Welcome to Gaia! ::

"I wanted to swim at the beach." Merlyn eyed the pool dubiously. It looked ... boring. He deposited his towel on the edge.

"The beach has waves," Blue pointed out. He left his towel neatly folded on a chair, and sat down on the edge of the pool, poking his feet into the water hesitantly. "You could get swept under and drown."

"Blue's right." Kher slipped over the edge of the pool into the water, looking thoroughly comfortable, in his element. The chlorine in the pool would irritate his gills, but it was preferable to attempting to teach his younger brothers to swim in the ocean. "It's easier to learn in calm water, like this. I don't want to have to save you from drowning, brat."

"I am not a brat," Merlyn protested.

"Are so," Blue said, kicking a spray of water at him irritably.

Merlyn stuck his tongue out at his brother, then leaped gleefully into the pool. "Cannonball!"


Airyn winced as suddenly there was water dotting her sketchbook, and she looked up at the pool with a glare. "Hey!"

Star, who was sitting nearby fiddling with the bow on her tail, laughed at her. "See? You're supposed to swim at the pool, not draw it, silly dilly!"

Airyn stuck her tongue out. "You're not swimming either, lamesauce."

"Yeah, 'cause Mom forgot my soft cap - I'm not 'llowed to go swimming without it, in case I bump into someone an' stab them with my horns." The demoness rolled her eyes. "She'll come back soon. Now... you..." She bent down and snatched the pencil and sketchpad out of Airyn's hands. "Go..."

The sketchpad and pencil were tossed onto the nearest chair, and Airyn found herself being pulled upward by her friend.

"SWIM!"

Shove!

"AUGH!"

Splash!

"Staaaar! I'm going to get you!" Airyn wailed, flailing about.


A pair of large, webbed hands caught Airyn gently under the arms, supporting her in the water. "Hey, take it easy," Kher advised. "I've got you. You won't slip under. Can you touch the bottom?"

Merlyn splashed over in a messy dog-paddle, sending water everywhere. "It's not deep," he added cheerfully, and stood in the water to demonstrate, the water lapping at his chin.

"That was sorta mean," Blue said disapprovingly, glancing up at Star.


Star looked startled at Blue, then stuck her tongue out merrily. "I'm her best friend, AN' I'm a demon... I get to be naughty," she said, cheerfully.

Airyn flailed a bit at Kher's touch, then realized she could touch the bottom with her tip-toes... and did so, feeling sheepish. "Um. Thanks... Star, you... um, it's okay, she really is my friend," she added, quickly, blushing a bit. "I'll just drown her when she gets in."

Star flicked her tail, and grinned some more, this time with teeth, and Airyn playfully flicked water at her before turning to her rescuers. "Th-thanks," she said, abashed. "I... don't really know how to swim. I'm Airyn, who're you?"


Blue looked startled a moment, then stuck his tongue out in return, feeling that he had earned a moment of childishness. "My best friend's a demon," he said, the proprieties satisfied.

Kher let go of Airyn, nodding. "Sorry about grabbing you," he said, his finned ears folding back apologetically. "You looked like you were panicking, and I didn't want you to go under. Doing okay now?" He smiled. "I'm Kher Sarihe, and these are my brothers - "

"My name's Merlyn," Merlyn interrupted. "Otherwise known as Agent Red," he added dramatically, and failed to strike a dramatic pose, mostly due to being chin deep in the pool. "Hi nicetomeetyou can I help you with dunking your friend?" He grinned, almost innocently.


"It's okay... and I'm fine, thanks..." Airyn paddled tentatively at the water, looking up to Star for support, but the demoness was nowhere to be found now. Wait, where'd she go?

Thus adrift, Airyn fought against awkward shyness for a moment before Merlyn broke it, and she blinked at him. "Agent Red, huh? How come you're in the water anyway? Cats don't like water...? Are you guys related or something?"


"Some cats like water," Merlyn corrected, not offended. "I'm a shapeshifter anyway. I only have one other form but maybe I'll learn other ones someday. But I like to swim, even if I'm not too good at it yet."

