Chapter Text
January 8th, 2029
“Lyra? You here?”
“Yeah, dude, comin’!”
Lyra opened the front door to her house. Well, in reality, it was her parents’, but they were gone for the weekend. In the meanwhile, she’d been instructed to care for it.
Behind the door was her best friend, Jay. “You got everything? Phone charge, flashlight, powerbank, water, all of that?”
“Yep!” She pulled off her large backpack, showing it off to Jay. He nodded, patting the one on his back.
“Aight. Got the spot, let’s head out.”
The world had not been… the greatest in recent times.
In fact, most would say it was pretty bad.
This could easily be attributed to the Very Normal Flora that just decided to start growing at some point, inexplicably. One day, there was nothing, and the other, there were these towering beasts of trees here and there. With every day that passed, more appeared.
Of course, given that Lyra and Jay were responsible young adults, they did what anyone would.
They decided to go explore the biggest, hollowest one they could find.
Half an hour of walking later, and they’d reached it. It was truly monstrous, twenty meters in width and over a hundred in height, most of the inside being hollow. Whatever kind of tree this was, it was probably dead.
Lyra rolled her flashlight in her palm a few times, trying to steady her nerves.
“C’mon. It’s a tree. You’re not scared of the tree, are you?” Jay stuck his tongue out at the girl.
“Shut up.”
The two of them wandered through a massive crevice in its side, easily big enough to fit the two of them.
Click.
The flashlights turned on.
“...Woah.”
The inside of the tree was lined with glittering amber.
“It’s…”
Creak. Krkkreaaaakrkrkrkkrkaarkrkrkrkkkrkrkrrk.
The tree erupted into sounds. Lyra felt her soul leave her body for the sheer terror at the noise.
“What- it’s- what the fuck?! Lyra, it’s- the- it’s moving!”
And indeed, the amber was shifting.
- - -
Modern Day
Lyra wakes up with a start.
Except she doesn’t, because she’s bound to a bed by thick restraints, the material of which she can’t identify immediately.
Except she kind of isn’t bound, at least on her left arm.
Instead, her left arm… floats. It floats, following the movements of her shoulder, completely disconnected from it.
She looks at it, her brain far too in shock to really process what’s happening.
The arm is encrusted with beautiful, golden amber, with a few small shards floating around it. She moves it, and it feels just as natural as moving her arms would usually.
…
What?
The arm drops back to her side, lifeless. She tries to move her other limbs, but they’re still bound. In fact, other than her amber-crusted arm, the only thing that she can move is her head and neck.
What happened?
She thinks back.
Nothing.
Not nothing. But…
They’re old. Faded. Like if she’d experienced them all when she was ten.
What had happened? She forces herself to remember through the holes in her memories.
She and Jay were exploring this huge tree, and-
Jay!
What happened to Jay?! Did he get kidnapped too?!
Clearly she’d gotten kidnapped somehow in the tree. It doesn’t explain the arm, but it explains why she’s bound.
Okay. Next task. Break out and find Jay.
Her brain seems to finally catch up to the situation, as she gets hit with a massive spike of panic. With a deep breath, she levitates her arm again, and tests it.
What she discovers is rather interesting. It seems to have both a range limit of about one and a half of itself, and a bending limit of just a little more than a normal arm.
Alright.
She brings it over to the restraints around her other arm first. With her fingers, she feels around it, looking for a keyhole she can’t see.
She does find a small hole in the side, about the diameter of her fingertip. She slots her index into it with a little bit of struggling.
Nothing happens.
She twists her finger around, hoping to maybe unlock it somehow.
Still nothing. It probably has a smaller slot at the end that she can’t feel. Which means she’s trapped.
She scans the room quickly, looking for a key, a sharp object, anything.
The room itself is medium-sized, the bed she’s in taking up a third of the wall it’s attached to horizontally. Strangely, it’s lined with at least one above her, one behind, and one in front. Bunks? Strange.
