Strange Friends

Truly, the most horrifying thing to him. Will he find out besides being very wet its filled with tons of terrible things that want to maul and eat him?

Or worse.... Suffocation by selachi glomp!!!

What a great chapter ! You did a superb job on depicting Jab's flight here and how much she loves to fly. It was touching
And seeing her straining herself to avoid insults was just cute XD

Thank you all for your comments. Indeed, what terrors await in the dreadful ocean? Hopefully nothing bad will come up before Calimn makes her way to the beach. References to vore, and the eating of another hapless squid. Comment as you like.

Chapter 6: Old Friends

“NONONONONO!”

“What is wrong with you? It’s the ocean. Well, technically a sea, but whatever.”

Swiftlit was at least forty feet up in the air, clinging to a massive palm frond tightly. Jab, looking somewhere between confused and annoyed, was trying to pluck him off of the leaf, to no avail. There was no way to get him to let go, his legs and arms wrapped firmly around the stalk of the frond. No matter how she tugged, he wouldn’t give up his grip on the tree, and she wasn’t willing to try using any more force than she currently was exerting.

“It’s not going to hurt you, you little sn- . . . mouse. It’s just water.”

“I c-c-can’t s-swim!”

“So? Just don’t go farther than where the water reaches your waist. Heck, you don’t even have to get in the water at all.”

“It ch-chased m-me!” the boy declared, tightening his hold on the frond.

“That’s called the tide, and waves. See, now it’s going back.”

Swiftlit looked, and discovered that the harpy was right. The rush of sea that had suddenly darted forward to try and grab his feet was receding, leaving a darker stretch of sand that slowly dried as the warm sun reached it. He stared out at the sea, and instantly felt a thrill of fear.

Water, water for miles and miles and miles. He had no idea this much of it could exist at one time. The Jewel River was huge, yes, and it was hard to see the other side, but the ocean was just one gigantic mass of water, one that seemed to go on forever, and he couldn’t see one speck of land out in it at all. Where was the other side of this thing? Even if he looked right and left, it extended infinitely in either direction, and it went off into the horizon as if it was never going to stop. It got deeper, too; he could see the darkening of the surf as his eyes strayed farther and farther from shore. It definitely went over his head.

Suddenly the water rose up, a long bulge turning into a curled wave that charged up onto the beach and swept over the sand. Swiftlit tensed; it was coming back! The wave receded, though, long before it reached the base of his tree. Waves he had seen before, but not like this. There wasn’t anything causing them at all. The water was just doing it on its own, for no apparent reason, and that scared him to death. Was it alive? He couldn’t see anything out in the water that could be causing the disturbance, no dark shadow to denote an aquatic animal. From up here he could see a school of fish, but there was nothing big enough to make the entire sea act up, all the way along shore for as far as he could see.

Another tug from Jab forced him to hang on harder, but the momentary lapse in attention allowed the harpy to pull his legs off of the frond. Now he was hanging on only by his arms, and without the extra help he was going to have to let go sooner or later. Another tug, this one harder, prompted him to hold on with everything he had, even though there was no way he could keep from letting go now.

“Okay, now you’re just being weird. IT. WILL. NOT. HURT. YOU. Let go and calm down. Sit down and play in the sand until Calimn gets here, or something.”

“NO! I-I’m not g-g-getting close t-t-to th-that thing!” he yelled.

Jab let go of his legs, and instantly the boy hooked them around the palm frond, squeezing the life out of the stalk. The harpy crouched down, bringing her head level with Swiftlit. He had his eyes shut tightly now, and had the frond in a bear hug. How could anyone be so scared of water? Even if he couldn’t swim, this was silly. How to make him stop clinging to the palm tree like his life depended on it . . . Maybe she could just sit down and wait. He might well cool off on his own.

“Okay.”

The harpy stretched, muscles in her back uncoiling, and fell backwards. The impact wasn’t nearly as heavy as one would have expected, a combination of her light frame and wings slowing her fall, but it still shook the tree Swiftlit was glued to from root to frond. The boy kept his hold, but loosened his grip now that no one was trying to drag him from his perch. Jab, for her part, laid on her back, taking a deep breath of the salty air. The breeze that was coming in from the sea ruffled her feathers and washed over her skin, warm and placid.

It had been a long time since she had been near the ocean. Last time she had been here was at least six or seven years ago, and her visit had been short lived. The hybrid predators in the area had made it clear she was to keep her claws off the local neko tribe, and the uncomfortable atmosphere had made her decide that leaving might be a better option. Hopefully this time no one would get bent out of shape about her hanging around.

* * * * *

Calimn could tell when she reached the Topazial Sea, without even looking out into the vast expanse of it. Close to the mouth of the river, the salt and fresh water mixed, and beyond that the mermaid could taste the difference in the liquid. It felt different going through her gills, and she felt lighter in it, more buoyant.

Nostalgia.

She had been born in the ocean, lived much of her life there, and she hadn’t been here in more than a year. She took a long draw of the saline-imbued water, letting the feel of it linger. It felt great. Freshwater had its own merits, granted, but the sea was warmer, and more complex. She flicked her tail, coasting along and searching for a current.

Aha.

She felt the change in flow right away. A current, fairly strong, and headed down the coast. Perfect. She slid into the current, then allowed it to carry her. The boost it provided to her speed as she continued on with a few strokes of her fin would definitely help her join up with the two faster.

Jab had told her just to go cruising down the Torpaline Coast. The both of them would stay on the beach, easily visible, and all the mermaid would have to do would be to keep an eye out for them as she followed the shore.

The mermaid flipped onto her back, rising up until she popped up out of the surf. A glance at the sand off to her left showed nothing, so she flicked her tail a few times to keep her momentum going and looked up at the sky. It was incredibly blue today, and there was a single, bright sun high in the air, barely any clouds at all. Calimn yawned, arching her back in the water, tail curling until it touched her hands and her body formed an oval. A second later she relaxed, letting herself unwind.

Drifting more than swimming now, she whistled a few notes out, but yawned again halfway through. It felt good to be back in the ocean after so long, and the combination of warmer waters and the warm sun was making her ready to float the rest of the way there on her back and maybe take a nap while she was at it.

A quick roll and a dive let cooler water clear some of the sleepiness from her head. She wasn’t ready to fall asleep just yet; she wanted to sit back to back with Jab, and Swiftlit lying on top of her head. She came up to the surface again and continued on her way, using easy, slow movements to propel herself along and using the current to help keep her speed up.

Another yawn, and this one made her inhale several gallons of seawater. She shook her head; she needed something to wake herself up with. Something . . . aha! A look at the beach showed something interesting. It looked like a decent sized squid was fighting with a fish of some kind in the shallows. A two-for-one meal, she thought, twisting to the side and heading over to the struggling animals.

The fish was a slim, needle-toothed thing, somewhat like a barracuda the size of a shark, and it seemed to be winning the physical argument. It had already eaten one of the squid’s tentacles, and it had shredded another limb to nothing but bleeding ribbons. The squid kept trying to grapple the fish, attempting to draw it close enough to bite with the serrated beak on its underside. The two were so embroiled in their fight that they didn’t notice the looming danger until the mermaid crashed down on them.

The nasty-toothed fish snapped at the cephalopod one last time, then darted away in a flash of glinting scales and ivory teeth. Its speed saved it; Calimn didn’t bother with grabbing at the quicksilver fish. The squid, injured and not nearly so fast, was caught in an instant, hauled into the air by a few of its remaining tentacles. The other flailing limbs immediately tried to wrap aroung her wrist, but by then it was far too late. The suckers popped in rapid succession, sounding like gunshots, as the mermaid coiled her tongue around the flailing cephalopod and dragged it into her waiting mouth.

Calimn let the squid thrash for a moment, limbs writhing and trying to get a grip on her face. Squid and octopi were pretty much her favorite food next to humans and such; she just loved the texture, and the peculiar sensation they gave while thrashing around in her stomach tickled like crazy. She slurped up the tentacles, flinching a little as one of the tendrils that had coiled around a strand of her hair came loose. A hasty swallow sent the cephalopod on its way to her stomach. That snack ought to keep her feeling a bit more awake with all the struggling it was doing.

Pleased with her catch and ready to meet up with her two friends, the mermaid never noticed the dark shadow that matched her pace, out in the open ocean.

* * * * *

Swiftlit was sitting up in the tree, no longer hanging on to the fronds for dear life, and enjoying the sea breeze. The Torpaline Coast was actually lovely, and the weather was a match for the scenery. Disregard the gigantic, apparently alive and moving mass of water that ate up the entire horizon like a blue monstrosity, and it was a great place to be. He looked back, into the jungle behind him, and scrutinized the foliage closely. The coast might be nice, but he wasn’t going to just relax. Felarya wasn’t forgiving enough for that, and even with Jab around he kept a sharp eye out for any sudden movement.

Jab sat up, stretched languidly, and shook herself to get the sand out of her feathers. A glance at Swiftlit showed that he wasn’t clinging to the palm tree anymore, now just sitting up on the top of the fronds and looking around. She was about to pluck him from the tree and set him on the beach when she halted. He had noticed her approach, and had one hand tentatively placed on the stalk, legs already wrapped around the frond tightly. After a moment, she withdrew her talons, and sat down again.

Swiftlit loosened up, releasing the tree and backing up to sit in the middle of the fronds. Jab didn’t seem as if she were going to press him about getting down, so he leaned back onto one of the broad leaves and drummed his feet against the rough bark of the palm tree. He had to admit that the coast’s atmosphere was soothing, and the warmth here was more pleasant than the thick humidity of the jungles farther inland. He could see a few birds floating on the light wind coming in from the ocean, drifting low over the waves farther out. Their calls were quiet, adding to the calm garnered by the serene weather and the low sound of the surf.

Even though he had been passed out for a good half of the flight over to the coast, it was just so relaxing here that he could just fall asleep. He peered sleepily over the edge of the palm fronds, checking on Jab. She was sitting down, preening herself while she waited for Calimn to show up. He watched for a little while, surprised by how flexible the harpy was. She could bend her torso almost double and easily reach the feathers on her hips and upper legs, teasing out loose feathers with her teeth, twist her head around to nibble at her own shoulder blades, and she could even scratch her head with her talons.

She ran one of her primary pinions through her mouth, then noticed the boy looking at her. He quickly broke eye contact and turned his gaze up to the sky again, while Jab went back to work on her other wing with a slight smile. At least he wasn’t trying to distance himself from her anymore . . . a closer look at the way he was studiously keeping his eyes on the sky made her revise the thought. At least he wasn’t trying to distance himself as much. As it was, he was only just comfortable enough to not be staring at her and flinching when she moved.

Calimn was the one to thank for that. The flight, and the proximity caused by it, had gotten him a bit more used to Jab’s presence. She was going to have to roll with the momentum and try to get him to be more at ease around her.

“You know what you call a little naga in the Great Rocky Fields?”

Swiftlit glanced at her.

“Huh?”

“A half-snake in the grass!”

A blank expression let her know she hadn’t done it right.

“Eh, what’s a harpy’s favorite instrument?”

“What?”

“A harp.”

“Uhhh . . .”

The look of utter bewilderment left the harpy flailing for something good, something that she had picked up from her travels and meals . . . She couldn’t think of anything right off the top of her head except for one joke a fairy had made.

“Umn, a pair of nagas are eating some humans, and one of them says, ‘I thin-‘ . . . Oh.”

Swiftlit’s face had gone from befuddled to a kind of wary discomfort.

Foot, mouth, Jab thought, wanting to kick herself for not thinking before she started the joke.

After a moment of awkward silence, Jab coughed and looked away, face hot. Swiftlit just kept staring at her with that bizarre expression, and the pause extended to nearly two minutes.

“Sorry, that was a really wit- . . .” Jab took a breath, “stupid joke.”

“Wh-what’s a harp?”

“Uh, just a . . . nothing. Never mind.”

Well, that had gone downhill in a hurry. Jab went back to nipping bits of loose, downy fluff from the undersides of her wings, face still slightly red.

She had a pile of down the size of a car at her feet when Swiftlit spoke.

