The End of Days: The Paths Through Clouds pt. 1

[kasihya]

Hurrah! Storytimes start! I am rediscovering the joy of pantsing the characterization! It results in things like huge chunks that I have to rewrite, because I realized that the only reason I was in this situation in the first place was because someone did something that was pretty OOC. Like Eiji waking up before noon, without someone having stepped on him. Asceticism is not a trait valued by his monastic order.

Prologue

The forests climbing up the sides of the mountain are, as promised, beautiful and filled with food for the taking. They remain at camp late into the morning. Reed is all for getting up early and leaving as soon as possible, to get on the road, until Eiji asks towards what, exactly, they are going towards. Because he, Tlazohtzin, and Marat, all look fairly weary from the day's hike, the group agrees that there is no harm in taking the next day at a more leisurely pace. "Especially," Eiji points out, "because there is so much to eat here."

It is settled. Violet sets about fixing a fire out of brush in the middle of a cleared patch of needles. Kephri crawls forward to watch her do it, because he is used to using firestarters -- of which there are, clearly, none around. He gets down onto his belly, propping himself up on his elbows, in order to observe, but in spite of staying as close as she will allow him, in spite of changing his eyes to lizards' so that he does not need to blink ... he still has to blink sometime. In between one moment and the next, the pile of scrub and wood changes from unlit to lit, from pile to conflagration. Violet sits back, blowing on her fingers and avoiding Kephri's curious gaze. "It will be cold at night," she says. "I spend my nights in parts like these, and it's always cold, even in the summer."

Kephri looks around at the clean night air dubiously, but as he does, he notices Ƈhatma and Tlazohtzin watching the fire eagerly, gathering closer without a moment of hesitation.

"I can go look for more firewood," he says. He reaches into the back of his mind, where all of his forms are gathered, and pulls to the forefront his favorite one for climbing trees. His palms become rougher, nails lengthening into claws. His nose and jaw lengthen into a snout; after a moment’s consideration, he adds hair, feeling it prickle along his face. It isn’t strictly necessary, but he likes the way it looks.

When he finishes, he realizes that Reed is staring at him. “You can do that,” she says. "That's ... um ... interesting."

Kephri shrugs. He inhales, relishing the smells that wash over him. Reed's scent is a combination of cleansers and city smells so foreign that he can't even begin to recognize them; Eiji still bears the smoky tinge of fire; Marat just smells foul, like wood polish and what he says are factories. Tlazohtzin is a combination of the utterly mundane and the utterly bizarre, with a faint crackle of magic along her arms. Violet is a black hole of smell, which he will analyze later. For now, he turns to Reed. "I can find wood that doesn't have too many bugs inside it. They sound terrible when they burn." They pop, pop, pop, and it distracts him. But Reed waves that aside with one calloused hand.

"What the hell do I care about whether our wood has termites in it? I'll bet you can track down animals pretty well, face like that," she says.

It's difficult to speak like this, so he just shrugs.

[She seems to understand. She tells him that he should go out and see if he can find food, and she'll take care of more firewood. He agrees that this is a good idea, and they go out their separate ways. Chatma chimes in, saying that he will go out and do what he can with the birds, as he is too large to go flying through old-growth forests.]

[Kephri comes back with food, which he hands out to everyone. Tlazohtzin continues to eat Reed's granola bars at the insistence of the latter.]

Tlazohtzin looks doubtfully at the fruit that Kephri holds out to her. “Are you sure about this?” she asks. “Reed’s food made me sick.” Behind them, Reed turns her head aside. She does not seem to be aware of the effect that this has, the effect which makes Tlazohtzin scowl. “I mean really: sick. Not just the normal type.”

“I’m sorry that there is a normal type of sick,” Ƈhatma says gravely. He has assumed a human form, which is clearly costing him a lot of effort; every so often, he runs off to the side, about fifty feet away from the rest of the group to stretch. Then, Kephri learned very quickly, he needs to cover his ears to muffle the pressure wave that Ƈhatma creates as he shifts and expands back into his own form. The peculiar shape of his usual body means that he has difficulty walking, so mostly when he is a pterosaur, he flies above them and swoops down every so often to gust wind over them and irritate everyone else.

For now, though, he is a handsome, dark-eyed man a few years older than Kephri, who looks to be charming the skirt off of Tlazohtzin. "Thank you," she says. "Do your females not get sick, then?"

Ƈhatma grins. It is bright and beautiful. In it, Kephri recognizes the same uncertainty of movement as someone who is trying out a new form for the first time, and hasn't quite mastered the intricacies of different facial expressions. "We lay eggs. My ... my family would have had children soon, I think."

"I'm sorry," says Kephri, breaking into the conversation at the same time that Tlazohtzin makes her own murmur of apologies. As they do, Marat breaks apart from Oneira and wedges himself between Kephri and Ƈhatma to tug on the hand of the latter.

"You don't lay eggs," he says.

Ƈhatma smiles. "Of course I don't, I am a man and as such I do the easy work. All that I am required to do is," --

" Ƈhatma," Reed says sharply.

"… watch the children when they hatch," Ƈhatma continues easily. "But it is very much true that my type of people lay eggs. Do yours, Kephri?"

Everyone turns to look at Kephri -- even Oneira and Eiji, who have been engaged in some form of communion known only to those who care not for the normal flesh and bones of living creatures. Kephri feels himself shrink under their gaze. Not literally, in this case, as his size is one of the only truly immutable things about his body. His face grows hot. "Not that I am aware of. We are never completely inhuman." Everyone still watches him, as though trying to figure that one out. In an effort to distract them from the topic, he holds out the pear, which is still in his hand, to Tlazohtzin. "It will be all right for you to eat. I just don't want your child to suffer for things that have happened beyond its control."

Tlazohtzin gives him a strange look. He doesn’t know what to make of it; her expressions are foreign to him. But she takes the fruit all the same, and bites into it with her eyes scrunched shut and brow furrowed. Kephri watches her, a knot of hope in his chest. It isn’t that terribly much depends on whether or not this girl — younger than him, she is, by several seasons at least — will eat what he gives her; but it would be nice.

