{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/fiction/atdra/03",
  "path": "/posts/fiction/atdra/03",
  "publishedAt": "2019-10-13T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "I think that, had I been nicer, the god --- bird --- vessel ---\nthing would have given me a skyward lift.  But... he was long gone\nnow.  (But not forever, if he was to be believed.)\n\nSo instead I simply climbed the canyon wall.  Not a very medusa way\nof getting up.  Tentacles were for many things --- but for climbing,\nit'd be easier to dig holes with a sword.  Regardless, I managed.\nLiving with levitation as lousy as mine --- I had the muscles for it.\n\nThree grasper tentacles it took to climb, because the other held my\nsunshield aloft.\n\nAnd I climbed.\n\n...If my graspers made to fall off once I took a break, breathing\nheavy at the top of this far, far too tall canyon, I really wouldn't\nblame them.\n\nAnd if tentacles in general decided I was a limb-abuser, and boycotted\nme from ever growing more, no, I still wouldn't blame them.\n\nBut, it seemed, my tentacles had some loyalty or determination.  Or,\nlike me, they knew not when to quit it.  Either way, they stuck with\nme through the climb, and rested beside me at the top of it all, my\nsunshield dropped to cover me like a heavy blanket.\n\nThere was grass up here, growing out of the glittering dark dirt.  I\nappreciated it; the planty stuff was softer under my bell than angry\nhot rocks and muddy, dull dirt.\n\nNot like having a pretty bell was going to help me, granted.  Or\nmatter, when this book finally closed.\n\nI had decided I would kill the high priestess of Avelt.  Assassination\nwas dirty work. Perhaps I should be dirty.\n\n(Perhaps I was never worth cleaning in the first place.)\n\nI couldn't rest forever.  I had the mission breathing down my neck, of\ncourse.  That, and you never wanted to be in the wild canyons when the\nsun neared the horizon.  Twilight monsters arose.  Some of them\ngibbering and piping.\n\nThe Arid Canyon was smaller, hardier than the great bog reef.  It\ngrew in the shadow of several massive slabs of stone.  Most days, my\ntime was picked killing the rodents --- annelid rats, teethy urchins,\nwild stars --- that strove to crawl inward.  It was a tiring job. And\nit got you no respect.\n\nBut, for better and for worse, it was something that kept people away\nfrom me.  No one much messes with the colorless rat killer living out\non the fringes.\n\nI wasn't going to get tied down again, tied to other people. If ---\nwhen --- I had to leave the Arid Canyon, I would leave.\n\n(Would have left, I reminded myself.  After all, I had decided.\nIt didn't much matter what happened next --- my sole purpose now was\nthe act itself.)\n\nI pulled myself to my stalk, and then crackling power pushed off in my\nusual clumsy levitation.  I lurched toward town.  It was always\nvisible --- the tallest coral spires were hundreds of bell-lengths\nhigh, held up steady by magical polyps.\n\nI everted six eyes and took a good look at the Arid Canyon.\n\nA cobbled road winded into Avelt, the reef like a vast pile of\ncoral. I saw the shelves of diners and stores that encrusted like a\nbarnacle ringing the town centerward, digging in past the\nexumbrella-outskirts cannaled with houses, like so many internal\norgans floating in the mesoglea of Avelt.\n\n(My stalk wriggled inside me, the lips of the mouth at its very end\nparting as if expecting food. I had fasted before visiting the shrine\nof death, and now I felt it.)\n\nAside from them, I saw one building that stood out because of all the\nempty space around it --- the Hornshell Pits, a prison carved within\nthe hulking remains of a hornshell crab, vaster than even the ghost\nsnail.  And it was guarded by rank upon rank of godstinging guards ---\namong them the prisonmaster, the only known doppelstinger, who alone\ncould match a legion in numbers and fight to attrition.\n\n(I did wonder if, after the act was completed, this was where my story\nwould end, my purpose elapsed.  A curious prickling crawled over all\nmy exumbrella, like the biting of gnats.  I rubbed me with feeler\ntentacles and let my mind be rid of the notion.)\n\nPast all that, I saw my ultimate destination, the central spire of the\nsun.  It rose higher than every tower around it; the spire of the sun\nascended past even clouds.  You couldn't see the top.  No one could.\n\nI lingered there a moment, fantasizing what I would find as I climbed\nthat eldritch height. There was something --- odd about the spire that\nI had never looked long enough to notice.  For all the barnacles and\nurchins and corals growing on it, the architecture overall was not\nmedusan.  It was --- cyclopean.\n\nI'd said it myself --- reefs seemed drawn unconsciously to those vast\nmetallic sites of the ancients.  Could the spire of the sun be what\nlured us to Avelt?\n\n(There was a deep dread that coolly saturated my Mesoglea; I knew it\nwhen recalling the field of horrors and I knew it when standing before\nthe avian vessel and now I knew it gazing upon the spire of the sun.\nI didn't blame me for drawing a connection between all of them, and\nsomething startled within when I realize that the vessel I met had\nbeen of the exact same proportions as those ebon stone statues.)