Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Aha,” snorted Aughra. “Didn’t cover that part in your little puppet show, did you.”

“We were aiming for concision,” SkekGra protested. “You’ve forgotten how slow this one talks”—to Gurjin’s surprise, the Wanderer made a huge, tranquil nod of agreement when his other half jerked a thumb in his direction—“and the rest seemed like it could wait, considering.”

“That was concision?” exclaimed Rian. Gurjin bit back a chuckle. After all, he’d heard the story of the story, if not the story itself, and lack of concision had been a major theme in both Rian’s and Brea’s telling. Then he cringed, expecting some kind of Lordly tantrum to ensue.

But the Heretic only issued Rian a grumpy squawk and an extremely pointy pointed finger as penalty for the offense. “Well! Let’s see you try to squash over a thousand trine into a shorter presentation!”

“All right, fair enough,” the new-minted Gelfling general conceded with a laugh. “Really, I guess we should thank you both for leaving out…whatever this is going to be?”

The Skeksis waved his taloned hand. “We can keep leaving it out forever if you want, Gelfling. It’s very little to do with your part of the task. Happy to skip it. But—I don’t suppose Mother Aughra is going to let it go now,” he finished grudgingly, glancing back at the ancient Crone. “You don’t usually bring up subjects just to drop them again.”

“She does,” countered Brea. “She teases us with all kinds of things. Cuts one little line out of what we can all see is a big gorgeous book, tosses it out for us to puzzle over, and then shuts the book up tight. Yes you do, Mother Aughra.”

“Knowledge…is…power,” the Wanderer reminded the Heretic mildly. Though he looked somnolent as ever, his throaty voice seemed to rumble all through the barrel of his great Mystic body and down into the very stone the seven of them sat on.

“Yes, and history is pain,” the Skeksis tossed right back.

UrGoh blinked twice at that and elevated his long head. “That’s…usually…my line…”

“Which makes it mine as well!”

Aughra rapped her staff on the floor. “Both of you settle down,” she scolded. “Absurd creature. Are you going to tell them, or aren’t you?”

The pair did, astonishingly, ‘settle down’—in fact, they deflated with disturbing speed. “Do we have a choice?” asked SkekGra, his trumpeting caw fallen to a subdued rattle.

“Always have a choice,” returned the prophetess. “Many choices, most days! But in this case, the choice is simple: talk and add your side of the story to our meal, or stay silent and leave Gelfling to sup on my interpretation alone.”

That last had carried notes of both teasing and threat. The two halves of Rian’s Great Being looked at each other.

“It’s not…so much a…side,” the Wanderer said at last. “We doubt…our tale…will gainsay yours.”

“Perhaps we can fill it out, though,” added the Heretic. “Be warned, there are still some things even we don’t quite remember, for all our trying. But we’ll give you everything we can. If—if you think it useful.”

Aughra narrowed her eye. “‘Useful!’ And since when has a tale needed a use for the Explorer to share it with anyone who doesn’t run away fast enough? —Or the Wanderer, or the Conqueror, for that matter?”

SkekGra gave a little sigh. “You might be surprised. UrSkeks live long lives. There are many stories our—forebear, our former self, never told you. Including a few that we, ah, we really should have.”

UrGoh hummed his accord, gazing down at the floor. “Yes. That we owed you…and yet…withheld. To our eternal regret.”

“We didn’t think there was any other choice,” explained the Heretic. “Or any better choice, let’s say. But that doesn’t—”

“Oh, that one Aughra already knows,” Mother Aughra scoffed. “A good Age old now, that heartbreak. Long past time to trouble yourself over me. It’s these young Gelfling you owe your truths to.”

Now it was the Skeksis who drew his hunched frame almost upright in surprise and—dismay?

“Wait. Stop, turn around. What do you mean, ‘that one’? What one? We haven’t even started!”

“See? She’s doing it again,” Brea put in tartly.

Mother Aughra flapped a long trailing sleeve at the princess, then at the Skeksis and Mystic. “Always the assumptions from you UrSkeks,” she complained. “You think because we never discussed it afterward, Aughra must never have thought about it.”

“Aughra is always thinking about everything,” the Heretic readily allowed. “But there are parts of it that even you simply have no way of knowing. Things that happened galaxies away from here...”