She swallows her bite, lips puckered with distaste. “Thank you,” she says. “It’s interesting. I am sure that I will learn to like it.”

“I would like to try this fruit,” Eiji says, coming up behind Tlazohtzin and addressing Kephri. Kephri feels a small, rebellious urge to inform him that he can have his fill after Tlazohtzin has had hers; that she is eating for two and Kephri knows that he must protect women and children before he can look after himself, but strange glass men are a different matter. But there is no real reason why he should not give Eiji fruit, so he does, holding out the smallest pear of his load.

Eiji takes it from him with strangely delicate fingers. He rolls it between his fingers for a moment before taking a bite. Kephri means to look away, to move on, but he finds himself distracted by the motion. Eiji’s face is not transparent, not fully, but his neck is more than clear enough to see the interior. Eiji swallows, and the pale flesh of the fruit works its way down his throat, the muscles contracting and expanding. Kephri wants to touch it, run his hands along the glass and observe the mechanics in action, until he catches Eiji watching him staring and remembers that this is a living person, not a statue.

“What?” Eiji asks, sounding irritated.

Kephri tries to think of a response. “I can see you chewing,” Marat answers, beating him to it.

Eiji’s eyes cut away from Kephri to skewer the clockwork boy instead. “And?”

Marat shrinks under his gaze. “It surely ain’t natural looking to my mind,” he says meekly.

~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~
the island of colors
~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

Kephri wakes up feeling lazy, with no idea where or what he is. He's lying on the ground outside, not in a house or a cave where he usually manages to fall asleep; the sky has a peculiar quality to it that he can't quite place; and the trees over his head are just the wrong shade of green. He holds up his hands, and is only mildly surprised to discover that they are covered in scales. No wonder he would rather just go back to sleep, despite the rising sun.

He rolls over on his side to find out where he is this time, and his eyes fall on a smoked glass statue nearing six feet in length, lying on the ground beside him. No -- not a statue -- and then he remembers yesterday, and the wandering, and watching water pour down Eiji's throat from the inside. Kephri falls back and squeezes his eyes shut. He does not want to think about that right now. He would much rather be alone to deal with this, and figure out what it means, than try to talk to these unimaginably foreign strangers.

"No one else is awake yet."

Kephri suppresses a groan. He tilts his head back as far as it will go. An upside-down Reed Henry appears in his field of vision, lying on her stomach and leaning on her elbows to watch him. "Hello," he says.

She glances up and to the side. "I mean," she says slowly, as though he is dim, "if you wanted to, you know, go off by yourself for a bit, I'll tell people that you're off finding more firewood."

Kephri blinks and struggles to gather his thoughts together. The lizard hasn't quite left his body. "I …"

"You should probably do that anyway," Reed says. "And water. Morning sickness is a bitch." She directs his attention to Tlazohtzin, who frowns in her sleep.

This is, Kephri supposes, less a suggestion than it is an order. He flips back onto his stomach and tries to get up. He does so without much effort, but in the process, he staggers and stumbles into Eiji. He recoils from the contact: Eiji's skin is cold to the touch, and strangely stiff. He holds still for a moment, praying that Eiji will not wake.

It is a vain hope. Eiji opens his eyes, awake and alert at once. He fixes his attention on Kephri. "Is it time to leave?" he asks. "What time is it?"

Kephri shakes his head. Responding verbally seems like too much of an effort. "Water," he says.

To his dismay, Eiji takes this as a cue to roll to his feet, a motion that looks like it ought to have been natural, but is hampered and slowed by sore muscles. He brushes the dirt and pine needles off his rough-woven clothing as best as he can. "I will come with you to the river." His expression is difficult to make out in the dim light that filters through the trees, reflecting strangely off his crystalline features, but his tone brooks no argument. Helplessness washes over Kephri, and with it, a streak of stubbornness.

"Yes," he says to Eiji. He drags a more sturdy construction of himself to the front of his mind. His legs prickle and ache as thick deer's fur covers him from the waist down, and his feet reshape themselves into hooves. "We will go, then."

Eiji stares at him without shame, which pokes at Kephri in a different way. He seems to be having second thoughts about his decision to accompany Kephri; good. Kephri leaps over Oneira's sleeping form, body protesting at the exertion so soon after waking, and turns around to look back at Eiji, waiting.

Kephri studies her dubiously. "I want to be there and back. I don't want to wait for anyone."

Violet looks singularly unimpressed. "I'll be fine."

Kephri has his doubts. Her short, frame, hidden under clothing that isn't heavy enough for the weather, and the clunky contraptions on her feet, seem like a recipe for a slow disaster to him, with lots of waiting around and tapping his hooves in circles while she stumbles over trees and fallen branches, hair snagging. A need for peacekeeping prevents him from opening his mouth to say so. He turns around and gestures with his hand to make her follow him.

As it turns out, he need not have worried. She follows him, without the intuitive ability to smell the water that he currently possesses, and every time he turns around to make sure that she is still there, she is no more than a few feet behind him. Easily respectful, but enough to let him know that she is having no problems keeping up. But because she remains behind him, he has no idea how she manages it. Every time he turns around, she seems to slow, stumbling and staggering and falling further behind him until he turns his back, at which point she is there again. When she falls down a hill one moment and is back up behind him the next, he finally loses his patience and rounds on her.

"What are you doing?" he asks. He hears the note of pleading in his voice, and hates himself for it.

Violet stops walking and blinks at him. "I'm following you to get water." She speaks with calculated innocence, a false misunderstanding that he can see through in an instant.

Kephri shakes his head. His heart is pounding, and he prepares himself to shift into something faster, lower to the ground. This reasoning doesn't make any fucking SENSE. Whatever. See, the thing is, Kephri wouldn't ask, either. He'd keep watching, but he'd never let something like that get the best of him. He'd need to figure it out by himself.

When she falls down a hill one moment and is back up behind him the next, he finally can convince himself that he isn't crazy, that there is something going on that he isn't aware of.

He knew there was no such thing as a world without anything magical going on.

