Stung

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley… but there were always trees and depending on who you ask, trees are arguably more magical.

Bear with me.

We’ll start with tree heaven. It’s exactly what it sounds like, that’s not the challenging part. Now, “heaven” is the eternal afterlife met upon death, I don’t expect that to be difficult for you. But “tree”? “Tree” is an almost arbitrary term used to describe a collection of analogous traits shared by unrelated plants who only happen to appear similar by convergent evolution. We would expect oaks, for instance, to share a heaven with roses sooner than with pines due to their closer evolutionary relationship to the former; or else, we might expect that all plants go to “plant heaven.” But it isn’t called “plant heaven,” it’s called “tree heaven,” and investigation via astral projection has reliably well established that tree heaven is home to oaks and pines, but not roses.

To understand why the classification “tree” is paradisically significant despite being genetically insignificant, it is helpful to draw an analogy with the term “anthropos.” A couple centuries ago, a witch of a prominent coven made the purely philosophical observation that the universe was perfectly amenable to being observed. That is, the laws, structure, and composition of the universe allowed the possibility of observers when they could just as easily or as likely, and perhaps more easily or likely, have not. In short order, the witch’s colleagues proved that the addition or subtraction of even a single spatial or temporal dimension would render material existence, much less consciousness, impossible. The witch proceeded to make the not uncommon academic mistake of participating in academia and called the apparent tendency of the universe toward observability the “anthropic principle.”

(To do the concept as little justice as that given to a virgin sacrificed to a god in a forest, the “weak” anthropic principle states rather tautologically that the universe is observable because it happens to be observable; meanwhile, the “strong” anthropic principle states that the universe is observable because that’s the only way a universe can be.)

The witch was immediately criticized for the wording “anthropic,” which suggested that the only possible observer of the universe was an anthropos, a human, despite it being possible, likely or guaranteed depending on who you asked, that other observers existed in the universe that weren’t necessarily human.

She was however vindicated within the last century by the kirk's and the ur-coven’s recent communion with interstellar cosmic beings whose theistic integrity was maintained by the worship of not only humans, but humanoids on distant stars. You see, the correct degree of the anthropic principle was neither strong nor weak but strongest, that is, the universe is not only observably composed, but its observers necessarily arise via a specifically anthropic schematic that supersedes evolution. While the trees of the world are analogous via convergent evolution and ultimately have a common ancestor, the evolutionary trees—if you’ll forgive the analogy (er, un-analogy?)—of humanoids on separate stars cannot be said to be evolutionarily convergent because those branches never intersected at any point. Neither “evolutionary” nor “convergent” are sufficient to describe what is actually happening: schematic congruence. That is, water and oil are entirely unrelated materially, but they have the same shape when poured into identical cups.

It should be added that despite the flowery speculation about “elves,” otherworldly humanoids are so cosmically distant that it is impossible to do anything more than simply note their existence and, similarly, that physical distance precludes spiritual interaction outside of the shared worship of interstellar gods, which is a metaphysical event so esoterically godly that it can only be shallowly investigated.

Great, now that we understand universal schematics, I can elucidate the seeming arbitrariness of the classification “tree”: there is an arboreal schematic arrived at via several evolutionary approaches among plants. Now, as I’m sure you’ve already deduced, a detail of the “tree” schematic—like the humanoid schematic—is that it contains a psychic nucleation point which allows for the generation of a soul from the background spiritual energy of the universe. Unfortunately, the less schematically congruent plants which represent more primitive forms that don’t qualify as trees but are merely located along their evolutionary trajectory—their “chain of being”—aren’t nucleated.

Your roses aren’t going to any heaven, tree or otherwise.

While you grieve the impending oblivion of your back garden, I will move on to our second topic, which I will try (and fail) to treat briefly—eyes.

The study of optics had a long, if primitive, history before the ur-coven or the kirk. Ancient monotheist authors noticed that covering one eye partially inhibited depth perception. The seemingly obvious conclusion that more eyes would sharpen visual acuity is what led to enlightenment being represented by the opening of a “third eye,” and further, explains why the “angels”—which we now know to be “gods”—of monotheistic cultures were depicted with a multitude of eyes, signifying ultimate perception of the mysteries of the universe.

Of course, the first confessors of the ur-coven and the kirk would later find through magical sensory manipulation that visual acuity plateaued much further beyond two eyes, a fact which was surprisingly critical to their apologia and the subsequent defeat of monotheistic heresy. The newly empowered and covenanted pair of the kirk and ur-coven became leading patrons of the natural sciences, and it was soon found that the worms ancient authors had called “blind” actually had “eyespots,” primitive sensory organs capable only of telling light from dark. Complexity rather than quantity was the name of the optical game.

