Chapter 568: Interlude

"There is a Terran legend that they were given fire by a powerful being that climbed a mountain and stole it from their Gods. Anyone who has met or studied Terrans will tell you this can't be true.

"They would have climbed that mountain themselves, and hit their Gods over the head with a rock." - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

Droplets of forgotten files dropped through the darkness to .png in the slow moving water of the river. The canyon was huge, made up of massive .tsr blocks, black rock with striations winding through it. In some places the rock bled as ironkey striations slowly rotted away when exposed to the .wtr files running down the surface.

The canyon opened up into a vast misted wreath place. The clouds were low, flickering now and then with .lgt sources and arcs of untethered light sources. There were twisted bushes, pointers and markers and hooks for the system, that were sickly looking and malformed, with ponds and puddles of stagnant water made up of process calls and access requests. The mist was low, concealing and revealing the distance.

On the shore of the swamp was a boat. Old and decayed, it was built from error logs with the words DEBUG STACK carved on the weathered wood of the hull. Beside the boat was a small fire, built from forgotten text messages and system alerts. Huddled around the fire was a fox with a bandage on his leg and a frog with a bandage around his chest to cover his shoulder. Both bandages glittered wetly with code.

Behind them, on the ground, was the body of a massive creature. All bone and sinew, tusks, a horn between beady red eyes, with a mane of fur down its back. A port firewall component with attack/defense capabilities that was now breathing heavily as the glittering blood flowed out of it.

"Where do you think we are?" the frog asked.

"Not sure, Lee," the fox said. He looked at the swamp. "What do you think that is?"

"Buffer maybe? Temp files? Who knows, Ken," the frog said. It held up a chunk of data. "Cookie?"

"Thank you," the fox, Ken, said, accepting the file. He munched on it and could taste how the cookie had tracked the user through nearly thirty sites and recorded everything they had done before the user had run a cookie cutter and sliced it away, removing the user ID's from it.

It was good.

They slept, curled up beneath carefully woven spreadsheets, their heads on pillows of gathered breadcrumbs. When they awoke, they ate cookies and then sat and went over their meager gear before examining one another's feet and backs. They dressed slowly then put out the fire before walking to the boat.

"I've never even heard of anything like this," the frog, Lee, said softly as he sat down in the boat and lifted up the paddle.

"Sculptable Object Defined Adaptable Programming Language," the fox, Ken, said, pushing the boat into the tepid and stagnant water. He jumped in and picked up a paddle.

In the sky strange rough beasts, process calls and file management threads, cried out to one another as they slowly circled in the forgotten systems that they inhabited after being spawned in dark corrupted systems.

They paddled slowly, using the paddles to push away from the floating mats of dll-moss that bobbled gently on the water. They moved through the mists, avoiding the islands, trying to be silent as they navigated the huge marshland. The only 148.178.28green was the scum of livid floating point error weed on the dark greasy milky surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses.exe and rotting reeds.cmd loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long forgotten summers. In the mists untethered actors mistakenly set to light sources flickered and moved slowly across dark waters, their luminense settings out of range yet still flickering strange greasy light.

"Ken, look," Lee said, pointing down in the pool they were crossing.

Ken, the fox, looked down into the water. Deep within was a Terran, naked, her hair flowing around her in the dark still water. A candle was held in her hands, between her breasts, her skin was pale and washed out, yet slightly yellowed and dirty. Her lips moved slowly as she whispered to herself.

Ken shuddered and looked away. "Do not look at them, they may look back," he warned.

Lee nodded, slowly paddling. "Who do you think they are?" he asked.

"The Sleeping Ones, perhaps? Lost and forgotten people awaiting processing?" Ken said.

"These are dark paths we follow, kinsman," Lee said, shivering. He pulled his cloak tighter around him even as he kept slowly paddling.

"We must find where they lead," Ken said, sneezing as he got a wiff of rotted file structure. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a crystal.

Bright it was, clear as glass yet shining with a pure silver light. He lifted it slightly and the light blossomed. The light seemed to push away the dank darkness of undefined space and mismatched variable distances. The frog and the fox both took a deep breath as it felt as if a great weight had been lifted from their souls.

Song notes were illuminated in mid-air, dancing, leading away in a single path.

The frog slowly turned the boat, following in the path of song notes.

The bright light encouraged the dancing, transparent, whispy song notes hanging in mid-air, and both the frog and the fox could hear the choir singing faintly.

sleep little podling warm little podling sing the song of leaves and trees bark and branch leaf and fern sleep little podling warm little podling

The two travelers guided their boat through the twisting winding channel between the floating islands of moss and algae, huddled close together.

----------------

"Well, this looks like fun," the fox, Ken, said to the frog, Lee.

The frog nodded, staring ahead of them.

Golden sand stretched off into infinity, piled up in gentle waving dunes that the wind slowly pushed in an endless migration.

The fox held up the crystal, illuminating the song notes floating in mid-air.

"Let's wait till night," the fox said. He was already panting from the heat. He checked the waterskin at his belt. "We can't fill up from the marsh. Hopefully we find water."