“Ah, but remember that I’ve now seen some of these galaxies,” she interrupted.

Gurjin was quite used to Skeksis looking this stubborn, and Mother Aughra—well, when was she anything but stubborn? But in what little time he’d had to learn of the Wanderer’s ways, he’d never seen anything on that strange, gentle face remotely like the drawn brow and crooking neck the Mystic wore now. For whatever reason, although he didn’t speak, UrGoh was nearly as stung by this as his other half.

“You have not seen our world, I don’t believe you can have,” the Heretic was arguing, and somehow this too was an important point to something somewhere, up among the ancient debris flying over the mere mortals’ heads.

Mother Aughra shook her long wild curls. “I haven’t, no. And now I never may. Yet I understand now that many worlds of the Crystal follow paths very unlike the path of Thra—”

“And we don’t challenge your superior wisdom. Crystal forfend, that’s long since proved. That still doesn’t mean you really know...whatever you think you know of our reasons—”

“I know you did not come to Thra of your own free will,” she said heavily.

Even the air between them stopped moving.

Chapter Text

“...What?” was the Skeksis Lord’s only reply after a minor eternity. Their face was a blank medallion free of stamp, although to Gurjin it looked more like the void of shock than of ignorance.

“Hnh. You heard me, all right,” returned Mother Aughra with a grim chuckle. “Thought I never found out, did you?”

Both halves of the Great Being were silent once more. All at once UrGoh murmured: “Raunip.”

SkekGra stared, then exhaled in weary recognition. “Your son, yes, of course he told you.”

Raunip. Raunip the Trickster, Raunip the Outsider, folk-tale saboteur, tormenter of Podlings and ruiner of Gelfling plans, who once 'accidentally' flooded the plain of Skarith, that Raunip?

Was Aughra’s…son?

The Mother of Thra had a regular, ordinary son? With who, for the Sisters’ sakes?

She chuckled again. “Yes, he told Aughra. Long trine ago, but not before Aughra had learned the truth in her own ways. Don’t look so gobswalloped! Have you forgotten that Aughra is the Crystal, the Crystal is Aughra, and in time nothing can escape its light?”

“Mother Aughra,” Brea began again.

“It’s not my wisdom you lack!” the prophetess admonished her. “Look to this one. Last chance, UrSkek. Admit it, now or never: You came to Thra unwilling. Is this true, or is it not?”

A slight croak dropped out of the Heretic’s beak. They and the Wanderer tilted their heads toward each other, eyes skittering about like cornered Fizzgig. “You—I…”

Aughra merely waited with a knotted hand on one ample hip. What looked like a titanic effort of will took place within the Great Being now; and in the end, all to whisper such a bare handful of words.

“Yes, it’s true,” they said at last, in that eerie unison of theirs. “Gelfling. We came…to your world…as exiles. Convicted…banished, by our own. Covered in shame.” At that last, their thin arms rose like sprouting pipe-reed as though they would literally cover their faces, which were weighted with the most broken expressions Gurjin could remember ever seeing on nonGelfling.

“There. We said it. Does it satisfy Mother Aughra?” asked SkekGra, eyes now squeezed shut.

“Mother Aughra does not demand your torment,” Aughra answered, momentarily far more gentle than her wont, “so satisfy is perhaps a bad word. But she is glad to see UrSkek descend from on high to join us in what is real.”

“On high!” the Heretic cried. “That’s how you think we saw ourselves, what we wished to be? Alone and apart from you, so we could pretend we were better or something?”

“I only knew you didn’t want to be here,” she said, still kindly. “Past that, the rest was a mystery. A mystery you could clear up now, if… if you were finally ready to.”

None of the Gelfling had chimed in on any of this so far. Probably they were all in the same spot as Gurjin himself; he was both staggered by the idea of the Great Being being some kind of—criminal? Did they mean a literal crime, like stealing or murder?—and horrified by the amount of suffering merely bringing it up had seemed to cause in the old Skeksis and Mystic. Honestly, his instinct was to leave it alone, pretend it hadn't happened, move on to some other subject. As ridiculous as that would admittedly be.

“You talk as if it were so simple,” argued SkekGra. “We already told you we don’t remember it all. Why does it matter?”

