“Neurons remember the shape they are in to make a thought. Neuronal drift helps tell time, but to fix memories we halt neuronal drift for all affected neurons of Isc, pinning axons and somas to fixed points within the brain. We allow for unfixed neuronal structures to pass by our fixed neuronal structures like a river around a sea of stones. Tell me what I’m missing.”
Rook shuffled through the B-side third floor index in the sixteenth of the twenty-nine campus libraries. And these were only the formal libraries — there were countless more: encased in Opa, hidden in dormitories, collected in basements and sub-basements, stacked beneath mattresses. But those would come later, to be found and shaken down only if the formal libraries turned up useless. Rook’s beak rasped through the thick paper sheafs, his head tilted so he could peer inside as he went. Here, he voiced to Corcus at a break in his search, and within a nanosecond of time recited from a leaf of M. Red’s manuscript verbatim: “A side effect of Isc memory trappage is denser neuronal tissue. Some memories may bleed into each other due to the proximity of connections not meant to be near to each other. Neurons that fire together wire together, and to chronic users of Isc, synaesthesias and artificially tied memories are inevitable.” The memory comes heartbeats before the text’s immolation during a memophenidate-infused evening tainted by eucalyptus leaf smoke in an open-ceiling classroom of thirty purple and one blue.
Corcus nodded, the transferred memory cooling into his mind like volcanic molten sand sliding into hissing waves. Across the room, on a cot lit by a grainy green Opa sequence chalked into wood, the unconscious body of M. Red groaned. Feathers in disarray, skin slimy with sweat, coat-ports unhooked and bandaged up along the ropy muscles of his legs and lean exposed ribs of his torso. Coatless.
Rook informed Corcus, Next library, and he blurred through a shut stained glass window to continue his search while Corcus waited.
Everything hurt when he woke, and wakefulness to his mind was like a series of wild dry lightning in dusty air.
M. Red squinted at the ceiling and the world spun, the fluid dynamics of the interocular vitreous humour too much for his sense of balance. Lying down, he gripped the sides of the cot to prevent himself from rolling off, held his stomach until the world stopped turning. He wasn’t used to being disoriented from gravity. Something was wrong, and he had known it since before he woke.
The burnt orange light of Opa was a brand against his dark irises. The room was dark, unfamiliar. To the right of the sequence was a sheet of flimsy with neat lettering etched in dark gold ink. At the very top — and it took all his effort to concentrate — read, ”Read upon waking.” Under that was smaller, even tighter lettering, glittery aurum against black and orange, blurring and smearing into the dark, lights unruly and smearing off the edges of the flimsy into the sides of his vision, lingering against the backs of his teeth, wet inside the canals of his ears, dripping. He writhed sickly. Read it, he nauseated himself by saying, and his stomach roiled as he, with effort, sat up, bracing himself on the wrists of his wings.
His head ached, peculiarly empty. Something was missing, and had been since he had woken.
”You are safe. Please don’t move. You are being checked on every half-hour — please refer to the Opa timer next to this note. It is— ” this character had been erased several times, a clean white chalk development over a graveyard of smudgemarks “ —the 23rd of Column’s Autumn. Your accident wiped away three years of your memory. You are not forming new memories and your coat is missing. We are working to fix this.”
He fell back on the thin mattress. His guts rebelled, clenched, but there was nothing inside to squeeze, so it just hurt. His legs throbbed. The words stayed, rumbling like boulders down an avalanche slope, and he stared at the wall as the information tumbled until, eventually, meaning crumbled out with a splitting headache.
He couldn’t remember? He blinked.
His head throbbed. His stomach ached. Why did it ache? He laid back, shut his eyes for a moment.
M. Red squinted at the ceiling and the world spun, the fluid dynamics of the interocular vitreous humour too much for his sense of balance. He gripped the sides of the cot to prevent himself from rolling off, held his stomach down until the world stopped turning. Something was wrong, and he had known it since before he woke. The burnt red light of Opa was a brand against his dark irises. A flimsy was attached to the ceiling right beside the bloody light. So red, like carnelian. Why was it red? He hated red. He closed his eyes and a heaviness came upon him like a smothering blanket, and he thought of nothing at all.
The room was dark, and he couldn’t move his neck. He patted himself down, paused there — there was a brace around it. He tried tugging it off before even considering why and his muscles did not obey — limp, weakened. Smaller. Heavy, but so light at the same time. He couldn’t see well — his near-vision was always blurry, but this was worse. His arm was a vague brown blob in the red dark.
He closed his eyes.
Corcus’s first emergency call is sedate. The golden-winged man stands in black, eclipsing the sun. His own light, stolen from the sky, flickers and rims his edges like he is a character in a picture book with all the colours washed out, only outlines remaining. His eyes are heavy and lidded, irises catching the firelight, sparks in the wet gaps in the ocular sockets like he is stuffed full of stars. His posture is that of a fire caught in a living woodprint, infinitesimal movements enough to show life and nothing more.
The man cannot hold on for much longer, hence why he called them here. His heart, after all, is not beating.
The expanding destructive void of the surgical theatre antiseptic sequence is blinding to Corcus’s nose, makes his lungs taste green-pink: chemical pomegranate and blood. Corcus's supervisor puts a hand back, one finger aloft, trusting not to need to look. They will do this, and he will stay to watch. His supervisor is a black coat embroidered in gold-thread floral patterns cinched tight by a striking lilac sash. Far better equipped for this. Corcus sets his eyes through Rook’s, lands his sensations through Rook too. He lets Rook take those memories for him, but keeps the channel open — this was tricky, once, but it is like warm ocean now. Rook will log everything perfectly. No memophenidates required.
His supervisor steps forward. The floor is solid crystal, green iridescence glinting from the blue winking out through crystal black. The student they were called for — Minh — opens his eyes, his mouth. His teeth are stained uniform black — he is not an animal. And he shuts his mouth, pitches forward, something in the room snapping — the sequence holding his blood steady, oxygenated? And a soft thump and his head cracks and bounces against the hard wood floor, but Corcus cannot see it because on the floor is something that Rook logs and erases the name of when he reads it. Corcus in Rook's body lingers, — if the knowledge is something he shouldn't have, he wants to ensure it will be locked in Rook’s mind until he needs it.
The stained glass glows. Minh's clothing splays like the cast of a snow angel. It is a sequence modified from Isc that attempts to take material not out of place, but out of time. Something that cannot work, and for which this student dearly paid the consequences. Now that Minh has moved in space, their time-lock is broken and they are dead.
The rest of the team — there is none. Corcus is so used to being on one that he forgot. They are alone, the three of them. Corcus’s body steps forward into the room, after he tells Rook that it is acceptable to do so. He flutters Corcus's body closer, too, and both on their first day finally see what their supervisor is capable of.
The body is on the floor, his supervisor beside it. Green under red under brown under red-yellow-purple-blue. And Corcus's supervisor tugs on a pair of red gloves — these brilliant red gloves, thin and sleek as freshly cut eyelids, redder than the sun in a smoky sunset or arterial blood or the splash of dead animal in the snow. They slip on these gloves and the fabric — is it fabric? — slides over their skin like velvet and sticks there like they were born wearing them, like their hands are vacuum sealed, like they’ve plunged up to their elbows in a bucket of vermillion paint. No shadows mottle the hue — it is brilliant, lit by an impossible sunbeam in a dark room, they’re like lineart before shading, like they’re washed in a cadmium catastrophe. Like the world is bleeding. Like they’re the only thing that’s real.
They lean forward. Minh is on the ground, prone. A structured lattice breaks their shirt from the back. An Opa sequence lights up like a lightning strike down Corcus’s supervisor’s calf. They breathe. The air smells like broken rice. And they submerge those cinnabar hands into the thing that was Minh’s abalone-dappled chest and tug on the misshapen tumor-ball there that is called a heart. Corcus feels this, feels this intensely with every nerve — he writhes in Rook’s body, and he is glad that Rook is managing his own, standing surreal and still, clockwork and observant — and suffers the sensation, the knowledge as his supervisor massages Minh’s heart from the inside, Opa firing in stattaco with Gravis along their knucklebones inside Minh's chest, pressing down on each lobe and allowing it to spring back up under the release of pressure, refill with blood, and there—
Sweet chunky jaundiced stomach acid splatters the floor. There’s an exquisite discomfort inside Corcus's body as Minh’s organs give misplaced signals and shriek at the living: sharp pain in his shoulders, he’s being slowly stabbed in his legs, his arms are clawed to ribbons. His throat swells, his mouth again floods with a rush of hot saliva, bulging his cheeks and protecting his teeth. Corcus breathes very carefully now through his nose, teeth clenched, and Rook's body's eyes stream like he is bursting with water inside. And his supervisor ignores all of it, presses the cardiac massage through again, suffering again. Corcus's ears are ringing, the air is too thick to breathe, they are drowning. ”Beat,” says something, and it takes Corcus a moment to recognize the detached voice of his supervisor over the deafening quiet of squelching of muscle stretched too far not to snap and the grinding of bone on bone, of suffocating smells and sensations crawling under his skin like Guinea worms, of the overwhelming tidal wave of lights and realization that medicine is not pretty, it is not orderly, it is a crash-burn into the side of a building and it is fixing things long after they have broken, it is blasphemy, it is becoming the injury and then some in an effort to keep someone alive a little longer so they can stick around to regret continuing. The banal daymare of it all.
