The Feather on My Scale: Ch 23

“Want Temp.” Lunam broke my focus.

“I’m not sure how I can get him in here until the curtains have been raised,” I admitted. There weren’t any ports or doors in the curtains. It was designed to fully seal off sections of the dome. I had only ever heard of one other time that a curtain had been dropped in my lifetime. Ramses had dropped one on a sector past where Ptolemy had lost his leg when a missile went through the glass. More than a thousand people had died as a result of suffocation before anyone was able to get in and patch the glass. The solar wind had roasted them to nothing more than mummies.

Lunam deflated. He quietly snapped his fingers at his sides as he thought. Chewing on his lip, he stomped off to the group of foreigners to start up another conversation.

“I think he wants Nour to translate,” Ptolemy stated the obvious. I nodded agreement.

The purr of another boat permeated through the low conversations on the dock. This one held two people, both dressed in clothing closer to that of Lunam’s group than Hawria’s traditional garments. Pants that cut off below the knees and vests. Both of the people were male and in their mid twenties I decided after staring long enough. The hair length was something else entirely. Brilliant white hair that hung well past their thighs. Bright red stripes wrapped around one of the men’s upper arms. It took the lean man standing in front of me to realize it wasn’t paint but color in his skin. It had been years since I had seen anyone with decorated skin like that. The last, save for Lunam’s barcode, had been one of the ancient Mariners who had used charcoal dust to color slash wounds purposefully made during a coming age ceremony that had faded from popularity.

“Lunam!” I called for the man’s attention. He popped up from a small knot of people where Borysko sat. I nodded toward the new men coming ashore. He wrinkled his nose and frowned. Shuffling between groups he scrambled over to us.

“White? No. Subgalaxia,” he tasted the words under his breath.

Eyes going wide, I swivelled my attention to Lunam. “How do you know about the Subgalaxia?”

“Temp.” He kept his reply short. Pulling his own hairtie out, I was surprised that the length hit close to midback on him. I shared a glance with Ptolemy before following his example. My hair, curly as it was, would probably compete with his if it was pinstraight like his instead. Rolling up his sleeves, he presented his hands, palms up in a much more respectful manner to these men then he had with the wolfmen. “Tha mi a’ cur failte oirbh, a bhrathair.”

The two men studied his movements. One of them, the one without red bands turned to Ptolemy and me to see if we had something to add to this. The one with bands left his hands in the air over Lunam’s and replied back, “Tha sinn a’ toirt taing dhut.”

Laying his hands onto Lunam’s, the two closed their eyes and bowed their heads. I shifted my weight and raised an eyebrow at the man without bands. He turned to appraise the group of wolfmen sprawled out under a tree.

When the awkward, yet reverent moment Lunam and the white-haired man shared had ended, they both dropped their hands away from each other. Lunam motioned for me to come closer. “Temp named white man Fyskar. Know?”

Fyskar. Fyskar were legends. They were angels or maybe even demons. They were the propulsion system for the Subgalaxia. That much I could remember of the word and what little my childhood wanderings through the Library of Alexander had gained me. Blood drained out of my face and hands, leaving me in a cold sweat. If Ptolemy was scared of Mariners for their boating habits, I was terrified of these two men. They were true magic. Something I couldn’t even fully fathom.

The white-haired man with the red bands lifted his hands in their form of greeting. Lunam pointed for my hands. He demonstrated how to lay out my hands flat, palms up. “He talks here.” Lunam pointed to his head. “Easy talk.” Swallowing hard, I stole myself against trembling. The people of Hawria were watching this interchange and I needed them to see me as king, not child hiding behind maids’ skirts.

Laying out my hands, I waited as the man spoke to me gently in yet another language different from what the wolves spoke. His hands settled onto my palms, warm and calloused.

The docks vanished. I found myself on a marble tile floor, staring through thick glass at fish and corals. Light filtered through from high above, leaving the tall room in deep green hues. Jittery at the sudden transformation of my space, I turned in search of the man. A menagerie of deep red and plum velvet chairs and sofas spread out on the marble floor. A heavy wood clock ticked against a wall next to an alcove.

“You are welcome in my space,” a low voice directed my attention to a shadowed space against a wall near the massive windows. The Fyskar man sat on a navy blue chair, his black suit and purple frocked shirt making his white hair that much brighter. He would have been no more than a scattered shaft of light in the camouflage of the room.

“You speak my language?” I let the anxiety melt out of my limbs momentarily.

“The voice of the soul transcends linguistic barriers, brother.” The man motioned me to a chair next to him. “Come, sit. Observe.”

“Where is Ptolemy? Where am I?” I demanded, wary of leaving myself vulnerable.

“As Dmitri explained, we are here.” The man tapped the side of his head.

“I don’t understand.”

“No. But you will shortly. Come, it is easier to find a neutral ground when seated. You have little to fear of me as I am.”

“I think I will stand.” I tested.

The man raised a shoulder. “Then let us converse. I am Maolruibh. The man at my side in the waking world is my younger brother Raild, grandsons to Bernhard of the Fyskar. I will assume you have heard of him?”