The river is down a small slope that ends in piles of rocks; when it comes into view over the edge of the earth, Kephri stops to avoid stumbling and bashing his head open on the rocks, and Violet goes charging past him with her arms spread wide and her cornrows bouncing off her back.

"Watch out!" Kephri cries out in alarm, out of reflex.

"Water!" Violet yells. Kephri cringes as the sound echoes off of the trees and around the forest. Then he realizes that he is cringing because he's afraid that something will hear them and come hunting; and then he realizes that there is no one left alive to come hunting for them. None of his natural predators, anyway.

Violet takes a sharp left turn as she reaches the water, and ends up tumbling to the ground unharmed, a blissful smile on her face. Kephri follows at a more cautious pace, hooves finding purchase in the steep embankment far more easily than human feet would. Violet looks up at him and laughs.

"Yes?" Kephri asks.

"You look like a cat," she says.

Kephri looks down at himself, just to make sure that he hasn't subconsciously shifted form. It wouldn't be the first time, but it would be strange to have such a drastic change go unnoticed. His legs are still those of a goat. "What do you mean?" he asks, clattering down onto the rocks at the edge of the river.

Violet sits up. "The way you were being all cautious, it's like my family's cat when she was around water."

The smile falls from her face. Kephri pretends he does not notice. He bends over to gather water to his face and hair. The water rushes over his human hands in clean, frothy bursts that defy him to catch them up away from the main body of the water. He does his best with his limited resources, then wipes his hands dry on his fur. When he stands, Violet has bounded out onto the rocks a little further out into the water, and is dragging a stick through the river so that it parts and foams up around the branch. The look on her face is grim, from what Kephri can see, so he leaves her to it. The water makes him feel more present in this time and place - cold water usually has that effect on him - but it doesn't mean that he wants to talk to anyone here any more than he did when he first woke up. He just doesn't want to be alone as well as separated from his world proper. Kephri turns around and begins walking down the river, in the hopes of spying a fish or something else edible. He is so caught up in his perusal of the water that he doesn’t hear Violet at first.

“Kephri!” she says.

He looks up. She is standing some thirty feet away, but even from here, he can see the exasperation on her face that means this is probably not the first time she has called him.

“Yes?” he asks.

“You have more experience with passing through worlds, right?” She folds her arms across her chest.

A cold prickling sensation makes itself known, running up Kephri’s spine. “No … not really,” he says. Worlds are a new thing to him. Crossing times and subsets of realities, that is something that he does on a biweekly basis at the outside.

“But you’d know what it felt like, right?” Violet asks. She sounds as though she is trying very, very hard to remain calm, but if she is, she isn’t having as much success as she probably thinks she is.

Kephri hops over the rocks to get closer to her, so that they don't have to shout so much. "What does it feel like?" he asks.

Violet spreads her arms out for balance on the rocks; Kephri gets the impression of huge, metal appendages unfurling along with them. "I feel like I did when everything around me was fading away," she says, without looking at him. "Every time I go over ... there." She points to a spot further down the river. "I thought, well I should go back then, but then I thought, I should ask the one who slides through reality for his experiences."

Kephri feels panic creep up his throat as the burden of decision-making settles on his shoulders like an unwelcome embrace. "I would step back from that place," he says. "I -"

He stops.

The air in front of him does not belong to this world.

"Do you feel it?" Violet asks him.

Kephri doesn't answer. His stomach turns, and he backs up so quickly that he falls on his backside as he reaches the shore. "We need to leave now," he says, voice shaking.

Violet stands behind him. He tips his head back to look over at her. He knew it -- he knew there was something strange about her movement, and now he has proof. It is almost one shock too many. "That was stupid," he says. "That could have taken you straight into ... wherever."

Violet tugs on his arm with her thin, dark hands. "I didn't know that. Is it here? Is it getting closer to us? How are we supposed to tell?"

[They go back to the camp, panicking. Everyone decides to pack up now, and they’ll go on to find more water downstream. They do have to wait for Tlazohtzin, who is sick again, and gets by with more of Reed’s granola bars. They do eventually get going. Things are going swimmingly, and they’re walking parallel to the water, going downstream in the opposite direction from the direction that the weird point had been moving, so that eventually maybe they can get to the point where it isn’t and then they can get water, which they all need.]

————————————

Kephri feels the change coming on before he sees it. Uh-oh, he thinks. He looks around to see if anyone else noticed it, but they all keep walking as though nothing has happened. Even Oneira, who had been so afraid of it happening before, continues to lunge forwards without any indication that she feels anything wrong. He looks around. The maple trees and the pine trees are still the same, and their leaves haven’t changed. A murder of crows still cracks open the sky with their creaking voices. Aside from a cool breeze cutting across the still, dull air, the atmosphere is still the same.


Maybe he’s just imagining things.

To his right, Eiji’s muffled speech with his careful, sing-song intonations interrupts his moment of confusion. What the fuck kind of sense does that even make. “You live with a man with whom you are affiliated in but a business context, not a social one,” he asks Reed. His hard glass feet crack against the stones beneath his feet, stones which Kephri with his goat’s hooves steps over without thinking.

“Yes,” Reed says. Kephri hasn’t been paying attention to their conversation before this, but from the tone of her voice, it appears that this isn’t the first time they have had this conversation today. “I don’t understand why this is such a difficult concept for you to get.”

Kephri sighs and moves ahead of them. They’ve strung themselves out along their path, wherever it is that they are going. Ƈhatma insists that they’ve been moving west for the last two days, but with the sun gone, it’s hard to be sure. “Magnets,” says Ƈhatma, tapping the front of his head with one claw. “Magnets in my head, great big magnet at the end of the world. I know where I’m going.”

Violet steps up, and he bends down so that his enormous beak rests on the ground in front of her. She puts a hand on the top of his head. “No magnets here,” she announces, after a moment. “There’s something, but I don’t know what.”

That had led to something of an argument between them, which Kephri had avoided by muffling his hearing and leaving the vicinity until he heard Ƈhatma shouting for him inside his head.