Rook catalogues. Corcus, numb, hangs in Rook’s body, claws clicking on the floor as Minh’s lips flush from grey to red, as Minh’s palms turn from ash to living. Eventually, the squelching stops. Corcus switches to himself an effortless interchange, and feels the bareness of his skin and the absence of memories that he just had. He shakes himself out, flexes his fingers and calves, shivers. Quietly switches a few choice memories with Corcus to keep continuity while Rook on the floor preens his feathers in rigid movements and tugs out a secondary from the force.
Minh is resting peacefully, visibly breathing, heart beating. The vermillion tide drips from Corcus’s supervisor’s hands like a metal-nibbed quillpen imported from France with the vacuum-sealed end nicked open so the ink flows freely: a steady dripping that leaves rivulets of colour washed out in the vision, raindrops smeared on a window but the window is skin and the skin is attached to a person, but the sensation of watching rain on a fast-moving window remains. And Corcus stares.
“I hope that was instructive,” his supervisor says. They brush themselves down, flick the black of their coat back, gold threads catching the sunlight. The edges are pendeluminous in descent, don't flutter in the air, and Corcus through Rook’s eyes catches the stitching where his supervisor had slipped weights inside. If not heavy on their own, then heavy through some quietly hidden sequence pulsing away somewhere in those countless folds of smooth-brushed wool and silk.
“It was,” says Corcus. Why Opa? He could do the same with Isc. And as the antiseptic rasp to the air buzzes down with a flickering gasp of light down the left panel of his supervisor’s coat, Corcus is thoughtful. It will be a long, fruitful apprenticeship, this. If the memory of red does not sear too thickly into his brain.
“You are up again,” noted Corcus. M. Red squinted against the white glare of rune Opa. Corcus was a messy shadow in the violent bright, scintillating blue iridescence of his wings like mirror-sprayed obsidian, waist tied with a sash so magenta-purple against the light it hurt.
Corcus read from a royal-blue-stained folded-over sheaf of papers, “How are you feeling?”
M. Red opened his mouth. Felt the skin stretch there like he hadn’t cracked his lips in days, stopped. He let his teeth quarantine his tongue, and he took a moment — a genuine moment, something in him giving way to patience and acceptance — to think. Not knowing why, but doing it out of habit he didn't remember building. Corcus was fragile, needed gentle hands and quiet words. Deserved the world, despite being so changed. “I am confused,” he said. His voice was sagebrush before a wildfire. He controlled it, changing it to the cinnamon he knew he could make it. A rogue thought appeared, fled, appeared again when Rook clambered onto his chest and laid down — did birds like to lie down? He didn’t remember. This was how Corcus recorded heart rate, breathing, blood pressure. He had seen him do it so many times with Jasmine — his vision filled with a purple sash threaded with red and gold. And then the thought was gone again. Rook laid on his chest like he was sleeping, but his eyes were wide black marbles.
“What do you remember?” prompted Corcus. He looked older than M. Red remembered. It had been a few weeks since he had last seen him, but already Corcus had a sea of new rune tattoos, bulging implants, healed and fresh scar tissue. His face was lined: a seabed at low tide. He would have contemplated further, had the needle-end of Rook’s beak not burrowed into M. Red’s sternum, flinching him back to the present.
“What do you mean?” His voice had the sagebrush tint again. He knew what he was saying, but could not remember what he was responding to.
The static smell of Isc, dry feathers and dust. Corcus deliberately, slowly, with careful enunciation and stoppered emotions poured drop by drop over each mound of syllable exactly where they needed to go, said in a clear repetition of something said several times before, “Please look at my notepad.”
M. Red shifted, but there was a piece of flimsy taped above him. He propped himself up on his wing-wrists, squinted at the flimsy — his near-vision was never good, but this was worse. Something written in gold. Corcus batted him away from it with an extended wing. “Don’t look at that,” he said snappishly. But the snappishness was wrong, like the feeling was cored from the statement. Only the inflection remained. “Not right now. Read this instead.”
“Why?” Something in him jarred loose. He knew he was being petulant, but the loose-jarred thing said it would, when spoken, provide an answer. He spoke exactly along the memory as he retrieved it, not knowing what his next word would be until the last one was halfway out of his mouth. “Once, someone tried to poison me with a thought. My father had written a huge Eha sequence on their back and instructed them to disrobe before me. I thought they loved me.” He took a pause, hearing himself. “It was something that—” And the memory ended, because there was an expression on Corcus’s face.
Corcus was still. When it was clear that M. Red was done, he held the paper closer. The paper was large, unadorned save for a few quick jots of an Opa draft sequence in the margins, now crossed out. In thick red ink, impossible not to read or ignore, was writ:
|
Please look at my notepad. (You look at the note taped above you.) Don’t look at that. Not right now. Look at this instead. (I show you this note.) You: Why? (I do not answer.) You: Once, someone tried to poison me with a thought. My father had written a huge Eha sequence on their back and instructed them to disrobe before me. I thought they loved me. It was something that— |
The note ended there. Behind the note was Corcus. On Corcus’s coat were seven silver characters: Extinguish your fires. Embrace the dark forest. M. Red didn’t know when Corcus had gotten an interest in that. He wished Corcus would tell him these things.
He remembered a fire. Smoke as thick as coal dust. Fingertips he could not see when he stretched out his arm to brace himself against the burning doorway, numb nerves unable to feel. Black, gritty mouth. The blast furnace of the room, unreal, his eyes sticky and wide. Otherworldly air, nothing like warmth or hot. A temperature more pressure than sensation, an overwhelming force that told him and everything else to simply lie down and be consumed.
He had obeyed.
“What do you last remember?” asked Corcus. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. There was a weight on M. Red’s chest — he looked down painfully, discovering that his neck was in a brace and he could not turn his head down, so he gave himself vertigo instead stretching his eyes to look down a little too far beyond the comfort for the muscles there — and saw Rook, lying down right over his sternum, beak digging into his skin, a noticeable dent already there. Ticklish down against the thin skin there. Did birds lie down? Rook did, and M. Red remembered that Corcus had Rook lie on patients’ chests to measure their respiration rate, heart rate, estimate their blood pressure.
He laid back, gazing listlessly at the ceiling. He had the nagging sense that he had forgotten something.
“M. Red?” prompted Corcus. “What do you last remember?” He was at M. Red’s side, too close for comfort. His eyes were obsidian marbles, probing. M. Red could see the algorithms running there, noted the flickering flashes of excess energy released as light through an Opa shedding sequence written at Corcus’s temples as he presumably accessed Rook’s stored memories.
M. Red wanted to lie back, but he already was. He gazed at the ceiling. He had the nagging sense that he had forgotten something. A paper fluttered above him. Corcus’s eyes bored into him. “Respond,” he said.
“What?”
Corcus was very, very still. M. Red’s wings hurt. Why did they hurt?
Thr Opa sequence above M. Red’s head flashed a yellow-white light.
The ceiling of the glowworm cave glistened like a tarot dream. "Tell me the unique proteins found in the spinal column nerves within the lumbar vertebra," Eliomar murmured lazily. Beside them, slightly down, was their tutor, a clinking shadow lit in bright sea green and blue to Eliomar's manually-dilated slit pupils. A tiny copper-embroidered sequence buzzed beside their right jugular artery; most students chose, their professors explained, to use Opa in its least form to incandesce sequences when they were active as their chosen safeguard-stop marker so they did not double down on an already-active sequence — if lit, then stop, else run, as Eliomar might have once written. Even those code-memories were fading now, with their fifth season on Rela. They shook their head in a single quick jerk that cracked stiff joints all along the cervical portion of their spine.
Quiet clicking and a sharp pinch at their thigh. They did not twitch, but the knuckles of their fist whitened — an old trick from so much bloodwork as a child, all their medical conditions and all their hospital visits teaching them how to redirect reactions to pain into neutral places of the body. M. Red noticed, but did not pause in his work.
Eliomar had chosen, instead of Opa, to use Eha in a major form — one whose details could not be embossed into every sequence, lest Eliomar have space on his body for only three small sequences with this effect, and so were written in a larger formula on the back of his right thigh. The purpose of Eha, major form: to make his sequences buzz.
Eha was not meant to do this. Not according to how it was taught, not according to how everyone and anyone else knew it. Before M. Red showed them how — made it for them, actually, and explained it enough that Eliomar could understand and therefore be able to run the theorem, though still nowhere near enough that Eliomar could explain it even in least form to anyone else, and not by accident, Eliomar supposed — Eliomar had had no idea that Eha could be used outside of heat transference. It was not even Eha properly, Eliomar suspected, though M. Red assured him that it was. It looked like Eha, but with fundamental lines and limiters missing, transportation and transference modifiers essential to the function of the base rune, he was taught even in his first year, absent. And M. Red still made it work, somehow. Eliomar’s heart did not believe that it was real, still, every day on waking. And for such a minor thing.
Eliomar’s heart was often right on these things. They hid this formula every day, from everyone. But tonight in the depths of the sea-cave, water walled off and liquid oxygen canisters boosting their blood saturation, M. Red's theorems drawn in the wet sand beneath a cliffside tree keeping their blood from deleterious effects of nitrogen and density as they descended — tonight, they were laid out near-naked and vulnerable on a smooth cold floor of dark wet stone, Eliomar’s paltry sequences weakly glinting in the runelight and M. Red’s insane impossibility of a complex theorem bared beneath the critical eyes of its singular maker and guider. The still cave air warmed at Eliomar’s sweaty skin but did not move, leaving them trapped in an inch-thick coffin exactly the size and shape of them, constructed out of humidity and ceaseless stillness. Eliomar stared down at M. Red, coated shadow kneeling down over the inner side of their bare thigh. Goosebumps unrelated to the heat of the cave ran down Eliomar’s skin.
