Chapter 467: 23: Agusmin

"Hello!" Apella shouted.

The rabbit-like people seemed to confer nearly silently together, but none of them stopped moving. Another ripple seemed to spread outward from where the sound of her voice had hit them, across the endless crowd, vanishing into the light.

"Maybe they don't speak common," Jade suggested from beside the small ship, as he bent to examine a particularly deep groove that had been scratched into the surface.

"Many of us do, actually," a thin voice piped up in response. 

"Very rude of them to suggest otherwise," another muttered.

Apella spluttered in protest, "Not as rude as ignoring a greeting!"

Harmony found herself repressing a laugh, as her elven character skipped down the slope of the root toward the rabbit-like people. The movement was far more comfortable than her old knees in real life would have allowed it to be, despite the regular exercises she engaged in to maintain an uncharacteristically youthful flexibility. 

She called out, and as Skyheart Snowsong her voice invitingly targeted the first NPC rabbit person who had spoken a bit more than it would have if she had spoken to another player, "Would you stop and chat a bit?"

The rabbit-like person easily resisted her call, shook their head and declined, "Can't stop. We must follow the sun."

The creature bounced forward. Each step propelled a body covered in leafy branches, like some kind of rabbit shrubbery, in a movement that mimicked normal rabbit's bounce and covered nearly as much ground.

Harmony scrambled along the edge of the crowd, moving away from Appella and Jade without thinking, as she asked curiously, "When do you rest?"

She thought it might be easier to approach them when they halted for the night. Her question made her the focus of hundreds of bright, curious eyes, and a murmur whispered through the air, even though not one of the moving crowd paused.

Most of the individual rabbit-people didn't even speak up loudly enough for her to make out words, but the one she had targeted did at least reply calmly, "We don't. The tree's gifts will recharge us until we finish our service."

Harmony hesitated as she saw the crowd of rabbit-people closing in ahead. The root-like hill that had caught their ship, began to narrow and sink into the shining sand, and the crowd closed in from the other side like a vast sea. She glanced back, and felt startled by how far she had moved away from Appella and Jade.

Those two were both so delightfully obtuse. It was taking her a while to adapt to the knowledge that while Jade was still Jade… he wasn't human, but that news had obviously hurt young Appella far more. She, or he, was in love with a person who wasn't human. And how confusing the irrelevance of that 'so important' problem, their 'identical' gender, must have seemed when it was revealed that they weren't even both human.

Harmony herself loved Jade quite a lot, but she had decades of experience with differences to buffer her from the confusion he, it, Jade had revealed. Jade wasn't even an organic being, native to their planet. In a way it was even funny. Jade's computer was so inefficient at mimicking a human brain, that it took an entire orbital station to do it. 

Apella had been frightened quite reasonably, Harmony decided as she eyed the movement of the crowd. But Jade's dear missing person was here on this moon adventure with them now. 

Harmony was very glad that the youth who played her was coming to realize that Jade was still the same person. 'He' was just as child-like, and yet cynical seeming, as he had ever been. He hadn't changed. He might be able to carry on more conversations at once than most people, but that was just a matter of capacity, not identity.

A shout drew her attention back to Jade, but it was too faint and unexpected to understand. "What?" she called back.

"Use your communication mirror!" Jade called out again. He pulled out the linked one that he still carried, and waved it.

Harmony glanced ahead and understood immediately. Skyheart's elven form twisted to access her storage even as she fell in step with the crowd. For a moment, she wondered if the rabbit person who had been willing to speak would make room for her, but the rabbit-like people curved around her as she stepped off the rounded mound where the root sank into the shining sea of sand. 

The communication mirror in her hands reflected nothing, but showed Jade's character Hisui's familiar dwarven features instead. Harmony looked up and focused on the weirdly expressive features of the bipedal rabbit beside her. The strange conglomeration of branches covered in growing leaves didn't actually seem to be part of the animal, but some kind of garment or burden that it carried.

The long ears that identified the creatures as rabbits to her mind turned toward her. Saggy, old looking, eyebrows wrinkled and raised as the individual eyed her curiously, and at last nodded and then glanced down at the mirror she held. 

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"It's a communication device," she blurted in response to an unspoken demand.

The head of her viewer tilted thoughtfully, and the fuzzy eyebrows rose again. The rabbit-like person replied oddly familiarly, "You find me as strange as I find you, I think. I am an Agusmin, one of the eldest who serves the Tree."

"The tree?" she blurted. Harmony couldn't help blinking at the creature incredulously and glancing back toward the enormous glowing branches of the vast, mostly leafless, tree that rose overhead. 

The Agusmin elder chuckled. "It must be true that your kind cannot hear it sing."

From within the image she carried, Jade suggested, "Perhaps rather than being like the tree that supports the beginner's vales as we had guessed, it is some kind of complex transmission instrument?"

Appella's voice asked excitedly, "Maybe the Jade Emperor sends his voice all the way to the Moon?"

"It is not," the Augusmin elder objected. "The tree itself sings, no petty Emperor rules here. Every branch sings in harmony."

The others, moving along beside them at the same pace, nodded with gentle smiles, as though the suggestion that a foreign Emperor could speak through their tree were silly.

"The device you carry is rather interesting," another Augusmin voice added.

"It is just an enchanted item that transmits our voices," Harmony explained quickly.

"Loudly. You communicate like children learning to whistle on their leaves without realizing that their elders can hear them all clearly," the Agusmin elder snorted.

A whisper of laughter seemed to carry beneath a soft murmur of voices, as the rabbit-like Augusmin traveled. Harmony looked out across a sea of beings so bright that even with Skyheart's elven eyesight, through the filter that Hisui had created, she couldn't see an edge to the sea of moving light that filled her vision. Even the shimmer of distant stars that had been mere reflections in an even vaster dragon's scales, was hidden by the pervasive glow.

"Is it getting brighter?" Harmony asked.

The Augusmin glanced at each other and their ears moved as though silently conferring with the tiny motions. The elder shrugged. "Both the sun and your Empire will seem to shine almost equally for a few bells."

"Bells," Harmony repeated.

"Living Jade Empire's equivalent of an hour," Jade reminded her.

Overhead an even brighter light shone beyond the branches, so much whiter than the sun she was used to seeing that it took her a while to recognize it as the sun. The far dimmer sphere that seemed to be about the same size… was actually the world of the Empire that they had left behind. The light of the sand beneath them seemed to brighten in reflection, like water might on earth, and so did the leaves in the branches that covered each of the Augusmin.

Unhindered by her wandering gaze, the Augusmin elder said calmly, "You should not let your friends fall too far behind."

"Why?" Apella demanded challengingly from the mirror when neither Harmony nor Jade immediately responded.

"You will freeze if full darkness ever touches you," the elder informed them. "Unlike your legendary Empire, where they say an endless fire is buried beneath the ground, this land is pierced by ice even colder than the emptiness beyond the sky. Even the great tree will grow dark and cold during the long night. The roots are strong, but the leaves will fold themselves away. That is why the fruits will never ripen unless we Augusmin carry enough leaves beneath the sun."

"Why don't you just carry the fruit?" Jade asked curiously.

The elder laughed. "Can you pluck one life free of another before it has fully formed its own existence? No! But even those who cannot lift mountains can carry a bit of energy back to the tree."

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