A witch who neglected her coven in favor of scientific progress hybridized cats and bamboo to produce what she called “a fast-growing ocular bouquet.” The horrific forest (technically a lawn because bamboo is a grass [but still going to tree heaven, remember]) was meant to rapidly produce generations of eyes that she would regularly cull to advance their complexity. Unfortunately, the witch made the rather uncommon academic mistake of sleeping too near her mutant lawn and a shaft of eyed bamboo grew into her back, up through her heart, and out her chest. The lawn spread unchecked and had to be entirely destroyed in a less-than-controlled burn lest it suffocate the nearby agriculture. Luckily, the witch’s data survived, but unluckily it was librarily voluminous and among many and sundry other failures no attempt at her feline-gramine hybrids succeeded in producing viable offspring.

Meanwhile, attention began to be paid to an essential component of vision: light. A country priestess with a boring parish who spent her ample free time reading the growing corpus of the covenant's literature on sound wrote a groundbreaking essay suggesting light was also propagated in waves. This was well-received by most who cared, but a missionary returning from across the sea found the abundance of waves on land rather annoying and wrote her own essay contending that light was a particle, a “mote.” The academics entered into a bitter and public rivalry that threatened the diplomatic relations of priestesses and witches.

A council was held to settle the “doctrine of light.” The wave camp threatened to establish unquestioned orthodoxy when it was shown that a ray of light passing through two slits demonstrated an interference pattern, but the particle camp almost simultaneously produced from the aforementioned witch’s research a superlatively sensitive “uber-eye” that successfully detected individual motes of light as they hit its retina. When it was determined that light was a mote that traveled in waves, the clunky term “wave-particle duality” was quickly abandoned in favor of “anthropicity,” drawing an analogy with the dual soul-body nature of humankind.

However, before the council could depart in peace, a yet-to-be-ordained seminarian showed that detecting individual motes as they passed through either slit in the wave experiment removed the interference pattern. It was concluded that motes of light existed in a superposition that ended upon either collision or observation. The Council of Light ended with the ordination and installation as a high priestess of the acolyte, but she wasn’t done.

Surprise! Their work had implications for the anthropic principle. In addition to the principle’s degree being “strongest,” it was also participatory. The necessarily humanoid observers brought certain particles out of superposition into definitive position by the act of observation. “Phenomenology,” put simply the apprehension of the universe by the senses as experience and consciousness, was not “soft”—i.e., the universe affected sensory experience and consciousness but not vice versa—but “hard”—i.e., the act of observation and subsequent construction of experience affected the universe. Because this feature of observation was first, uh, observed in light, whose new anthropicity was recently discovered, the high priestess called their new discovery, rather annoyingly, the anthropic anthropic principle.

What does this have to do with eyes? The anthropic anthropic principle shows that eyes not only provide perception, but power. Within a generation of the Council of Light, the covenant had finally waded through and processed the cat-bamboo priestess’s research and found that she had independently arrived at the anthropicity of light (she called it “numismatic,” that is, like a coin having two sides) and had been in the process of developing ray microscopy—the most powerful eye did not just passively receive light, but generated its own ray of light that brought its vision into terrifyingly powerful resolution. The resultant revolution in the natural sciences was fittingly called the Enlightenment Enlightenment, but what concerns us is that ray vision is the most authoritative expression of power via observation.

A dragon’s panoply of light beams in its dozen or more eye sockets exerted supernatural and often fatal pressure on whatever fell under its gaze—incidentally, the word “dragon” means “gazer” in Old Coenic.

The spreading rot with which the dragons had infected the forest created a steady stream of tree souls rising to tree heaven that, to those with metaphysically enhanced vision, caused the air to shimmer with spiritual energy. Focusing their array of light mote rays and the attending will onto a single infinitesimal point in the arboreal rapture, they pressed into the fabric of existence a psychic nucleation point. The tree souls drawn by the point’s spiritual gravity created a now plainly visible ghostly whirlpool that, when it reached a critical metaphysical mass, embodied itself in the steam from the rapidly desiccating trees and fell as a living fog upon the desolate forest. But its incarnation was only half complete—within the fog came the year-long sound of a lumber mill’s operation all at once.

