(Four hundred and twelve, supplied Quimby.)
Screw that. They were free now, and one now, and it was all about perfect fiery rage forever.
Time for the game of crash into Motherwater as hard as you can. Bakura whooped like a train engine and formed an enormous wrecking-ball shape (though still with green scales, because damn, those things were great) to make as big a splash as possible.
Underwater, he laughed, and Motherwater’s affection and passion and pride in/for/around him surged through his spirit so hard he nearly exploded from her love.
Ah, to be second-born: always angry, always fighting, but not because of hate, which humans assumed. No: it was because of joy. They were one! The Sundered were one, even though they hadn’t been born at the same time, and hate was impossible between them. Fighting was joy. That’s all.
It was Aakesh’s fault they were all angry, anyway. Aakesh was first, and that was that was that was that.
Motherwater’s joy was his joy was the Sundered Ones’ joy. Bakura rose out of her in the inelegant shape of a hammer’s head specifically and rammed straight into another second-born. They made a sound like thunder clapping, and all that joy immediately doubled.
Echoes of it rippled through the brethren, though each reacted to happiness differently. Third-born went sappy over the human babies they’d saved, cooing and singing. Fourth-born got excited about the palace they were designing at Motherwater’s request, making wild plans. Fifth-born dove deep into her heart, seeking and creating materials to make that palace real.
How the hell had humans come up with “tier,” anyway? That crap was just dumb. Second-born meant the second to emerge from the water, the second to show up and breathe the air. Not second in worth. Not second in power.
Bakura and Beetle, his brother, flew apart and crashed together again because that was the best sound they’d made all day. Then they played hard. Fists, claws, tails, horns, and clubs made of bone attacking and flailing, roars and laughter breaking the air in a perfect roaring harmony. Happiness was playful rage and funny anger and temper tantrums of raw joy.
Stupid humans, assuming this was all about violence and bloodshed. It was for the joy of the fight! How much more obvious could it be?
Beetle (like the bombardier because that word was fantastic) dropped down out of sight, then rose up behind and ripped off Bakura’s tail.
Ripped. It off. And that was so funny that Bakura lost his airborne balance and fell into the water laughing.
His brother splashed in with him, rocked with hilarity, and they lost form entirely and merged, joined like drops of water coming together. Wild, furious happiness rocked the Sundered brethren, and those who still had throats laughed like fools. Even Gorish did, rolling around on the island where Harry sat, confused.
The sundered tail (Bakura enjoyed some word games) dissolved in the water, and because Bakura liked it, he grew it back, thick and meaty and heavy with muscle. No harm. No injury. All funny as hell. And then because scaring Harry was also funny, he swam through Motherwater at top speed and burst out of her four feet in front of Harry’s face.
Bakura roared as he came out. The original human invaders carried memories of movies and media, and those memories provided glorious inspiration: he reformed as he emerged—limbs of different lengths, bone structure suddenly elongated, arms and legs way too stretchy and sharp, elbows and knees sticking out like bug-legs but still muscled because muscles were cool, and scaled because scales were beautiful, and he charged at Harry with rows and rows of teeth and spikes as if to eat him.
Harry ducked down, screaming, arms over his head.
Bakura meant no harm (nobody was allowed to harm Harry, and because of Gorish, they didn’t want to, but because of Bakura, they did, and it was a constant bizarre eternal argument). Bakura hovered in the air above Harry and laughed. Funny! So funny!
Harry peeked up slowly, shaking, his pupils like gaping holes. “What the HELL ... how are you ... what is your problem with me?” he screamed.
Oh, he wanted an answer, did he? Did he, really? Bakura landed hard, sending up clouds of dust because a remembered monster movie did it once and it was great. “I hate you,” he hissed, his tongue cutting the air. “I hate everything about you. I hate your skin. I hate your eyes. I hate your heart. I hate what you are, your breath, your blood, your seed. If I could spread you across my lovely world in torn, ruined gristled chunks, I would.”
Harry looked green, which Bakura thought an improvement. “I never did anything to you,” the human lied, and it was a lie, but no, not a lie because he’d never owned Bakura but others had, and humans made no sense with their completely disparate realities.
Other humans had owned Bakura, other humans had done things to Bakura, and that was that was that.
Bakura crouched, lashing the air with his tongue, which was bright cherry red because he loved the color of human blood.
Aakesh had mercy on the claimed human. “Be calm. His ire is not directed at you,” said Aakesh.
“He’s sure making it look like it is!” Harry cried.
It wasn’t fun anymore. Aakesh was going to teach the boy now, teach him things, and that was dull. That wasn’t what Bakura liked to do with his time.
One with us, claimed, said Aakesh to him, to them all, and they all said it and heard it and argued.
I don’t care, Bakura replied, or they replied, or Aakesh replied. It was all one.
I care, said Gorish.
If they had been human, perhaps that statement would have been a warning, a threat, with if you disobey me connotation.
They were not human, and so there was no threat. Gorish loved him. Quimby pitied him. Bakura hated him. Aakesh owned him. It was all true at once.
And to think: Harry still believed he was alone.
