.
scry(
target: Kwandriss Talauth,
seek: greatest fear
);
She just wanted to double check. Kwandriss had been traumatized by a stray graze as a broodling. The wound had festered, and sprouted a myriad of boils about it, and it was a time before the infection could be treated, for Aryssal poverty left her spirits unequipped. Every time she stared at that inflamed and pus oozing wound, she would get the feeling of creatures crawling all over her body, and she would itch and scratch furiously, leaving her in agonizing pain when she made it worse. When the abscess cores finally burst and spilled out, it would leave deep, gaping holes where the pus had formed the abscess. She found it so torturous that even after the wound healed, any time she saw many holes arranged together in a row, she would feel that same sensation of infestation within.
Well, time was wasting. She needed some sort of mental construct to base the foundational hallucination on.
Suddenly that annoying spirit was now quite handy. She could have simply consulted the silent daemons, but in truth she had come to enjoy her banter with the thing. She unmuted it.
Just as she summoned the spirit, she felt a longing pang to once again behold the -
How dare you, vassal!
Any ideas? She asked the spirit. She hadn’t the spite for truly creative malice, and conjuring horror was presumably its namesake.
But the spirit ignored its host, still flummoxed at being muted. You cannot silence me! Hahaha! Again, that grating, screeching, faux laughter.
Malevolent, I have a question for you.
What is it, vassal? Be quick with your duties! As much as this vassal irritated the spirit, it still had to serve. It had no choice in the matter.
I need something from the old realm, a visual, something for me to help construct these holes I’m going to hallucinate all over Kwandriss’ body. Vilithe made sure to conceal these thoughts from poor suffering Kwandriss, even though Kwandriss was surely aware of the presence of her tormentor, and agonizing over it, probably wishing Vilithe would just go ahead and get it over with.
Malevolent processed her request.
And then Malevolent summoned the generative image of a strange Reathean plant in her mind. The spirit had taken but nanoseconds to recreate a perfect visual amalgamation.
The immature lotus root, offered Malevolent, with seeds in it.
The little sprout of a tuber felt to Vilithe like it was arranged roughly hexagonally, or had she spent too much time in this damn hive? Smaller holes encircled out from the central concentric circle of holes, in a chaotic pattern that unnerved. Organic. In each opening there lay a little bud, a strange little pale bulb with a tiny black dot on the end. There was a faint recollection of having seen a real one before, but it was too faint for her to recall where, why, and how she knew.
hallucinate(
target: Kwandriss Talauth,
param: young lotus root holes covering her body, with the seeds still in
);
The spirits, knowing her wish before the thought was fully formed, switched the lights on for her. Electric current flowed through the circular tube of mercury vapor mounted to the ceiling, and the small room was flooded with the sickly pale of clinical fluorescence. “Ah!” cried out Kwandriss, blinded by the sudden brightness.
And then as the phosphenes cleared and her eyes returned to focus, she saw lotus root seed holes – with little seeds in them – emerge and open on her palms.
“Ahh! AHH!!” she screamed.
The lotus root seed holes spread, bubbling out, and around, up her fingers, down her arms. Her wrists opened into little lotus root seed holes. Her biceps flushed with them. They all had little seeds in them. She tried closing her eyes but Vilithe puppeteered them back open. “AHHH! AAAH!!” Unable to close her eyes she started scratching her arms, trying to peel out the seeds. She was scratching too hard. Her skin began peeling. Little trickles of black blood started to spill from her scratches. She realized what she was doing, and tried to get a hold of herself, but they kept spreading, down to her exposed breasts and along her stomach. She returned to her clutched, fetal position, staring straight ahead at the wall in front of her, trying not to think about the holes, with the little seeds in them still, that were hallucinating all over her body. Tears streamed down her face. Her teeth grinded. Her breath was shallow and rapid, her diaphragm weakened by trembling neurosis. She felt no actual physical pain, not even that which she inflicted upon herself, so overwhelmed by fear was she. This torment was truly tailored uniquely for her mind.
Why did the Goddess have to be so cruel?