Right now, though, there is no argument, just a lot of talking that he wants no part of. Eiji can talk to Reed about her lifestyle, and Violet can alternate between chattering to Marat and listening with great intent to Tlazohtzin as she tries to conceal her discomfort with walking, but Kephri would rather climb alongside them, squirrel-like, and watch Ƈhatma soaring overhead. He cannot, of course, because the trees are just barely too far apart. The best that he can hope for is to climb up one tree high enough to see Ƈhatma above the canopy, climb down, and race ahead of the group to climb the next tree.

It isn’t satisfactory, but right now, that’s what he’s doing. He climbs up the tree, scanning the clouds for the bright yellow and green plumage and stretch of wings. A first glance doesn’t reveal any, so he climbs up further, until the branches will not hold his weight. The sky is still clear. Panic begins to cloud his thoughts — did he do right in not mentioning the atmospheric shift that he felt? What if it was a true shift, and swallowed Ƈhatma whole into the ether? Kephri climbs down, rushing, branches snapping past him and snagging on his bare arms. It gets to the point that he actually slips off the last branch, and his heart jumps into his throat, adrenaline kicking in and drawing a more balanced form to the forefront. He lands, not on his feet or even in a tumbling heap as he had expected, but caught up by wiry arms and pressed against a startlingly broad chest.

“Did you miss me?” Ƈhatma asks.

Kephri regains his balance and jumps away from him. “Ƈhatma! Where did you go?”

Chatma shrugs. "There's something weird about the area up ahead. I didn't want to lead anyone in without warning. Where did they go?"

"Warning of what? Warning of what?" Keprhi jitters his way back the way they came, looking over his shoulder to make sure that Chatma is following along. "Come with me, we need to catch back to Tlazohtzin and Reed."

"And Eiji and Marat and Violet," Chatma says, sounding amused. He really does have a nice voice, Kephri thinks.

"What is wrong with where we're going?" Kephri asks.

Chatma jogs up to keep pace with him, stops, and rubs his bare arms as they rejoin the others. "It's colder, for one. Did you notice? I did. It's awfully cold."

"Is it?" Reed asks, looking pointedly at his bare chest. "I hadn't noticed."

Chatma bounces on the balls of his feet. Eiji lifts his eyes to the heavens and clears his throat. "Oh, for fuck's sake. You can see each other's guts if you take off your shirt, but you are going to look away if I don't cover myself? Although," he adds, eying Violet's oversized sweatshirt, "If you live places that are this cold all the time, I can see the point."

"I don't," Tlazohtzin says. She looks distinctly uncomfortable. Kephri walks over to her.

"I can put my arms around you, if it would help," he says, seriously.

[They reach the break in the forest and stop dead. Things go south when the farther they walk, the thinner the trees get, and then they trail off into scrubland, and suddenly they’re on a steep slope where a flock of sheep stand between them and the winding gravel road down to a collection of white houses. It’s suddenly gotten a lot colder.]

“I hasn’t never seen so much green in all my life,” Marat declares.

“Where did it come from?” Tlazohtzin asks.

Reed stares down at the fields and the flocks with her hands on her hips. “You weren’t kidding about it being different,” she says to Ƈhatma.



~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

For the fourth day in a row, Kephri wakes up with no idea where he is. He stares up at the whitewashed ceiling, hands folded across his stomach. The bed beneath him is too soft, and his back aches with it. The light coming in the window is watery grey and too weak for it to be full dawn, but Kephri wakes up all at once, irrevocably, so he’s too alert and too uncomfortable to go back to sleep. He swings his legs over the edge of the bed, pulls on the dressing gown that Pink And Orange hung on the hook behind the door, and walks out of the guest room.

Both of his hosts are awake already; Pink and Orange is sitting on the couch, watching a book play across a screen in front of her, while Blue and Aqua is in the kitchen, flipping eggs in a griddle over the miraculous white stove that Kephri finds a little less miraculous now that he's seen it in action and understand a bit of how it works. He tries to enter quietly, but trips over the strip of wood in the doorway. Both of his hosts turn around.

Blue and Aqua waves at him, smiling. The aura around him changes, flickering yellow and green in a simple geometric pattern that Kephri interprets as a greeting for the morning. Pink and Orange reflects the pattern, then adds a few muted purple undertones weaving through the design.

Kephri shrugs and smiles and hopes that it gets his point across just as well. He opens his blank book up to the next page, and colors in an approximation of the yellow and green pattern that they emitted. He holds it up with a smile.

Pink and Orange nods. She gestures at the table, aura chartreuse and a light brown that, Kephri discovered yesterday, means "meal". There are ways to express a smaller amount of food, which is again different from food as a thing in and of itself, but Kephri hasn't learned the exact differences yet; only that meal has a few more scraps of color around the edges. Regardless, he picks his way around the couches and into the dining room, whose large windows overlook a hill rolling down into a steep cliff that plunges into the ocean. The only house visible through here is the little white one by the bay, where Chatma has been housed, last that Kephri heard. It pains him to think that they are all separated now, the people he can speak to in words that make sense, and isn't that strange, as well? Why should they all have come from worlds where they speak in air and movements made with the mouth, and which all sound more or less the same?

Blue and Aqua and Pink and Orange join him at the table shortly, setting plates down in front of each of the chairs which he has learned must remain on the table. Food ought to be picked up with the silverware that is placed on either side of the plate. Blue and Aqua puts the eggs on the plate in front of him, and pours water into the glass. He and Pink and Orange fold their hands with their elbows on the table. Kephri mimics the action as they press their foreheads to their knuckles and begin to emote. For this, Kephri keeps his eyes open, watching the dancing rainbows of color that play across the shoulders and arms of his hosts. They remain in this pose for about a minute; then, slowly, the colors in their auras fade back to the default, and they begin to eat.

They continue their conversation as they eat, interspersed with moments of song. Kephri focuses on holding his utensils correctly, and watches them. Pink and Orange smiles at him with dark brown eyes, colors flickering into a question about the food. Kephri isn't sure what it is, but he does know how to respond in the positive, so he puts down his utensils and sketches out a happy, content drawing for them. Blue and Aqua laughs gently at him, and sings something else. Kephri looks at them uncertainly.