“Why d-does the ocean k-k-keep coming in and going b-back out? Is it alive?”

“No, it’s not. That’s just how it is, I guess.”

Jab looked out into the sea, watching the waves roll in. She stared out, sharp eyesight picking out the details of the ocean. Where was that mermaid? A flock of airgle were floating over the swells a fair ways out, but other than that she could see no sign of anything in the sea. The harpy stood up, taking a few steps into the surf and going in up to where the feathers began halfway up her legs. The cooler water felt nice, particularly after standing on the warm sand. She didn’t go any farther in; she didn’t want to get her feathers full of saltwater after just having preened them.

Well, there was also Swiftlit. She wanted to keep an eye on him. He was still up in the palm tree, halfway asleep and reclining among the heavy fronds, but he would check his surroundings every few minutes with a quick sweep of his eyes. Calimn had told her that he was able to handle himself fairly well due to his agility and speed, but she wanted to be sure something didn’t nab him while she wasn’t paying attention.

Jab should have been paying more attention to her surroundings.

An explosion of foam and spray erupted in front of the harpy, making both the bird-woman and the boy start with sudden fear. Jab tried to jump back, reflexes kicking in, but she was slow, far too slow. A pair of arms wrapped around her middle, hoisting her into the air. Jab flailed, trying to figure out what was att-

“Got you, Jab,” Calimn laughed, putting her friend back down.

“Geez, you disgusting slobberface, I almost clawed your scaly butt to ribbons!” Jab chuckled, taking the ambush in stride.

Swiftlit, having previously ducked down and attempted to hide himself with a few of the palm fronds, breathed a sigh of relief on seeing that Jab wasn’t being mauled by some seagoing monstrosity. As the harpy and mermaid made their way back to the palm tree, he waved.

“Hey, Swiftlit. I see Jab didn’t eat you as a mid-flight snack on the way here.”

The harpy snorted, “Pfft, I never eat anything on the wing. I like to land and enjoy it. Flying and eating at the same time just doesn’t let you taste things properly.”

* * * * *

Calimn hauled herself up onto the sand, working her way over to the palm tree and sitting up next to it. Jab took a seat on the opposite side of the mermaid, letting the two talk.

“So what do you think of the Torpaline Coast?”

“It’s nice . . . umn, except for the s-sea,” the boy responded, glancing nervously over at the ocean.

“Oh, the ocean is great, though! Out a ways there are some beautiful reefs with lots of colorful fish and eels and delicious octopi. I’m going to go out and visit them in a while. You want to come?”

Swiftlit stared out at the ocean, then rapidly shook his head.

Calimn rolled her eyes.

“Even if you can’t swim, you don’t have to be scared of it . . . Well, maybe you should be a little scared of it. There are quite a few predators in the sea. Mermaids, chlaenas, giant fish, nagas –oh yeah, there’s sea snake nagas, too-, those snakes covered in gems, lots of things.”

The boy just made a soft wheezing sound of fear and looked back at the waves with newfound horror. Calimn just laughed, shaking her head.

“You don’t have to worry. You can just sit up on my head and you’ll be safe. Unless you want to stay in my stomach?” she joked, grinning.

He shook his head again, hard, and grabbed ahold of the palm frond firmly.

“Come on now, don’t act like that. I’ll keep you safe, and you can get used to water. The reefs are really pretty, too.”

“C-c-can’t I just st-stay here and sit up in the t-tree?”

“But that’s such a waste of a good trip! Come on, show some sense of adventure. I’ll swim nice and slow for you, and then make a sand castle for you to relax in. How’s that sound?”

“I’ll just stay here. That ocean is creepy,” he announced, gripping the tree even harder as he looked out to sea.

“Jab, could I borrow a feather?”

“Wha-? Pfft, I’ll lend you one out of pity, you filthy bum.”

The bird-woman lifted one wing, then shook the limb, hard. The wind from the motion sent a swirl of sand around the beach, but, more importantly, it showed her what she was looking for. She tilted her wing, nuzzled the underside of it for a moment, and pulled a small, fluffy feather loose. The downy bit of fuzz came out with a sharp but not unpleasant tug.

A smile quirked Calimns lips as she took the feather.

“St-t-to- Ahahahah- n-no, st-t-t-tahahah- st-ah-hahahaha- quit-t-t-t-tahahah!” Swiftlit squeaked, laughing so hard he had tears running out of his eyes and he was starting to lose his grip.

The fuzz of the feather kept brushing against his sides, and he absolutely couldn’t stand it. At this rate he was going to have to let go of the frond and fall. Maybe he could dodge the water and run inland when he hit the sand? He was laughing too hard; the world had become blurred by tears and he could hardly breathe.

“Let go or I’ll keep this up. You want to die laughing? Come on. Tickle, tickle, tickle. Let go and I’ll stop,” Calimn chuckled.

Jab was trying not to burst out laughing at the scene. It was so funny it was almost surreal. A bond like this was just so off-the-wall absurd that it was hilarious. She finally did laugh as the boy, out of energy and barely able to breathe from all the tickling, let go of the palm frond and allowed Calimn to pluck him from the tree. The mermaid, with a triumphant grin, placed him on top of her head like a ridiculous, tiny hat and slid back into the sea. Jab opted to stay on shore, taking a quick nap to rest after her flight over the mountains.

Calimn could feel Swiftlit squirming around on her head, messing up her hair as he fidgeted. Even though she was keeping him well out of the water, he was twitching around and squeaking at every little bob and dip, and he had a death grip on a strand of her sapphire locks. She had to smile at it, and reached up to pat his head gently. She would keep him safe, and maybe he would get more comfortable around water. He would never be able to swim, given his bizarre trait of gaining density when wet, but a little confidence around water would do him some good.

An easy one-two sweep of her tail sent them towards the dark line in the deeper water that showed where the reefs began, and soon they were drifting above the bright coral and darting fish.

“See, nothing to worry about. Check it out.”

Calimn let herself sink slightly, getting lower in the water so that Swiftlit could cautiously peer down in to the sea and observe the life flitting about below. She heard him take a sudden breath, whether from fear of the water or awe at the sea life she wasn’t sure.

The mermaid, too, looked down, Swiftlit adjusting his position so as to not fall off her head.

The reef was beautiful, a multihued mass of various corals of many differing shapes and sizes. Branching yellow coral arched over blobs of brain-coral the color of grass, and fan-coral that matched fire in its scarlet hue. It was like a stone rainbow, with flecks of color flickering in an out of it. Fish, large and small, cruised around it, as well as some decent-sized sharks, a few rays, and a human-sized mermaid that immediately retreated on seeing her larger brethren. Calimn snickered at the small hybrid; she didn’t eat other mermaids unless starving.

She adjusted her head again, Swiftlit scrambling to avoid the water.

“Cool, isn’t it?”

“Y-y-yeah, I g-guess,” Swiftlit stuttered, glancing around constantly and nervously.

“Calm down, nothing is going to just up and attack you while I’m here. Don’t worry about the water, either. I won’t let you fall in, and if you do by accident, I’ll grab you. You’re perfectly sa-“

Something yanked on her tail, hard enough to pull her under for a half-second. Instantly she felt Swiftlit turn heavy, a lead weight resting on the crown of her head. He spluttered, taken by surprise by the sudden dunking. Calimn, unnerved by the abrupt tug, was about to reach up and take ahold of her friend when a second pull came. This one, however, was strong enough to drag her under. Something was trying to attack her!

She thrashed, twisting around in the water, and then realized her mistake. Swiftlit fell out of her hair, and it was falling; he shot down towards the sandy bottom like a granite block, so quickly that her attempt to grab him was a complete miss. She could clearly see his expression, one of utter terror, eyes wide and mouth open in a bubble-strewn scream, as he sank. The grip on her tail halted her, stopped her from diving after him, and she could only watch as he hit the bottom in a puff of sand. They were both in deep, deep trouble.



Now we’ve got a bad situation, Swiftlit going to drown and Calimn in the grip of some undersea predator.

Felarya is Karbo’s

Named characters are mine unless otherwise stated.

very nice chapter ! you describe each scenes so well they are very easy to visualize. When I start reading I can't stop until I finish
The tickling scene really made me grin as well XD

Sir, you are most certainly an incredible writer, a fact beyond denial. A few things about the story though. First off, I am enjoying it immensely, that really comes without saying. However, I just can't really catch where it's going. Then again, I totally didn't see the ending of "The Smiling Man" coming either, so I guess that's a silly remark. And lastly, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for those two, I've grown very attached to them. Hopefully Swiftlit can withstand immense water pressure, seeing as he's sinking like a rock. I'm leaving you off with a big thank you for the great read, it was certainly worth the time!

I totally saw that coming. Let's hope he somehow learns to shoot lazers or something to defend himself underwater.

Oh man, Swiftlit's reaction to the ocean is pretty priceless, though I hope it doesn't end up killing him o:

Really interesting series so far. Read SF, SF short and up to NF chapter 6. It's like reading a book without paying for it. You Mr. N have talent, a talent that i slightly envy to have but damn... I want to know what happens next! >< The cliff hanger... it makes me want to know what is going to happen to Swiftlit and Calimn.

Yikes! Ah, such an idyllic scene just had to go wrong. Nice description of the atmosphere - and good effect with the sudden twist! Calimn's surprise at the unexpected attack was quite vivid.

Finally finished catching up, and I have to say that you are an amazing writer and I just love this story!

Short piece I thought of while working out a new character.

Octopus' Garden


The village was in chaos. People, a mix of nekos, humans, and a handful of taurs, ran frantically about as massive hands swept overhead. Roofs were torn off, wooden shingles flying, and walls made of heavy reed collapsed as digits as long as a man was tall swiped away at the huts. The sixty or so villagers were sprinting about, unable to think straight with the panic flooding through them, making their minds hazy and limbs supercharged with adrenaline. The screaming, the sounds of nothing but excruciating terror, blanketed the place like a roiling coverlet that just couldn't seem to hide the corpse underneath. They were all sure they were going to die.

Families tried to stay together. Mothers and fathers carried children too small to walk, helped injured siblings to their feet, clumped together into shifting masses attempting escape. Others were not so successful. A lone little girl, a fuzzy tailed neko kitten, sat against the side of a half-collapsed house, wailing with fear and calling for her parents, her kind sister, her strong brother. An elderly, tottering old man, one of the few in the village that had been to another world and aged, lay in the packed-dirt road, wheezing and clutching a splintered upper portion of a cane.

There were bows among some of them, but they dared not fire at the creature rending their homes to slivers. Their wooden, fire-hardened points would do little enough, the stone ones not much more, not when powered by their primitive self-bows. Even so, the annoyance might incite the beast to rage, and death would come swiftly after that. Instead, they ran, weaving between houses, trying to find friends and family among the shattered remains of the reed huts.

And, easily audible over the din of horror and shock, was the thunderous, giddy laughter of the monster in their midst.

* * * * *

"Run, run, run! Ha ha ha! Come on, scatter, little wrigglers! Bet I can catch all of you in one go!" Enilin roared, kicking a small dwelling aside with a chitinous brown leg. His tan, oblong abdomen came down, hard, on another house, embedding sharp bits of reed in it. He ignored the pinpricks as he let his legs fold, taking a seat in the middle of the village; he was too excited to notice the slight jabs. The little snacks were running in all directions, shrieking and dashing around. It made him think of jumping at a flock of birds, watching them take off as a mass, and it was just as fun, if not more so.

The adolescent dridder put his third right foot through a door, which yielded a half-dozen nekos, three adults carrying a toddler each. He snorted wildly as they fled, unable to restrain his mirth. He had already kicked over two other residences, grinning as the groups in them ran, when he pumped both fists toward the evening sky and yodeled joy at the barely-visible stars. It was so crazy out here, out of the gloom of the Dridder Forest. The Torpaline Coast was so much better than those brooding, dank trees. So, so much better. No other dridders to take his food, knock him down, or boss him around. Out here, he could do anything he wanted.

"Oh, what's all this then?"

He swiveled without his lower half moving, back popping as he twisted to see who had spoken so calmly in the middle of this. His eyes widened.