“Why do you not want to tell it?”

“Well! Well, obviously!”

“History is pain,” repeated UrGoh mournfully.

“And knowledge is power,” Brea echoed, though in a more bittersweet tone. “You've always said so, not just today.”

“They may have a point though,” said Rian—as reluctant to enter the whole discussion as he sounded. “Does this actually bear on our purpose?”

“Course it does!” Aughra barked back. “Don’t you know, even what is not remembered affects all that comes after? You face what you face because of what once crumpled their faces in agony. Even now, Skeksis know not all the reasons for what they do, because they’ve forgotten them. —Or choose not to remember, more like. But if we, on our side, can know what they forgot, we can know what they'll do even before they can wonder why they’re doing it! Above all,” she added darkly, “we will understand why they drain the Gelfling.”

She gazed at the Great Being, who both looked ready to jump up and do something rash: “You believe this. We already know you agree with Aughra, or you never would have done what you did with that silly Glaive business. Why then do you defy the Mother of Thra?”

“Don’t tell us what we believe!” shrilled the Skeksis. “We’re mad, not stupid! We know what we said!”

“Are you sure? Do you remember? Or is it another thing to disappear into the hole when it suits you?”

All that greeted this was a sort of yelp, and the spectacle of both halves seeming to actually quiver with wordless rage now.

Princess Brea got up, the picture of calm, and walked across the grounds to meet them where they sat. As she approached, Gurjin noticed their long heads descend toward her level, such that when she arrived they weren’t far from touching nose-tips. (Beak-tip, in the Heretic’s case.) The Drenchen lieutenant nearly felt sorry for SkekGra, even knowing all the Skeksis had done. Poor old bird.

She took up a huge, withered hand from each of them, which they startlingly allowed, and bent her head over them almost prayerfully for a moment, eyes closed.

“Grandfathers…” she said as she looked back up to them, “…please don’t be afraid. It’s all right. You can tell us! And we’ll love you just the same afterward, I promise.”

We will? wondered Gurjin. Whence came this sudden soft talk? He knew that Brea had been growing a bit close with the Wanderer and especially the Heretic of late; and yes, true, people had begun to call them Grandfather SkekGra and Grandfather UrGoh, especially after they’d made those fruiting-season toys for the children of the camp and somehow turned the tide merry under extremely trying conditions. Still, this was a wild leap into new and undreamedof lands.

“You always say that,” the Heretic protested.

She gave them her sunniest smile. “Well? And have I been wrong yet?” “Not…” began the Skeksis dubiously; “…yet,” finished the Mystic.

“Then trust me,” she urged them. Their shoulders slumped in quiet defeat.

“Very well,” were their next words, spoken again in tandem. “What would you have us tell?”

Brea simply clasped each of their hands in turn, warmly, and returned in silence to her seat. Everyone goggled after her as though she’d just pulled off a conjuring trick.

“And is that what the halves of GraGoh so fear?” Aughra marveled, with a note of likewisesurprising sourness. “Loss of Gelfling love?” (And Podling, Gurjin noted to himself dryly, but even the great Mother often seems to miss them out.) “What about the love of Aughra?

You never worried about that overmuch.”

SkekGra blinked at her as if through suns-glare, and returned a bit carefully: “Did Aughra… love us? I truly apologize, but I, but we…we can’t exactly recall.”

“Hmph.” She shifted backwards in her seat, rising minutely on her staff to do it. “Fair enough. Truth is, the Explorer always did annoy Aughra. Always full of questions, questions. Too many questions. And too cagey to answer any completely themselves—just like the others.”

“Well, then.”

“Fair, I said.”

Gurjin felt even sorrier for the ancient pair at this, even though they answered her back with the same careless tones she was so fond of in her own music.

“Well,” said Rian. He sounded if anything even less eager than before, but forged on regardless. “If this is important to the Skeksis…whether they still know it or not…then I suppose…”

“Spit it out,” grumbled the Heretic. “Don’t be an UrGoh.”

“Then I suppose,” he continued in a slightly raised voice, “the first question would be what you were tried for and convicted of…and why the punishment was that you come here. I don’t think our world is so bad that it should have to serve as anyone’s prison—”

“My son said that,” murmured Mother Aughra.

