They walked in near silence for a time, accompanied only by the rhythmic hush of Slipscale’s stride and the occasional pop of fungal spores bursting in the underbrush.
ProlixalParagon fell slightly behind the others, deliberately slowing until he walked beside the scout.
Slipscale didn’t look at him but flicked a forked tongue once into the air. “Curious breath,” they said. “Yours smells like melted alloys and turning gears. Even the soil marks your weight differently.”
“I’m a Tinkerer,” Prolix replied softly, unsure how much to explain. “I… repurpose what others discard. Craft things that think, sometimes. Fix things that shouldn’t move, and make them move again.”
Slipscale turned a lidless eye on him, unblinking. “Ah. One of the iron-singers.”
Prolix blinked. “You call us that?”
“We do not call you anything. But the forest knows the difference between those who shape in harmony and those who force the world to their will.”
Prolix hesitated. “Which do you think I am?”
A long silence followed. Slipscale’s movements slowed slightly, and their frill stirred as though tasting the air between them.
“You wear your changes like softened metal—folded many times, but not brittle,” the scout said finally. “Not all who shape the world with tools do so out of arrogance. Some of you simply… wish to make sense of its cruelty.”
They walked several more paces before Slipscale spoke again, quieter this time.
“Our kind remembers when iron came for us. Not with swords—but chains, and how iron refuses to honor old pacts. We were made to carry, to harvest, to fight, in the wars of air-dwellers. Those who shaped metal then did so without listening first. They took our silence for submission.”
Prolix swallowed, guilt pricking behind his throat. “I wasn’t part of that. I didn’t even know—”
Slipscale held up a webbed hand, not unkindly. “You are not the weight of those before you. But your hands carry their echoes.”
They paused by a slow-moving pool, its surface so clear the stars above shimmered as if painted there.
Slipscale crouched beside it, running their fingers through the water. “Quang do not place worth in hierarchy. We listen first, always. The oldest among us speak seldom, and when they do, we call them Deeplistened. We do not command. We coax.”
“So no leaders?” Prolix asked, crouching beside them.
“No rulers,” Slipscale corrected. “Only stewards. Our young teach the old to shed shame. The old teach the young to shed haste. If you hoard power, the current strips you bare.”
Prolix’s ears flicked back, thoughtful. “You said I smell like alloys. Do you smell the future in that?”
Slipscale’s throat fluttered with a sound halfway between a chuckle and a sigh. “I smell choice. Unforged. But I will tell you this, Tinkerer—there are machines that rot forests, and machines that sing lullabies to sleeping roots. Make of yourself the latter, if you would pass through these lands again.”
Prolix nodded slowly, the weight of the conversation settling around him like ash. “I’ll try.”
Slipscale finally stood, looking back toward the path. “Trying is what the saplings do before they become trees.”
The scout resumed walking, their tail sweeping gently across the moss. Prolix rose to follow, his steps quieter now—more deliberate. The path ahead glowed faintly in hues of green and gold, as if welcoming the shift.
Behind them, the water they had touched rippled once… then stilled.
The forest changed gradually, like exhalation cooling against skin.
Twisting vines thickened into sinewed curtains, drooping from ghost-barked trees. A fog coiled low across the ground, glowing faintly green with an inner bioluminescence that seemed to pulse in time with unseen heartbeats. The scent turned sharp—ozone and something sour, like overripe citrus and clean bone.
Kaelthari moved ahead to scout with Ralyria, but even her armored steps grew uncertain as the earth began to breathe beneath them. One moment firm, the next springy as wet moss, then suddenly brittle like ancient shell.
“What is this place?” Marx murmured. “It’s like the whole forest is dreaming.”
Slipscale gave a slow nod. “It is. You’ve entered the Memory Mire. The land here remembers what most would choose to forget.”
Before Prolix could question that, the fog surged toward him—tendrils curling with curious intent. A flicker of silver shimmered through it, and he gasped: he saw a memory. Not his own. A Goblin child reaching for a knife. A Fennician kit crying as shackles were fitted over her too-thin limbs. The image passed like breath on glass.