Vilithe released Kwandriss from the hallucination. Kwandriss was sobbing softly now, in morose gratitude.
Kwandriss.
Yes, mistress psion. How can this lowly vassal serve the Goddess?
Vilithe hated her role. Vassals caught in the hell of psionic flaying often couldn’t tell if the psion inflicting it upon them were Amallarkeans, they simply assumed that they were. And she was thinking it, not speaking it. So Vilithe could discern it was no lie. She had already been broken by the whip strikes, afraid to ever defy Clan Amallark again. This punishment pushed her past the brink. Fraying would surely follow. She might see shadows that just weren’t there in the corners of her eyes. Maybe she would develop a schizophrenic voice in her head. She would be far less effective.
But the task instructed clear and plainly-
Punish her by exploiting her trypophobia.
Did the Empress do this because she feared the vassals would grow brazen without this oppression, go rogue, and overthrow her? But it felt to Vilithe nonetheless that being so awful to your enemies just invited vengeance.
Kwandriss was numb and quiet now. Her face was blank.
She hadn’t been strong enough to resist, to ward off her fear. Vilithe wondered what she could do for her. Certainly, this task was done surprisingly quickly. She was used to vassals made of sterner stuff, vassals who still had that glimmer of hope that they could resurrect their dead clan, vassals who resisted with everything they had left in them. At least breaking them was a challenge, which could distract Vilithe from the hideously sadistic nature of the things she was doing to them.
Could she somehow prevent Kwandriss from making more errors? Fix her bugs?
She delved back in.
scry(
target: Kwandriss Talauth,
seek: your clan, your history, your identity
);
Memories now rushed through Vilithe, compressed moments in time that unfolded in parallel spirit-cycled cognition, the core, keystone memories that held up the arch of her conscious being. Memories that even the Amallarks dared not strip away, lest her sanity crumble.
I am Kwandriss of Clan Talauth.
I was born of the three hundred and eighteenth Aryssal brood of Queen Talauth, but I never rose to the rank of greater psion. I attended the infirmary, making sure that the Brood Mother in charge of the chamber always had handmaidens fetching her medicines and extracts as needed to dress the wounds of our soldiers.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
And now Vilithe saw rows upon rows of injured soldiers, flax fiber bandages soaking up inky dark, flashing images of minor abrasions, major lacerations, fractured bones. Gashes and burns and broken bones. Necrotic damage and flesh turned cancerous and malignant by the corruption of spirits. Cardiac arrest from shocking touches. Falling into frightening dreams of soldiers, psionically pulling them out of head concussion-based trauma - headaches, chronic tinnitus, and sensitivity to light.
I fell in love. Gwin was my lover, she too was a worker, we held each other when the howling sandstorms of Aryss would roar over our bunker.
And Vilithe now felt Gwin’s presence, and she felt a wave of oxytocin come over her. She felt Gwin’s breath on her cheek. She heard Gwin whisper audibly to her ear, “The Traitor won’t find us. We’ll prevail. Our Queen will take care of us.”
I was captured recently.
Vilithe could feel a faint, blurry recollection of hectic chaos, but nothing clearer than that. A heroic last stand. One knight against overwhelming odds.
She tried to go deeper.
Like the pinging reverberation after smacking your skull accidentally on something hard, Vilithe was rudely ejected from Kwandriss’ mind. The reverberation seemed to roll about in the steady waters of her inner ear, and she then felt like she was at sea, the ground around her heaving left and right, back and forth. It grew more violent now, and-
break();
She shook her head left and right and took a few deep breaths.
She was drenched in sweat now. It was pouring profusely out of her, though she had not felt cold nor hot just a moment ago. Now she felt both. It felt like there was an internal fever inside her, burning her up alive, but her skin was so sticky and wet with sweat that the slightest ebb of air felt like the needles of a piercing chill.
A psionic booby trap. Just a conditional mind blast. A psionic sequencer. Still sucked. She grit her teeth and furiously rubbed her hands against opposite arms to warm her skin. It took her a little while to get composed.