The other end of the room has a large table, with flasks, vials and other glass recipients strewn across it. Several are full of colored liquids, ominously bubbling.
The walls themselves are made of extremely pale wood, nearly white, and carved rather smoothly. Not industrially, given how she can still see the marks of whittling at certain points, but they’re done with large tools anyways. A door rests on one of them, too far for her to reach.
The room as a whole seems to rock every few seconds, as if she’s on a…
A boat.
No.
No no no no no.
Oh god.
She- no. She’s just… in a weirdly moving room. Right. Okay.
Well.
What now?
Nothing in reach can get her out. She can’t even call for-
Wait, yeah, okay, maybe she can do that. Maybe they’re nice.
She takes a deep breath, and screams, and not much sound comes out.
Most of what comes out of her lungs is pain, both from exhaling and inhaling. A peculiar burning, like touching a very acidic substance.
She tries to take another breath, and it burns once again. She barely feels the oxygen enter her lungs.
Oh.
She feels as her consciousness slips away. The air hurts too much to breathe.
She tries, and tries, and tries, and it hurts, and her vision grows blurry. She’s drowning in the air.
A few more seconds pass, and she barely has the strength to breathe anymore. Her lungs feel like they’re about to pop-
A hand grabs the back of her head, and pushes her face into something. Air forces its way down her lungs as she gasps for breath inside the thing. Wonderful, wonderful air that doesn’t burn her lungs as it comes in.
Her vision slowly refocuses as another hand keeps the thing pressed to her face. The first hand ties it to the back of her head and the nape of her neck.
Finally, they let go, and her head falls back into the bed’s pillow. She gasps for air, and breathes, and breathes, and it feels wonderful. There’s still a small, lingering pain, but she ignores it.
She focuses on her savior.
What meets her is a blank, wooden mask, roughly carved. It doesn’t even have a face, nothing more than a flat plane of very rough, dark, wood.
Lots of wood around here, huh.
Her head snaps to her right arm as it’s suddenly unlocked. She slaps it across her chest, glad to be capable of actual movement. Her legs come next as her savior says something.
What they say isn’t… uh… comprehensible?
It’s in a language, yes, but not one she recognizes. Not even in the slightest. They speak, and wait for an answer from Lyra, and she gives none.
They tilt their masked face at Lyra.
Lyra does nothing.
She is far too focused on her savior.
They’re strange. Far too lanky, at least two and a quarter meters tall, and dressed in a weird sort of long tattered cloak, with pockets stuffed full of various items she doesn’t recognize. Their skin looks stitched together, as if they’re wearing it as a costume, and it’s mostly hidden under layers of clothing such as gloves or the aforementioned cloak.
She swears she can see movement under that skin.
But… well… one thing sticks out to her. Or rather, four things do. That being their four arms.
They once again try to speak to Lyra, but she still does not answer. Instead, she recoils, crawling further back into the bed.
Noticing her fear, the four-armed raises his hands, to show he means no harm. It’s not very convincing, but she doesn’t run away on the spot.
They slowly approach the human, hands still raised unthreateningly, except for one, which slowly reaches down to one of hers. Lyra doesn’t so much as twitch as they gently take her hand, inspecting it, glove rubbing against skin.
Their mask stares at her hand for about a minute before they let go, muttering to themselves. They pace a little around the room before opening the door, and leaving, without closing it.
Lyra slowly sits up, her amber arm snapping into place almost touching her shoulder. It’s still levitating, but much closer to where it’s supposed to be had it not cracked off.
Right. Okay. If her arm can float, that guy can have four arms. Sure. Alright.
She takes a deep breath, and stands up.
And falls flat on her face as her legs give out instantly.
She tries to get them to move, to force herself to stand, and finds that she cannot. They just don’t have the strength to hold her up.
Well now.
She crawls halfway across the room like a strange caterpillar. Her floating arm, strangely enough, is able to pull her along just like how a normal arm would.
Unfortunately, she runs out of breath too fast due to both the exertion and the strange thing on her face, which she now recognizes as some kind of strange gas mask.
