Future Proof

Kerrev has a fine whispering voice and a fine whispering mind. "Come with me," ey says, "I smell a smell of power, I taste a wisp of a waft of something to feed us."

Kerrev adorns eyself in prizes, acquires attainments. Ey displays resinous worms, maps knotted in umbilical cords and tangled in quartz storage. Ey pours handfuls of jangling coins into open palms to let the pattern of their fall suggest direction. Ey covers the body granted by the knife and vows to have better. If not the before-body then a new one, a better one, a whole one.

All lean in to touch the coins, to read the symbols of obverse and reverse. A glimmering and a gleaming answers stirring fingers.

"I won't take the knife again; I don't care who wields it," says Jjenr in a brave groaning little voice, and flips her blades about her elbows as if to say, any deity who dare try it, I'll cut back.

They are hunters all of them, and it is a hard hunt, the sniffing-out and the reading-of-entrails and the long, long journeys through foreign lands. Voices speak to offer power. A place to rest. A floating duty, comforting and mindless.

Kerrev's whispers break the tightening cords of the hum from Saturn's rings. Ey tells stories of what-was and what-is and what-could-be through the journey.

"I will be beautiful," Kerrev says, and "I will be whole," Jjenr says, and "I will be myself," says a heretofore silent Subjugator called only the Ferrule.

"We will make ourselves anew," Kerrev murmurs, and all hiss in hope as painful as the touch of the knife.