The Wyrms of &alon

While Nina and I were busy blowing things up, Lark was… well… she was lost, both figuratively and literally, not that the difference mattered to her one fucking bit. Having a sense of direction had never been her strong suit. Was that a crime? No, but it was really damn frustrating, and the anthill-like construction of the Voovzhee (or whatever) mountain-city-place-a-mabob was having a field day with her. Ordinarily, this wouldn't have been a problem, except that Lark didn't like having to ask for directions. Strong, independent women could figure things out on their own, strongly and independently. Also, all the porters and soldiers skittering past seemed plenty busy, and she didn't want to bother them, though, mostly, it was because everything was just so darn freaky.

Body dysphoria was bad enough when you had a face, and she didn't have that anymore!

Also, it didn't help matters that nobody in the big damn anthill cared to distinguish "up" from "down". Even the architecture was indifferent to it.

Whenever Lark came across one of the mountain fortress' thin slit-windows, she'd stop and hold her antenna up to the opening, to hear-see the view on the other side. Some of the windows were angled in such a way that their light projected onto the tunnel walls, illuminating the sides of the passageways with images of the electric wilds and the dust bestormed skies. The patches and strips of patterns and textures carved into the tunnels distorted the images in places, but not enough that Lark couldn't figure out what was going on.

Regarding the bothsexual alien body she was currently in—she couldn't remember the fancy word Suisei and I had used for it—the jury was still out on whether or not it triggered her dysphoria more than her bedicked human one had. At the moment, it seemed like the answer was going to be a resounding "maybe", but Lark was used to that shit. Self-satisfaction was still something of a novelty to her.

But that wasn't what was bothering her here and now. It wasn't the reason she was wandering through the anthill like a ladybird who'd stumbled into the wrong neighborhood.

No, that distinction went to the uniquely shitty feeling of being aware of how painfully useless she was.

Lark wasn't used to saying, "Thank You." It was just so fucking awkward. It made her feel like her cheeks—face, not ass—would burst 'cause of all the blood running through them. Besides, she did such a good job of convincing herself she didn't deserve what she had—thank you, Impostor Syndrome!—that having to say "Thank you" challenged her to do that one, utterly unthinkable thing that she'd never been able to bring herself to do, namely, to think and feel and believe that she was actually worth something.

Lark came to a stop at a branch point in the tunnel. A gentle, cooling current wafted down from the mouth of one of the branches. She crossed her arms to warm herself, shaking the kerchiefs and cloths the Voovzhees had given her to wear.

She muttered to herself.

"Nina has powers, Dr. Horosha has powers, Dr. Howle has powers, whale-guy has powers, every-fuckin'-body has powers—except for me."

Unfortunately, Lark was used to being the butt of the joke. That was the tough part about comedy: being funny wasn't easy. In her experience, for most folks, comic relief was ultimately self-serving. It was born from the hope that if you could make others laugh, then, just maybe, you could finally make yourself do so.

Lark felt that she owed me a great debt, and—due to all the insane things going on—I'd been having to put my spirits' needs on hold, both to avoid alerting the Vyx anti-virus software, and because, for once, I needed to focus on my own mental health.

She wanted to contribute more to our quest than just snarky quips.

It was while Lark was like this, standing by the mouth of the branched-off tunnel deep in thought that she heard a sound. It flowed in ripples and streams that drifted out one of the side tunnels. It was obviously D'zd, but it wasn't quite speech. The feeling of language it had was diluted by more musical contours and cadences, smoother and more sweeping than what Lark had experienced of the D'zd's speech so far. And it was beautiful.

Maybe that was why she thought it was some kind of song.

Curious, Lark walked up the side tunnel, creeping softly, so as not to disturb the D'zd song. Oddly, the tunnel wasn't straight. Instead, it rose and fell in successive hills and valleys, almost ridiculously so. The song got louder and brighter the further along she went. The tunnel got warmer, too, and eventually, the passageway flattened out, letting a gentle, cooling breeze sweep through from the slit windows further down. The current tickled slightly as it passed over Lark's flower.

The light of the sound thickened.

A long room lay ahead of her. It curved against the mountainside, as if someone had decided to build a balcony but hadn't figured out when to stop. The floor and ceiling stuck out from the rock face like two giant cupped hands. An opening in the wall ran almost continuously from one end of the room to another, forming an ultra-long window covered in a patchwork of thick, angular shutters in various states of overture. The pattern was complex, and if it meant anything, Lark couldn't tell. Weirdly, both the shutters and the trellis-like transom and mullion they were on seemed to be made from some kind of plastic, something that Lark confirmed when she reached out and tugged on one of them.

