Aetherdrawn

• Aetherdrawn (I)

  12th of Gnielm, 334 EA

  Peyr Myarsa

  Mepka had draped herself at the edge of the temple stoop, one arm crooked over closed eyes and the other hanging limply off the side. It was a languorous pose, one that her body formed to readily. She used it to sift her thoughts for inspiration. 

  Nothing came quickly, and so she rolled over to watch her fingers dance just at the brim of the bog. The water here had a stagnancy to it, as did the air, and the trees, and the muck and the moss, and the whole of Peyr Myarsa, and her swallowed up in it.

  Her head lolled to gaze into the temple behind her, framed by the great misty wall of aether looming in the distance. The temple was severely overgrown, crumbling more on one side than the other in a way that unbalanced anyone walking around inside. She felt the odd little structure to be pathetic, when she felt anything about it at all.

  A splashing sound broke Mepka from her lament. Scrabbling to her feet, she could see the jowled figure of her mother approaching. The woman was moving tediously through the calf-deep swamp, making her way from the outlying cabins towards the temple proper. Mepka took the moment before she came into earshot to groan.

  When Estrid finally reached Mepka, she did so in a huff. She released her clutch on the bunches of stained frock that she had been holding away from the mud. “What’s this then? Lazing about?”

  “I wasn’t lazing, I was thinking.” Mepka backpedaled, putting herself right beneath the arched entryway of the temple.

  “I don’t want your excuses,” Estrid brushed past her. “I want you to get in here and do your damnable duty.”

  The arch that Mepka stood under had been taken by a gnarling tree trunk, one large enough and in an inconvenient enough location that none of the other penitents had set themselves to its task. Mepka allowed herself another exasperated breath, climbing up hand over hand to start the slow process of undoing the swamp’s hold on the architecture. 

  The work took her hands for hours, hacking at wood and peeling away bark.

  When Estrid reentered the main chamber, she dropped the bundle of branches she was carrying. “What are you doing up there? They’re near already, you had to know that damned thing would never come down in time.”

  Mepka surveyed the product of her work, a modest dent in the otherwise unbroken behemoth.

  “How will this look?” Estrid kept her voice to a low hiss, “You, with nothing to show for your time! You make our family look shameless, you-“

  Mepka kicked at a small branch, nearly cut through already, snapping it and sending to fall just shy of hitting her mother. “I’m not the reason we’re in this place.”

  Estrid jumped out of the way of the clattering limb, and when she looked back up her face had taken the roil that the ponds had when a storm pulled across the horizon. 

  Just before she could begin to rip into her daughter, a procession of figures laden down in mud-caked robes began to filter through the opposite end of the temple. Estrid swelled in a rigid silence as Mepka scrabbled her way down from the arch and collected her pile of wood chips. 

  The Peyric worshipers continued their lockstep, moving around Mepka, Estrid, and the other templekeep penitents. Mepka stumbled through the motions she was meant to take. Those in her wake were thrown off by her blunders, though most corrected in their final moments of motion. Estrid stuck to Mepka throughout, taking her drifts in stride and forcing a precision onto them. Finally, the room came to its standstill position.

  A man stepped forwards, clad in rusting plate and a severe demeanor. “We stand here, necessary, as the conservators of old Myarsa.”

  As the high abbot began his allocution, Mepka’s eyes wandered the outskirts of the line. She placed Irec, figure of stone that he was, across an uncovered plinth. Her father’s vision scanned much in the same way as his daughter’s had, and she tried to lock eyes with him. When his inspection did eventually turn to Mepka and Estrid, it slid across them without catching. 

  Mepka felt the rejection as a tightening of her throat. She leaned into her mother, feeling out the tension of their weight against each other. Estrid gave a surprised look, but didn’t push away. The two stood, touching vacantly under the hum of the priest’s words.

  Mepka went about the remainder of the service with a despondence that could pass itself for acquiescence. Finally, the priests called for the penitents. Mepka made her way up with the rest of them, depositing her meager clippings amongst the pile of swamp-stuff that had been collectively detached from the temple that day. 

  A sallow woman in bilious teal robes stood over them all, tracing outstretched fingers across the unlighting pyre. Mepka felt the words of the high abbess’ spell reverberate through the temple, crawling across her skin and worming into her gut. She swallowed hard to keep herself from vomiting at the intonation as the scrapped wood curled away from the priestess’s reach and rotted into near nothing. 

  When all that remained was a foul taste to the air, the congregation broke and began to flow out of the temple. Mepka kept with them to the temple stoop, where they struck west and she split north. Estrid followed a pace behind her, quiet. The swamp seeped into their boots with a steady persistence.

  Estrid broke their silence as they approached the raised hovel that the two of them had come to share. “You’re a lucky girl.”

  Mepka drug herself up the ladder and onto the platform, giving a vague grunt in response.

  When Estrid crested the slatted platform to the cabin’s porch, her eyes were critically appraising. “You’ve been given a second chance to reenter society.” She broke up her thought with a flinty pause. “Not one that you deserve, I might add.”

  “Yes, okay. I understand.” Mepka’s tone held hollow.

  “You’d do better to be this agreeable all the time.” Estrid pushed, “If you’d only do what I say, people wouldn’t find you so grating.”

  Mepka pulled fingers back through a tangle of hair. “I don’t care about that. And what if I don’t want to reenter society? I hate being in Peyr, the people there are awful.”

  Estrid made a sour face. “You don’t hate it. What else is there? What are you going to do instead, become a savage? Wander the swamps, shamed for the rest of your life?”

  “Maybe I will,” Mepka fumed, snatching her quarterstaff off of the wall. She crossed the porch in two long bounds, dropping down to the swamp floor and stalking away.

  “Don’t be daft, Mepka.” When no response came, Estrid called out again. “Get back here this instant.”

  Mepka flipped a hand up to her mother, and the cabin behind her, and the temple behind it. 

  Estrid’s shouting continued, but Mepka didn’t deign to suffer it. She pushed out of earshot, trudging until all that was left around her was the water, and the air, and the trees, and the muck and the moss. The only company she had never managed to shake.

• Aetherdrawn (II)

  16th of Gnielm, 334 EA

  Peyr Myarsa

  The aether stood, a billowing wall of blur bounding the whole of Peyr Myarsa. 

  Mepka stormed alongside it, taking miles of the swamp with spiteful steps. Where she could, she pounced from patch to patch of packed dirt using felled trees and moss-eaten boulders as stepping stones. In each of those places where the waters had been so gluttonous as to have taken any possible path beneath their murky surface, she jabbed her staff like a knife until they gave up a passable shallowness.

