Disclaimer: I do not own Jackie Chan Adventures.
Betaed by: Zim'smostloyalservant
Fourth Age (Part 1)
The Mother
Two daughters, and two sons.
Her children squirmed in the cushioned depression in this bedroom's floor. Shen — the first found, named for her father — she gently prodded with her carefully charged tendril tips while her eye was filled with magic to see deeper. Strong; his chi glowed in a simple but steady glory. He grabbed one of the tips in his tiny hand and Yade smiled, following his jerks with that appendage as if he was really winning some contest.
She reclaimed the tendril and stroked his jawline with it before shifting her attention to Hebi. The girl already had one of her tendrils captive; Yade had named her for her greater enthusiasm for the serpentine motions of her uppermost limbs. Her chi was growing steadily, but seemed to be refining itself into still more shades.
Fascinating.
Lin was trying to be asleep, and attempted to roll away from even the most delicate inspection. Her chi was shifting over itself, the color altering along with it. But she seemed healthy enough? Still strange.
Finally Jack, the smallest one, the one who seemed to suffer the most from his isolated exposure on naked stone.
Yade took a breath to let it out when she confirmed yes, his chi had grown. It was far behind the others, but like his body, it was growing. He actually was asleep; he was always the first to sleep and last to awake.
Hopefully that would change, Yade thought. Keeping most of her coils in place, protecting the nest of the moment, Yade stretched over to the nearby desk to grab a thin slab of shadow stone. She wrote the results in light grey on the black stone. Memorized though it was, she compared all the data here committed to Channish just to be sure. Her children were healthy.
Happily replacing the slabs in their slots, Yade returned to the depression and braced herself over it with all her hands. The tendrils delicately picked up the infants as four seams relaxed open across her torso.
"Everything's okay, darlings, time to come to momma," Yade cooed as she eased her children into their resting places.
X X X
Food was a problem, and while Yade at first welcomed a challenge in this, now she was worried.
She was in a room she had converted into a lab of sorts. This building, like most in the Grand Palace, had no real purpose beyond the murals it held. Even at the height of the Himinate, the Shadow Walkers had occupied only a fifth of the buildings effectively for operations.
One reason it had been commuter headquarters was because storing food here was difficult. The corrosive nature of the realm did not make it impossible to store food, but impractical on a grand scale. Besides which, Yade had been a bit offended to see people enjoy a meal when that was a luxury quite lost to her.
But there had been shelves and storage containers left over from the second Shadow Walker Period left behind, and she had moved them to this building just outside the Water Ring. The shelves and pots were now full of her harvest, the raw materials to be used in this lab to determine what was edible among the shadow plants.
She could produce plenty of milk. Taking in shadows to fuel the process in place of eating, she was pretty sure she could do it indefinitely.
But her children were growing. They would need real food eventually. A mother provides, and she wanted to know what was safe for them to eat and what wasn't when they passed that threshold.
But how!? She could experiment on them, potentially poisoning them. It was unthinkable. But she couldn't test it herself. Aside from the fact that even trying to chew anything felt horridly wrong now, her physiology was no comparison to theirs.
The table before her had samples of virtually every plant, including moss and dried algae. But what process could she use to determine what was edible?
She appreciated Lin kicking her from the inside as the child turned over. Yade felt she deserved a great many blows being thwarted like this in such a vital task.
Needing some air, Yade punched the door off its hinges and slithered over the wrecked piece of stone work. Leaving the lab behind, she slid through the gateway out into the Water Ring.
She did not go far, breathing in the aroma of the bog shrouded area. While the Vermillion Fields held a special appeal, Yade enjoyed the worn and slightly abandoned look nature had given to this part of the palace. While she knew each structure and walkway, looking at it now she could almost pretend it was an ancient ruin like she might have explored when she was Jade Chan. It let her pretend there was mystery here to be solved, instead of the answers to each bit of stone and architecture all coming back to her own limbs.
Placing her elbows on the shadowstone railing, Yade leaned down, resting her belly on the stone, letting it push into her softer tissue while her breasts hung and her tendrils waved in the air.
Her reflection looked back at her with one tired eye from the black waters below. She had long used the dark water as mirrors, but now it was not still, as tiny insects made their way across the surface. Some living off of the algae that floated past in clumps broken away from the colonies attached to the stones. Others hunted the herbivores, sliding across the water, blending greatly until they moved in a single motion of speed, carrying them toward their grazing prey.
If insects can keep themselves fed, Yade thought, I can figure this out.
X X X
The solution had been dropped in her hands. Pests, that was the solution.
Memories of pantries and camping had made her take care to protect her pantry and such from the new life of insects. But her neatly-arranged set up in the lab was left in the open. And she had left the door off its hinges and in pieces. So when she finally returned, the bugs were having a grand ol' time of it.
Some open beakers had dead bugs, and a few had their contents change color, having dissolved bugs. But the plants… some had bugs swarming over them, feeding, or had been reduced to nothing, leaving empty spaces. While others had only dried further, or been unchanged and untouched entirely.
These animals were born of the same mixed energies as her children, Jade concluded, grabbing a slab from a shelf to take notes. A babe currently in each arm, she used her tendrils for the tablet and to double-check and then triple-check every item in question.
She had been instructed once to take lessons from nature. In this place of solitude, that wisdom had atrophied for lack of applicability. Now, though, it lived again. For this world lived.
"Let's learn from each other. Eh, little ones?" Yade asked. She wasn't sure if she was talking to the insects gorging on her science or the babes nursing at her breasts.
Maybe both?
X X X
Cooking was not a science. Finding what was edible or not was, but food was a work of art.
Yade's vast library held many works of history and fiction, and a few on hard sciences. But cookbooks were not around. The closest being descriptions and some recipes included in texts and such. A chef supreme she had never been. She seemed to recall she could hold her own in a kitchen, but her life had erred more to quick preparation and payoff.
Besides, even if she could make a microwave, her darlings deserved the best in farm-to-plate organic baby food, with no preservatives or chemical coloring.
And the model three stone oven was holding up well! She had based it off an old-fashioned pizza oven she had worked for about a month on assignment undercover in a college town. Yeah, that had been a weird one — basically, a terrorist cell had actually been hunting down a cult trying to release a demon with the head of a lion and the body of shark. Well, not quite a shark, but yeah.
