Pearl Before Swine ch 29: Wings
~THE PEARL~
When I was yet small, Terra received a petition from a coalition of queen ants whose neighbors had been massacred by deranged bees. The culprits had taken up residence in one of the conquered mounds. To confront them, Terra broke off a piece of his heart and sent it as an envoy in the shape of a millipede.
I questioned this. If he knew where the villains were, why not crush them with a hoof?
He indulged my interest and allowed me to ride on the envoy’s tail.
We found the bees exactly as reported, in the deepest chamber of the largest warren. They did not feel pain, and they did not fear death. Terra faced them with neither in hand. His words coaxed out the source of their power: an elixir stolen from humans.
He asked for a sip of this elixir to prove its existence, and they agreed. Just a tiny sip. A tiny sip for Terra amounted to the entirety of their cache.
Without their drug, the bees died or returned to normal. Nothing was needlessly destroyed. That was my first outing with a lesson: The act is not as important as the why.
The interior of the science wing now reminds me of the ant warrens. The hallways bend and climb, breaking off into ramps and catwalks. The abundance of six-sided shapes grants the scene a cellular appearance as if viewed through the hexagonal facets of a bee’s eyes.
I am as an ant scurrying along the floor while Issoria and Halcyon are as bees with the advantage of flight. Yet, I follow the scent of their energy—Sky energy, like the howl of a snow-laden gale. Questions propel my feet in a run worthy of a gazelle. The air in here, though clogged with steam, fills my every breath with the purest vitality.
I have never felt more full or more determined to discover the all-important why. Is it because this place captures dreams and transmutes them into reality? Or is it more specific? Does the progress manufactured here relate to my realm, whichever realm that may be?
The act is not as important as the why.
The science professor wanted to bring Saburra—a Creature of Essence—into this building. Why?
The blood of a Creature of Essence painted the floor of Beau’s and Sal’s room. Why?
The dean hoped I would stay here. Why?
My mouth runs dry as all three find the same answer. The science conducted in this building involves the Essences, or at least their Creatures. It requires a specimen. A victim. Or many victims.
As I approach the room where the Creatures of the Sky have stopped, I press my back to the wall. It hums at my warmth. The gears hidden behind its smooth surface clatter faster, and my ears strain to catch the hissed conversation beyond.
“It’s the seventy-seventh prototype, Halcyon. He’s almost figured it out. They kicked him out of Central University for even trying, but here at his uncle’s school? In such a short time? You can’t look at this and tell me you’re not in awe.”
The Dragon’s voice thrums, monotone and whispered like the scrape of a rain shower’s first drops falling through brittle leaves. “In all of Sky, I have never seen wings like these.”
“That’s because they’re not meant for the sky.”
Metal clinks and clangs.
“Don’t you dare put that in your mouth, Dragon! I brought you in here for one reason. You’ll go back to Caelus and tell him about all this.”
“You should return and tell him yourself.”
“I have to see this finished. I’ve done too much not to.”
The rain shower becomes a storm, the scrape not quite a roar. “My mission is to bring you home, not tell Caelus about weird wings.”
Issoria’s hiss is the lightning between those droplets, a sizzle no one hears for the thunder. “You’ll tell Caelus about the Auroras. You’ll tell him they’re the infantile creations of a fourth Essence, the Essence of the Stars, and you’ll tell him it exists because of this.”
The Essence of the Stars. I mouth the words, enthralled by their flavor. The Essence of the Stars. Not the Night, not overlapping the other realms, but in the space beyond the sky, swathed in simultaneous night and day. It has no Essence, for there are no humans.
Yet.
Shaping the words again, lolling them over my tongue, I peer around the corner. I must see this thing that will take humans to the stars.
The air rips, grumbling for several seconds after the knife thrown at my face halts between Halcyon’s jaws. Clawed fingers curl around the handle as his teeth release the dented blade. Its coating of light flickers and crackles.
He turns it beneath an inspecting gaze. “This looks too much like one of Caelus’ feathers.”
“I can’t help it if humans like to copy nature.” She shrugs, wings fanning behind her thrice as big as she is. They are as a monarch butterfly’s rendered in effervescent silver and gold, never still. As they ebb, a glisten behind them peeks at me, a light that whispers of a hundred curves pinched to sharpness. Then, her wings pivot wide again.
“You showed them too much, Issoria.” Halcyon’s claws close around the knife, and it crumples like paper. “Essences are supposed to protect the world from humans, not join them in conquering it.”
He swims through the air, nose in the lead, bones a mere suggestion. Issoria jumps to meet him, and a scaled hand comes down on her sternum. With a ragged cry, she hits the floor, claws around her like the bars of a cage. One punctures her wing and sinks through the metal tile beneath.
