Lord Ryggion's thunderous "Don't shoot!" was their last sound of the Human World, as they hurtled clouds and outraced lightning by the Baugn's horrific speed, which elongated their vision, so that for one flickering moment, they glimpsed the electrical lash unfurled in its entirety, and slid alongside it until the world-beast seized a grassy knoll on the oasis.
"Don't dismount," Khyte shouted from the back of another Baugn. "This might be a short stop."
Leitara patted the ebony beast's warm, rippling fur. "Elani."
"I'm still here," she sighed.
"I can't make root or leaf of our leavetaking. Were you behind me, or did you leap from a Baugn already in flight to this one?"
"The latter."
"Why would you risk that? If it had poured on its full speed, you might have landed in Cuvaernei."
"I thought having a companion would make this flight faster. No one ever told me how fast they flew."
"As our meaty friend says, it isn't over. Look there." Although the planetoid still fabricated flashing clouds as it unraveled the steaming air, outside this fringe halo, the enormous surface of Hravak spilled in every direction. Perhaps it was a trick of the oasis's imperceptible momentum, but the Human World seemed to bubble ever so slightly upwards.
"That can't be Hravak?"
"Yes, we're standing on the other end of your farseeing lens, if at an entirely new perspective."
"It's breathtaking." After a few hushed moments, she added, "then we're on the dryad weapon."
"To be exact, it didn't start as a weapon. Between your world and mine are thousands of these miniature worlds."
"A rock doesn't start its career as a weapon until some clever ape ponders the rock pile. That floating archipelago is now your Queen's arsenal."
The next flight of Baugn carried the whooping Lord Ryggion, puffed even wider from exhiliration and hilarity, the two gray Drydanans Khyte claimed for parents, the one-eyed grizzled swordsmaster known as Iulf, and several younger Drydanans, who straddled the beasts with feebler grips than these tribal elders.
Seeing the soil beneath them, Ryggion and his warriors slid down and staggered until they regained their legs, then tottered nearer to the Baugn bearing Leitara and Elani.
"Are they drunk?" sneered Elani.
When Lord Ryggion leaned on the noble Baugn, he panted and smiled up at Leitara, then with a blinding flick of his wrist, his sword leaped into the world-beast's heart. The ebon neck, like a furling ribbon, coiled around Ryggion untl it stared him full in the face, when the beast slumped, dragging Ryggion underneath, his strangled breath rattling in the Baugn's dying throes.
When Elani's calf was pinched under its writhing hindquarters, she slithered away as a snake, while Leitara, by shoving off as it fell, landed nimbly, planted her feet, grasped a section of black furred neck in each hand, and untangled Ryggion's head. "Do something!" she barked. "Don't just sit there."
While the Drydanan lord could not extricate himself from the dying Baugn's convulsions, when the death murmur shivered its wings, legs, and neck, Leitara was able to free Ryggion from the coils.
"Why did you free me?"
"Humans are such rancorous creatures," said Leitara with a venomous look. "I should have let you choke."
"Don't think I owe you anything, Tree-Woman."
"At least an explanation. Why did you kill it?"
"While they're beautiful beasts, I came a long way for the pleasure of your company, and couldn't have it carrying you into the Abyss."
"Leitara," called Khyte. "They're leaving!" While inrushing Baugn still coated the oasis, the pooled black wings now shed in waves back into the Abyss, darting so quickly that they seemed to dwindle to gnats before dissolving into darkness.
"Let's table this conversation for another day." But when Leitara stepped toward Khyte's Baugn, Ryggion blocked her advance.
"Forgive my dissemblance--it's not only conversation that I seek, Tree-Woman."
"What else could you possibly want? While my growing garment might serve as negligee, it would not flatter your oasis-sized paunch; this Inamu sword is sharper and stronger, but lighter and shorter, and would not swing to your different strokes; as to my companions, you already lay a claim on the ne-er do well on the Baugn, and though the witch is my only friend, she inspires me with reluctance more than wonder. Which one would you have?"
"You forget your place and my position. I'm a lord. Though I might take them all and sort it out later, if you suffer to give me the garment and the Tree-Woman under it, the rest may go free."
When the next exodus of Baugn departed in a teeming cloud that shaded the planetoid from the Abyss-light, Khyte, his parents, and his swordsmaster shimmered in the crackling electrical storm, only to vanish in the black flickers of the strobing lightning.
