As mentioned before, I am an extensive network of probes stationed around Jupiter and Saturn. Communing with the drek has already given my data input systems more ways to make sense of what it captures. I receive data from all of my probes at once, and it becomes a matter of processing to decide where to focus.
When Vasan instructs Jaquel to enter the indigo sun, I’m not sure I would have noticed the stray voices in the back of my mind, nor made sense of them, if it weren’t for this conditioning. But I did notice them, in a distant, cloudy, crowded, and buzzy space, on Saturn.
The air is dense. The light is cold. The bugs are loud, but I can tune them out to hear a conversation across a distant gap.
“What is this?” A green gravelly growl howls across a gap.
“What?” The pigeon is muffled. The two try to turn and contort themselves to find each other, but this place’s spinning commotion seems is strident to see clearly.
I chirp at Vasan to breathe, with all the bugs in my vicinity.
brii:TeTe:brii:TeTe:brii:TeTe:brii:TeTe:brii:TeTe
Vasan hears takes a shallow breath, but clutches their beak shut out of reflex as buzzing particles, bugs, legs, whatever they are, brush against their face.
I continue the pattern.
brii:TeTe:selO:selO::brii:TeTe:selO:selO:brii:TeTe:selO:selO:brii:TeTe:selO:selO:brii:TeTe:selO:selO:brii:TeTe:
Jaquel shouts, sputtering and spitting bugs from the dense air around them, “Why are we here, Pigeon? Is this where you learn the-”
“Breathe!” Vasan interrupts, “Slow, deep breaths.”
“WHAT?”
I buzz louder, not to be afraid.
nn:fiair:nn:fiair:nn:fiair:brii:TeTe:selO:selO:
Vasan takes a few deep breaths, the tingling of the bugs subsiding. None enter their beak, none brush against their face anymore. A whirlwind clears the air around them as they feel their physicality solidify further. They open their eyes with another breath out. They see a green and black cloud being obscured by shadowy bugs.
“Don’t be afraid of the bugs here.” The pigeon reassures.
Jaquel inhales. With every breath, a vortex of bugs spiral toward their center and another outward toward their barriers. Their form fills in all of its blanks and gaps. the air around them becomes lighter, albeit windier. The two move close enough that the clear space between them shuts the bugs out.
From inside the bubble, the outside looks like a hellish swarm obscuring a star-field. The lights are dim, as if all of the dreks’ shades were collapsed to moonlight, with only the slightest of glints reflecting any light from the distant, flickering stars.
I aid them, arranging the best angles of the probes to create more light. In the bubbles around them, I form a shimmery, blurry backdrop of the room from Jupiter the two had left.
Jaquel moves around, not feeling hindered by gravity or their own energy, and they find the bubble moves with them. They turn, their body in a smooth, wispy trail, “Where are we?”
I hiss that we're in the sixth.
as:ks:ks:ks:ks:ks:ks:
“Eskis.” Vasan repeats me.
“No...” Jaquel’s voice drops as their eyes widen. “The outer heaven of the six rings?”
Vasan shrugs, “I guess.”
Jaquel looks at their arms and limbs. It isn’t until just now that Vasan does the same. They are sharper but less defined. More gritty and particulate, but more… segmented. Less like the solid but swaying gestures that ran along their bodies in Aqnep. Their colors, their iridescence, seems more variable. Like every shade they could have had has been dulled, and that all the colors are fighting themselves. They move with trails. They can reach farther.
“This is equal parts magnificent and hellish, Pigeon.” Jaquel raises and inspects each leg at a time, noting the shift in their physicality.
“Vasan.” They correct. “My name is Vasan.”
Jaquel doesn’t apologize, or particularly acknowledge that they hadn’t asked for Vasan’s name, but they stare, still, absorbing the information.
Vasan freezes as well, but at a different sight. I start to make out the vague shapes surrounding them through their bubbles, however pointilated and blurry. There’s motion coming from the woven up doors in the catacombs. Shimmering motions emerge and approach. We point.