"The most prominent unique proteins contained in the lumbar vertebrae are CB12-1, CB12-2, and A1K3." M. Red's eyes flickered up to meet Eliomar's as he answered, deft fingers hovering and briefly stilling a centimeter above a section of his theorem-riddled skin. M. Red’s coat was a deep and brilliant red, but in the dark, it was almost indigo. His wings cloaked behind him like a bridal train, tips resting in a pool of brine too heavy in salt to be targeted by Eliomar’s more conservative sequences.
M. Red turned back to Eliomar’s thigh and tweaked a metal fibre there. And—
Eliomar’s pupils were chrysalises engorged before the birth of butterflies. The sclera of his eyes, white like salt lakes under a snow sky, turned the colour of the blood of fish. A burst of psilocybin fragrance assaulted his nostrils and twin daggers scraped the insides of his orbital bones like mallets on singing bowls. He shuddered, the skeleton of a whale with all so many eels like algae fronds blooming on undersea kelplines and was rocked to his side by an earthquake with hands that murmured a deafening thunder that rolled through his chest in vibration, pummeled his ribcage and sternum and every point of each of his bones ached in symphonic harmony. His face became a cave and out from the cave grew a plume of bats.
”M. Red,” he thought. So loudly it echoed — it was a croak that rammed his entire frontside as a ship’s keel over a bleached coral reef advertised to tourists as still in full flush with living rainbow despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. His hands parted the water, his diving mask oiled at the seam between his skin and the rubber, diving bag clouding behind him like a squid’s inkjet. Weighed down with nothing at the moment, but he sucked in breath and dove deeper. Somewhere below was better than any human bounty and worth its weight in gold: a colony of nautiluses. In his belt was a telescoping electroshock rod, keyed for fish and on a pole long enough that he would be minimally affected, and it was heavier than the gold his wallet would soon hold. His chest was more lead than his diving weights and his heart was empty of soul, and his tongue was flat and disinterested in living. He dove deeper, pulse thrumming and eyes eager only because it was routine now and the exhaustion of moral dilemmas of extinction promotion had washed over him as the tides do to cities and eventually his emotions wore down into barren stumps of rebar and clumpy concrete. Easy footing for the scavenger crows and monsoon-resting ravens. He would surface eventually, but now was exhaustion and desolation, but not even that. It was cold down here, he recognized as he dove deeper. Almost there, in the crevice where they had been spotted. Cold. He wished for warmth.
Eliomar coughed, lungs empty of air, hacked and seized as his collapsed chest fought to draw open enough space for air to come in where there was currently vacuum. His throat was swollen, his tongue thick with dry meat in his mouth. Gasping, sitting upright, world blurring as an oilpainting does when brushed with a careless hand wishing to wipe it down and not seeing Wet paint; do not touch on the side. A click like the moon being switched off—
A cold hand pressed at his lower back, easing him up. Freezing stone beneath his bottom. A metal tube parting his lips, prying between his teeth, lips sealing behind it. Warm. “Drink.” Eliomar sucked greedily and the taste of elderberry flooded his mouth, cloyingly sweet and thickly spiced until it gelatinized with his saliva. He choked, found he couldn’t spit, swallowed it down, lungs vibrating in his chest with exertion. He doubled over again, coughing heaving breaths that came smoothly despite the ragged taste of copper and exertational saliva flooding his mouth.
“Condolences,” said M. Red. He opened one wing like a blanket over Eliomar’s shoulders. The downy feathers in the middle tickled Eliomar’s neck while M. Red scooted down to Eliomar’s thigh with an open bottle of numbing antiseptic and a threaded stitching needle. “Look away.”
Eliomar wondered what had been in the drink — his head was cotton and his mouth became a desert, as did his tear ducts. When he breathed with his nose, it was like inhaling a thick hot fog, suffocating like how running in the tropics during mosquito season is. He slowly, unwillingly, closed his eyes. Opened them again, blinked heavily and breathed effortfully — there was a twenty pound weight on his sternum, even sitting up. Something soft was under his lower back, and a cushion plush the space between his shoulders, back, and the stone cave wall. He opened his eyes and watched M. Red work and flakes of green and orange paint shed from the barbules of M. Red's feathers onto Eliomar's exposed torso like dandruff or snow. His eyes closed. They opened, lidded and difficult and he was so tired. He saw that M. Red kept in his peripheral vision and his face was thick with yellow. An unusual emotion on him, Eliomar thought to himself.
He shut his eyes.
When Eliomar opened them next, blurry with spirals of brown and green and grey like a prisoner's theatre, he was warm and dry on soft dusty ground beneath the olive tree M. Red had had them meet under before his surgery-tutoring. The mud where the cave-clearing, oxygen-filtering, and water-displacing sequences had been written was covered lightly in leaves, though underneath were visible smears from a hand wiping evidence from an ephemeral paper. He blinked stickily, trying to clear the gumminess from his eyes, and boosted himself from the ground to standing. Swayed heavily, because his inner thigh felt bruised and eaten by flesh-tunnelling maggots. Elected to limp, leg tearing open inside, mind blurry with newly connected sequences that tickled at his consciousness, to a nearby pillar of glassy obsidian, heart sated but mind still catching up to the previous good decisions that led him here, and at last in dodging the sparkling sea of pebbles and mismatched clips of copper wire interspersed with daggers of grass left behind by the so many students who worked on sequences here spotted the small notebook that M. Red always left for him detailing his procedure and the workings of his new sequences so he could modify and run them to his satisfaction. An orange ladybug with no spots crawled over the cover and paused, tugging, footclaws stuck in the fuzz of the leather.
He sat down heavily. Looked up.
The horizon showed students of many colours, wings a buzzing whisper of asynchronous flapping. Among them was one with massive black albatross wings flecked with the remnant yellow and green paints of last season’s celebration. Eliomar stared, and his sequences buzzed at his left carotid artery. Mists clearing across the lake, across the sea, the sharp smell of salt like wasabi in his nostrils and sinuses, sun making his eyes water but he stared upwards anyway at the clouds of mixed people and birds and occasional Gravis users falling sideways across the world. Legs collapsing, sinking into the mud, journal describing his surgery in his lap.
He leant his head against the cool obsidian, and his oilskin coat made slippery marks across the mirror. The sun was warm and the dregs of dissociative drugs were leaving his system, replacing their numbing presence with exhaustion like a heavy orange-patterned blanket.
A dragonfly buzzed by, and his eyes fell shut. He had nothing for the next so many hours — he had a break, at last. His professors would not understand how he had made what he had now, and he would not tell them. He did not fear.
He fell into sleep, then straight into dreams.
The world is so scary for this patient. Their head crooks at an unnatural angle, their eyes wide and dilated, staring at the static photons held within the training space. Rook says he can see them sometimes, that they look like static stars or a galaxy that you can walk through, and Corcus hisses, Not now, but makes a note to look at that memory later.
Corcus's supervisor reads an auto-populated chart borrowed from a template they traded for in the people-thickened air of a symposium two weeks ago. "More of a bazaar than a research gallery," echoes the ever-eavesdropping, permission-granted Rook using a memory of a heavily accented woman with her hair covered, no wings, and skin just the right shade that he couldn't tell if she was a Relan with well-disguised implanted runes cast in bronze alloy or an off-world trader here to sell or buy.
A sharp clicking like a beetle flipping onto ceramic tile. "Focus, Corcus," rasps his supervisor. They click once more for good measure, though Corcus knows as well as they that they are unnaturally effective in telling when Rook and Co are present, not diving through the layered duff of memories like cichlids wriggling in the mulm of years that is an inevitable consequence of a single-species artificial pond — the one kept in the courtyard between the third library and the outdoor aerial flying space strung up in iron bands and ropes thicker than fists between trees planted, grown, and tended for this very purpose, huge spruces and pines, eternally peeling redwoods dusting the forest floor like blood-rusted psoriasis — but Corcus pulls himself back. He is distractible today, trying a stimulating chemical cocktail as an assignment from Dr. Orange, the visiting professor whose name enamored him the moment he heard it. He will meet with her later, but first is the Now.
The gold embroidery of his supervisor's Gravis coat gleams against the black fabric, bright under the purple and yellow lights of the theatre space. The shelves are thick with jars, jars dark with umber viscosity. Large things swim like hands detached from their owners inside — fish, Rook notes for Corcus, who watches his supervisor in dutiful attention. Fish — this is fish sauce, but these are alive, fermenting and living despite the dying nature of their bodies. A unique flavour resultant of their living-dying state, suggests Rook, reading Corcus’s notes of what he sees through avian eyes. Corcus directs Rook to observe the ceiling, and Rook’s claws dig into the rough-scrubbed leather of his bandolier’s shoulder-padding — something that concerns Corcus, as vertigo is unusual for Rook. He takes prudence and avoids the knowledge through their tether of whatever is up there until Rook can process it, sanitize it. If there is uncertainty as to whether what is above is safe to know, he would rather wait. The time sequence that’s burned into his memory — and which failed to be eradicated, not to administrators’ lack of trying — was trouble enough, and he did not need noticing again by authority so soon. Taking a leaf out of M. Red’s book for that one.
The patient groans. “Here,” offhands Corcus’s supervisor, and he steps to their side, taking from them the EKG leads like a handful of rattlesnakes. Corcus tapes the leads to the patient, sticking them down and feeling the static-velcro of the threads as they adhere to the patient’s dark skin. And Corcus feels a slip of his brain into Rook’s body, and his experience becomes a series of pictures.
