The Wars We Fight

Two veiny and flattened orbs in front of it, all slimed up because of a poor lifestyle. Wings no longer smooth curves, but thin and rectilinear. Director of the council, too.

‘Do you understand what is at stake here?’ Came the question into its ears.

‘I do.’

‘And you are not afraid?’

In all honesty, it thought, yes. ‘No.’

It was approached by all of the councillors, bespectacled or no. Lözan ‘One-talon’ haįs extended the origin of its sobriquet, the keratin having almost completely eroded from old age. Lözan was the director’s most trusted advisor, a legend in their community, and its godfather. It was only here because Lözan managed to finesse an appointment for it. If not for Lözan, it would still be out in Dornos, leading a battalion of green haįs against the enemy Barzath-haįs clan. If not for Lözan, it would probably be dead now, along with the rest of the battalion, and all of their efforts on the northern front would’ve been reversed in a day or two. Nepotism was a very common practise among haįs.

Its own burnished talons rubbed against Lözan’s in deference. ‘Thank you,’ it said.

Lözan tried to hold back its tears, skin puckering - sentimentality was strictly forbidden during council meetings. ‘You are no longer a hatchling,’ Lözan said, its tone avuncular.

It reminisced about the halcyon days - when Dornos was not a dustbowl, but a lush meadowland; when haįs met their end more often in peaceful slumber than in battle; when their childhood heroes somehow seemed to be a tangible part of their existence, instilling hope and expelling fear from their minds.

Feels like several lifetimes ago, it thought.

‘I was born a haįs,’ it said, voice hard as sky-rock.

‘That’s the spirit,’ the director’s sardonic wheeze burrowed into its ears like a repulsive worm. ‘If only all of our warriors were so… stout-hearted.’

It was led to the underground chamber. The guard at the padlocked door sniffed the air around its body, gave a commiserating snarl, and unbarred the way in. The interior was like an enlarged haįs’s throat. The walls were made of some unknown, squishy substance that absorbed all incoming light and reflected nothing. Around the door one could make out numerous phlegm-coloured bulges, like a family of enraged warts.

‘I suppose this is goodbye.’ Lözan had insisted on accompanying it down to the remote, uninhabited depths, even though only one organism could enter the chamber at a time.

It found that oddly amusing. ‘Goodbye for now, you mean! I don’t think I’ll be there for very long.’

Lözan’s silhouette sighed. ‘For our sake, I certainly hope that’s the case, but that’s the thing about the Seed - it doesn’t give a hoot about our wishes.’

It had a bemused look. ‘What does that mean?’

Lözan paused. ‘The Seed… is, quite simply, a thing unto itself. If you ever do return, it will be because the Seed gave you permission to leave, not because you escaped. I wish I could explain it better.’

It remembered a fragment of a dinner-table conversation in which Lözan had recounted its harrowing experience in the Nøg - the Seed’s dwelling-place. But way back then it paid little attention to the words of older, wiser haįs, and what valuable information Lözan may have then possessed was now, most likely, at the bottom of memory’s ocean, condemned to a noiseless co-existence with starfish and sea urchins.

‘What does the Seed look like?’ It asked.

Lözan had already turned to go, but the question made it go rigid.

Watching its godfather in profile, it listened carefully. ‘The Seed does not have an appearance. Or rather, it is not a fixed appearance, like yours or mine.’

It thought of another question. ‘What if the Seed does not give me Seręmaw’s scale, and I return empty-handed?’

‘Then you will return empty-handed. But… your vis will not return empty-handed.’

‘Your vis will not return empty-handed,’ the guard parroted, cackling enigmatically.

Lözan gave the guard a fiery, admonishing glare, and the latter swallowed its insolence as though it was a nutritious, but very unappetising stalk of asparagus.

‘Lözan,’ it called, as the form of its godfather receded farther and farther away.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m scared.’

Lözan looked back one last time and arched its mouth into a strangely uplifting smile. ‘If you weren’t you could not be a true haįs.’

And with that, the doors slammed shut. Nothing could be heard or seen, not even the cankerous lumps that wanted so desperately to escape this chamber. Except…

Something bright was shimmering right behind it, something so bright that its leathery skin looked like a lightning bolt had struck it and was trapped inside its body. It turned around and saw a tiny patch of light hovering above the ground at the opposite end of the chamber, a kind of gaseous husk surrounding a perfect sphere.