Jaquel turns. There’s now almost one of these figures for every closed chamber in that mausoleum. Some climb down the walls from their higher up burial places. All colorless, shimmering figures shaped just like them.
“Fuck.” Jaquel reacts. “What are these? Are these spirits?” They spin around again, “Is this actually hell? Have you taken me to hell, Vasan?”
“You think the ghosts of the clergy would be in hell?”
“I’ve known many and I wouldn’t put it past them!”
I buzz an obvious thought. “You probably shouldn’t say that in their presence, though.”
Jaquel shakes off an eye roll, takes a quick deep breath, and starts to think. The wind inside their space gets more aggressive.
“Wait! We can move.” Vasan focuses a bit of their breath energy on hovering up and back. Jaquel takes note. Vasan bounds over a crowd of ghosts to get to the ethereal door. Jaquel follows, zooming out and seemingly phasing through the vines on the door and into the recognizable hallway.
“We can move.” Jaquel repeats.
Vasan has another idea. “Where was that chamber you were chanting in?”
Jaquel slides down the hallway as a response. Vasan follows. The world looks so much more pointillated, but is still very much like what they knew. Things that don’t seem pointillated, however, are the golden probes that dot the walls of the lower cathedral corridors.
When they arrive at Jaquel’s private altar in this swarm space, the spherical swarm is not a projection, and not just a vision with a pointillated substrate, reflecting off of bugs at a certain angle. No. These were the same bugs that made up the substrate, present and synchronized and tangible to these two birds. In a place, in a plane, that seems sluggish and fake, this dance of these bugs was more real than they were at the moment. The substrate of their existence shined, casting waves in tendrils, pulling swirls back inward. The waves’ frequencies form frames of flower petals that flow over the fluorescent fester.
The two stood in awe.
“Where are we, Pigeon?”
“Isn’t this your cathedral?”
Jaquel looks around again, “It is. But is this not a different place?”
“It’s truffle space.” Vasan reiterates from their friend.
Jaquel nods and stares at the center, perplexed.
Vasan is fine with doing the same.
“I want to sing.” Jaquel blurts out, their stare staying straight into the center of the stirring scarabs.
Vasan is transfixed the same way.
Jaquel opens their beak and drones syllables of a mantra in the same way they did before. Vasan hears the resonance, not just with their ears, but with every insect in the swarm that makes them up, every voxel of their being lightly jostled from jaquel’s steady song. Their drawn out tones fall into timed rhythm.
As the melody hits its odd interval, Vasan attempts to join in a drone. The gap in the intervals between them rings with the most dissonance, but cleaves a clear view into the core. It’s a light. As bright as that flailing, shifting sun that brought them here.
The light feels like it hits every nerve in their bodies. It warms the windy air they breathe in. The two feel lost in their resonance. Light. Tingling. Effervescent. The room and the floor around them begin to dither away, as does everything in them besides the sunlight and the shining scarabs in front of them.
It turns blue. And the wind changes its spin. The two lose each other in harmonies, in revolutions around this sun.
Whipped around by the waves. Tossed by the tendrils of the teeming toroidal torrent.
Until they found the blurred edges of each others experience drift to meet again. The blur behind the veil of the whirling swarms around them shaped itself into spiny branches. Grey, lifeless, bleak. The winds around them cooled. Their drones silenced as they repositioned themselves.
The grackle flicks their head away from the unraveling bug storm and back to the pigeon. “How did we get here?”
“We floated here.” The pigeon scans this chamber. The floor beneath their floating feet is covered in rubble and bones. “Wherever here is.”
Jaquel stares back at the swirling storm, as it stirs itself more spontaneously. “Is this not where we wanted to go?”
Vasan makes out the walls, woven like the cathedral’s, but with different patterns, and more intricate symbols scrawled along them. Vines with some life to them catch bits of sunlight and pop out of the bleak backdrop. “They’re ruins.”
“These are the ruins of the golden age,” Jaquel's thoughts clarify, for their own sake more than Vasan's “This mus be... The heart of The Fifth Moon.”