  She used the aether as a guide, following its curve northwards. When it seethed too close, she swiped at it just the same as she did the water. It took an eddying retreat from the hiss that the quarterstaff cut through it. Mepka glared into its depths as it rolled continually past.

  “You’re getting awfully close there, aren’t you?” A voice burbled across the air.

  Mepka’s head slid around, searching for the source. “It’s not going to hurt me.”

  “Not unless you want it to.” The words dripped from directly below her. A mired face birthed itself out of the swamp floor near her foot. Spindly arms slopped their way out to follow, pushing up a stubby winged form. 

  “Have you ever thought about it?” The mephit spat a globule of mud down its chest. “Walking out into the mists?”

  Mepka kept her aggravated tread, trying not to let the swamp slow her. “So what if I had?”

  “Things get lost in the aether,” Her new companion wallowed, “It might kill you.”

  It reached up to place a hand on her calf as they walked, which she uneasily kicked away. “Is that what the swamp would want?” Mepka asked hesitantly.

  “Never,” the mephit hissed out spittle. “The swamp marked you with its stain when you were born into it. You belong to it, just like everything else.”

  Mepka became acutely aware way her boots stuck in the mud, each step a struggle. “Going into the mists would break that hold, then?”

  “It would break you.” The mephit weaved around the side of a wide tree-base, its voice echoing from out of sight. “The swamp is solid, and so you are solid in it. The aether is nothing, and so you would be nothing in it.”

  “How would you know? Like you’ve ever been.” Resentment flooded into Mepka’s words. “You muddy fuck, you don’t have any hold on me. Screw you and screw this whole blasted swamp.” 

  There was no response. When Mepka came round the other side of the tree the swamp had lost its face.

  She looked around, confused, just before being pelted with a deluge of muck from below. Her eyes were sodden, gaze black as it slammed bruising into her side and stiffened around her leg in restraint. She swung her quarterstaff in a panicked sweep, wincing at the reverberation of it cracking into an unseen stone. Pulling her leg free in a jolt, she stumbled back and over a collapsed log, feeling small fists slamming into her again.

  She wiped her eyes to find the mephit clawing up her prone stomach. Meeting its voracious leer, she struck a sharp jab of the staff through the creature’s neck. It hung there for a moment, seeping and struggling and spiteful, before bursting into a sludge of mud. What little remained sloughed off of the quarterstaff and reconstituted with the bog’s element.

  Breathing heavy, her eyes sat wide to pull in the fullness of her surroundings. No movement caught her attention save for the warble of the landscape beyond the aetherline. Left with her thoughts, now muddled against the swamp’s foul motives, she pushed herself back up to her feet and walked on.

  Late in the afternoon the trees began to fall behind her, opening into a clearing of sorts. The way ahead was a field of thin, stone obelisks gasping up from beneath the swamp. Mepka situated herself amongst the Crop of Myarsa, that once-great borough now subsumed such that only it’s highest masts remained in view. 

  She leapt up onto the rounded head of the pillar nearest to her, wobbling slightly. She breathed deep and felt the world balance around her. She had found herself in a quiet place, one abandoned by the people of Peyr and thus lain to rest.

  Mepka started a vault across, her feet brushing from one weathered column to the next. The Crop flew beneath her. She released control over her direction as she circled across it, reveling in the clarity of her momentum.

  The aether came back into her peripheral, cutting across the Crop in a warped mirror. She danced close to it, and when she did a foreign thrill came to her chest. The pattern of her feet pulled her closer still. When face to face, it parted for her. With a sharp intake of breath, Mepka slipped past and into the aether for the first time.

  A ripple through her core set her balance off, sending her tumbling onto an elastic ground. Propping up from the obelisk she had fallen from, she felt its concretion give ever so slightly under her touch. The world around and ahead of her had gone suddenly indistinct. Feeling that feeling in her chest spread and underpin itself, she began to stumble forwards. 

  The further she moved, the more that the ground bled into the sky bled into the void bled into her. Form fled into a wash of color, and then color into tones of gray. She escaped from sense of time, sense of space, sense of self, in that silvery indetermination. 

  Her heart slowed, and the moment before it ceased to be she felt a word of power whisper around her.

  “Ahtr’ul“

  The word echoed through her consciousness and across her lips, and at her next steps she could see the vague forms of trees and stone pillars. The aether here at the border to the Crop felt bare by comparison to what she had just experienced, mere wisps. She held her daze, unsure of herself. Faint tendrils of the aether clung at her as she crossed the threshold back into corporeality.

  She managed a few steps on unsteady legs. Air filled her lungs again, acrid, drawing her back to herself. She blinked out of her rapture and looked around. It was dark by then, deep into night. 

  She stumbled back and away, seeking distance from the great unending void. She charted a direction back towards the Last of Myarsa, towards the familiarity of the cabins. She held off on looking back over her shoulder until miles had passed between them. When she did, she did so in apprehension.

  She called out that word that had been called to her, “Ahtr’ul“, and she felt within her chest the resonance of an aetherdrawn heart.

• Aetherdrawn (III)

  19th of Gnielm, 334 EA

  Peyr Myarsa

  Mepka reentered the cabin side-by-side with the first rays of gray light off of the horizon. 

  Estrid woke with a vigor, demanding to know where her daughter had been. Mepka took the tiff as it came, letting barbs glance off of her with little need to respond in kind. Estrid seemed not to know what to do with this newfound lack of spar in her daughter, and so by the end of that first day returned she fell into a fuming silence.

  This suited Mepka fine, for whom a period of time was necessary to reacclimate to the world. The swamp around her was ever unchanged, its inhabitants much the same. It was her that had shifted. She felt less an element of it all than she had before. So, throughout this resettling of her routine, she maintained a mind apart. 

  She tended temple, playing at penitence, but her thoughts lingered only ever on the mists. She guarded her experience preciously, asking none of the questions that now propelled her. Instead she took to staring off at the great wall of aether, far in the distance from where she was, as a sort of silent confidant.

  Though they were not speaking, Estrid watched her incessantly. The pressure of her mother’s perception was most acute in their cabin at night. In the temple, or out in the swamps, there were other things to be occupied by. But in the bare dark, while they lay down to bed across the room from one another, her mother was all there was. 