Like a moth drawn to a flame, it lumbered forward, the miniature sun before it dilating like a hungry white pupil. Once the sun, or whatever it was, had banished all remaining remnants of darkness, it heard a series of scuffling, whishing noises that seemed to issue from all around it, as though the room’s layout was being completely overhauled by some omnipotent artist, disappointed with the crudity of its previous attempt. And as though ashamed of its patent lack of talent, the artist had thrown a white blanket over its head to prevent it from seeing what exactly was taking place. Minutes went by.

And then, as if all this time it had actually been falling through a cosmic paint-can, it landed on solid ground, and before its brain could even register the pain signals, the world came into focus, and the blinding white ether gave way to a truly mesmerising sight.

It saw trees it had never seen before, trees it didn’t imagine were even possible. They stretched endlessly high, and bore almost no foliage, save for occasional prong-shaped branches that were laden with furry, palm-sized spores. Their boles did not curve outwards at the very foundation, as was the case back in the real world. Their bark was not striated, but perfectly smooth, like a skinned asparagus.

It looked around. Trees to the north, trees to the south, trees everywhere. And then it dawned on the haįs: this was the Nøg, and cardinal directions here were as pointless as a bowl of carrot soup with a side dish of fresh carrots. For a moment it stood still, indecisive about which direction it should take.

All of a sudden, the trees appeared to be floating upwards. But then it felt something slimy creep up its sinewy forearms and hind-limbs, and, looking down at the ground, saw that it was being submerged into some kind of sentient morass, and that the trees had nothing to do with it. The ground belched out disgusting gobbets of black matter that singed its skin and left little craters. It hissed in agony, and then realised that it only thought it had hissed, and that nothing had actually came out of its mouth.

It spread its wings, as though preparing for flight, felt the alien muck latch onto the tender underside of its wing membranes like an army of leeches, and tried to wedge itself between two trees by spiking them with its keen fingers. The trees were surprisingly tough, and its fingers couldn’t puncture deep enough to provide sufficient purchase. Its tail thrashed about like an eel that had been dropped into a vat of acid, blindly lashing everything that lay in its path.

Finally its tail smacked something warm and round, and in an instant it coiled itself around this object. With impossible strength it raised its forearms out of the demonic ground and, propelled upwards by its tail, vaulted up to the nearest branch. For a second it just hung upside down, like a giant bat, and blinked in horror at the roiling, dark entity down below.

Climbing up onto the branch, it surveyed its immediate surroundings. The ground on the opposite side of the tree was a shade lighter than the thing that had just tried to kill it, and made of rock. It slid down the tree, scraped its clawed feet along the ground warily, and breathed a sigh of relief when nothing happened.

When it had calmed down somewhat, and had begun to navigate the treacherous ground in search of the Seed, it tried with all its might to focus on the task at hand, but something in the back of its noggin was bothering it.

Your vis will not return empty-handed, Lözan had said before it left. What did it mean by that?

It knew, of course, what a vis was. Every haįs knew what it was, because every haįs had one. A vis was what shaped a hatchling into a haįs, what gave it purpose. A vis was what made each breath an intake of life, not just of air. A vis was what made it feel things, not just be conscious of them. A vis gave it the ability to hate, and be hated. To love, and be loved. A vis was a hatchling’s birthright, and as such, its parents were the ones responsible for giving it one. Its parents…

It stopped moving. The memories came crashing over it like a tsunami, but it stood still, its eyes closed.

‘My parents are dead,’ it said. This time it heard itself speak, its voice quivering, as though a temporary sound bubble was created in the default vacuum of the Nøg just for these four words. Its parents had died when it was still a hatchling - no, a haįs, it was always a haįs - long before the Barzath clan had stormed Borönjas and massacred all of its inhabitants, precipitating the Third Dornos War. It remembered being at their funeral, remembered the huge crowd that had gathered to pay their respects, remembered how confused and frustrated it had felt… but it also remembered Lözan’s heavy, warm forearms resting on its neck and shoulders, and somehow, in that moment, it had felt assured that its parents would always remain a part of it, albeit a static one.

And yet - could Lözan have meant what it thought it meant? (No, surely not.)

That it would find its parents in this place and return home with them, its vis whole once again? Replenished like a water-skin at a well, after being lost for countless days in a desert? (You’re trying to trick me, whoever you are.)