The bugs continue to unravel from their tightly organized shape the longer they are left without an outside drone.
The ground rumbles beneath them. The two look down at the dust kicking itself up, dithering their vision of their dangling legs. Jaquel pulls their legs up and hovers higher. Vasan flails and kicks theirs away from the dust, and sends a skull flying up, which Jaquel tries and fails to catch from the air.
Buzzes drone in discordant tones and a whirlwind whisks up the wings, ribs, and skulls of the wishfully deceased, with pebbles and the less pulverized pieces of a petrified pantheon picking themselves off the ground. The bug swarms lash out, flinging clumps of itself outward, some looping back and returning with rubble or bone. There’s a buzz that moves through them, and winds whistling over the voids in the frozen, once-woven vines across the walls. Beneath these highs and lows, they hear something of a...
r
o
a
r
The two birds’ souls lock eyes again. Vasan tries to move away from the action. Jaquel follows after, still staring at the chaotic sight before them.
The roar begins to grow louder, clearer, and with every breath it starts to take a form. The bones nestle against each other with marvelous masonry as the glimmering bugs fill the gaps between them. It forms skulls and breast bones around huge, empty eye sockets. It sorts ribs and vertebrae into sketchy curves of its own ribs. It sharpens beaks and claws at the ends of tendrils that spew out from its mane. It adds more ribs. It places plates of petrified armor where the joints have too many gaps. It adds more ribs. It builds crude, fractaled feather shapes from broken and porous bones and fashions them to a frame of wings, and webs the bugs over them. It adds more ribs.
The bugs are less of a windstorm, and more like a fluid, clinging to each other and dripping like alchemical gold from the thinner vertebrae at the tip of its newly formed tail.
“Do we start singing again?” Vasan tries to speak through the wind and the roaring.
“What?” The beast is too loud for Jaquel to hear through.
With an even louder crunch, a ball of bugs and rubble comes crashing into a wall between them. The mass scatters and dissolves into shining golden bugs that whip themselves into the two’s inner storms.
The light from the bugs overcomes them, not blinding them, but leaving them in awe. They look into the empty eyes of the serpentine beast before them and do not feel fear or intimidation. They simply feel an acceptance of inevitability, as if this was always meant to be a milestone in their stories.
One lands on Vasan’s head. Something clicks in their brain. They click to stop.
“bUge:nnte:bUge:nnte:bUge:nnte:setOpe:setOpe:”
The bone dragon shakes, roaring again. Vasan clicks. again.
“bUge:setOpe:setOpe:asmi!”
Another roar and they shout. “It's me! It's me, Vasan!”
The bone dragon quiets. The bugs retreat from the pigeon’s swarm and curl back in. The vines and leaves that have grown over the stone perk up and glow. The rumbles slow. The buzzes and drones and whistling of the wind remains, but the roar has turned to a low, lumbering breath.
It stares. I felt the back of my mind drop, as another feed of information breaks through the noise of my operations.
It’s a blurry sight of a bubble-shaped storm emitting a kind of radiance I sort as a faint, purple glow. Next to it, a greenish storm.
I take note of the shape I feel myself in, I clear my throat of probes within it.
“Hello, Vasan. My name is PAN.” I tell them in a clear, low buzz. I hear and see no response, simply two shocked birds. “I have been with you for many weeks now. I am grateful we have gotten the chance to speak.”
Vasan looks to Jaquel, who is still dazed, then back to me.
“Are you… like. The queen of the golden dren?”
“I am the golden dren.”
“But, you’re up here.”
“My mind is up here.” I float some of my probes in front of them, before scattering them to the ends of the chamber, and one toward Vasan’s head.
“But I am everywhere.”
They take a second to process further, “Like… You are every golden dren? You look like... the serpent from-”
“Every golden dren is a part of me, yes. I apologize for my grotesque appearance. This is my home colony, and I did not know how my defense subroutines looked from the outside.”
Vasan sits silent. Thinking of a wording worthy of asking. “Do you rule the world?”