The frog just nodded.

---------

They traveled at night, resting near oasis of clear cool water during the day, laying the shade of palm trees made up of the solid code of call processes. Birds called from the trees, a few fish splashed in the oasis.

At night they passed great engines, half buried in the sand, their purpose forgotten. Here and there the domes of ancient palaces rose above the sand, the stained glass windows of the ancient cathedrals lost to the sands of time. The path of the music notes led them ever onward, through the featureless dunes that slowly moved endlessly, the breeze wiping away tracks of the two travelers as if they had never walked the sands.

Finally, the pair came to a cliff. On either side of the cliff were great statues of Terrans of the past. Ornate head dresses, clothing that spoke of nobility of ancient times, both holding staffs still graven with runes the sands had not been able to slowly erode away.

In between the statues was a vast arch, carved and inlaid with images of Terrans with the heads of strange and bizarre animals. Some were holding orbs above their heads, others were pulling on either side of a rope, still others were holding strange and foreboding objects to one another.

Beneath the arch, resting on the sand, was a great figure. The body of a great feline, the tail swishing back and forth, the face of a Terran female with eyes marked by dark pigment, lips of blood red, and flashing golden eyes.

The fox and the frog approached carefully, their hearts filled with trepidation.

When they got within twenty paces the woman/feline smiled.

"Should you wish to pass, a single question I will ask," the creature said. It's voice was pure and lovely, musical and lilting.

"Ask, oh great one," the frog said.

The journey had taught the frog and fox both the ways of speaking to ancient creatures.

"Round she is, yet flat as a board. Altar of the Lupine Lords. Jewel on black velvet, pearl in the sea. Unchanged but ere changing, eternally," the Terran creature asked, singing her riddle.

The fox and the frog huddled together, whispering. Finally the frog turned back to the fearsome creature, which was licking one paw, its vast scimitar claws extended.

"Luna. The moon of Terra," the frog said.

The creature nodded. "You may pass from the Great Wastes unto the Land of the No Longer Living, traveler," it said.

The frog and the fox both bowed and moved carefully past. They had learned from a creature in a tree, a Terran woman with the wings and legs of a bird but the body and face of a lemur, one simple rule.

You must never run from an immortal, for it attracts their attention.

Together, they struggled up the canyon, the sand turning to stone turning to carefully cut cobbles.

A curtain lay before them. Shimmering, dancing, iridescent and all colors yet none.

"Ready?" the fox asked.

"Ready," the frog answered.

The two friends joined hands and stepped across the curtain.

-------------

TELKAN GESTALT CLONED

TELKAN GESTALT HAS JOINED THE CHAT

TELKEN GESTALT(1) HAS LEFT THE CHAT

LEEBAW GESTALT CLONED

LEEBAW GESTALT HAS JOINED THE CHAT

LEEBAW GESTALT(1) HAS LEFT THE CHAT

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

oof...

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

LEEBAW CONTEMPLATION POOL

ouch...

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

GUYS! THEY'RE BACK!

Hey, how did it go?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

I've been worried sick about you! Where were you?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Give us a minute.

Huh, we're not quite disconnected.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Wow, your gestalt clone is pulling down full bandwidth. Where were you?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

LEEBAW CONTEMPLATION POOL

We found out where the Gestalt lines go.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Where?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

The SUDS.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

Yeah, in hindsight, that makes sense.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Are you still getting data from your cloned versions?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

LEEBAW CONTEMPLATION POOL

Yeah. It's... distracting.

---------

The city stretched out before the traveling pair.

Buildings of all types pushed together. From rude adobe huts to towering skyrakers of hyperalloy composites, all were scattered hodgepodge and pressed together as if they were all constructed by the same mad engineer. The pair could see throngs of people moving through the street, dressed in a dizzying array of clothing, colors, styles, and fashions. Voices called out, merged together, overlapped, and turned into one great sound. Birds and stranger creatures circled over the vast city, which was surrounded by heavy walls.

The walked down the highway of stone, past the markers engraved with strange glyphs, until they came to the gates. Beside the gates were fearsome guardians, the body of a Terran with the head of a jackal, their burning red eyes staring at the two. Their bronze spears glinted in the waning light of day, but they did not bar the traveling pair.

They moved through the gate, through the tunnel bored through the great wall, and entered the city proper. They held hands to avoid being swept away from one another by the surging mass of people of all kinds, endlessly following the faint song notes that only they could see and hear.

They passed the great spire at the center of the city, refusing to be lured by the promises of flesh, the offers of lotus flowers where they could eat their fill, to join the dancing to the strange songs sung by creatures unable to be described for their loveliness.

Finally they passed through, the gate guards merely staring, leaving behind the perfumes of flowers and dabbed skin, fur, hide, and scale.

The road before them stretched upward, a single ribbon rising into the sky, the underside of the road adorned with stalactites of ancient code and data stone. The ribbon vanished into the morning sun that never rose.

Together, still holding hands, the two travelers began climbing the road.

Neither looked back at the city of such delights behind them.