No, it thought. It shook its head free of its troubled past, of the wishful thinking that had beset it like a swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitos.

‘My parents are dead,’ it said to the tree in front of it. The tree did not have any ears, but for some reason it believed the tree was listening, that of all the trees in the Nøg it had stumbled upon the only one capable of understanding it.

It lifted its angular arms and jabbed the tree with its talons. ‘MY PARENTS ARE DEAD,’ it screamed. ‘MY PARENTS ARE DEAD!’

The upper branches of the tree wobbled in response, raining down spores soft as cotton and twigs that looked like dead caterpillars. Then it felt a presence appear right behind it, followed by a popping sound that seemed to reverberate around the tree - no, the entire forest - as though it had angered it with its brazenness.

‘You have repeated yourself twice now,’ a sonorous, un-haįs-like voice boomed out. It spun and fell backwards immediately. One of the spikes on the back of its neck cracked upon impact, and an unimaginable amount of pain rolled down its spine like a comber. Its eyes watered, but it couldn’t catch the tears with its talons even if it wanted to. It was immobilised.

But over it loomed something rather odd - not the trees that towered over its fallen body, nor the tracery of cobwebs that it only now made out high up in the sky, no. There was a round shape the colour of spoiled milk and the size of a haįs egg, and it stuck out amid the bilious, cheerless topography of the Nøg like a sore thumb. It was only when that voice issued from somewhere deep inside that shape that it realised it hadn’t merely hit its head too hard and was seeing things.

‘There will not be a third.’ The round shape floated down to the rocky steps leading down to where it lay, by what power it did not know. As the shape approached, it strained its eyes for any sign of wings or a tail, but it could see neither. In fact, there was nothing about the shape that looked normal at all, at least from the perspective of a haįs. The newcomer’s head was roughly spherical; its ears sprouted from the sides of its head, as opposed to the gill-like slits on a haįs; its eyes shared the same enclosure of flesh; its triangular beak did not depart much from the rest of its face. And its body, it now saw, was extremely compact in proportion to its head, like that of a frog. Its skin was smoother than a slab of dressed alabaster and bore no discernible marks.

It had never seen anything so unadorned, yet so pleasing to the senses. In its stupefaction it even forgot the creature’s fearsome tone and sinister words.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ the creature said in the haįs tongue.

‘Who are you?’

‘Must I really state what is so obvious?’ It observed the subtle changes on the creature’s face when it spoke- its mouth opening and closing like a clam; its cheeks puckering and then relaxing; its faint, fuzzy eyebrows being drawn up ever so slightly, then settling back down.

’You’re the Seed,’ it said.

The creature neither nodded nor shook its head. Instead it knelt down and put a hand to its brow. Immediately a warmth passed through its thick skin that felt nourishing and necessary, despite the cold blood that churned in its veins. But just as it was starting to get addicted to the comfort that the external heat provided, as when a hatchling is brought to the ancient Görïn magma pits for the very first time, the creature stood up and retreated a few feet back.

‘Well?’ The creature inquired after a good few moments had passed, ‘are you just going to lie there until you decay into the ground?’

Only now did it realise that the pain of its broken spike had dissipated completely. It raised a forearm and examined its back gingerly, but when it came to the spot of the injury it instead ran up against a perfectly tapered impaling device. It looked at the creature questioningly.

The creature gave a mischievous smile. ‘Do not act so surprised. I am the Seed, after all.’

‘How?’

‘I do not like how’s, or why’s. I find they obscure more than they resolve. For instance, if you ask ‘How does the Sun produce light?’, and I tell you that the Sun is like one enormous fireball, you will end up asking how the Sun exists in the first place. And because no one knows how, or why, it exists, all of the resulting questions become meaningless… and meaning, my winged friend, is the one thing we cannot live without.’

It propped itself up into a less awkward position. ‘Who are you?’ It asked again, this time out of curiosity, not fear.

‘Are you fond of repeating yourself, or do you simply not value the time you have?’

‘The time I have?’

‘Yes, the very same. You didn’t think you’d be stuck here forever now, did you?’

Its head was spinning and pulsating, as when one stands up too quickly from a recumbent pose.

’The Kløktår-haįs clan sent me here,’ it stated, by way of cutting through the tension.

‘As I said before, I’ve been expecting you.’

‘You know why I’m here?’