But anyway, under a cheerful and/or disillusioned cafeteria worker's direction, Jade Chan had worked that oven and served an absurd amount of pasta to apparently starved students and faculty.
Opening the oven, she pulled out her first culinary experiment.
"Oh, Rosco would laugh at this. Hey, that was his name wasn't it! Cool," Yade remarked, throwing the burned paste over her shoulder. Yeah, that guy had perpetual stubble and endless stories of how the food program used to be better and advice on how not to tread on the wrong toes. A good guy; she would need to add a mural to that fake job, she decided.
X X X
Yade was in the Vermilion Fields when it happened. A routine inspection and taking various samples to catalogue and such. As planned, it was a sunny, beautiful day, but not too hot to have her babies playing in the reeds bound by her coils. Weather control was awesome for planning your routine.
While she faced out and gathered with her arms, her tendrils were active with the kids. It had become a game as they grew more physically capable, them trying to grab the tips and hold on. It had become routine enough that she didn't need to be watching.
"Mama," came the word.
Her torso whipped around on its pivot, letting her look at them wide-eyed.
"Hebi?" Yade asked, having recognized which spoke. But they were crying. Yade crumpled a bit in shame as her children were upset. She had moved far too quickly, jerking what they had been focused on away. But she rose back up, beaming, and scooped them all up in her arms, laughing.
She was a first word!
Three more to go, too.
X X X
Still nothing from the others, Yade thought as she inscribed in the shadow metal. The children were on the floor before her, and she was holding up the plate in her top left hand, glancing to the children as they watched her. Save Jack, who was staring off at something. Her tendrils were etching the scene into the metal stroke by stroke.
It had only occurred to her recently she should take baby pictures. Considering how much they had grown it was already late, but at least she had her notes to make a proper text baby book for that stage.
"Shen, honey, please don't roll around. Momma is trying to capture the moment without Kodak," Yade said, finding her etching of that son now off. Bending down, she used her lower hands to roll him back into place.
"Mama."
"...SQUEE!" Yade went. Then cursed, seeing she had crumpled part of the slab in her grip.
Tossing the slab away with the other discards, the clunk sound startling them into looking up at her, she grabbed another off the pile next to her and started over.
X X X
"Sun!" Lin repeated as Yade patted her on the back.
"Yes, yes, it's a very nice sun your mommy made, Lin. And this one, the potter is almost more interesting than the pot too," Yade remarked. The kid gurgled and pushed against Yade's chest, trying to look past her to the door they were moving away from.
Yade sighed and massaged her brow as she made her way into the large building. She was feeling nattered out and had just wanted to spend some time in the familiar stone ways and still fairly pristine courtyards of the inner palace. And her daughter not only gives the glory of her first word to a pseudo-celestial wonder, but decides she both does not want to sleep in as such and wants more sun all the time.
"Sun!" Lin insisted, yanking on a tendril.
"Fiiiinneee," Yade groaned, turning around. As she slithered, she reached into a spare pouch and moved around the sealed meal box. The blasted things kept lodging themselves awkwardly. They hurt more than that Dominio guy when those corners got rammed into some organ or cavity or other.
"Maybe I should invest in a knapsack?" Yade wondered.
"Sun!"
"No, I am not calling it a purse."
X X X
Yade hung her head, seated on the throne, the Oni Columns glistening with foul majesty as they looked upon her humiliation.
How, oh how, had it come to this, she wondered as she stopped Lin from yet again climbing over her coils.
"Crap," Jack said again.
"Okay, I am at least 90% sure I have never said that since you were born. So please stop?" Yade asked her son.
He smiled at her, surely not in mockery?
"Okay, fine, but the record will show your first word was 'mama'," Yade said. Jack started to suck his foot, while Yade made a mental note to forget this atrocity.
"Why would you even? None of you poop, and neither do I."
"Poop?" Shen said. Yade put all her hands to her face.
"Crap," she declared flatly.
X X X
The children were at play on the polished stone floor. Yade formed the boundary of the playpen herself.
They had grown some; still not ready to stand for more than moments, but active still. They were not bereft, either. Yade had crafted them simple toys from some porous shadow material.
A struggle broke out as she watched one of the girls trying to take a rod from one of the boys. It was no real threat, just crying really. Still, she reached out, separating the two. Leaving the boy his prize, while stroking the girl.
Her daughter gurgled happily at the touch. It could still surprise Yade. She was monstrous, but not to them. Her face, her form… was that of their mother.
She noticed they were not as humanoid as when they started. Curious. She wondered, as one of her sons started patting on a limp tendril, if that was natural or a side effect of her milk.
X X X
The first major trust moment was letting them play beyond the perimeter of her body. To break the circle of her coils and let them roam under her sight.
Lin and Jack had been the ones to make her realize it was time. Their Channish still left something to be desired, but their toddling demands and their attempts to climb over her made it clear.
Though she made sure to not let them loose anywhere near water. She was responsible, after all.
The second trust moment was letting them out of her sight.
Even as they left the custom of sleeping in her body and she switched them to food she prepared from the flora and fauna, she had kept them together.
She had halted any work she couldn't bring them along for, doing only what she could keeping them firmly in her senses. They slept in whatever chamber Yade chose for the night together, or slept under the night veil outdoors together. Whether it was sharing a bed in a chamber or them on her form, they were five together.
It was not about her when the change came; she was very grateful for that. It came unexpectedly. Yade had, for some time, let them have a say in what would be done for the day. Shen, Lin, and Hebi favored visiting the Vermilion Fields, in particular the Shrine ruins and the pond that Yade had named the Basin of End and Beginning, the very place Yade had laid in despair while her children grew from the Netherworld until they called out to her. Jack had wanted to instead continue studying the murals of the Marvel Gallery. Three against one, it was set to simply have him carried along by the majority.
Except he had asked that question:
"Can I go there on my own, mama?"
Such a simple question. And while she immediately told him no, and he accepted it, she knew even then that it was the beginning. The idea was out, and the three were not so alike, she could already tell. Not just their bodies, but the way they acted, what interested them even, seemed diverse. There would be other conflicts of interest, and desires to purse them at the expense of this togetherness that had defined her family.
It was inevitable.
X X X
With an exasperated sigh, Yade picked up little Jack with a tendril and set him facing away from his siblings.
"What?" he protested.
"No looking at the others' slabs," she reprimanded him. He looked at her with those big red eyes as if he had no idea what she was talking about.
