terriblepurpose | Deer Country Contact

We didn't go to the desert until I was old enough to have stopped pretending, most of the time. I grew up on forested islands on a world covered in oceans. We had storms like the ones out over the oceans here, sometimes bigger. I didn't know what air without salt smelled like until we left. I would have done much worse. I would have tickled you mercilessly. What is Creyden like, as a place?

Oh, would you have. Ten tickles?

[Hurr hurr hurr.]

A more rural principality than some places, not very big or very vast. We raised a lot of sheep, and did most of our trade on the sea. Some forests, some rocks, mountains to the north. All the richer kingdoms were further to the south, where the land was better. But we were valuable enough to have a wizard, I suppose, and that's something.

They're interesting, the witches and wizards. They keep to themselves, have their own little society and schools, but they send out their members and station them with kings and nobles all over. Helps them keep a guiding hand in things from the shadows, I imagine. When they take up in a place, they're supposed to be bound by oath to protect and serve it, but that doesn't mean anything. No witch or wizard ever owes their real allegiance to anyone but themselves.

Ten times ten tickles. Do you know what else is funny? Sometimes I wonder if we might be from the same universe, just different parts. We have things like wizards and witches where I come from. The Spacing Guild might be wizards, they control travel between worlds, or Bene Tleilax, the flesh crafters. The witches would be Bene Gesserit, a sisterhood of scholars, at least if you believe the rumours. My mother is one. Is there a word for a son of a witch?

Now that really is merciless, you're right. Torment a hundredfold from my friend the sea monster.

...Though, now that you mention it, I don't think I've ever heard of a witch having children. And they're all beautiful — not just pretty or fair-faced, but truly striking. It'd odd, it's like they've been frozen in time. Never changing, always the same.

Do you know what a conjunction is?

I'd have to stop for you, because of your special powers. You'd talk to me and convince me to be kinder. Our witches are known for being beautiful, but they're also known for having children, and aging. But there are different schools within the school. I don't. Would you tell me about it, please?

It's how the world began, or so the legends go. Bards sing old songs about it, sometimes. It all started when the spheres knocked into each other, and people slipped from one to the other between them. They say that's where the monsters came from, too — from somewhere else, originally, until they crossed over between the spheres that collided.

The oldest telling of it I ever heard said that when people came to our sphere, they were refugees fleeing one they'd ruined. But it's hard to tell, with songs and stories. You never know what parts are true, and what parts were just added in to make a catchy ballad.

I don't suppose any of your guilds and crafters and scholars ever went missing, did they?

Over time? Uncountable numbers. It's not out of the question. I wouldn't have thought of it as a possibility, but we're both here from other places. If transit from our worlds to this one is possible, it's not unreasonable to assume it's possible for transit to have occurred between our worlds as well. We've certainly ruined enough worlds in my universe to generate refugees to populate a whole array of new ones. So perhaps I could have visited you through a portal, come to feast on your innocent sheep.

I would've spirited a few away for you here and there, to keep you placated. Only from the farmers I didn't like much, of course.

Maybe I could have followed you back through. Monsters carrying princesses off is how it's supposed to work, you know, so it'd all be very permissible and proper. I think I would've...done some things differently, all told, if I would've had a friendly monster I could've run to.

I do require a great deal of placating. We would have gone to live under the sea, I think. Halfway between both worlds, so we could visit the people we wanted to, but no one could find us if we didn't want to see them. It might have been a little like this place, now that I think about it.

Well, you can't have one for every tentacle, so some of them will just have to share.

Have you thought about it? Who you would go back and visit, I mean. If we were living in the conjoined ocean as little monsters, ourselves.

Edited 2022-02-05 00:27 (UTC)

I've thought about it. My mother, the witch. She could cast spells on our enemies for us, if we had any, which we wouldn't, of course. What about you?

Which we wouldn't, of course.