‘You’re here on business.’

It was somewhat taken aback by the creature’s bluntness. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that, mister… Seed.’

‘Let’s get two things straight, king of lizards.’ The Seed’s eyes did not blink once during this entire exchange. ‘One - of all the visitors the Nøg has ever welcomed throughout its existence, not one of them sported a straw hat, shades, or a garish bathing costume with a hundred pineapples on it. They did not come here on holiday, to paint the town red. And you are not the exception to the rule. Two - if I’m a mister then you’re an ostrich. Seed is perfectly reasonable, though that is only an empty label that your kind have stamped me with.’

‘Seed, then. I feel there is somewhat of a misunderstanding about the nature of my visit. You see, my kind is fighting a war where I’m from, and I believe there is something here that may help turn the tide… and restore the order of things.’

‘Yes, I know all about your war.’

‘Do you know where I can find Seręmaw’s scale?’

‘Is that why you are here?’

‘The scale will bring us the fortune we need to turn defeat into victory. I, or another of my kindred, will bring it back of course, once we have accomplished our goals.’

‘I did not ask what you plan to do with the scale. I asked what you were really here for.’

‘I - I,’ it stammered, letting its gaze drop from the Seed. ‘I don’t follow.’

The Seed clicked its tongue reprovingly. ‘Your parents.’

At hearing that word it started. Its jaw flexed, nostrils flared, and the acrid stench of saltpetre filled its throat instinctively, as though it was preparing to exhale a gout of fire.

‘What did you say?’

‘Your parents. That’s the real reason you’re here.’

‘My parents were killed when I was smaller than you.’

‘And yet you felt the need to convey that sentiment to an inanimate object not once, but thrice! Almost as though you were trying to convince it, no? Or perhaps you were trying to convince yourself?’

It felt a tear forming in its eye, and no matter how much it wanted to erase that last phrase of the Seed from its memory, no matter how much it wanted to accept that its parents had left this world and would never return, it knew the Seed had expressed the truth better than it ever could have.

It sighed, but there was no flame in the air it exhaled. ’You’re right,’ it said. ‘I came here because I thought I would see my parents.’

The Seed nodded wisely. ‘You seek closure to two wars - one that your kind is waging with other haįs, and one that you are waging against yourself. Seręmaw’s scale will help you win only one of them.’

‘A dear friend of mine told me that my vis would not return empty-handed when I leave the Nøg. That is why I thought… why I wanted to believe that -‘

‘I understand. Your vis is still fragile, even though it was dropped from the cliff of tragedy years and years ago. But there is one thing you do not yet see.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That your vis has just been healed.’

‘Healed, you say?’

The Seed shambled over to the base of its tail and looked up at it. ‘No longer are you under the illusion that the past may be reversed.’ It soaked in the Seed’s comforting speech like a hot bath after a long day of hard graft.

‘You are like a hatchling,’ the Seed continued, ‘who desires clams but instead eats oysters, because clams are extinct. After a bout of impassioned resistance, the hatchling’s belly loses its hankering for the imagined tastiness of clams, and becomes content with its inferior sibling. And so I say to you: let oysters be oysters, and let bygones be bygones.’

And with that the Seed vanished, and it strained its eyes for any unusual signs among the trees and the cobwebs that connected them. But the more it strained its eyes the more it realised that it was hurting its own body, and it finally looked down, though not before whispering, ‘Goodbye.’

There, on the ground beside its tail, was a semi-circular, opalescent object. It lowered its neck so that it could see it up close. There was a sigil etched in the centre of the object that was streaked with the blood of the haįs the object belonged to. It couldn’t help but smile.

Now there’s only one war left to win, it thought, and this will certainly do the trick.

It didn’t remember how it got back to its world. Perhaps it got sucked up by some galaxy-sized vacuum cleaner and was spat out the other side… that didn’t matter.

The Antechamber whence it had traveled to the Nøg greeted it with the same charcoal-black, ill-looking, blister-ridden embrace. It hurried to the entrance, and as soon as the doors were opened, dropped to the floor in one saggy heap. For what felt like an hour it lay there, slowly breathing and listening to the grunts and coughs of the guard at the doors.

Then something tapped its shoulder, and it raised its head to see Lözan peering at it radiantly. It mirrored that happiness back at Lözan.

‘Now you’re a haįs,’ Lözan said.