She squirms and kicks under the bulging hand, screaming at the Dragon. My ability to comprehend speech has frozen with my heart. All I understand are his intentions. His other hand rises, fingers like swords aimed at the human invention.
My arms fly around his waist. “No, Halcyon! Please!” My voice softens as he looks at me with a tilted head and a curled lip—softens like the ground beneath a monsoon, drawing in all and never letting go. “Please.”
“This is Sky business. Your presence is neither relevant nor wanted.”
“This is the business of Creatures of the Stars, and I—” My voice hitches, but I swallow and press on. “I believe I am one.”
He snorts. “Nonsense.”
“You said I have no connection to an Essence. My Essence is too young to support me.”
“Then you would not exist.” Like a strengthening wind, he stiffens, preparing to break the circle of my arms.
I grip him tighter. “Yet, I do exist, and so do the Auroras. I am closer to them than I have ever been to anyone.”
“I see it.” A wary slant angles Issoria's features, and the acute tips of her teeth glance from under the flat line of her lip. She reaches toward me, and gold wafts from several scrapes beneath her torn sleeve. “The dark expanse of the Pearl’s eyes. Fire coiled within. She’s a fraction of what she will be, and already she’s unlike anything made by Land or Sea. She’s closest to Sky, but we know she’s not Caelus’.”
After a moment, Halcyon lowers his hand. Azure scales revert to pale skin, and curved daggers become fingers.
I release him and finally face the dream that has allowed—no, necessitated—my existence.
It stands as a human-shaped carapace, like a cicada’s abandoned exoskeleton. Its inky, opaque hide conforms to a gnarled, overlapped texture like the Dragon’s scales. Toothed circles dot its surface in gold, recalling the brace that encumbered Jun. Yet, these are tiny and plentiful as a nightscape, their slender cords like comets stealing through the heavens.
Behind it rises a pair of massive wings.
As if a moon drawn to a planet, I approach, fingertips brushing the intricate interlock of feathers. They are as a swan’s yet dipped in onyx and limned in iridescent blue, pulled sharper with a perpendicular slit bisecting each one.
Curiosity sloshes within my core and spills. Like morning light, it washes over all in my vicinity, fills the other Creatures of Essence present, and drums like a thousand heartbeats.
When I ask Halcyon to release Issoria and request she explain this novelty to me, my voice is more than the product of human vocal cords. My mind nudges theirs, wind upon the clouds, and they obey.
With the glow of enthusiasm, Issoria speaks of material. The realm of the Stars would destroy a human’s skin, but this suit protects it. The goggles grant the same security while allowing one to see, and the golden mask delivers air from the flexible containers that hang like braids from the skull.
She pulls a cord and toggles gears to prompt flame from the feathers’ slits.
If I ever wanted wings before, that is dust compared with the supernova that is my wish for these. I close my eyes and picture them on my back. I search out their feeling, explore how they attach, how the muscle winds my shoulders and sides and shifts at my whim.
Nothing happens. I remain wingless, a lowly ant not yet worthy of the stars, trapped in this form just as when I was a stone.
Not a sea stone. A star stone.
My eyes dart to the Dragon. How I covet his skill. Can he sculpt any shape he envisions or only those his Essence has given him?
His Essence, Caelus, the Essence of the Sky. He is a blurry shadow in my mind, a fluffy vapor constantly reshaped. Sal claims to have met him, yet he did not tell me the story. Sal fears him, and Issoria wants this fickle Essence to know of the new realm. What will he do with that information?
“It can’t turn out like it did with Mare,” Issoria answers. “Caelus needs to find the infant Essence and care for it.”
Halcyon’s nose crinkles as he circumnavigates the starsuit. “Terra has always raised the younger Essences. Why should Caelus search for it?”
“I don’t want a hostile border between Sky and Stars like there is between Sky and Sea.” She fiddles with knobs on one of the many tools littering a workbench. “As the humans travel out there, I want to go with them.”
He stops, head listed, and his silence pulls at me, a string harpooning the words that simmer on my tongue.
He breaks it with the barest voice, syllables stretched. “Do you wish to be gifted to the new Essence?”
Her eyes flick to me, as brief and blistering as lightning. Will they change from sky blue to night black like mine if she is given to my Essence?
I capture my cheek between my teeth, unsure of what I hope she replies. I do not want to share my Essence, though I will have to with someone. If Issoria helped the Essence of the Stars come into existence, does she not have a greater claim them I?
With a huff, she points her nose in the air. “That would be a silly wish. When Caelus asked for a gift from Mare, she killed the Swine rather than give him away. Why should I expect Caelus to do differently?”
“What one thinks will happen and what one wishes to come about are not often the same.” Lance melts through the back wall as if stepping through a wave. Metallic edges glow orange as the wall heals without a scar.
