Weekly Drabble #244: All that Remains (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'genetic ark' from Arthur, as told by the other side of the refuge. Enjoy!

~

All That Remains:

“Coooome ooooonn,” Lissie wheedled to her brother. “Let’s goooooooo.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Calvit said as he rumbled out of bed, his dark hair mussed and eyes still blinking. “I was hoping you’d forgotten about it.”

“No way! You promised when Mom and Dad are away these couple days we’d go see the Umai. You proooomiiiised.”

“How are you only a year younger than me and this immature?”

Lissie’s long, scaled tail whipped back and forth excitedly, then thumped against the floor. “I’m not immature,” she scolded her older brother.

“Really? Because you do a very good impression of it.”

Lissie’s response was an obscene gesture that she would have been house-bound for a week if her parents had seen it. Calvit only laughed. “All right, fine. You win. We’ll go. But you have to promise to be careful. This isn’t going to be like any ordinary hike, all right? They’re dangerous.”

Dropping the bratty, begging air, Lissie nodded seriously. “I know. I’ll careful, I promise. We won’t do anything stupid.”

“We’re already doing something stupid.”

“Stupider.”

Calvit sighed. “Yeah, stupider. Okay. How’s about you get out of my room and let me get dressed? While I’m doing that, you can double-check all the gear. After breakfast, we’ll head out.”

Lissie practically skipped back out the door. She’d been waiting months for this opportunity and now that it was here, she almost couldn’t wait.

~

“They’re so weird,” Lissie said as she peered through the telescope her brother handed to her, whispering spell-words to zoom in and focus on their world’s new arrivals. Well, relatively new. “What do you think they’re doing?”

It had taken them a day’s travel to reach the Umai, Lissie and Calvit spending the night camping in the jungle before approaching the settlement at dawn. It was like a huge, rotten geometric blister on the face of the world; tall grey walls jutted towards the sky, the jungle clear-cut for miles all around. Farmland surrounded the settlement, along with smaller clusters of homes and buildings, while six bulbous domes extended from the central keep, connected to it by sealed above-ground tunnels.

“Maybe they’re not doing anything,” Calvit told her.

Lissie frowned as she caught an Umai female, the woman walking with a young boy along one of the foot paths that encirled the fields and outer perimeter of their home. She was holding his hand, talking to him as she pointed at something along the horizon. “I don’t believe that,” she replied.

“Sanjed says it, and his father is on the Furtherance of Knowledge board,” Calvit said. “He says they’re not really people, just animals.”

“Animals don’t build all that,” Lissie said with a wave towards the sprawling settlement.

“Fritter-flies build colonies. Kappel create dams.”

“You find me a fritter-fly colony anywhere close to this and maybe I’ll accept that,” she told Calvit. “Besides, you know that’s not true. Sanjed’s father is a stupid twit who doesn’t believe in anything that hasn’t already been written down. If it were up to him, they’d rename it the Unfurtherance of Knowledge board.” That was a bit of exaggeration, but Sanjed’s father was very traditional and conservative in his views. He was very well-educated on matters of history, but he was known for dismissing new information in favour of looking into the past for it. He believed that there was nothing that his people could learn from the Umai that hadn’t already been known. Even knowledge of the newcomers themselves would be found in the right archive or forgotten text.

The Aylin had lost so much of what they were and had been. It was a struggle – often a very real one – to recover anything from their history. In Lissie’s opinion, too many people kept looking for answers and solutions in that past, trying to uncover what their ancestors had done or known rather than learning it for themselves, struggling to reclaim old glories instead of creating new ones. Some people agreed with her, but a lot of the other Aylin just shook their head whenever her idealism came up. Her people lived for centuries, and at twenty-two, she was still a child.During the height of their civilization, it was said that the Aylin had lived even longer than that, so those most concerned with the past had even more reason to dismiss her.

“But they don’t have magic,” Calvit protested weakly. “Only animals can’t cast spells.”

