<USS Cervantes> "Flight Away"

Chronology Note: This log takes place parallel to Rain Dance Pt II
 
"Flight Away"
Ashne'e Al Kiara
Special Guest Star: Kennedy Rhune
 
            The mythology of Ashne'e's home world was dense with
symbolism, if interpreted through the right gaze. In the beginning, the
Mother of Creation and the Lady of Destruction were banished to the
outskirts of the universe by the Sire of Order. Some anthropologists had
dared to hint that in the religions of the older Hubrian subcultures,
before the moieties were established, the Mother and the Lady had exiled
the Sire, and his opposite, the Creator of Chaos, to the outer dark.
Natural disasters and the nature of aquatic living had all but destroyed
the remaining vestiges of these legends. When technology spread and
brought economic prosperity with it, the modern tales were preserved,
forever emphasizing the ethos of order, where the female pursuits of
creation and destruction were relegated to the background.
            The Khefiraa were celebrating life. Their mythology
whispered about the closeness of death, always nudging the borders of
existence like a wave lapping at the shore that prophesies the incoming
tide. With the ease of a swimmer slipping beneath a wave, they accepted
death and celebrated life. They danced in cascades of violet stones and
made love publicly. 
            The Mother and the Lady had been silent goddesses, peering
down at their people from afar. Thanks to the intrusion of the
Ss'thla'an devils, the Khefiraan saw their own gods each night, pacing
the streets as harbingers. Perhaps their ideals, their gods, would
persist when the culture changed, enlivened by the strange reality that
underscored each mythological dream.
            "It could be worse," Ashne'e said.
            Kennedy shrugged sharply like a knife slipping in its
scabbard.
            The frenzy of touching, emotion-sharing, had ceased to a
lull, and the felines were cavorting in the room as though it were
nothing sacred at all, only another convenient place to celebrate. The
fur was thick, and the perfume of emotionality rife. It was difficult to
distinguish the statues in the crowd. 
            Those statues were strange. They were so poignant and
melancholy alone, so awe-inspiring when the culture was gone. In the
future, they were a dusty photo album in muted grey-tones; in the
present, they were just a breath beyond living, more than a jug of wine
or even an altar. They weren't sad or poignant at all. She wouldn't have
even been sure they were statues here, in the past, yet there had never
been a question in her mind in the future, although they seemed like
living tissue and were obviously not forged from any traditional metal
or stone.
            A blaze appeared through one of the gaps in the rafters
illuminating the statues, and Ashne'e looked up at it, momentarily
staggered by the dizzying height. Shading her eyes with her hand, she
filtered out the glare, and saw a beacon fire lit in a tall building
above them. She could remember that building the way it seemed in the
future, a tall hull peering over the other wreckage like a single rib
remaining on a decayed skeleton. She had never been close enough to see
the crenellations that pocked its pinnacle. In the future, there would
have been no way to glance at the fine filigree without climbing the
tower, and staring down below. None of the other buildings were tall
enough to show it as more than a blur far off in the heavens.
            The building they were in now must have fallen when the
sands swallowed the city. She remembered it now, a sad, but pretty chaos
of stones, still glimmering with paint and the occasional brightness of
a gem. It was strewn beside the main temple room like a fallen tree
stump clotted with weeds. It had crumpled under the force of
ill-designed architecture coupled with likely seismic activity.
            The jeweled webs were fading, but the blaze in the watch
tower shone like a sun.
            Like a sun.
            Ashne'e touched Kennedy's shoulder lightly but forcefully.
"We have to go."
            Kennedy pulled her arm away, but didn't shift. Even her
cloak remained perfectly still. "I'm reading the -"
            "When the wormholes vanish, and we're transported back to
our time, this tower is going to crumple, and we are going to plummet
from its height all the way down to the sand, or more likely, to the
ruins below."
            "Oh -"
            Kennedy's eyes were still lapping at the mural, greedily
burning the contents onto her retina, the better to sear them into her
memory. She pushed back on one heel, her throat diving backward at a
slant. 
            "The watch tower - it's lit -"
            "Yes," said Ashne'e, hurriedly. "And we have to -"
            "Ssarish told me yesterday. They light it to signal dawn."
It was Ashne'e's turn to stammer in panic as her heart fluttered against
the wall of her sternum.
"Oh-" 
            "But where are the Ss'thla? Why haven't they gone?"
            The room was awash with fur and pleasure, little moaning
mews spurting up like a ballerina's upraised fingers. Only their own
dark cloaks were a restful counterpoint to the vivid colors.
            "They did."
            "The webs are vanishing -" 
            "We have to -"
            Water droplets pounding slick pavement. A frenzy of Bach
beaten out by a fevered pianist, trickling sweat onto the keys until
they were drenched. Their feet joined the patter wordlessly, taking the
stairs that had balked them so long during the procession with
wind-speed. Their toes dug into the crevices as their soles slipped on
the marble, their hands swooping through the air to maintain the
precious commodity of balance.
            With their eyes open, regarding the solidity of the tower
and the stairs, it nevertheless seemed fragile as an eggshell. In the
mind's eye, it was wracked by shudders, crumbling into powder like a
sandcastle beneath a malevolent foot, shedding stones and beautifully
carved molding in a deadly rain darker than any hail. Around them, it
seemed to shake and fragment and weep into the pieces of an Escher
painting brushed by Salvidor Dali's surreality, until it was as broken
as a shattered mirror. The stairs threatened to vanish beneath them, to
send them plummeting through a void of darkness, never seeing light or
sound again, with the threat of sand looming below, never fulfilled, but
always darkly present.
             They were still running when they touched the etched stone
of the temple floor, their momentum carrying them like frightened birds
across the expanse and onto the dais beyond.
Their cloaks were shrouds no more, but coronas now, midnight halos.
Their bodies were visible beneath. Eyes sought out their forms, and both
women startled before matching features to the pupils boring into them.
Cultural contamination, they thought, and with the same force as an
obsessive compulsive, they buried themselves deep within the fabric. A
sensation of dirtiness crept along their flesh; this was the sort of
stain the soul could never forgive, a whole culture affected by the
carelessness of self-preservation.
The eyes that sought them were bright and frightened, but stared out
from high cheekbones and pale skin atop bronze lips parted in confusion.
The trail of faint brown markings wandering down the cheek like drunken
footsteps marked the owner as Lar.
            "What-?"
            Beside her boot, peaked by an infinitesimal wind, a scrap of
black fabric billowed away from the vivid green muzzle of a dead
Ss'thla.
            There was no time for discussions or explanations, because
the next second brought the dawn, and the whole world was different.

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