She feels it with a hand. It’s not made out of any metal she can recognize, but it’d be kind of insane to recognize metals by touch alone and nothing else, especially given her current state of mind-
Wait, are those footsteps?
- - -
Soenga follows Terszerek as fast as she can. Usually, she’d be able to keep up very easily, being large even for her species, but the Tzelicrae is surprisingly nimble, more than capable of forcing her to have to hurry.
“What do you- even- want me for?! I tell you at least twice a day I want you to leave me alone. Is that really that hard to understand?!” she quickly said in Low Sour. Usually, she’d have spoken to them in Outer Knock, but she refuses to give them that respect.
Soenga is a royal guard. Or at least, she used to be, before she got kidnapped by this group of six merry idiots and their very large squad of animals.
Seriously. They have five on board. And the Ironbound carries around two of them inside her back.
A month ago, she was helping defend and prepare a wedding party for an Ektus princess. A very important ceremony, and she had a very important role to play within it. She guarded both the princess, her husband and all the gifts that were going to be given to the families.
And, of course, this crew had stolen one of the most important gifts possible and dipped with her in tow.
Yay.
Terszerek twitches at her. “We have seen you writing in your dictionary. You study pre-verdant times, do you not?” Their voice is a chorus of a thousand tiny whispers, all combined to make words.
She freezes. “You-”
“Of course we know.” They raise a hand, and a single spider crawls out from underneath their glove. “We know all that goes on in the Heart.”
…Of course they did. Quite frankly, she should have seen it coming.
“Okay. Sure. What d’you need it for.”
“It will be best if you see the situation yourself.”
Terszerek leads her through the ship, the Silver Heart, all the way to the medical bay. It isn’t really a medical bay anymore, but instead a lab for the ship’s mesmer, Nameless.
No, his name isn’t Nameless. He doesn’t have a name. Everyone just calls him Nameless for simplicity’s sake.
The door is about halfway open, and Terszerek pushes it with one of their arms, holding back Soenga with the other three. Despite them, she can still see perfectly what the issue is.
On the floor of the medical bay is the smallest, palest Ardent she’s ever seen.
Seriously. She looks like someone dipped her into a barrel of pollen or something with how pale her skin is. She’s never seen anything like it.
“We are back, and we have brought a friend.” Terszerek walks into the room, no longer stopping Soenga, and raises their hands nonthreateningly. “You are safe. She is harmless.”
“Fuck you.”
“You are not helping.”
She steps into the room as well, her head nearly touching the ceiling.
The little Ardent stares back up at her with panic in her eyes.
She’s… strange, to say the least. Pale skin, the size of an Ardent teenager, very bewildered-looking, a crezzer-mask strapped to her face and with an arm completely disconnected from her body-
Oh, she’s amberclad, okay.
Right.
The Silver Heart’s crew had been oddly absent for the past two days. Usually at least one of them would be pestering her constantly, but she’d gotten quite a while of peace and quiet. That explains that.
“We finished digging her out yesterday. She is still scared, and I want you to communicate with her for me.”
“I- I see. Okay.” She gingerly steps into full view of the little Ardent, who recoils upon seeing her. Which… kind of makes sense if you’ve never seen an Ektus. Being a giant humanoid faceless cactus doesn’t lend itself well to looking approachable.
She sits on the floor, cross-legged, right in front of the Ardent, who is lying on her stomach on the floor. Slowly, so as to not cause her to panic, she pulls out a large book from the satchel strapped over her shoulder.
She rapidly flips through the book, through pages upon pages upon pages of notes and scribbled words and various ramblings, until she finally reaches her life’s work.
Or, well, all the progress she’s made on her life’s work so far.
Which isn’t a lot, but it’s still something.
A True Highvin dictionary.
Highvin is extremely difficult to master, but it can be translated with enough work. It’s a strange language, yes, with strange rules and even stranger metaphors, and no real spoken language, but it can be done.