Lissie bit her lip. Calvit was right. Across the width and breadth of Horizon (well, actually, the planet’s name was ‘From-the-horizon of-the-rising-sun-to-the-horizon-of-the-setting-sun-and-beyond’, but nobody used the full name outside of formal documents), only the Aylin had been born with an innate ability to bend the world to their will, a trait focused, studied, nurtured and honed over thousands of years. Some animal species could be corrupted by exposure to magic and could wields it to some extent, but none were born with it.

That the Umai had no magic of their own and, indeed, were completely blind to it,was the greatest oddity about them. Not that they had come from the stars, not even that they looked like Aylin with their tails cut off, faces smoothed out and everything about them from their cheeks to their fingers to their pupils rounded off like a child’s toy. It was amazing that they had done so much and advanced so far without even the smallest trace of magic in their blood. They used ‘technology’. Strange mechanical golems and machines built their homes, they watched the breadth of their domain with hovering devices that could see as easily as a Watching Eye and instead of spellfire and storms, they had devices that spat metal fragments into their enemies.

Maybe their technology was their magic? It had worked for them so far, but Lissue couldn’t imagine building such things. Aylin mages could lift cities, part seas and open the very firmament itself. Could it even take them to the stars that the Umai had descended from? She didn’t know. No one knew. Some of the more idealistic members of her city were wondering if it were possible to do so with their own abilities, or even if they could pair Umai technology with Aylin magic, a concept that sent the more traditional and past-seeking members of society into apoplexy.

Lissie and Calvit’s town was the closest of the Aylin communities to the Umai; many of the larger cities and prefects looked to them in deciding how to proceed. The Umai had been on Horizon for a decade already, and in that time, they’d come across the Aylin many times. Those encounters weren’t always cordial... and that was putting it mildly. They were dangerous. Quick to frighten and easily provoked.

No one was to go near the Umai without clearing it with the town’s leadership first, a rule that Lissie and Calvit were blatantly ignoring. She’d never seen an Umai before. Not a live one, at least. The Studious had several preserved pieces in his laboratories and, though her father had tried to keep her from it, she’d seen the bodies brought into town after a skirmish between the colonists and Horizon’s own people. Umai skin started with beige and ran through various shades of brown, their doll-like faces and features just as capable of showing fear, hatred or pain as any real person’s was. She wondered what they saw when they looked out on their world.

She’d heard that they had no home, that these Umai were the last of their kind, fleeing some kind of disaster that had claimed the rest of their people. That was why she felt drawn to these strange newcomers. They, too had fallen from what they’d once been. The Aylin knew almost nothing about the collapse of their civilization; did the Umai know what had befallen them? Did they have more than hard-won scraps to remember their former glories, or were they like the Aylin, trying to piece together what they had left?

“Come on,” she said, elbowing Calvit in the ribs. “Let’s get closer.”

“I think we’re close enough already.”

“This is hardly close at all. If I wanted to stare from a long ways away, I’d borrow-”

“-steal-”

“-borrow one of the Skywatcher’s seer stones. Come on. They’ll never even know we were here.”

“And if they do?”

“They won’t. It’s not like we’re going to try and touch them or anything. Just... get close enough to use our own eyes.”

“This is a really bad idea,” Calvit said in a tone that signalled capitulation.

Before Lissie had a chance to argue for why it wasn’t, a branch cracked from nearby. Lissie and Calvit spun around. About ten meters away, two Umai had appeared through the brush, a young boy and his older sister. The two pairs of siblings stared at each other for what seemed like forever, but couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. Then the boy screamed and ran, his sister after him, shouting something into a device in her hand.

Calvit looked over at his sister. “Was that close enough?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’re going.”

“Good idea.”

The pair dashed into the thickening treeline, away from the Umai settlement, running until the wailing of alarms faded down to nothing and all that was left was the calls and songs of morning in the jungle.