Chapter 87: Chapter 87 – The Cherry On Top

I sit there for a while after Vonne drops that story on me, finishing my meal and being grateful that she grabbed me the null-ta pouches.

I’m pretty sure I believe her. I mean, there’s no particular reason for her to lie about any of it, and there’s no reason to think she’d be wrong; she’s pretty clear about which parts of the story have which degree of confidence, and that’s a really strong sign in its favor. On the other hand…

“I’ve definitely heard different stories about the origins of the sed,” I say with a frown. “And not from a trivial source. Zidanya implied that you were, as an ilk, from Arcadia, and that you were… spirits. Not spirits of the land or bound spirits like the Wind, but spirits of folk.”

“Huh.” Vonne looks more intrigued than anything else. “I don’t think that’s right! I mean, maybe the Arcadia thing, a little bit? I know Momma Vix had me, us, her litters I mean, there. But I’m… okay, I’m not exactly flesh, not anymore, but I’m not a spirit. I think?”

“You have siblings?”

“Yeah. I… don’t really see them anymore, though.”

“Oh. Right. I’m sorry; that’s gotta be rough, since they probably aren’t even around at the same time as you are.”

“No!” Her startled reaction cuts across my burgeoning feeling of shame and awkwardness. “I know it’s hard to understand for the natural ilks, but I thought I just told you? They made us to die; why would they make us sad about not seeing each other anymore, or let us miss each other? That would just make us try to kill them!”

“Which you did anyway.”

“Well, yeah!” Vonne’s grinning at me again, teeth bared. “They were awful! Or so I hear from Do and from the other stories. We had to help them by saving them from what they became.”

“Huh.” In a way, the story is just too much for me. Not too much new information to synthesize, not in the medium term or even to some extent in the short, but there are just so many different questions it brings up, and so many emotions that it threatens to provoke. “I… that’s a lot.”

“I know!” Vonne slumps back into her chair. “Was it too much? I decided to give you the whole story because I thought you might like it. But maybe it was too much?”

“No, it was, it was good, it was right.” I wave my hands vaguely. She seems over-distressed by the idea that she’s given me too much, and that’s so patently ridiculous that I can’t put into words how ridiculous it is. “There’s just so many questions that I could ask, so many things that I want to know more about. I’m…it’s been a long time since I’ve had such open-ended avenues of inquiry, and so little base of knowledge.”

“Oh! I know this one!” Vonne practically bounces with excitement, gone from morose to thrilled in a flash. “You ask the first one! And then you ask the next one! And between them, you eat your desserts!”

I stare at her for a moment, blinking. “Ask the first one, eat baked goods, ask the second one.” I sound like a stranger to myself, and I don’t understand why. “I… you know, that’s a pretty decent philosophy.”

“I,” she says smugly, “am sed, and we know these things. Besides, haven’t I been alive for thousands of years? You should respect my wisdom!”

“Uh huh.” I smirk at her. “You’re still younger than me, aren’t you, in perceptual time.”

“Nuh uh! You’re, like, what, thirty years old?”

“Mmm.” I flick my Visor long enough to do the conversion, since I don’t feel like doing the math in my head. I take a bite of the muffin, and my eyes go wide. “Huh. I didn’t expect it to be so tart! This is what cherries taste like? Also, no, I’m almost fifty five.”

She makes vaguely excited protesting noises, which in hindsight makes sense, but I’m too busy savoring the rest of the muffin to have space in my head for things like predicting other peoples’ reactions. Eventually, she gets herself in control enough to make words come out, rather than just emitting various adorable squeaking noises while waving her hands. “You’re two years older than me! I’ve never met someone alive who’s older than me. And! I don’t know if you know this, but! You’re more than twenty years older than any Outsider we’ve gotten! Ever!”

I blink and almost choke on the scone, which is a lot drier than I’d expected and coated with big, crunchy sugar crystals. “Wait, ever,” I mumble around a mouthful of crumbs, “like, across Cador?”

“Oh! No, I mean, how would I know? How would any of us know? Maybe the other Temples can talk to each other, ‘cause they’re actively managed by a divinely appointed overseer, but the only way we get any news is from surfacers.”

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I nod at her, drinking enough water to wash down the remnants of the scone. The last baked good is a bar of some sort, and it tastes of bitter and sweetness and a startling flavor I’ve never had before, with the sour tartness of the cherries. I take a moment to appreciate it, sighing happily. “So only kids getting pulled across the universe to show up here, huh? I wonder if that’s specific to this Temple or specific to how the kids get got.”