  At first light each morning, she fled out into the swamp on the pretense of foraging. It was only when she was absolutely certain that the moment she held was in privacy that she brought to bear the word that the aether had given her, “Ahtr’ul“.

  Each time she did she was rocked by that selfsame vertigo as in the depths. She knew it to be a word of power, but she was no learned spellcaster, and so she struggled to put her full weight behind it. Time and practice would win her this faculty, but with the other penitents about such freedom only ever came in fleeting bursts.

  It was weeks before her first cantrip struck through. She called her word, and traced mist laden fingers through the air, and where they passed she felt the resonance of a force unseen tugged into place. When she released those strings, her whole body became untethered from the world and she began to float in an upwards drift. After a beat Mepka’s feet reaffixed themselves to the ground, but her sense of awe lingered.

  When Mepka started back that morning, she came to a host of penitents out on the temple’s front steps. At her approach, she caught the tail end of Estrid’s address to the group, “- and there was really nothing to be done about it. Of course, we felt absolutely horrendous displacing him, but the work that my husband is doing really must take precedence over such quaint manners as he employs.”

  She noticed Mepka, and her voice took on a saccharine quality, “Ah, and my lovely daughter. Come, sit darling.”

  The group mumbled hellos, and Mepka mumbled them back. She took seat between her mother and Leça, a penitent of weathered years. Leça had not been of a class to know Mepka’s family in Peyr, but here as equals in exile Mepka could plainly see the esteem their character held amongst the others.

  When they leaned over to speak, the chatter of the group fell away. “It is a fine thing to see you Mepka, you have been scarce since the last reclamation. How goes your time here?”

  Mepka stiffened, feeling her mother hovering over her shoulder. “It has been good to reflect. Though, you speak true. I know I ought to spend more time in the temple proper.”

  “Nonsense,” Leça waved away the depreciation, “You do well by us. You are adept at navigating the swamps, and without that skill we’d be lacking for food.”

  Mepka smiled tentatively from her guarded state of mind. “This is kind of you.”

  Leça shrugged. “As you said, I speak true. No less, no more.”

  Mepka rubbed at the tension in her neck, trying consciously to relax.

  “We certainly welcome the appreciation you have for all that our family does Leça,” Estrid stressed, “But my daughter really is meant to be serving the temple. Developing a devotional mind, and all, so that when we return to our lives we’ll be able to move forwards as if this unfortunate mess had never happened.”

  Mepka felt herself flare bitterly under her mother’s smothering story. “Are these not our true lives then? It feels an awful lot like we’re living them.”

  “Now there,” Leça spoke in a tone intended to placate, “Your mother has something at the heart of the matter. Trying as it is, this time will pass. You’ll not be in penance forever. You’ve been under this sentence for some time, the high abbot may even permit you to return to Peyr soon.”

  It was a thought that Mepka had been avoiding, one that notched a dreadful pit in her core. 

  “We- I, um,” Her mind raced and the air thinned in her lungs. The community nodded around to each other in misunderstanding, expecting her assent that all would one day be well if only they could return to Peyr.

  “I’d not want to go back!” She burst.

  “Daughter,” Estrid enunciated in a veiled vexation, “Hush yourself, before-“

  “No,” She cut her mother off abruptly, the words starting to pour out of her, “The way the conservators go about things is a misery, and I can’t be the only one thinking it. What’s so good about Peyr? They exiled us, all of us, and for what? Trying to come up for air, from their drowning? Blaspheming against the will of the abbots? And the abbots, high fucking hypocrites they are. They don’t give any more of a damn about this temple than I do. If they did they’d be here, drudging away like we are. They call this place holy, but all it does is bind us. We’d do better to let the swamp take it, then what will they have to threaten us with? I don’t regret the blasphemy that landed me here, because it wasn’t until I was forced out of Peyr that I understood how much of a fucking trap it really was.”

  Mepka ended her outburst, breathless.

  Leça had listened in a pensive pity. The other penitents sat through in a fearful stun, as though Mepka’s sacrilege could stick to them if they were to say anything in response.

  Met with this terse silence Mepka stood and took her leave, feeling their stares boring into the back of her skull. She returned to the cabin, an empty chamber for her anxious thoughts to echo.

  She expected Estrid to burst in, enwreathed in wrath. Instead, her mother shuffled in sullenly. She took a seat on the bed next to Mepka, and started to sob. Mepka held a moment, unsure of how to handle this, before placing a hand uncomfortably on Estrid’s shoulder. 

  “I’m sorry.” She intoned weakly.

  “You’re not. You’re not, or else you wouldn’t have done it.” Estrid sniffled, wiping at her eyes. “I know that you resent me. You think that I do the things I do because I feel the same way about you. That’s not it at all though, nothing could be further from the truth. All I want is for our family to have the best life that we can. To be respected. But you always sabotage us. I’ve given you the chance to live well, don’t you want that?”

  “Of course I do, I just-“

  “Then why won’t you just do as I tell you?”

  “I just can’t stand to be around the conservatorship. Trying to square their beliefs, and the way they treat us, it makes me feel like I can’t breathe.”

  “You don’t have to believe,” Estrid jabbed fingers at her own chest. “You think I believe, in my heart of hearts? Having faith has barely anything to do with showing faith.”

  A moment passed between them without a response. 

  Estrid took a heavy breath in through her nose, wiping under her eyes. She composed herself into a more familiar, stiffer form. “I’ll only ever do what’s best for us, Mepka.”

  Mepka nodded tentatively, unbalanced and ashamed. For all her indignation, her mother’s tears still lashed her heart tender.

• Aetherdrawn (IV)

  27th of Gnielm, 334 EA

  Peyr Myarsa

  For Mepka, being alone in the cabin was not nearly the same as being alone in the wilderness. There was a disquiet to the place, like it might tell her mother of any secret thing she did sitting in its guts. Still, by herself for the first time in weeks, Mepka couldn’t help but call out her word. 

  “Ahtr’ul” She swept hands over the course of her figure. Where they passed she faded from existence ever so slightly, ever so briefly. The call allowed her a moment of peace, to feel as though she was there and not here. She called out for that moment again, and again, and again.

  A strange sense broke her from this roll, tendrils of an approach. Her core knotted, and in an instant she willed away the echo of aether fog that had swirled in comfort around her.

  A moment passed in tension. Estrid flitted in past the cabin’s doorway curtain first, with a look equal parts panic and elation. Two figures swept in behind her, a biting woman and a caustic man. Recognition pooled in Mepka’s view of the High Abbess of Reclamation and the High Abbot of Consternation, governors of the city of Peyr and most holy of the Conservators of Myarsa. Their presence sucked the air from her lungs, choking her on decay and dread.