The smell of smoke. A stuttering of flesh, a singing. Extinguished fire inside. Corcus’s hand, inside the ribcage, accessed from below. Closed eyes, deep breathing, the sweet smell of clean broiled meat. The taste of red, a murmuring of insects in the eartubes. Whisper, whisper, sleeping with the eyes open, accessing pages and his mentor behind him, ushering his hands and fine cold bright silver scalpels to peel the layers apart of skin and muscle, striated fat and power. Uncommon on an Isc user like this, says a distant thought in Corcus’s replay — ah, that was Corcus in Rook’s perception of him, that was indeed how he sounded to Rook — and yet here they were.
Peel, slide, pink all inside. Pink and brown meat, bulging magentas uncut and fuschias carefully followed to go around the brown, and the throbbing red arteries like cherry vines or fat ketchup smears on an exchange student’s pale white mouth. Yellow fluids, slightly greenish, pooling out and onto the carpet, staining it and the bile smelled like pufferfish poison. Hard to get out, says Rook through his control and passive blinding of Corcus’s current perception. At least a three-wash deal. And Corcus is pushed gently by Rook into a memory that Corcus and Rook share of the red 5-gallon plastic bucket kept illegally on Rela, no plastics like this allowed without special permission but to hell with that it is light and durable and nonreactive, not that Corcus keeps anything in it, and the memory intensifies so Rook can work and keep Corcus safe.
Corcus was up to his forearms in the frigid water. Water tends to heat up and stay warm around the skin when still; however, any excess warmth that he could have experienced was leached from Corcus’s flesh as he swished his shirt through the Eha-cooled water. He didn’t dare heat his body right now — the block he had rigged the Eha sequence to drain heat into was snugly tucked between his thighs, so he was not going to cool his core temperature too much, but transferring the heat into his body at a single point would burn him, and transferring it over a large portion of his body risked the chance of triggering an Eha loop if that part of his body entered the area of heat transference that the bucket-cooling sequence was affecting. Which could at best wreck Corcus’s bodily sequences and run dry his reserve energy batteries that he kept on hand should this ever happen before he identified and stopped the chain reaction, or at worst destroy his bodily sequences as too much energy overloaded his sequences, trigger every sequence he had on him regardless of type in every way it could be sparked, and send him into seizure.
Corcus washed the shirt with his hands, his forearms numb to the cold, and he did not use Eha to warm his body. In some other world, Rook remembered for him with a time when Jasper spoke of a similar experience, saying “I don’t think I can feel temperature anymore. On my arm. I can feel pain, pressure,” and Corcus allowed the memory to become bigger, brighter.
”I couldn’t feel anything. On the place where — the burn. It hurt on my hand. My wrist. Really hurt. But on — it didn’t hurt there. It felt room-temperature. Not even just pressure — it felt normal.”
Corcus washed the shirt. The blood plumed out from the wool in dark dense clouds like wine poured into a well during Spring’s Festival-of-Gods. He shook his head. Corcus was somewhere. He worked the fabric with numb fingers, watching his hands so he knew what he was doing because his proprioception was as dead as his nerve endings. This wouldn’t hurt him. And if it did, he deserved it. He—
A warmth as he is tugged from the memory — the memory he had forgotten he was living in, for the moment. Learn from experiences flashes over his vision in Times New Roman on a newspaper scrap read as it flutters on the wind through a Way opened briefly when M. Red stood in a back alley behind the student-run butcher shop in the academy village, him murmuring words that didn’t make sense and holding an amethyst pendant that glinted green in the weak sunshine between the moss and ferns that sheltered the damp brickwork from the baleful blue sky. And Rook says again, LEARN FROM EXPERIENCES, and Corcus is kneeling, knees aching and legs numb beneath him, spine crying to be cracked and muscles in agony from being bent over for so long. Corcus’s other senses come online, and he is assaulted with a wall of the sweetness of meat combined with burnt flesh. He gags, his stomach clenches, his throat closes on the acrid gasses and his lungs seize. He veritably chokes on his heart, and warm saliva floods his mouth.
Blessedly, his hands are still on autopilot, and though his thoughts are shocked his training is left unhindered, and he is left free to notice his mentor watching him from the corner, arms crossed and face stern, as his fingers loop through the catgut stitches, pinching the flesh together so he can more easily dive the needle deeper. The student’s skin is slick with sweat, face concentrated in pained stillness. There is an oddness to his left hand — a pressure. Curled in that hand, Corcus noticed, is a plate of metal.
He finishes stitching. Takes the sequences written on the secondaries of his left wing, temporary holding space for trial sequences so beautifully useful as it is, and lights them with Opa that flares bright, though not hot, in compensation for the amount of energy that pours through the silver wiring there as he clasps a hand to the student’s forearm.
Their face stills, and whatever energy source they were drawing from, it is done.
Corcus sits up, back stiff and hands pressed together between his knees like the aftermath of prayer. The fish in the jars squirm — he had almost forgotten that those were there, on the bookshelves. The room is dark to his memory-adjusted pupils — rods and cones, corrects Rook, but he acknowledges the thought and does not dive into the memory. His hunger for avoidance is sated, for now. His flesh is cool and comfortable over his own skin; the present is alive and well in his mind.
“Good,” his mentor says. They pull him to his feet, and their eyes flicker with brilliant gold before returning to their brown-black. “Next time,” they say gently, “don’t rely on your other mind so much. You’re only paying me to teach the one of you.”
Corcus knows this will affect him, and Corcus tells Rook to take the memory, and Rook does as he is told.
Corcus stares at his mentor, a gap in his experience of time apparent, and Corcus lets that exist. He stares into their eyes. His mentor nods, satisfied with something.
The fish writhe, and their patient breathes on the floor in the middle of the room. On the ceiling is still something. Awareness from Rook washes over him: while he had been repairing and stabilizing the patient, his mentor had been busy on the ceiling using Opa to carefully disintegrate the sequences written there. Rook, watching Corcus’s thoughts, quietly reminds him that they know exactly what had been written there.
His mentor turns and leaves the room, fingers tapping at their thigh in indication to follow. Corcus does. As they pass under the student’s doorframe, a burst of Opa-recognition briefly illuminates the back of his mentor’s coat. On the black fabric are written seven silver characters: Extinguish your fires. Embrace the dark forest.
Here is the taste of yellow.
Yellow is between red and green. Orange is sometimes included, but sometimes not. Green is close to blue, and blue is close to red because of purple, pink, magenta. Blue and orange are considered opposites. Purple is this lovely hue that looks like a mother, looks like royalty. Purple would whisper, "It's all right" after you fall from a tree. Purple, too, will wear itself upon you like a roman dictator's cloak, giving you self-assurance and confidence during a speech. Purple is serious, kind, judging.
Purple's opposite is yellow. Yellow is energy, pure energy. Sometimes it hurts people, though it usually doesn't mean to, and it hurts in quick brushstrokes, like electricity. The same as a burst of high-intensity radiation. Yellow is a thrumming intensity, a fiddle solo conducted at the center of your ribcage. Yellow is the firecracker bursts of joy of movement and the restlessness of a trained athlete fed, watered, and lathered sitting still. Yellow is fleeting, may last but you must chase it, and it will reward you with breathless glee should you try. Yellow is furious joy, radical love. Yellow is a runner's high — this is how it is orange, too, that lower-intensity exhaustion bleeding into emotion and thought, that is orange. Yellow is the blanking of the body and mind, the singular experience of soles on the pavement.
Yellow is anticipation. Yellow is intensity, energy, excitement without words. Yellow cannot speak for how excited it is, and would have little to say save for Go, go, bye now. Purple is seriousness and dedication. Purple has many words to say, most of them long or with complicated meaning. Purple stands, but stands still, or paces at most but that edges into blue and red. All colours must be taught with their counterparts. Heat cannot exist without cold. Light cannot exist without dark Yellow cannot exist without purple. People, too, are like this, and can only exist as distinct entities when they have their foils.
This has been yellow.
“What do you last remember?” Corcus’s lips asked. His face was that of a statue.
Something was very, very wrong. It had been since M. Red had woken. A burst of energy — spurred, perhaps, by Corcus standing at his side, or perhaps by the golden-grain Opa light blinding him in its current intensity — motivated him to sit up in his cot, bracing himself on the wrists of his wings. His wings were sore. Why? “I’m not helpless,” he murmured without prompting. “Just give me a minute.” But Corcus pressed him back down, hands firm and strong on M. Red’s thin skin. I’m the child of the two best mages in the Academy’s history, he thought helplessly, and on a strangled impulse reached for the cables of his coat that threaded into the sequences written there, seeking strength through gravity. He’d never been one for body training — excess muscle mass was detrimental to his techniques and made adjustments to his runes necessary. He knew how weak he was without his sequences, and so he reached for them now to overpower Corcus, love for him overridden by a panicked-animal need to sit up, to demand an explanation for what was going on. Why was he here? How did he get here? His nose recalled the smell of smoke, and his twist of the torso aggravated a tickling, sticky black sensation in the base of his lungs that spurred him to cough, but above all was the base thread of thought that had started to connect with the ports in his hips and sides of his calves to access the sequences written in his coat—
It wasn’t there. He was so used to the weight of it that he didn’t even notice its absence, waking without it, because he had forgotten what the absence felt like, and now he knew what had felt so very wrong all this time.