For a moment I’m wondering if she’s going to argue with me on that point, tell me that someone in their early twenties isn’t a kid. She doesn’t, though; she just looks sad. “It doesn’t seem right.” Her voice is quiet. “They get strong so fast, but it’s not the right kind of strength. Sometimes they come back, and it’s like they broke. And I can’t ever do anything to help them, except for sometimes on their first time through.”

“You ever show ‘em cherries?”

She startles at that, then shakes her head. “You’re the first Outsider who’s wanted to eat with me. They always have other things they want from me, or they don’t want anything to do with me.”

“Well, the more fool them, I guess.” I smile at her. “Can’t save them from themselves if they aren’t interested in hearing it. Can’t show them cherries if they won’t eat a meal with you.” I give it a couple of beats, drinking deep of the water cup to clear my mouth from the richness of the cherry bar, and then take a bite of the pie.

My eyes go unseeing and wide, and for a moment, I forget where I am.

“That,” she says, voice quiet and content, “is the face of a human eating cherry pie for the first time.”

“It sure as the fucking Void is,” I say blankly. “Stars abounding, this is amazing. Tart, sweet, juicy, the dough has an amazing flavor in its own right and it’s crunchy and flaky, which contrasts with the syrupiness…” I take another bite and close my eyes, savoring it. “Stars. I owe you one. Good call.”

“I’m sed,” she says almost primly, and I open my eyes to look at her with my head tilted a little. She doesn’t say anything else, like those two words are a sufficient explanation in their own right, and I guess given what she’s told me, they are.

“Still owe you one,” I say eventually, empty plate in front of me. She’s been sitting there, something between a smirk and a beam of delight across her face, watching me while I eat the pie, which somehow manages to be only a little bit weird and a little bit creepy. “So. Uh. I know I had a bunch of questions. Like, what’s the Shieldstorm?”

“Oh, I know a bunch about that one!” Vonne bounces up and down a little in excitement. “Mama Vix was part of the Stormbringers. Um. This wasn’t a proper story, I never heard it attested, really, not with Zekhira’s blessing.”

She’s looking at me intently, and I nod slowly. “I understand,” I say, even though I only mostly do.

“So, um. When the, well, everyone other than Firstborn rose up against the Twiceborn Prince and the other seventeen Firstborn on Iavshet, I dunno any of their names, everyone knew that beating them was totally gonna happen. But the sed everywhere on Cador were rising, and they didn’t think that everywhere would win, right? So Mama Vix and, um, I think it was five other sed and five Wind and two Rue, they got together with an Iron who was old, like, really old, more than ten thousand years.

“He poured his heartblood into the ocean.” Her voice firms up, slows down; not into the same storyteller’s almost-trance from before, but a voice that’s more her own, more organic. “He had his ten thousand years, and survived at least one Culling. It changed him, and he carried that forward, and that also mixed with the ocean, and the ocean woke up.

“Fire, lightning, ice. Whirlpools and waterspouts, winds to batter down even Firstborn shields. The … dimensional magic, the magic that defines space and time, and Void, everything woke up with the ocean. Nobody on Iavshet knows if any of the other continents put up their own Shieldstorms because the Iavshetani can’t leave, and nobody can come here, ‘cause there’s a storm from above the clouds to below the bedrock, and it’ll kill anyone who comes near it, and it’ll keep doing that for at least another few thousand years.”

“That… sounds like overkill. Like, strategically; wouldn’t you want only enough time for all the continents to resolve, and then the storms go down so you can go on the warpath?” I scratch my head. “Wait, but no, because as long as you have an enclave with people who are having kids, and you have the ability to do the, uh, soulripping thing, you can win the long game by just… you know, every time one is born, you do the thing. Is that why the Shieldstorm is still up?”

“I dunno.” Vonne shrugs. “I know strategy is a kind of puzzle, but it’s not a puzzle I’m any good at. We have to specialize more than most ilks, ‘cause our brains get all wonky about the things we don’t hyperfocus on. I’m better with that than I used to be, I can think a little bit about more things, but I’m still the youngest sed.”

We sit in silence for a bit, and I make up my mind. “Do you want to come back to my team’s rooms? We can talk—”

“Yes.” She cuts me off. “Yes! Yes, I wanna meet your companions and cuddle and hear your stories, cause I’ve shared some of mine and now I wanna hear some new stories. Yes.”

She’s grinning at me, and I grin back at her, and I stand up. “Alright. Let’s collect my minder and head on out.”

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