If you just landed here, check out Part 1 and Part 2 first
By the time the Hershella arrived at Mount Magnet, Dez felt a little river sick and decided to snooze it off near the water in the shade of a bent willow. They were just off the main concourse but close enough to hear the low-frequency hum of the whizpipe shooting passengers around and the faint chimes of the airships docking near the summit overhead.
From Mount Magnet, you could travel to thirty-six different cities fanned out in a neatly organized array from the southwest to the northeast. The post-flood infrastructure allowed smaller self-contained communities to develop over the high ground and decentralize from the unsustainable ancient coastal urban grottos—most now submechanophobic nightmares.
Nobody lived here at the hub except the maintenance crews and a growing population of grass cats. Surrounded mainly by unpopulated farmland, it was still a busy place as commuters, adventurers, and merchants gathered and transferred from one place to another.
Dez lay down with their eyes just barely closed, absentmindedly rolling a seedpod between their fingers. Juujee hadn’t wanted to come on the journey—mostly because of the unpredictable ferry ride—and while this was understandable, Dez wished she was here right now.
After the intense intimacy of the last few days, speculating and sharing, Dez missed that connection. Everything felt a little flat and colorless at the moment as they slipped into a peculiar sleep.
Millenia before the Columbo Asteroid impact, another even more catastrophic space boulder hit the planet and wiped out thousands of species. Though this cosmic interruption changed the world profoundly, it was the things hiding inside this interstellar monster that altered the way humans made sense of life, death, and the absurdity of it all.
Unknown to anyone, like Columbo, the great rock Nebonasu was inhabited by extra-terrestrial micronauts who survived the crash and lay dormant in the sea bed after that big whoosh until ocean temperatures increased, allowing the ancient visitors to re-animate.
Unlike the newcomers, Fantastrigo metadido, these microscopic alien forms were incompatible with humans directly and didn’t see the point of them anyway. But they eventually found suitable host creatures and became quite prolific in the neuroblastic stem cells that created the nervous systems of flies across the Diptera family. Go figure.
The affected flies combined with enzymes in the digestive tract of Avian and Reptilian species that ate them created a new quantum host-compound for the ‘Nebs’, allowing them to evolve into independent governors with anoetic consciousness in a thinly obscured, adjacent, extra-dimensional plane.
In this sentient layer, the Nebs had amassed some power and influence across culture, art, religion, and philosophy in the last six thousand years. Affecting the subconscious human dimension by inserting and positioning their new planetary allies as gods, demons, and spirit animals was a unique and bold long-term strategy for control until Fantastrigo metadido arrived and started messing around.
Dez was a large disembodied hand in the dream, waving gently back and forth, keeping the horse flies away from the vision in front of them. Descending from a cloudy red mountain, an enormous flying feathered serpent in orange and gold spiraled toward an icy plane with crystalline extrusions that erupted brilliantly as reflective shards mirroring the flame-like plumage above.
Here, Dez understood this was Kaetsagamal, god of the wind and rain, creator of the world and all humanity. Ruler of the sky and the earth, there was a terrible calming elemental certainty in knowing this omnipotent entity existed. And as this vision faded, a new one emerged as Dez, now reborn as Typhor, an ancient sage, pulled apart in two directions by Hespiria, mother of snakes, and Varlata, god of the birds. As they split Typhor, his halves became a pair of wyvern charges flanking an armored hornet on a heraldic crest above the mantle of a great room in a castle called Maudettier.
These dreams subdivided, fractals converging into more visual patterns and stories, but as Dez stirred awake, the visions barely held together and dispersed, quickly forgotten, dandelion seeds blown into the aether.
The Axolotl wasn’t any ordinary river vessel. The hull and deck were painted soot grey. Its bow sat high in the water with weapon mounts, and the stern flattened out low and wide, inferring there was much more lurking beneath the surface. The cabin dome cut squarely, a dark emerald, reflecting the picture of a large tree dipping a branch into the water ahead. Gliding slowly toward the shore, a looming figure carved from dark wood adorned the prow. A wide whiskered fish with bulging eyes held two crossed axes in its upper arms, a bejeweled shield and scepter with its center limbs, and across the lower arms, it cradled a fallen angel. The tailfins of the fish figure hooked forward as a barbed trident that skimmed just above the surface as the ship quietly ducked into the shadow of the willow in the late afternoon haze.
“Don’t spook em,” warned the Captain of the Axolotl, a menacingly tall lanky figure named Pearl, “Grab the bag first.”
But as the pirates waded forward in the hip-deep water toward their mark, a curious tree viper dangled daringly from a willow branch and dropped on them, immediately sinking its fangs into the shoulder of a young bandit.
