Gone?

Londt watches from the back half of the short cave he offered to share with her. She hasn’t slept all night, neither did he, both for very different reasons.

His eyes soft, hidden under his lashes, in the dark, wondering about things he just learned. Her, unaware of his gaze, rolls around as if troubled by things she just seems to be realizing. After so long, she sits up, grabs one of the many skins layering the otherwise cold floor, lays it flat in her lap, and starts rifling through his collection of found and crafted items, which to her surprise were annoyingly, simply, a plethora of odd shaped bones and skins of different roughness and textures, quietly she tosses all the things one might need if they were going to…

She finds his book, opens it.

He knows what she’ll find in there, and she seems to. Her fingers glide over the thin-skin pages bound in sinew and an old jaw bone a few long minutes before she unexpectedly lumps it in with the rest of her, his… things.

He flinches.

“OH!” She jumps as her eyes finally catch his. “On Odin, I wasn’t… I-“

“You just got here, you can’t just run off, Frigg, you don’t know what it’s like out there.”

She doesn’t seem to care, she gathers the corners of the skin in her lap and hastily ties them off. “We’re already dead, aren’t we?”

“Actually… No.” Londt says pointedly.

She does a double take of his words. “Ellana said-“

“But we might as well be. There are things out there worse than death... being here in the first place only is one of many of them.”

Frigg looks down from the mouth of their second story cave “yeah… I saw some of that earlier.” She sighs dryly, whatever she’d decided in her head, though dismembered, still breaths. “If Erik is here though, that means the others might be, too, nothing else really matters till I find them.”

As she attempts to stand Londt grabs her wrist. She snaps her eyes at his. He’s serious.

She slowly pulls away, but stays put.

“You’re not wrong, but if they aren’t at Origin Point, you’re probably not going to find them, at least not as you remember them.”

Why’s that?”

“Well, out of the survivors, all but a handful of recent arrivals have been here for hundreds of years, a few have been here longer. And some even longer than that. Everyone knows everyone after a while, when your only choices are to either die or hide you end up bumping into each other wherever’s safe. The rest get stitched.”

“I was out there a while before Ellana brought me here, nothing was as scary as what I saw in this cave.”

Londt’s brow crumples.

“Why are you so defensive over them, why the fuck does it matter? Shouldn’t you be worried about yourself?” Frigg recoils, annoyed that he’d dare look at her like that. 

“Look, I’m trying to be nice but you sure are naive. I’ll explain everything if you just stay put. You would be a liability out there to us and yourself. I know we only just met but you are going to have to trust me.”

She finally settles. “How about you start with the fucked up shit in that book? Or what a Stitch is… Or maybe with why your food and animals look like shit, or-”

“Soon.” He can tell she’s not actually mad at him, remembering feeling the same if not worse when he showed up. “It would be easier if I just showed you, Ellana, Chev, and I are heading out to meet up with someone, how about you come with… get some sleep.”

He says sternly, giving her more of an order than an invitation.

—

A tall, dark, brutish, cloaked shape enters a simple but grand geometric metal-sheathed cave, a few others; battered, stumble in behind him and veer off down a smaller tunnel. After walking deeper and deeper into the dark, he stops. His hand glides over the still air of the room, a smooth glimmering page of green crystalline light source appears beneath and ornately rotates against his palm. A doorway opens in the floor, a step appears, as he makes his way down more appear as those used disappear- the doorway closes seamlessly behind him.

“Anything?” A monotone, modular voice asks from nowhere as he turns a corner at the bottom into another room alive with wriggling things one of a less-than understanding of their ways might perceive simply as glow bugs following bioluminescent slime trails on the walls.

“No… It wasn’t there.” He replies as he dusts his ‘skin’ off, looks around the room to an empty, mead-barrel sized chamber. “Where is Uhluru?”

“Gone.” It replies.

“Gone? As in not in Oblivion?”

“Correct, Sur. A Stitch attempted to reach you.”

“Must have been out of the zone…” He says as he pulls out and checks his module from one of the many side pockets in his loose, ragged pants and slips into a sitting place.

“Correct”

“That can only mean…” he taps the floating wall of mist, checking, as he folds his other arm behind his head. “He got one.”

“Correct.”

“Doesn’t leave us with many options, does it…” He remarks to himself as he overlooks a grid map in his mist pool.