  The abbess Niolett spoke first, her voice silken spite. “Mepka, so good to see you again.”

  “Yes,” Mepka stammered under the weight of their focus, “Yes certainly. It has been some time since you have come for temple mass.”

  The abbot Anzaw’s lip twitched at the reply, prompting a shared glance from his wife. Their connection cemented Mepka’s unease.

  “Yes, well. It seems as though the same can be said for you.” Niolett’s gaze swept off of Mepka in seeming disinterest. “What excuse do you have for your absence today?”

  Mepka glanced over to Estrid with a look of worry.

  “Your holiness,” Estrid took up the call for aid, “We thought it best that my daughter keep to a private penance.” 

  Mepka took a subtle step back to place her mother at the forefront.

  “And why might that be, dear Estrid?” The abbess’ inquisition drew the faintest of cruel smiles from the abbot, leaning back against the doorway.

  “Considering her,” Estrid wracked for a word, “circumstances.”

  Mepka gritted against the moment, but kept quiet in light of the panic she felt.

  “Her continued sacrilege, you mean?” Anzaw rose in a voice like untreated iron.

  “I don’t know if I would-“

  “We would, Estrid. We really would.” Niolett interrupted. “There is not a need for you to contradict us.”

  “Be glad, woman, for the grace we’ve extended to you.” Anzaw underpinned his wife’s statement. “Expect now to display faith in kind.”

  Mepka’s focus bounced between her mother and the abbots. “Grace? What are you talking about?”

  The abbess ran her fingernails over the wooden table at the center of the room. “Your kindly mother has shown humble penance in her labor here. She has been invited to return to the comforts of Peyr.” 

  Estrid’s eyes shown hopefully.

  “We’re going back to Peyr?” Mepka’s felt herself spinning out.

  “You’ll be going nowhere.” Anzaw cut in, “One family member, paltry as she may be, is enough consolation to ensure your father’s continued agreeance.”

  “My father did this?” Mepka’s mind cinched on encompassing resentment coupled against intense relief at the thought of being left alone.

  “Highest abbot, please, I beg of you. My husband will surely work better with the knowledge of his child’s safety. He needs us. You need us, if you have any hope of-“, Her mother cupped nervous hands at her heart, but in the midst of the pleading Mepka saw only vulgar light filtering off of Niolett’s fingers.

  “Lu’byke Guasyr”, Niolett called a set of words, and Estrid’s veiling statement cut in her throat to a gurgling of choked water.

  Mepka rushed to her heaving mother’s side. Her eyes trained in fear on the abbots.

  Niolette leaned over to meet Estrid’s hunched field of vision, “The decision has been made, Estrid. You will come, and she will stay. Now, tell me you understand the wisdom of our path set for you and yours.”

  The water poured from Estrid’s mouth with a distinct lack of pretense or dignity.

  “Stop this! Stop this now!” Mepka howled.

  In a terrifying flash, Anzaw clapped an armored mitt down on her shoulder to yank her away. “Stay out of this, wretch.”

  Mepka felt power flow up her arm, her hand moving instinctually to the point where Anzaw held her.

  “Ahtr’ul” Her word rang openly through her touch, and in a burst of aether the gauntlet holding her dented inwards. Anzaw grunted out in guttural surprise, releasing her and shifting to his back foot. The reverberations of her spell sucked all else out of focus.

  Niolett turned sharply, flicking away her held incantation. Estrid sputtered from her knees, sucking in deeply drawn air.

  “That,” Niolett rolled out in an unsettling hush, “is a very interesting word.”

  Anzaw slammed back into attention, smacking Mepka across the face and sending her tumbling. The rotted boards of the cabin floor cracked under her impact. The Conservators stood together over her prone form. Mepka looked up at them, the visage of her mother framed behind.

  “Well. It seems your wish may be granted after all, Estrid. She’ll most certainly be coming with us.” Niolett’s smile pierced.

  “No.” Mepka’s mind raced through panic into desperation.

  Estrid looked at her daughter woefully overwhelmed. In a despairing bid for escape, Mepka scrabbled towards the open doorway.

  Anzaw drew his mangled hand in her direction, and commanded a gritted tone. “Comrir Soihs’nunnehv“

  Every muscle in her body tensed, and then went limp. The will to move was pushed into deep recess. Anzaw unsheathed his sword, a long tarnished blade, flipping it in his grip. The hilt of it struck the back of her head, and the world shattered away into unconsciousness.

• Aetherdrawn (V)

  29th of Gnielm, 334 EA

  Peyr Myarsa

  The intervening hours were lost to Mepka. She saw nothing. She felt only swaying, an intense pressure on her joints, and spite. At moments she knew she was struggling, but it was as though she was occupying someone else’s body going through those motions. Her indigence only landed her retributive blows from unseen hands.

  She came back to clarity in a cell. It was a small space, still and cold save for the pulsing of her pain. Wooden walls around her bowed, and behind their cracks the swamp threatened with the weight of pressure-packed clay. Her hands were hitched behind her in a binding tie, holding her to a slumped seat on the ground. She pulled against the cord, fruitless and indeterminate.

  A panic welled up in her, a beating of her heart that she thought could only be quelled by calling her word. When she tried, she found that the gag lodged in her mouth prevented her from forming it, the syllables garbled out of coherence. Still, she could not help but rage against her binds. 

  She thought she must be at the very center of Peyr, so deeply set that her wounds formed a heart for the place. Before this time it had not occurred to her that there were cells to be found in Peyr, where the surrounding muck slavered at the step of exiles. She had never once in her life longed for the swamp, not like she did now. The swamp she could fight, could silence. This place, though, this was silence.

  Sounds of scraping and shuffling behind the walls transmuted Mepka’s fury into a wrenching dread of the unknown horrors that awaited her. The door could only groan at the entrance of her father.

  “Mepka,” Irec started, lingering in the doorframe, “Oh…”

  In her unconsciousness she had been stripped, the comforting wrap of her work clothes replaced by an oversized jute shift. It left her feeling unsettlingly bare, helpless against the elements of her surroundings. The pitiful sight of her had drained some nerve that Irec had collected prior to his arrival.

  “They, they say you are not yourself.” He spoke to her, not registering that she could not speak back. “I just don’t understand why you would do the things they say. I’ve told them, we are a happy family. I just don’t understand how it could all go this wrong.”

