Relic Engine -- Chapter 2

         Drifting away…
         In between waking and dreaming now.  He felt it come on, that feeling of falling and floating.  It was a familiar, comforting feeling that he knew without needing his departed memories.  He let it take him, anticipating an escape to a world free from burning trains, buried cities, and strange alliances.  The tick of dripping water, the myriad mechanical noises coming from the walls, and Mei’s own soft breathing all faded into the ambience.  The only sense that persisted from the waking world…was the heavy weight of the glass orb, in his breast pocket, sitting on his chest. On some level, whether real or dreamed, he took it out of his pocket, held it in his hand.  It floated up from his pale, slender fingers, with a life of its own.           The orb flared, growing brighter and brighter.
         This disturbed him, and with a growing sense of urgency he thought he should wake up.  The light would be too bright, it would wake her.  She would be upset; already she had put her life on the line for him, put up with his mistrust and his surliness.  He did not want to be even more trouble. 
         Then he realized that there was no one here but him, he was in a vast, empty abyss.  He was alone here, always had been, and these others he feared waking…were only figments of a dream.
         And so he relaxed and let the glow surround him.  There was only a brief moment, before it took him completely, when a final coherent thought bubbled free…
He was forgetting everything, all over again.
         And he heard a voice, laughter, and it told him of the darkness, and of the end of time, and to it he listened.
2

         Damn bees!
         He swatted at them.  The clumsy creatures were too slow to evade him and he knocked a couple more out of the air.  They were replaced by even more.  They hummed stupidly inside his ears, and their blunted tails prodded at him impotently.  He flailed his arms about angrily, and succeeded in clearing some space in front of him, but only for a moment until they reformed their cloud.
         He whistled loudly, once, twice.  Some long moments later, Haestus came down out of the treetops. With the great force of her wings, she scattered the multibees in all directions.  Finally the air cleared, and he could see again to complete his delicate work. He worked now in a buffet of wind that left him swinging from the branch, and having to hang onto another branch beside him to keep steady.
         One of the bees emerged from the safety of its hive.  In the half second before Haestus blew it away, he peered at the ridiculous insect.  Its three pairs of wings flickered iridescently, each trying to take the creature in a different direction.  No eyes guided the thing, for the three separate bodies were joined together at the point where on most other sensible creatures, the head would have been found.           The multibee slowly floated up from its hive, seeking its lost brothers, before another mighty flap of Haestus’s wings sent it tumbling off into the darkness.
“Almost…,” he grunted, as he pried another flake off the hive’s surface.  It came free at last. 
         He curled, doubling himself over, reaching up to the container he held clasped in his hind feet.  It was filled with several hours’ worth of valuable Fichia peelings, and he held onto it securely, never letting his attention waver enough to drop it.  He pressed at the glassy surface, which immediately softened and allowed him to press it together.
         “Done, and done!”  He relaxed and stretched his body out, hanging from his tail.  “What’s next, then?”
         Haestus consulted her appreciable memory.  “Luna Resin.  Ah, easy work and a breath of fresh air!”
         She flew in close to him.  He reached out, took hold of her talons with his forepaws, and loosened his tail from the branch.  He swung down, now hanging from her feet above the long, long drop.
         They retrieved his pack, which he placed the Fichia into, and then he shrugged it over his shoulders again.  He looked up, to the canopy far and out of sight above them.
         “That’s a hard climb,” he said.  “Are you sure you don’t want to rest first?”
         Haestus chirruped dismissively.  “If I get tired, I’ll just let you go.  You’re young, you’ll bounce!”
         He frowned, thinking about just how many long seconds that fall would take.  “That ain’t funny.”
         Upon the beats of her powerful wings, they climbed.
         It was slow going.  The tightly woven foliage of the midlevel jungle kept her dodging, searching, winding through a veritable maze in order to ascend.  The growth was so close around them that the Sune could have hold grabbed one of the slender branches without letting go of her feet.
         Through the jungle’s dense center, they rose.  This floral metropolis teemed with life.  So densely packed was the middle layer of the jungle that all forms of life lived in it.  Those creatures without the ability to fly had an unlikely advantage here, even many hundreds of feet above the ground.  Long-limbed simians were daredevil acrobats swinging expertly from branch to branch.  Tiny, wide-eyed chippers scrurried across thin tendrils of hanging vine, seemingly everywhere, but never running into one another on the slender tightropes.