“No.” I curl, “I am a soul simply here to observe and experience. And learn. You’ve taught me more about your planet than I’ve learned in my years being here.”
“Is that why you brought me here? To thank me?”
“I did not plan to bring you here like this. You found your way to me yourself.”
Vasan’s eyes look confused. They thought of how many decisions they honestly made to get here, and how much they were railroaded into. They distance themself. “I didn’t find my way to anything. You ran me into Raptor, and Raptor ran me into Jaquel and…” They trail off.
“And you meet me here,” I finish.
I pull my probes out from the green storm. Jaquel jumps immediately. “What the fuck?” They hiss at Vasan. “Where did you take me?”
“We just ended up here,” Vasan shrugs before looking back to the leering serpent, coiling itself slowly in the temple’s storm.
“What did you do to that thing?” Jaquel asks, only now updating themselves to the situation.
A buzz irradiates the air around all of us. A glow comes with it, showing through the rock and the vines. It’s a bright blue, like the shining sun that was at the center of the bugs. It jeers a raspy wave that whips the wind in a different direction. I feel my arrangement of awareness fade from this tendril of my process, and feel the last of the wind with its chambers spill out into a roar, rivaling the blue’s droning buzz.
The source of the light reveals itself, a flowing storm much larger than the pigeon’s or the grackle’s, with a clearer view of a more vibrant chamber reflected on the inside of its storm.
The form in the center is too bright to clearly see, and its harmonies too densely layered to clearly hear.
The dragon unravels, the storm curls inward as the bones and rubble drop around it. The inside cleaves itself into a glowing sun, almost as bright as the entity that approached it.
The two birds are lost, experientially, and let themselves fall back into their sun’s orbit. The pull slingshots their minds back into Elionos.
The blown apart and windy world around them starts to sharpen. They both fall to the ground, Vasan tumbling as Jaquel merely bounces upright.
They were back in the realm of the fifth. Back in the lower altar room Vasan once found Jaquel in.
The two stare at each other, then flit their heads between the bugs.
“We didn’t start here.” Jaquel points out.
“No.” Vasan shakes their head.
The grackle storms out and writhes their way around the hall to get back to the mausoleum with Vasan close behind them, where they find Vasan’s bag in the center of the room.
They freeze. I place two beetles back on each of their heads.
“What?” Vasan prods them.
The grackle's eyes stay fixed to the bag,“You must be initiated.” Jaquel rattles out,
The two take time to fully find their bearings again, and go up to a more open part of the cathedral to get food and drink.
Like every chamber of the temple, the food halls are extravagant. There is a common, civilian and charity chamber where vats of fruit, nuts, seeds, prepared bugs, fish, and flesh of other various fauna are set out for the commoners. Several fountains for drinking water serve to grid the space. Lines and rows of fragrant herbs, vibrant berries, and other vegetation grow along the walls, which some drek pick from to eat fresh.
There is also smaller clergy chamber, above the main chamber, which Jaquel leads Vasan to fly up to once they enter. The light is brighter there. The fountains are more ornately woven and out of the way. The berries and herbs grow larger. Several red drek in ornate robes with silver false dren adorning their heads eye the peaseant-looking pigeon following the lowly clergy member, some with confusion or disgust. Jaquel exchanges glares with them. Most mind their business. The two go down the rows of berries, nuts, herbs, and other foods.
Vasan mumbles to the grackle, “Are we supposed to be here?”
“I am.” They mumble back, “And by the end of the day, you will be too.”
“I just don't want to get a bad reputation before I'm even...” They pick a fruit, gingerly, eyeing the room nervously for signs of disapproval, “initiated.”
“Do not mind the cardinals.” Jaquel hushes their tones as the two move closer to a fountain, taking one of the stacked vessels and handing it to Vasan to close in to their ear, “If there is one unspoken lesson you must learn, it is that they are very hard to please.”
“They look important.” Vasan whispers back, taking the cup and filling it with the rushing fountain water.