"Related, yes, though not by blood," Kher said gently, and hauled Merlyn into the crook of his elbow long enough to give the kitten a noogie. This caused more splashing, which Kher ignored. "He's still my little twerp of a brother. We're having swimming lessons today."


"Oh... my Nana said almost nobody on Gaia bothers to have kids the usual way anymore," Airyn said, offering the wisdom. "I guess your mom and dad think the same way, huh?"


Kher chuckled. "I suppose that's true," he said. "I know a lot of people who were adopted."

"I was hatched out of an egg," Merlyn offered proudly. "Because I don't have a mom and dads can't have babies that way."


"An egg?" Airyn stared. "But... you're a kitty!" This was mind-boggling. It went against all the rules in the school science book! Even if it had a disclaimer on the front saying that it may not be applicable in all situations!


"Yep, because I had to have somewhere to grow, so when they put the cells together to make me they made an egg for me to grow in," Merlyn explained. It was all perfectly logical, right?


"I... guess..." Airyn made a face, and for a moment resembled her dad in question-thwarted mode. "I guess it's okay. My mom was a tree for a long time, so you can come from an egg." She nodded; that was fair.


"Your mom was a tree?" Merlyn asked, curious. "That's cool. What kind of tree?"

Clearly the lesson was going to be a little delayed. Kher patted Merlyn's shoulder. "Don't go in the deep end, and be polite," he told his little brother. "I'm going to go see if I can get your brother to actually get in the pool." He headed for the edge. Blue had retreated onto a lounge chair while general attention was off him, and looked faintly dismayed at having been noticed.


Airyn watched Kher go with a bit of anxiety; what if she drowned again? She couldn't draw in the water to save herself... right?

Curious, she flicked her right hand through the water's surface with a deliberate motion, and the pact seal flickered - but the water couldn't hold a shape, and she succeeded in producing only a few floppy water-snakes that breached and fell again. Cool, not useful... but it did distract her from the danger of Imminent Drowning. "I dunno. It had blue flowers, but I'm glad she's being my mom again. It was boring!" She drew a water-snake in the kitten's direction and grinned as it flopped before dissapating.


"Can she change into - whoa, that's cool," Merlyn said, distracted, and attempted to catch one of the snakes. "What kind of magic is that? Are you a water mage like Auntie Nim?"


"Nuh-uh," Airyn said, pleased at getting attention. She tried a squiggly, but failed. "It's drawing magic. I can draw things with this hand and make 'em come to life for a little bit... but the water's not good for it, it doesn't hold a shape. Sand falls apart. Paper's best... well, I guess rock carving would be really the best, but that's hard."


"That's neat. I want to see," Merlyn said. He paddled over to the edge of the pool to lean on it. "I can do a little Dream magic," he offered. "But not here, it doesn't work so well out here."


"I wanna see! Like what?" Airyn was curious. This kid was much nicer than the other magic-using kids she'd seen at her old school... they had tended to be part of Renswell's clique.


"Like summoning Dreams, or making things grow faster, or making illusions. But not here, only in Dream." Merlyn splashed idly at the surface of the water. "It hurts my head if I try too hard in Gaia, and then I lose my shields and that hurts worse because people are loud, so you'd have to come to my house if you wanted to see," he finished.


"Your shields?" Airyn wrinkled her nose at Merlyn, and for a moment she looked very much like her father in expression. One hand traced the image of a knight's shield in the water, and she giggled at the resulting splashes.


Merlyn splashed at the image, laughing. "No, in my head," he said. "I hear what people feel if I don't have shields, and that just kind of sucks mostly." He glanced around automatically to make sure that his older brother hadn't heard him saying sucks.

"Miz Leila is teaching me how to shield so it doesn't make me get all - all - " he gave up on expressing that concept with words. It would have been easy to tell Luna or Reverie, but he didn't think he could tell Airyn that way without dropping shields. Instead, he made a scrunched face, as though his head hurt, and waved his hands in an expressive kind of flaily gesture.


"Oh," Airyn said, sympathetically. "Like too many people talking but all in your brain? My dad has a friend who could do that. She's gone now, though." Riven hadn't said much about Shina lately, though she'd seen the pictures of the two of them together. "I'm glad nobody can talk in my head except me. Sometimes just me is too much!"