In the thrashing commotion, the pirates hadn’t noticed Dez, now standing awake on the shore waving their arms, “Slow! Slow down! Keep him calm—carry him here, I can help.”
Looking back at Captain Pearl, who nodded permission from the deck, three drenched would-be robbers lay the snake-bitten boy down at Dez’s feet.
“You want to slow the blood flow. Don’t get him excited. Hopefully, that little vipe was too young for a full dose”, assured Dez as they tipped back their hat and began sucking the blood out of the puncture holes, spitting it out on the shore.
Now joined by Captain Pearl, the pirates watched as their target turned medic saved the fellow crewman from an uncertain fate. “You know a thing or two about medicine eh?” said the Captain.
“A thing or two about snakes actually...” corrected Dez, staring past the pirates with a blood-stained face, now noticing the conspicuously threatening boat sitting in the water amidst the drooping fronds.
“Ah, you’ve noticed! The Axolotl! A real beaut he is,” said the captain, changing the subject, “A sight better than those skiffs the Swiss Knuckle thugs pole around in.”
The crew giggled as Dez panned across their faces, “So you’re not...uh….”
“Knuckleheads?!” Pearl finished, and they all burst into even more laughter and lap slapping, “No, my pretty, we’re not from around these parts. And if I’m not mistaken, you look a little out of place as well. Traveling are we? Kickin’ sticks? What’s that—a bag a books?” She reached for the pack, but Dez quickly leaned backward out of reach. “Oh, settle you fry thing, I’m not gonna hurt you—a quick one you are. Got your Headies ready and all that.”
“Hey, I’m just minding my business,” Dez said, simultaneously realizing how ridiculous this sounded after the dramatic intervention.
“Heh ya, your business is our business now, doc. We could use a mate like you, c’mon, don’t be shy”, Pearl shot back as they wrangled a curiously cooperative Dez aboard the Axolotl. The wood dowels of the rope ladder tapped against the hull as they climbed on deck. Tap Tatap Tap Tatap Tatap Tap Tap Tap Tatap.
Juujee waved, only vaguely surprised to see Raket already on top of the Olga Fripp Block, sitting cross-legged on the sun pane surrounded by hundreds of birds hopping and limping around chasing bugs. Some jumped up, beat their wings uselessly, then fell back down. A meter-high wall around the perimeter of the roof kept the grounded birds penned in; however, Juujee watched as a few ambitious flappers occasionally scrambled up the ledge and jumped.
“What happens to those guys?” she asked Raket, pointing at the ledge.“Most figure it out and swoop away. Most. I already tried helping some, but—a couple of them just dropped”, Raket answered, chin on their chest petting a fluffy brown songbird.
“What made you want to come up here anyway?” Juujee said, looking over the edge of the building, knowing the probable answer.
“I’ve had the picture of this place in my head for days and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Like my Tads were stuck on repeat.”
“Same,” said Juujee
“Right, huh—so I made my way up, and this is what I found.” Raket held out their arms and let the little brown thing furiously flap to the ground and limp away disappointed.
Without warning, a crow violently dropped to the roof from above and rolled on its side at Juujee’s feet. The bird’s wing obviously broken, she started piecing the puzzle together. “Maybe some of the ones you tried to help were uh—beyond that kinda help. A lot of these birdies seem okay, but some of them like this one”, she pointed at the crow and rolled her eyes to the side, “are not going to be flying anytime soon. So let’s see which ones can flap and which ones can’t. After that, we’ll launch the flyers off the building, and the others we’ll take down for rehab.”
“But what’s making them drop?” worried Raket, “Maybe the panels? It’s a terrible, terrible thing” As if prompted, another bird fell and lay stunned on the tile. They both stared at it until it stirred and got on its feet.
“It’s gotta be this building. Like this sky above here,” Juujee fanned her arms, looking up, “it’s a no-fly zone. Maybe their flight mechanics stop functioning, but when they’re out of this square”, she did a turnaround, “they can escape this …. uh, drop field.” Juujee grinned, still turning, rather pleased at coining a new, though niche bit of jargon.
“Yeah, maybe, sounds possible, but what’s making this a drop field?”
It was a bigger question than either had time to figure out. They were both quite eager to begin the bird evacuation before it got too hot. And one by one, they carefully began testing wings for flappability, sending the graduates, more or less soaring off the nine-story building.
As the last of them flew away, they looked at the shit-stained roof panels and wondered how long it would be until more birds (and some of the same birds) crowded this space again in the drop field. Someone needed to find out why and how this was happening.
