From Ruins

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  That had been another thing she had worked at while away, for the Alliance had been more than willing to lend a visiting queen one of its cargo holds. She had gone there with the Emperor, hiding her trepidation... but he had been a capable teacher, and though the bay had been too small for more than a few hopping glides, she had begun to learn what male Chatcaava were trained to from the moment their wings lost their translucency. Nor had her training been confined to those short flights, for there were exercises she could do on the ground. He had insisted she continue her practice daily, on the Alliance base, on the ship, and again once they reached the throneworld: "You will strengthen muscles you will need once you are free to use them properly."

  He had become a true partner to her, which she had never anticipated... and a Great Emperor, which no one had. She'd seen it in all the conferences they'd undertaken. How he no longer merely understood the Pelted, but respected them, and empathized with them. How he effortlessly engaged the loyalties of the Chatcaava who entered his ambit. The Admiral-Offense would be his unto death, she thought...and so would the Worldlord, whom she met when they finally came home.

  The Worldlord would make an invaluable counselor. She'd liked him... liked his patience and his willingness to live through and wrestle with discomfort, and the evident care he had for his extended family. His behavior reminded her of the Knife's commentary on how such relationships were not all devalued, especially among the lords and on the more distant worlds. Listening to his report on the reactions of the system lords during their absence, she found herself hoping he would become Second, or Third. And that was before she'd seen his face when the Emperor divulged that the Pelted known as Simone lived, and had sent a message for the Chatcaavan who had released her to seek the treatment that had saved her.

  They would need such males at their sides, for the work before them... the work was long.

  "So somber, my pet."

  She glanced at him. They were passing through the arcades now, in the perfume of the gardens. "I think of what lies ahead of us."

  "Ah." A smile. "Let it trouble you less than it did before. We have bought ourselves the time to make good on our plans."

  "Do you think?"

  He caught her hand and licked its palm, a kiss as their current forms counted it. "I do. Not to say we won't have our troubles, but we have broken our enemies into small enough pieces, and gathered a sufficiency of allies, that we might address those troubles as they come."

  She nodded slowly. "We will Change."

  "With all that implies," he agreed. "Good and difficult." He pushed open the door to his tower, and she passed him to start up it. How many times had she climbed these steps at the Ambassador's side? How many joyful days had she spent entwined with them?

  "Memories," the Emperor murmured.

  "You too?" she asked.

  He smiled, almost invisible in the dimness, dark hide against shadowed stone. "We killed our way up these stairs and the joy of it was that he was with me. That we shared a purpose. When I sent him from me the first time, it was because his presence would have shattered all that I hoped to accomplish. To have his presence ensure it...."

  She shivered at the rightness of it. "Yes. I understand."

  They continued their climb in silence, touching now and then: a caress of a hand, a brush of wing. When they finally reached the top, the Emperor considered the vista and said, "Someone found my furniture."

  The Queen laughed. "I like it better this way than how it was when we left for the Alliance!"

  "So do I." He drew her to him and she fitted her head under his, feeling anticipation welling in her like wine. How long they remained thus, she didn't know... only that it was everything that opposed the feeling they'd had together after the Ambassador's departure, that first time. The weight of the future had been lifted from their shoulders; the aching of their loss, reprieved. The Beloved was coming home.

  "Ah, my Treasure," he whispered. "You feel it too."

  "Yes," she answered.

  He licked her brow, a gentle kiss. "Are you ready?"

  "I have been ready all my life, my lord."

  He stepped back, keeping her hand loose in his so that she might choose whether to break free. She didn't, and held his fingers in hers all the way to the balcony. They stood together, surveying the morning sky. Then he drew her to the lip of the balcony.

  The Queen Ransomed met his eyes, and all the pride in them, and the strength that she would lean on, when she needed it. She gave him back her love, and her trust, and her joy that they had come, at last, to this moment.

  She turned to the sky, and leapt.

  EPILOGUE

  "I can't believe you're leaving!" the Knife said.