         Up this high, most of the jungle’s peculiar creations relied in part on the weak light that would filter down during the day.  Nevertheless some of the deeper denizens wandered up here as well.  Strange, blighted things rising from the permadark like imaginings of a nightmare.  As they rose up through all of this, he heard the familiar eerie whooping of a nybat.  Looking around and above him, as he clung by his forepaws to Haestus’s talons, he spotted a couple of them hanging nearly motionless in the air.  Their membranous wings spread wide, they hovered on the air with little effort.
         They had nothing to fear from these ghoulish bottom-dwellers, who were locked in a battle of sonar wits.  They faced off, eyeless heads turned to meet in a blind gaze, and blasted one another with their subsonic whooping calls.  They were nearly inaudible, even to a Sune’s sensitive ears.  But when they rose between the two combatants, a buffet of invisible air pummeled him and he swayed as if being blown about in a storm.
         At last they left this crowded scene behind.  The foliage began to thin out.  But they weren’t at the canopy yet.  Even here, the moon’s ethereal light was almost entirely blocked.  They both relied on their sharp night-vision to find their way through this almost lightless world.  Then they came free of the midlevel, and the tangle of greenery fell away from them all at once.
         Below them, a broad carpet of green stretched in all directions.  All around and above, like a bubble caught in the middle of the lush jungle, there was an enormous cavern of open space.  Here or there, hundreds of feet apart, immense tree trunks thrust from the depths.  Spectacular living columns, each a half a mile in diameter.  Up and up to the true roof of the jungle they reached, spreading out mammoth branches from which the leafy canopy was made.
         Caught in its grandeur, the two of them were just tiny points of life.  Haestus had to fly long and hard to climb through this great in-between.  She could not fly straight up without quickly exhausting herself, so their climb took them across many long miles, as the powerful Famira climbed some, and then soared for a few moments to rest.  When they reached the jungle roof, they were perhaps fifteen miles from the point where they’d broken through the midlevel.
         They had to fly on a bit further to find a break in the thick canopy.  Here, the long reach of two colossus trees met in a borderline of thin branches, and gaps allowed the night sky to shine through.  Haestus soared up through the break, and they left the shadowy jungle behind for the clear, open sky.
         As they flew in towards the center of the next colossus tree, the leaves beneath them grew more dense, and the dark patches that revealed a sobering thousand-foot drop eventually disappeared.  When they were near the tree’s trunk and the branches underfoot were as strong as steel beams, only then did Haestus allow her friend to set his feet down.
         Here, the leaves weren’t just extremely dense.  They were coated with a substance that hardened and made the canopy solid enough to walk upon.  This material, extruded from the trees at their immense trunk, was the luna resin for which they searched.
         But it was called luna resin for a reason.  Just as there was a reason that he, young, unaccomplished, and at the whim of his elders, was sent to procure these botanical staples including the resin, when it was easy enough to find that anyone could do it.
         The reason for both was: luna resin, under the light of the moon, became soft and unpleasantly tacky at night.
         There was no danger of falling through, at least.  Underneath the sticky outer layer, the densely packed leaves continued down for several feet, and all of it solidified with permanently hardened resin.
         Through this tacky muck he waded.  His paws came free with sticky snaps at every step he took.  Haestus would have cHaestused him, of course, saving him the nuisance of it, but after her long flight hauling him beneath her, she was tired and found a branch on which to perch for a good rest.
         The moon had not yet fully risen, so the resin merely plucked at his paws instead of sucking them down.  He took from his pack the sample container, and began searching out the thin golden veins running through the sap, which held the important nutrients that made the stuff so important.
         The search and collection took the better part of an hour.  “Take your time,” said Haestus at one point.  “It’s quite pleasant up here tonight.”  The light wind ruffled her feathers as she hunkered on a nearby exposed branch, well above the sticky goo that would give her terrible trouble if her feathers should get stuck in it.  Another reason that he, despite his own discomfort, did not ask her to carry him so low to the surface where a wingtip or tail feather could easily get stuck and rip out.
         “I would,” he said, “but this is…getting…difficult!”  He now had to pull his feet out of the resin with every step.  The moon’s rise was making it softer, and soon he would have to stop.  Above all, he could not be in this stuff still when the moon began to set.
In a separate container he had collected nearly his full quota of resin, and it was suffused with the rich golden color that showed it was good quality.  “That’ll do for that,” he said.
         Perhaps because it was late, or his mind was simply in other places, he made a very stupid mistake just then.  Instead of waiting, and letting Haestus carry him up to a perch above the stickiness, he impatiently started to remove his backpack first.  To do this he had to pull the pack off his shoulders and above his head, sitting up and using his forepaws, and that meant standing on his back feet.