With some relief from the climbing temperature, a micro shower broke and washed the bird crap into the drains. Pit pat pit pat patty pat pit pit patty went the rain as the pair ushered the remaining bird herd toward the stairs.
Fantastrigo metadido, as it turned out, were not passive players in the mutualistic microbial human relationship. Driven by the need to reproduce or die, they used human brains as incubators to replicate and propagate. These brain bodies needed to be protected. But the humans were soft and defenseless against the Nebs, who had been indirectly influencing their behavior for thousands of years, steering them toward self-destruction on the wings of religion and an underbelly of arrogance. Their long-term human extinction campaign had been working. They might have gone further faster if they weren’t limited to an awkwardly specific appropriation of the animal kingdom. But it was far enough. Humans, oblivious to any of this, were the battleground for two warring extra-terrestrial species.
Saving the humans and fighting back against the Nebs and their interdimensional sabotage was the priority for the global Tad network that sprawled through the connected human experience and beyond. Though their actions were also limited, they slowly and steadily evolved a plan to step up reproduction and build large-scale transmission structures. This architecture, powered by collective synchronized bead movement, gave them an unexpected way to take the offensive and deescalate the threat, albeit with some strange experiential side effects for the humans.
Aboard the Axolotl, Dez had lost track of time. It was probably mid-morning the next day, but hard to tell below deck. There wasn’t a lot of free-mingling happening. Most of the crew had little practice and, like many people, saw mingling as a sign of weakness and vulnerability. The Captain, although quite capable of connecting, was very guarded and suspicious, thwarting Dez’s attempts at getting a read on their intention.
Dez walked out of the crew quarters and into the common room where Captain Pearl sat with a mug and a chunk of smoked fish. “So—what’s the plan?” Dez started, “Like I said, I think I have some important information here that I should share with the FM Consulate right away.”, They waved one of the notebooks, “Not sure where we are now, but if you take me to the closest office, I’ll give them the goods and come right back—escort me if you’d like.”
The captain raised her eyebrows and glanced at the charts on the wall. They were further upriver than Dez might have imagined. These maps were unlike anything anyone from Lost Council had seen before. It was hard to pinpoint where they were precisely, and Dez felt a creeping uncomfortableness in their gut as they tried to make out any familiar landmarks or distinguishing features. This was bigger than a district view of their environment; this looked like an actual new world map—a very rare thing.
“Not sure there’s anything like what you’re looking for around here.” said the captain, swiveling on the stool toward the wall with the charts and pointing, “We’re somewhere ‘round here.” She made an imaginary circle in the air. Dez went in for a closer look, “I don’t recognize much of anything here. The scale and proportions are different from what I’ve seen before. Is this the whole thing? Is this all of it?”
“No idea, probably not.” The captain got up and stood beside Dez, “Hard to tell, unless you sail off the edge,” she joked with an awkward laugh. “See this here?” she traced a wide blue river from one side of the chart to the other, “That’s the Sindonglahya. And it just keeps going”, she motioned toward the other maps. “We picked you up here,” she made an invisible X on the river, “And I think we’ve just passed Jerk Forks, right here.” She stuck her thumb down on the map on top of a river delta with a smattering of small islands and shoals.
Dez had never heard of such a place, which wasn’t too unbelievable considering they hadn’t ever ventured that far. A couple of trips to Standard, up north by the big lakes, was about as far afield as they got.
Dez peaked up and out of the dark dome. The river looked the same, but the trees on the shore were short and sparse. There was no one else on the river either; the traffic had dwindled to nothing. Dez started wondering how and who made these maps. They had seen a few of the before maps, created using pictures taken by space cameras. But that pre-thaw cartography was useless now, and all the space tech was gone anyway, ripped to pieces long ago in the great chain reaction that left the old world stranded and starting over for generations.
“How’d you get these?” asked Dez, suspecting they robbed someone.
“They came with the ship.” said the captain, “Some old b’loon skipper spent his whole life chartin’ the lands and lakes, horizon to horizon. And these are some of the hard-to-find copies of that work.”
Dez walked along the wall excitedly scanning the detail, “This is amazing, it covers so much area—unbelievable! And look at these drawings,” they pointed at all the tiny illustrations across the map, “this sea monster here in the lake and here, this phoenix on top of the mountain! Have you been to these places? Seen these things?!” But before Captain Pearl could answer, Dez redirected the question, “Where are we going then?”
The captain stood leaning against the small table in the middle of the room, thinking about how to answer. Her fingernails hit the table one by one, starting with her pinky and tapping toward her thumb and then back again, starting with her index finger. Five then four. Sindongla-hya, Sindonglah-ya.
I love this world you've created, Jon. So atmospheric.