"Yeah, like that. I don't like it very much." Merlyn poked at the surface of the water. "It's neat when people are happy, but when they're sad or mad it kind of hurts, and when there are a lot of people it's way too loud." He tilted his head at Airyn curiously. "What's it like to have just you talking in there? Is it quiet?"


"Um... I guess so?" Airyn tilted her head and fiddled with the end of her braid, trying to understand. "I guess it's no different than being in a room all by yourself compared to being in a room with people. I mean, I don't know exactly how it is for you..."


"I guess that was kind of a dumb question," Merlyn admitted. To cover his mild sense of embarrassment, he sent a splash of water at Airyn.


Airyn yelped, then splashed back - no magic involved, just pure physical force. Then, suddenly, her eyes brightened and she ducked under the water, paddling away from Merlyn towards the edge of the pool. She looked back at him and put one finger to her lips when she resurfaced.

Sure enough, Star was walking back towards the pool with a grimace on her face as she pulled an odd bathing cap over her head.

Airyn mouthed the words at Merlyn. One... two... three!

Merlyn ducked away, grinning, then blinked as Airyn suddenly moved back towards the edge of the pool. He followed, paddling over to get back in range; then he spotted the other girl, and his grin turned mischievous. That was a clear enough signal. He splashed with all his might.


Airyn splashed too, simultaneously, and Star shrieked as she was hit from two directions at once. "Hey!" She stomped her foot and glared at them, though there was a smile fighting to get out. "Airyn, that's not fair, getting reinforcements!"

"Hee hee hee." Airyn paddled over to Merlyn and held up one hand for a high-five.


"Awesome." Merlyn high-fived obligingly and gave Star his best no, really, I'm just cute and innocent look. ... It generally worked better on adults, but you never knew.

"Merlyn! Come on, it's your turn," Kher called from the other side of the pool. Blue had climbed out and was buried in his towel, looking extremely grumpy.

One of Merlyn's ears went down. "I have to go," he said, and waved at Airyn and Star before splashing his way back across the pool, looking vaguely disappointed.


"Awww... bye-bye!" Airyn waved. "Let's play again, sometime!"

Star hmphed, and sat down to dangle her feet in the water, kicking one of them so that a splash of water sprayed Airyn in the face. "Serves you right," she added, serenely, as Airyn spluttered. "Serves you right."

thoughts

The ruins of the watchpost were barely a building any more; once the inhabitants had abandoned the place and ceased to pay attention to it, the entropy of the Wilds had begun to break it down, and now, over ten years later, it was little more than an outline and a single crumbling corner beside what once had been a chimney. But it was getting dark, and it was better than nothing. Merlyn picked the rocks off the ground in the corner, tossing them over the wall into the surrounding bushes. His backpack was a good enough pillow, but the ground was uncomfortably hard; he tried wriggling into different positions, but nothing was comfortable.

Oh. Duh. Stupid! He sat up, zipped the backpack open, and rearranged the clothing inside; then he changed shape and crawled inside. Much better. He curled up into a tight ball of kitten and put his tail over his nose. Maybe it was okay that he wasn't taller yet; if he was a bigger cat, he wouldn't have been able to fit easily into the bag.

It was quiet. In Gaia, there were always sounds. The house was in Barton, so it wasn't as bad as Durem or Aekea, but the distant sounds of the road and the city filtered in. Sometimes the neighbors yelled, or played loud music. And there were always, always the sounds of the house. And then, too, there were the sounds of sentient life all around. Even with his shields up and intact, he could feel people around him; his brothers and his fathers, and farther away, other families, other people. It was like a stream flowing constantly, a soft and indistinct babble that never stopped.

Here in Dream, in this abandoned place in the Wilds, there were only the night sounds of the forest. Wind, and rustling, and the calls of night birds, and sometimes the footsteps of wild things. And silence, when the wind stopped. Silence like Merlyn had never heard in his life. He could sense animal life in the forest, the quiet and feral thoughts of creatures familiar and unfamiliar; here a fox, its self subtly distorted from the kind that lived in Gaia, there a small flock of wild Dreams. But nowhere was there the shushing murmur of conscious thought. He dozed uneasily, his ears and mind straining for the sounds that should be there.