Eight tentacles slowly twisted on themselves, each one nearly double her total standing height, as thick at the base as his well-muscled biceps. All were layered with an underbelly of suckers, the smallest no larger than the pad of his own pinkie, the largest, big enough to nearly cover his whole hand. They twined and knotted on each other languidly, slow pulses of pink and light blue rolling through their pale, semi-translucent lengths in soothing waves.

Almost hypnotic.

He finally dragged his eyes away from the ripples of color and looked up at the other half of the chlaena. The tentacles wove together to form a base for the upper body of a pale-skinned woman, sleek and athletic in build. A real predator, one that moved with confidence even out of the water, her natural element. She was slightly "thick", somehow, in a way he couldn't figure out at first. Confusion warped his features before he realized her boneless body must be too loose to really support her out of the sea that rushed in and out no more than a two hundred yards behind her. About the only thing solid about her was her teeth, which had the appearance of bleached whalebone. He gaped, then hurriedly stood up and began nervously fiddling with one of the small pedipalps at his waist.

She was kind of pretty, in a lean, alien kind of way.

Shining, silvery eyes, with no irises to speak of, gleamed as they went over him. Inky pupils sucked in his features, weighing him carefully. Whether those mental scales found him wanting or not was inapproachable, hidden behind a face as blank as the now-moonlit beach. Cool, smooth, just as unreadable as the sand and just as pale. Then the face broke into a small smile.

"You enjoying yourself?"

"Y-yeah." great response, idiot! he thought, mortified by his inability to speak properly.

"Well, that's a bit of an issue, you see. This is my garden, of sorts. I keep an eye on it, and you're ruining all my hard work."

THe villagers, hearing this, stopped, stupefied, looking at each other, confusion overtaking fear. Some still continued to run, but many halted their flight and listened.

"Oh, I'm so-"

"That's fine. You didn't eat any of my 'crops', so no harm done. However, I've got a proposal for you."

Enilin started as a tentacle draped itself over his shoulders in a slippery, comradely embrace, pulling him closer to the octopus-hybrid. He felt his face heating up as she spoke right into his ear.

"I honestly like you. Eight legs, eight tentacles, interesting, eh?"

He gulped.

"Uh, I-"

"You want to die?"

"Wha-"

His response was choked off by that tentacle coiling around his neck, squeezing so hard he thought his throat would be crushed. He scrambled to pry the limb off, but it was no use. The rubbery tentacle was horrendously strong, and too yielding to tear.

"You come back here again and I will snap your neck so fast you won't even have time to think," came the dangerous whisper.

The tentacle whipped sideways, unwrapping from his neck and leaving a dozen round, hot bruises from the suction cups. The dridder scrambled away, headed east. The Dridder forest sounded perfect right about now. The chlaena let off a hiss to send him on his way a bit faster, then turned to the villagers.

The old man, still clutching his broken walking stick, shuffled forward on arthritic knees to place his forehead to the ground before the gigantic hybrid. Tears of relief shone on his face and he ground his teeth together. He couldn't believe what had happened. His village. His family. His people. They had been saved. SAVED.

"Please, let you be blessed. Thank you. Thank you so much."

A tentacle came down slowly, the tip no larger than the man's hand, and with exquisite grace touched the man's bald head.

"Not at all. I might come around now and again. You might not actaully be my garden . . . but I'll keep an eye on you."

With that, the massive hybrid crawled down the beach, carefully avoiding the houses so as not to smash them, and waded out into the waves.

In a moment she was gone.



A short piece, a bit of a break from the main storyline. A new character, a Chlaena, is introduced.

Felarya is Karbo's

All named characters are mine unless otherwise stated.

Very nice! Good to see a few giants being protective of the less fortunate folk. The villagers' relief was palpable, and rather moving.

The dridder will have learnt a lesson: Never let your guard down or assume everything's safe when outside your own territory!

It's great to see more stories from you

And this one is intriguing ^^ I think you captured very well the strangeness of Chlaenas, with this one considering the villagers as crops. I think that just fit her perfectly XP

Hmm. Good to see more writing from you. A short but intriguing story and well-written.

Great chapter! I'm really glad this story is moving still!

The chapter was so short and contained no familiar characters, but somehow it still felt really solid and complete. Those first few paragraphs start out of absolutely nowhere and paint a very vivid picture of a disaster befalling a village, and the reader really feels for them despite knowing nothing about them.
The neko kitten searching for her family really got to me, as did the old man at the end, you really know how to convey emotions powerfully.

I've read Strange Friends from start to finish three, maybe four times now, and I have to say it's one of my favorites... If not my absolute favorite Felarya story ever.
Your stories are what actually inspired me to start writing in the first place, I was just waiting for an update to make it relevant to let you know!

Keep on keeping on, I can't wait to see where the main storyline goes from here!

Thank you all for the support. I haven't been writing much, but now I think I'm getting back on a roll.

An ungodly long chapter that I have been working on for some time and typed up in about three days, affirming a new major character and setting down some serious issues. There is only mild references to vore here. Any comments, critique, or constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated.

Chapter 7: Cosmic Rapture, Cosmic Rupture

Calimn flailed, trying to wrest her tail out of the tight grip that held her. She jack-knifed twice in rapid succession, but neither attempt brought her outstretched hand any closer to her quickly drowning friend. The only thing she caught was a generous but utterly useless helping of sand, the stray grains running down to the bottom again in long, slow rivulets, liquid within seawater. Another swipe at Swiftlit raked up another huge cloud of sand, but that effort yielded nothing more than did the first. She twisted, rolling in the water, trying to wrench her way out of the slippery but paradoxically inescapable grip. This maneuver only served to further entangle her, and as she struggled another tether reached around to snap taunt on her wrist, pulling her backward.

She recognized the limb immediately. It was a tentacle, thick around as her own arm, silt raining off of it as the color changed from a speckled sandy hue to pale. It had been hiding . . . hiding in the sand and waiting for the inattentive mermaid to swim over it.

Inattentive to the point that both she and Swiftlit were going to die.

Whether it was a giant squid or octopus she wasn’t sure, but she knew how to deal with either through eating their smaller cousins and, on occasion, battling the larger versions. She had to do this quickly. If she couldn’t make it, it was over. She glanced over at Swiftlit, now lying on the bottom and half-buried in shifting silt. He was at least a hundred feet from the surface, and it really wouldn’t have mattered if he was even a foot from it.

Unless she got to him within a few minutes, he would drown.

She took in a massive gulp of ocean water, getting ready to spin. A second later she twirled, performing a textbook example of the death-roll so often used by crocodilians. Her spiraling would twist the tentacles into each other, and all the tensile strength in the world wouldn’t keep them intact against this kind of torque. The animal would have to either let go or have the limbs ripped right off, leaving it bleeding out into the sea for everything within miles to sense its weakness, and all the more vulnerable for being short a few arms.

It didn’t let go.

And it didn’t get its arms ripped off.

It released her tail with one tentacle, moving it for a moment before grabbing again. It did the same with its other tentacles, one after another in a rapid rotation, always with a hold on her. Her escape ruse had been rendered meaningless, less even than that, wasting energy gyrating like a top with no results whatsoever. It was not an utter loss, however, because it instantly told her that what she was fighting was no ordinary cephalopod. Squid and octopods were smart, often stunningly so, but not that smart.

She had been nabbed by a chlaena, or a cecaelia, either one of which was bad, bad news.

Trying to use reason on one was close to useless, with their queer and twisting logic, and fighting one was like trying to fight jelly. With rubbery bodies and ridiculous gripping power, a chlaena was a massive threat to a lone mermaid, even one close to their own size. You couldn’t really hurt them with punches, and their squishy flesh resisted anything less sharp than a selachi’s teeth. Wrestling with one was practically suicide, but they had one weak point. Their siphons, like a fish’s gills, were sensitive and plugging it with a fist would kill them in short order, asphyxiating them. Some had gills, however, and those members usually had them on their necks, or, on occasion, their waists.

Reaching said weak point while being grappled by eight or ten separate and incredibly strong limbs was another matter entirely, and a feat few mermaids could claim to have accomplished. All others were swallowed, stuffed down gullets that could stretch “like you wouldn’t believe”, as Calimn’s father had said.

The prospect was terrifying.

Calimn went limp, letting her muscles go loose. Fear washed through her, flooding her stomach with the sensation of falling and being filled up with glacial-cold water. She had never been this scared before. Not with the midgets, not even with the lacolith. The first had made her frightened and the second had shocked her with its abruptness, but this was worse on a myriad of levels.

This time, she had someone relying on her.

The tentacles, sensing that she had stopped fighting, pulled her backward, into soft, boneless arms.

* * * * *

Swiftlit had no doubt that he was going to drown.

He was practically nailed to the bottom of the sea by his own weight, unable to do much more than slowly move his arms along the sand with short, sharp dragging motions. His density had increase to the point that it hurt, every particle of himself straining to fall straight into the earth, and every few seconds he slid deeper into the loose sand of the seafloor. In no more than a minute he would be buried in the depths, gravity digging his grave for him as he rapidly ran out of air.

This far from the surface, the pressure of the water added itself to his exponentially increased weight to create a massive, crushing force. His lungs felt like they were going to implode, along with his skull and torso, and the only way to relieve this monstrous pressure was to release some of his vital oxygen. In fact, it wasn’t even voluntary at this point; the weight was forcing air out of his lungs no matter how he tried to hold his breath. A steady stream of bubbles paraded mockingly towards the sunlight that filtered down from thirty meters above his head, reaching the surface he could never get to.

Calimn was the only one who could get him out of this now.

He turned his head, the weight taking over halfway through the movement to wrench his neck as his cheek embedded itself in the sand. He couldn’t see, really. The salt in the water burned his eyes, blurring his vision, stinging unbearably until his eyes filled up with tears, washing them away, and repeating the process over and over in a cycle of blinding pain. It hurt worse than getting sweat in his eyes, and it had an even more detrimental effect on his vision. Through the blur of pale sand and bright coral that stood in a rainbow wall off at a diagonal from him, he could see something . . .

His eyes widened.

Calimn, a blurry, more substantial blue mass in the aquamarine of the water, was in trouble. Another blur, this one at least as large as she was, had ahold of her, strange tendrils wrapped around the hapless mermaid. He couldn’t tell what it was, only that it was huge and had some eight or ten . . . or twelve, he couldn’t see a thing with his eyes on fire like this . . . arms, and that it had captured his friend in a snare of tentacles. It grappled with her as he watched, paralyzed with horror, dragging her closer no matter how her indistinct form twisted and maneuvered.

Then, suddenly, she stopped fighting. She halted her flailing, and without the thrashing to hinder its progress, the giant beast that had ahold of her reeled the mermaid in with no further delay.

She was going to get killed.

He opened his mouth, and sacrificed the last of his precious air for one scream.

“CALIMN! DON’T DIE!”

The sound never came out, instead devolving to nothing but a mass of bubbles, and then there was nothing more he could do. Water rushed into his lungs, and blackness pulsed through his eyes like an influx of nighttime in his head. Another pulse of dark, and then the world suddenly stilled.

No sound . . .

No sight . . .

An endless void of silence and blindness with nothing but his body thrumming to remind him that he wasn’t dead yet.

Yet . . .

Then the night poured in and drowned him twice over.

* * * * *

Calimn allowed the chlaena to drag her in, tentacles bunching together as she was drawn closer.

A little more . . .

Arms, the more human version this time, wrapped around her middle, the grip somehow familiar.

Now!

She spun in the grasp of her would-be captor, turning to face the enemy. Her hands shot out, aiming for the neck, hoping this one would have gills there, or at least the siphon in that area. It felt like her intestines were knotting up inside, she was so scared, but her fingers curled into hooks, and her face was stone-firm with nothing but utter determination.

She froze when her eyes met the face of her attacker.

A minute motion, not even an actual movement, went through her, a not-quite recoiling from being stunned at the sight before her. A line of bubbles trickled from her open mouth, rising as she stared at the smile she knew so well.

“What? Not going to give me a hug after all this time?” asked the chlaena, voice distorted by the water.

“Welifindi?” Calimn gaped, voice ringing clearly through with a hint of whale-like mersong behind it.