The room got wider the further Lark walked. She looked around in curiosity. Whatever this place was, there sure was a hell of a lot of stuff here: shelves and tables covered in all sorts of goods: cloaks and other clothing, pieces of armor both flexible and not, various ceramics—pottery, wall tiles, some weird lookin' troughs—and, most notably, weapons galore.

Lark had just passed the room's halfway point when she figured out what the place was. It was a smithy, like something out of a video game. She recognized kilns, furnaces, crucibles, and whatnot when she saw them. They were spread out in intervals along the wall, scattered around the tables and desks. All of the furnishings were low to the floor, enough that a D'zd could reach them even when they sat with their abdomen planted on the ground like a horse after a long day of horsing. Molds laid out on the nearby tables held weapons in them, freshly cast, if the heat they were giving off was any indication. Lark saw D'zd scissorblades among them, along with bracelets and breastplates, and freaky looking hooks that, if she had to guess, were probably meant to be worn on the stinger.

It felt kinda weird when she realized the weapons and armor were made from the same stuff as the shutters: plastic. They had the same color and everything. And it wasn't just the weapons laid out here, it was also the ones Lark had seen back in the Dominion, too.

Were they fighting with fucking plastic?

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Eh, that's probably par for the course, she thought.

As for the heat Lark had been feeling, it was coming from the furnaces—one, more so than all the others. Various kinds of radiation rose off the thing in streams, struggling to force their way out through the gaps around the furnace's door. The mound-shaped appliance was made of some kind of stone, one that reflected light differently than any of the other types of rock Lark had seen the D'zd use. It twinkled all over the place.

Whatever it was, it had a faucet-like outlet on the side that stuck out and up through the wall, probably to let out heat. Lark recognized the basins on the ground as the goo-filled ones she—and I—had seen laid out in the Sun up topside of the mountain. Curious, she reached out and stroked her fingers over the surface of one.

The goo was rock hard.

Finally, there was the matter of her company and the song.

There was only one other D'zd in the room, a guy with tongs. Ze stood not too far from the active furnace, and had to be the biggest fucking D'zd Lark had ever seen, taller than her by a whole extra arm-length at least. The D'zd wore bulky plastic armor beneath a thick, broad cloak. A menagerie of lights orbited around zym, moving in swirling ribbons that converged on the D'zd held zyr arms over. The molten plastic in the mold glowed with loud heat. The energy ribbons appeared to be migrating into the weapon, as if the D'zd's song had drawn them there.

It was damn impressive.

The more Lark looked around, the more she realized she really had no business snooping around. For whatever reason, she couldn't help but imagine the smith as a crotchety old fart with a hunched back and a big beard whose wispy tip dangled over the floor like an underused paintbrush—not that ze had a beard. People like that tended to be really "get off my lawn"-y, and while Lark didn't know if this was true of this particular D'zd she still worried about it, especially if the smith turned out to be some kind of wizard or something.

'Cuz ze certainly looked like ze was.

Whatever song the smith had been singing, ze must have finished it, because ze stopped and picked the cast up with zyr tongs and walked over and placed it in a shelf carved into the mountain's stone of the room's inner wall. Then the smith spoke to Lark in a loud, clear voice, yet without making even the slightest movement that suggested ze was aware of her.

"You must be either very brave or very foolish to interrupt an earthsinger at work."

The words were said so briskly and incisively that they spooked Lark. She stumbled backward, and—worse—in trying to stop herself from doing so, she slipped and slammed into a small, low-lying table covered in freshly-cast weapons still cooling in their molds. The impact made the table careen onto its side and fling a couple of the molds onto the wall, where they and their contents cracked into halves and thirds and then clattered onto the smooth, stone floor.

The smith turned around in shock and bellowed, dropping the tools in zyr hands.

"My work!"

Lark fell supine, legs in the air, trembling like a bug. "I'm sorry, please—I—I…"

The smith pulled off zyr cloak and reared up tall.

"Please don't hurt me!" Lark said. She closed her flower tightly and kept on saying that, repeating her desperate request at least half a dozen times before she dared to cautiously open her flower once she realized the smith hadn't killed her already.

The smith crossed zyr lower pair of arms, flicking zyr tail in frustration. "What are you doing, you sap-for brains?"

"Trying not to die… again?" Lark said.

The smith stomped one of zyr forefeet. The shards of broken plastic quivered. "What are you getting on about? Just tell me your phyle already so that I know who to complain to."

"My what?" Lark asked.