When he woke for the fifth time, he thought about just going home. But that would be giving up. Admitting he couldn't do it, that he couldn't go out by himself and be okay. And the edges of his mind would keep fraying away, like the time he had ripped his jeans and a long thread had slowly come loose, making the hole bigger and bigger. He couldn't go back yet. Even if he didn't know where he was going. Even if it was creepy out here alone. "Damn creepy," he whispered, the mild thrill of using forbidden words comforting him slightly.

He hooked his claws into the edge of the bag next to the zipper and pulled it almost closed, and pushed at the fabric of his sweatshirt until it was a more comfortable nest, and curled himself tighter, paws tucked in, tail wrapped tightly. After a time, he slept.

Merlyn was lost, and hungry, and his ankle hurt, and he had banged his head and lost his sense of direction when he fell down the sinkhole, and worse, he had lost his backpack. He untangled himself from the pile of dusty, rotten old sacks he had fallen into, sneezing and coughing miserably. Where was he? This didn't feel like the Wilds.

The dust settled slowly. It wasn't quite pitch black down here, wherever here was; there was a faint and sourceless light that illuminated the roughly hewn cavern into which he had fallen. It had once been a storeroom of some sort, that much was clear. Along one wall, the rotting remains of casks were stacked; empty shelves sagged along another wall, and below the hole he had come tumbling and yowling out of, piles of sacks lay. The wooden door sagged open, hanging by a single hinge. Just beyond the threshold ... what was that? Merlyn stretched to see, then made a tiny yipping noise and fell back into the sacks in shock. Skeletons! Several of them, all tangled together!

He tried to stand up, and discovered that his ankle had no intention of holding him up. It wasn't swelling - and he could wiggle all his toes - so it probably wasn't broken. But it hurt a lot. He yelled in wordless frustration, whacked his fists into the pile of sacks, and spent another five minutes coughing and sneezing in the resultant cloud of dust.

"Real adventures are no fun," he muttered sulkily. Well, he couldn't walk on two feet right now. At least he didn't have to try to drag the backpack. And his pocketknife was in his pocket, so he still had that. He shook himself crossly into a shapechange. It was going to be really slow going, being small and gimpy. He wished he was bigger.

And then, oddly, he was.

He almost forgot how much his ankle hurt. It wasn't easy to see himself, but as far as he could tell, he'd become a wolf cub, bigger than his kitten self by a good bit. "Cool," he said, taking a tentative step, and then, "Ow," as he was suddenly reminded not to rest his weight on his injured leg. Still gimpy. But bigger! He growled experimentally, and his ears flattened back at the sound that echoed from the walls. "Whoa. Cool." He was scary!

Smells and sounds were subtly different from being a cat. So was his balance, and he nearly fell over a few times. But he picked his way carefully out of the room, across the threshold, around the skeletons. A closer examination showed that all three seemed to have swords stuck into each other. That caused his hackles to spring up, and he heard himself growl. "Freaky. Really freaky," he told the bones.

But his senses told him that nothing living was anywhere nearby now, and he skulked slowly and awkwardly down the hall. He had no idea where he was going.

Anywhere but home.

Time passed. There was no day or night in the Library, but Merlyn could sense the cycle of activity ebbing and flowing; the Librarian tending his ankle first arrived in the "morning," when there were the distant sensations of multiple minds waking from sleep, collecting themselves and organizing their thoughts into consciousness. It returned several times throughout the "day" to bring him food and water and help him with his needs.

Identity: (you) [query], he asked it, on the second day. In return, he received the impression of a smile, and a long and complex sequence of stylized concepts, delivered too quickly for him to follow. He stared at its masked face, confused and intimidated.

Identity: librarian (fifth₪), it clarified for him, enunciating carefully; there was a kind of twist on the end of the name - or was it a title? Identity: librarian (fifth₪), he repeated, carefully copying the silent twist at the end.

Correct, it answered, with another mental smile. Identity: librarian (second※): title (honor): (you), it added.

"My name is Merlyn," Merl told it.

librarian (fifth₪) nodded. Yes, it said. Concept: comprehension (self). Concept: communication (vocal): inability (self); inability (self-including-others). Concept: communication (self): identity (you): librarian (second※). Intention: dishonor (none).