  Mepka’s eyes went to incredulity, that after so long this would be his tack. She tried to yell, but again it was stifled by the hemp tie filling her mouth. Irec winced in reaction to the gurgled cry, and he stepped across the threshold to approach his daughter. For all the animosity she felt towards him, his closeness drew equal shades of comfort and shame to her.

  “Your mother is safe.” Irec filled the silence as he reached around her head to work out the knot in the gag. “She prays day and night for you.”

  Mepka felt hot tears welling up at the thought of her mother, water pouring from her lips in the last moments that they had been together, and for her crying she was glad that her father was leaned over her and would not see. 

  Irec removed the gag with the great care of a healer’s hands. Mepka wanted to pour out her anger, but instead she felt a sudden and sickening desire of care overtake her.

  “Father,” The word grated on the stiffness from her jaw, “Please help me. Please, take me back to the cabin. I can’t be here, don’t let the abbots get to me.”

  Irec spoke quietly, as though to himself, “The abbots- you have to understand dear- things can’t be as simple as they should be right now.”

  Mepka felt that dread begin to percolate again in the back of her stomach, some of that acridity bubbling up into her throat. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, and this isn’t to say I-” Irec stumbled rigidly over his thoughts, “It’s just, sometime, when an illness strikes-”

  “I’m not sick.” Mepka’s voice trembled, “I’m not sick. You need to help me, I need your help. Please, untie me. Please.”

  “I can’t- I can’t do that.” Irec put a hand on his daughter’s cheek. “The abbots will be in soon. You need to comply with them.”

  “I- What? No, you can’t leave me with them.” The thought of it all was too much to bear once more.

  Irec descended deeper into a hard coolness that he kept on hand, the same look he took on at temple. “Answer their questions. Being honest will only help to cure you, to set your spirit back to right. And, when this is all over, you’ll have a place back home in Peyr. Anzaw has sworn that to me himself.”

  “You’d leave me with them? You’d leave me to this place that I hate?” Mepka felt a deep outpouring from within herself, “I hate you!”

  She began to struggle against the binds once more, yelling heartfelt loathings at her father. Irec, for his own part, deflated back into a seated position on the ground out of her reach.

  Mepka felt her heart tug out for him, for her family, for understanding, like a singular cord on her soul.

  “They say that you have allowed some demon into your heart. I could not believe that my daughter would do such a thing.” Irec’s mask of stoicism had fully fallen away. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

  “So that’s it? You would take their superstition as enough to see me hurt like this? To let them force mother and I away from you?” Mepka’s voice strung so tense that she feared it might shatter.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” Irec shook his head violently, “This break inside you, I just don’t know how it could have come on so suddenly.”

  Mepka felt the pressure inside her well up at his words, at his impossible lack of awareness, at his misunderstanding of who she was and the life she had lived, and she felt that last cord snap.

  “I don’t care,” The words fell out of her mouth in a mumble, realization striking a stunning blow to her core. “I don’t care for you.”

  With its passing across her lips, her acknowledgment of that truth, she felt her anger slip away. Even it had been care, in it’s own perverted way. The disassociation sent her adrift, blank and floating through what was left to come.

  “This place,” She felt herself smile, a hazy manic smile, “I am not of this place, it’s over here for me.”

  “What?” Irec was set off guard by her altered demeanor, “What does that mean Mepka? Of course you are of Peyr, it is your home.”

  “Did you really not see it?” Mepka asked in dispassionate tone, as though she were speaking about someone else. “Are you happy, father?”

  “I-” Irec ran tense fingers back through a thick bramble of hair, “I have lived well. I have done what was expected of me.”

  Mepka’s smile turned sad, not to the hate that had left her but to pity. “You’re blind. You don’t care either, but you can’t admit it.”

  Irec drew in breath as though to speak, but could not find the words before Mepka’s drone continued. 

  “You put me into this world, at the mercy of the abbots and their conservators.” She stared ahead blankly, putting a fine point on her newfound relinquishment with a catharsis that had eluded her, “They’ll kill me, for what I have. Or else, they’ll see me waste away. They’ve already broken me, it will not be difficult for them. And then, when I have faded fully and there is nothing left of me, I will be free.”

  Irec bit back tears that fell from his face like stone. “That’s not true. I know you can’t see it, but it’s not. The abbots- They’ll get you the help you need. They will.”

  Mepka signed in high resignation. “You should go. Mother will need you.”

  Irec was unpracticed in weeping, and so his face screwed up in a particularly ugly way as he sniffed away the tears and nodded. He thumbed the gag he had removed so that they could speak, his hands moving apart from his mind.

  “Goodbye.” She said simply, believing with every part of herself that these to be the last words she would speak to him in her life.

  She could see the layers building back up around Irec as he lifted himself up to standing once more, dusting himself off from the grime of the dungeon. He leaned forwards and she loosened her jaw, preparing to take the gag once again. Instead, her father kissed her forehead for a long moment.

  Mepka watched him walk out, shutting the door behind him. He was gone, and she knew in that moment that he would not return to her.

  Her wrists chafed against the hempen rope that held them. She opened her mouth tentatively, as though she were not sure she was as alone as she was. She wondered an intrusive wonder, if this had been intentional or if it was another of Irec’s many oversights. No answer would come to her.

  She moored her focus back onto her body, her lashed wrists. She spoke next in quiet plea, not to any yielding ear nor even to the origin of her power itself, so far away as it was at the edge of the plane, but rather to the wellspring within herself. “Ahtr’ul“

  “Ahtr’ul Ahtr’ul Ahtr’ul” She incanted, feeling her emptiness crystallize into intangible magic. Her wrists passed through their binds as though they were no longer a part of the same world. She fell forwards, catching herself on hands and knees. Her heart suddenly began to pound, and she prepared herself to run.

• Aetherdrawn (VI)

  29th of Gnielm, 334 EA

  Peyr Myarsa

  All that Mepka had left in this world was the sound of the door coming unbarred. Leaping from her crouched position, she thrust through with a crack and a crunch.

  Niolette cried out in high pitch as Mepka knocked her to the side. Not waiting for the shock to wear off from her captor’s reedy features, she dashed up the ladder through the hatch and into a display room of intricate stonework and relics recovered from the ruins of Myarsa. She pushed past a dividing pillar into a hall. Her vision caught a dead-end right into a sitting room, fire crackling menacingly from lit braziers. She started left towards a dinner table crammed by food and around a blind corner into an adjacent hallway.