         When he did, his tail, which he had learned to be painstakingly careful with up here, dipped into the resin.
         He knew he’d done something bad as soon as he felt the cold goo soak the tip of his tail.  He tried to flick it up and out of it, hurriedly, but the resin stuck to the fur.  It tugged painfully on the long, fluffy fur when he tried to jerk his tail free.
“Haestus! Help!” he cried.  He daren’t move a muscle, or risk pushing his tail even further into it.  He didn’t even risk a look behind him to see how badly it was stuck.
         She took to the air and shot towards him.  This was by far the worst he’d been stuck, even worse than the very first time (when he’d thought he had learned his lesson forever!).  Though there was no need to be worried, his eyes went to the moon, hanging high in the sky, fearing that now that he was stuck, he would see it beginning to set, rushing to the horizon before his very eyes.  Of course it sat there, to his eyes unmoving, not even close to its pinnacle yet.  But suddenly he couldn’t be sure that it didn’t appear to be slowly dropping…
         “Get me out, get me out!” he cried.  Another tug on his own, another sensation of his fur tearing out.  He tried to shift his weight to look back over his shoulder, but stopped as that only put more weight on its tail, forcing it down.
         A terrifying thought occurred to him.  “Am…am I going to lose my tail?” he nearly whimpered.  “What if I can’t get free…before this hardens?”  Then, “My feet!  My feet’ll be stuck too!”
         “Okay, okay. You’re not going to lose anything except a bit of fur.  Hey, why don’t you tell me again, how that new contraption of yours works.  The one with the fireflies.”
         He heard her soft chuckle, and he was sure she was just asking to pander to him.  But it worked.  He started thinking again about his latest project, the one he was determined to finish this time.  And he began to tell her again about his whole vision, getting excited as he went along.
         “Well, see, plascharge, like the Teki use, it’s hard to create and it doesn’t last very long.  Not for more than a split second.  But fireflies—especially the permadark kind—can create just as much power as—owwOOCH!””
In the blink of an eye, his tail was ripped free from the resin.  It was over and done with before he knew what she was doing.  She held his tail in her talons until she was sure that he’d recovered from his shock enough to keep from setting it down again.
         “That really hurt!” he wailed.  He pulled his tail close and examined it.  There was some fur missing from the last dark ring near the end, otherwise he was pretty luck, really.  He realized how whiny he must seem, after Haestus had rescued him from his own carelessness, so he buried his pride and offered her a grateful smile.  “Thank you…”
         When they were ready, he took hold of her talons again and she lifted him into the air.  “One thing these Teki—which you admire so—haven’t learned how to do,” she spoke as she cHaestused him along, “is to make progress while still in harmony with their surroundings.  Instead of changing everything to fit their needs.  Do you know how long Sune and Famira  have worked as partners, like we’re doing?”
         About the long, rich Sune history, he was actually pretty knowledgeable.  Next to his fascination with mechana—all things related to technology that the Sune so carefully avoided—it was one of his greatest interests.  But she already know that.
         “For nine thousand years,” he answered.  “Ever since the end of the enmity, when Sune, Famira, and every soul of Seiyu—other than the Teki—began to work together instead of preying on one another.”
         “Before that, even,” she said. “We helped one another before the time of enmity began, back in the very beginning.  Point is, all of us, we draw on each other’s strengths to get things done.  We all have unique gifts the jungle has given our kind.  The Teki are a good, compassionate people and we have had peace with them since both our species were born.  But they know only how to solve problems by altering their world.  That only leads to increasing destruction.
         “Their strength is, admittedly, for the rest of us a weakness.  I’ve been around long enough to see the marvelous creations and advances they have made.  We are no less brilliant, yet we are fated to live simple lives because we eschew progress that requires us to destroy—“
         “Eschew?”  the Sune asked.  He didn’t know what that meant, but to him it sounded like a sneeze.  He was wise enough, at least, not to say so.
         “We...deny ourselves…new ideas and inventions that don’t fit our way of life,” she said.  “Even while smart and original minds like yours dream up these things.”
         “Ah.”  He knew what she meant.  His interests, his tinkering, unusual creations were coldly received by most that he shared them with.