Ralyria hissed, drawing her blade halfway.
“Do not fight it,” Slipscale warned calmly, their frill darkening. “The mire is not a weapon. It’s a witness.”
The others froze. The fog brushed Kaelthari’s armor but found no resonance. It swirled around Marx, who grunted as if struck, then stared ahead in blank horror, jaw clenched. He did not speak of what he saw.
Prolix stood still as it reached him.
A thousand gears turning. A shattered clock face. Wires twisting into nooses. Screams muted by design. Self-aware servitors marked defective. Then—Lyra’s hand on his shoulder. Her voice saying “You are not broken. You are unburdened.”
He shivered, but the fog passed gently through him.
Slipscale watched with interest, tilting their head. “Most surfaces it touches, it reflects. You—some of it sank in. It rarely chooses.”
“Chooses what?” Prolix asked hoarsely.
“To speak,” Slipscale said simply. “To share.”
The fog receded. The glowing trees parted ahead.
Beyond, elevated on slow-swimming root clusters and interwoven branch bridges, lay the Quang village—Tlekaneth, a soft-spoken jewel in the drowned wood. Bioluminescent membranes pulsed softly in the twilight, casting silver-green hues across hollowed stilt structures shaped like water lilies and coiled ammonites. Quang moved between them with languid grace, their smooth scales slick with dew, webbed fingers clasped in silent greetings.
Slipscale turned to the group. “You’ve passed through what remembers. Now you step into what endures. The village will receive you.”
Kaelthari glanced back uneasily. “And if it hadn’t?”
“Then we would have guided you around. The mire listens more than it judges,” they replied.
Prolix looked back once at the fog, now drifting like forgotten breath. Then forward—into the alien stillness of Tlekaneth.
And the whisper of a thought followed him: Machines can forget. But land… land always remembers.
Tlekaneth did not bustle, it breathed.
Prolix moved slowly through its winding biobridges and suspended platforms, careful where he stepped. The “wood” beneath his feet was not wood at all, but a fibrous sponge-flesh that contracted slightly when pressed, then slowly rebounded—like moss with memory.
No pulleys. No wheels. No tools as he knew them.
And yet, every detail in this place thrummed with deliberate function.
Slipscale walked beside him, unhurried. “Your eyes dart like a salamander cornered by flame. You are… what did your kind call it?” They clicked their scaled tongue thoughtfully. “Tinkerer.”
Prolix nodded. “Yes. That’s my class. Or—it was given to me.”
“Mmm,” Slipscale murmured. “Among Quang, we are not given what we are. We are grown into it. As kelp becomes reef. You smell like metal and blood-memories. Yours is a craft that splits. Ours is one that weaves.”
Prolix paused beside a structure that appeared to be a home—half-bloomed pod structures hung on long mucilaginous threads, their interiors faintly lit by softly bioluminescent algae. A small Quang child floated nearby, affixed to the threadlike hammock via a sticky secretion along its back crest. Its frill pulsed once in greeting.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“That pod is… alive,” Prolix whispered.
“All homes are,” Slipscale said. “To dwell in death is to lose harmony. We raise our structures like we raise our young—with patient symbiosis. And they grow to shelter us in return.”
The Tinkerer couldn’t stop himself—he dropped to his knees and touched the central support trunk. It was warm. Damp. But there was a gentle vibration within—like a deep hum. Not quite mechanical. Not quite natural.
“What powers this?”
“Need,” Slipscale answered. “And memory. This tree grew up where three Quang first mated and mourned. It remembers the blood, and now nourishes peace.”
Prolix’s ears flicked, a familiar hunger stirring—not for food or water, but for understanding. “You… don’t build anything separate from your environment?”
Slipscale lifted one webbed hand, and a small, spheroid object rolled down their sleeve and bloomed open like an urchin—slender spines quivering. “This is a chiralgland. It secretes enzymes tuned to intention. I think, it shapes. Used for healing. Sealing wounds. Or dissolving bindings.”
Prolix blinked. “You think your tools into form?”