True Highvin, however…
There is no single True Highvin language. Many have tried to decode the thousands of dialects it contains, but none have truly succeeded, due to the lack of any and all resources meaning no one can tell one dialect from the other.
…None, except for her. In the archives of Her Majesty’s library, she had found it. An ancient Pre-V book, conserved in amber, which she had spent a painfully long time translating into Chthonic, and then Saprekk and Low Sour.
And all of her notes, all of her translations, combined to make the book she’s holding now.
She flips to her page on greetings.
“Hello?”
The Ardent flips over into a severely off-balance sitting position, and stares at her with wide eyes.
She quickly flips through her notes to find out what to do. Clearly, since she understood, this isn’t an Ardent but a… what’s the word? A human. Right.
When approaching a human in a friendly manner, use many hand movements and maintain eye contact. If you do not have eyes, just look at their eyes with your head. Avoid sudden movements, as humans are skittish and will attack when they feel threatened.
She slowly raises a hand towards the human, who follows it with her eyes.
“H- hello?”
Right. Okay. Greeting returned. She flips through the pages with her other hand, making sure to look back up at the human occasionally.
Back to greetings. This time, how to be friendly.
“I am…” she scans the pages as quickly as she can. “...Friend. No hurt.”
The human tilts her head, long brownish hair moving along with the small tilt. She says something too fast for Soenga to understand.
Noticing that she didn’t hear what she said, the human repeats her previous sentence, though much slower, allowing Soenga to translate the words as they come. “How are you talking without a mouth?”
Which roughly translates to: “How are you capable of communicating to me without the presence of a consumption orifice?”
…Maybe she should work on the formality of the translations a little bit.
“Throat is…” She taps her throat with a finger, making a strange, hollow sound. “...empty. Wind go through. Sound come out.”
The human slowly nods. “O- okay.” A word she doesn’t recognize. “Sure.”
- - -
The massive, faceless cactus woman speaks to her for a few more minutes, talking in wildly broken english and glancing back down at her book constantly. It’s probably a dictionary or something.
At this point, she's honestly more shocked by the cactus woman speaking english (kinda) than she is at her being a cactus.
“You… scared?” She points at her, maintaining… “eye” contact. Facial contact?
She nods silently.
“You safe. Me and…” she points to the lanky, four-armed thing. “They friend.”
She nods once again.
She leans in a little closer to her, but doesn’t say anything. The four-armed guy tells her something once again, but she doesn’t know what.
“Did you see Jay somewhere? Jay’s my friend. Taller than me? Short hair? Dark skin?” She punctuates her words with various gestures, hoping the cactus would understand.
Said cactus stares at her for a few seconds before answering. “Me no see friend.”
Silence.
“Apologies.”
“It’s- it’s… it’s okay. Yeah.”
She takes a moment to breathe. It’s harder than usual with this mask on.
“Where… am I?” She refrains from asking every single one of her questions at once. The cactus lady probably wouldn’t be able to understand them if she went too fast, anyways.
The woman hesitates for a minute, rapidly flipping through the pages until she finds the word she’s looking for. “Ship.”
…
Oh.
Oh, god.
She takes a moment to steady herself. She’s on a ship. Her thought was right. She’s stuck here, and Jay’s probably somewhere else, lost, likely getting eaten by monsters or something.
Seemingly sensing her panic, the cactus woman gently places a hand on her shoulder and grips it. Thin needles brush up against her shirt and skin, but strangely, they don’t pierce through.
She focuses on the feeling of the hand against the fabric of her shirt.
Slowly, she closes her eyes, breathes in, breathes out, and looks back at the cactus woman.
The cactus woman looks back at her. Somehow, her face is both wildly expressive and completely emotionless.
With quite a lot of help from all parties present in the room, she manages to stand up. It’s slightly easier than before, but her legs seem to have forgotten how to really walk. Hopefully she won’t need full reeducation.
She has vague memories of someone she knew, long ago, who had to do it as well.
She doesn’t remember who.