         “You, my dear…” she smiled, “you are quite different.  You’re the seventh Seiyusune I’ve been fortunate enough to be paired with, since I began doing this…oh my goodness, fifty years ago.  There’ll be a lot more before I’m done, and I don’t intend to be old when I retire from it.  I loved every one of them—still do—as some of the closest friends I’ve ever had.  But in none of them did I see the potential to really become something truly special.”
         “What do you mean?” he said.  Special…what was special about him, he wondered.  He, who seemed to be a favorite target for the older youths with their specialized talents who always singled him out for sample collection duty?
         “You will not spend your life dedicated to pharma.  Even as a solutionist, it would be a waste of a unique mind.  And Sune, like yourself, know how to make the most of the strengths of that they possess.”
         They soared through the chilly night, a blanket of stars above them and the deep, dark jungle below.  They weren’t heading back towards the village.  She was taking him in the opposite direction.  She was leading up to something, with all this serious talk, and wherever this excursion was going, it would certainly be more fun than going straight home.
         


         
3
         
Even seen from afar, the lights of the Teki city were dazzling.  The glow was a mountain sitting on the horizon, bigger and grander than he had imagined it would be.  That he should only be seeing this now for the first time, fourteen years into his life, made him feel more than ever that he had been sheltered, all this time, from a much larger and richer world.  He said as much to Haestus.
         “They have sheltered you,” Haestus said.  “You, and all Sune children.  They do it because they’re afraid.”
         “Afraid?” he scoffed.  “Of the Teki?  But they wouldn’t hurt us.  Everyone knows there’s never been a war between—“
         “Oh, no they’re not afraid of the Teki..”  She waved dismissively. “Not them, per se. And despite what some might say, it’s also not the thought of losing touch with their heritage that scares them.  They’re afraid of losing you.”
          “Me?”  He was astonished.  “Am I really that important?”
         “No,” she said.  She stifled a laugh, amused at the thought.  “Sorry, kid.  I shouldn’t laugh.  Rest assured they don’t go to such lengths for you alone.
         “But you are important,” she said, in a moment of seriousness.  She put a wing around her young friend.  “And…I don’t mean that in a ‘we’re all special’ sort of way, either.”  She laughed.  “Oh I hated it when someone would say that to me!  At the risk of inflating your ego, the fact is that you are very special indeed.  One day, I really beleive, you may be the one who leads your kind into a new and better future.  You may lead all of us, quite honestly.
         The Kyo glowed, like a warm and comforting oasis, upon the darkened plains.  Glowed like the stars.  Both places distant and unreachable for him.  As the conversation turned to the Teki, the young Sune found his imagination again trying to grasp what their cities must be like.
         “Those who make the big decisions,” she was saying, “they fear losing more and more of each generation to the Teki world.  There have always been those Sune drawn to their way of life, their society, and why not?  They live comfortable, and ambitious, lives.  As masters of their own domain, there is ample opportunity for a bright young person to make a name for himself.  It’s not the way of your kind—nor mine—to prevent those who wish to leave from doing so.  To do so would be very wrong.
         “But their society is growing so, so fast. While ours, by comparison anyway, appears headed nowhere.  Since the Teki learned about plascharge, they can build all these fantastic new machines.  In just the last hundred years¸ they’ve gone from living in those cute little villages and farming towns to these Kyo, these places of tall towers and noise and ideas.  Their new creations—and most of them are very clever—make their way into our lives.  Books that help us teach our children, medicines and healing arts that the jungle doesn’t provide, even those gorgeous air-ships they fly around in.  Those in our world, especially those coming of age like yourself…smart, ambitious, with their futures wide open yet, they see these things and wonder if they could make a place for themselves in the Teki Kyo.
         “No, the Teki would never harm us, or try to destroy our way of life.  But we might do it to ourselves.”
         He sat beside his friend in silence, for some time, thinking about this.  He knew that some of the older Sune left, but he always imagined that most of the came back after fulfilling their curiosities.
         “I wouldn’t want to live in a city forever,” he finally said.  “I do want to learn about machines, and plascharge.  I might even be a famous inventor myself, someday.  The things I’d invent, though…I would want to bring them back home.  It wouldn’t make sense to go away, learn all that stuff, only to help people I don’t know.”
         “That, my dear boy, is why I believe in you.  So much so, that I badgered many of the elders mercilessly until they agreed to give you the scholarship.”
         “Scholarship?”  He pulled away from his friend’s feathery embrace, looked up into her eyes.  “Scholarship…like to a—“
         “You’ll go to a university,” Haestus affirmed.  She could not contain her delighted smile, and so she did not try.  “And learn from some of the finest Teki scholars, all about the mysteries of their mechana.  That is, if you want to, hey?”  She nudged him playfully.