  “Wretch!” Screams pitched back off Mepka’s tail as Niolette crested from the buried cell. “You insolent bitch!”

  A worry darted across Mepka’s mind that Anzaw, infernal man that he was, would surely know that something was amiss now, but she had to put that thought out as she clattered down the long and labyrinthine halls. She passed a commode, a bedroom with windows showing an impossibly high view over the swamp and the city below. She hung left and quickly right, moving over a cabinet with a clatter. Niolette was still out of sight behind Mepka, but her fuming chase could be heard through her shrieks and snarls.

  An oncoming draft broke the choking stagnation of the air, and a pang of hope washed over Mepka as she knew the exit must be close. She found it at the end of the next corner-turn, a three way intersection of a foyer, and with it the dark and waiting silhouette of Anzaw. She had only ever seen him in the imposing figure of his armor, and now in draping robes he looked somehow skeletal. In his hands was a ceremonial axe, the swing of which she barely managed to dodge with the thought that it looked almost identical to the one her father used to carry.

  “Fuck,” she let slip, stumbling back into the untreaded hallway as Anzaw bared a grimace towards her.

  “Ah, there you are, husband.” Niolette caught up from the path Mepka had previously escaped along.

  Mepka’s eyes darted between the two of them, and then to the open entryway behind Anzaw as the three squared off.

  “Ah-ah-ah,” Niolette’s tongue clucked across the roof of her mouth, tracing her fingers together in a sickening gesture before releasing them to point at the exit, “Pel’h Q’ot”.

  A shimmering wall of billows light apparated to cover the way out. Mepka felt in her bones that to pass through it would spell death.

  “We have further answers to pull from you.” Anzaw grunted, lunging forwards with the axe in an upwards swipe that slashed across Mepka’s breast and shoulder in searing pain. He pivoted quickly to come down for a heavy blow, but Mepka managed to lunge sideways and the momentum of the swing lodged the axe in the wood of the floor between them.

  Sprinting back and away in the moment that the weapon was indisposed, Mepka burst through a set of double doors into an armory, heavy weapons presented in honored fashion all around. She snatched the nearest sword, but its unfamiliar weight gave her no comfort. Anzaw rounded the corner behind her, Niolette in tow, and with him came an aura of malice so potent that it was almost physical. 

  “You’ve nowhere to go. Submit, child.” Anzaw gloomed, his presence a testament to dread that Mepka’s wits could only barely hold together under.

  “Drop that silly little lizard-sticker and we’ll handle this as civilized peoples should,” Nicolette added from behind, her face creeping into a smile while retaining all its sickening fury.

  Mepka looked behind her, into a dark corner and another interior door. She looked to the figures closing in. She looked to her side, and saw through the thick foggy glass of the window the vastness of the Aether with only open air and miles of swamp between. In a flash she had dropped the sword and gone diving for the window. She felt the slam against her head and shoulder, the cutting of the Abbot’s home as the glass shattered, and the freefall that sent her out of reach of the Abbot’s choked cries.

  “Ahtr’ul” she plead between her corporality and the impending impact as she sailed from the highest point in the city. She felt her entire body fade for the barest moment as she impacted and tumbled down a stairway of wooden planks. Bruised, but alive, she scrambled back to her feet. From above, a sudden wash of green nearly struck her, instead causing the solid staircase that she had tumbled down to fall to horrid decay in an instant.

  “Return at once!” Anzaw bellowed, overtoned by Niolette’s incoherent cries of vexation. For a moment Mepka felt her limbs go rigid, compelled by some unheard word of Anzaw’s demanding prowess, to stay put, before breaking free and stumbling down the stairs as fast she could.

  From this high perspective, the squared levels of the ziggurat city of Peyr laid themselves out in front of Mepka. Wide, ramped walkways below buzzed with the press of the populace, though here amongst the peak the streets had a more open feel to them. Mepka sliced down through the district, feet slapping against the muggworn wood. 

  Conservators from the highest noble families stood agape as she blew past, their rotten peace broken by the sight of her so ragged and frantic. She muscled around them, their judgement a repulsion.

  “Stop her!” Niolette’s cry rang out from some distance behind, “Stop that demon, in the name of all that is holy!”

  The hands around her turned forceful, but before they could restrain her she hand shoved through. Another crowd loomed up from the ramp ahead, this one more alert to her predicament and their role as her adversaries. Darting right, Mepka hooked over the platform’s railing and slid across the roof of a building sticking out from a lower layer.

  The city here was more familiar to her, below the uppermost reaches. She dropped down the side of what appeared to be a small home, the dull throb of her injuries flaring with her landing.

  Two deputized citizens appeared in the street ahead of her, and from the first moment she met their eyes Mepka knew they were foul in intention. Backing up and turning on her heels to sprint, Mepka launched herself down the alleyway behind her and underneath the weighty overhang of the level above. The dark opened up to her, embracing her as she ran between shadowed market stalls and folk of mundane business.

  She strafed around a corner and for the barest of moments, she knew that she had broken her pursuer’s sightline. Focus daring around wildly for the next escape, she landed instead on a figure frozen in the middle of the way, a woman leaning heavy on a walking stick. Mepka strode to her quick through the flowing crowd, grabbing her gruffly by the upper arm and pulling her though the door of the closest building. The sound of boots thudding on wood passed, as Mepka and Estrid stood just inside of what was apparently a weaver’s shop, staring at each other.

  Estrid, for her part, hung bewildered in her daughter’s still-clutched grasp, mouth agape.

  “I’m leaving.” Mepka was blunt, motioning only to the spar of wood that Estrid had been using to hold herself up. “I’ll need my staff in the swamp. Give it to me.”

  “I- I don’t-” Estrid’s mind clearly raced behind her eyes, “You’re on the run from the Abbots. I should call them, I should take you back.”

  Mepka clamped a hand over her mother’s mouth. The way Estrid had spoke made the words limp, more automated response than real threat, but Mepka would not chance any further betrayal. There was a moment of surprised pushback from Estrid, jolting her to the present moment from some other space she had been occupying in her mind. That shift in awareness settled on a resignment that belied clear sight of her daughter’s intention.

  From her held position, Estrid proffered the quarterstaff. Mepka took it, releasing her mother into a pained slump. She remembered the twang that disappointing her mother would have brought on before, but did not feel it any longer.