To his very great surprise, Pink and Orange takes the book from him and starts to draw. She isn't very good at it, and Kpehri wants to tell her that she can just draw outlines of things and it will go a lot faster than filling in all of the shapes with color, but it makes sense for them, he supposes. He waits and eats his eggs, and when he looks out the window, he thinks that he can see a bit of great, feathered wings dipping over the edge of the cliffs.

Pink and Orange taps him on the wrist. He turns and looks at the picture she has drawn. He recognizes her house, and a crude illustration of the main street in the town. There's a building which she has labeled with a sketch of utensils for eating, and with it she has drawn Kephri, a large bird shape, an empty outline of a man, two women whose faces are filled in black, a smaller girl with enormous wings folded behind her, and a final, smaller figure. They are all dominated by a squiggle wrapping around them, with a line leading into the door of the building.

Kephri looks up at the woman. Her aura radiates a soft ochre, the color of a question. He points at the picture, at himself, and then out the window at the sun. Same sun? he asks. Today.

She smiles and flashes bright yellow with yes.

Kephri shrugs. Then, remembering that she doesn't know what that means, he flips to a new page and draws a series of squiggly blue lines. Uncertain.

While they are communicating and drawing, Blue and Aqua leans over his plate and looks out the window. He appears so interested in what he sees there that Kephri cannot help but twist around to look in the same direction. They have not had any visitors since Kephri came to stay, but that doesn't mean anything; there are plenty of slow days. He misses his family suddenly, fiercely and overwhelming and out of nowhere. He pushes it away.

Eiji is coming up the road. He has on a jacket that he must have borrowed from the family with whom he is staying; Kephri didn't bother to find out who, too upset that they were being separated from each one of the others. He looks surprisingly fragile. Kephri hasn't thought of him as fragile, though his bones shine white through his skin. It's the bulk of the coat that encases his narrow frame. Kephri quells the surge of familiar happiness that arises in his stomach at the sight of a familiar face by reminding himself that Eiji is strange and frustrating and weak of limb, but he doesn't fully manage to convince himself. Here is someone he can speak to, clearly and without hesitation or miscommunication over the simplest things.

He is nearly out of his seat with badly disguised impatience by the time Eiji finally makes it up to the door and knocks, four sharp raps of glass on wood.

Surprise, surprise, says Pink and Orange. She looks at Kephri, aura turning ochre again, with a hint of yellow and green edging the question. He pushes his chair back from the table and goes to answer the door.

Eiji, when he opens the door, looks terrible. There are vague purple clouds in the glass under his eyes, and his hair is a mess, but when he sees Kephri, his expression lightens. It's difficult to quantify what, exactly, changes to let Kephri know that he is happy to see him; a slight widening of the eyes, or perhaps a lessening of the seemingly permanent downturn of his lips. Kephri doesn't think he's seen the man smile yet, but it's a start.

"Goat boy," he drawls.

Kephri cannot prevent the smile that spreads across his face, though he pinches his cheeks in his efforts to hide it. "Words," he says in reply.

Eiji nods, one corner of his mouth twitching. He leans past Kephri to look inside the house. "I like it," he says. "Air. Light. My fisherman has a hovel."

And just like that, Kephri's happiness at seeing him evaporates. He had just been thinking that the house, though light and probably pleasant for these people so dependent on being able to see clearly, is not at all what he's comfortable with, and that he would be happier in a dark place. "What are you doing here?" he asks.

Eiji pulls back. He looks as though he is about to answer, but then his eyes travel past Kephri. Kephri turns around. Pink and Orange and Blue and Aqua are standing behind him, uncertainly. Kephri holds up a hand. He runs back to the table to retrieve his colors and book of blank pages, scribbling out a combination of "good morning" and "hello" and "good person" in order to introduce Eiji.

Pink and Orange takes one look at the paper and starts to smile, turning pink around the edges with mirth. She shows it to Blue and Aqua. He smiles, and bows to Eiji.

Eiji's demeanor changes. His narrow shoulders relax underneath the burden of the enormous coat to protect him from the elements. Blue and Aqua invites him inside and shuts the door behind him.

[But then I guess it turns out that Eiji, I feel like he'd be really good at communicating via color. He picks up Kephri's pad and starts drawing like mad, scribbling together a picture that will get across that he wants to take Kephri out to go for a walk. They communicate back that that would be fine, but Kephri detects a bit of a disappointed tinge to their auras, so he explains to Eiji that he needs to help wash up, first, the way that they wanted. Eiji says that he'll help (and, for the record, since when has Eiji been the sort of person who helps other people willingly? I feel like he's just fallen all over Kephri for superficial reasons, and then they'll start to argue and find fault later. It's the same thing -- if you're thrown into a situation, it binds you together and you only find out the personality details not pertaining to your predicament later. Right now, Eiji is just "Kephri, enigmatic person who isn't showing off, and just seems completely oblivious to everything" when really it's "Kephri,
who is fed up with everyone and works better on his own."]

[So, anyway, they try to clean up together, but Eiji is pants at it, so Kephri just asks him to please let him do it himself. Eiji spends the time communicating with Pink and Orange and Blue and Aqua, drawing pictures with each other and color coding their feelings about them. When Kephri is finished, Eiji gives him back his book and colored pencils. He puts on his jacket, and Kephri accepts one from Pink and Orange because she is insistent. He does, however, leave off the pants, and goes straight into goat-mode. Eiji and Kephri leave.]

They walk down the road in silence. Eiji shivers, and Kephri begins to feel the bite of the damp, chilly air on his human skin. The hill is quiet, save for the whispering of the waves as they crash against the cliff a quarter of a mile away. He looks around at their surroundings out of habit, even though he knows that it's the same as yesterday. There are sheep in different places than there were yesterday or the day before, but that is only to be expected. Kephri wishes that he could show his sister the sheep. She loved them, thought they were the strangest looking beasts ever.

"Have you seen anyone else?" Eiji asks, breaking the quiet.

Kephri shrugs. "I saw Chatma flying yesterday." He had tried calling out to him, but it had been so quiet that the idea had made him uneasy, and by the time he walked down to the edge of the cliff where Chatma was staying, the fisherman who lived there said that he had come back from flying, with fish in his beak, and gone human to go into the town.