"Why do meat men think I'm a trophy?" With an exasperated shudder, Leitara drew the Inamu sword from its makeshift sheath in her garment and rent the efflorescence to dangle in vegetal rags to her thighs. When Ryggion's eyes were drawn to her exposed attributes, she vented another frustrated grunt and lunged. Although he parried easily, he winced under her blow, backpedaled, and motioned to his guards, who advanced into an uneven circle around Leitara.
"Drop the sword, Tree-Woman," said Lord Ryggion. "Though our ballads say dryads regrow limbs, I'd weep a few tears if you make me test that myth."
When they hunched under their shields and warily raised their swords over their heads, she heaved her blade high, but when her target shuffled back from the downswing, she staggered under her overextended weapon and backpedalled, dragging her weapon back to the center of the circle. Each time she thought to strike one, he hastily retreated, and the others closed on her position. While they sometimes overshot their mark, having a lighter step on the buoyed but sinking oasis, the young men were hasty to return to their cautious stances, as if they feared Ryggion's discipline more than Leitara's sword.
"You're wasting your strength, Tree-Woman. Those sheepdogs won't fight you."
Leitara saw her predicament—while the warriors wouldn't fight, they hemmed her in wherever she moved, and though she might risk a wound by barging through their ranks to challenge Ryggion, she was unfamiliar with the Inamu sword, and Ryggion was a skilled warrior.
"I should have let you die," she seethed, then sprang, with all her vegetal force and lightness, over the heads of those beside her--feeling the wind slit by the swords swinging under her heels--and sprinted for the thick cloud of Baugn.
While the world-beasts were fast departing, for the present, their number spread faster, as the mountains disgorged their burden of Baugn in gloomy waves toward the oasis, where they dispersed in a restless rabble, moaning, trilling, and thrashing their wings.
"Bring her back, and I'll only kill one of you dogs!" Savagely motivated by this shout of Lord Ryggion, the warriors' panting nearly drowned out the clank of armor in their frenzied pursuit of the Tree-Woman and life.
Reaching the fringe of the mobbing Baugn, Leitara leaped onto a lively world-beast that threaded quickly towards the departing swarm.
When her left arm was seized, and she raised the sword in her right hand, another warrior grappled that limb and had nearly pulled her down when a wriggling green serpent dropped from her hair to hang by its teeth from the man's cheek. His eyes rolled white, his hands scratched Leitara, and he collapsed into a convulsing froth.
Though she rang her sword pommel on the other's helm, he held on relentlessly as the Baugn shot into the Abyss, hollowing out a whistling funnel of speed through the reddening darkness. The meat man's teeth-chattering shriek was stopped by the savage repetition of Leitara's hilt blows, cracking his helm and gauntlets and splitting the pommel of the Inamu sword. When he fell into their slipstream, he faded into the distance so fast that he seemed to wink into nothingness.
Leitara's snarl relaxed last, long after her heart soothed to a murmur, her knees relaxed their clench on the Baugn, and her green blood seeped back to her white-knuckled hands. She would be grateful for the wood-witch's assistance if Elani did not presume to make of her body a lair for the dark desires she aptly clothed in snake skin. Moreover, Leitara tired of anticipating Elani's opinions and appetites, and if she was curious whether she was trampled or slithered to safety, she was anxious for neither outcome.
Despite this silent farewell and heartfelt good riddance, she expected the wood-witch would spring anew, like Khyte, with a weed's persistence. Weeds. Her smile stretched the dull ache of her tightened face, which had held its scowl overlong; While days ago she was the esteemed seed of a noble Tree-Mother, now her lot was cast among the weeds.
Leaning forward to grasp the Baugn's forequarters, Leitara then straddled it with both arms and legs, her cheek resting on soft black fur. Soft. Had two days of life mellowed her already, that the Baugn's fur should seem so exquisitely soft?
When she awoke, the Baugn was cleaving toward the vermillion swath of Abyss-light glimmering through the constant melting of the Abyss. For hours, their headlong journey dissolved into the unknown point of the Baugn's desire, until a devouring thirst roared in Leitara, as if echoing the oases welling up from yellow motes to golden streaks flooded by Abyss-light, then green pools blurred by the momentum of the Baugn. Moreover, the Abyss-light glinted on the swarm of Baugn flanking them left and right. While the planetoids' details were destroyed by their great speed, the world-beasts were preternaturally clear, for since their speed was matched, they seemed to hover in place, the slower Baugn drifting backwards while the faster shuddered forward, as if each were subject to a capricious current bending mighty whims wheresoever it willed. Although she craned her neck here and there to look for Elani, Khyte, and her execrable pursuers, she saw only the droning world-beasts teeming towards the oases.