She just answered with the next word. And they set to scratching it on the slabs she gave them. Yeah, school was about as much fun on this end. The five basics to cover — writing, reading, arithmetic, lore, and magic. And she had to be teacher, principal, and guidance counselor.
"She's poking me!" one of her daughters shouted behind her back. The elder goddess' shoulders drooped as she pulled a tendril out of her face and then turned to confront this problem.
She knew she shouldn't think it, but for all his being a mediocre student, why couldn't the rest behave more like Shen? The girls were already getting into a slap fight, eager to escape the test.
X X X
Jack stood atop the Forbidden Wall, eyes narrowing, trying to pierce the dark flowing ether beyond the Night Veil. It was a disappointment, now as it was when he first violated this taboo.
"Brother, why do you persist in this disobedience?" Shen asked. Jack grabbed the torn edge of the veil and drew it back.
"Why do you insist on being obedient?" Jack asked. He watched as mother's work stitched itself back together now, leaving only the faintly luminescent dark glow of the veil before him.
"Stop that! Answering a question with a question is cheating," Shen protested. Jack smirked, trying to regard the other boy.
Shen was hairless, unlike him, his nose and face flat and broad. Mother said he was more reptilian in heritage, though she had yet to teach them of more reptiles than the lizards that hunted the bugs in the rushes and shrubs. He, on the other hand, was far closer to the humanity depicted on so many walls. Right down to the black hair thick atop his head and brushed above his eyes.
"It's a fair tactic, brother. Mother is letting us choose how to dress now. I am keeping the pants and shirt, but you mostly go shirtless, why?"
"Better for training, and I can see my progress in every reflection," Shen puffed his chest out, his stomach compressing. Others might find the display of bone, muscle and pulsing vessels off-putting, but to Jack it was just his brother.
"Well, Mother bans us from only two things unconditionally — the Edge, and the Box. I can't reach the box, so my curiosity brings me here."
"Mother is right, that is all you need to know," Shen insisted, looking at the veil with a frown. He had not taken a step closer. He was right on the edge of the wall top, as far from the edge as he could be while being on eye level.
Shen relaxed as his brother approached, thinking this misadventure was at an end and they could be back in bed before Mother noticed they were gone. Not a bad idea; Jack liked the notion of getting something past her eye. But his brother always seemed to win physical contests. So, he pushed him off the wall into the border bog.
And Shen grabbed his shirt, pulling him along, too. Maybe the shirt was a disadvantage?
Jack expected to splat into the mud and face another defeat in play fight.
They never hit, landing in a mass of warm and cold tendrils.
"Uh oh!" Jack said, as Mother pulled them down to dangle in front of her face.
She was dripping wet and frowning, crossing her arms over her belly.
"He did it!" Shen accused.
"And you didn't come to me. Come along, back to bed, then you two will be scrubbing a lot of stones," Mother declared.
X X X
Hebi glared at her sister, before turning back to the potted fern before her. Crouching on the balls of her feet, her talons scratching slightly against the black stones, she used the back of her hand to push fronds aside and take a look at the dry soil.
"Stop it!" she shouted, as he was poked in the thigh again.
"Move," Lin said, reaching over and pulling Hebi's cowl down over her face. Hebi flailed out and fell back onto her rear, carapace scrapping against her robe. Hissing, she pulled her hood off her head, before putting it back in place, covering the three rows of serrations atop her head.
Lin was sitting cross-legged, ignoring her. Body bare as it had been for years, finely blue-scaled, Lin's face was smooth, with slits for nostrils and thin lips over needle teeth, unlike any of the rest. She had hair like Jack, but in a single strip going from a point at her brow and running back and following her spine, running down her tail until it poofed out around the curving white sting at the end.
"You're mean," Hebi declared.
"I was here first. Mother said I could work alone. You're mean for following me," Lin said. She held up a struggling lizard, its limbs tied up with fine black thread.
"Girls, are you fighting again?" their mother asked, turning from the sphere full of rainbow smoke she had been studying on the stone table.
"Make her leave!" Lin shouted.
"She can't leave me alone all the time! I don't want to just play with Shen and Jack. They are too rough!" Hebi protested.
"Fascinating. You both seem to have failed to recall you are supposed to be practicing your shadow casting right now. Not playing," Yade sighed. Slithering over, she gently pushed the two girls apart with her lower arms. And then snatched away the lizard and fern with her tendrils.
Lin growled and tried to reach for the lizard, only for a tendril to press down on her head and force her back into sitting down. Once she stopped growling, the tendril lifted and instead, along with three others, began to stroke the strange child, making her straighten up and purr contentedly.
"You children, how shall I ever lead you away from these pointless little conflicts?" Yade teased, while scooping up Hebi for a more traditional hug.
X X X
Yade Khan sat on her throne, looking down on her children. It was interesting to be back here like this — once she had been at ease letting her children explore unattended, no easy task that, she had taken to napping around various places she had neglected while repairing them. Save for the odd nap, she had not sat in this throne since, huh, not since that last meeting with the dirty coward.
She wondered whatever had happened to Zaben. Had he become a new big bad, or just a deteriorating recurring villain?
Well, that was some one-hundred-forty years in the past now. The future was what was what concerned her today, which was why she had decided to add more ceremony to the occasion. If nothing else, it meant she had the undivided, and for once common, focus of her children.
They had entered their puberties smoothly, and somewhat bizarrely. She had wondered if they would grow to resemble herself more as time passed. But instead, they diverged even more from each other.
Jack was perhaps the single strangest in objective terms. He had sprouted up, not only losing the stubborn bit of baby fat his neglect of physical training had let endure, but his efforts, such as they were, seemed multiplied as he became tall and trim, looking like he was close to the end of his puberty after a mere two years. Handsome Asian features, his hair — worn long in a tail — was thick, and a near reflective body of black that human women would likely kill for. He had even been able to grow sideburns of that same natural slickness that complemented his fine jawline. Wearing a reasonable imitation of a business suit, complete with a fedora style hat, he could have easily passed for a human save for the fine, light blue scales of his skin and his glowing red eyes.
Shen… well, he would not be mistaken for human. He had grown up some, but also out, with wider shoulders and thicker arms than any human save perhaps Tohru could boast. Save these ones almost reached the ground as he stood. His face, likewise, had a stretched look to it, possessing all the human features but not quite right. Along with his short legs and long, dextrous toes, Jade could see him being seen as some kind of reptilian-gorilla-human hybrid. Though unlike any such chimera, her barrel-chested son — who far surpassed all others in the martial arts, even inventing one to meet his own body — worked them in a seamless harmony. He still only wore loose pants, showing off his physique.
