452. Beyond the sky, 8

(Blume)

Without real eyes or skin, everything is different. It’s like watching a movie or listening to music. The feelings can affect you, but you’re not quite experiencing the events.

Still, it is an enjoyable simulation I live, while I have this odd body of mine fly through the skies.

I have a blurred and achromatic perception of my surroundings. My aura reacts a little like iron particles in a mist, warming up in the direction of the sun, and aligning toward the magnetic field of the planet.

So I can roughly navigate even though I’m technically blind.

When I get close to my destination, my aura and Nightmare’s should intersect and we’ll realise we’re near each other. Then we’ll talk.

The last time I actually chatted with a being-like-me takes me back quite a while.

I’m eager to meet this new friend of Rose.

It’s nice to be conscious and alive. Things happen and emotions torment you.

Living as a plant can be nice and sometimes relaxing. But living as humans and gods is indubitably so much fun.

And this reckless Rose of mine brings much entertainment, passion and wild insanity to my life. I wouldn’t dream of having anything else.

I love that she’s always questioning the morality of her own actions. That’s probably very human. But I love the perfume it gives her thoughts and herself. It’s a subtle fragrance of kindness, with a hint of bloodlust in the background.

Kind blooming Rose...

Life is nice.

~

I fly at the highest speed I can achieve with these wings. I certainly can reach a speed of a few metres per second, I can feel it roughly from the pressure of the air against the wings, but I can’t bother to measure it more accurately.

I feel the sun vanishing behind the world as a change in the temperature and excitement over my feathers.

I keep flying, without rest.

Were I more human, slightly more, I would have grown an eye to enjoy the sceneries I fly through. They must be a sight.

But right now, I don’t really care about that. It’s not that important. I’m more curious about what I will find at my destination. I’d be happy to say hi to Myls if she’s there. She’s a good girl like Rose.

~

And so, without a real perception, or care, about time, I ended up finding and then reaching my destination.

I headed toward the domain I perceived that yelled the concept of nightmare around. The aura of fragmented thoughts is massive.

That one I could tell right away wasn’t fully like me. In the spectrum of life between me, or more primal beings-like-me, and humans of the old world on the other side, she’s further down the later side than I am.

Despite her looks and character, Nightmare is closer to humanity than I.

Not that it matters to me.

I enter the outer layers of her presence, and I say hi as she begins to react to my presence.

I generate waves of T.I. that have similar patterns to sounds.

I say hello, and that I come on the behalf of Rose Blume.

Nightmare opens a tunnel in the air for me to follow. She’s opening her door to me.

I enter her inner domain, her realm. Where her powers affect the world surrounding her directly.

She has an aspect of slow fountains in the shapes of blooming trees, giant trees, spread out over the land, with an underground network of veins.

All that is invisible under sunlight, but I know from Rose what I would see otherwise.

She is an underground being that grows around the floating island in synergies. She didn’t create them, but they help each other.

I see in the trees the growing fruits of new species of birds she’s attempting to create.

That passion for birds is too human to be innate. Nightmare must have developed that from a past human life at her beginnings, or a human she absorbed early on as well and based her persona upon.

Anyway I follow the invitation to land on one of the floating islands where she condensates an emulation of her consciousness.

I can see the shape of a daiûa as clearly as if I had eyes. She’s absorbing light and irradiating T.I.

As she knows languages, it’s easier to communicate complex concepts and thoughts.

B - I’m pleased to meet you, Nightmare.

N - Hello... Odd bird.

B - Rose sent me to meet you and her friends, as she wouldn’t make it in time.

N - She’s alive?

B - Yes. She’s doing well, and misses you. She kept saying you’re a good friend.

I saw an uneasy emotion appear. An inner conflict. A paradox in her primal logic of a being-like-me.

Her hatred for humans has already mostly dissipated because of Rose, but lingering stains remain, and are brushed painfully by the exception Rose brings again today.

She doesn’t quite have affection for Rose, but there’s something that is not hatred at all at least.

So it bugs her again, that she feels different. It’s not unhappiness.

It’s kind of cute, on a nightmarish level.

N - She’s alive...

B - And she says hello, very kindly.

N - What happened out there?

B - I’m aware that Dragod in agony propagated a few dying words... What did you hear this time?

N - The scream of agony of a dying star. I didn’t hear any word.

B - Good, good... That star was a god quietly devouring the world out there, far, far bigger than us and Dragod before. Rose didn’t like that. We struck it down.

N - ... You did?

She’s bewildered about how we could achieve that, not really asking for a confirmation. The power the magenta god released was phenomenal; so it sounds to her as if a fly killed an elephant somehow.

B - We played it well. I was scared though.

N - ...

B - Many things could have happened. This is how it turned out. Would you have come to help if we had called you?

N - ... I might have.... When this dying star became visible, I saw a god eating god covering the land out there for a moment. I felt fear too.

B - You realised it would have been a predator to you too you mean?

N - I think so.

B - Not all of us are as kind as you unfortunately.

I teased her and it works. She’s bugged. It’s as if she was embarrassed, would she be human.

I can see where Rose found her kind and sort of cute, in her own way.

N - What happened to my child?

B - You mean the dragon? Yaelun was it? Oh...

I tell her what Rose told me. They found the source together. And then, they parted way in the worst way imaginable, with conflicting ambitions, and one of them killed the other.

B - She told me she was sad about it. Unfortunately that’s all I know.

N - ...

I can read her thoughts as much as she reads mine.

It’s not that she’s sad or angry about Yaelun’s death oddly. She didn’t care that much for that one.

What concerns Nightmare are the implications of these events.

On one hand she’s worried because Rose appears as a murderous warmonger to her. It worries her to know that another thing wanders the world, killing beings-like-her. She is worried.

On the other hand, Rose didn’t kill her when she could have, and that also means something. But it’s hard to understand, what this means and what it implies.

I try to help her process all that, answering her questions about it all.

We discuss until it leaves the matters of facts and reaches the domain of abstract ethics.

B - Rose values a form of morality. She kills things when she believes it will save many more others, or just her own life is she feels threatened. Like everything else.

N - She values life?

B - In her own murderous way, yes, she always has... Her goal is not to hunt us down. War is not her goal. What she wants is... I guess, for everything alive to have a fair chance at life. Not just us nor her.

N - Fair... Do you think she would be willing to kill humans if they were hunting us down indiscriminately?

If the prophesied war were taking a grim turn for us, against all odds. Where would Rose stand?

Would she stay on the winning side for human supremacy, or help us survive, and murder her kind?

B - Without a doubt, yes. Rose would kill humans if it meant saving the life of innocent gods.

I’m absolutely sure of that. Though I hope for her spirits that it never needs to happen.

~

B - I also came to speak to her friends, for they were meant to meet around here sometime soon. Have you noticed them?

N - I’ve eaten them already.

I shiver figuratively. She’s grinning. That was a joke.

N - They’re just outside.

~