“Ugh, you know I can’t stand people using my full name,” came the bubbling, barely audible protest.

“Wel! I haven’t seen you in forever!”

The chlaena pointed upward, indicating they should get to the surface where she could speak properly without having to resort to the sign language and mind-bending patterns of color-speech chlaenas used for underwater communication. The pale finger, indicating the shining mirror over their heads, instantly brought back Calimn’s terror. Swiftlit was still down on the bottom, and by now he must be an inch from death. She turned, starting to dive, but her friend hauled her back with a tentacle.

“Don’t worry about the human. I got him,” she burbled, augmenting the message by lifting another arm and showing the boy gripped in it.

“Surface!” Calimn yelped, this time the words nearly hidden behind the warbling melody of mersong.

Both of them shattered the glass of the upper world together.

* * * * *

I-infinity . . .

Flying past an army of tiny lights that stretched out into the distance forever, forming a horizontally barred cage of shining threads. It felt like he was moving, but not forward, despite what he was . . . not . . . seeing. The darkness between the gleaming bars of stars stretched by speed too great to be comprehended was absolute, a void, a gulf that was truly bottomless.

Sound was absent, but in a sense beyond hearing there was a vague suggestion of a keening, mad screeching that echoed just below the range of detection. It was terrible, but he wanted to hear more. He knew this sound . . . this psychotic tune that defied the ears and warped reality. He had heard it when he had first started to breathe.

Oh, he wanted to hear more . . .

The sound began to get louder as he moved farther and farther away from the edge of reality, into the void of nothingness that lay past the blackness and the brightness. He raced even faster toward the source, clawing his way into the abyss with a desperation he had never known but once, when jumping for an unreachable portal ninety feet above his head.

* * * * *

Calimn laid Swiftlit out on the sand, panic spreading like a flame through her lungs and heart. Everything was moving slowly, and yet far too quickly for her to do seemingly anything. Wel moved easily over the beach on a writhing carpet of tentacles, the chlaena stopping at where her friend was trying to revive the Swiftlit with repeated finger-flicks to the chest. Each strike was as gentle as she could manage, as hard as she dared try, and possessed of a kind of desperate determination. All did nothing more than driving his small form into the sand a few centimeters.

“Ah, sorry for messing up your treat,” Wel apologized, a sheepish grin crossing her face.

“Swiftlit . . . don’t die!” Cailmn uttered in a furious whisper.

“Umn, you really want him to squirm on the way down that much? I can manage that, if you like.”

Jab, who had been stunned when her aquatic companion burst out of the sea with a limp and unmoving Swiftlit in one hand, practically crashed into the pair, a single hard flap lifting her of the beach and propelling her a hundred yards to where Calimn now crouched over her human friend. The harpy was panicking nearly as much as Calimn, flapping constantly with worry and spewing a constant, completely incomprehensible stream of curses and random nouns that would have put off a pirate.

Wel, with deliberate and careful slowness, reached down, a slight smile on her face. Calimn grabbed Jab and hauled the harpy back, giving her chlaena friend room to work. The winged woman barked out a line of protests, squawking as the mermaid accidently pulled out a few feathers. Though she didn’t show it, Calimn was as frightened as Jab, and more. She could only hope that Wel could do something to revive Swiftlit. At the same time, she hated that she could do nothing for him herself.

The only option was to watch as Wel pressed a finger to his belly, rubbing with clockwise motions that carried a mix of gentleness and firmness. Sparks started to flicker across her digits as she did so, and for a second her eyes narrowed. An instant later her other hand came to hover over Swiftlit’s face, her forefinger pressing into his midsection at the same moment.

* * * * *

He remembered this feeling, all these sensations, so well.

That sense of moving in every direction while being held in perfect stillness.

The not-sound that vibrated the whole of his existence and shook reality to its core.

The horrible, wonderful colors and motions that could never be truly registered by the eyes.

Freezing hot and burning cold.

Light made out of darkness.

A cacophony of sound in the midst of absolute silence.

He was in the place he had come from, journey completed in his death. Now he could fade into the infinity of chaos he had been made from, back to where he belonged. Slow pulses ran through him, soothing, and he started to relax, to disintegrate.

To forget.

He let himself fall apart and weave back into the infinity around him.

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

Lightning ripping him apart, tearing through the universe and catching him in electric claws that burned with blue fire! Ten thousand lines of light shattering through him like glass wires! A black sun that pulsed with obsidian flames in the center of his being! Hooks of reality digging in, dragging his form back together and pulling him to some infinitely distant place!

PAIN!

“SWIFTLIT!”

He screamed back at that semi-familiar voice, spoke something that could never have come from any place but that boundless chaos at the end of the universe. It wasn’t a word, even, some convoluted, unpronounceable sound that buzzed with unreality and seemed to make the air wilt with its alien noise.

Then weight slammed back into him and his heart restarted, lungs filling up with a breath that seared him from the inside out. He thought it would kill him to take in oxygen after touching that place, but his body took it, held it, and shrieked out its need for more of it.

He was alive again.

* * * * *

Calimn watched as Wel lifted her hand, water jetting into the air from Swiftlit’s mouth as the chlaena’s Deep Magic warped the water pressure in his lungs. The liquid flickered like a serpent, then splashed back down onto the boy’s face. He didn’t so much as twitch. Sparks, flickering with colors the mermaid couldn’t place, snapped and cracked over him.

Something was wrong.

Wel kept tilting her head this way and that, squinting at Swiftlit, a bad sign. He wasn’t breathing, and something was happening to his body. She couldn’t quite describe it, a kind of blurriness or warping, a distortion that made him look semi-insubstantial. She thought it was some kind of vibration, because there was a strange feeling, a sense of something just out of the range of hearing, that was like a tiny insect buzzing inside her head. Something between a hum and something more, that couldn’t be picked up by the ears.

It put her teeth on edge.

“Where’s he going?”

Swiftlit was going somewhere alright, but where exactly that was Calimn didn’t even dare to guess. Jab, next to her, shook herself as if she had water in her feathers; obviously the harpy could feel this bizarre not-sound as well. She looked scared, and turned to the mermaid as the vibration began to pick up and Swiftlit got even more blurry.

“Does he normally do this?”

“No . . . I don’t know what’s happening to him . . . Wel, did you do something?”

The chlaena flashed a light maroon for a moment, the color washing through her from head to tentacle. That was the code for a negative in the color-speech of the chlaena, so Calimn bit her lip as her fear mounted. She hoped that this was some kind of cycle of reviving for him, something normal, like his odd density, but that hope was rapidly waning as Swiftlit stayed immobile and grew more and more indistinct.

She shuddered for a moment, then sprang forward on her tail and leaned in to pick him up. A moment before she touched him, a bright flash or bolt of energy snapped across the gap between them, striking her palm.

Instantaneous agony.

She felt her entire arm seize up, muscles locking to the point of pain. It felt like her whole hand was being annihilated atom by atom, pulled apart at the seams and white-hot. Lava flickered through her nerves for a quarter-second, then vanished so quickly that she almost collapsed. Jab just barely managed to catch her friend with a wing before Calimn crashed face-first into the sand.

Calimn’s ears were ringing . . .

Eyesight blurred . . .

Her whole being ached . . .

Her body was pulsing with a wild energy that she couldn’t comprehend or control, freezing but also so hot it felt like she was going to be immolated by it. She trembled so hard it almost seemed as if she would come apart and vanish. A thousand things too complex to be called emotions washed through her, but at the base of it was two intertwined vines of terror and awe.

It felt like she was dying.

Her breathing began to slowly readjust, her heart quietly and gradually ceased its pounding, and she propped herself back up on an elbow. Her ears were still full of the keening wail of nearly being struck unconscious, but her eyes were back to normal. The psychotic force that had just shot through her was gone now, dissipating like that odd blurriness that had possessed Swiftlit a few moments ago. She looked over to where he was laid out on the sand, puffing as Jab helped her back into the “sitting” position she used on land.

He seemed to be back, no more sparks or strange vibrations, as “there” as he had ever been. For a moment he was still, and she was afraid trying to touch him had interrupted whatever process that had just been transpiring, that maybe it really had been keeping him alive. Then he coughed, gasped, and his mouth went wide with a howl she couldn’t hear through the high-pitched buzzing in her ears. He jerked up off the ground in a full-body spasm that seemed like it should have snapped his spine like storm snapping a sailboat’s mast, but somehow he relaxed, eased back down into the sand, and sat up.

He turned his head one way, looked up, then turned to the three predators looking at him.

She held out a hand, not quite waving at him, but testing if he was alright. He held up a hand in the same manner, and she saw his mouth moving, though nothing reached her through her temporary deafness.

"Calimn?"

“WHAT!? I can’t hear you!” she yelled back, even her own words indistinct under the keening in her ears.

“I’m okay!”

She caught that, even if it sounded like he was a long way off. The humming was beginning to go away, letting more sound from the outside filter in.

“Are you sure, Swiftlit?” she asked, this time her voice more moderate.

“Yeah! Feel pretty good. Chest hurts, though,” he replied, and finally she could hear him clearly.

She flushed, remembering those finger-flicks that she had attempted to wake him up with, and then scooped him up, hesitating for a moment as she recalled the shock that had shot through her before. Then the threat of possibly being electrocuted again didn’t matter and she hugged him as best she could. Jab joined in, feathers puffed out and warm, while Wel just scratched her head and smiled in an slightly confused way.

“So . . . you’re not eating him?”

Jab was the one to reply.

“You retarded? Of course we aren’t, you idiot, noodle-legged bowl of putrid jam! He’s Calimn’s friend.”

“Uh . . . what?”

“Calimn’s F-R-I-E-N-D, snotbulb. Mine, too, kind of by default, but there you go.”

“Thought that’s what you said. Interesting.”

* * * * *

Swiftlit couldn’t figure out why he felt so calm. Wel, a peculiar mix of octopod and human, should have scared him, but she didn’t. He recognized that she could hurt him very easily, but he felt a bizarre confidence running through himself, and a buzz not unlike adrenaline, but much deeper than that. Perhaps that place had infused him with something, or maybe being there had unraveled some of the integral fear he had felt before now, allowing him to stretch his emotional muscles beyond the extremes, going into milder forms.

“What happened to you, Swiftlit? You got really blurry, scared the feathers right off of me,” Jab inquired, Calimn nodding to show she also wanted to know.

“I think . . . I was going home. Wherever it was I lived before coming here to F-Felarya. Well . . . I guess it wouldn’t be called living. I can’t describe it. More like being made out of air and lightning and being part of a storm, so that you’re not really . . . I c-can’t put it in words. I’m glad I s-stayed here, th-though,” he added quickly, looking at Calimn’s alarmed expression at the note of longing in his tone.

“You better not try going back there. I’d eat you and never let you out again,” Calimn reprimanded.

“Why g-go back if you and J-jab aren’t there?” he chirped, a hint of a giddy laugh in his voice.

Calimn just squeezed him again, hard enough to make his already bruised ribs flicker with pain. His whole torso was aching, as if he had been hit with a massive padded club a few dozen times in a row. He wasn’t sure if this was an aftereffect of going to whatever realm he had slipped into a few minutes before, but he felt like it wasn’t. His body was still humming with that exciting, familiar tingle of the other dimension, and he felt . . . amazing. It was a wonder he wasn’t levitating with all the energy spiraling through him, making him feel feather-light and almost ecstatic.

A sliver of pain forced him to stop focusing on the incredible euphoria tickling his heart. He slapped at Calimn’s arm, laughing despite the hurt. Well, for a moment. A particularly sharp hitch in his side cut through the giddiness and made him squeak sharply. Calimn almost refused to let him down, but finally, reluctantly set him back on the beach.

Jab leaned in close, peering at him with incredibly sharp, steel-colored eyes. Her gaze went over him thoroughly, searching for any hint of blood or injury, the scrutiny making him feel a bit awkward. Finally, she drew back, and sighed.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Of course n-nothing’s wrong. I feel fine,” he announced, stretching to show that he was perfectly alright.

“Better than fine,” he muttered, so low that no one could possibly have heard him unless an inch from his shoulder.