         “Do I want to?”  the young Sune hopped from foot to foot like a nervous rabbit, so uncontainable was his excitement.  “You bet I do!  When do I go!”
         She laughed quietly.  “Oh, not quite yet.  We figured on giving you another year, here with your family and your kind.  No reason to be sad, though, this year is to be given to you for your study.  This may be the last time we come up here to collect resin, as a matter of fact, because you will now have much more important pursuits.
         “I would miss this, though,” she said.  “If you like, we can still come up here together, just the two of us.”
         “Yeah,” he smiled.  “I’d like that too.”
         After a time, it occurred to him to ask what was nagging at his mind.  “I’m very grateful, Haestus, but…why choose me?  I mean, there are other Sune that are just as fascinated by mechana as I am.  Older ones, too, who know more than I do.  So why am I different?”
         She nodded.  “I won’t lie to you—if it was just about sending the smartest and most skilled, this chance would go to someone older.
         “Scholarships are very expensive.  Even many Teki families cannot afford to send their sons and daughters to these universities.  And it’s not our way to accumulate wealth.  We sell the fruits of Seiyu to our cousins only for what little money we may occasionally need for trade.  To put together the money for a scholarship, requires contribution from many villages.  Sune, Famira, Haechee, they all make an investment.
         “So you see…what does it gain us, to educate one of our children in their university, only to lose him to their world?”
         “You trust me to come back,” he realized.  “Come back, and bring what I learned over there.”
         “Just that much, would be reason enough,” she said.  “For most concerned.  But, oh…you could do so much more than that.”
         Perplexed, he waited for her to continue.
         “I think that you’ll see it on your own, very soon.  I’m not sure that my explaining would be nearly so meaningful as the realization that settles in one’s own heart.  I can only say this much.  Surely you must begin to see…one lone individual can bring to his home the knowledge of another land, even teach his village how to recreate the great things he has seen.  But if he can’t teach them to build on this knowledge for themselves, then there has been no progress.”
         His large green eyes just stared.  Finally she laughed to herself, shook her head and said, “No worry.  Your heart is here, in your home, and like a great fish who’s overgrown his pond, you will one day make tremendous waves.”
         They remained together under the stars for a long while, he asking many questions about what life would be like in the Kyo, she trying to answer as best she could.  The night sky was full of activity, as in every direction airships traveled high above the world.
         So often, as he would watch the wide airships float overhead on their way in or out of the jungle, he had tried to imagine what it would be like to ride in one.  Always the fantasies had been wildly imaginative and indulgent, since he knew he’d never be on one anyhow so why not?
         But now!  He looked towards the north, where a pair of distant ships drifted serenely over the edge of the jungle.  To be on one of those fabulous flying machines!  He did not have to envision himself living another life.  This day, this life he was living, would need no whimsical turns of forture or lucky breaks to set him on course for such a grand future. He would ride an airship. He would go to Kyo.  He would live in the marvelous world of the Teki!
         It was as he dreamily watched the faraway airships, that he noticed the first odd flicker in the sky.  It appeared in the distance over the curve of the nearest ship, a brief flash of multicolored light.  He kept his eyes on it, thinking that perhaps this was an effect of some new airship technology.  Then it happened again, closer, stronger, and now Haestus noticed too.
         “Whoaa… what was that?´ she said, looking up.  She hadn’t been looking directly when it happened, and so she said, “Lightning?  There’s no clouds…”
         “That…ain’t lightning.”  He backpedaled nervously, bumping into Haestus.
         At that point, the phenomenon began to flicker all across the sky.  It was a hazy, shimmering light, but flush with a color that was almost sickly.  The pale greens, purples, and reds were astonishingly rich.  It might have been beautiful, except that the spectacle flickered like lightning bursts, triggering in them both an instinctive fear.
         “Give me your paws,” Haestus said quickly, taking to the air above him.  “I think we should get down from here immediately.”
         He was slow to do so, and because of this he was still watching when the first airship began to glow.  At least thirty miles away to the north, still hovering at the fringe of the jungle, he could see the oblong shape grow strangely bright.  It wasn’t on fire, and the glow surrounded the barrel shape, quickly building in intensity all the way around.
         “Haestus look!”  The ship began to pitch nose-first towards the treeline once that glow ramped up.  Terrified, he could not move or gather the good sense to find cover, but only watched, wide-eyed, as the mighty airship came down.  Its running lights blinked once, twice, strangely serene in the instant before it plowed into the treetops.