Halcyon strikes like a serpent, but Lance catches his neck. His bones crack, and the Dragon falls limp.
My eyes and mouth widen, but only soundless tears escape.
Issoria fumbles her tools with an iron clatter, her every line flattening. Her voice is a single, low note. “Who let you in?”
“No one. I came through this flimsy wall.” He leans against it, drops Halcyon, and inspects his nails. “The question is about what you honestly want, Pixie.”
I crawl toward the fallen Dragon. He lies much too still, and my heart does the same, a stone in my chest as heavy as the world.
Issoria’s wings flutter. “You’re not even going to bother with my name, Unicorn?”
“Caelus makes at least twenty of everything.” He shrugs. “I can’t bother to remember all your names.”
“I’m the one you invited to travel the world with you.” A tempest’s howl fractures her reply as I reach Halcyon.
His skin is ice.
Lance laughs. “Pixie, ‘the one’ would be a misnomer.”
“Lance.” I grab his shin, fingers digging in. “Did you kill him?”
With a sigh, he kneels. “Creatures of Essence don’t die so easily. When he wakes up, he’ll have learned not to annoy me.”
I look down at Halcyon. His silver ringlets are half-transformed into wispy strands of cloud. Scales of the purest blue dot his skin, and massive molars peek from his elongated jaw. The incomplete shift renders his expression difficult to interpret, but its tightness and twist hint at pain.
As an idea comes to me, the boundaries of my frown buoy. “He shared energy with me, and now I can return the favor.”
“No, Honey. I’ve shared more with you than he has, and I won’t let you repay that debt yet.” Lance moves to cradle me, but I evade the scoop of his palm.
Issoria catches me from behind, long arms like a rib cage. A trap. Her intention is to trap me.
“You know what would be wonderful, Pearl?” Her breath strokes my ear and sets my fallen strands of hair in a swaying dance. Her ripped jacket sizzles wherever it touches my skin.
I wish for Halcyon’s claws, but of course none appear. Even if I could shift, would I be limited to the two forms I know: human and stone? Both harmless.
“If you, a Creature of the Stars, were to allow us to study you, imagine what we could achieve.”
“You make progress by studying me, yet I only exist because of your progress.”
She nods, cheek against mine. “An irony, yes, but one that works in our favor. The humans learn, and you grow.”
The tiniest of warnings slithers along my spine. The act is not as important as the why. What will the humans do with what they learn? Already they have made blades and projectiles that can hurt us.
Jun wants to kill Mare.
Yet, my eyes slide back to the spacesuit. Energy fills me. How amazing the human mind is.
I bite my lip and only succeed in pinning down half my smile. “Issoria, tell me more.”
*
~THE SWINE~
I’ve never been in a cage that looks like a cage. This one has bars. It’s roomy if not big enough. To sit, I have to slouch, and to lie, I have to curl my knees in. Wood shavings cover the bronze bottom and fill the air with the piney scent of the forest where I wish I was. Steam turns to dew on the metal lid and drips.
I’m somehow both very wet and still overheating. It’s been hours, and they’ve given me nothing. As I contemplate drinking the condensation, Pike shows up.
He stares at me.
I stare back.
He stares more, rubs his narrow, square chin, and hums a descending note.
I turn my spine to him.
“You’re a Sea Swine?”
“That’s what they tell me.” I don’t look at him, but I can feel his squint.
He hums again. “I don’t see it.”
Now I turn. “Then why don’t you let me out?”
He kneads the back of his neck, then laces his hands behind his head. “Listen, none of us real followers of science believe that poor animal we caught today was some mythical being. An undocumented species, perhaps. A mutation maybe…”
He leaves the thought dangling as if I’m supposed to grab it. I don’t.
He straightens, hands falling slowly, reaching toward a tray of pointy tools I try not to look at. “I’m not convinced you are whatever it was either. I mean, you look nothing like it. It was changing shape, but it never looked convincingly human, and it didn’t speak.”
Saburra didn’t feel like dignifying them with speech, but I won’t tell him that.
I face him and lean as close to the bars as I dare, not touching them. I’ve already made that mistake. “What do you think I am, then?”
He picks up a cylinder with several knobs and extends it. I fight a flinch and lose, but I don’t retreat. I hold my breath as if it is reins keeping me in place. Pain echoes my current hurts. Caelus’ feathers through my shell. A pirate harpoon in my belly. Jun’s knife impaling my side and heart.
Please, Pike, don’t.
I can’t say it. My mouth is too dry.
Cold water drips on my head. It runs down my face and tastes of metal.
His eyes catch on his sleeve or something hidden beneath it. “Mare isn’t real, but if she was, do you think we could make a deal with her?”
Continued in chapter 30: Science and Stars
Thank you for reading!