Corcus’s gaze softened. “Your coat is missing,” he said gently. Too quickly, too readily. How did he know? A chain of thoughts — or, perhaps, now that he was thinking about it, a pattern in his immediate thirty-second environment that was the perfect brew for the thought to occur, which otherwise would have gone felt but unvoiced, left wordless and nameless as a baby bird in the snow, completed its fire-chain like mixed saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal set ablaze: “Do I have memory loss?”
Corcus answered, “Yes,” but M. Red already knew, and though his mind was vague-distorted and opaque as tofu-milk or opalite, he fell into the behaviours and patterns that he had set up for himself, the feeling of a warm heavy coat falling over his skin the trigger for this particular sequence of behaviour — unlike Corcus, he kept the triggers for his mental states writ inside memory sequences held in his calves, right beside his coat-ports. He always had chided Corcus for holding his so vulnerable and visible on his neck and scalp. And now he experienced that falling-world sensation, and—
“I see. Let me up,” he said, acutely recording and holding information pertinent straight in the front of his mind, focusing so it would not leave his immediate awareness. He could remember, he was aware, but the last however-long felt like a dream. He would need time to write down his meantime-life, track down physical reminders that the dream had happened lest false memories be mistaken for real ones or real for false. That would come later.
Corcus’s face was still as stone, and his shoulder-feathers — so that was real, then, the xenografts had taken well; that must mean that Corcus was still on immunosuppressants, and those were shipped through the Ways going to France if M. Red recalled correctly — M. Red wound tight between his fingers for stability as vertigo removed his sense of gravity, and he recalled while barely retaining his sense of memory and stability in his focus-set that he attended the Gravis gym in the cathedral and that was likely true, too — his skin remembered the weight of the safety lines, the rough tightness of the belts. Or was he beyond those now? He could not remember. His wings ached, and that memory slotted into place like a ball of ice melting until it could fit perfectly through the smoothest tidal borehole. M. Red wobbled, letting go of Corcus’s shoulder and had the strongest recollection, briefly, of Corcus and he in opposite positions — he with a warm bonfire in his chest, Corcus half-drugged to his teeth on opiates, IV lines like albino grapevines draped across his limbs, under his clothes, taped to his neck, porting into his spine, the crooks of his arms, some flush with saline bags and others drugs clear or lightly tinted hanging from the two IV poles settled firmly by his side, clutched white-knuckled with a cathetered hand. His wings — new, dusty grey from dried nutrient bath, feathers trimmed to half an inch long each and he looked naked and alien, swaddled in gauze at the attachment sites of his scapulae. Warm red tubes directly connected the largest veins to the arteries connected to his lungs, flushing his new limbs with supplemental hyperoxygenated blood until the bones and tendons grew sturdy enough to support the new living flesh there, greyish white with a lack of identifying chromosomes so his body wouldn’t outright attack them but foreign enough to necessitate a gentling of his body until he was healed enough to move uninhibited.
He stumbled a moment, dizzy. Then his mindset, functional coherence leaning on the cane-thought of his amnesia, lended assistance: he looked about, standing with Corcus staring at him with the most concern he had ever seen him show, more than when his shipment of immune suppressors was delayed and more than every time he had woken thrashing and sweat-soaked, airborne from medically mandated Gravis, seeing M. Red in the cot opposite inevitably staring, awake, then begging M. Red in a voice he hated to hear for more opiates — to numb the pain, to distract his mind, to quell the shakes and cravings. Begging with a voice M. Red never heard him affect in waking hours, when he was more inhibited, when he was more liable to fall into pain as a method of controlling himself — at night, Corcus was so afraid of everything, inhibitions coming down and his terror at the world coming alive and taking hold. He gave up, at night. Let go of consequence and whispered, Make it stop. Hated discomfort beyond belief. I don’t want to do this anymore, he had once scrawled with Eha burns after his lips were recovering from a miscalculated heatsink. Help me. He never begged. Never.
The Isc student had thrown themselves into the sea. In the net was a salt-soaked mass that thrashed like an eel dying from isotonic shock in a brine pool. Animals tend to act the same way when you deprive them of a fundamental thing that even their far-off base origin needed for survival. When an anorexic starves themselves of food, they obsess over it; when a runner overdoes their exercise, they stumble and slur their speech; when a student deprives themselves of sleep, they do so with stimulants and snappish anger and swinging metronome of hypomanic and depressed mood.
There is no unique experience among deprivation. Corcus knew this, but to experience it was different. Before him the student writhed, and all Corcus could see was the eel he had seen just the day prior at the bottom of the sea in that brine pool, squirming and thrashing as its systems overloaded with salt. ”Heave!” cried Corcus’s instructor, black-and-gold Gravis coat a stain in his vision, and Corcus’s muscles obeyed without consent, hauling the student up in their dressings of seaweed and algae like old bandages, crusted with salt all over their skin like tiny mountain ranges as pure water simply poured off and out of points hovering just above their skin. The animal that was the student — the student that was the animal; it was easier to call them the animal right now— shivered, eyes tightly shut and sunken in their orbital bones. Their skin was tightly wrapped around their muscles and tendons like a dehydrated bodybuilder in a competition, like a mummy.
“Put them there,” said his master, but it was unnecessary; Corcus was already unrolling the animal onto the blazing furnace orange of the rune-woven mat, his creation. The mat blinked with Opa lights on the end and Corcus’s heart crawled into his chest, into his throat; his throat was in his mouth and he couldn’t breathe as he scrambled, kneeling, clawing at the bottles and vials and finger-sized jars hanging and corked on his bandolier, yanking for the right one and his mentor was there, hand on his shoulder. So warm, Opa and Gravis but warm.
“Focus.”
Corcus took a breath. Tugged on the transference sequences embroidered under his skin on his sides, over his laterals — he let Rook take the emotions for now. And then triggered a smaller sequence like the adrenal gland over the liver, and felt the flush of sweet in his mouth and purple over his vision, briefly, to do as it was designed: he implemented the failsafe of personality.
He was a soldier right now. That is who he needed to be. A surgeon-soldier, and the animal was dying and might be dead in front of him. It shuddered weakly, mouth wide open and no drool coming out. Corcus felt Rook steal his vision briefly; from across the campus perched on M. Red’s gloved fist in a lecture hall where bioaugmentation was the topic of discussion — Rook let this information bleed through, knowing Corcus would dwell on it if Rook didn’t let him know — Rook said to Corcus, See the unfinished lines of the saline balance. This student didn’t take the failsafe lecture before attempting to monitor their blood sugar, and confused sugar for salt in modification sequences. Rook pointed and focused Corcus’s pupils at a particular ring and concentric circles like spasming, popping bubbles on the student’s arched back. Time was frozen, briefly, blessedly. His mentor’s hand was between heartbeats on his shoulder and would be that way until he moved. See here, Rook said through creation of the memory of words and shunting that false memory into Corcus’s foremind, not quite words and not quite speech but close enough that with practice they could effectively communicate. Not mind-reading, but sharing of constructed thoughts. It had to be paid attention to, whether a shared thought was there, unlike speech which was undeniably there and one has to focus to make it not understood or heard. See here, Rook repeated, noticing Corcus’s absence of attention, and trained Corcus’s frozen-time eyes on the ring of popped-bubble spikes on a spiralling ring like a dandelion bloom with clustered threaded words instead of stems and leaves, nonsense ordered plant where everything was where it shouldn’t be, and see how the space for sugar has been erased and rewritten. They were not sure of themselves, I think. Rook did not often discuss thinking. His thoughts were not foremost in language, as he had been born a bird first, had had experiences of existing outside of being a second mind, despite Corcus and M. Red bonding Rook and he so early in Rook’s life, as soon as Rook was biologically stable enough as an animal for the surgery to be possible without death.
Rook blinked with his own body, and Corcus blinked too, and his vision was his own. His supervisor’s hand was a warmth on his shoulder. He took a breath. Time resumed.
“Give me the silver wire,” Corcus instructed. He knelt down and sent a signal of activation to the temporary runework he had installed on his rightmost primary feathers, attached to his blood-fed tissues by a copper loop enbanding his wing like a bracelet. if item: defined on [back left hand, see definition187 at location:98] NOT equal to: item2 defined: eyesight-trained, below by grace=3 units saccade by fifth within time: minute until now and is type=liquid, then: equalize item2 using type:itempowder2 located at origin: triangle gold3 neon green thumbnail, contained by glass; if equalized then STOP! Else equalize item2 using itempowder3 located at…
The work shivered up his wing and down his spine, awaiting activation. Corcus and Rook each used one of his eyes as Corcus asked Rook and Rook provided the relevant correct sequence, runes, and modifiers for the animal, now alternating between spasms of a seize and dead stillness. His heart was completely regular in his chest, beating a drumbeat like the kind that indicates a wait before two acts in a play. Suspense, the drama and theatrics professor called it in his elective, and when Rook responded with the sequence into Corcus’s field of vision Corcus took a pen from his pocket and scribbled without looking, not needing to look, the shapes on the back of his left hand. In his right hand, upfacing and fingers a cage, was placed a loop of silver wire. His mentor’s eyes were black and red like bleeding hazel. Corcus, on his knees, scooted close to the student and wrapped the silver wire into the correct receiving shape , then narrowed his focus, sharpened the end of the wire into a thick needle with a pinch of his fingers, and smoothly slid the end under the desiccated skin of the animal’s exposed sternum.