         For a moment the nose, then the entire front half, simply disappeared into the trees, before the resulting explosion ripped free, spreading from the front all the way back.  As the ship was beginning to blow apart, several pieces shot away from the body on their own.  They were far too coordinated, as with Teki fireworks, to be a part of the destruction.  Then, these cast-offs accelerated, flying in different directions, and rising into the sky.
         They all made it to the same height before that same ghostly glow appeared around each of them.  He watched the nearest pod slow, wobble on the air…and then tumble from the sky like a wounded bird.
         Haestus looked anxiously at the sky, and quickly came to a decision “Grab hold!” he said.  The Sune clung to his talons and Haestus took to the air with a great flapping.
         “We’re going to fly in this?”  the Sune said.
         “We’ve got to help them!”
         Hanging from her talons, flying through the suddenly malicious sky, he found himself scrutinizing his dangling feet for any sign of that ghostly glow.
         They made for the fallen airship.  He looked hard for the spot the pod had crashed into the jungle, somewhere off to the east and deeper into the wood.  There had been no explosion, and the forgiving denseness of the jungle may have caught the pod before it could slam into the ground.
         But it had been many miles away at the time, and he could not spot the place where it had gone down.  “Can you see anything?”  he yelled up to Haestus.  She couldn’t either, and they flew on towards the still distant fiery glow of the main crash site.  What happened next, would change this Sune’s life forever.
         A pain like stabbing knives exploded in his paws.  He screamed so hard and so loud, taken by this sudden agony, that for a second he was unaware that he had let go of Haestus’ talons.  He felt the rush in the pit of his stomach then as he fell.  All the way down, his tortured feet engaged every bit of his mind and senses, as if it were the only thing that was real.
         He plummeted forty feet to the treetops.  Haestus flipped herself around and went straight into a nose-dive, but the fall was too short and there was not enough time.  The Sune crashed through the top of the canopy, and disappeared into blackness.
         Haestus gave a wordless cry of despair, even as she dove full speed after him.  The thick beams of the branches should have broken her wings, but she plowed through them without a care.  Faster and faster, she pushed herself.
         In the darkness of the upper jungle, her sharp eyes picked out his small form, tumbling helplessly.  If breaking through the canopy hadn’t killed him, hitting the dense midlevel trees certainly would.  She gave everything she had.  She came close enough to grab at him, but her talons weren’t long enough, and in another second—
         She caught something, not even knowing at first what it was, and she grabbed at it, so tightly that her claws dug into his skin.  She banked, so hard as to almost cause herself to black out, and the dangling Sune missed hitting the tangle of thick branches by mere feet.  He was hanging head first; she had a death-grip on his tail.
         She cried out his name, but he didn’t respond.  She looked up, despairing, knowing her strength was too far gone to make it back up to the canopy.  Her friend, unconscious or worse, could not hold onto a branch and the trees here would not support him.  And so she went down, down, into the murky depths.
         It was another couple of hundred feet to the ground.  Here, in the almost nonexistent light, things moved on all sides of her.  She was almost never this deep in the jungle at night, when even her powerful eyes could do little with the solid darkness.  She was at the ground almost before she realized it, and the Sune, beneath her, struck down more roughly than she’d intended.
         The bottom level was, ironically, the least dense part of the jungle.  The trees all had to be so tall, even the midlevel flora, that down here was a sparse forest of impossibly spindly trunks.  Few branches, no leaves. The impossibility of their being any wind down here, gave the place a deathly feeling.  The ground was cold as she lay him out, letting go of his poor tail.  His chest lay still. Haestus, at a loss for what to do, tried in vain to rouse him, nuzzled at his still face with her beak, and then cried.
         For a long time, nothing happened.  Time, here at the bottom of the world, seemed to stop.  It was eerily quiet, save for weird, almost inaudible noises, ghostly moans and high-pitched screeches from this place’s other-worldly creatures.  They mocked her—mocked her pain, the broken body that she sobbed over, while offering them no help.
         Gradually she became aware of a new light.  Nothing like the light of the sun, or even the moon, this began as an icy blue glow.  She looked up from where she’d buried her face against the Sune’s unmoving chest, to see an unforgettable sight.
         All around her, tiny points of light floated silently.  Floated towards them.  They came closer and she saw that the lights were tiny figures.  There was nothing familiar or even comforting in their shape, which was simply alien.  They had elongated bodies, like little silkworms, and at the end was a bulbous—head, she supposed—with no eyes, a tiny slit of a mouth.  In all her time, admittedly little of which had been spent down here, and even less during the night—she had never seen a creature like this.