Though not as much as Lin. The girl had, since given the choice, chosen to emulate her mother, not covering her body. Granted, it wasn't much that would be peeped, were there still such a thing. Her breasts were small and thin things, her womanhood concealed by the hairy strip that had advanced between her legs to rise up and touch the base of her neck. If Shen was stretched to the side, Lin was stretched long. Her hands and her feet were bigger than her limbs would leave you to expect, and each finger boasted five joints before the tiny claws. Her spiny whip of a tail had split over a painful week Yade to watch over her through, leaving her with three identical ones that curled up behind her now in those innocuous coils.
Hebi was covered, save her eyes. Her segmented form was its own modesty, Yade admitted, and Hebi assured her that the insectoid nature of her appearance, down to the mandibles that emerged from her mouth for eating, was no shame. Yet she insisted that she felt most comforted veiling her form still more.
There were days it was hard to believe these majestic, graceful, and powerful creatures were the same frail babes she had taken into her body and fed at her breast. But they had grown, and she knew each in their own ways had come to chafe at the directionless life they lived outside her lessons. Playtime had ceased to distract them. They craved something more substantial.
Though her dear little wizard Jack… he had been straining the leash for so long that she could hardly think of him doing anything as obediently as the others.
"My children. Today marks the one hundred and fortieth anniversary of when we became family. When you gave meaning to my life. Despite what you may fear, you have all four of you made me proud. If you have not passed every test I have given or heeded every lesson, it has only let me learn more about your weaknesses as well as strengths as your mother. Raising you has been a joy. The first true joy, I think, since the day the life of Jade Chan began to end in a perverse game of chess.
"But while you still have growing to do, it is time to prepare you to work beside me as well as learn under me. And first I will share a a potential danger. Knowledge can be dangerous, but ignorance is a poor shield against peril.
"Behold, the Sun-Smote Eye of Yade Khan," she said, pulling the gem from her pouch, holding it up for them to see.
X X X
"Hong Sisco," Yade declared. It had taken fifty years, but she and her children had it all laid out in the new library built on the ruins of the old Pool of Souls shrine.
She ran a finger across the books lining a shelf containing the magic engineering and the research into biosphere. The biological side was still in the mix. The New Ring was serving as Lin and Hebi's testing ground for the new breeds.
Her new world would not just be a domain of small creatures subsisting off mosses, grasses, and the odd fern while bugs swam about in puddles. But Darwin's crack about God being fond of beetles was a stale wit. You built up this mundane foundation with care, but your pride was at the pinnacle. Displayed high, 'lifted up' for all to see.
It would be glorious.
She frowned, slithering to a window and watching Jack and Hebi discuss something as they flew over the Vermillion Fields toward the palace.
And it would be planned. Not unplanned. She had seen to that. Crowded pantheons led to the worst kind of drama.
Feeling a bit put out, she moved to the central table, where the great atlas assembled by Shen laid. The outline of the sphere carved into the cover was framed with gold Yade had melted to mark the occasion.
With a flick of a tendril, she opened it to the proper page.
Amidst all the minutia and details, here was her favorite part. An artist's rendering.
"Hong Sisco. Ha. Cha. Welcome home to us," Yade smiled, licking her lips.
X X X
First, the star.
They checked her math, but that undertaking was her power, and precision, more than just an orbiting light that illuminated their home. Truthfully, she had been preparing the spot and elements since long before she revealed her plans.
Motion, friction, and IGNITION.
Amidst the ether of the Shadow Netherworld, a red star burst into being, its birthing throes guided by her magic. It threatened to slip so many times, no will of its own, only power.
She had tasted the fury of a sun before, but this was her creation; she knew it as it didn't know itself, as it could not know itself. She answered power not only with power, but with skill, understanding, and will. Will, she thought most of all, suspended in the void far from home, eyes of her children upon her, motionless to mere eyes but the ether shredding about her.
And three years' struggle ended with the star stable, a steady, red light hanging like the sun of Earth in size relative to her.
The children brought the palace to her, its atmosphere and pull sweeping her up and the children easing her to the ground in the Vermillion Fields.
"The Shadow Netherworld is finished, now this begins to be, the Shadow Universe." Yade Khan declared. And for the first time since she became a mother, she slept, fully and truly.
X X X
She awoke in a sleeping chamber, one of the many her children had not claimed. She had climbed a cushioned, coiling column to stretch herself in sleep. Thankfully, she had not rubbed the column down in her sleep. She was not an adolescent eldritch anymore to behave so.
She first caught sight of it in a reflecting pool in the first atrium she came to. She had made a sun.
"I am awesome," she declared, shielding her eye a bit with her tendrils, looking up at the beautiful blazing red.
The children had not been idle. Shen had dedicated himself to creating mass, assembling asteroids as it were, under his siblings' direction to test calculations and theory in a controlled manner.
Her sleep had not been a brief thing, and it was both a relief and pain when they came to her in a rush as she slithered over the Water Ring. For though she had been missed, they had held well. And they carried on their tasks without her guidance.
Though her return meant things could move much quicker.
The first priority was to get Shen to stop wasting his time and return to his desks. Jack could serve mass creation duties in addition to his adjustments to the planned geography. Yes, he chafed, but when did her most restless son not?
The girls retired to their various labs. Results were varying and the domes often revealed glaring flaws in these ecosystems. If they could not endure in a controlled environment, they could not be expected to adapt and thrive on Hong Sisco? But the girls, for all their sniping, knew their craft. Hebi's plants and Lin's animals both were needed to realize their mother's visions. Loyalty and pride kept them on task.
Shen, though, was where she was needed. Her ages of life had afforded much time to learn, to refine skills. But the simple fact was she had never held great talent at the magic of numbers or applying it to magic. Hers was a genius of motion and action. Improv at its finest. No amount of practice can make one a natural.
Shen, for all his preference for the physical, made the numbers dance to his design even as he rewrote the choreography. Like a man building a ladder at the same time he slid the bricks on the wall he was working on. While singing opera.
