And Thy Wardens Lead Astray

I think that, had I been nicer, the god --- bird --- vessel --- thing would have given me a skyward lift. But... he was long gone now. (But not forever, if he was to be believed.)

So instead I simply climbed the canyon wall. Not a very medusa way of getting up. Tentacles were for many things --- but for climbing, it'd be easier to dig holes with a sword. Regardless, I managed. Living with levitation as lousy as mine --- I had the muscles for it.

Three grasper tentacles it took to climb, because the other held my sunshield aloft.

And I climbed.

...If my graspers made to fall off once I took a break, breathing heavy at the top of this far, far too tall canyon, I really wouldn't blame them.

And if tentacles in general decided I was a limb-abuser, and boycotted me from ever growing more, no, I still wouldn't blame them.

But, it seemed, my tentacles had some loyalty or determination. Or, like me, they knew not when to quit it. Either way, they stuck with me through the climb, and rested beside me at the top of it all, my sunshield dropped to cover me like a heavy blanket.

There was grass up here, growing out of the glittering dark dirt. I appreciated it; the planty stuff was softer under my bell than angry hot rocks and muddy, dull dirt.

Not like having a pretty bell was going to help me, granted. Or matter, when this book finally closed.

I had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt. Assassination was dirty work. Perhaps I should be dirty.

(Perhaps I was never worth cleaning in the first place.)

I couldn't rest forever. I had the mission breathing down my neck, of course. That, and you never wanted to be in the wild canyons when the sun neared the horizon. Twilight monsters arose. Some of them gibbering and piping.

The Arid Canyon was smaller, hardier than the great bog reef. It grew in the shadow of several massive slabs of stone. Most days, my time was picked killing the rodents --- annelid rats, teethy urchins, wild stars --- that strove to crawl inward. It was a tiring job. And it got you no respect.

But, for better and for worse, it was something that kept people away from me. No one much messes with the colorless rat killer living out on the fringes.

I wasn't going to get tied down again, tied to other people. If --- when --- I had to leave the Arid Canyon, I would leave.

(Would have left, I reminded myself. After all, I had decided. It didn't much matter what happened next --- my sole purpose now was the act itself.)

I pulled myself to my stalk, and then crackling power pushed off in my usual clumsy levitation. I lurched toward town. It was always visible --- the tallest coral spires were hundreds of bell-lengths high, held up steady by magical polyps.

I everted six eyes and took a good look at the Arid Canyon.

A cobbled road winded into Avelt, the reef like a vast pile of coral. I saw the shelves of diners and stores that encrusted like a barnacle ringing the town centerward, digging in past the exumbrella-outskirts cannaled with houses, like so many internal organs floating in the mesoglea of Avelt.

(My stalk wriggled inside me, the lips of the mouth at its very end parting as if expecting food. I had fasted before visiting the shrine of death, and now I felt it.)

Aside from them, I saw one building that stood out because of all the empty space around it --- the Hornshell Pits, a prison carved within the hulking remains of a hornshell crab, vaster than even the ghost snail. And it was guarded by rank upon rank of godstinging guards --- among them the prisonmaster, the only known doppelstinger, who alone could match a legion in numbers and fight to attrition.

(I did wonder if, after the act was completed, this was where my story would end, my purpose elapsed. A curious prickling crawled over all my exumbrella, like the biting of gnats. I rubbed me with feeler tentacles and let my mind be rid of the notion.)

Past all that, I saw my ultimate destination, the central spire of the sun. It rose higher than every tower around it; the spire of the sun ascended past even clouds. You couldn't see the top. No one could.

I lingered there a moment, fantasizing what I would find as I climbed that eldritch height. There was something --- odd about the spire that I had never looked long enough to notice. For all the barnacles and urchins and corals growing on it, the architecture overall was not medusan. It was --- cyclopean.

I'd said it myself --- reefs seemed drawn unconsciously to those vast metallic sites of the ancients. Could the spire of the sun be what lured us to Avelt?

(There was a deep dread that coolly saturated my Mesoglea; I knew it when recalling the field of horrors and I knew it when standing before the avian vessel and now I knew it gazing upon the spire of the sun. I didn't blame me for drawing a connection between all of them, and something startled within when I realize that the vessel I met had been of the exact same proportions as those ebon stone statues.)