The animal screamed. The student screamed, high and eerie, and weakness flooded Corcus’s muscles right before his recovery sequences activated on the right side of his body, stealing back the shedded ATP that he had failed to limit his emergency-response sequences for should they run out of raw material in the bottled components. He must not have refilled the phosphorus in the fuel bottles in his belt pouch — a student should not take that much right away. Or maybe their sequences were more gravely broken than he realized, and there was no way to save them now. But he could try, and that is what he was doing now.
Their screams descended to light whimpering. But their skin was still coated in salt crystals, and their skin still clung to their bones in the death mask of deadly dehydration. It was only through the student’s own sequences, Corcus assumed, that their blood still ran.
Corcus concentrated, activating more of the recovery sequences he had made over the past several months in his apprenticeship, and the grass and ground at the edges of the recovery tarp withered and cracked. Corcus’s sequences drew in water gradually, infusing the student’s veins with the water they had lost. A few months ago, he would have breathed a sigh of relief and allowed himself to relax, but he had learned that he needed to wait and see, and he was rewarded for his wariness, because something was wrong. Just like when they had drawn the student from the water in the net, water gushed from the student’s body, appearing several feet away over the earth and splashing down to the moss and ferns. Corcus drew a critical eye over the student’s clothed chest, then gave a quick shake to his head in Rook’s gesture across campus and efficiently tore the thin tunic from the student’s chest. And there it was: the offending sequence that had broken the student when they had hit the water. A perpetually-working thing taking water and salt from outside the body and placing it back inside, using the average concentrations of salt and water outside and inside as the baseline to adjust to. The sequence’s modifiers specified that it would only adjust based on the properties of water touching the skin — Corcus could see applications for this in ensuring water loss via sweat wouldn’t be missed — but did not feature limiters on how much water could be measured from. So when the sequence — or, rather, the student affected by this sequence — had submerged themselves in the Arwally sea…
Corcus blinked. Analysis complete, knowing what was wrong, he took his felt-tip and made a few quick, sharp strikes to the sequence. Then, with his other hand, he twisted off the cap to his water flask — chemically pure, in case of uses like this — and poured it over the student’s skin.
Their recovery was almost immediate. Skin filled out, cheeks flushed, eyes unshrunk and opened. Lips moistened and bled from more cracks than Rela’s West Zether desert. Their muscles plumped, and their breathing deepened and slowed. Corcus, though, was not quite done. In came the adrenaline bolus from the end of his right frontmost primaries, the temporary sequence there budded just enough into the blood-fed tissues of his wing that the sequence could be activated still, and he aimed the intent at the student’s arteries that fed the brainstem.
They gasped, they sat upright, they trembled. They blinked rapidly, glancing around frantically. A look of disconcerted grief passed over them. “But I was going to die,” they said in a voice like gravel, like broken glass. Corcus had healed that too, lubricated the throat with concentrated enzymes and powdered gum thickeners, but the mind was not something he could change, and the psychological aspects of drowning and hypernatremia took time. The student took in who was standing beside them — Corcus’s master. “Professor Yaw?” they asked, and cringed slightly as they understood that Corcus was their new charge.
Corcus stood. A moment was passing, one that smelled like pink flower petals and dusty sunlight and warm cut grass. He wanted no part of it.
His thoughts were calm. Orderly. Column’s Summer was ending, and soon it would be Column’s Autumn — Column was this year, due to the cyclones and static discharges that rocked the world every few cycles, due to the same magnetic shifts that made it nearly impossible to have anything involving — microchips, supplied Rook — and keep it working for any good length of time on Rela. Whenever there was something like that, it was for a brief event, not meant to last more than the day, maybe the week if luck was to be counted upon. Focus, he told himself, though he would not need to do that in a few moments.
He stood from the student’s side. Walked over to his master. “What was my performance this time?”
His master’s hands were lit in crimson, briefly. A flash of unreal gloved brilliance. Their Gravis coat was satin black and icy gold. Their mastery of not only Gravis and Opa, but also Isc was easily missed, though Corcus knew. His master kept public knowledge of whether their choice of third rune mastery was of Isc or Eha very, very quiet. And Professor Yaw answered of issues in his performance, “None at all.”
Corcus nodded, not processing. Not due to emotion, but because the answer didn’t matter. This was just a formality, at this point. “I see,” he said.
“You are considering leaving the Emergency Response program,” Professor Yaw named. They nodded slightly to themselves. “You were a good student, but not a match for the program temperamentally, I think. You are right to have made the decision you are making, and I support you in your endeavors. If you need me to write a letter of high transfer for appropriate placement in a non-punitive program, let me know and it will be done.”
Corcus whirled through first bewilderment, then disgust, then fear, then radical acceptance and peace. It always went that way, spiralling and ending at peace. Pretend that everything is fine, everything is normal, take it in stride and joyously accept the insane wrongness as the most normal thing in the situation and see how far you can work with it. How did they know? No matter. They know. What’s next?
“Thank you,” said Corcus in genuine gratitude. “It was my pleasure to be your assistant. I learned so much. I have a hospital rotation next, so if you could give me a letter for that, that would be excellent. After that, I may ask again so I may receive placement in the Gravis-Wing cathedral for flight training — I need to get my fitness up to speed before I take internship off-world.” He bowed. “It may be the case that I take classes from you in the future. You are an excellent teacher. This has been a valuable learning experience, and it was my pleasure to be your student.” And he meant it.
Corcus bowed, and Professor Yaw bowed back, wingless and black-coated and hair as white as the sun. Both rose. The animal-student shivered on the tarp. Corcus paid it no attention, heart full and sated, turned heel, and walked from the cliffside.
Purple and yellow are opposites. Orange and blue are also. But orange is not a colour to the Academy — rather, red, yellow, blue, and purple are. And green is not a colour at all, so here is Purple.
Purple is serious, kind, judging. It wears itself upon its person like a Roman dictator’s cloak.
Blue the friend of purple. Purple’s other friend is yellow, though red is despised, as red’s ambitions get in the way of purple’s motivations. Red is impulsive, aggressive to anyone who does not know red well. Yellow, though it is also impulsive, is directionless and easily moulded by the will of purple.
Purple is pride — proud of itself, proud of existing, proud of doing anything at all. It is not ugly, nor is it peaceful. It is similar to grey — it is everpresent, unfeeling, unflinching. Undaunted and yet not dauntless, per se, would not jump buildings unless to show others that it is possible. Purple is a leader and purple feels so much inside, but shows none of it. Purple is far from green — purple is unbendable, indomitable, unquestioning and unanswerable. Purple simply is — does as it is told and does what it thinks is right, but does not question what is right or why it does as it is told, or why it is told to do the things that it is told to do. Purple is here and is useful for existence, though not as the entirety of one's existence — but it is often fallen into because it is like a shuttle through life, when cloaked over the entirety of one's skin. It is armour as light and cool as silk. Purple allows one to be noble and regal and higher-than-thou and to push down all the fears and tears and things that are breaking down all around everywhere and always. Purple is in pain and purple cannot feel any of it and purple is not only push through the pain but also I use it to become stronger, and the more purple uses pain to further themselves the more purple becomes someone for whom pain is nothing at all because it is as omnipresent that the body has stopped screaming.
Purple is here to stay, and purple is a deathtrap that feels like an icy-hot vasaline embrace. And when one is in so much pain that they would curl into a break and cry and fall apart into a million pieces, that is exactly what one thinks they need.
M. Red concentrated.
It had been three years and counting since Corcus’s doctors decided Corcus was flight-ready, that his muscular strength and proprioception were enough for him to fly unsupervised. It was an orange night, the sky a brilliant milk-anise — somewhat like that mix brought in by the Aztec. Corcus told M. Red over a red-summer Opa hastily scratched into the wood with a fingernail, eyes hooded and thickly shadowed by sleep demons, that he was still wingless in his dreams, and waking was an endeavor that shot lightning bolts of pain through his artificial sockets that lingered as a heavy ache until he arrived at the hospital for his amphetamine bottles. In the neon blue-white light of Opa, M. Red could see that Corcus’s muscles were stiff — M. Red knew better than Corcus’s doctors that Corcus hadn’t taken his drugs that morning.
“Your doctor is here,” Corcus said, eyes distant. His voice was throated with the taste of raven. M. Red swayed on his feet, fixed his gaze on a flickering aurora borealis of Gravis spiralling over Corcus’s left tricep, exposing just before where the feather-stubble began — M. Red remembered tracing it one night, scarred ridges detailing radio-frequency waves. Rook pecked at the window, a rapid clak-clak-clak, was let in, and it was a challenge to fix the knowledge in his mind of all that he had just gone through — if he had no short-term memory to long-term storage, then he had to maintain all of what he was experiencing in his active awareness. It was killing him. But the door opened soon after — he didn’t know how soon or how far, or maybe he had simply skipped on collecting the memory of time — but the door was open now. How had he gotten here? Grasp, firmly and quickly: the memory of grainy yellow Opa as his doctor, a person stepped into the room beside Rook and Co with loose white pants, no shirt, and the fewest runes M. Red had seen on anyone in recent memory. Their face was an ill-practiced mask hiding the most guilt since Corcus on the beach. Draped over the doctor’s arm was a thick red contraption of heavy oilcloth sewn with metal joints, double-layered inside with black waterproofing, structured between with an ironsilk gauze lattice finer than spider thread and tougher than titanium. Dangling from the depths of the structure was a series of solid needles, socketless, bouncing on the ends from spooling wire springs, and a heavy tangle of belts and buttons and zippers and ties and fasteners without extra belt-knots or threading, no extra length, all fitted exactly to the measurements of their owner. A lightning bolt of almost erotic pleasure exploded through M. Red, sea-sized and washing-out, overwhelming. The pleasure left him shuddering and weak, weak from muscles unused to gravity, weak from a mind left gaping with longing, reaching and stumbling towards his coat, his memories, his life. The world narrowed. His doctor's eyes were lilac and fearful; tiny lights bloomed under them. Corcus stared, sharp blue eyes piercing. M. Red was sick with need, yearning. "Please…"
Liekki squatted into the leg-posture of a frog, raised to the posture of a flying squirrel, squatted again. Eir arms were perfectly level, outstretched; eir fingers were even, finely spread like the grooves on seashells. Eir Gravis coat was a striking shade, vibrant yellow like spilt treesap — though that was far from eir mind. More like festival flags snapping in the wind. Eir coat was not on em at the moment, not worn; ey gazed upon it as ey squatted again, legs trembling inside but still controlled outside. The yellow of eir coat basked under the noonday sun, a heady warmth streaming in from the wave-cut windowglass of the South Third tower, eir dorm.