         These creatures, perhaps a couple hundred of them, bobbed silently towards them.  Should she be afraid, or leave them be?  They began to cluster around the Sune’s body.  Frightened, she couldn’t make out at first what they were doing, and debated shooing them off versus how they might respond.  But the choice for her came quickly and decisively, when she discovered that the swarm was slowly pushing its way into her friend’s ears, his nose, his slightly open mouth.  She…flipped…out.
         Her hammering wings beat at the creatures from every direction, and it was like she was flying through a cloud of pebbles.  She knocked them away, felt them fall under her mighty wingbeats, but they surrounded her, and kept coming.  The sounds, the words, that came from her mouth, were acid but ultimately useless as she was helpless to watch them desecrate the body of her beloved friend.
         Amidst the swarming cloud, his body was pushed, rolled over, a ghastly reanimation by these horrible creatures.  Unable to break through the swarm that held her back, Haestus wanted to claw her own eyes out in despair.  “Leave him be!”  she screamed.  To her pain, they paid no care.
         At one point, she saw his head jerk violently, moved no doubt by the tiny monsters teeming within him.  When his back suddenly bent, making his legs twitch and flop like a puppet, it was all she could take and a morose blackness swam over her.  The ground came up to meet her head, and consciousness slipped away.
         When she came around, her first thought was of those loathsome creatures, and she panicked, fluttering her wings, thinking she could feel them in her throat, worming around in her stomach.  They were not, and after a moment she realized they had not touched her.  She started to pick herself off the ground, terribly dizzy, then:
         She heard a cough.
         She was up in an instant.  The little blue demons were still bobbing all around, but this time they didn’t move to block her from her friend.  She rushed to his side, where most of the creatures had already left, in time to see a couple fluttering out through his nose and his ears.
         Please don’t let me be hearing things, she begged.
         Another cough.  This time his muzzle twitched slightly.  She was so overjoyed that she might have beat him to death with her wings in her excitement.  She rubbed her head against his cheek, felt him stir.  Crying, she was preening at his fur with her beak before she realized it.  He turned his head, weakly, and opened green eyes that she had never thought she’d see look at her again.  They were hazy, sleepy, but they were his, it was him, and she accepted that this was not a dream.  He was alive again.
         He smiled a little, and what a beautiful sight that was for her. 
         “I…” he coughed again.  One last blue-bobber came hurtling out of his mouth.  “I don’t bounce.”

>>4

         He wouldn’t sit still long enough for her to look him over.
         But then, what would she look over?  He’d just been brought back to life, his pulverized bones rebuilt and his heart restarted, by a bunch of flying worms…
         Still, she fussed and berated him, to no avail.  Since waking up, his mind was on another planet.  He charged about, running from one direction to the other.  Sniffing at the air, yipping at himself, and refusing to answer her questions with more than a word or two.
         “Would you just tell me what the hell is going on!” she yelled.
         In the watery glow of the still-hovering bobbers, she saw him race into the darkness beyond their glow, then return moments later and run in the opposite direction.  “Very close!” he said, unhelpfully.  He stopped again in the middle of the pool of light, looked all about, whined.
         “You’re acting like a wild animal,” she scolded.  Beneath her disapproving tone, she was really very scared.  Has he lost his mind? she wondered silently.  Then, far worse, Is this maybe all those creatures brought back? Some damaged shell of him?  She banished the thought, would not let it surface again.
         “Haestus… I can see them!  Whoever’s in that crashed pod.”
         “See them?”  she frowned.  “What do you mean?”
         “And I can feel, I can…smell...”  He sniffed again, at a phantom scent.  “Smoke!”
         With that, he took off like a shot into the darkness.
         She barely kept up with him.  Dodging between the wiry trees, where he could run freely, she followed his murky shape for several long moments.  When he stopped, she almost bowled him over.
         The downed pod was as dark as everything else in this place.  Darker, infact, because it was belching smoke.  One whole side of the pod, she saw, was a crumpled ruin.  The opposite half was buried in a mound of earth thrust up in its skidding stop.  The Sune tried to climb from this up to the top of the pod, but when his paws touched the metal, he draw back with a pained hiss.
         “It’s burning hot,” he said.  “I can’t touch it to open the door!”