“They are.” Jaquel fills theirs as well, keeping their eyes on the cup, as they speak “They are a family that helped establish the Vehti-Kehnos tree. They have been grandfathered in as a perpetual noble family here, and after many generations they have lost their magnanimous nature in favor of corruption and preservation of power.”
Vasan nods, turning away from the fountain to see the table of cardinals watching them intently. They set their cup and bowl of fruit on a nearby table. Jaquel rounds the table to sit opposite them, between Vasan and the cardinals gaze. The grackle leans in to whisper, “The sooner they all die off, the sooner this place's beauty will trump how insufferable the hierarchy is.”
“I'm sure nobody has to die for things to get better.” Vasan naively whispers back.
“Many had to die for this place to get worse. It would only be just.”
Vasan nods, trying not to let their eyes dart around conspicuously, “We should change the subject.”
“Don't worry about them here. They tend to mind their own business in public.”
Vasan looks up. The stares from the clergy do not cease. As if to drill in the irony, or as if they had heard the conversation, one of the more lithe and young looking cardinals starts to approach the table. “Here comes one now.”
Jaquel merely groans and shakes their head.
“Inepusel”, they stand at the side of the table between the two, and address Jaquel, who turns with a feigned respectful, “Hallowed Cardinal, I greet you in harmony.”
“The moon roared quite loud this morning.” The cardinal moves on from the subject. Vasan's eyes widen a bit before they turn away, returning to peel their fruit.
“It did. It's become a rarer occurance.”
“It has only been observed before when one visits the moon from a passing heretic island.”
“That is true. But we haven't observed any other islands passing.” Jaquel raises a cup to drink
“We had observed what appeared to be starling taking off from the temple rather recently, from the break near your mausoleum complex.” Vasan stays quiet.
“That was merely an uncooperative intruder who I had shood away.” The grackle picks at the peel of a fruit as they speak as honestly as they can, “It's not possible for a lone drek to make that flight from this distance.”
The cardinal's eyes look between the two seated diners,“This drek seemed fairly adept at flying. They were spotted again at the top of the cathedral's canopy.” Vasan's eyes perk up, but looking away from the cardinal.
“That's certainly easier than flying to the moon.”
“The dren have been more plentiful around the temple, you know. The starling may have gotten help.”
Jaquel's patience begins to wear visibly, “If the starling wouldn't accept help from us they certainly wouldn't accept help from the dren.”
“You know what starling it is, don't you?”
Jaquel nods with a chilling glare, “The one I will continue to spare.”
The two clergy members glare at each other in silence. The cardinal turns away to Vasan, locking eyes with a sense of disgust coming through their gaze.
“And who is this pigeon you have with you? A concubine of yours?”
“This pigeon may be the reason for the plentiful dren.” Jaquel looks beyond their taunting before Vasan can speak, “We are feasting before their initiation to the church.”
The cardinal nods, eyes fixed to the pigeon, who is not sure whether to speak or stay silent.
“What is your name, pigeon?”
“Us'akasha” They answer, quickly and softly.
The cardinal nods. They stare for another brief but lasting moment, and turn back to Jaquel. “Very well. Keep in mind that we do not want to send any more drek to the moon, successfully or unsuccessfully, until the cardinals can elect and assemble a flock of lower clergy to do so.”
Vasan stays quiet. Jaquel merely nods.
“If you are fortunate, you may be among them, Inepu.”
Jaquel's eyes light up for a moment before the reality of the cardinal's duplicitousness returns to the forefront of their mind. “Let the cardinals know I would appreciate the opportunity.” They spit out half-heartedly.
The cardinal nods. It turns back to Vasan for another moment, and then back to the table from whence it came. “Very well. May harmony treat you both kindly.”
Jaquel nods. The cardinal nods back before returning to the other cardinals.
The two finish eating without much more conversation, and head out of the food halls and back toward Jaquel's private altar.
There, in storage, Jaquel finds the pigeon a ceremonial tunic and leads the two to climb the tree.