“Tools are not things,” Slipscale said. “They are reminders that we are not alone in making.”
He was silent a moment.
“I want to learn,” Prolix said finally. “I want to know how this works—not to copy it, but to respect it.”
Slipscale’s slitted eyes narrowed. Then, slowly, they reached forward and smeared a faint line of slick biofilm across Prolix’s palm. “Then let the village remember you as well.”
Behind them, a sharp motion broke the stillness.
Marx had entered the outer threshold of one of the pod-halls, and a ripple passed through the fronds. The Quang tending the entry stiffened. Though no words were spoken, Prolix caught the sudden quiet in their bodies—the subtle backward lean, the close-fold of frills. Marx noticed too. He hesitated. Then turned away.
Kaelthari wasn’t far behind him. Even the youngest of the Quang children flared their skin with cautionary light—soft yellow, edged with wary orange.
“They do not mean offense,” Slipscale said quietly. “But your… tall ones… carry much forgetting in their bones. The land does not always forgive.”
“But they came to help,” Prolix murmured.
“They came with iron in their blood,” Slipscale replied. “And that sings a different kind of song.”
The Tinkerer looked down at the line of slime across his palm. It tingled faintly.
He wasn’t sure if it was acceptance, or warning.
The rhythmic murmur of wind-chimes and waterbowls marked the beginning of the healing rite. The Quang gathered in concentric spirals around a hollowed pool, where bioluminescent ink traced ancient glyphs across the surface, shifting with each chant and breath. Fragrant plumes of salt-root and nightpepper smoke drifted lazily above the crowd. ProlixalParagon stood near the edge of the inner ring, unsure if he was meant to remain a witness or step away before the rite deepened.
Then the mist stirred.
It wasn't the wind—there was a hush, a pressure. Heads turned, voices lowered. A figure emerged from the shadowed threshold beyond the pool: tall, elegant, wrapped in robes of silver-edged black that bled into the air like dusk made flesh. The scent hit next: earthen spice laced with the tang of steel, sharper than incense, strangely grounding.
“Storms walk gently when they visit sacred ground,” came the voice—low, liquid, layered, familiar.
Prolix’s heart skipped. “PillowHorror,” he breathed.
The Quang parted with reverent ease. This was no stranger to them—PillowHorror walked as one revered, moving with casual grace, tail flicking in subtle, amused rhythm. Their yellow eyes locked onto Prolix with that same amused glint he remembered from the Palace of Falling Light.
“Little fox,” they purred, stepping close, fingers briefly brushing Prolix’s shoulder in a touch both greeting and acknowledgement. “Still surviving. Still stirring.”
A few of the Quang gasped softly—not in alarm, but recognition. Whispers passed between them, rippling faster than the incense smoke. It was not just who PillowHorror was—but that they had chosen to acknowledge him.
Elder Nhaloa, previously deep in the rite’s recitations, rose and bowed her crested head with ceremonial precision. “Avatar of the Pale Tide. Shadow of the Changeborne. We welcome your aspect.”
PillowHorror bowed slightly in turn—gracious, but never small. “This rite is a tide. I will not disrupt its course.” Then, they gestured with a flick of clawed fingers toward Prolix. “But the fox walks many liminal paths. If he wishes, he may wade deeper.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, the inner circle of the rite expanded—elders shifting their positions to make room beside the pool.
Elder Nhaloa turned toward Prolix, her expression unreadable but calm. “You have walked with those who dwell between. If the herald of Dedisco calls you kin, you are welcome in the basin.”
The invitation, so publicly spoken, was unheard of. And yet none objected. The Quang, who prized harmony and balance, understood: when a force like PillowHorror noticed someone, it was not frivolous. It was fate.
Prolix hesitated, then stepped forward, sandals brushing the ink-lit edge of the pool. PillowHorror smiled.
“Let’s see what songs the water remembers,” they said, voice coiling with mischief and mystery.
And the rite resumed—only now, with ProlixalParagon at its center, threads of past and present beginning to converge beneath the surface.
