V
On the highest island floating above the skies of Aqnep, the cathedral is asleep. Deep in its poorer-kept residential chambers, a Pigeon and a Starling are tangled in a nest, fast asleep and sapped of energy. Until a spare thought rains from space like a neutrino and phases through everything it needs to strike my pigeon host directly where needed to jolt them to consciousness.
Vasan tapped me awake and rolled out of their nest to re-situate their rags that were dropped next to them. Our senses tell us it's the middle of the night. We push through the loosening vines in the door. A few of my beetles are dotted along the walls, providing a dim glow that the sleeping glowblooms are too tired to.
The lower halls and tunnels of this cathedral are a labyrinthine mess in and of themselves. Steam pours out of a weave of vines that indicate showers. Various other vine doors, tightened or loosened, grid the walls.
An echo trails down the halls. It's steady, flowing. It's a droning reverberation. As Vasan wanders through, it seems directionless, but nearing it fills the space of the hall even more. I know where it comes from. My swarm. But experiencing the approach, the all-encompassing spacial buzz and how it radiates through the otherwise cold and skittering halls. I understand the draw the Drek have to these displays
Vasan finds a lower chamber where I have a large multi-ringed communication configuration droning to a steady 360Hz, switching to a steady 540hz. Pumping. A steady cycle that can be filled with further harmonic information.
This is one way I effectively communicate and update my probes. It occurs to me how much these birds have been helping my code do it's work. Vasan sees something magnificent about it. Their wide-eyed will walking them unwaveringly toward the whirlwind of whizzing beetles. Hypnotic to both of us. I realize we are approaching the same experience from separate angles. But, like with the brain truffles, receiving a different experience.
I understand the significance and I'm reacting to it. Vasan does not understand the significance. But has their own reason to react to it.
We stand, stare, absorb, with Vasan's beak agape. My probe buzzes in tandem, and stays perched with my host. A voice adding to the drone adds a tone, around 504hz, to the first root, adding new shapes to the flowing swarm.
We watch the wheels within the wheels, and the constant consonance of intricately chosen intervals, the pump of the activity with each chord switch. The shapes within the recursive ribbons twist like braids. The drones flow at once like a fluid, but stiffen themselves into edges and surfaces when they find a harmonic peak. We see shapes in the light and shadow, in the glints and colors that the bugs spin. We see serpents coiling. We see birds, primitive ones and then a drek like us, we see beasts, we see wingless drek forms, we see the shadows of the cages gods are kept in. We hear their intense buzzing, screeching, droning. Vasan can't help but attempt to join in, catching someone's attention.
Jaquel turns, breaking their contribution to the drone and letting the bugs go back to their own cycles.
a ! pizn ! Jaquel shouts, iugidafUkadahiih!
"I'm sorry." Vasan sings to the tune of incredulous.
I turn some swarms behind Vasan to back them up, literally. Providing a few orbiting rings, and some floating extra wing extensions.
"Oh." Jaquel nods, brows raising. "Are you a member of the church?"
Vasan flits their gaze to the various hovering ornaments I've arranged myself into. "No?"
"How do you have this much experience with the beetles?"
"I'm pretty new to this." I twist a dust pile up beneath Vasan's feet, droning in a steady tone as I situate them in a nest of wind and bugs. "They're just friendly, you know?"
"Pigeon, come down."
I keep them up. Vasan tries to bounce down from my hover-winds. I scatter my swarm's attempt and cloud behind my host, one keeping affixed to their brow as always.
The robed bird steps up to face Vasan and makes little effort to compensate their volume in the closed distance.
"Pigeon, you are a complete stranger to me." They tilt their head, "I have been in or around these beetle temples for the better half of my life, and through all of that time, I have seen some shit." They gesture to the beetle, "I have never seen anything like that in my life." They pause, a crack in their voice showing their desperate curiosity beneath their attempted mask of authority. "How are you doing that with the holy scarabs?"
Vasan is equally as perplexed. "I've never seen anyone do what you were doing with those bugs before by themself." They sputter, "I don't know — I don't. I can't explain this." They gesture to Jaquel's beetle, "You clearly have something going here, too."
Jaquel sits silent. In a burst of awareness, I pull my probe off of Jaquel's brow and have it land on Vasan's shoulder. I swap Vasan's probe with Jaquel's and reconfigure. Jacquel taps at the beetle on their head. Still as strong as ever.
"You are a fucking thing of wonder, Pigeon." Jacquel blankly bounces as they conclude, "There are…" Their eyes dart around to the swarms surrounding the two of them. "so many things I need to talk to you about, but not tonight." They shiver and double back to the altar for a second, frustrated and conflicted. They dart to the side of the room to pick up a pile of ceremonial looking cloth and wrap it around their arm, and then turn back again to begin shooing the Pigeon back to the halls. "The higher clergy would NOT be happy to see a scarab wielder as blessed as you wandering the lower cathedral halls, at midnight, without a proper introduction."
"Why not?" Vasan turns and follows the gusts of their shooing, with a stuttering reluctance in their steps.
"You are uninitiated. The clergy has not seen you, and does not know you." Jaquel follows out into the hallway, trailed by scarabs. "These chambers are for members of the church."
"Can you initiate people then?" Vasan feels their pace rushed by the pushier Jaquel.
"When it's appropriate, and when I'm not risking my feathers and cloak to do so."
I adhere a trail of beetles to the walls as they push Vasan down the hall, in whispers barely echoing, covered by the buzz of the probes.
"What does any of that have to do with the bugs, I just want to know about the bugs."
The bird places itself between us and the door they were about to push us through.
"Mysteries, Pigeon," They wisp, "Between us and the bugs is the church."
"And we're in the church."
"And between the church and the bugs, there's mysteries." Jaquel twitches, "Not just any Drek can be trusted with these mysteries, so we're careful."
Vasan nods, but turns back, "What mysteries though? There was nothing between me and the bugs."
"You know the Astrocartographer, so you apparently know enough," Jaquel continues, "But we must be sure to not break protocol in echelons this high."
Vasan accepts this, just as the grackle swings around again to shove them through the loosening vines.