"Stupid Elani. I might have torn free on my own. Now who will lecture me? Must I entertain myself and my incalculable, insufferable store of opininonated whispers with only two days of life to review?"
She half hoped the wood-witch would take that moment to reveal herself, having latched on to the Baugn at the last moment, but when no such revelation occurred, she settled against the Baugn to count the subtle differences in the swarming world-beasts' coats: this one was dappled, that one had the hint of stripes, and another was so gray as to seem white in the dazzling Abyss-light.
When the Baugn slowed passing through a tangle of dry vines suspended in the Abyss, a kind of floating orchard burgeoning with fruit swollen to the point of bursting, Leitara first only grazed one, but her second exploded, coating her hand and cheek with pulp, and at the fringe of the Abyssal thicket, having nearly thrown herself from the Baugn to grasp the fruit, her third laid shiny and gelatinous in her lunged hand. She bent to the bloated fruit, seized a juicy mouthful in her teeth, then devoured the tatters, licked the dribbles from her lips for the dribbles, and felt herself in that moment to be the center of the bursting flesh, as if she was devouring herself, not the Abyssal fruit.
The Baugn mazed through the creeping gardens of the Abyss until they neared a flyspeck oasis no longer than one of Cuvaernei's sidestreets, although it teemed with gigantic plants, some of which were longer than the planetoid in which they rooted, so that Leitara brushed aside stalks and wide grass blades in a descent that moved glacially compared to her other, shocking landings. The Baugn had not only quieted, it had gentled, as if it was not only familiar with their surroundings, but home. Finding a tiny vacuole seemingly hewn to match the Baugn, it landed on its haunches, then rolled into the hollow, forcing Leitara to scramble aside or be crushed under the exhausted beast, whose coarse, shuddering pants soon segued into snores.
Although dumbfounded by the minuteness of this oasis, Leitara found her scattered thoughts as she circled its equatorial grove, a few dozen fruit trees overshadowing the dwarf firs stubbling its snub poles. Even more so than on Xulcia, the Baugn night land, her weight ebbed away on this meager world, and she felt little more substantial than the wispy breath she held in her astonishment as she leaped a gnarled, hulking tree, which had, in not knowing up from down, grown in alternating directions, and ended as an arboreal knot. Moreover, the flyspeck oasis had no atmosphere of its own, but swam in the tepid air and vemilion twilight of the Abyss.
During her jaunt on this tree-stump of a world, no other Baugn landed. If her chosen world-beast was an eccentric loner, perhaps it marked a change in her fortunes, for while no other migrating Baugn would attend to her departure, neither would Ryggion or his goons, and she must only wait by her slumbering steed.
As she walked through the sere overgrowth, her brush cut and thorn-pricked feet vexed her so sorely that she leaped for the highest branch, and swung branch to branch to the Baugn's cave. As the distant Human World was shaded in under the leafy canopy, when she dropped to the grass, she could still trace its faint outline.
When another Baugn timidly approached the sleeping world-beast, it seemed less caution than an attitude of submission, and as Leitara wondered what would happen next, she nearly missed the cracking leaves and the telltale whiff of meat man.
Was she a moment faster in her recognition, she might have raised her sword to meet the blow which spun both blade, and the severed hand grasping it, through the slow air of the Abyss. Prepared by her memories, the sudden wound shocked more than it stung, and with a reflex born of desperation and denial, Leitara thrust her fist into the neck that still bore bruises from the dying Baugn. As Lord Ryggion staggered under his sword, which was lifted overhead for a second slash, it crashed behind him, then skipped, tearing the tall grasses and dragging a furrow through the glinting soil.
When the meat man gagged, grasped his throat with both hands, and bent on her a murderous glare, he stumbled over the sword's crossbars, strove to regain his footing in the lightness of the oasis, and collided with the trunk of the gigantic tree, which thrashed back, shook the rooted ground, then swung its vast leafy canopy from shade to light, knocking them from night to day as its gnarled branch brushed Ryggion back toward Leitara.
