Elements and Memory

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Zenebatos was made of bones.

Meru felt it. She knew it, on some level. The buildings were just the bones of what they had been, its servants just bones and copies of thinking creatures, and somewhere, miles down, lay the bones and dust of the people who had lived here.

Ruled here.

The party was sleeping for the night amidst the rubble, far from the droids, and equally far from the glittering strangeness that was Savan's last thoughts. They were tired. Tired and frustrated, with gritty eyes and gritty joints, and everyone was snapping at each other. Except for Dart. He barely talked to anyone anymore. He hadn't since Shana had been taken. Rose... Rose went back to what she had been. No more quiet, biting criticism, or the flash of white teeth in a smile so rare that as soon as you saw it you wondered if you really had. Now she was all cold eyes and long night watches and a tongue that didn't say anything unless it was absolutely necessary.

They knew what she was now. Dart may have forgiven her. That was his way. Of course, he knew her better than any of them did, always had. But that didn't fix it for the rest of them. They'd been brought up on the stories of the Black Monster.

Miranda resented her most of all. Her sister, Luanna, had her eyes burned out of her head by Rose, and her mother killed. She knew first hand the terror that had gripped Mille Seseau when a thriving and peaceful town had been wiped off the map in a single night. Many of the refugees had fled to Serdio, and Albert had heard their stories. Haschel had offered little. Only said that his daughter might have been in Neet.

Meru had slipped away. Climbed up on the rocks and leaned with her back against them as she watched the lights of the droids flutter and buzz overhead. Her hair was down, and it clung to her skin with the tenacity of static, and rippled in the cold and parched wind.

She'd been feeling this strange gnawing feeling ever since they had walked into Aglis. Ever since Ulara, really. That there was this whole other world, this giant complex world that no one had ever told her about. One that had featured her ancestors. One that might have featured her. And what had she found?

A city in a wasteland populated by a vague and ancient society that had been dying for millennia. A city underwater, populated by one old man and the shimmering toys he made himself. And this place. Made of bones and things that thought and thought and thought and didn't feel.

She remembered the Coliseum in Kadessa. It had made her skin crawl, and her ears feel like a thousand people were plucking at them, pleading, begging, shouting. Let us tell you how we died.

Her people were tyrants, liars and murderers. That's all there was to it.

Her eyes adjusted to the contrast between black sky and grey stone, and she picked out the figure nearby. He looked like a stone himself, but the ruff of the pelt he wore around his waist fluttered in the wind, and she saw him by that.

The Giganto, oddly enough, didn't make her nervous. Albert wasn't entirely comfortable around him. His grandfather had led the expedition into Kongol's city all those years ago, and put every inhabitant to the sword. Kongol never brought it up, but Albert remembered. Everyone else just saw his enormous size and thundering voice, remembered how hard it had been to fight him, and kept on guard, as if he were an avalanche just waiting to rip the mountainside apart.

Meru liked him because he was tall and if she bugged him enough (really bugged him, like jumped up and down and wouldn't let him sit down anywhere and kept screeching and crying until he gave in) he'd let her ride on his shoulder until they next rested. And because, like her, he also didn't have pants.

And Kongol knew.

His city was bones as well.

Meru unfolded her legs and rose to her feet, one birdbone hand wrapped carelessly around the haft of her hammer. She danced her way down the rocks to where Kongol was sitting.

He didn't turn his head, but his eyes glittered down at her. Even when seated, he was taller than she was.

"Hey," she said, and pushed her toe forwards without actually nudging him. Her voice was cracked from the long day of sun and little water. "Come on. I'll steal some of Miranda's hair stuff and we can do up your Mohawk again."

She was a little shocked when his lip curled upward in a grin, revealing the largest, flattest and most white teeth she had ever seen. It was a little terrifying, until she remembered that his favorite food was a certain spicy pepper that would burn the roof of your mouth off before you finished chewing. "Kongol like that," he rumbled.

She flashed her own grin in return. "Good," she said.

And that's all there was to it.

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