  She slunk out the door and onto the street again without another word, now armed with her familiar weapon. Estrid mumbled something from inside as she went, some half-hearted goodbye, but it was not loud enough to be anything to Mepka’s ears.

  She slunk quickly away, keeping her her head lowered carefully so as not to attract attention. Moving as such through Peyr’s wheezing ebbs and flows, bound for the lowest levels of the city, she found a surprising lack of conservator guardians. As she approached the edge of the shadowed undercity, she looked a quite nook. She poked out a grime hole, with just enough of a rot across its boards to allow for sight out into the exposed streets.

  Surveying, she found a rank line of conservators out searching the docks. They had the numbers on her, by far, but they were spread well out. It was clear that the message of an escapee had gotten out, but that they did not know where she was exactly. Off to the right from where she crouched a link in the chain broke to go and hassle a small group of swamp-scrapers that had not been wise enough to evacuate from the now-contested area. A path to burst through opened ahead, and Mepka could not help but indulge herself a moment to envision her escape out into the swamp through it.

  She darted out from behind the line, feeling the distance out in the open. A dark-haired man was the first to spot her, his eyes going wide as he bellowed out, “Prisoner!”

  Mepka kept for the weak point in their line, seeking to dodge their grips but unable to evade their attention any longer.

  In her last steps towards escape, she felt a rocketing impact from a figure unseen. A wiry boy, a conservator younger than she was, had slipped her view and tripped her to the ground just steps past where the force had set their barrier. Enemies raced towards, their hands outstretched for her, and her wild wild eyes met the boy’s who had taken her to the ground.

  “Ahtr’ul” The word was flung off her tongue with force, and with it a pulse that rocked back any who had dared approach. Swatted, the line cowered from her display of Aether magic just long enough for her to regain her footing. 

  She was past, though they were at her heels she was past the conservators. They were a scrabbling, rabbling mass of pursuers. Still, over their din it was impossible not to hear the howls of fury that Mepka knew in an instant meant the Abbots had hooked themselves back onto her trail. The ground slammed into Mepka’s heels, sending a vibrating malevolence into her body from their chase behind.

  Her head start afforded her her life, but also the refilling of a panic that she could not measure. She spared only a glance behind, seeing that the conservators chasing after her had been scared into organized effort by their leaders, now fanning out effectively to catch her should she let up. They drove her across the last of the docks, matching her for her sprint.

  Ahead, the city gave way off a steep platform to the fen that hungered for their presence. Mepka leapt into its clutch, needing for anything other than the structure of Peyr. She carried her rush from fallen branch to belched stone, tracking overtop of the swamp as she had been practicing all her life. From behind splashes and thuds into the ground were less graceful than hers, but still the people of Peyr kept on her. They lurched forwards, through muck and moss, frictioned against the natural and unnatural fen they lived to defy.

  It was not long before her outpace levied the sounds of her pursuers calls quieter and quieter. She was out of sight, but still they rang in her ears, and so for hours she refused to let up. She felt her lungs burning, her heart beating heavier that it had ever beaten before.

  It was her view out over the treeline that eventually slowed her, her final destination coming into view. She set her pace over the distance, and felt her feet sink further into the muck at each lingering step. She tried to extricate herself, and found panic return to her as pulling her leg up and free revealed legion hands of mire scratching her back down into the very center of the plane.

• Aetherdrawn (VII)

  29th of Gnielm, 334 EA

  Peyr Myarsa

  The swamp held it’s grip on Mepka with all of it’s vast, baleful might. 

  Emerging from the heart of mire, a myriad of mephits began to hiss their way up and out all around. They scratched and clawed with finger bones of snapped boughs and ligaments of muck. Mepka swept at them in a wide arc with her staff, feeling a jagged squelching head splatter only to be replaced by a newly congealing body of dragging dread. 

  “Why are you doing this?” Mepka yanked a leg out forcibly, taking a single belabored step. “Let me go!”

  “You can not leave,” their voices called out in chittering swarm, voices layered on top of voices, “You have abandoned your home, human, and it has abandoned you. This we know. They will keep you from us no longer.”

  From behind, Mepka could hear sudden hoots and hollers, cries from her conservator pursuers underscored by the elated terror of the hunt.

  “You are ours, now as you have always been.” The voices continued to slop out as she felt a crust of earth dry and harden around her feet, her calves, her knees. “All comes to us, laid low in time.”

  Twisting in place, Mepka caught a glimpse of a stream of robed figures rushing forwards, and then suddenly stopping as they recognized the demons of their blasphemous nightmares embracing the quarry they sought.

  The wind rushed through the boughs of the trees, as though in an anticipatory snarl.

  “Herd, who follow this bait so easily.” The belching of the fen came through as a chorus of jeers. “Our heart thrums everlasting, at the center of our world. We are the name of your god. Now join it, as you so dearly wish.”

  The approach of the conservators in Mepka’s view stuttered in backpedaling fear. For one ominous moment the swamp receded, it’s water and sludge pulling down and away as the trees bent back with creaking wails. In the next, a drowning torrent raised up and rushed over them all. 

  Plunged under the spate Mepka could not see, could not come close to drawing breath. She heard the screams cut short by muffled choking, a horrid sound of flesh rent asunder by earth and water forced inside.

  She felt a sleight laxness to the earth holding her in place, the swamp legion’s focus now divided between her and the revelatory slaughter far behind her. She kicked panicked kicks, and her legs came free just in time to be tumbled through the repulsive tide as it drew out.

  The swamp’s grasp had slipped just enough for her to survive a breath longer, and under the power of her own body she began a wading sprint away. She could see the aetherline. She could see the aether, and she made for it with everything she had.

  She felt an injurious roar filter up from the ground, and knew that it was for her escape. She fled through rocks and water, evading vines reaching for her at every stride. She felt the pain of the whipping branches and knew that the others behind her felt that same pain tenfold.

  Every frantic leap and tumble drew her closer to the aether, closer to release from the horrors of this world.

  She sensed a presence behind her, on her tail. Swiveling to see it she found not a person but a hideous disembodied hand the size of a boulder, fingerflesh strewn together from clumps of moss and muck and rainwater. It reached for her, unwilling to let her go. It moved faster than it should have, the swamp shearing across itself at a greater clip than she could match in her fight forwards.

  She leapt just as it did, leapt past and into the aether, bellowing out every sheer desperate hope she had left to her in one great and instinctive word, “Ahtr’ul”!