         She flew up and above it.  The ‘door’ was a typical escape hatch.  One of four on each side of the emergency pod, but the only one not currently buried or melted.  She hovered close, inspected it.  “I can’t grab that with my talons,” she said.  “Here, take hold.”
         He held on with his forepaws and she lifted him to the top.  Holding him only perhaps eight feet above the ground, already she felt panicky, and it occurred to her then that she may never again be able to bring herself to carry him high into the air.  Or likely anyone.
         With his toes, every bit as nimble as his fingers, he gripped the metal wheel and turned.  Haestus flew in the same direction, together allowing them to wrench the damaged seal open.  For someone trapped inside, choked by smoke and presumably injured, the jammed wheel must have been unmovable.
         The hatch came up.  A cloud of smoke boiled out, enough to make them both cough and gasp.  Inside the pod, there were fitful flashes, like lightning.  Haestus, having already lost him once more than her heart could ever bear, almost refused when he asked to be lowered down in there.  But he would go in, with or without her, and so she relented, slowly easing him into the open hatch.
         With the frequent flickers of sparking plascharge, it was easier to see in here than outside.  She lowered him until her great wings kept her from going further.  “That’s it,” she announced.  “Can you see anyone?”
         “Right below me,” he called.  “I can’t grab them.”  His green eyes looked up at her.  “Pull me back out, and hold the end of my tail,” he said.
         They tried again, he hanging from his tail as she clutched it tightly in her talons.  This time, he grabbed at the lumpy form with his free hands.  It was almost impossible for her to see, past her own body and his, but she could tell the shape was smaller than a Teki, and something of an auburn color.
         He got hold of its feet, nodded up at her, and she set to work pulling them both out.  With the still-billowing smoke, and the added weight, she struggled mightily before getting them both clear of the pod.  Not sparing the energy to look yet at what they’d rescued, she flew them both from the crash site, out of the smoke, before setting them down.
         It was another Sune.
         “Is…” The markings, of a darker shade that her friend’s fur, made for a safe assumption.  “Is she alive?”
         He rolled her over onto her back.  Her eyes were closed.  She was not breathing.  She must have been in that smoke for…for half an hour, Haestus realized.
         He pressed his mouth to hers, trying to breathe the life back into her.  For several long minutes, he tried valiantly.  He remembered his training admirably, did everything right, but she did not respond to it.  After an eternity, Haestus reached out to him, touched his back.
         “She’s gone.”
         He whirled.  “No.  No, she’s not!” he hissed.  His ears were flat back, and his eyes fierce.  After a moment, he calmed.  He looked back at the lifeless Sune.  “I can…still feel…”
         He closed his eyes.  Squeezed them tight.  “I saw them before, when they came.  But not through my eyes.
         “Through hers,” he breathed.
         And then Haestus saw something, herself, and it was astonishing…
         As before, the lightless world around them began to light up.  Like an underwater world, everything became tinged with blue.  They appeared, from the depths of the darkness, these tiny sightless creatures.  Converging on them, on her.  Not terrifying anymore, now that Haestus had seen the wonderful miracle of her dear friend being restored to life.
         It was the same with the girl Sune.  They enveloped her, ignoring everything else, the two of them, as they did not interfere.  Into her mouth, her nose, and her ears they poured.  There was no ghastly jerking of body and limbs, this time, for her body was not shattered and broken the way his had been.  Out of her mouth, through the glowing blue cloud, an unmistakable puff of black smoke rose from between her lips.  It seemed to go on forever, spewing out of her deep lungs.  That which had killed her, now floated harmlessly away.
         Clean, cool air rushed back into her body, and they could see her chest rise with the first new breath.  It took time, while they both sat and watched in reverence, as the creatures did their magic inside her body.  After what seemed like forever, they emerged from her, in a long, slow stream that was as gentle as it had first seemed invasive.
         Some unknown time later, the girl’s eyes peeked open.  Green, like his…and like his, confused and unseeing at first.  It was at that moment, Haestus noticed something. It stuck in her mind, screaming of significance.  It might have been coincidence; it might not.  Most of her fur, through some luck, didn’t seem greatly burned.  Perhaps the floor of the pod had been padded, insulating it from some of the scorched heat of the hull.  Her paws, however—specifically, her forepaws—were badly burned.
         Her eyes focused on them, on Haestus at first, and then on the other Sune.  At him she smiled, almost profound sort of smile.  “I’ve seen you…haven’t I?” said.
         “What’s your name?” he asked her.
         “I’m Snow,” was her reply.
         “I’m Ennio,” was his.