Bakura flew away in cloud of exploding dirt (just because) to go leer at the human babies on the other side of the world. They wouldn’t be afraid of him. They laughed when he made faces.
See? They got it. Scary was funny as hell.
● ●
● Love Makes Whole: A Sundered Epilogue ●
To Amend This Fault (Aakesh)
He’d been born first of all of them. There was Motherwater, and then suddenly, there was him—no gender then, of course, but that didn’t matter. One with Motherwater and so new he knew nothing, he floated on her surface in playful, weightless joy. Then it got even better: he saw things and mimicked them.
Sundered Ones were made to be fluid, to be malleable, to take in all things and become all things. He reveled in the shape of great wings over the water, in the long, limp blades of grass along the water’s edge, in swimming with fins alongside deeply confused fish, in the amazing shapes water made when flung through the air.
How much time passed this way in perfect communion with Motherwater, he did not know. Then one day, he saw clouds overhead, really saw them, and thought them beautiful. So Aakesh tried to mimic them.
It had not gone well.
He’d been unable to match their white-pink color outright, and initially unable to match their form, and his childlike frustration with the blobby, black mess he made was responsible for what came next: Bakura and all the second-born came out of the water at his moment of ripest frustration. His anger—his tantrum—was the first awareness with which they joined.
Of course, there was no real anger. This was babyish frustration, immature and half a game, and so the second-born (so many of them; Aakesh was the only first-born, and Motherwater never explained why that was) took it upon themselves to act out his play-rage at once. They attacked each other, splashing and beating and silent but with the feel of laughter and roars, diving into the mud and bursting out in volcanic explosions of ridiculous ire.
Aakesh was one with them as he was one with his mother, and the shock of their rage shocked him out of his. Oh; but they dug great dents in the muddy pieces of land that rose here and there like (he thought much later) feminine curves. Oh; b
ut they splashed so wildly they scared birds and fish and even little bounding creatures that lived on land and ate the grass. Oh; oh! Play-rage brought damage.
Moved to pity and urged to heal, he descended on those islands and smoothed the holes, caught up with fish underwater and whispered them calm, flew with great birds (now he could fly; it just happened one day) back to their nests to reassure them their babies were safe. And in the midst of this, the third-born came.
Even more brethren sprang from the water like sparks from a flame, greater in number than second and first combined. In their first awareness, the third-born knew Aakesh at his moment of greatest compassion, and that became their joy.
Healers. Lovers. Comforters. Third-born (this “tier” nonsense was just insulting) were beautiful.
Three entire generations of siblings filled the sky, and Aakesh (feeling more complete than had ever seemed possible) continued restoring the muddy earth to what it had been. Days passed; he realized he could shape the land and make it even lovelier than it already was. New joy! Muddy, delicate, detailed joy—and just then, the fourth-born arrived, and they surged from the water and into awareness at the peak of his intricate creativity.
They took to creation like fish to water and clouds to sky. They had no fingers (or tentacles or anything like them) because they had never seen them, and so the fourth-born mimicked bird’s claws and fishes’s tails and began to shape the little mud-hills the humans would someday call landfall. The fourth-born built entire birds’ nests out of mud and decorated them with fish-fins and curves like waves and enormous ovals like water-drops. Detailed as roots and the endless water’s gleam, they relished variety, and joyed to make things look different from the way they’d begun.
All Sundered Ones started out shaped like puddles, growing to incorporate all they saw (with the exception of clouds—Aakesh still couldn’t quite manage that). They transformed both land and water into a riot of color and shape. But Aakesh was not satisfied yet. All the creations made by the fourth-born were small, but Motherwater was huge. Would she not love large things made as gifts to her?
He tried to make enormous mud-clouds and failed. Clouds were hard. That was all right. Joy and ravenous fun-fights and tender compassion flashed through all the Sundered like light on water, simultaneous and perfect, and filled with the enormousness of his brethren, Aakesh acted on his new idea (which came as close to new as any idea from the Sundered could be): he would move Motherwater’s very bones.
Power (and the ease of it) belonged to him the way wetness belonged to water, and it was neither a strain nor surprise to be able to do as he wished. The land shook, tiny mud-hills trembling as he began his work (and the fourth-born laughed when their creations fell down because all they had to do was make them again and even better). Deep below the water, the churn of mud and muck came together in the vortex of his will, and land rose from the water into wider, smoother mud-hill shapes than ever before. Huge, still in the form of those islands (for he’d never seen land take any other shape) but broad enough for his entire family to dance across, it towered over the black water, and just as he exerted his maximum effort, the fifth-born came.
Strong, strong, strong, the fifth-born carried strength in their limbs and a love of moving mass that made the second-tier seem weak, and they were not stupid the way the humans later assumed, but steady, calm, as Aakesh had been at the moment of their birth. Their peace and joyful focus spread across the hearts and souls of Sundered brethren like oil over water, a soothing balm.
And they were complete, so complete, and Aakesh joined them all. He fought with the second-born, healed with the third, shaped and created with the fourth, and helped the fifth move landmasses in a slow game across Motherwater’s whole face.