“You’re sure?” Calimn pressed once more, worry evident on her face.

“I’m s-sure.”

* * * * * *

“Can you introduce me to this little fellow, Calimn?” Wel requested, body flickering with shades of white and yellow, in a distinct ring-to-stripe pattern, tentacles starting to gravitate towards Swiftlit and tips pointing at him like dogs catching a scent.

Jab shook herself, feathers rustling, as she started to nibble at her plumage again. Of course she didn’t need any more grooming, but that chlaena made her antsy. Jab didn’t know Welifindi very well, having only one brief encounter with her before. It hadn’t been a terribly pleasant one, either. Not totally hostile, but far outside the warmer realms of congeniality.

The Rosic incident had left everyone with some bitterness.

Then there was that quirky tendency all chlaena had to turn their head all the way around to address you if you were behind them, and their inherent weirdness. The way they moved was just . . . you didn’t expect to see it in any kind of tauric creature. Their minds were just as incomprehensible, or so she had heard; she had never met any other chlaena besides Wel.

“Not that I hate them or anything,” she thought to herself, “but they just make me feel nervous . . . Well, Welifindi does, anyway.”

She glanced at Swiftlit, and accidently tugged out a still-attached insular feather. She winced at the sharp prick of pain, and let the feather fall from her lips, the bit of fluff drifting slowly down to rest on the beach. A moment later the tide washed it away.

Swiftlit . . .

She wondered what had been happening to him, with that strange vibration and phantasmal look. She couldn’t even begin to guess, and she tried to remember ever talking about anything of that sort before. She couldn’t call up any knowledge. She had never heard of anything like that before, other than the voluntary ability of the Canopy Fairies to drop out of reality. That was incomparable, though, to what Swiftlit had been doing, where he had been going. Like the difference between walking a mile and flying to the edge of the world.

She shivered again.

That last shout, if you could even call it that, had been nothing that should come from normal vocal cords. When he had woken up, and screamed out that noise . . . It had really just about scared the wings off of her. Like nails on stone and wind howling and chaos and some kind of weird ambience that wasn’t quite an echo, and all that loud enough to hurt her ears.

. . . She needed to talk to Quen about this. Quen knew just about everything.

The harpy watched as Welifindi extended a tentacle out to the boy, who looked both cautious and curious at first. After a brief moment of hesitation, he held out a hand and the tendril wrapped around his fingers, shaking his hand gently before withdrawing. At first, the chlaena gave him a blank look, then broke out in that wide smile the octopus taurs seemed to carry around all the time.

“Hmn. Interesting to meet you, Swiftlit. Calimn’s friends are my friends . . . Why don’t we talk for a bit, take a stroll on the beach?”

Calimn looked worried at this proposal, the concept of Swiftlit being very far from her after the incident obviously one she wasn’t keen on. Wel noticed, obviously, because she halted the protest rising up from the mermaid, with a raised tentacle. The limb gained a swirling pattern of hypnotic blues and greens, calming hues and patterns meant to be reassuring, soothing.

“None of that, now. We won’t go far, and I’ll be right with him.”

“But-“

The swirls turned to bright rings that encircled the tentacle, moving towards the base in steady, assertive pulses.

“Let me talk to him. You need to rest. You just got hit with the equivalent of a lightning bolt, if those little shocks I felt were anything to go by. Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

Jab had to agree, despite sharing some of Calimn’s worry. She had caught the mermaid as she fell, and the harpy had realized that the her friend had been right next door the being unconscious. Jab had felt something through Calimn, too, like the feeling of intense energy you got when lighting was about to strike. It made her feathers puff out just to think about it. Like flying in the Great Rocky Fields during a storm.

“Come on, you saggy, sad sack of Saslenoth spit. Let’s fry ourselves while that bowl of badly-made calamari gets to know him.”

“Calamari is squid, Jab,” Calimn corrected, a slight chuckle managing to come through.

The harpy stretched out on the sand, her friend imitating her, as Wel moved further down the beach with Swiftlit trailing the chlaena.

It wasn’t long before the warm sun and sand put the both of them to sleep.

* * * * *

Swiftlit walked behind the massive octopus hybrid, watching with interest as she moved adroitly about on eight long legs that left a bizarre pattern in the sand, one long footprint with curious swirls and dots instead of heel and toe impressions. The high of being in his own realm, however briefly, was slowly fading, but it was enough to keep his nervousness to a minimum. Without the heavy veil of fear, the chlaena was actually pretty neat.

She had a peculiar smoothness and grace to all her movements, despite the fact that her body couldn’t stay completely straight being out of the water as she was. He was particularly impressed by her tentacles. They all moved together with a kind of swift economy and synchronization that he could barely imagine himself having if he had eight limbs to operate at once, and the dexterity of them was quite astonishing. He had only recently felt the tip of one cleverly cinching around his hand and giving him a slightly rubbery handshake with no hesitation at all. The peculiar mix of firmness and gentleness behind the grip had been nice.

Maybe it was the still-active joy of going home acting on him, but he felt like this giantess was one he could get along with fairly easily.

He was still thinking when she stopped, carefully turning around on a rotating pedestal of tendrils. Easing back into a relaxed position, she let shades of light green seep into her tentacles. Two of them began to fiddle about in the loose sand with slow idle motions, continuing as she began to talk.

“So you’re Calimn’s friend? How?”

Swiftlit rubbed the back of his head.

“I-it would take a l-long time to t-tell it all.”

“I’m in no hurry.”

“Well, I c-came here –Felarya, I mean- and I was g-going through the Miragia F-forest when I g-got to the r-r-river. I walked in and almost d-drowned.”

“You can’t swim? Why go into the river then?”

“I d-didn’t know what w-w-water was then.”

“Hmn.”

“Well, I got s-sort-of-saved by a f-f-fairy, then she chased m-me around until I r-ran into Calimn. Th-then I helped her get a harpoon out of her th-throat and she tried to e-e-eat me. I r-ran, got away, but I c-came back. After a while, she decided she d-didn’t really want to e-eat me. After that . . . well, we became friends. Kind of w-weird, I know, but that’s h-how it happened.”

“I wouldn’t call it weird . . . Grab that stick over there, would you?”

Swiftlit went over closer to the treeline to haul a hefty branch out to the chlaena. She split the limb with a pair of tentacles, sticking both halves into the sand.

“Thank you. So, where is your village? Do you live with the Rosics? Or one of the tribes on the edge of the Jewel River?” she asked, color changing to stripes of white and yellow.

“No. I don’t know who the R-roses are, but I live by m-myself in Miragia.”

“Hmmmm. That’s interesting. The Rosics . . . well, ask Jab,” Wel said, the white changing to an acidic green-yellow shade while the lighter yellow remained.

“Anyway, you said you live in Miragia. How do you keep from getting killed, all by yourself?”

“The vortexes there d-don’t really b-bother me, and I can run. Really f-fast.”

“Hmhmhehe. How unusual . . . How fast?”

“Well . . . right now . . . I feel . . . so light I think I could outrun anything.”

“Anything?” she hummed amusedly, yellow leeching into the tips of her legs.

Swiftlit scratched his head, smiling nervously. He felt a bit sheepish now about saying that, even if that was really how it felt. It seemed as if he should be floating, and a good jump might well put him even with the chlaena’s shining ink-and-silver eyes.

“Not anything, I g-guess. B-but a lot of things.”

“I’m surprised you aren’t scared of me. I’m larger than you.”

“I d-don’t know. I feel really g-good for some reason, maybe because I went home for a little bit. P-plus I could probably get aw-way from you easily. I’ve n-never felt so fast in m-my life.”

“Hmmmn. I think we could be friends . . . I find you interesting . . . For a little human sprout, you seem unusual. I don’t see why you run, when you have that lightning-strike power. I doubt anything would dare touch you if they knew you could give them that . . . to chew on.”

“Lightning-strike p-p-power?”

“Umn. Never mind. Just me being a silly softhead.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway . . .”

“Wh-what are you making?”

Swiflit had just now noticed, fully, that Wel’s movements in the sand were not idle ones at all. She had already shaped three walls and half of a doorway, additional tentacles joining in to pat the sand into a relative firmness. A handful of heavy branches and logs pressed into the ground served as the stabilizing pieces for the walls and a corner of the ceiling she was working on. The work was moving along quickly, six of the eight legs working in tandem to carefully construct the simple building.

“W-wow, you know how to build s-sandcastles?”

The yellow on her tentacles turned even brighter, the color creeping up further.

“Who do you think taught Calimn?” she laughed, smile becoming even wider, and it showed a slice of teeth that had the peculiar look of bleached bone.

He felt himself start to freeze up, but he managed to throw off the instinct, instead twitching for a moment and settling. He didn’t need to be scared of Wel. She was nice enough, and he felt sure that he could outpace almost anything in his current state. Although that feeling was still draining away at a slow, steady pace, which kind of worried him.

“It s-seems l-like e-everyone t-taught Calimn s-something,” he noted with a smile, making a point not to look at her grin.

Yellow suddenly turned to a deep grey, stone-colored and somehow upsetting to look at. It moved in slow swirls with darker rings pulsing from tip to base slowly.

“Yes . . . Calimn needed . . . handling when she was younger, and mentoring.”

“What d-d-do you m-mean, ‘handling’?”

“She never . . . ? I don’t think I should really be the one to tell you this . . . Ask her yourself.”

Swiftlit raised a hand to his mouth, beginning to chew on his knuckles. What could Welifindi mean? Maybe Cal-

“There you guys are! We wondered where you went!” Calimn exclaimed, wriggling along the beach with Jab’s assistance.

“Geez, you grub-puking slimepunks could at least have put up a raggedy, vomit-inducing flag up for us to find your worthless carcasses by. Calimn about flipped her empty lid when she finally dragged her lazy butt out of dreamland,” the harpy added, puffing at the effort of having Calimn lean on her.

Swiftlit looked up at Calimn, and noticed she still looked pale, an almost pastel shade of blue. Although she wasn’t sweating –could mermaids even sweat?- her face had a strained look. There was also the fact that she was being helped by Jab, something he had never seen before. She had recently learned to sort of hop around on her tail, but instead she was having to crawl along with the aid of her friend’s shoulder. What had happened to her, anyway? Wel had mentioned a lightning strike . . .

* * * * *

Calimn still felt weak, a not-quite numbness that was fading away a little at a time. She kept having muscle twitches in her arm, her pinky jerking at random intervals. She still wanted to know what had been happening to Swiftlit, and what that lightning or light had been.

Swiftlit seemed just as worried about her, as well, and also had a hint of something else to his stance . . . hesitation? He was shifting his feet, looking like he wanted to ask her something but wasn’t sure how she would react.

“What’s up, Swiftlit?” she queried, letting go of Jab and getting her tail curled underneath herself to “sit”.

“Uh . . . N-no, nothing. Nothing . . .” he muttered, half to himself.

Calimn was about to push him when she noticed the sandcastle –well, sandhouse, really- and looked at Wel. The chlaena just shrugged, smiling. Calimn imitated the gesture, although she was somewhat disappointed. She had planned to build Swiftlit a little sand-hut herself . . . oh well. For now, it was time to enjoy the trip she had planned, with another friend she hadn’t expected.

“Alright, let’s actually have some fun on this trip!”

The group dispersed, going to various activities. Jab stretched out, flapped her wings, and then let herself fall back into the sand for another nap in the sun. It was really no wonder she was always so tanned and possessed of so many freckles. Calimn had had more than enough sun for now, and rolled down into the sea again, reveling in the wash of cooling water. She laid down in the shallows, tired even after napping. That shock had really sapped her energy away. She still kept an eye on Swiftlit though.

He was investigating the beach, picking up the occasional shell that crossed his path, and playing in the sand. He made sure to steer well clear of the water, skittering back a few yards whenever a wave came too close for comfort. A few of the arthronodes that roamed the coast took an interest in him, edging in close only to be firmly reprimanded by the flick of one of Welifindi’s tentacles. The chlaena was keeping fairly close to the boy, constantly tilting her head this way and that in her odd, hyper-flexible way, and smiling. A lot. More so than usual, anyway.