Another raise, a squat, a raise. Thirty-eight, thirty-nine. Liekki had many sets ahead of them until ey reached zero or met failure. This exercise was one ey had learned from a mentor back at the temple of eir home planet, simple but effective: start a set that goes to 100, then rest, then do it again but go to 99, then rest, then go again to 98, rest, and so on until one reaches zero or until collapse, or near enough to collapse that one is certain it is collapse and not a lack of willpower.
The air was silent save for the faint twin red pulses on eir cheekbones associated with eir breathing. Raise, lower, raise, lower, raise.
Eir hands trembled, and eir legs shook. Eir posture had become sloppy — ey adjusted it, widening eir hip splay and straightening eir back, eir chest. The floorboards were rough under eir feet, uncarpeted — eir first move when assigned this room, after being told that it was eirs to do with it as ey wished, was to strip it bare of excess. Remove the rug, the wall coverings, the curtains, the bed, the couch, the table. Ey installed a hammock, a mat, a small shrine by the door, another for eir personal gods by eir bedside where eir carvings of worship could see outside if they turned their wooden and stone heads. A chair — a bamboo folding thing, to hold eir coat and laundry. And, recently, a large formal tapestry of eir own making, a huge burning tree on an island, birds flying off from the explosion of flames like the incandescent leaves were the flames of the sun, its great looming shadow the only distinction between the illuminated sky and its burning reflection within the sea. Ey were aware that ey had successfully distracted themselves, while maintaining count; eir body ached, shook. A few more.
Ninety-one. Ninety-two. Last raise, and ey collapsed into the chair and were glad ey had collapsed because ey were not sure if eir legs would have given out had ey lowered eirself more slowly than that. It felt like their muscles were separated from their bones, like how chicken meat becomes when boiled. Ey took a moment, breathing, and mentally assessed eir body. Eir heart was pounding and eir breathing was ragged, lips parted and mouth dry from caffeine and dehydration. In a few moments, ey determined that ey could probably push for another set, and eir body would give out around the time that the set went up to 90. Right now, though, ey needed to rest.
The air was still over eir bare shoulders. Liekki's chest, eir feet, and exposed back were lit with a thousand tiny scars; these shone under the dim lights illuminating the rest of eir room. On the nape of Liekki’s neck laid the slow makings of runework in Eha and Gravis, the most recently installed burning faintly as tattoos often do, but these were implants and shifted under eir skin as ey twisted their neck. Ey looked down at eir thighs, the ports there cold and capped. Round, shiny, exposed things. Vulnerable. The needles for the ports, cool and blunt, hung exposed from the edges of the Gravis coat draped over the chair ey were sitting in. Brilliant yellow. The needles there were not quite identical to the older, more scratched and dented port-needles that hung from the much darker and more battered red of the Gravis coat hanging at the door. The foreign coat seemed to stare at em as ey glanced back at it, breaking through the wall of discipline that ey had built to keep the new coat from eir mind. Ey still didn’t know why ey had been given it, nor when it had arrived in eir room, but the headache from trying it on was only being kept out by exercise right now. Which, to remember, it was almost time for another set. The throb of the migraine that would proceed into debilitating, consciousness-killing strobes was looming, had been building from the moment ey had sat down. Ey gripped the arms of the chair, ready to rise.
Eir muscles twitched. Birds noised outside; ey knew this from the flickers of the diodes over eir cheekbones, just below eir eyes. It was a tiny device ey had built at home, a battery-powered loop with a wire that stretched under each of their eyes to tell them the direction and frequency of sounds. On request, and with so many permission forms and documents and nondisclosure forms, ey had jumped through enough hoops to be allowed to bring it with em to Rela and — miraculously — it kept working despite the stress of Rela’s pulsating electromagnetic field. At home, ey had made it to help know when someone might be creeping up on them, but here, it was used more for when someone might knock on the door instead of stomping or flicking the lights. Birds noised outside, and ey knew that they were there.
The diodes flickered again, then again, sharp green middle frequency, rhythmic. Not birdsound anymore. Liekki turned, looking in case there was anything interesting or threatening. Or, in honesty, ey was looking out of curiosity and as a way to stall the next set of squats, even as the headache loomed.
A crow, or maybe a raven, was perched on eir balcony, tapping on the window. The balcony was something ey had not been allowed to remove, as it was outside the bounds of eir room. Moving gingerly, using eir hands to help tackle the task of getting up, ey rose, slipped on a pair of pants and, when eir legs were more stable after the challenge of putting on clothing, ey stepped out to the balcony.
Pale sky today, and the loose fabric shuddering in the wind helped to hide the shaking of eir legs. Ey leaned on the railing overlooking the academy square below and all the trees, trying to be discreet about eir weakness. <Hello,> ey signed to the raven, the crow, the rook — and with that thought, ey understood exactly whose bird this was. Liekki stood up straighter. <Hello, Rook.> Rook’s sign-name among most of the Deaf community at the Academy was WEIRD BIRD.
Rook cocked his head, saying nothing. Liekki lowered eir head in a faint bow. Ey had a suspicion that ey knew exactly why Rook was here. <What is needed?>
The last of the needles socketed into M. Red's legs with a twang of unspooled wire tightening and the dull thump of metal hitting and locking into interior clamps, and M. Red's minds came alive with a pop.
"Done," Rook croaked in Corcus's voice, but M. Red knew that. He swayed briefly, off-balance between the height he once had been and the extra inches he had grown into in the last few years. He balanced with his wings outspread, leaning over like he was recovering from male chest reconstruction surgery as he would have had so many years ago, had he stayed home instead of accidentally solving the Eha-Opa conundrum that even the best Mages of Rela couldn’t explain. Wings, education, prestige, job and life security for the rest of his existence. Endless praise. Not a bad tradeoff — but then again, his destiny never had been his to make.
M. Red declined Corcus’s proffered hand. He was still holding onto memories, he recognized, and felt the barrier-wall he had made inside to keep thoughts from fleeing bearing the brunt, now, of memories from himself inside his coat. He was oddly reluctant to let it go. Was this how Corcus had felt those few months ago, when he and Rook were separated and in each other's bodies? A minute was what he would give himself, he decided. A minute more as memories trickled in before he would let the dam break. Already, assessing himself, he recognized that he could no longer remember how he had gotten here.
A pale flame-haired thing of a first-year — M. Red knew from the vibrance and unblemished quality of their sash, and that the cut of their clothing was so fresh — peered at him from the corner. He sat back down slowly, folding his wings — absolutely enormous, ridiculous in their size — and feeling in discomfort the soreness of the muscles there, like he had done push-ups using his wings instead of his arms. And given that he had a habit of sitting up by doing just that, he suspected he knew exactly what he had been doing every time he woke up on that cot. He swayed.
<Steady,> signed the first-year automatically, and then ey caught eirself. <You, um…> they gestulated, worry clear on eir face that ey did not know if eir present company knew Relan Sign Pidgin.
Corcus blinked slowly through Rook. Folded his hands and stepped closer — a habit he had when he wanted something but didn’t want to ask for it. The slow blinking, though, was Corcus expressing his frustration as best as he could without the other person in the room noticing. His skin was purple and orange, pink and red and blue, green from the lights above and yellow from the faint light of Opa dimming now that the nearest heat source was lesser.
"Liekki," M. Red said, then stopped. He only remembered Liekki from circumstance, having run into em in his increasingly smaller Gravis classes. Liekki had been given special permission to join the more advanced program, the one only accessible through sufficient proficiency. A rare case of genuine giftedness. <Thank you,> M. Red signed haltingly. His accent was clear: his face stayed almost entirely blank, like he was focused on moving his hands instead of communicating. But the effort was kind.
Liekki bowed. Eyed Rook — who had, ey remembered faintly, attended more than a few classes taught in or accommodated with RSP. Shuffled then, uncomfortable. <Am I still needed?> ey signed.
Corcus’s eyes went distant, then present again. Rook ruffled his feathers, then smoothed them again. <I don’t think so,> Corcus's body signed a beat later. His gestures were fluid, rhythmic. <You were needed to make sure there wasn’t any extra effect from M. Red’s memories in you. Condolences for the headache, by the way,> and he proffered a small corked bottle of unemulsified white powder and clear oily liquid. The glass was thin and etched in tiny whirling patterns — Liekki spotted an Isc-specific targeting modifier near the top. Ey took it cautiously.