"I haven't." Eiji stops walking at the edge of the road, beside a coop of fat orange and brown birds. Their auras are all small, compact, and varying shades of pewter. Eiji looks down at them and wrinkles his nose.

Kephri bends down to inspect them. Most of them shuffle away, looking around like they're trying to pretend that they haven't even noticed him and it just so happens that everywhere else in the coop is more interesting. Kephri runs a hand over his face, skin prickling as he draws out feathers the same color as theirs. He takes off his jacket to examine the feathers that result there as well. It's surprisingly warm; he can understand why they have them. He turns around to show Eiji, feeling pleased with himself.

Eiji's eyes widen. "You look strange," he says.

"It's warm," says Kephri. All of the reasons that he had had for not wanting to see Eiji, words from his mouth or no, come rushing back to him. "I like it."

Eiji sits down on the heath beside him, back against the fence. "The woman I am staying with has two dogs," he says. "They are large, and the house is small."

Kephri experiments, letting the feathers at his fingertips grow longer, bending the bones to shrink some and grow others while he lets Eiji talk. He doesn’t pay any particular attention to the words.

"I want to find Tlazohtzin and Marat to find out what they are doing here. I have an interest in them." Eiji stops talking; when Kephri looks over, waiting a beat too long to see if he’ll keep talking, he has an interesting, confusing expression on his face.

Kephri blinks at him.

Eiji stares a bit more. It intrigues Kephri that, for all that the rest of him is built in varying shades of clear and milky white, his eyes are dark, brown bleeding into the irises without any transition. "I wish you wouldn't do that," he says at last.

Kephri looks back at the chickens, who have all gathered on the other side of the pen now. He draws his fingers along his nose, cheeks, forehead and chin, letting the feathers slide back out of existence. The cold air hits his face again, even more unpleasant now that he knows how to minimize its chill, and he brings them back again. "No, I like being warm," he says.

"I was referring more to the bird wing coming from your shoulder right now," Eiji says, voice dry.

"Oh. I don't need that, no." Kephri lets his bones and muscles and skin grind back into place. He straightens, and Eiji follows suit. He puts his jacket back on so that he doesn't have to carry it, and lets the feathers fade off of his body save for his head and neck because underneath the clothing they are itchy.

They start to walk again, down the winding gravel road towards the main street. "I thought you didn't like to wake up in the morning," Kephri says, as dawn light hits his eyes through a gap in the clouds.

Eiji scowls at the sun, squinting. "I don't. The sun was in my eyes, so I woke up. Marat is with Reed, isn't he?"

Kephri looks out towards the cliff, where Chatma is staying with his fisherman. "I think so. I know where the road that goes to that house is, but they might not be awake yet."

They walk into the main street. Everything is silent and closed, and the wind picks up, sending sprays of moisture across them both that Kephri can only feel when they hit his eyelashes. Feathers are good for this, he thinks. If he is going to have to stay in this world, then he is going to look for places that don't require feathers all of the time; they get dirty faster than skin, and he hates to clean himself. The fine mist forms tiny drops of water across Eiji's skin, which he brushes away every now and then with a clinking sound only barely audible to Kephri's ears.

The road that Tlazohtzin, Reed, and Marat had taken with the older couple two days previously is, if possible, even steeper and more roughly hewn from the hill than that which led to Pink and Orange and Blue and Aqua's house. Kephri leaps up it with goat's feet in several bounds, and then waits for Eiji, who struggles with even the simplest of steps. He could probably, he thinks, climb all the way up to the whitewashed house halfway up the hill, wake up Reed and Marat, and bring them back down most of the way before Eiji ever caught up, if only he started now. If he woke Tlazohtzin up then, it would even give her time to make herself feel less like death and get ready to meet Eiji.

Kephri turns around. There is now a cow between him and Eiji. It stand, large and brown and with a white aura around it with slowly undulating spikes that hurt his eyes to look at. Kephri engages himself in a staring contest with its huge brown eyes until it loses interest in him and goes ambling across the road. Eiji staggers after it.

“You said you came from a mountain,” Kephri informs him.

Eiji scowls at him. “I lived on a mountain, yes. I stayed on a mountain. Why don’t you go on ahead. I’m sure that Tlazohtzin will need time to prepare herself to be seen by society.”

Kephri’s skin prickles, different from the kind that means he is altering his own physiognomy, and far less pleasant. “I was just thinking that,” he says, by way of defense.

[Kephri goes to get Reed and Marat and Tlazohtzin.]

The man who opens the door has grey hair and a sagging face belied by the bright yellow and green of his aura. Kephri remembers, too late, his book, and flips back a few pages to show the man the drawing he made from earlier. Pink and Orange and Blue and Aqua had told him that he should probably draw a new picture for everyone he met, unless he was meeting a lot of people at once, but this time, haste is more important.

The man nods, although his aura does dim a little bit. Kephri shrugs it off. He steps inside the home as he is offered. He is about to ask where he can find his — not friends, not friends, but companions, people he met with in the same circumstances — but then he sees them. Tlazohtzin and Reed are asleep on the couch; Reed pressed against the back, with an arm thrown over Tlazohtzin’s shoulders to keep her from falling off in the middle of the night. The sight fills Kephri with an intense feeling of nostalgia; now that Eiji isn’t here to frustrate him, he can without fear wish that he was. Kephri would like someone to bundle with in the same manner, the way he piles in close with his family and with Xansa.

Marat has curled up in a huge, squashy-looking chair next to the couch. His fingers are curled against the arm of the chair, head pillowed on them; but when Kephri walks in, he opens his eyes and sits up with a smile on his face. “Hello!” he says.

Kephri smiles at him in answer. “Hello.”

Marat uncurls himself from the chair, stretching until his joints pop like they belong to someone three or four times his age. Then again, Kephri isn’t exactly sure what the rules are about age and bodies where Marat is from. Maybe those joints do belong to someone that age. The thought is banished from Kephri’s head, replaced by surprise, as Marat runs over and throws his skinny arms around Kephri’s waist. Without thinking, Kephri bends down to pick him up, hugging his chilly body close.