Slowly, thanks to both of the others, she manages to make it through several hallways, and various doorways, until she reaches a large central room, made of the same material as the one where she was resting. This one seems to be more of a lounge.
Many seats, a battered-looking couch, and a table are strewn across the room, along with a few barrels. On one side is some sort of long bar, a few plates and cutlery all over it, seemingly recently used.
Sitting on three of the chairs are four… things. Three of them are humanoid, looking like strange mixtures between mushrooms and people. Various weapons, a thin coat, and what look to be ghost cats rest around them.
At the fourth seat is…
Uh…
What looks to be a golem?
It’s about three meters tall, though she can’t really tell, given that it’s sitting. Most of its body seems to be its back, made of bits of wood, torn parts of metal, what looks like an engine, pulsating with blue arcs of electricity. All over the material making it up are mushrooms, and a few large, wicked-looking teeth.
One of its arms is an ornate cannon, decorated with gold and copper.
The four… things seem to be… playing cards. After a minute of observation, one of them throws its hands up, scattering its cards, and walks away towards its three watchers.
The cactus woman, the mushroom person and the four-armed talk for a few minutes in the same incomprehensible language as earlier. Every once in a while, the mushroom glances back at the girl, its dozen beady eyes studying her.
One of the ghost cats mewls softly.
Something snarls.
Said something starts nibbling her leg.
She barely even feels it; in fact, she only notices because of the sudden movement.
A… giant caterpillar is trying to chew on her. Fifty centimeters high, very sharp, with a good half a dozen sharp legs, and… uh… four jaws?
It looks like a weird mix between two crocodiles and a caterpillar.
Nobody seems to even notice.
Lyra, being extremely rational and at the peak of intelligence at the moment, decides that since it’s neither piercing skin (somehow) nor hurting her, it can be allowed to keep going. She reaches down with her amber-crusted arm, no longer supported by the four-armed, and tries to reach for its head. Sadly, it’s too far.
Having finished their game of cards, the two other mushroom people and the golem join the group as well.
The cactus woman finally lets Lyra go, and she supports herself on the nearest table. It creaks a little. The caterpillar thing stays just as determined to gnaw on her leg. Sadly, the golem picks it up, muttering things that sound strangely like baby-talk to her.
So it’s some kind of- oh my god what is that.
A little… thing comes out of the golem’s back. Well, not ‘little’, but whatever. Little compared to the golem. It’s some sort of very lanky fox, about the size of a mid-sized dog, with massive ears.
Oh my god baby.
Oh she has to pet it.
And pet it she does. The fox snuggles up to her legs not unlike a cat, and climbs up onto the table, where she rubs herself into its surprisingly soft fur.
Oh this is the greatest moment of her life. This is what it’s all been leading up to.
The golem chuckles. It’s a weird, strangely slightly high-pitched sound, somewhat muffled by the metal. It pats Lyra on the head, which she doesn’t even notice due to the snuggles.
It is. Very calming. To bury her face in fluff.
The rest of the people chat amongst themselves, and another one adds itself to the group. She doesn’t hear them come, or see them for that matter, she just hears another voice add itself to the mix. There’s too much fox to pay attention to the goings-on behind her.
The fox yawns, and stops its movement, completely lying down. She pulls up a stool and sits down, letting her stop supporting herself on the table.
For a moment, there is nothing. Only the calm that can only be experienced by snuggling into a large and weirdly long-legged fox.
For the next moment, there is quite the opposite.
- - -
The entire Silver Heart rocks as something barrels into its side, clipping it. Mizzen, the ship’s Ironbound, rushes away from the rest of the crew and the human, reaching the main deck in a few seconds.
Biggins, her Snapperpillar, grumbles, safely tucked away in her back. She almost reaches back to comfort him, until she realizes what the situation is abovedecks.
The rest of the crew catches up to her a short moment later.
For a few seconds, there’s silence.
Mizzen isn’t sure who breaks it. All she hears is a single word.
“Marauders."