The formulas and calculations to bring mass energy and magic together to form a world in stable orbit and atmosphere with little more than shadow mass and life to work with. Under her guidance and experience, his natural golden talent became an alloy of marvel. When it was done and verified by small-scale test with all five of them at work or observing, the tomes of Shen's work filled shelves.
She had watched over them to make sure they didn't burn out. And now, as everything seemed poised to begin, she called a halt, 365 days for them to rest and do as they wished. She would see to maintaining the project and make more preparations to ensure they could begin on schedule. But before they began the world crafting in truth, an endeavor that Shen had assigned more than a decade to in his numbers, they would have freedom as a reward.
Soon, very soon, Yade would be able to take her family home. She smiled, the lips curling back from her muzzle, revealing all her sharp black needle teeth.
X X X
Jack was reading of creation. The books had been read and returned, notes taken. Now he walked through lore and creeds. He had not slept for days, not even worked through the food in his pack.
It was a common thread he had detected, to empty oneself to invite a state of emptiness and difference. To force oneself from the rut of routine existence through denial of basic needs and desires. To unlock the mind or invite the outside forces in, the goal remained essentially the same. To gain insight in this state that would not reveal itself otherwise.
There were numbers, but they were bricks, mortar, materials. He walked through spears thrust into primordial oceans to give birth to islands. Words calling light from void. Horned serpents battling false faces and shaping the land in their battle and nations being born from the survivors.
That stopped him. Yes, this story, the words rose up, adorning the images Mother had wrought in stone. The final blow had fallen from stars. A star struck the lair of the serpent, torn loose by war and thus ending it. But the end was not done. Floods, destruction, death on a grand scale. But from death, life. Five families standing lonely and exhausted, and from each a nation rising.
Why this one? Why not, he wondered?
There was a lesson here, in all of this. So many. It was beyond the great labor before them. For that step that he anticipated and dreaded above all else. Mother's greatest promise. And perhaps threat. They would not dwell here alone, they would be gods.
Troubled thoughts entwined with joyful anticipation and glowing pride, Jack wandered through the stories of beginnings.
X X X
Hebi clicked her mandibles, considering the game. Chess was Lin's game, she preferred Risk. But Lin had actually won the coin toss fairly. She moved the back bishop, still clicking as the likeness of Daolon Wong moved to change the flavor of the board. Her upper hand opened under the robes to let her look with all her front eyes as Lin actually moved her queen.
"That seems an overreaction," Hebi noted. Lin nodded.
"…"
"What is bothering you?" Hebi demanded.
"Besides you improving at this game?" Lin asked.
"You are dominating this match, and you know it. You came to me today. You can be receptive to company, but I can't recall the last time you actually looked for someone unless you wanted something," Hebi pointed out.
The Fountain of Paco's Triumph was making merry tinkling sounds, the red light of the false sun was pleasantly warm, and even a bit of wind rustled through Hebi's potted plants. Still, Lin's look gave Hebi pause.
Her sister had not changed much in body since the start of the planetary project; her nudism made that easy to tell. But she was withdrawing more, despite them actually having reason to work and discuss matters. The fact that Mother seemed to not disapprove meant it shouldn't be questioned, but-
"A great many things trouble me. Like the fact you have two new arms and your head has shifted again. Are you even exercising your wings?"
"Have you been spying?" Hebi demanded.
"No, merely observing. Very carefully. Despite how you dress, you are not that good at keeping secrets. Mother is the master of that."
Hebi had long since lost the ability to frown, so a slow click pattern with a low hiss was used as a substitute.
Lin carried on in the face of the clicks, "I wish you would not hide yourself. You are unique in how rapidly your body changes. Our brothers seem to have stabilized. And I can't even be sure which is the advantage."
"I do not wish to be a subject for your research. Mother checks on me, that is enough."
"When it comes to life, I am smarter than her, Hebi," Lin said. Hebi reached out with a gloved hand and picked up Lin's king. It cracked and crumbled between her thumb and index finger.
"Go," Hebi said.
"Very well. But things are changing, and will only do more so when Hong Sisco is complete. Understanding how they change will be vital," Lin said, shrugging.
Hebi stayed seated, but sensed Lin out until she was quite gone. Then she shrugged her robes off with an ease that would surprise her arrogant sister, and stretched all her limbs. She then scuttled over to check on how well her plants were doing outside the domes.
X X X
Shen stood, legs spread, stance loose in the thigh-high growth of the crimson field. Wind rippled the plants and the distant pools of black surfaces.
Eyes snapping open, he dashed forward as tendrils shot up from the ground. Turning around he sprinted, his hands nearly blurred out as he struck the tendrils trying to ensnare him, sending them back.
Yade emerged trough the shredding soil, carving the ground in her wake as she closed the distance…
Later:
"Ooof!" Yade cried out as the fist practically popped one of her breasts. The follow up kick took her in the side and sent her crashing into the asteroid. Pulling herself from the stone with her tendrils, Yade looked to her son with shock. For his part, he fell into a stance.
"That's enough for today, Shen," she said, rubbing where he had struck her with her hands. He frowned for a moment, but then bowed, making the seal of reconciliation. Yade returned the gesture twice over, and watched him fly back to the palace through the void.
Frowning as her body healed, Yade inspected the impact she had made on the asteroid. She had made a habit of letting her son connect at times. With his siblings so uninterested in the martial arts, or battle in general, he needed an outlet. While she herself would hate being pitied, it was not like he had any hope of actually beating her.
Or so she had thought. True, it was strictly physical combat with no magic, but he had been able to penetrate her defense. A defense with her armored tail, four arms and tendrils, and with mostly human preparations she had gotten through.
It had been a long time since they last sparred, she realized. This battle of… a week, had been a massive growth from him. His endurance surpassed Hebi, and her physiology was superior to his, from her analysis. And those two blows — he had struck her earlier in the match, but those last two had actually hurt her. That Domino guy weakening her and powering up had not been able to do that.
Her children could be powerful, but she had too much of a head start to ever be surpassed by them, Yade had thought as much. But Shen… he, like the rest, was not even 500, and yet had managed to hurt her. Was it because of the Sun Soul magic? She had not sensed something like that. He strengthened himself with shadow rather than wielding it like a wizard in his style.
Of course, had she fought seriously, he would never have been able to lay a hand on her, or penetrate the armor she could envelope herself in. This was her holding back, being caught off guard.
Which was no excuse, she thought, slithering up atop the asteroid to go over the field of raw material she had created.