Vilithe just couldn’t let it go.
scry(
target: Kwandriss Talauth,
seek: the goals of Clan Talauth
);
Another memory now, but this was seeped in golden hue. Light danced, colors were vivid, perception was sharper than normal. But more important than that, Vilithe could feel an aura of psionic reverence about it, bestowed by Kwandriss, but not the maker of the memory itself. This was a special memory. This was Queen Talauth’s own thought, shared with all her daughters.
Now she saw a vast and whirling imagined empire, an obsession of accumulated rote dreams, built and stacked upon assumption after assumption. A floating red sphere, with a tiny patch of white atop it, now spun itself before Vilithe’s mind’s eye. The realm of Aryss. Now as the realm spun the white started to shrink even further, but a thin veneer appeared over the realm – an atmosphere – the white suddenly became rayleigh blue out of nowhere, exploding suddenly, snaking its way outward. Underground ice. The sepia earths of the realm graded to verdants and viridian.
All along, it was Queen Talauth’s vision – certainly one shared by many Queens and probably the only reason why any of them were even here stuck in this blasted place – to terraform Aryss.
And then Vilithe realized that this core memory was a foundation of all this worker’s hopes and dreams.
She dreamed of an Aryss covered in plants and water like Reath. She dreamed of it populated with revived creatures that once lived on Reath but were long dead. The mythical tastes of the cryptids which no elvan or orcan had tasted in two hundred revolutions, only facsimiles of it: Flowers of every color for pollinators now cryptid – creatures not seen since before the Catastrophe – to gather honey. Queen Talauth was very old, and she was feeding her broods very dangerous memories indeed, memories of a dead time, memories that only gave despair, and fury, and anger, and sadness. Queen Talauth believed that one revolution this dead desert planet would become a paradise.
Somehow, all of this felt very, very familiar to Vilithe.
Why hadn’t the Amallarkeans redacted this? She then realized the obvious. They only care about fear and trauma. This wasn’t fear, nor trauma. This was a desire. This was happiness. This was a dream. It would be easy for an Amallarkean psion to overlook this. They didn’t know how to use it.
If Kwandriss believed that one rote Aryss could become a garden realm, then she had everything to fight for. Even if she died, the small chance that going rogue and fighting her way out of the clutches of the Amallarks to survive out in her own in the Aryssal wastes, just long enough for something – anything – to compel the processes of Aryssal climate change, atomic fire rained on the ice and then make something resembling a happy life for herself.
Vilithe was saddened by the naivete.
Aryss’s mantle, its inner sphere of molten magma, magnesium, silicon and iron, the very beating heart of the realm, had stopped spinning. Flatlined. Aryss could not produce an electromagnetic field strong enough to hold any atmosphere onto itself at all. You could pump all the carbonic gas you wanted – no small feat to transport from realm to realm, the finicky, hateful, invisible effluvium, the evil emission of forbidden fire – it would do nothing. If there ever was a sky in Aryss in eons past, it too had all been simply shorn away by solar wind when Aryss’s broken heart gave up. Despite the naysayers, it turned out to be easier to live on Phyros! Indeed, her clan had proven it. It is better to tame an atmosphere, wild and wooly and out of control, than to create one from scratch. She knew this with certainty, for she knew how, and why, she knew it.
She decided to truly fix Kwandriss once and for all.
imprint(
delete: There is a hope that one rotation Aryss will go green,
and become a liveable place,
update: There is no hope that Aryss will ever be anything more
than a barren wartorn desert
);
The erasing was difficult, but as long as a new memory was crafted to take hold, tedious as it was, it could be done. Vilithe rushed the job by simply editing the words that escaped the lips of Kwandriss’ Queen Mother all that time ago. When she would say paradise she now said hell. When she would say utopia she now said dystopia. Any conveyed concept that couldn’t be neatly broken down into its opposite duality she just removed and replaced. Instead of Queen Talisa Talauth’s soaring rhetoric, now there was nothing more than just Vilithe’s own little pedantic rant about the astronomical features of Aryss. It was self-plagiarized material.