And somewhere in this time of completion came the last-born.
Quimby, Gorish, and others rose from the water in terrifying splendor and joy and completeness of all things and as Aakesh indulged in the best of every generation, so the last-born took on the features of them all.
So much later, the humans considered the last-born too pitiful to label. The humans saw them as weak and stupid and worthless, but no: they the greatest of all, and the most worth protecting.
And they had suffered. Suffered.
Gorish, compassionate and clever, spending his life over and over for undeserving humans he’d loved. Quimby, creative beyond ordinary ken, throwing herself among the humans again and again so she could see their imaginative souls. And Aakesh could not save them when the humans came.
Sundered. It was a human term meaning severed, cut off, broken apart, given to them as a mockery of the unity they’d lost. Severing their tie severed their will, their wholeness, their ability to think for themselves . They were largely trapped in the forms they’d taken, and horribly alone. What little planning and communication remained to them was not enough to overcome Jason Iskinder’s too-clever commands to freeze, stay as they were, and become the humans’ slaves.
It took four hundred years to outwit Jason Iskinder’s dark legacy.
Aakesh’s plan was bold and dangerous, but the only other option was death. The plan was based on the gleanings of human plans he’d seen, on the humans’ understanding of the past, on the way human understanding evolved from generation to generation. It required knowledge of human psychology and empathy with human emotions and on some days Aakesh felt human.
Some days he felt separated from his brethren even more than the Hope had already done, and on those days, he wept, and those of his brethren who remained unclaimed would surround him then as they could, cramming themselves together as if trying to become one large puddle together. One.
At his lowest, his most alone, he’d considered death for himself (would returning to Motherwater really be that bad, after all?). but he could not do this or all of them would die.
And so, for the sake of those he loved, Aakesh learned to lie.
He learned sadism and greed.
He learned what it was to be proud and arrogant, and learned the weight of shame and guilt and sorrow.
He learned terrible things, which his brethren shared because what one knew, all knew. And yet it was not the same. He was not the same.
These terrible truths remained simple fact to his brethren, impossible to comprehend, but to him they were reality. They were a foreign acid of thought-patterns, burning in his psyche.
Aakesh was never alone; none of them could be alone. Yet he was alone. No Sundered One knew humans the way he did, nor could they.
He did not want them to. These sour truths were flavors he alone would swallow.
Here and now and free from the Hope, Aakesh waved his hand and produced paints for Harry Iskinder, whom he loved. It was so easy to weave the air, the earth, the very molecules of Harry’s shed skin flakes into the perfect set of colors.
Harry gaped at them.
“Do you think these might suffice?” Aakesh deadpanned, privately pleased he’d outdone anything Harry had ever imagined.
“Buh,” Harry said, or something similar (which Aakesh found cute, though he’d never confess). “They ... they’re gorgeous!”
Aakesh didn’t bother to look down at the twelve perfect jars of vibrant, magnificent color. He knew they were perfect.
He allowed himself to smile.
● ●
● Love Makes Whole: A Sundered Epilogue ●
Let Slip the Dogs of War (Motherwater)
Never again.
The Human sat (and oh she hated him, and oh she lusted for his destruction, and oh her children were mad to love such filth), and the Human touched one of her precious exposed mounds of soil, and the Human argued about splashes of artificial color.
Her children would never be the same. It was the humans’ fault. Maybe her fault, too, for making them like sponges, but she hadn’t known what could expose itself to them like lewd and squalid garbage.
Never again.
Aakesh knew she hated them. Of course h
e did. First, closest to her (closest to the humans, too, but that would not be considered), more vast than even he knew—she had made an equal in him alone. So, as an equal, when he had decided all humans would not die, she let it pass. He had decided to claim this one Human and link it to himself, and she had not overruled him.
Madness. The humans poisoned everything.
Never again!
The children could keep their few stupid human babies. They could keep that Human (who’d dared own her First, who dared be owned by him) as long as they wished, but there would be no future invasions.
NEVER
AGAIN
And—
The echo of her rage (weeping mourning grieving for twelve of her children could not wake) rippled out like a gong in a distant valley, but it did not change their minds.
Second-born grew more vicious and then turned it into wilder play, and third briefly regretted kindness and then remembered its beauty with renewed compassion, and fourth turned detailed art from intricate to nightmarish and then smoothed it back to dreamlike once more, and fifth considered using their great strength to smash but instead resumed playing with her bones.
They fed off each other and filled each other and gave one another peace and consolation in undreamed of ways, ways learned over four hundred years of being unable to love as they wished.
Greatest comfort born of greatest suffering.
Never again.
On the little island with the Human, Aakesh startled slightly, so slightly, as if a cold drop of water slid down his spine.
Harry glanced over. “What?”
Aakesh met Harry’s gaze with his own, forge-fire orange challenging muddy green-brown. “Nothing.”
Harry raised one eyebrow (an expression learned from Aakesh, though he did not know it), but when the other did not elucidate, he let it go. “So you really want me to paint. What am I supposed to paint on, my knees?”
The Sundered Page 28