It didn't matter, she decided. If her children surpassed her predictions, that would only mean this new universe would be formed quicker, and even better than she expected. And that her progeny plan needed to be implemented.
A mother had to be ready to protect her children even from themselves, after all.
X X X
Apparently, after making a star, a planet was less of a deal. Oh, sure, it was manipulating massive amounts of energy and matter, both the asteroids and such made for the occasions, and other stuff. Her children magically linked up to guide their parts in the design, and adding their own power to the process.
So really, a bit humdrum when it came down to it.
And the moon too. Yes, Shen had at some point insisted a moon was vitally important. Still, it was not going ti be white; Yade was insistent on a green moon. You never saw green moons, and this would be a trendsetter of a moon.
The core was the big problem. The planet was not properly self-sustaining, and its core would need a jump every thousand years or so. Short of Yade throwing herself into the core, she did not have the ability to make something that magical to supply the power demanded. After all, it was not like her planets would just be wet rocks coated in gas. The Shadow Universe had standards that she had written.
And now they had to wait for the thing to cool enough to start the final sculpting.
X X X
It was not necessary to be this close. For her children, it would be dangerous to enter this atmosphere that would kill a human before they had a chance to be poisoned.
She could have done this in upper orbit with the children arrayed as they were, guiding the still volatile "clay" in strokes broad and medium. They were anchored to their positions by necessity, but Yade the center moved where she did, her part flexible, both receiving and sending the knowledge as the surface of the planet took shape in real time. This was micromanaging. It was not necessary in and of itself, it only served to guarantee this semi-arid world would indeed have the four "civilization zones", as Lin had so poorly dubbed them. Yade called them Gardens.
Settling her tail and then laying full length on the searing ground, she imagined both a strip of bacon on the pan, and the beaches of Earth. Grasping the ground with her every limb, she felt its movements, its chaos giving way to order and the great magic that fueled it and now was channeling it. Channeling, yes, not true control. That was what she could provide.
She breathed, and even as her lungs were ravaged and rebuilt by the effort, she actively forced this atmosphere into her blood. More than bellows for talking and other such things, they functioned truly for the first time in so long, pumping gasses that she doubted any mortal life could endure into her.
It hurt. Enough to make her weep as she pulled her upper body up and gathered her coils. Her eye was steady and strong, but her blue flesh peeled away, and new skin grew in as the birth pains of the planet attacked her inside and out.
She was glad to be alone for this but still connected.
Shadow came to her from all around, answering her body's need for new mass as she let the planet bite back. Because this was no palace, this was no fortress. This was no theft of worlds.
Jade Chan the Shadow Queen had sat in the windy void of gasses surrounded by serpents. Her clothes had become ragged already, torn by Tohru's final hex to expose her belly. The black and blue cloak was shreds, and the gi little better. Her long black hair whipped in the wind, only to settle. An unwelcome distraction but one not worth addressing.
She was the shadows. Yes, that was what Tohru had in essence invoked, wasn't it? That she had more of that power in her than anything else, beyond what even an elemental should have and still be able to think.
Clasping her hands, she abandoned spells and forms. She threw her will, her desire, her passion for everything that could be thrown across her mind for motive. To make the shadow take form.
Sweating across her form, she took a deep breath and tactically swallowed it, pouring that primordial act into it as well. Several spikes of shadow erupted from her body. Further damaging her clothes and staggering.
She cried out in pain, hands coming apart. The snakes drew near, in curiosity. Perhaps wondering if she was food now. Still hugging herself, she hissed out a warning that sent them back. Opening her eyes, she blinked away tears and tore a hand from her shoulder to brush away her hair.
Thin, little more than a porous wafer, but the black mass floated before her. With her free hand, she reached out and plucked it before the wind could take it. Flaky, a bit jagged to the touch.
But it was real, she had found how. It would grow easier, and she smiled even as a gust of wind snapped it in-between her thumb and index finger.
Yade roared to the sky, the maelstrom clearing to let her glimpse the red sky that would enshroud this world. She had forgotten details of that moment. Hidden away in the dust that coated so much of her memories, but still there, waiting. She had been so young, so small, and so simple in her body. Such petty motivation, to match her petty form and excuses for achievement.
This would be the beach of an ocean. To the north, the greatest river this planet would boast would flow into it. From distant mountains and in mimicry of the Nile, it would cleave the arid and semi-arid land with abundance before reaching the fertile coastlands. Water could not cover the majority of this world. Its seas would be lakes of prodigious size, but the desert and the mountains would dominate this world. These places of moisture would be the nests. The river was the Great Paco, the sea El Toro.
And this spot, she realized, was unplanned.
Rather than the foundation for the sandy beach, it was white crystal beneath her. No, that was flakes; using her tail to brush it, she saw it was transparent with white spiral running through it. Downward. Like her coil?
Then she noticed her tail. It was thicker, and pitch black. As was her hand, make that hands. A quick inspection showed her upper body had lost its fleshy covering. It was all coated in black scales, some areas like her breasts very fine scales, but even so. Tendrils, smooth, glistening even. Not black, but a sort of deep blue. They felt very nice and looked a bit… rubbery?
Taking a deep breath and tasting the air like a fine bouquet, she rose from the land transformed by her transformation, and flew low and quick to the next ocean.
X X X
Yade loved the feeling of her tail in the sand of the beach. The sensation of the waves breaking against the fore tail and washing over the rear sections. A light rain was falling on her but the horizon was clear, the dark sky gaining a red hue, showing the water stretching out of sight. She had sand in the wave pool she had built in the Palace, but this felt so different.
Turning her head, she looked over the children. The first sporing was done and the planet settled, and this beach was the first place for them to alight on Hong Sisco. Her family had come home.
Hebi was interested in the water, going down on one knee just beyond the tideline. She didn't mind sand soiling her newest robe, but had quickly shown she still hated them getting wet. A particularly robust wave saw foam almost reach her. With a startled hiss, her wings slipped out through the robes and carried her up into the air in a purple blur. She landed a few feet up and huffed, dusting her knees off and walking stiffly as she aways did when embarrassed.
Shen chuckled at Hebi's actions, but was standing on a rock at the sand's edge, looking over everything with an appreciative eye. Yade was pleased as he closed his eyes and spread his arms; shirtless as usual, he let the wind rush over him.