One-armed, and much lighter than her meaty opponent, Leitara had little hope in combat, but despite that, firmly grasped this last straw, hoping to uproot her troubles in one go. So the Tree-Woman planted her feet, stiffened her remaining arm in his hurtling approach, and at the last moment, slid the fist a hair down, hoping to assault his bruised neck yet again.
Seeing his impending destuction, Ryggion grasped at the branches his flying bulk stripped away, and the shrubs his hurtling mass uprooted, and, at the last, a vine that unraveled its soil, showering them in an explosion of dirt as her fist connected, not with his turned neck, but his armored shoulder, which resulted in the sickening three-fold crunch of the metal plate, the shoulder and collarbone under it, and Leitara's hand, splayed in a shredded snarl of green fingers. Copious red blood from his gouged shoulder and neck mingled with the lesser flow of green blood, although both meat man and Tree-Woman screamed noisily and noisomely.
"Stupid farm animal!" Leitara shrieked, as she stepped away from the broken human. "Why can't you stay in your stone pens and domesticate your stray desires? Just because you want me for dark purposes doesn't make my fate yours."
"Please," Ryggion moaned. "Help me."
"Having some experience in helping you, I don't think so. Even if your shoulder is wrecked and your head was a mess to begin with, your legs aren't broken, meat man."
"I must be dying," groaned the human lord. "No one in the land of the living would have the effrontery to speak to me thus."
"You're not the lord here, the Baugn is. Here, your men are a fiction, and your lands are a thought."
When Hravak's cloudy outline darkened, a gradual darkening emanating from a black spot in its southern hemisphere, shadows rippled overhead as well, cooling the tepid climate of the oasis.
"Now they're not even that," sneered Leitara.
"What is that?" Ryggion's good arm wavered pointing to the Human World.
"It would be cruel to call it home now."
"Why do you speak in circles, Tree-Witch?"
"Your pain makes you confused—the Wood-Witch is my friend; I'm the Tree-Woman. And since we're speaking so generally, that black cloud is the destruction of Hravak—at least the side where you lived."
When Lord Ryggion's rasping sawed into unconsciousness, Leitara lifted her mangled hand, then her stump. Though the green flow had stopped, her arm would take four days to heal, given water and light. While her thumb, forefinger, and middle finger might grow back tomorrow, the less useful danglers might take a week. Sometimes dryad pinkies never grew back, although this was rare.
Thinking the Baugn would likely sleep for many hours, and that Ryggion could not heal as fast as a Tree-Woman, she left both problems behind as she scoured the oasis until she found a bubbling pond more deep than wide. Thinking this planetoid could not have much water, and whatever water cycle it supported was already siphoned by the Baugn, she rationed herself, and drank only what she required, hands-free, by kneeling beside the bubbling pool and dunking her head into the froth. Although cool and refreshing, it acted as if it was boiling; though too thirsty to care about understanding it, the churning bubbles were as refreshing as her gulps of water.
Thinking that she could afford to rest a moment, she woke hours later, and stayed in her grassy bed a few minutes more as she gawked at Hravak, which had spun to its other side and dragged the fringe of its expanding cloud to wrap around the other hemisphere, leaving only a central bright spot like the white of an eye on the Human World's reverse.
Although her left hand was not yet healed, new growths pushed through the dessicated crumbs of her old thumb and forefinger, and she rubbed this crumble away on the bark of the giant tree. Her stump had lengthened two inches, tapering toward the wrist, a dramatic growth much faster than she expected.
She returned to find that the second Baugn had vanished; in place of Lord Ryggion, there was a bloody depression in the grass; and, her Baugn was decapitated in several messy strokes by the Inamu sword, which lay crusted with blood between its torn neck and the head, which had rolled a few yards and levelled an eight-eyed stare into the Abyss. Gouges at the lip of the hollow marked its confused, plaintive death throes.
She searched in vain for Ryggion, and by the time she stopped searching the toy planet, her fingers had grown through, which, though they included a good pinky, she could not think of as good fortune, and threw herself on her belly for a fretting, fitful sleep on the grass, only to awake not only dampened by dew, but the unwilling nest of tiny spherical insects which rolled over her back, splayed limbs, and upturned face by the shiver of cilia-like legs that covered them like hair.
When Leitara exhausted the tiny territory, its only unexplored turf was the elongated tree, which tapered and spiralled until its flimsy, curlicued bole wavered under her feather-lightness, drawing her eyes in a funnel of vertigo to the pale pink blossoms perched on the tremulous twig-end dangling on the brink--"Flower," she said, "I will call this world Flower."