  Uuvek snorted. "Yes, you can. Idiot. Why would I stay here?"

  "Because exciting things are happening here," the Knife said, "and they all need logistical support!"

  That brought Uuvek's head up. He frowned until he saw the mirth in the Knife's eyes. They started laughing at the same time.

  "Help me pack."

  "As if you have so many possessions," the Knife said, but set to it anyway, rolling Uuvek's clothes and stuffing them in a duffel. That felt good, the camaraderie, the ease. He would miss it. But Uuvek had said one of his first projects would be to optimize the code he'd written to allow the Chatcaavan skein and the Alliance network to connect. If the Knife insisted on being bothered, Uuvek had declared, he intended to do it realtime. More efficient that way.

  "There," the Knife said. "That's it. Not much of it, but we're Navy to the core." He dropped onto the folding chair beside Uuvek's bunk. "So, is this it, do you think?"

  Uuvek eyed him. "Don't be ridiculous. This isn't an epic saga. Life doesn't have endings."

  The Knife chuckled. "I guess you're right." He watched Uuvek heave the duffel over his shoulders. "You'll go well?"

  "What else?" Uuvek grinned at him. "Fair winds, huntfriend."

  Grinning back, the Knife said, "You too. You'll need it. Those Eldritch are always getting into messes. Tell Maia I'm counting on her to keep you out of trouble!"

  Uuvek's laugh trailed back through the door.

  The Knife stayed on that chair for some time after his huntfriend's departure. Not really thinking about anything, though Living Air knew there was enough to keep any Chatcaavan busy these days. No, he was just... existing in the moment. Breathing. Tasting the wonder of it.

  The sound of the telegem chirping drew him from his reverie, and far more gently than any Chatcaavan comm request would have. "Yes?"

  "Hey, you ready?"

  "Yes, I'm done here." The Knife rose.

  "Great. We'll be docking in ten. Meryl says she's got a seat warm for you."

  The Knife wrinkled his nose. "What does that even mean, huntsister? Why does your language have so many strange metaphors? Can't you just say things in a more straightforward way?"

  Laniis laughed. "Get your tail upstairs, ‘Queen's Liaison to Fleet Intelligence.' Or your seat will get cold, and when you sit in it you'll figure out why that's bad."

  Smiling, the Knife said, "I am on my way."

  APPENDICES

  The Words in the Frontispieces

  In the past I've been coy about the calligraphy faded out behind the title pages of each of the six books in this series. Lots of you have asked though, so I'll confirm: those are in fact Chatcaavan words, and here at last are the meanings:

  Book 1, Wingless - to defy/do

  Book 2, Transcend - to be deserving

  Book 3, Amulet - to change

  Book 4, Only the Open - to give

  Book 5, Extremis - to suffer

  Book 6, Ruins - to live

  The final glyph, at the conclusion of this book, is 'to love.'

  Sadly, these calligraphies have a few errors. The most egregious is that Chatcaavan is written down to up, so most of the words are backwards (the exception is the final one, which I did properly). The other is that I wrote the wrong glyph for th
e 'eh' sound in several of the words. The Chatcaava have remanded me to basic writing practice, along with the rest of the children in the nursery, though they give me points for style...!

  The Species of the Alliance

  The Alliance is mostly composed of the Pelted, a group of races that segregated and colonized worlds based (more or less) on their visual characteristics. Having been engineered from a mélange of uplifted animals, it's not technically correct to refer to any of them as "cats" or "wolves," since any one individual might have as many as six or seven genetic contributors: thus the monikers like "foxine" and "tigraine" rather than "vulpine" or "tiger." However, even the Pelted think of themselves in groupings of general animal characteristics, so for the ease of imagining them, I've separated them that way.

  The Pelted

  The Quasi-Felids: The Karaka'An, Asanii, and Harat-Shar comprise the most cat-like of the Pelted, with the Karaka'An being the shortest and digitigrade, the Asanii being taller and plantigrade, and the Harat-Shar including either sort but being based on the great cats rather than the domesticated variants.