Lin was still tapping on and inspecting that crystal Yade had made by accident. That girl, so fixated on one thing she was missing the whole. As her nude daughter uncurled her forked tongue to take a long lick of the crystal, Yade decided enough was enough.
Slithering past where Jack and Hebi discussed seashell prospects for the future, Yade reached Lin and slipped one of her lower arms under the inquisitive girl's belly.
"Hey!" Lin shouted.
"I told you," Jack laughed. Even Hebi put a covered hand to where her mouth probably was as Yade carried the squirming Lin over to them.
Setting a fuming Lin upright, Yade looked to Shen and gestured with a tendril for him to come over. He leapt, and the force of his landing sent up a cloud of sand. That had the others spitting and complaining. Yade wiped her eye clear of the gray grains with a tendril and forced her tail into a coil around all of them.
"Sunrise," she whispered. Bless them, she thought as they quieted down. The family stood there together on the beach, watching the red sun rise over this new world.
X X X
Lin had returned to the Palace to rest, as Mother ordered. They had "seeded" the planet with life now that the surface was calm enough for the oceans to form.
Inspiring sights. Mother had invited them all down to the surface to look over the new world from the shoreline where she had first descended. Lin had a small chance to inspect the pure crystal Mother had created. Larger than the later ones by far, unlike any matter she had seen in the Palace and Mother's notes. It irked her that Mother was more interested in watching a sunrise — "A real sunrise!" as the ancient put it — than learning about something new.
Lin walked through her lab and pulled out an unremarkable looking file from her logistic cabinet. Contrary to many of Mother's stories, she had decided the best hiding places were in plain sight.
She had yet to fully update Mother's profile. She had returned from the surface that first time fully armored, approximately 10% larger, with cosmetically different tendrils, and frankly fatter. Apparently the thickness and possibly additional size was to better protect her organs.
Mother had allowed her some inspection, including slicing her side along a nice long seam to be seen. The new layer wasn't fat at all. More like foam with air bubbles to insulate her interior from heat intensity, just as her scales would guard against acids like she had encountered. And all of it done so quickly, and without proper guidance.
Mother was a true horror when you got down to it, Lin concluded, putting the file back. The power levels and potentials she had assigned to her and her siblings was a system that failed on Mother. Because she could not properly isolate Mother's energy from the Shadow Netherworld itself. She was constantly and intimately connected with the very world around her. Lin's theories included the proposal that in essence, Yade Khan was essentially the mind or brain of this universe, with all its matter her body. Considering her own personal matter was of this universe, that was a disturbing thought.
Beyond theory into fact, she could no longer hope to surpass their mother. It was not impossible, but Mother exceeded expectations whenever pressed to act, Lin admitted, sitting down on a chair and curling her tail around the back to rest against it.
She did not need to reread the file for her siblings, thinking of it as she looked over the portraits of them hung on the wall amidst notes, charts, and doodles of historic food she wished was available for her to eat.
Hebi, who probably wore those robes for a sense of control as her flesh was prone to rapid change. Whether it could be controlled was unknown — apparently it had not occurred to Mother that Hebi might prefer to not let her body "develop naturally". Lin's body had morphic potential which she had been making use of, but it was a torch next to the great bonfire of biological possibility her sister had.
Shen had been a surprise. Her brother's preference for physical pursuit over study had made her underestimate him. What use was a warrior in a time and place where there was no war?
But he was special. His body was not adaptive, it seemed to have settled, locked even. Instead he was developing energy conduction. As of now, he only really used it in spells as directed and to enhance his physical prowess, but since the project started, the increase had been nearly exponential. He may never transform or manipulate biomass as the rest could, but she could easily see the day where he could shatter anything they built with a single blow. Perhaps even challenge Mother?
He was a fine prospect, and she would need to reach out to him. When the day came that their desires diverged from Mother's, it would be vital he was not loyal.
As for Jack, he was noting special.
Lin pulled the lever on her chair and leaned back into lying down.
X X X
Hong Sisco was beginning to bloom, Yade noted, looking over the sphere suspended in her personal lab. It was not floating; a rod held it aloft as it turned on its axis. The rod connected to the array on top of this structure, which let her view the planet on a large scale in real time.
The picture was changing, the mountain snows and red plains of sun-baked dirt and grey sands alongside the black waters of sea and river; colors were emerging. Plants of blue, purple, white and green. And red flowers. And, well, a great deal of awesome stuff.
And not just plants. Animals of all stripes. A few small mammals. Bugs and arachnids came bigger and more meaty than Earth. Plenty of awesome reptiles as well, especially for the waters. Yade was so proud of the krakens that Hebi had made to be the apex predator of the sea. Yeah, many a mortal ship would fall victim to those handsome fellas. But the Sroows packs would make sure they didn't get too numerous. And some lovely tree-dwelling cats for the great forest that was developing quite nicely. All in all, a healthy biosphere that had only required six or so desperate interventions to make sure. Who knew beetles could be so much trouble?
But now, it was time to get mortals up and running.
Slithering over to the row of decanters large enough to fit an older child in, she grabbed the one furthest to the left with her tendrils and unscrewed it. Taking in in her upper hands, her tendrils probed the inside and outside looking for any flaws in the transparent material, and lighting up all the spells meticulously scrawled out. A book's worth of spells, including several texts in noxious golden glow.
Ugh, sometimes she really hated Sun Soul magic being vital to creating new life. But the fact was, with the exception of herself and the long-banished serpents of the void, at least a trickle of that "paternal" energy ran through all life in the Shadow Universe. Her efforts at "pure" shadow beings or purifying existing ones all ended in stillbirth or… death that was relieving for even her as an observer.
Hebi had made this. Yade had designed it, but she could not work with Sun Soul magic this delicately at that level. It was like, well, staring into a sun. She closed her eye, still able to feel that ghost cleaving her. Putting the decanter back in place, she slumped on herself. Rubbing her eye, she wondered how that world had turned out.
Was that why she was getting glum? She had been inspecting the Himinion river valley. That was going to be able to support a city-state, likely a very agricultural one with no 'major' mineral deposits. She smiled at the thought of it being flanked by rice paddies, and the emergent city standing watch over the fields and the towns likely to radiate into the pads and down into the marshlands that swallowed the river into a unique water plain rather than an ocean.
Boaz, that would be her commanded name for the city. Had she done well by him? She once would have said yes, but now? She had been not quite a mother to him, but definitely a lover. And goddess too. it had not really been healthy for her. Unsurprising, as she had been very off-kilter in general. Still clinging to the forms and patterns of her mortal existence, flipped to darkness. But still, had she ruined him for all the success he had achieved?