The moment ProlixalParagon stepped into the ink-ringed basin, the temperature dropped—not cold, but cool, like the air before a storm or the shadow beneath a tidepool. The bioluminescent glyphs beneath the water flared brighter, then shifted hue, turning from tranquil blue to a deep, pulsing violet edged in silver.
He knelt as instructed, the shallows barely lapping his thighs. Salt-root smoke clung to him now, threading into the fur of his arms and ears. A Quang initiate gently anointed his brow with shimmering salve that smelled of crushed pearl and bitter reeds. Then the chanting resumed—low, harmonic, and resonant enough to tremble in his ribs.
PillowHorror knelt at the opposite edge of the basin, watching with their chin resting lightly on their claws. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.
The surface of the water stilled.
And then, it pulled him under.
Not physically—his body remained upright, heart beating in his chest—but his awareness was submerged like it had slipped beneath a membrane too thin to notice. He blinked and saw not the pool, but a fractured dome of mirrored reflections. Each pane showed a different version of himself.
In one, he knelt beside the ruined shrine of the Pale Tide, hands stained with blood and salt.
In another, he was laughing, standing atop a sand-dune city with a crescent moon carved into his shoulder like a brand.
Another showed him as a blur of motion in a soot-lit forge, weaving lightning into brass and bone.
A fourth—flickering—held a version of him cloaked in voidlight, holding a severed chain and staring at a cracked chalice overflowing with black ichor.
“Many notes,” PillowHorror's voice whispered—not aloud, but within. “You are becoming a chord. That’s why they notice you. That’s why he watches.”
The dome of mirrors shattered.
Prolix gasped, but no water entered his lungs. Instead, he fell through ink—a tunnel of cascading runes and sound. It wasn’t music in any literal sense, but it resonated with rhythm. A refrain, PillowHorror had once called it. He reached out blindly—and his fingers brushed threads.
Some were taut. Some quivered. Some looped through him like veins of light and shadow. His hand caught on one: warm, pulsing, braided from copper and mist and memory. When he touched it, a voice not his own whispered:
“Build from what they burned. Shape what they feared. Wake what they buried.”
The thread dissolved into motes of moonlight.
Then the ink drained away, and he was falling again—but this time, toward something waiting.
A pair of hands caught him. Not physical, not quite, but real enough to slow the descent.
Dedisco.
Or perhaps just an echo. A pale figure stood at the bottom of the void, eyes hollow, limbs swaying in rhythm to unseen waves. No features, only suggestion—mist and moonlight, the echo of seabed bells, the scent of salt and blood and rebirth.
The being leaned close. Not threatening—assessing.
Then:
“He who guards the boundaries brings change only by breaking them.”
A hand—clawed and inhuman—reached for Prolix’s chest.
He didn’t flinch.
The touch sank into him. Not pain—just pressure and heat. It left something behind: a flicker of silver and deep crimson that swirled behind his ribs like an ember lost at sea.
Then everything reversed.
He surged back into his body with a gasp, water splashing softly around him. The glyphs were dimming, the chants softening. The scent of salt-root was gentler now. The ritual was ending.
PillowHorror stood first, tail flicking once—amused, perhaps, or satisfied.
Prolix remained kneeling, breathing deep, heart racing with whatever had taken root inside him.
Elder Nhaloa approached and looked into his eyes, then gave a slow, solemn nod. “You’ve been marked by more than the rite.”
PillowHorror grinned. “He’ll feel the pull more keenly now. The waters remember their own.”
They turned, robes unfurling like stormclouds, and vanished into mist before anyone could speak further.
ProlixalParagon stared at the pool’s surface, now still and dark once more, and felt the weight of something vast ripple beneath his skin.
Something had changed.
>New Trait Gained: Tidefract Echo<
Source: Communion of Depth and Dissonance
Affinity: Water, Abyssal, Resonant>
You have been touched by the deep cadence of Dedisco and the fraying lull of PillowHorror. The ritual did not grant power—it awakened recognition. You are now a vessel for fragmented truths beneath the tide, and as such, the world of boundaries, chains, and silence reacts to your presence in subtle ways.>