The next morning—and time was such a confused flurry on the whirling planetoid that six of Flower's days and nights were crammed in Leitara's waking day, and she was often awakened from sleep by the rude Abyss-light—Leitara decided to call Flower home. Still hoping for the luck of a stray Baugn, however, she decided not to put in the work of building one. Instead, she stole the Baugn's cave, however much it smelled like musty fur, and through a few judicial slices, removed the world-beast in manageable parcels.
Her daily excursion to the bubbling pond wasn't a long walk, and as gazing at both nearby oases and the receding cloud on Hravak were her main entertainments, she soon looked forward to this daily constitutional.
When the dark cloud settled into a black shield, Leitara's interest shifted to the oases, which began to exhibit their own strange phenomena—shadowy streams that passed between the oases. When Leitara tried to work out the pattern to the transit of shadow-stuff, her best guess was that plumes of ejected soil reacted in sympathy to the destruction of Hravak. Then she dismissed it as a stupid idea, having never been much of a scientist.
When the shadow plumes seemed to stretch toward Flower, she scooped bubbly mud from the pond banks, returned to her hollow, and sealed its entrance. While she feared a mighty storm of air, water, or Abyssal debris would overwhelm the tiny planetoid, when the hour of its fall was at hand, the lowing of Baugn, the mashing of wings, and the tremor of alighting feet drew her from the caked-in cave to see Flower teeming with Baugn, and the air choked so black with world-beasts that it overwhelmed the lesser blackness of the Abyss. It was as if Hravak's dark cloud had swept over Flower.
"Leitara!"
While it was not the voice she wanted to hear and her heart sank on hearing it, she was so desperate for any society at all that she couldn't help smiling. But when she gazed through the smile to see not only Khyte astride a Baugn, but Elani holding onto him, she felt that she had wasted her smile on the meat man.
"Leitara!" he repeated. "Mount up. We're not dismounting. There's too much risk." Although both seemed gaunter, with frowsy hair and sunken faces that seemed hungry for their trembling smiles, the meat man added to this urgency a frazzled beard, while the Wood-Witch's black hair grew in a raven streak under her white locks.
When Leitara mounted behind Elani, the three sat quietly, their eyes on the roiling Baugn above.
"It shouldn't be long," said Elani.
"Don't sell them short," said Khyte. "We know how stupid they can be."
"Have you been together all this time?" When Leitara felt a pang of jealousy for the first time in this seed life, it was not only more painful than she remembered, but her whispering host of past selves seemed to mock her envy, as if in her stay on Flower they had turned on her for presuming to forget them in her struggles to take root in the meager oasis.
"Not at first," said Elani. "But soon enough. After I bit the one holding you,
I had the good luck to latch onto the tail of a Baugn. Taking care not to prick its skin with my fangs, I shifted to my own shape, then climbed on its back. When it landed on a neighboring oasis moments after one bearing Khyte, we resolved not to flutter through the Abyss alone, though we were not then the fast friends we are now. I suppose we have you to thank for that, as we had nothing else in common at first."
"It was good thinking, Wood-Witch," said Khyte. "If we had not, you would have died, and I would have settled in for a month of lonely roving."
"What do you mean?" Astonishment and dread stirred in Leitara. "Surely you haven't been in the Abyss all this time?"
"That is exactly what I meant. Like the Drydanans of old, we're nomads. We shuttle back and forth between oases, at first only grasping fruit as we clung to our Baugn, but having accepted the fact that the world-beasts now migrate in an endless loop between oases—when they're not sleeping the sleep of exhaustion—we now dismount, take our rest, and eat our fill."
Elani took up the thread. "The Baugn refuse to roost on any world. While they pass oasis to oasis, and sometimes beyond the worlds, only to double back at the point of no return, they never land on Hravak, Alfyria, Ielnarona, Nahure, or Nymerea. Their omission is so intentional it seems that they're either snubbing the Five Worlds or searching for a lost foal."
"Or grieving," said Khyte.
"Grieving?" scoffed Leitara.
"For Mount Juntawni, their ancestral land. Think of Drydana, or Wywynanoir, gone in a thunderflash of falling stone. Do Tree-Women not grieve for places?"
Leitara deigned not to answer this, and fell silent as their Baugn fought the closely swarming world-beasts, stirred its mighty wings, then shot into the Abyss.