"You…—" but the smith cut zymself off. The last rings of zyr words rippled out into the ether. "Well I'll be a fossilbit fucker," ze said, "you… you're one of the Messengers, aren't ya?"

"H-How can you tell?" Lark opened her flower a little bit wider. Her words were little spurts of pollinated light.

"If any of our phyles had someone as dim as you in them, it'd be the talk of the town. I mean… what kind of Vvz'zsh doesn't know their phyle?"

After struggling to lean forward and right herself, Lark managed to get back to her feet by pivoting on her abdomen with a helpful push of her stinger tail against the floor.

"Does this mean I'm not in trouble?" she asked.

"Oh, you wish." Bending over to pick up zyr tongs, the smith turned around and used the tool to open the furnace and rotate the block of melting ooze before shutting the furnace's door once more. "Look at the mess you've made for me. If you were one of ours, your phyle would deal with it, but seeing you don't got one, I'll have to send one of my apprentices to Chief Krr'kt'zz to figure out what the appropriate punishment ought to be. I'd go myself, but I just don't got the time. There's just too much to do. Warriors need their weapons, and I'll be damned if mine are anything less than perfect."

The smith opened zyr flower to the maximum extent and extruded zyr antenna. Lark was pretty sure it was some kind of obscene gesture, since she hadn't seen anyone else do it until now.

Feeling bad—and not just because getting in trouble sucked ass—Lark skittered over to the wall and began to pick up the broken molds.

The smith grumbled. "What are you doing?"

"Trying to help," Lark answered.

"Haven't you 'helped' enough already?" the smith said. "Why the fuck are you even here in the first place? A Messenger like you ought to have better things to do than botherin' a heatbusted old codger like me. Or are the Vyxit just not as bright as they used to be?"

Lark set the broken molds and castings on the table. "If you really wanna know, I came because of your singing. And," she drooped her limbs, "because I'm kinda feeling like shit about myself right now."

"What's shit?" the smith asked.

"Oh yeah, that's right, you've got that whole 'otherworldly' jam going on." Lark waved her arms condescendingly, though it was mostly self-deprecation.

"For one," the smith replied, "it's not singing, it's Chant. And… why would you even care?"

Lark folded her legs underneath herself and sat down on the floor. "I'm a singer, too. Can't an artist appreciate another's work?"

The smith glanced at the furnace again, and then went and got an empty mold from off a nearby table. Carefully taking hold of the crucible with zyr tongs, ze pulled it out of the furnace and swung it over to the mold and poured out its liquid plastic contents. Lark noticed there wasn't any heat radiating off from the mold. Something had to be actively snuffing out the waves of heat.

But what?

Watching the smith lose zymself in zyr work, Lark almost considered sneaking away while the smith was distracted, but decided not to. If she failed, the extra trouble it would cause just wouldn't be worth the risk.

Wanting to stay busy Lark decided to do something fun for once.

It was generally recognized that staying busy was one of the best ways to keep feelings of uselessness at bay.

So, Lark decided to sing, and—what the hell?—she decided to try her D'zd hands at the smith's song, or at least, what she remembered of it. After several abortive starts that really only succeeded at making the smith even more irritated her, Lark tried to stop focusing on how her alien body made sounds and instead did what felt natural.

That did the trick.

Her song was light, and its interplay with her surroundings was enchanting to behold. It really did feel like magic, and in more ways than one. However miserable Lark got, music had always been there for her. When she lost herself in the rhythms of music-making, her troubles would seem to disappear.

Electromagnetic wisps vibrated through the air as she sang. They swam around Lark like a school of fish, drawing closer with every revolution.

Suddenly, the smith turned and stared at Lark, flowers wide, arms slack at zyr side.

Thinking she was doing something wrong, Lark stopped singing. The lights swimming around her promptly disappeared.

"Fossiled fucker !" the smith said. "What'd you do that for?"

"What do you mean?" Lark asked.

"Why'd you stop?"

"Becaaaaause you were staring at me?" Lark said.

"And why shouldn't I, when you use Chant like that?"

Lark held her arms close to her chest, not really knowing what to make of that. "Is… is that a good thing?"

"You bet your stinger it is!" The smith stepped toward her. "What's your name, kid?"

"Lark."

"How the hell am I supposed to shine something weird like that? Whatever. Well, Rk (Urk)," the smith said, "let me tell you this, you don't need to worry about getting the Chief involved in this fuck up of yours, no sirree. I know just the thing you can do to make up for it."

Right then and there, Lark felt the particular kind of dread only a person about to perform a great deal of manual labor could know.