  The Quasi-Canids: The Seersa, Tam-illee, and Hinichi are the most doggish of the Pelted, with the Seersa being short and digitigrade and foxish, the Tam-illee taller, plantigrade and also foxish, and the Hinichi being wolflike.

  Others: Less easily categorized are the Aera, with long, hare-like ears, winged feet and foxish faces, the felid Malarai with their feathered wings, and the Phoenix, tall bipedal avians.

  The Centauroids: Of the Pelted, two species are centauroid in configuration, the short Glaseah, furred and with lower bodies like lions but coloration like skunks and leathery wings on their lower backs, and the tall Ciracaana, who have foxish faces but long-legged cat-like bodies.

  Aquatics: One Pelted race was engineered for aquatic environments: the Naysha, who look like mermaids would if mermaids had sleek, hairless, slightly rodent-like faces and the lower bodies of dolphins.

  Other Species

  Humanoids: Humanity fills this niche, along with their estranged cousins, the esper-race Eldritch.

  True Aliens: Of the true aliens, six are known: the shapeshifting Chatcaava, whose natural form is draconic (though they are mammals); the gentle heavyworlder Faulfenza, who are furred and generally regarded to be attractive; the Akubi, large dinosaur-like fliers with three sexes; the aquatic Platies, who look like colorful flatworms and can communicate reliably only with the Naysha, and the enigmatic Flitzbe, who are quasi-vegetative and resemble softly furred volleyballs that change color depending on their mood. New to the Alliance (and not pictured in the line-up) is the last race, the "Octopi" of Either Side of the Strand.

  For a more detailed look into the species of the Alliance, a Peltedverse Guidebook is available through me; you can get the link by signing up for my mailing list (from my website) or by jumping on my Patreon.

  The Languages of the Pelted Setting

  Eldritch

  Most readers of this series will be familiar by now with some of the conventions of the Eldritch language, particularly that of shading words with colors meant to inflect their meanings. In the spoken language, these moods are indicated with single-syllable prefixes; in the written, with colored ink if people want to bother with them. (And as we learn in this text, the color modes are carried into other formats, like music.)

  So, to refresh, the seven modes (three pairs, one neutral):

  Gray is the normal/neutral mode, and requires no modifiers. It has one, though, if one wants to stress one's neutrality.

  Gold is the best of all worlds, and foil to Black's violent, angry, dire, or morose connotations. This pair is the extreme emotional end of the spectrum, good and bad.

  Silver is the positive, hopeful shading, foil to Shadow mode, which gives negative (cynical, sarcastic, ironic, dreadful, foreboding, fearful, etc) connotations to words. If gray is in the middle of the spectrum and black and gold the ends, then shadow and silver are between them and the gray center.

  White is the mode for holy things; its foil is Crimson, for things of the body. (If you want to be technical, Eldritch illustrations put it on a perpendicular line from Gold/Black, with gray still in the center: white above, crimson below.)

  Eldritch is an aggressively agglutinating language: if it can make a word longer by grafting things onto it to add meaning, it will, and if that makes it harder for non-native speakers to pronounce anything without stumbling, so much the better. It's also fond of vowels, and almost inevitably if you see an Eldritch word with more than one adjacent vowel, they're pronounced separately (thus, Araelis from the novel Rose Point is properly ‘ah rah EH lees'). There are also no "silent" vowels (so Galare is not ‘Gah lahr', but ‘gah lah reh' or ‘gah lah rey' depending on your regional accent). There are some cases where I've misspelled things, or I've continued to write out diphthongs instead of using diacritics, but for the most part if you pronounce every single letter you see in an Eldritch word separately, you're probably doing it right.

  Like many of the languages of this setting, Eldritch was originally a conlang, created by the people who would become the Eldritch as a way to set themselves apart from the people they fled. It has been several thousand years since then, though, and the language has only become more convoluted since, a reflection of its people's needs.