\n\nStare at my goal as intensely I might, soon my eyes were drawn\nhorizonward, inexplicably to me, and in the distance the trees and\nwild corals league by league grew dense and became a wet forest and\nyielded to the vast bog beyond. There my old home lay and even at this\ngreat distance you could still faintly see the ruins rising in that\nfield of black stone statues.\n\nStill letting my gaze be pulled by whim, the sight I looked at last\nwas the boundary of all the world, the distant mountains bordering on\nthe twilight sea. There were strange settlements there, the only\nmedusan habitations that knew night. It warped them.\n\nAnd I knew --- but did not see, could never see --- that past them all\nwas the black ocean, the frozen life-haunted wastes where myth says\nthe lands are tended by evil, alien medusae, and the last god waits in\neternal slumber, and the darkling reefs abide.\n\nThe spell was broken, the the world knew motion once more. Clouds of\nplankton drifting above, the arms of rooted anemones being tussled by\nthe wind, hopper worms searching for burrows, all these I saw as my\nawareness returned from the distance.\n\nOver in Avelt, smokestacks rose where the flamestingers tended to\ntheir blazes, cooking meats or lighting firestones.  Bright glowing\nbeams twisted around where the lightstingers fired off messages.  I\nwatched the pale blue forms of waterstingers tend the waterfall\ngateway that cleansed all who wished to enter the spire of the sun.  I\npondered how I might subvert them.\n\nEven aside from all those annointed with godstingers, all throughout\nthe vast pile of coral that was the reef you saw the bounding,\nballoon-like forms of other medusae drifting in and out of enclosed\nspaces.  Levitating up toward the clouds, or propelled bullet-like out\non some unknown mission, they had the determined energy I should have.\n\nI tried to summon that. Put some heft in the magic I expelled,\nsqueezing my bell and waving my tentacles.  I had decided to kill the\nhigh priestess, and every action I took should be angled towards\nreifying that.\n\nMy mind was a sticky, problem-solving sort, the kind that got snagged\non thoughts like these.  When I got there.  It seemed instinct that\ncaused me to pause there and rake it with my claws and tear open the\nthought.\n\nDid I think I could just drift into the temple and levitate up to the\nhighest levels and slide free a knife and---\n\nNo, of course it couldn't be that easy. I had to evert the eyeless\nanxiety.  It was slowing me down, clogging my mind like muck.\n\nThe death god... M------... had given me a final resort for just\nthis reason, something that would halt defeat in its tracks.  A\nheartstinger.  Nothing like what you hear of in legends, he had\nassured me.  No, I wouldn't be wielding the power of gods.  But for\nstorming the temple of the sun? It would be enough, of that I was\nassured.\n\nIt will take time for this sliver of the heart to integrate itself.\nWhen the stinger is ready, you will _know_.\n\nI waved a tress, this ribbon-tendril momentarily free in this casual\ncycle of levitation-gait.  It, like all the others, was still\ntinglingly tired from magical exertion but there was a certain\nshiver within it, like a coldness without temperature and this\nfeeling slithered up and down and it waxed in intensity.\n\nThere were diseases of the cnidae that felt like this --- Friiya had\ntold me all about that --- but I trusted the one who trusted me.  And\nI had never had those diseases myself.  This feeling was new and if it\nwere unrelated it was quite the coincidence.  What else could it be?\n\nA whipcrack resonated in my bell, and my eyes jerked to full\nstalk-eversion.  Like that, my mind once more settled in my body, in\nawareness.\n\nIt was a very late for attention, of course.  I should have been aware\nall along.  I had a mission.  But for now---\n\n\"Ru, is that you?\"\n\nI angled a few eyestalks at the medusae who'd just sung.  He was\nbouncing a bit more than the others, his bell all swelled up.\n\nI puffed my bell once for him, and then gave quick regard to the other\nmedusae standing around here.  Six.  They had me surrounded --- that\nwas the magnitude of my unawareness.  Some of them were drifting from\ncorals and bushes, and one of them had a suspicious translucency about\nher.\n\nThey all had something suspicious about them.  Not one of these\njellies were clear of exumbrella --- stingerless --- like me.  The one\nwho vibrated earlier --- a bright, burning red.  The translucent lady\nbeside him had a hint of purple to her.  There were two green-bells\ndrifting all close to them.  A deep, deep blue medusa with a golden\nring levitated above her head (how?), and finally one whose color\nshifted a few times as I watched: blue, yellow, silver, cyan, gray ---\nI gave up tracking it.\n\nThey all had metal guards lining their tentacles and tresses, and\nalong their sunshields blazed the fiery symbol-script declaring\nloyalty the Arid Canyon.\n\nGuards.\n\nDeaths beyond, I hated dealing with guards.\n\n",
  "title": "And Thy Wardens Lead Astray"
}