"Oh," Merlyn said in a small voice. "Okay."

There were walls in the Library; the space was not infinite, though it often seemed that way. The Librarians lived in the shelves and behind the walls. The small room that Merlyn stood in was carved in stone, but its walls were muffled with layer upon layer of draperies, embroidered lengths of cloth, cascading from hooks and bars, cloaking the room in quiet.

Action: remove (covering), librarian (fifth₪) told Merlyn.

Concept: possession (covering): (self), Merlyn protested.

Quality: covered (you) [not] [qualifier: form( proper)], the Librarian repeated.

Well ... it couldn't watch him undressing, anyway. And his clothes were probably kind of stinky. Merlyn reluctantly undressed, dropping his clothes on a bare patch of floor. Concept: covering (favored), he said, and added, a little forlornly, "I want to keep my shirt."

Action: preserve (covering): (self), librarian (fifth₪) said solemnly. Action: return (covering): (you) [qualifier: time (future)]. It moved to the walls, choosing lengths of cloth. Merlyn wondered again how it could tell what it was doing with its face masked.

A Librarian's robes, it turned out, had no buttons or zippers. librarian (fifth₪) deftly wound lengths of shaped linen around Merlyn's body, tucking and tying the cloth. Quality: attentiveness: (you) [qualifier: imperative], it told him gently. He tried to remember the sequence in which it had layered and tucked the fabrics. Confusing.

The first layer was a robe, like a kimono, tied neatly at the sides and belted; the undersleeves were a separate layer, reaching to the elbows. It was just about the right size. Concept: belonging (covering): youth (you-including-others) [query], he asked. He got a sense of silent assent in return. So Librarians did have children. He wondered where they were.

He shifted uneasily when the Librarian wrapped his hands neatly in fabric, binding the cloth carefully with a smaller strip of linen to separate his thumb and his index finger so that he could grasp things. It seemed clumsy. But he didn't protest; to stay here, it seemed, he needed to speak and dress as they did. He could do that. Couldn't he?

But when librarian (fifth₪) moved to cover his eyes with a narrow strip of cloth, he backed up a step. Concept: sight: (self) [qualifier: necessity], he protested nervously.

No,, the Librarian said simply. Concept: trust. It left the concept open, not specifying an object. Trust who? Or what?

Merlyn thought of his family, of his brothers and his parents. The Librarian had agreed to help him. He couldn't go home until he'd figured out - whatever it was. And librarian (fifth₪) was waiting for his response. He swallowed hard and closed his eyes.

The blindfold was soft, with rough patches of embroidery at the temples. librarian (fifth₪) tied it behind his head, not too tightly; then came the mask, draped gently and loosely over his head and face. The darkness behind his eyelids wasn't totally black. The soft light in the covering room filtered through two layers of fabric and through the fur and skin, lending a dim redness to the organic dark.

Quality: attentiveness: (you) [qualifier: imperative], the Librarian said again, gently.

Merlyn frowned slightly. But he couldn't see. How was he supposed to know where the layers went now? He was startled when librarian (fifth₪) paused and laid a hand on his forehead, stroking away the wrinkles of his frown. Concept: trust.

He felt his shields being dismantled from the outside in. librarian (fifth₪) was unweaving the shaky structure of his mental protection, the walls that kept the outside world from crashing in on him and overwhelming him. Panicky, he struggled, throwing up layer after layer of hasty protection. The layers fell, one after another, raveling away under the Librarian's sure touch. It was worse than being naked. He felt far more visible, far more vulnerable.

Concept: necessity (none), librarian (fifth₪) said. It laid a portion of its consciousness over his mind, neatly and precisely, with control far deeper and finer than Merlyn had ever known was possible.

He UNDERSTOOD.

He didn't need the shields. The Librarian was right. What he needed was understanding. The SELF didn't have boundaries, and he had been trying to stuff it into a smaller, tighter, more confined space than he could ever hope to fit into. Of course his shields had been breaking; they had been under unbearable pressure from the inside.