Still, the pulsing bands of white and yellow rolling down her tentacles at regular intervals were promising, if Calimn’s memory on chlaena color-moods was at all accurate. Being friends with Wel had allowed her some very basic insight to a small portion of how mood and color corresponded for them, and she was fairly sure that white and yellow combination was a good thing. It was nice to see them getting along, considering how hard it had been for her to get used to Wel’s inherent strangeness.

Chlaena were so weird.

Swiftlit didn’t seem to mind, though, and actually talked to her a fair amount without stuttering more than once or twice per sentence. It was impressive for someone who had nearly died of fear on at least two occasions, and she had to wonder if that strange . . . No. He must have just gotten a bit more confident due to being around two giant predators, that was all. A good thing.

Maybe she would see if he was interested in meeting anyone his size. There was a fishing village fairly close to her territory, right on the border, and no one particularly wanted to go after them. It was a courtesy of mermaids to ask before hunting in another’s area, and Calimn was big enough to be somewhat intimidating, so it was a rare thing that anyone did much more than pass through. Calimn pretty much ignored the fishing folk, unless she was particularly hungry. The nekos worked very hard to keep themselves fed, and she could appreciate their love of fish. Not to mention she could occasionally sneak a squid off their lines.

She followed this train of thought. She wondered how Swiftlit would handle being with others his size. That he would be nervous was a given, but would he actually be able to interact with anyone normally? Living in the jungle, panicking all the time . . . that didn’t exactly lend itself to being good at socializing. He did alright with her and Jab, and now Wel, though, so maybe he could manage it.

The sky had finally faded to a deep purple, the last sliver of sunlight vanishing over the horizon, and a curious rust-colored moon with a huge split down the middle had risen into the sea of stars. A particularly beautiful twilight, she decided, climbing back onto the beach.

Jab had, in defiance of her earlier naps, gone to sleep already. She was sprawled out on the sand, muttering in her sleep. Most of it was miscellaneous nonsense about botany, the rest composed of cursewords and mumbled threats. Calimn yawned herself; the bolt of light or energy or whatever it had been had really taken a toll on her. She patted Jab’s leg to get the harpy to shift out of her path, then continued over to the sand-house.

Swiftlit was examining the makeshift shelter closely, prodding here and there gently. A little sand spilled like water from a leak, but quickly stopped. Wel just nodded at him, pointing with a tentacle at the door. The cephaloid was sitting next to the house, limbs a massive relaxed tangle. Despite the posture, her eyes were wide open, refusing to blink as was usual.

“You guys seem to be getting along pretty well.”

Wel shrugged again, but the tips of her tentacles pulsed with a warm mix of yellow and light blue.

“Sleepy?” Calimn asked Swiftlit.

“N-not much.”

“Nonsense. Vertebrates need their sleep,” Wel insisted.

Calimn, with another yawn, agreed, and pushed Swiftlit inside with a forefinger against his back. Though he didn’t seem to want to go to sleep yet, he stayed inside the little house of sand.

Wel relaxed more, head lolling to one side as she let of a burbling sigh. Her eyes stayed open, though. Calimn never could tell when her friend was awake or asleep with those eyes. Deep, slow breaths were all she could go by. The mermaid laid down slowly beside the hut, then scooted close and quietly, carefully curled around it. Tentacles shifted to let her tail coil around to make a nearly complete circle, and Welifindi gave an almost-silent noise as several of her limbs wrapped around Calimn’s tail.

“I’m not a guppie anymore, Wel. I don’t need you hugging me all over to go to sleep.”

“Mmn. You’re still a kid . . .”

“To you?”

“Mmn.”

“I’m still not a minnow now.”

“Go’Slee’”

Calimn did so.

* * * * *

Pulses.

Steadily increasing pulses that raced towards him at speeds that defied the mind.

With each pulse . . . he could see more and more clearly the outline of something . . . He wanted to go back to it . . . what was it? Something . . . like a ball of light and color and darkness. In the center was a tiny blot of intense blackness . . .

Closer . . .

Was that . . .?

Closer . . .

A . . . ?

Closer . . .

Sun . . . ?

Closer . . .

No . . .

Closer . . .

Not . . .

Really . . .

A . . .

Sun . . .

Black Sun? Something more, but just as dark. He had to get closer . . .

Swftlit opened his eyes slowly, and for a moment felt terror.

BlacknesstheBlackSunswllowedmeI’mblindittookmyeyesandbu-

Then he realized it was still dark, but a faint, faint light was coming in through the door of . . . where was he? Some kind of hut made out of sand? What . . . ? At last his memory kicked back into gear and he recalled the day before. He rolled over onto his side, trying to snuggle back down into the small hill of soft sand set up as a bed. If that faded light was any indication, it was before dawn, but not by much. He laid in the dark, but he just couldn’t get to sleep again. The light seemed to be getting brighter, too. That didn’t help at all.

A soft slithering sound outside made him seize up in fright, going as taut as a bowstring. Was that a snake? Calimn had talked about some kind of serpent that covered itself in shiny rocks or something. What if it was one of those Sea-Crate nagas? His heart was trembling in his chest despite the utter stillness of the rest of him. Then he remembered Calimn was right outside. The thought did nothing to assuage his fear. She was asleep, and if it was a naga, it could swallow things her size . . .

“Calimn, wake up. Wake up,” he prayed in an intense whisper.

The slithering noise came again, but this time accompanied by a soft popping noise, like something being pulled out of a sticky substance . . . well, not quite. He couldn’t think of anything that made that sound. Very, very slowly, he eased himself up off the sand and crept silently to the door. He peered out, not breathing.

Yet, somehow, he managed to gasp.

The sky was steeped in pale blue light, nebulae with dull reds and blues and purples resting in the crystal clear, cloudless expanse. The split moon was in the middle of it all, but the sun was nowhere to bee seen. He had been wrong. That light wasn’t dawn.

It was a gigantic comet.

It was nearly a third the size of the moon, which was fist-sized, white and blue tail flung out behind it. It was moving across the night sky slowly, silently making its way from left to right.

Another wet popping sound made him look to his left.

Welifindi pulled the suckers of two tentacles apart idly. She was staring up at the spectacle overhead, eyes full of mercury and onyx, shining with the gleam of the comet. Her tentacles were swirling with the same exact hues as the comet possessed, and once the two she had been using to make that sound settled to the ground, they were absolutely still. Swftlit turned his eyes to the stars again, and walked over to stand beside the chlaena. They stood without any sound for a few minutes, and, at last, Swiftlit spoke.

“Tell me what you meant about Calimn needing handling. I was scared to ask her myself.”

“Does it remind you of home?”

“What?”

“Space, the night sky, all this so far above our heads. It’s so beautiful.”

“I don’t get what you’re asking.”

“It does. You aren’t stuttering.”

“What?”

“It must remind you of home, this twilit sky, full of things we can’t understand.”

Swiftlit kept gazing at the universe spread out before him. Wel didn’t so much as glance at him as she continued.

“I think this is the closest you will ever get to seeing it besides being there. All we need is a black sun eating a hole in the moon and it is perfect.”

Swiftlit shuddered.

“You talked in your sleep. Must have been a vivid dream. It sounded amazing, even if I had to put my ear next to the doorway to hear.”

“You’re right. It does make me think of where I came from.”

“I knew it.”

“Calimn . . . ?”

“She was . . . a handful when she was a child. Lost, tangled up in a net, poor, silly little mermaid. They wanted to make her a tool, a slave. They would have raised her into something that she isn’t and shouldn’t be. Wanted her to hunt whales for them. Stupid . . . Maybe she would have been a daughter to them, but I couldn’t allow it. She was too pathetic not to help. I was barely grown myself, but unhooking the net was easy. She was a real terror at first. Couldn’t stand boats, nets, harpoons, any small creatures on the water. Tore a longboat in half once, and wasn’t gentle with the rowers. It took time to temper that, and it faded after a while.”

“Parents never came for her. I wonder how far that storm carried her before she got caught . . . It was the biggest one I’d ever seen, a hurricane that wouldn’t quit. But, I kept an eye on her, helped her to hunt, protected her.”

“So you were like her mother?”

“Older sister. Definitely not a mother. She hardly depended on me at all, after the first few years.”

“I wonder why she never told me about you . . .”

“She couldn’t have known this would happen . . .”

The comet was moving along at a snails pace, but it was still moving, and Swiftlit was beginning to see what path it was going to take.

“She could have never predicted that she would take this road.”

It was headed for . . .

“I think you should go.”

The moon.

“Wha- . . .” he began, starting to look over at her, but a tentacle coiled around his neck and forced him to keep watching the collision of celestial bodies.

“This is something no one should miss. A rare event. Watch it while I explain.”

Despite himself, he did.

“I really do like you. All sorts of vegetables everywhere, all of them unique and delicious, but here’s a flower in the middle of the garden. Those sparks . . . I felt what you did, a little. I didn’t even have a color to express it. But . . .”

“I think that you can’t stay here. Calimn has to protect you, and if she does that she could get hurt. That would be fine . . .”

“Fine!?”

“Scars are tougher than normal flesh. Experience is better than ignorance. But . . . what you could also do is kill her. What happens when you lean on her too hard? With too great a weight, a threat she can’t handle? You’ll break her.”

Tears shone silver and blue as they ran over smooth flesh that flickered with those same hues in steady bands and swirls.

"And then . . . there is the force you seem to be channeling from whatever place you came from. Do you know what you did? You almost stopped her heart when she touched you. And you weren’t even a third of the way gone or connected or what it was you were doing. I could see it. They probably couldn’t pick it up, but I could. Colors they can’t see . . . but I did. And when that lightning touched her I was terrified that she would turn to dust and ash.”

“What will you do if it happens again? If it gets worse? It could kill her. It could do worse than kill her.”

The tentacle slowly tightened as the chlaena spoke, cutting off his breath a little at a time, and Swiftlit slapped weakly at the limb. The stars were getting brighter as the comet blazed towards the hapless moon.

“You are going to murder her.”

His arms went limp.

“N-no. I d-don’t . . . I couldn’t . . .”

“Did you see her right afterwards? How pale she was? How tired? What happens if she tries to stop you when you are almost home?”

“I c-can’t leave . . . I’ll turn insane . . .”

“Go find another garden . . . find another place, another path. I know you don’t want to see her dead any more than I do. Please.”

A second set of tear trails joined Swiftlit’s, sliding around a desperate smile.

The comet struck the moon, and a split became a fissure. Silver-blue light was snuffed out. Dust danced out into the dark as two halves drifted apart, mourning the empty space between them.



Felarya is Karbo’s

Selachi are credited to Darkstorm Zero, Flare, and Fish. Lacoliths are credited to PrinnyDood. Silent Eric is credited with the Rosic Neko Tribe.

All other named characters are mine.

Amazing chapter, especially the parts about the void, the way you describe it makes such an alien concept tantalizingly real, almost imaginable. Simply wonderful.
The end, the last line especially, was so well written, it was very very good, like really good, art in more ways than one.
But I'm henceforth going to have to call you Captain Cliffhanger! Gah! You always do this to me you cruel evil person!!! Two chapters in a row?
The way you wrote the end, I can hardly tell if Wel really killed him or not, it would really really suck if she did, though maybe Swiftlit could somehow "find" his way back... I hope do.
Really well done. Just don't leave us hanging for too long!

Thank you, Archvile. It was a large climactic point in the story, and one I worked quite hard on. Nice to see that effort paid off.

The aftermath of the event of the night before, and a bit more from Jab’s perspective. As always, critique and comments are welcome.

Chapter 8: Selfish

Calimn woke up slowly, the warm orange light of sunrise stirring her back to consciousness. She sniffed as she levered herself up from the sand, then rolled towards the surf with a yawn; she was pretty dried-out after sleeping out of the water all night. A refreshing dip lent her new vitality, the strange exhaustion of yesterday gone entirely after her heavy sleep. She inhaled deeply, letting the seawater soak into her gills. After a moment of relaxation, she splashed her way back onto the beach.

The cracked moon was all but gone, the top of it visible as a pair of jagged halves vanishing over the horizon even as she watched. Oddly, they seemed farther apart than they had been yesterday. Ah, well. Must be her imagination. Now, where was Jab? Ah ha.