I'd have us swim down the coast, then. Further south even than the school for witches, to Cintra. There's a girl there, a few years younger than me, who's just become a queen. We're not friends; we've never even met. But I'd want to see her just once, I think.

Why her? If I may ask. She sounds young to be a queen.

Because I can't think of anyone else.

[She doesn't mean it to sound so dismal, but, well. Well. At least there's another tack she can quickly move on to, anyway.]

And I think we're alike, if the stories about her are any indication. She's tough, skilled in battle. They're calling her a lioness, for how soundly she won her first victory. It's made me curious about her, I suppose. What kind of queen she's going to shape up to be.

I couldn't either.

[It's an impulse, to throw himself into the same pit that she stumbled into, but not one he regrets.]

Perhaps she'll come here one day. It's a place that collects remarkable people. What kind of queen do you think she should be?

[And that gives her pause, for a minute, as she slouches down low among the shelves of the archives and draws her knees up close to her chest and slowly teases out the implications in what he says. He couldn't think of anyone, so he picked his mother the witch. His mother the witch from a sisterhood of scholars, known for having children, who raised him on a planet of oceans and then took him to a desert, where desert people were waiting for a messiah to come with his mother in tow, to make him a sword in his mother's hand.

She must still be living, his mother, or he wouldn't have picked her. But he only picked her because he couldn't think of anyone else.

She isn't even altogether sure what that all adds up to, in the end, but for the fact that they've played out their mutual fantasy for a while now, and none of it sounded like he was only doing it to humor her.]

The sort who's strong enough to have her own mind, I think. To do what she thinks is best, for better or for worse. No witches and wizards whispering pretty notions in her ear.

What if we went back through to your desert? No oceans there. We'd have to turn into something else, to go to the parts where no one could find us.

[Paul thinks that he knows exactly how much of himself he's revealing, each admission a thing he notices and recalls, so he knows where he stands with Renfri. If he knew what she was making of this, he'd rethink that, but ignorance is its own solace.]

That's how a ruler should be. When authority lies in your hand, you have to be master of yourself before any others. That one is easy. We would be sandworms. They swim in the sand like it's water, and they're the masters of the desert. They're huge, large enough to swallow a whole troop of people without one touching the sides, though they do, since they're lined with their teeth.

You talk about them like you've seen them firsthand, these sandworms. You've laid eyes on something like that and lived?

I have. I was only a few meters from one, once. They're amazing, Renfri. There's nothing like them anywhere else.

[Paul wasn't joking about the diagrams. He attaches a sketch to the message.]

I'm going to ride one, one day. The Fremen do it with hooks under their scales.

...I see what you mean about the teeth. That is what all the jagged bits in the center are, then? Those are all teeth, thousands of them.

Why didn't it swallow you down? Were you not to its taste?

They're sharp as murder, too. They make knives out of them you wouldn't believe. As for why it didn't swallow me down: they hunt by sound, and a passing troop used a device to lure him away. (The Fremen word for them is Shai-Hulud. Most translate it as Old Man of the Desert, but I think a better translation is Father Eternity.)

So that's the trick of it. You were that close, but it didn't really know you were there. I suppose that's how you ride them, as well? You get onto their backs without letting them hear it.

Do you have a knife like that?

I think so. I've only seen it done at a distance, but it would have to be. There's a way to walk on the sand to avoid their attention, unless you end up on the wrong type of sand. Not yet. Or yes. I'm not sure. Someone gave me one, but I hadn't had the chance to ask if she wanted it back before I came here.

All that power and might, and people have still figured out how to take advantage of them. Though I suppose the sandworms don't care, do they? What people do or don't do around them, it doesn't matter to them either way.

That's a curious gift, a knife as sharp as murder.

That is a thought. The Fremen revere the sandworms like gods, but they still ride them. I suppose all religion is like that, in a way. Gods in service to man even while they're worshiped. It was appropriate for the task at hand, and an honor. It was given to her by her great aunt. If you gave someone a knife like that, would you want it back?

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