My mouth ran dry. Grandsons? They looked to be in their twenties, but they would well be over two hundred if their grandfather had been on the Subgalaxia. “As a child, I was privileged to spend time in the Library of Alexander. There I learned of your stories.”

“Dmitri said that you are a Pharoah, a king of this biodome by the name of Henu. May I call you such?”

“Who is Dmitri?”

Maolruibh cocked his head at the question. “The man you had come greet us?”

“Lunam? Oh, Dmitri must be his original name. They have some strange practices in their dome.” Watching the deep sea fish, I was caught by a wandering thought. Wash was from the South Temple, up in the mountains. I had never questioned how he knew what the bottom of Nile looked like, let alone the fish often brought up from it.

“As I gathered. Henu, if I may?” Maolruibh drew me back from my thoughts.

“That is fine.”

The man gave me a procedural nod. “Borysko requested we come from the ship to speak, seeing as there is a language barrier, and Dmitri said he was not confident in explaining what was happening. Forgive us. We meant no harm to your dome. We have the technology beyond the emergency clotting cement to replace the panels.” I must have visibly sagged from that by the half smile Maolruibh gave me.

“My brothers must have startled you, forgive us. The Polaris Brotherhood forgets themselves that the dome-livers descended from the Red Hare line and are not capable of shifting.”

“Red Hare? Polaris Brotherhood? Shifting?” I stumbled over all these variables.

“You spent time in the Library of Alexander, yes?”

“As a young child. I know nothing of these words though. I know of Fyskar. Spirit talkers. They can see the whole of you unguarded; all your secrets and use this for their own doings.”

Maolruibh chuckled. “I haven’t heard you use the word evil yet, but your tone tells me that might be your logical end to that bit of knowledge. The Polaris Brother fractioned away from the surface world when Corbin, the great founder of the Subgalaxia and saviour of the human race, went against Anson’s request to leave his genetic line alone. You are a descendant of this deviance. As is Dmitri.”

I sat with that. “We’re brothers?”

“Not so much brothers in the way Raild and I are from the same mother, but more such relations in the same way that all Mariners share the same code that gives them their skin and eye color. You and Dmitri share the same code from the last true Red Hare.”

“How do you know that?”

“I see fire in Dmitri. I see it entwined in the very core of his being, built and driven by a forced evolution derived in test tubes and pipettes. I see in you the counterpart, the fuel of it, if you must. Why Corbin felt it necessary to split the code in such a way, I wish I knew.” The man rested his chin on his knuckles to regard me in quiet thought.

“We come from one of the Fyskar that drove the Subgalaxia?” The velvet of the chair ensnared my senses as I ran my thumb along a seem to sooth my racing heart.

“Fane Anson, yes. Fyskar were made of three sides – the White Horse, the Red Hare, and the Neutral. I am a White Horse. Fane Anson was the last true Red Hare. We are, in a way, complete opposites in power. Corbin, possessed by a curiosity that broke our lines of trust and loyalty, intersected Fane’s code with the populations of the ships escaping earth. Egg cells, sperm cells – he adjusted the DNA to host Fane’s fire in hopes of making a stronger species capable of surviving this infernal planet.

“We, Bernard’s progeny and the Polaris Brotherhood, left the ground domes to Corbin’s expirements and settled at the bottom of the sea – as you might assume from your surroundings. This is my void, my center, where I feel most at home. It is a real room in our domain.”

I studied the man as I slowly absorbed the wealth of information. “How do you know of Mariners?”

He gave me a half smirk. “I see you. All of you. Your malice and your hope. There is no hiding your history and your trajectory. In a way, it benefits me to quickly understand the cultures present around you.”

“Why are you here then, if you left us to our own devices?” I wanted to get up and pace off the restless energy building in my system. Instead, I settled against the chair back and forced myself to slowly relax each muscle group from my fingers into my chest.

Maolruibh shifted with the question. Collecting his thoughts, he studied a particularly large armoured fish sweeping by the window. A shadow fell across his face with the motion before the world came back to shimmering light. “The Polaris Brotherhood is small. We have kept our records as close as possible to prevent inbreeding. Now though, we are reaching a bottleneck. There is a limit to how far we can continue our lives without devastating consequences. Food production, housing, health. Those we are secure with. It is that we will die out.”

I blinked. “You came in unannounced and broke my dome to find fuck buddies?”

Maolruibh blanched. “I was trying to be polite about it. In such a rough way of saying it, yes. We need new blood.”

I settled my head into my hands and sighed out. All the pressing weight on my skin settled into a hard knot in my chest. Tears threatened. “Gods, I thought we were going to lose the whole of the Mariner’s Ghetto and the Nile Bay. We could have had more than two thousand people die. I’m going to be locking into this section of the dome for more than a week as we get those dome curtains up and you come to me with your magic and your demons and you want our blood?”

“Not blood in the same way as Dmitri requires.”

“No, I get that. I’m just not entirely sure you fully grasp the battle you are looking at in obtaining your objective here. Look through my memories. You’ll find issues abound in our hierarchical system.” I flinched back as Maolruibh sat forward and reached for my forehead. “What are you doing.”

“You said ‘look through your memories’. I shall.” He placed his hand on my head.

Chapel Orahamm (C) 2022-2024. All Rights Reserved.

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