The harpy was still sleeping, a pile of feathers that heaved with her deep breaths and sighs. She was mumbling something, and, grinning, Calimn leaned in.

“Mmshdn . . . C’mon, ye book-grubbin’ owl, te’ me more . . . &*^%ing info-miser . . .”

The harpy hiccupped and rolled to one side as Calimn straightened up, restraining a snicker, and made her way over to the little sand-house Swiftlit was staying in. Wel was sitting a few meters in front of it, staring at the sun as it rose in a shining ball of orange, red and yellow. Calimn took a minute to admire it, as well. It was a beautiful sunrise, a complement to the amazing night sky yesterday. She stretched, back popping a few times, and finally spoke.

“When did you get up?”

“I never went to sleep. I stayed up and watched the moon . . .”

“You always did have a thing for stargazing. How was it?”

The chlaena’s color turned from its usual shade to a silver-blue Calimn had never seen before.

“Amazing . . . and very, very sad at the end of it all . . .” was the answer, tentacles going a shade of deep grey as she finished.

“Sad . . . ?”

Calimn shook her head. Not even after being friends with one for this long could she completely understand the mind of a chlaena. She turned towards the shelter. Time to wake Swiftlit up, if he wasn’t already awake. He didn’t sleep much in the first place, and last night he had been particularly disinclined to going to bed, though for a different reason than the usual complaint of nightmares. That weird confidence . . . she shook her head again, dismissing the thought. Time to get him up. She was about to reach into the hut’s doorway when Wel’s voice stopped her.

“Don’t bother.”

“Huh?”

“He isn’t there . . .”

“Oh, he already woke up? Where’d he go?”

“Away . . .”

“Away? What are you talking about, Wel?”

“He went away . . . “

“ . . . Did he fade away again?! Wel, di-!?”

“I almost think wringing the life out of him would have been kinder.”

Calimn’s heart suddenly dived for the tip of her tail. Numbness spread in a hideously slow wave from the top of her head like freezing tree-sap. It was infinitely colder than that which had gripped her yesterday. She was so tense she couldn’t even feel herself. Frozen solid despite the fact that dawn was only cool and slightly breezy. It would warm as the sun rose, but Calimn was sure that no matter how high the sun reached, no matter how hot it got, it wouldn’t be able to erase this chill.

“Wel . . . what did you do?” she asked, voice turning quiet.

“We had a talk . . . and watched the moon die. You really should have seen i-.“

“I really should have,” the mermaid interjected, with a sharpness that surprised even herself.

“Calimn. I just told him the truth.”

“WHERE IS HE!?”

Jab shot into the sky with a startled screech at Cailmn’s shout, still half-asleep but more than willing to fly away from whatever had woken her up. After a second of flapping, she realized her error and circled around to land near the two. The chlaena was adorned in dark grey bands that pulsed both ways from the middle of each tentacle. Calimn looked furious, her face a livid shade of royal blue. Jab knew better than to step into this argument.

“Gone . . .”

“Did you hurt him?” Calimn asked, voice going frosty and flat again.

“Only a little –“ Wel admitted with a slightly apologetic smile.

Calimn swung, but the chlaena halted the slap with a tendril before it could reach its target. The mermaid swung with the other hand next, but that effort, too, was entangled. Jab shuffled, wanting to help Calimn, but . . . she wasn’t sure what was going on, fully. Wel had hurt Swiftlit? Where was he, then? It was confusing. She stayed where she was, continuing to fidget as the argument began to devolve into something far, far less savoury.

“YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY THE MOST SELFISH, TWISTY-MINDED THI-!”

“CALIMN! Let me talk!”

“NO!”

Red joined the grey now, in blazing rings that flickered fire with the same rhythm as the bands. A third tentacle shot out, spinning around Calimn’s mouth to stop it.

“I am trying to tell you something, so listen to me and shut up!”

Calimn revised her initial observance. There was one thing that could melt this deep, rending numbness. It was the white-hot glob of molten steel that was currently eating her insides alive. That could melt this mental ice but quick. The humiliation of being handled like this only added to it. She hadn’t felt this angry since . . . well, since she had been a child, furious at everything to do with boats and nets.

She could recall always being the most temperamental of her family. Before the storm had swept her away, that is. Tumbling in the murky, clashing waves, spun over and over in the surf until she couldn’t remember where the surface or bottom was. Now here was the one who had helped her forget being separated from them, holding her still as if she were still no more than a minnow.

That blazing coal in her middle was still burning, but she finally let her hands drift back to her sides and nodded. The tentacle wrapped around her mouth unwound after a moment, as did those restraining her wrists.

“I did not kill him, and the bruise should already be gone. I just told him the truth of the matter. He left a few hours ago.”

“What did you do, twist his arm until he had no choice?” came the bitter inquiry.

“No . . .”

“I’m detecting more to that response . . .”

“I didn’t twist his arm . . . I did twist his neck a little, but the bruise will be gone by now, as I said.”

“So you threatened him into leaving. Why would you do that?”

“I didn’t threaten him. He left voluntarily, in the end.”

The coal had simmered down, now cooling from anger to confused grief. Why would Swiftlit leave, run off like this? What could Wel have possibly said to make him think leaving everyone behind was the best option he had?

“Why . . .”

“He really does think of you as his best friend. I might even venture to say he sees you as something like an older sister. Like you see me.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever see you like that after this.”

The red rings flashed before turning a grey so dark it bordered on black.

“I’m sorry, Calimn. I swear I never meant for this to happen. It was an honest mistake . . .”

“Where’s the rest of that sentence?”

“ . . . on your part to make friends with him. I guess it’s more my fault than anyone’s. I thought you had really taken it to heart, that they were for food.”

“Don’t you dare call him food.”

* * * * *

Jab had never seen Calimn so enraged, despite the fact that she was trying to conceal it below a façade of calm and chill curtness. Her whole form was rigid and livid with emotion. There was a slight shine to her eyes, too, that bespoke tears that hadn’t yet fallen. The harpy was torn between wanting to comfort her friend and knowing that now was definitely not the time for it. Stepping into the fight now would most assuredly blow up in her face.

The chlaena, who Jab had gained an even greater dislike of, seemed calm, but her usual smile and cool cheer was gone, and those storm-cloud colors moving on her eight lower limbs were indicative of her inner mood. Now her face was flat and her eyes seemed so bright they were almost reflective, twin, double-colored mirrors shining above a mouth thinned to the point of almost disappearing.

“I did not call him that. He isn’t food, not anymore. Maybe he was, but I wouldn’t dare eat him now.”

“Jab.”

The harpy nearly molted right there at the sudden address by Wel. Her stomach did a loop-the-loop as if her aerial antics had suddenly been transferred to her gut all at once. She set herself, wings opening slightly. No telling what Wel would do.

“Wh-what? You wanna fight?”

“Get rid of the hut.”

“Why?”

“Look at the floor of it.”

“Fine.”

Calimn, fury once again fading to confusion, watched as Jab erased the dwelling with a sweep of her wing, the blow razing it down to the ground in one pass. Both harpy and mermaid stared at the floor, trying to see what the chlaena was getti-

Jab felt the breath catch in her lungs, and would have shuddered if she hadn’t been frozen in place.

There was neat Swiftlit-shaped patch of sand that had been melted into a kind of dull, murky glass. Jab gently tapped the spot with a claw, and the glass shattered. There had only been a paper-thin sheet of the glass over the sand it had once been a part of. Jab had once caught a glass-making craftsman, and queried on his trade thoroughly. She knew to melt sand you needed to have a lot of heat, and that meant Swiftlit, some time in the night, had been practically on fire.

“Now imagine what would have happened if you had let him sleep with you as a pillow. You would have an interesting burn-scar for the rest of your life.”

Jab felt the skin on her abdomen crawl at the words, as if anticipating being seared by a burning branch.

Calimn, you don’t need to be anywhere near him anymore. He’s going to kill you if you try.”

“No,” was the only response from Calimn, though the comprehension growing in her visage was truly terrible to see.

“I’m sorry, Calimn. I really, sincerely am. You were his best friend, and he was practically a little brother to you . . . You know, he cried so hard when he left, I thought he was going drown himself in tears. But he did leave. For you. Because he knew he was going to kill you if he stayed. It would have been a total accident, beyond his or your control, but it would have happened eventually . . .”

“Stop . . . j-just stop it.”

Jab finally found the chance to step in as Calimn’s form slumped, face filling up with sorrow and tears. She pulled her wings around her friend, squeezing hard as she could, and once again felt Calimn’s tears sliding over her feathers. The sensation finally brought the whole of the situation home with a blow that staggered the harpy. Swiftlit was gone. Calimn was heartbroken. And that was it. Period. In a moment, Jab found herself joining Calimn in crying.

“I liked him, actually. A wildflower in a vegetable garden, so out of place but nice anyway.”

“THEN WHY DID YOU DO THIS?!” Calimn screamed through her tears.

“Because . . . If I didn’t, you might have died. I’m trying so hard to keep you safe. At least give me some help and forget about him.”

“I’ll never do that!”

“Then just let him go.”

“I can’t . . . “ she choked out, tightening her hold on Jab inadvertently and nearly throttling her friend in the process.

“You have to.”

Jab had to say something. Now she switched off with Calimn, grief beginning to turn to a hotter and more aggressive emotion by far. Hot metal and frosted glass slipped through her, and after a tighter hug she let go of Calimn to walk over to Wel. The “wha-“ the chlaena was about to say was cut off as Jab head-butted her, the harpy’s forehead slamming into Welifindi’s nose. Of course, it didn’t do any real damage, but the chlaena looked a bit shocked.

“You are so incredibly selfish I can’t even comprehend it.”

Each word was painstakingly pronounced, all given a weight with the emphasis she put on them. Jab had never used an insult in all seriousness before, not like this. If she wanted to insult someone, she gave them a backwards compliment. She’d never spoken outside of her own dialect and sent a barb at anyone. It was a serious breach of etiquette, enough to make other harpies gape at her if they knew. At this point, Jab didn’t care. Wel had just screwed everything up. She’d ruined the trip, but that fact was a pale imitation of the greater harm she had wrought.

She’d essentially severed a friendship that had been running for a good year at the least. Split it right down the middle with a hammer blow like a meteor coming down. How could this possibly be considered -by ANYONE- to be keeping Calimn safe? Or happy? Jab had to resist the urge to head-butt the chlaena again. Instead, she swiveled around and went back to Calimn.

“I’m going to go find him. I’ll be back.”

With that, she exploded skyward, full of a fierce determination that mixed with the joy of flight. She could cover a lot of ground quickly if she skimmed the treetops, keeping an eye on the coast and some of the jungle near it. Grey eyes slivered the trees to splinters, scouring the beach like a wave of heat. Where, where, where. She flew up higher, some thousand feet above the trees, and scanned for any sign of the boy. With his shoes on, he could move incredibly fast, and he had seemed even more agile after the incident yesterday. He would be quite a ways off by now. That left the question: Where did he go to?

She circled around, looking for any trace that might indicate where he went.

Nothing.

If he had left any footprints, they were long gone, erased by the surf. She could only guess as to where he had went. She didn’t think there was any method of predicting which way he had gone now that he was no longer tethered to Calimn by friendship. No, that thread of connection had been cut. Wel had made sure of it. He would be wandering, but to where? Maybe to Miragia Forest? Back to where he had first come to Felarya? It seemed likely enough. She was about to bank around when something slammed down onto her back.

Whatever it was, it struck with the force of a flying whale and nearly broke her spine, knocking every molecule of air from her lungs. Her wings snapped upwards painfully from the impact, and she felt a series of pops ripple through her back as she nearly folded in half in a way she was never meant to. The numbness of the shock was eradicated a second later by the blast of pain that followed.

Jab fell out of the sky in a tailspin, then smashed into the treetops.

Greenbrowngreengreenbrowngreenbrownbrownbrownbrowngreengreen.