Stare at my goal as intensely I might, soon my eyes were drawn horizonward, inexplicably to me, and in the distance the trees and wild corals league by league grew dense and became a wet forest and yielded to the vast bog beyond. There my old home lay and even at this great distance you could still faintly see the ruins rising in that field of black stone statues.

Still letting my gaze be pulled by whim, the sight I looked at last was the boundary of all the world, the distant mountains bordering on the twilight sea. There were strange settlements there, the only medusan habitations that knew night. It warped them.

And I knew --- but did not see, could never see --- that past them all was the black ocean, the frozen life-haunted wastes where myth says the lands are tended by evil, alien medusae, and the last god waits in eternal slumber, and the darkling reefs abide.

The spell was broken, the the world knew motion once more. Clouds of plankton drifting above, the arms of rooted anemones being tussled by the wind, hopper worms searching for burrows, all these I saw as my awareness returned from the distance.

Over in Avelt, smokestacks rose where the flamestingers tended to their blazes, cooking meats or lighting firestones. Bright glowing beams twisted around where the lightstingers fired off messages. I watched the pale blue forms of waterstingers tend the waterfall gateway that cleansed all who wished to enter the spire of the sun. I pondered how I might subvert them.

Even aside from all those annointed with godstingers, all throughout the vast pile of coral that was the reef you saw the bounding, balloon-like forms of other medusae drifting in and out of enclosed spaces. Levitating up toward the clouds, or propelled bullet-like out on some unknown mission, they had the determined energy I should have.

I tried to summon that. Put some heft in the magic I expelled, squeezing my bell and waving my tentacles. I had decided to kill the high priestess, and every action I took should be angled towards reifying that.

My mind was a sticky, problem-solving sort, the kind that got snagged on thoughts like these. When I got there. It seemed instinct that caused me to pause there and rake it with my claws and tear open the thought.

Did I think I could just drift into the temple and levitate up to the highest levels and slide free a knife and---

No, of course it couldn't be that easy. I had to evert the eyeless anxiety. It was slowing me down, clogging my mind like muck.

The death god... M------... had given me a final resort for just this reason, something that would halt defeat in its tracks. A heartstinger. Nothing like what you hear of in legends, he had assured me. No, I wouldn't be wielding the power of gods. But for storming the temple of the sun? It would be enough, of that I was assured.

It will take time for this sliver of the heart to integrate itself. When the stinger is ready, you will know.

I waved a tress, this ribbon-tendril momentarily free in this casual cycle of levitation-gait. It, like all the others, was still tinglingly tired from magical exertion but there was a certain shiver within it, like a coldness without temperature and this feeling slithered up and down and it waxed in intensity.

There were diseases of the cnidae that felt like this --- Friiya had told me all about that --- but I trusted the one who trusted me. And I had never had those diseases myself. This feeling was new and if it were unrelated it was quite the coincidence. What else could it be?

A whipcrack resonated in my bell, and my eyes jerked to full stalk-eversion. Like that, my mind once more settled in my body, in awareness.

It was a very late for attention, of course. I should have been aware all along. I had a mission. But for now---

"Ru, is that you?"

I angled a few eyestalks at the medusae who'd just sung. He was bouncing a bit more than the others, his bell all swelled up.

I puffed my bell once for him, and then gave quick regard to the other medusae standing around here. Six. They had me surrounded --- that was the magnitude of my unawareness. Some of them were drifting from corals and bushes, and one of them had a suspicious translucency about her.

They all had something suspicious about them. Not one of these jellies were clear of exumbrella --- stingerless --- like me. The one who vibrated earlier --- a bright, burning red. The translucent lady beside him had a hint of purple to her. There were two green-bells drifting all close to them. A deep, deep blue medusa with a golden ring levitated above her head (how?), and finally one whose color shifted a few times as I watched: blue, yellow, silver, cyan, gray --- I gave up tracking it.

They all had metal guards lining their tentacles and tresses, and along their sunshields blazed the fiery symbol-script declaring loyalty the Arid Canyon.

Guards.

Deaths beyond, I hated dealing with guards.