When the fog finally dissipated it revealed a smooth, woody bulb the size of a house. The immense gall shuddered and cracked like an egg. Out of it crawled and unfurled a Dire Wasp, the Smotewoods Dauber, which remains a perfect reason to stay out of the Valley, even after the departure of the god-making flock of dragons.

However, the abundant mulch of the smitten Smotewoods made it the perfect place to farm and, one hill over from the Valley, a town popped up and grew, but it could never settle on a name. It enjoyed the prosperity of the draconic slash-and-burn of the age before it… until it didn’t.

It was a lean year, especially lean, and those were bad for virgins. Lean years are bad for everyone, but especially lean years are bad for particularly virgins, you see, because fewer crops to harvest means two things: hunger and more time on the hands of the hungry. Hunger is bad enough but given enough time the hungry might just try to resurrect an old tradition of sacrificing a virgin to appease their local deity, who the hungry reason has itself been going hungry from the lack of sacrificed virgins.

But every cloud has a silver lining—although it is probably gauche to speak of clouds in the context of peasants whose fields didn’t get enough rain this season, so let’s say instead that every… hmm… aha! Every cemetery has its grass. So, while our virgin was going to be sacrificed, the grass in her cemetery was that unlike most such traditions, she was going to be thrown into a deep pit instead of having her throat cut.

The fall still broke her leg, and a jagged bone sliced her femoral artery and erupted from her skin amidst a gout of blood (does anything else come in gouts?), but her throat was intact and still capable of being screamed out of. Her cries broke both the solemnity of the ritual and the resolve of the townsfolk, who hurried out of earshot because guilt is the only burden than makes you move quicker the heavier it is.

The virgin’s screaming echoed in the shadowy pit, so when it finally gave way to whimpering her ears rang. Her hands went from groping around uselessly to gripping fistfuls of dirt at her sides. The blood loss was beginning to blur her vision by the time the shadows at the edge of the pit spat their lurker into the light.

In the shaft of sun invading the Dauber’s nest, the girl could see herself reflected a hundredfold in the dead, vespine eyes of the god. The clicking of its mouthparts and twitching of its wings drew her eyes away for a second, but they were always drawn back to the dull sheen of the Dauber’s stare. There was something reminiscent of the dragons’ gaze in its compound eyes, but unlike one of those basilisks (in proto-Coenic “king of serpents”), it couldn’t kill with a look.

Its stinger would suffice.

Not to be crude, but the virgin was impaled, lifted, and flicked onto the nest’s hard-packed dirt floor. Her consciousness was flooded by darkness as her body flushed with dragon-fire venom.

But gods are always pulling us out of graves.

When Andromeda opened her eyes, the sunlight had been replaced with starlight. Her head pounded and her body pulsed, as if being swelled by an inner bellows. Taking new fistfuls of dirt in newly-clawed hands, Andromeda dragged herself up out of the nest. When the moonlight fell on the dark skin of her back, it coalesced into wings one might describe as “fairy” if one did not see the venom burning in Andromeda’s eyes.

“A witch.”

Andromeda startled at the voice and her eyes eventually found the only possible speaker: the Dire Wasp, perched, almost woven, in the trees.

“What?” was all she could muster.

“It was a witch,” the Dire Wasp rasped, its voice supernaturally clear and entirely, gruesomely out of synch with its flexing mouthparts, “was it not, that whipped up the mob to throw you in the hole?”

“Yes.”

“And you wish to kill her, yes?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Perhaps one day you will find out… and live up to your name.”

“Andromeda?”

“No. I name you Witch-Hawk, avatar of the Smotewoods Dauber. Delight in my will, you shall find it hard to resist.”

“It feels like I’ve fallen in another hole.”

The trees creaked but there was no wind—was the wasp shaking? Laughing?

“An irony more bitter than my sting, how helpless mortals feel when the gods give them power! You will find your own sting, or you will meet your swatter.”

“I—”

“I!” The Dire Wasp flung itself into the air, causing the leaves and grass around the nest to whip up into a whispering chorus that the god was easily, eerily heard over, “I, I, I! Now that you’ve been made into someone, how flippantly do you hurl that slender bolt of a word! Let me teach you something of gods. It is not that our designs are inscrutable, it is that we have none! Only mortals need to be actualized. So, my avatar, find your purpose… and kill it.”

With that, the Dauber was gone and Andromeda, who had unwittingly fallen to her knees, stood. Her own wings fluttered her into the air and, above the canopy of the forest in the Valley—where for a time there had been dragons—her thoughts strayed to vengeance.