“I can’t understand anything that he’s saying,” Marat whispers in Kephri’s ear. “I don’t think he talks.”

[Kephri wakes up Reed and Tlazohtzin. Sure enough, Tlazohtzin is sick. That’s why Reed slept on the inside, so that Tlazohtzin could get up whenever she needed to during the night, to go outside and do her thing. Kephri explains that Eiji is waiting for them. Tlazohtzin is not impressed. Reed is thoughtful. Marat is excited, and wants to go see Eiji now. Kephri and Tlazohtzin are all for it, but Reed says, no, we’re not letting a child wander around by himself. He’s from the city; it’s very different.]

[They do finally get around to leaving, after promising the man that they’ll go get his sheep. Reed explains what they have been up to, in summary. Then they meet Eiji. From there, they go off to the sheep fold further up the mountain. When they get there, Violet is sitting amongst the sheep, looking small and lost but happy anyway.]

Now they are only missing Ƈhatma. As Kephri is thinking this, Ƈhatma’s huge wings beat high overhead. They are all sitting around in a circle, more or less, with Marat sitting in between Tlazohtzin’s legs, and Eiji sitting on her other side, with Reed across from them and Violet on her rock and Kephri lying down with his feet towards Tlazohtzin and his head towards reed, when he looks up and sees a shadow blotting out the sin that is coming through the clouds regardless of the way that it was dawn before. Ƈhatma soars and lands a few hundred feet away, so that the sheep will not scatter. It doesn’t seem particularly necessary — one runs away, but the others only shuffle about hand and get back to grazing. Kephri wonders what types of birds they are used to, that an enormous creature so close to the ground doesn’t bother them. When he gets down, Ƈhatma transforms into a human, shoving away all of his mass and folding his enormous wings into slimmer, muscular arms. He walks back down the hill, slowly at first,
and Kephri sits up to watch. Ƈhatma speeds up his pace as the hill becomes steeper, and then he starts running, a full-out run without any clothing on that has Tlazohtzin laughing, then clutching her stomach and grimacing, and Reed turns around, stifling a snicker. Eiji looks away, looks away at Kephri, who avoids his gaze and goes back to waiting for Ƈhatma.

Ƈhatma throws himself down on the ground next to Kephri, panting and grinning like a dog. “Good morning!” he says. “I was just going for a morning stretch, and then I saw you all, and I thought, that’s nice. I haven’t seen any of you in quite some time, and it feels strange, doesn’t it, it feels like it ought to have been longer that I’ve known you, but the truth is that you are the most familiar faces in this whole crew of strangers.” He stops for a moment, and frowns at Kephri, then points an accusing finger at him. “Except for you. You look different, somehow.”

Kephri smiles, a stupid grin that spreads across his face without his permission. “There are chickens, my people keep chickens. They’re stupid, but their feathers are warm.”

Ƈhatma appears to accept this. He rolls onto his back, hands behind his head. “I see. You like them, then? I like my man. I haven’t figured out his name yet, because he says that I have to earn it. We’ve been having the most fascinating discussions, though, about the art and the history of the place. I quite like it here. Better than a barren mountain. How about you? Marat?” He tips his head back until he can see the boy, who crawls over to him. Kephri watches his dark, lkafjsd face light up.

“There are these huge animals — I don’t know the name, I call them cows, ‘cause we’ve got them like in my world — only I ain’t never seen any while they was still alive, but there’s a butcher’s shop, selling the most marvelous meat, right outwide where my sister works.” He throws up his hands. “I like them. I get to feed them, and I have to clean up their shit, but I don’t mind. It smells funny.” He holds his nose and waves his hand in front of it.

Reed smiles grimly. “I wish I could say the same.”

Kephri turns to her politely. “You don’t like the cows?” he asks.

Reed makes a face. “I’m a city girl, born and bred. All this open pasture makes me twitchy. Give me a murder and a ghost any day.”

Marat nods. “I don’t like the fields, neither. Too much room, it makes my neck all prickly.”

Ƈhatma looks around at them all despairingly. “But you like your people, right? Everyone is happy with the people?”

There is silence, while they all appear to contemplate it. Kephri thinks back to Pink and Orange, with her breads and jellies and paintings, and he thinks about Blue and Aqua, with his food in addition, and his obsession with the chickens that Kephri will never be able to understand. He thinks about the days spent silently, with the flickering of their auras in the evening to keep him company and light the way so that he can read the books. He thinks about the way that they have of reading books that glow and flicker in patters only, and how it makes for a very silent, if beautiful, house. It contrasts so sharply with his own home, and with the noise that he is used to doing with his own family: there would always be his sister shouting and running around, and his twin younger brothers who would do even more shouting, and his mother yelling at them both to be quiet … no matter where they went or what caves they were in, what time period, they were always loud.

It is, perhaps not to his surprise, Eiji who voices what he is thinking. “It would be better if they could speak,” he says. “Or if we could, perhaps, all talk in colors! Who knows what might result then?”

Ƈhatma sits up. He stares at Eiji with wide eyes, then looks around at all of them. “What?” he asks.

Violet leans forward on her elbows, clenching her jaw. “We can’t communicate,” she says. “They talk one way, and I could talk like that but it’d probably rip up the grass and bring famine, so I’d kind of rather not since they’re the ones who are taking us in …”

Ƈhatma’s jaw drops. “What do you mean, you can’t — they talk in colors? No!”

Kephri exchanges incredulous looks with Tlazohtzin, who pulls Marat back closer to her chest and runs her hand over the wooden half of his head. “I’m got a bunch of — no, what I mean is. Yes. That’s their auras … what have you been doing? Does your fisherman speak?”

Ƈhatma shakes himself out, and gets for a moment a wide-eyed look that has nothing to do with surprise — Kephri guesses that it has something to do with the fact that he wanted to use his tail to express something, and then realized that he no longer has one. “They — no, that’s not right. It’s all, it’s like the way I talk to you when I’m big.” (His word for when he assumes pterosaur form.) [It isn’t something that Kephri would think of as important. The thinking is that he wouldn’t distinguish between “I am two different species at different times”; he would think of it as “this is one way for me to be, and this is another way for me to be”, and it’s still fundamentally a human being, because that’s what a human being is in his world. There’s just different races.] He taps his forehead, and looks around at them all with amazement written clumsily across his face. “You didn’t know that?”