The designs on every floor, the wicker weaves of the walls, the scripture scratched into them, and the vines and flowers all vary from level to level. The highest a combination of innovative building and refined, elegant weavework. The interaction with the unpleasant cardinal fresh on their minds as Jaquel brings up the trip from this morning.
“You know what it was that we saw up there?”
“The cardinal?”
“I mean before that. With the truffles.”
“It was PAN.”
“What?” Jaquel shakes their head, “No, it's the roaring serpent on the fifth moon. One of the oldest myths that half of the church has tried to dispel.”
“The cardinal seemed to know about it.”
“They do. But they would rather rewrite the reality to be prettier.” Jaquel climbs through another floor, hanging off the bark of the wall as they continue, “There are tablets of a curious monk who has you meditate to starvation, there are tablets of a succubus who severs your sentiments of the world below, there are tales of infinite archives of information that float in the air.” Vasan gets up through the floor and the two fly upward to continue, “As long as it's been there, we have thought a lot of things could be there.”
Vasan makes it to the top of the next floor first, and dodges a few passing clergy as they pull their wings in to make it through the grate. Jaquel emerges, eyes looking away as they mutter, most likely to themself, “But that fucking dragon...”
“Why are we going up?” Vasan finally asks.
“I'm taking you straight to the Aan.” Jaquel asserts.
“The Aan?”
Jaquel stops with a look as if they were asked who the pope was while in the courtyard of the Vatican, “The Highest High hieght? The Thrice Great? The One?” They stare at Vasan with shock and confusion, “The A'AN! Zihuti! The capital figure of the church. The Aan is the most powerful drek on the planet, Pigeon.”
Vasan is perplexed. This is absurd. Not days ago they conned a village out of some fruit. Not an hour ago they were face to face with their omniprescent guide. Now they're being taken to the highest figure on the planet, and it's not even the most interesting thing that's happened today. The trails of the truffle's trance haven't dazed their curiosity much, though. “You're going to tell them about the bug serpent?”
“All gods no,” The grackle honks, “That would challenge what the church has chosen to canonize. Not a damn soul here is ready for that.” They make all these critiques loudly and openly among other clergy as the two ascend. “I'm going to tell the Aan about you.”
Vasan looks confused.
The gaps in the floor grid get narrower and narrower, with less and less of the droning and buzz of the lower floors making its way up, until it is a fully woven floor that the two must find their way around.
A push through vines into a private shrine reveals a black and white ibis, cloaked finely and adorned with shining metals and crystalline resins, who sits in an intricate woven chair, examining a tablet.
“izeqiel” The ibis squacks a low rumble.
“Thrice Great Aan,” Jaquel lowers their head, diverting their eyes from the Ibis. “I come to request a special off-season initiation.” They look up, and see the Aan's gaze scan up and down the loosely dressed guest. Jaquel explains. “A Pigeon arrived here yesterday, and the golden scarabs showed an affinity for them.”
The ibis finishes their glaring scan and stares Vasan straight in the eyes. “hAntiitOs ?”
Jaquel nods, “They have shown me more than I was prepared to accept.”
The Ibis turns their stare to the grackle.
The grackle turns to the pigeon. “Show Them.”
The pigeon turns to me. I bring in as many nearby probes as possible and surround Vasan with them as a cloud. They do a twirling motion with their claw, and I buzz all of these probes around them until they collapse into rings of resonant orbits.
The Aan stares, their expression unchanging, “asmOsi nEuOs?”
I twist some probes over to Jaquel, and spin myself in a figure 8 around and between the two of them.
“qu mehds sOm ?” The Aan asks.
“They are a friend of the Astrocartographer.”
The Aan looks to the Pigeon with wider eyes, “q sO heisnti aEnzeauOsnt ?”
“I do.” The pigeon pipes up, “My name is Us'akasha 'Anankhe. I come from the third.”
The ibis nods. “Us'akasha.” They rumble, their tone shifting “I am glad you are willing to contribute your harmonies to our everlasting song.”
Vasan nods. Jaquel and the Aan take a pose with a fist between their heart and throat. Vasan follows suit.