<This should relieve your headache.> A pause of consideration, hands drifting like he hadn’t thought about this until this moment, or like he was listening. His body's eyes refocused. <It is an inverted derivative of the memophenidates used here. It stabilizes the position of neuronal tissue inside your skull. Your brain won’t be able to perform drift, and will halt your synapses from being able to grow closer or farther. The supply in this bottle will last you about thirty hours.> He grimaced, then shrugged, wing-elbows raising behind his shoulders with the movement like great green-blue-black shadows. Hints of gold from the Opa sequence fizzling out at last, fuel gone, on the wood behind him. His face was tired. <It'll keep there from being any long-term effects of wearing his coat. When you wore M. Red's memories— > M. Red looked up, recognizing the fingerspelling of his name < —you acquired a forceful biological imprint from the weave suggesting to your tissues how they should rearrange so that your neural tissue would match what the coat expected to see, which is M. Red's brain structure. You don't want that — it will kill you, at best, or make you crazy, at worst.> He looked away, oddly mournful. <The coat’s effects last around twenty hours. The drug lasts for thirty, just to make sure. It’ll keep your brain your own — will keep that from happening>
Liekki nodded, skin cold. <How do I use it?>
<Just keep it so the glass touches your skin. If you have something to tape or tie it down with, like a chemical bracelet, that's even better — I have one here.> He showed his true colours, then, when Corcus's body nodded towards Rook's right leg, where aside from his jesses and metal ID anklets and stabilizing thicker bands etched in fine modifiers and location sequences to kick-start the sequence braids inside his flesh — aside from all of that, there hung a small leather thong like the kind that holds a gemstone, but this one held the tiniest bottle of neon purple liquid. It sloshed, despite Corcus-in-Rook standing perfectly still.
Liekki bowed again. <Thank you. I will leave now,> ey signed to Rook-in-Corcus. A brief moment of hesitation: should ey thank Rook for taking over Corcus's body so ey and he could converse? But to do so was basic decency. And yet encouraging this behaviour through praise meant it was more likely to happen again in the future, which was positive. But then, of course, it indicated that it wasn't basic decency, and almost dehumanized people like Liekki by saying that Deaf people should have to thank others for showing them common courtesy. Like they were second-class and needed the generous accommodations of others to live as others did naturally. A conundrum.
Liekki thought all of this, and ey realized that ey were very tired. Meanwhile, M. Red eased himself gently back onto the cot, face grey and twisted, and within seconds he stilled and eased into sleep.
Ey watched this happen, bowed a third and final time, turned heel, and left.
Green is not a colour to the Mages of Rela. However, that does not mean that it does not exist.
Here is green. Green is the chlorophyll in the eucalyptus leaves that sway above the training halls. Dead forms of the green swords in the sky dapple the ground in yellow and red like splatters of oil on an art studio floor, or a disco simulation done by the students who found each other and all remember the 90’s of Earth in Universe 42. Green is the velvet of their blazers alongside one hideous tie and green is one of the flickers of light off the disco ball mirrors — the students thought first to make mirrors instead of thinking rune-first, thinking of using Opa, and this prioritization of the mundane will change for the three of the six students who will remain to finish their final Season before their graduation.
When the wash-outs leave, it will be to go home and talk of the wonders of Rela. They will try and fail to use their runes, and they will not understand why they cannot remember how to power large sequences off of anything but what they are already keyed to. The students who graduate, of course, will know, and they will be employed together as a unit by an aeronautics corporation to fly ahead of aircraft and find turbulence, then to disrupt it through usage of Eha and Opa so their employer’s planes can fly clear and will be faster and more reliable than those of their competition. They will forget, briefly, their lives on Rela in this time, and will spend the next few months more on the wing than on the ground.
A month after that, the shareholders will publicly announce their realization of their purchase’s untapped potential, and the Relan Mages — not Mages of Rela, because the former are cheaper — will be tasked with disrupting air currents on the flight paths of opponent aircraft industry companies — sabotage, it will be. The non-winged members of the team, a Gravis-Eha mage and an Isc-Opa, will be tasked with fixing planes in their downtime. The specific demands made will seem impossible, and for a time the pair will become isolated, sleep-deprived, and despairing until they recognize the unseen ask in the CEO’s request — because the CEO communicates to them directly now — and the mages will reluctantly embed the company’s planes with brand-new, world-keyed sequences and fix them to become theorems that make the planes stronger, more durable, more intelligent, more mobile. The plane wings will deform and reshape to meet the needs of the pilots against the strength of the disordered wind that now wreaks havoc like a thrashing serpent across the upper-cloud troposphere — the place where the other half of their team are now constantly in flight, disrupting air patterns wherever they go to smooth the routes of their employing company’s planes or attack the flights of enemy planes, and they are called enemy planes now and not competing companies because that is the truth and over the months the layers of falsehood have eroded down to the simple fact everyone knew all along, but in a way that it is said openly now instead of lyingly hidden behind like through a veil one pretends not to see the Wizard of Oz.
The Relan Mage team will watch as this world succumbs to incredible windstorms and hail and eventual hurricanes and burning, and the people of the world only now might recognize with sufficient loudness what has happened but by this time they will be helpless to stop it, as only one unit of Relan Mages and Mages of Rela were agreed to be stationed on this planet and now the world regrets as everything falls apart.
Years later, at the end of their internship and the beginning of their next Season, the Isc-Opa and the Gravis-Eha mage will return to Rela. The winged members of their team will return too, and for a moment in the reunion hall they will not recognize each other, because the winged Mages will be armoured and battle-scarred from tracerfire and midair incendiary bombs, and the mechanical side of the team will be grease-stained and covered in makeshift sequence tattoos and over-skin would-be-beneath implants that were briefly used to control the consciousnesses of the few airplanes that had had their pilots transferred inside so they could better fight the countryless war their company pretended they hadn’t started, even after all this time. They will embrace, and when they realize that they still do not hate what has happened to them or the world upon which they were stationed, they recognize what it means to be Mages. They will be faced with the colour of leaves on the trees outside, and they will recognize it as either a shade of yellow or blue. Their experience is a divorce of the understanding of green — to understand green, one first needs to understand the world in its absence.
Here is another form of green. Green is the flavour of lime and grass on the tongue while M. Red and Corcus and Rook walk the graduation halls that double as flight training spaces — or, to Corcus, the other way around. Green is the fabric on the banners and the temporary woolen carpeting on the ground that makes green sounds under their bare feet and which squishes between the toes in a way just on the other side of itchy, and Corcus sends this sensation into Rook so he can walk unimpeded. They are but two of the sixteen third-Season mages from their cohort called here as representatives of each discipline, the best of their cohort as examples of what one can become as a Mage of Rela. They gather alongside a number of their professors in an uneasy, untrusting group who hides their feelings of discontent because it is natural to them now, and they are the least green thing in the room as a result.
Before the cohort and their teachers is a sea of green. Students dressed in green robes, green pants and shirts, green capes, green anything they could find in their closet. Some trail suitcases and others hoist bags, and a scant few actually followed the directions to bring nothing at all but the green clothes on their backs. All followed that it was specified to be green. Ones who did not wear green were stripped and given simple single-sheet cloth rectangles — green — to be draped over the shoulders, trailing to the knees or floor, to be tied with a green rope cord. New greens file in through Ways transferred to this space by their best Waygate technicians, including one Professor Yaw who is currently halfway across the world in a stained-glass-domed observatory that has not looked toward the stars since the day the center of the universe was pinpointed, a discovery which has been fixed in a massive theorem set in thick braided pure elemental silver cables that stretch in circuitboard patterns across the marble floor — the telltale sign of Isc with Opa flavour.
Green. Professor Yaw is working with a nervous Opa-Isc undergraduate with a braided purple sash around her waist, temporarily borrowed from M. Red’s team and thankfully easy to work with, as she follows authority like no other influence matters more. Her talents are helping the Waygates from across the planet appear in the graduation-training-welcome hall now, and her specific shade of green that she uses Opa for in energy discharge sequences sparks at the edges of the Ways. Rook is the only one to notice this as the last new potential students enter the hall and the Ways blink out behind them in a smear of that same green like a wet paintbrush flicking over a finished piece. The administrator is not here — never is, though M. Red is one of the few students to know this and has not told this even to Corcus, as though he is willing to share much with his budding beloved, there are some secrets which would not only kill him but kill others, too, should he name them. Secrets that are being watched for. The leading faculty opens xer mouth—
And here is green still, again. Green is the flavour of a mage’s name through his synaesthesia. He, too, is working in the observatory halfway across the world. On his coat are seven silver characters: Extinguish your fires. Embrace the dark forest. He does not believe that he told anyone about how he once used Gravis to stop time, and he believes incorrectly that he eliminated all evidence from his dormroom, and he does not notice the gradual mercury poisoning from a deleterious sequence snuck onto his skin in his sleep fogging his thoughts. His world is a refreshing mint green.
Green is the taste of new, of change, of dreams transitioning into waking just where one forgets what is real and what is imaginary and whether they are standing or lying down. Green is the memory of spring when winter has whited out the world. Green is the flavour of a necklace with one’s name lasered into the mirror finish and tucked beneath the shirt, a weight and pressure that reminds one who they are even when they think their name is something else. Green is the opposite of red, which is steadfastness and stubbornness and willpower to make things real, a firm belief in something no matter what that thing is. Green is the colour of acceptance and compassion and empathy and flexibility, and there is reason for why the primary colours of the Mages of Rela and their Academy are red, yellow, blue, and purple. But green does exist, always is stubborn and persistent.
Green will come back eventually.
FINALLY. HOLY HELL this thing is old and long. Like other things, such as komodo dragons, which have a lifespan of 30-50 years and can reach a snout to tailtip length of up to 10 feet.