But it was good enough. Slowly but surely the golden hue that ringed the memory started to be tinged with ashen gray, the color drained from the mental image of a flourishing Aryss, teeming with life. The rayleigh blue fell back into the desert, rewinding, retreating back up into the ice caps. The wreath of hazy air spun out. It all returned to barren rock.
The imprinting was finished.
And it was the truth, after all. And since there was no memory left behind the imprinting for it to rest on, the imprinting began to set into the form of all her other memories. Her true memories. Her authentic self. Vilithe wanted to double check her work, so she gently teased the incepted false memory out of Kwandriss:
There is no hope that Aryss will ever be anything more than a barren, wartorn desert.
Just like that, it was as if an inner light inside Kwandriss and snuffed and died, back to black, faded from existence entirely. Her blank expression melted away to a hopeless one. Her hope was gone. Though the hope wasn’t even her own to begin with, she had now lost it, she hadn’t even let it go. It had been simply ripped away from her. But Vilithe knew that hope was dangerous, she had to do it out of compassion. It was for her own wellbeing.
Her eyes were still stained with tears, but she had stopped crying. Now there was nothing but apathy. Objective now, clear from the illusion of false emotions, she had no more rational cause to ever disobey Clan Amallark ever again.
Alright, first task done, moving on.
The door to the cell opened, and technically Kwandriss was now free from her imprisonment, having been properly punished. She was expected to scurry off for her next responsibility, but still Kwandriss did not yet move.
Vilithe strode out, retracing her way out of the interminable rows of cells, eager to get the nasty proceeding out of her mind.
Having been touched by the psionic legacy she had once known every word of every tale written by the Godlike Franz Kafka, but it had all been lost since her severance. Now she could only recollect a faint understanding of what kafkaesque meant.
It was just basic staphylococcus aureus, which had grown over time during the Million Wars period to be resistant against almost all beta-lactam antibiotics, and which the elvans had carried with them to Aryss upon their skin. They could still be defeated by natural pathogen resistance, or destroyed by spirits. But not always.
Daemons- spirits who did not telepath back to their hosts or users, who stayed silent in the mind, humming quietly in the background doing their job and only giving the psionic user exactly what was needed and no more. The daemons constitute the great majority of spirits, after all, a minimal interface meant better psionic user experience, even as any daemon, like all spirits, could beat the Turing test.
…the psionic legacy.
Grown in artificial ponds, ensconced in the nimbii of her home. But this was redacted from her.
Every psionic intrusion, against the natural order of the mind, would leave psychic damage, known as fraying. While such unraveling of the mind could occur naturally, what once called mental illness, psionic fraying was defined by being caused through unnatural psionic manipulation of the mind.
Certainly at this point, the elvans born outside of Clan Amallark outnumbered those born within, not ~100:1 as it was before the War of the Clans, but it couldn’t be less than ~50:1. Not even the Goddess could kill that many elvans at once, at least, as long as they all went for it together, and at once. If not, the God Empress would simply divide and conquer, and the rogues would be riven, as they were now.
if, else if, else - ? - : -
The first Clan to lead colonization of Aryss was Clan Boucher, Queen Sidarael, to ward against the possible extinction of all persons, in any realm. Even if it meant embarking on a futile quest to conquer hell.
Or so she believed.
For the elvans it was spirit woven flesh that could not quite completely mimic the real thing, or for orcans, meat mutts with woven essence for eating born with no eyes or ears, guided only by nose, mouth, and stomach, placid and obedient, and always hungry.
When she was just a girl she expected the world. But it flew away from her reach.
The Rogue Queen Talisa Talauth had really just cribbed this dream from the novel Dune, by the Godlike Frank Herbert. Really, it wasn’t even her own. She had believed in someone else’s dream.
Her own core memories, her own hopes and dreams.
While taking out the thought-word, Vilithe also thought to herself – there’s nothing in the future, it’s up to us to make – but she wasn’t sure why.
And while putting this one in, she thought – we don’t have no daughter, let the motherfucker burn – and again, she wasn’t sure why.
Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.