He didn't know how to keep the SELF distinct yet. But librarian (fifth₪) would help him learn. It would keep him from losing himself into OTHER until he could do it himself.

He didn't need to see. Without the artificial imposition of boundaries, everything around him was him, and he was everything around him. He could sense where he was just as clearly as if his eyes were open. Distantly, he was aware that the dim red glow of the light still seeped through to his eyes, but that was just another sensory impression in a storm of OTHER.

He would be the eye of the storm. When he learned. He would learn.

Time in the Library was a steady, silent progression, a cycle of dim and bright that was like and unlike day and night. The level of true light in the great space never changed. All around the stacks, around the comparatively tiny beings who lived and moved in and around them, was the cool yawning dimness that cloaked and protected the books. The scattered, flameless lamps lit when anyone moved into their range, and extinguished again at a touch, or when nobody remained nearby. Merlyn could see the vague and physical glowing of the light through his closed eyes.

The lamps, he had discovered, were simply a courtesy to the dreamers and the Court, or what remained of the Court: his parents, himself, his family, all the scattered Dreamers who unconsciously fed and supported the world through their bonded Dreams. The Librarians had never really needed the light. He had gathered that their eyes, huge and jewel-like underneath the wrappings, were immensely sensitive; somewhere in the depths of time, they had begun to wrap themselves as a form of protection, and never stopped.

Layers upon layers of ritual and formality cloaked the Librarians. Everything in their lives was a kind of art, a stylized and formal dance. They spoke and worked and ate and slept in graceful motions. Everything thing had its place and its time and its way. Merlyn found it oddly peaceful, even as he found it strange and restrictive in other ways. The Librarians knew quite precisely the paths of their lives, and were content to live and breathe and eventually die within the measureless spaces of the Library, within the rituals of their long and quiet lives.

Time cycled and passed in the shushing dimness, and Merlyn's mind grew more still, in the way of the beings around him. Instead of falling over his own edges, bleeding out into OTHER, he found that he could turn his SELF deeper rather than wider, retain his identity within his own space. Not that it was truly space. There were no words for what he was learning. Metaphors were inadequate. The Librarians could explain it easily; but they didn't speak in words. He wondered what Miz Leila would think, what Reverie would think, what they would say.

It was okay. He was okay.

He would still need his shields when he left, to keep the babbling of untrained minds from spilling too loudly onto him. But without the shattering, raveling pressure of his own chaotic mind, they would hold up easily and without great effort on his part. That made him feel a little smug.

And one morning he woke in the hammock, and it was time. librarian (fifth₪) and the two (seventh)s who attended it were there, waiting quietly. They didn't have to speak; he knew they knew, too. Merlyn sighed very quietly, climbed out of the hammock, and submitted to librarian (fifth₪)'s careful hands. It undid his mask and removed the blindfold. He squinted and blinked at the sudden brightness, and felt it smiling beneath its mask.

Concept: maturity (you), it said. Action: learn (you) [qualifier: time (continuing/constant)]. Action: remember (you): (self-including-others). Concept: affection (self): (you).

Merlyn pulled his t-shirt back over his head and returned its smile. Concept: affection (self): (you) (you-including others). Concept: gratitude (self): [qualifier: degree (highest)]. Action: leaving (self): [qualifier: emotion (sadness)] [qualifier: emotion (happiness)]. He stepped forward and gave it a careful hug. "I like it here, but I'm ready to go home now," he added aloud. His voice sounded startlingly loud after days of disuse, and he coughed. "Thank you. All of you. I'll come back sometime."

Concept: welcome (you): (here) [qualifier: time (continuing/constant)], it said gravely, and Merlyn could feel the (seventh)s' quiet assent; their attitude towards him had thawed once he had shown a willingness to learn, becoming a neutral friendliness. Impulsively, he bowed to them, and felt their startlement, then laughter. They bowed in return.

He glanced back over his shoulder, once he and librarian (fifth₪) had gone out onto the catwalks, moving towards the great doors. The (seventh)s stood quiet and motionless, watching until their master and his charge turned a corner and were no longer in sight.

They weren't really frightening, Merlyn reflected. Just people.

librarian (fifth₪) overheard the concept, and he could sense its silent amusement all the way to the edges of the Library.