The world became a blur of earthy colors and heavy crashes into half-glimpsed obstacles. She slammed into a branch face-first, nose snapping to one side and immediately spitting out an uneven flow of crimson. Then physics, in their usual arbitrary way, dictated that she flip in the opposite direction. A wing caught in a tangle of vines, entrapped and her motion was arrested in a wrenching, joint-breaking jolt. She felt the pull stop just short of snapping her wing, and then she was left hanging in the tree by a net of leafy tendrils.

She panicked instantly, terrified. The prospect of breaking a wing was one every harpy feared to their core, an instinctive fear rooted in their hearts even more strongly than the fear of dying. It was the deepest and darkest horror available, because it meant a slow, agonizing death when out in the wild, on your own. If you were in a flock, they could take care of you, but even then there was no absolute guarantee that you would mend the right way unless your commune had something like a healer.

Breaking a wing meant the distinct possibility of never being able to fly again.

That was utter terror.

Though fear was rushing through her in a flood, she knew better than to struggle in this situation. Her right shoulder was already strained with her weight in its awkward position, threatening to dislocate, or, even worse, just crack. She stayed absolutely still, barely breathing for fear that filling her lungs would tip the balance. She slowly swung back and forth, caught firmly. If she could just get her wing rotated a little, so it wasn’t locked up like this . . .

A rush of wind made her swing harder, eliciting a cry of pain as her shoulder creaked under the added strain. Fire traced its way around the joint, searing her nerves and bone. She tried to crane her head around, to see what had just landed near her.

“Keh, you shouldn’t have shown your scum-sucking face around here again.”

It was another harpy, bigger than she was by some twenty feet for a total of a hundred and not looking too happy. She wasn’t a rock harpy, like Jab, and the evidence was in her feathers. Jab’s were a sparrow brown, one of the dullest shades for a rock harpy to have, while this particular harpy had steel-colored feathers that darkened to nearly black at the ends. Black bars stood out in horizontal on her legs and wings as well.

Jab recognized her instantly, and ground her teeth.

“Omidri, I swear I-“

“Wasn’t eating some of the best goddamned musicians in the Rosic tribe enough for you, you gluttonous maggot? I told you to get your butt outta the sling it was in and shove off. Now you’re just back for more, huh? Little runt.”

“Omidri, I need to-“

“Didn’t even give them a chance to pull out their instruments, did you? Pigging out on nekos, jeez. It’s a wonder you didn’t get your rear handed to you by Gerich.”

“MISS OMIDRI, MY WINGS ARE CURRENTLY ENTANGLED AND IN DANGER OF SERIOUS INJURY! I POLITELY REQUEST THAT YOU STOP SPEAKING AND REFRAIN FROM MY COMPANY!”

The other harpy’s eyes went wide with the heinous language, her stance speaking how much she was taken aback.

“You’re mom teach you to cough up slim-streaked gastric trash like that, Vomit-Cusp?” she said back, taking the moral high ground by remaining polite and actually using even more polite phrasings.

“Sorry, but you kept talking over me. I’m about to break a wing here and my friends are in the middle of a huge breakdown.”

“Gods, why didn’t you bother to spit that gunk out of your face in the first place, retard?! Hang on while I get your wing out of there!”

Omidri hopped across a branch to get closer, then carefully stuck out her leg for Jab to stabilize herself on. With a quick twist and a jerk, she managed to extract herself from the trap, then dropped before snapping her wings open and flapping back up to perch on a heavy branch. Omidri stood opposite to her.

“You make me sick, you putrid worm, but even such a wretch as you doesn’t deserve a broken wing.”

“Pfft, as if I needed your weak attempts at helping me, you featherless fledgling.”

“Apologies that you’re such a weakling that one stoop of mine into your back would nearly de-wing your worthless carcass.”

“As if you could even make my skin itch with your feeble little bumps.”

“But really, you should get out of this area. Some of local predators would flip out if they knew you were within a hundred miles of the Rosic village. You did a big no-no when you ate a few of those cats.”

“You think I don’t know that, you bleeding dustlump?” Jab muttered, wanting to rub at the odd, semi-circular scar hidden under the feathers of her left leg, high up on the back of her thigh.

“You’re just lucky Gerich doesn’t have any venom, Pimple-vat. He was mad about Esil. She was a great guitarist.”

“Yeah, yeah, I ^*%&ed up. How was I supposed to know the Rosics were off-limits? Everybody jumping me wasn’t the right way to tell me. Come on, you bunch of degenerate cretins, no need to mob me over it. Not like I got nearly bitten on the butt or anything. Although I have gotten bit there before, but that didn’t count because it was the other gal’s fault for trying to rush in and eat my damn food, and I tried to block with my hip, but that was her fault comple-“

“Don’t you have some kind of worthless agenda on your pea-brain, you droopy-eyed drooling ball of stupid?”

“Fffff- I forgot because you were so intent on flapping your useless trap at me. Next time I see you I’ll tear your ears off and stuff them in your empty eyesockets.”

Omidri responded in kind as Jab blasted off into the sky again, leaves flying as she burst out of the canopy. She felt a rush of relief. Though Omidri had been one of those who had driven her out of the area before, she seemed a decent enough harpy. That stoop had been pretty hardcore, if a little much. She’d probably forgotten that Jab was smaller and a tad more fragile than most rock harpies, being the runt of the clutch. She stretched her wings, working off the residual ache in the shoulder of the one that had gotten hooked. She wheeled around, stalled in the air for a moment to wipe away the blood still dripping from her nose, wiped away the dregs of tears from her cheeks, and then ascended to coast towards the Miragia Forest, vision sweeping about for a hint of Swiftlit.

* * * * *

Calimn was left with Wel as Jab took off into the air to search for their lost friend.

For some reason, no matter how many tears fell, the supply never ended. The chlaena had turned a grey over her entire body, and her tentacles were curling against one another slowly.

“I’m sorry, Calimn.”

“How could . . .”

“I don’t want to see you wounded, or dead. Neither did he. He was actually crying blood at the end of it. Left drips of red all the way down the beach as he headed off.”

Calimn felt her heart seize up at that. She’d only seen that from him once, when he had been so furious and sad that his skyrocketing pulse had forced blood into his tears. It had been the most heartbreaking thing she had ever witnessed, and the idea of him going through that again brought another flood of grief. She bit her lip hard enough to draw a trickle of red from it, shoulders trembling.

She understood what Wel was saying to her, but she couldn’t accept it. Let Swiftlit wander aimlessly in Felarya? With the possibility of him disappearing forever into some psychotic dimension she couldn’t reach or even comprehend. Just . . . no.

“Wel . . . please. I can’t let him die out there, or fade away.”

“Calimn- ”

“No, Wel. This is not up for debate,” Calimn interrupted, heat coming into her voice again.

“Are you suicidal?”

“No, I’m unwilling to sit back and let one of my best friends be erased.”

“Are you serious?”

“Serious as a whirlpool full of selachi.”

“ . . . . . .”

“Just tell me where he went, Wel. You have to know where he’s gone.”

“Calimn, you’re going to get yourself disintegrated if-“

“And that’s my choice. I’m not a minnow for you to carry around under your arm and decide things for anymore, Wel. That was a long time ago. I’m an adult.”

Silence stretched to the horizon, holding for nearly ten minutes as black-and-silver eyes locked gazes with eyes the color of spring grass. Finally, the chlaena let a long, exasperated sigh drift out.

“You’re right. I guess I can’t tell you what to do anymore.”

“Where did he go?”

“He’s going back to where he came from, of course. Miragia Forest.”

“Thanks, Wel.”

Calimn wiped away what tears she could. The hurt was still there, aching, but now she could do something to relieve it. She could help Jab find him. She began to make her way towards the water, then rolled the last few dozen yards into the sea. Water enveloped her, abetting her sorrow with the familiar feel of the ocean. She rose up until her head was out of the surf again, then swam out into deeper water and set off for the mouth of the Jewel River.

“Calimn!”

She turned to look at Wel.

“Don’t let yourself die. And I am sorry.”

Calimn didn’t say anything back, but she nodded, and then she was gone.



Lots of harpy dialogue, and a little on why Jab was tossed out of the area before. Calimn and Jab go looking for Swiftlit.

Felarya belongs to Karbo.

Rosic Neko tribe is credited to SilentEric.

All named characters are mine unless otherwise stated.

Really good chapter again!
I love the way you do harpy speech! It cracks me up, I have no idea how you come up with all of that...
You make me want to create a harpy character, but at the same time I think I'd suck at their speech.
Good job!

Powerful chapters; excellent writing! Gripping through and through.

I finally reached this point in the story! Spent hours and hours reading, and no regrets! YUJUH! XD
Hahaha
Anyways, wow, I didn't expected a story like that from you (which it's not a bad thing) ... though to tell you the truth, I didn't know what to expect at all.
I love the humor, the developing relation whith Callim and Swiftlit (though someties I have hard time telling what's going on with him, spetially in those last scenes) and also the tension in many scenes, phew.

Looking foward your next chapter =P

Wow superb chapters here ! so powerfull
You conveyed each of their expressions so well ! And it was downright captivating. I couldn't stop reading even if I wanted to
It's a very unexpected development that beg so many questions. I just can't wait to see what will happens next !

Heh. It's good to actually be back on this forum once again. Last time I visited was, what, 4 months ago? Salutations to everybody!

And now, while the feeling's fresh, I'd like to relate something to you. Here's what happened today. I got incredibly bored, had finished watching all my favourite TV shows, the music I usually listen to sounded dull to my ears, it didn't bring me to that imaginary land that I always immerse myself into when listening to a track or reading something or even watching a movie. So, on a whim, I decided to check the forum, this forum. Scarcely, I recalled that the "Strange Friends" thread consisted of LESS total pages, so, remebering how awesome the story was, I checked it. And right I was, you had added a few new chapters.

I can't express the joy I felt when reading those, but I'll get to that later. A short story is on its way. The Devourer of Tales, eh? Interesting title, I once thought of myself as such, even if I never outright claimed it for everyone to see. I did try to read everything, literally -every- literary piece connected to Felarya in some way. You can check my dA profile if you'd like, it might answer some questions. Especially my favourites tab. By now you're probably wondering where I'm going with this, and likely if I'd remove myself from this conversation the sooner. In order to answer the former question, I'll have to continue my rather tiresome rant. Right, so anyway, the same was the mission that I set off to when I found the complex, beautiful and yet dangerous world of Felarya. With all its allure, it drew me in, and I embraced it. I can't recall the number of stories that I read, I don't really appreciate any other form of art as much. Drawings never really caught my eye. However, as time passed, the tales that I read began to lose their charm, their seductiveness if you will. What I once found amazing, now seemed below average. Only the foremost top-quality ones could revive my old enthusiasm about this realm, the Felaryan realm. And even that was all too soon lost to Time as well.

You cannot imagine my surprise when today I saw what a marvelous tale of woe you had weaved. Well, given how only the last few chapters can be considered tales of woe, but you get the point. It managed to bring that old feeling back, that magical sensation flowing somehow from within. For which I thank you so very much. I genuinely felt the urge, I felt compelled to say something to you, to thank you somehow for taking the time and writing this. I can't really put it into words how difficult it is for me to comprehend what it is there for authors, what prize there is that you waste hours typing for other people's enjoyment, so I only pray that you, and good authors in general, continue to do what you do best. As a person who appreciates your trade, if I may call it that, with all my heart, I can all but compliment you.

I've often been told by everyone who knows me, and knows me well, that they can't tell when I lie or tell the truth, since often when I speak I tend to exaggerate everything that I say. In a humorous way. After all, what are stories when you can't spice them up? Problem is, this whole post is NOT an exaggeration, everything I've said I really do mean. Basically, this is like Jab insulting Wel. One of those rare moments, almost nonexistant ones, where I'm absolutely serious.

Now, you among a very few select others are the only people that I can rely on to bring the Felaryan sensation, rather crude wording, back. It's worth to note though. I've read a truckload of fantasy books by renowned authors, along with fan fics on the side. You, MrNobody, are beyond any author of fan fics that I merely read, on the side. Just who are you?

Once more, thank you. Sorry about the creepiness of that last question. Also thanks to you Karbo for creating this world, none of this would've been possible without you.