“No,” says Eiji. “That explains things.”

“I had my suspicions,” Reed admits. Tlazohtzin turns around and gives her a scandalized look. “Think about it — they have electricity; they have math; they clearly have higher learning. How are you supposed to express that with colors? My other thought was that they only speak in educational settings, but that was a bit more of a stretch.”

“Electricity?” Ƈhatma asks, and Kephri is glad that he isn’t the only one confused.

"The lights," Reed explains. "And the stove, and the other things that look like they're magic."

Marat raises a hand. "I know about electricity," he says. "We've got that at the factory." His face falls again for a moment.

A sheep wanders into their circle, stopping to graze on the grass by Violet's stone. She reaches out a hand to pet it, gaze unfocused and turned upwards towards the sky. They all sit and digest this.

"I didn't know about that," she says. Kephri turns to look at her. Her gaze, impossibly dark and compelling, lights on him and focuses. "I also haven't spoken to anyone here since we arrived. The woman who was going to take me in thought better of it."

"Who was that?" Reed asks. "What kind of woman," --

Violet tilts her head to the side, as though to indicate the lack of necessity of talking about the matter at all. "It was fine. I like being outdoors," she says. "But I'm getting hungry. Do you think there's anyone who will take Confederate States of America currency? That's all I have." She reaches into the pocket of her pants and withdraws a crumple of small sheets of decorated paper.

“I work for my keep,” Kephri says. Tlazohtzin and Reed nod.

[He tells them about the restaurant down the hill, where Pink and Orange suggested that they go together. They all decide that that sounds good, although Reed expresses some concern about the ability of them to get seating for breakfast for seven in the clothing that they are wearing. Kephri shrugs off his jacket and gives it to Ƈhatma, who wraps it around his waist by popular demand.]

Kephri can see the roof of the eating place that Pink and Orange suggested. He points them in that direction. Ƈhatma takes off the jacket, telling him that he'll take it back when he gets there. "I'm already hungry enough to eat someone whole," he announces, and Marat falls back to hide behind Violet. "If I stay small for another mile of walking, I'm going to faint, and you will have to carry me, and it will just not be a good situation to be in."

Kephri takes the jacket back. Ƈhatma takes off at a downhill run, so fast that Kephri fears he'll fall head over heels and smash his skull open on one of the many rough cornered rocks that dot the hillside. Just before it looks like his fears will be realized, Ƈhatma leaps into the air and expands outwards. He throws his arms out, and they keep on *going*, lengthening and widening into huge, muscular wings. His body thickens, and his torso explodes in a burst of feathers and crest so that a moment later, a huge primeval creature like a bird takes off and beats the grass flat with wind as it lifts its wings and gains altitude. Marat shouts and runs after Ƈhatma, although his stature prevents him from getting close enough to be flattened by the plume of feathers at the end of the tail as it sweeps the ground for navigation. "Ƈhatma!" he shouts. Kephri looks around, but the only people around to hear them are the sheep, and a man driving a locomotive device in bright orange down the road half a mile away.

Ƈhatma climbs higher in the sky, opening his mouth to let out a high shriek. Look at me, he crows, and Kephri hears him outside of his head. He squints up at him, sees Violet doing the same with a vague darkness spreading out behind her. He wheels up, then swoops down and with another beat of his wings steadies himself, directly in front of the sun. Kephri's eyes water, and he looks away for a moment to avoid the glaring light.

When he looks back, Ƈhatma is gone.

The bottom falls out of Kephri's stomach. He looks around at the empty skies.

"Ƈhatma!" Violet shouts.

“Shit,” Reed says. She picks up her pace, walking forwards. “Come on, come on. I don’t want to get left behind. I don’t know how this works.”

Kephri immediately understands. He forces himself to calm down as he follows Reed down the hill, towards the spot where they saw Ƈhatma last. Eiji picks up Marat, then realizes apparently that it will slow him down and that he’s the slowest one there anyway, so Kephri takes over the burden. He’s taller and stronger, anyway, and Marat clings to him as they plummet downhill. Kephri looks down to make sure that he isn’t missing anything, because there are rocks and now he has to make sure that he’s taking care of Marat as well as his own well-being. When he looks back over his shoulder, he see Eiji and Tlazohtzin lagging behind, behind him and Reed and Violet who is taking the slow way down but is still holding her own. Eiji looks at him and for a moment his face is open and naked with emotion, fear and other things that Kephri doesn’t have time to care about right now. He turns back, eyes fixed on Reed’s backpack as it swings from her shoulders in her mad plunge down towards the town and the sunrise.

When he looks up, the town is gone. Reed is running towards the bottom of a hill, but that’s about it. At the bottom of the hill, instead of farms and sheep and houses, there is only more plains. Kephri stops, reeling. He sets Marat down, and Marat runs back up to Reed, holding onto her hand like a small child of three or four. Kephri turns around. Eiji and Tlazohtzin are still there, stumbling along. Eiji has his hand on her arm, ostensibly to support her, but Kephri can tell that it’s more of a collaboration, and he’s leaning on her just as much.

“Hey!”

Kephri nearly goes weak in the knees with relief when he hears Ƈhatma’s raucous chattering voice booming in his head from a hundred feet above them. The great bird form wheels around and descends on them, swooping and landing clumsily on the incline. Kephri runs forwards on his goat feet to get to him.

“Look where we are now,” Ƈhatma says.

Kephri doesn’t respond. He’s too busy catching his breath. He waits for Reed to make it back up the hill with Violet and Marat in tow. Then they wait for Eiji and Tlazohtzin to make it down, and then they are all together.

“What just happened?” Eiji asks, sounding offended.

~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~*~~

I like the last try a lot better. It's getting longer than I expected, although I feel like I have a lot better handle on Kephri, Chatma, and Eiji now. I suspect this is what Chaucer felt like after writing the first few Canterbury tales, and realizing that he still had 197 to go ...