She had done better with her blood children. But she was about to be a goddess again. She needed to be a better goddess to the new mortals than she had been to the humans.
X X X
Jack rubbed at his arms through the sleeve of his suit, frowning at it as he walked out of the new Mortal Dome.
"Oh please, even you can't have failed to heal from that," Lin chuckled. Jack frowned; his siblings were gathered around the red tile-paved road that connected this dome to the wider Palace complex. The reeds had been cut back around the dome, stakes laid for future structures.
"It's not the flesh, and you know it. Or can you simply shrug off losing pure life essence?" he asked them in general.
Shen frowned, as if he was genuinely confused at the question. His brother was enough of a powerhouse maybe he didn't feel it keenly. A less than comforting thought, even as Jack was pleased at the notion of Shen being stronger than Lin, whose cocky smile all but admitted she was blowing it from another.
"It was quite unpleasant. But Mother had no choice, as we can't have children of our own," Hebi remarked. She had turned away to look to the horizon. The planet filled much of it, an odd sight in the daylight provided by the Palace's own sun.
Mother said she would be putting that to new use once the Palace landed. Jack had prepared the landing site himself. All was ready; the Netherworld Palace complex would become a plateau removed yet roughly equidistant from the five cradles of civilization to come. Not a city-state, but a sacred land Mother described the mortals as making pilgrimages to and a way stop for commerce between the civilizations.
Hands resting on his shoulder while she extracted his essence, she had spun visions with words. Visions of this place crowded and bustling wth students and teachers, song and prayer. And the plains splashed with the colors and bustle of a great bazaar fit to have sprung from an old story.
She was making mortals. It wasn't just a hope for the future to meet new people, it was fact. Mother might have trouble, but he had no doubt she would succeed in time. Surely as the day to follow night, this world which he had known only for five would be one of multitudes.
'It's always excited me, the thought of life, like from the stories. But here we are on the brink, and I fear what they will bring,' Jack thought. What would it really be like? Would it be like he thought, relief from the tedium and finite nature of company and knowledge? Or would he find it insufferably loud and crowded, and long for the times when it was only him and his?
He chose not to share these thoughts, standing there with his family, Mother's happy singing reaching them from the door cracked open.
X X X
Yade looked over the decanters, and the vast chambers she had to work with. The old lab had everything she had needed, but this was a momentous occasion. She would not have it be said that she created this new race amongst clutter. The birthplace of her mortals was a place of beauty and function, the walls adorned with stylized depictions of Hong Sisco, with the dome's apex holding an aerial view of the Grand Palace with images of the children at the compass points. No depictions of Yade Khan, though. After all, the real thing was here to bear witness.
Jotting down some notes with a tendril tip, she stashed the notebook in the pouch and returned to studying the contents of the decanters. The potions within held suspended masses. Each formed from combining the essences of her children combined into a whole. Her grandchildren would be descendants of them all, but mortal. Which seemed for the best; the trend seemed to be for the mix to dilute power. Instead of demigod plus demigod equalling demigod, the fusion seemed to err toward mortal.
Well, save number 7. That one had significantly declined in power levels, but still stabilized far above what she had termed the 'mortal threshold'.
Science might make her play that one out. See what was the cause. But she was no scientist. She was an artist, and her vision did not call for a larger pantheon. Resting one hand on the decanter, she sent a charge through the potion. The biomass dispersed. Not dead, as it was hardly alive at this point to begin with, in her reckoning. Merely clay that had been wanting.
This was too important for errant wanderings or needless innovation to be indulged. After all, she hadn't gone to the trouble of sterilizing her children to let sentient life get out of hand from the start.
She was so close, she thought, leaning close to one of the containers, seeing her eye and muzzle reflected in it. Too close to be thwarted from her perfect world coming to be with rogue factors.
X X X
The Mortal Dome was much as Lin remembered it. Though the decanters were now empty and scrubbed pristinely clean. Lin wondered if Mother cleaned with magic or actually scrubbed the containers or floor. Her own personal spaces, she had taken to magic for broad strokes and the physical for detail work.
The other change, in the center of the dome at the middle of a new elegant geometric design of red, blue, and black, was an altar. A workspace of an altar, surrounded on three sides by tables covered in note books and slabs.
Mother was wrapped around the base of the altar, rearing over the opposite side from them beckoning them closer.
Typical Mother drama, Lin noted.
When she and her siblings reached the altar, though, she smiled wide.
Two grey, ovular eggs, large enough to be held in two hands, rested atop grey sand. Leaning closer while the others marveled, Lin noted grains of sand sticking to the leathery-looking surface of the eggs. So they had been buried at some point?
"Behold, the Neukhan! These eggs hold the first female and male of the mortal race that shall inhabit Hong Sisco. The blueprints have bee planned. I even added a significant occurrence of asexuality to keep population growth more stable than humans. Hopefully that will make sustainable living in the Gardens easier to strike. Naturally, I will make more eggs. But these two are the first. Oh, also, they are not pure reptiles. When they come out of the eggs, they will need to be nursed."
"Why?" Lin asked. Mother gave a nod to Hebi, who picked one of the eggs up, before turning to Lin.
"Well, amongst other issues, I want to ensure family structure, and the milk bond between mother and children is one key I am using for that."
"How long until they hatch?" Shen asked.
The egg Hebi was holding cracked. They couldn't hear it, but they all went quiet.
"Right about now. That is why I called you all in!" Mother laughed merrily, holding the other cracking egg up in the palm of one of her large hands.
"Ohh crap," Jack muttered.
"Jack! Watch your language in front of children!" Mother snapped, while Lin pressed her fingertips against her forehead.
Author's Note: And so we meet the Khan family! And you get to see how much or little Yade's mental state has improved in her maternal role; and her ambitions for herself and her family.
I actually intended this to run longer but I realized the rise of the Neukhan warrants its own chapter distinct from the era when Yade and her children were living alone.
Oddly enough the Age after the Fourth Age the Age of Dreams is already done. But I am not sure how long bridging the gap will take.
So in addition to working on the next chapter here I am going to be feeling out "Dragon and Horse" and "Queen of All Oni's" next chapters. I plan to work on them all, but whichever comes easier will probably be the 'top priority' for the next update.