  Chatcaavan

  On the other hand, the Chatcaavan tongue likes its consonants, dislikes agglutination, prefers its verbs separate from its nouns, and is littered with many other features that contribute to it sounding "choppier" than Eldritch does to the untrained ear. Where you see multiple vowels in Chatcaavan words (like the word ‘Chatcaava' itself), they are intended to convey syllable stress, not phonetic differences: thus, chat CAA vah. (And the ‘ch' is actually pronounced ‘sh'... sorry about that.) I have, for the most part, spared you this whenever the vowel sound is denoted by more than one letter. "Kauvauc" should properly be "Kauvauauc" but at some point one draws the line for readibility.

  Lisinthir's description of the reification of concepts in Chatcaavan is accurate. It's also one of the most crucial distinctions previous ambassadors failed to grasp, through no fault of the Seersa who were sent to document the language; they didn't miss the linguistic differences, they just failed to map them accurately to the culture, which they were poorly prepared to grasp. This is one of the few times we see anything grafted onto nouns in Chatcaavan (that I know of). The difference between ‘treasure' (the concrete thing a dragon hoards) and ‘Treasure' (the abstract ideal, the platonic perfect ideal) is that the abstraction takes tense on the noun rather than the verb.

  So, for the ideal:

  Past-Beauty moves me > "Beauty moved me."

  Future-Hope strengthens my fleet. > "Hope will strengthen my fleet."

  Versus normal concrete nouns, taking the tense where English-speakers would put it, on the verb:

  The wind buffeted me.

  I will do that thing.

  Or, to use the examples for the ideals:

  Beauty moved me > A Chatcaavan named Beauty dragged me somewhere.

  Hope will strengthen me > A weapon, or a ship, or a person named Hope will strengthen my fleet.

  The idea there is that concepts exist throughout time, and all acts revolve around their permanence; while normal people and things do their time on stage and are gone. They don't get to exist forever. Titles, like abstractions, take tense on the noun. This is one of the reasons Chatcaava want them so badly; they imply immortality, significance. So here you can see the differences between a Chatcaavan named Knife and "the Knife":

  Knife pushed me. > A Chatcaavan named Knife shoved me around.

  Past-Knife pushed me. > The Knife (the Chatcaavan wearing the title The Knife) pushed me around.

  Universal and other Languages of the Exodus

  There's no discussing the languages of the Alliance without mentioning Universal, which is not just the lingua franca of the Alliance but the native tongue for those Pelted races that re
jected the need to create their own language to sever themselves from their origins. Universal began as American English, with the Seersa as its stewards-but putting the Seersa in charge of any language project inevitably involves its expansion, since they are the Alliance's premiere linguists. There are many, many loanwords into Universal from not just the Seersan tongue, but from all the languages the Seersa made for other Pelted races (including languages that were adopted and instantly abandoned, like the Glaseah's). For the most part I've spared you those loanwords, save for the most common (like arii and alet)... but it is apparent to everyone in the Alliance that Universal is "sticky" and keeps rolling around in other cultures and coming back with new words clinging to it. This is one of its charms: it reflects the overarching Pelted culture, with its big tent philosophy.

  Arii and alet, interestingly enough, are not loanwords from the Seersan tongue, but from Meredan, the Exodus language. This was a pidgin that began formation on Earth, where it was used by the Pelted (before they were called the Pelted) to communicate with each other without being understood by their owners. Meredan did not become a full language until after the Exodus, and its heyday was brief-it was spoken on-ship and then fell out of use in favor of Universal not long after the first settlements. The reason for that abandonment is still hotly debated today; you will find many academic dissertations on the topic if you browse a Pelted library in the historical linguistics section. The most popular theory is that its association with victimhood and powerlessness made it less popular than Universal, with its implication that the Pelted were free to use the language of their oppressors without fear of retribution. But no one's sure why Meredan use dwindled, and to this day its study remains an eccentricity particular to scholars. The few words that have survived in the Universal lexicon are assumed by laymen to have been borrowed from Seersan.