  The hand of the swamp lunged after her, grasping for her leg, but where she slipped through the fog it collided against a misty wall of implacable conjured force. Recoiling back, the swamp pounded and beat and struggled to reach for her, but in the place she had reached with the spell she had cast the vast power of the malevolent world she had been held by all her life was rendered totally ineffectual.

  The eyes of hundreds of mephits swung to her. The forces of the Peyric conservators, dead and dying, paid her no more mind than they did in life.

  She was spent, having poured more than all of herself into the spell that saved her. She retained barely enough consciousness to crawl away, away from her life, away from her torment, as she levied her final retreat back into the depths of boundless and eternal nonexistence.

• Aetherdrawn (VIII)

  ?th of ?????, ??? EA

  The Aether

  Mepka floated in blissful rest for one long eternity. Around her, the limitless fog danced and swirled in beautiful arrhythmia. The aether had enveloped her, fully, and at moments she had become it. It now allowed her to be truly and wonderfully empty, light for the first time in her life. It held no judgement, no expectation as she allowed herself to slip in and out of material being. Through it all, her word reverberated through her.

  “Ahtr’ul”

  It echoed, spoken on her unreal lips and those of countless unseen others.

  “Ahtr’ul”

  She felt herself being unmade, fading away as she was washed further out between the tides of corporeality. Her heart slowed, and the moment before it ceased to be she felt that word of power whisper around her once more.

  “Ahtr’ul”

  A wide seam of verdant black split across her vision, pulling her gravitationally. Out from it a slender hand of sheening aureate metal suddenly appeared, as though reaching through a hole in a wall. Real existence radiated out from that hand. She registered the wonder of something else existing here, the first coherent and singular thought she had had in as long as she could remember.

  She reached for the hand in kind, her forearm becoming tangible only as it moved to grasp. She clasped it firmly, felt the rest of her body galvanize into definite existence, and then fell into exhausted unconsciousness…

  Mepka woke to cool, dry air. Those first breaths were like nothing she had ever had before, fresh and clear in a way that had never been made available to her. She was laying in a bed, on sheets of clean linen. She shifted, fluttered her eyes open to find walls of stacked stone brick, her quarterstaff leaned up next to a window that shone onto a glorious blue sky.

  “H- Hello?” An unfamiliar voice, low and lilting in it’s accent, sprang from the corner. “You’ve awoken!”

  Mepka spun, jolted from her reverie, to see who was in the room with her. She settled on a tall, excited figure. His skin was dark and delicate, his features high and angular, with long thin ears coming to impossible points behind his curled tresses. He was dressed strangely, in tight-fitting clothes as though for labor but immaculately clean, decorated with bangles and brocade of a heavy amber-colored metal Mepka had never seen before. He had shot up from a chair propped into the corner of the room, strewn around by hardbound books.

  “It’s okay,” He seemed to read Mepka’s bewilderment, putting hands out in front of him in a reassuring posture, “You’re okay. You were out in the Aether for a long time, it seems like, but you pulled through, by some miracle.”

  “What- How-” Mepka felt herself scrambled, and as she moved to sit up she felt as though her muscles were soaked in molasses. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in Athal.” He said, as though that would explain anything.

  “I’ve never heard of that. Is Athal what’s on the other side of the fog?” She rubbed at her side, feeling bandages and bruises.

  “Um,” The figure seemed puzzled by the question, wheels that she could not interpret turning in his head. “In a way, yes, we are on the other side of the fog.”

  They both just stared at each other for a moment, unsure of what to say next.

  “My name is Sylber, by the way. I was the one that found you, pulled you out of the fog, as you called it. It’s called the Aether, by the way.”

  “I know what it’s called.” Mepka winced trying to stand. Sylber strode over to help steady her, gentle in his touch. “I’m Mepka.”

  “Right, of course you do.” Sylber smiled apologetically. “Mepka, there are some things you need to know. You’re not at the place where you are from, anymore. You’re actually quite far from there.”

  Tears of relief began to well up in Mepka’s eyes, tears which set Sylber into a look of concern.

  “Hey, no no, it’s okay,” He tried to reassure, “We can try to get you back there, don’t worry-”

  “No!” Mepka pulled away from him, “I’ll be damned if I’m going back. I don’t know where we are, where this Athell is, or how I got here, or that there was even anywhere out there other than Peyr Myarsa, but I’m not going to go back there. Never, not ever.”

  Sylber looked momentarily taken aback, “Oh wow, no of course, if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I’m sorry if I brought up a sore subject. It must really be isolated, your home demiplane, how many others are in your subcluster?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mepka kept her distance, eyeing her staff.

  “Right, sorry.” He apologized again, speaking with a bounce from one thought to the next, “I’m sure it’s a lot for you to take in. Just know, there are worlds beyond the one you grew up in. A lot, a lot of worlds. Demiplanes, is the technical term. They’re not really in the same place, any of the planes. You couldn’t walk from one to another, if that makes sense. That’s why the Aether is there, it holds each plane together. Like a cup holds water, kind of. Gods, I should be better at explaining this. You were in the Aether, which is crazy, but you were. And now, you’re somewhere else. Somewhere good, if I do say so myself. Athal. The Citadel of the Athalial Explorers League, to be exact”

  Through all of it, Mepka’s eyes wiped appraisingly across the space, taking in this new paradigm without resistance but without traction either. “Can I see it?”

  “See it?” Sylber cocked his head.

  “This other world.” Mepka took a shaky step towards the window, taking up her old stave as a crutch.

  “Oh, sure. Of course.” Sylber let her move of her own accord. “It’s alright, the view out of the Third Seat isn’t the best but, you’re welcome to it.”

  Mepka approached the window, pane glass so clear that she might not have known that there was anything between her and the sky in that moment, and what she saw filled her with awe.

  Rolling greens, hillocks ringed in neat curving lines by paved walkways. People, many myriad people rendered tiny for the distance, standing out under the open sun of a sky dotted by puffy white clouds. They bustled across lawns, hung in doorways, sat in the shade. They gathered, they greeted each other. They came from stone buildings with shingled roofs standing whole and tall, built higher than the last of old Myarsa could ever dream of. It was a place that was decorated grandly, in its facades and columns and statues. Where the buildings grew sparse a forest wended it’s way through in bright autumnal oranges, yellows, reds, and purples.

  Mepka’s heart drew her gaze up, and out to the middle distance. There the aether stood, a billowing wall of blur bounding the whole of this new world her heart had drawn her into.

  “Can I stay?”