“—And I don’t want to just assume about what happened, especially not on another world. I

think we need to hear out your side of the story completely before we judge.”

“Of course,” said Naia a bit guardedly, as though offended he’d think anyone felt differently.

“Let’s,” was Seladon’s terse agreement when the General glanced at her. The All-Maudra rearranged the serene drape of her robe, a thing she always did when visibly settling down for the duration in a hearing.

“Well, then,” Kylan finally spoke up. “What was it? The charge?”

Again the restless, Fizzgigging glances. Whatever the accusation had been, clearly both Skeksis and Mystic regarded it as a dire one, because they refused to meet anyone’s eyes, not even those of Brea—which, now that she wasn’t their focus anymore, did carry a quietly greedy gleam as she sat and awaited enlightenment.

Their answer came out as though on a dying breath. “…Heresy.”

Chapter Text

“Heresy?” That word piqued Brea’s interest even further, and Gurjin was relieved to hear her voice full of fellow-feeling, not disdain. “You mean that you—questioned your rulers, the way we questioned the Skeksis? Said things they didn’t want said?”

Both halves of GraGoh looked completely dumbfounded at that. “Oh good suns, no,” the Heretic chirruped hastily, though Gurjin noticed that the Skeksis’ manner had changed since he and the Mystic had joined hands at conversation's beginning: it was not just quieter and slower now, but less…pushed forward in the mouth, or something. He almost—almost—sounded like another person. “No, nothing like…heh, like what you did to Skeksis, which I cheerfully admit we earned a hundred times over. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that we saw something they didn’t want seen, and I promise I’ll explain that remark. But to answer you, Princess, no. We never set out to defy them. That would never even have entered our minds.”

Beside him, Gurjin sensed Rian stirring. He had an immediate sense that he should know and maybe on some level did already know exactly what his best friend was thinking, even though for several frustrating moments it remained a nameless cloud of gathering instinct. Then it suddenly broke on him. Saw something they didn’t want seen. And he felt stupid, blushing greenly among the gathering and hoping none would notice.

The Skeksis chuckled wanly before continuing. "No, we didn’t want to take away from the Eldest’s wisdom or their ways. We wanted to add wisdom to the whole world, add science, add more…compassionate paths for everyone. We, I mean GraGoh, I never dreamt that could be a threat to anything. Maybe some of us did? Maybe our Master had some idea. One or two of the others, perhaps. I honestly thought—ha!” He shook his head in wonderment. “Well. How naïve can one get…”

“I thought we were keeping it—for a sort of surprise,” the Wanderer said with a doleful smile, gracefully taking up the thread their other half had dropped. Their speech was changing too: still deep, but less interminably slow. “Waiting until we were sure we had it right before revealing it to the UrSkek, and that was why all the secrecy. No, we didn’t see the danger. And we make no excuses for that. In hindsight, for such an eager investigator, there were signs we chose not to investigate. Things we must have preferred not to know. But bear in mind, we were very young…and we had barely arrived on our world. That was probably some of our trouble.”

“Your Homeworld exiled a child?” Naia interjected in frank horror.

“Hm?” UrGoh lifted his sleepy amber-yellow eyes in the other Drenchen’s direction. “Child..?”

“Oh no, we misspoke there,” exclaimed SkekGra—again, as though the words had just fallen out of his own beak, and not the Mystic’s spiral-wrinkled snout. “Sorry. There are no UrSkek children. Not as Gelfling or Podlings or…even as Arathim have them. We are not born, we Awaken. We come to ourselves, we realize our own existence, at our—full and complete size, you could say. At our whole intellect. All we lack at the beginning is experience.” He shook his head. “Alas, as we’ve discovered, that can be a dire lack.”

Mother Aughra nodded sagely. “So, you Awaken as Aughra did.”

The Heretic was taken aback at that. “Well—perhaps, perhaps it’s something like how you came into being. I hadn’t thought about it…”

“That’s no surprise to Aughra,” she nodded even more sagely. “Arrogant UrSkek.”

Neither SkekGra nor UrGoh seemed quite as devastatingly cut by those words as Gurjin would have been, had the Mother of all Thra lobbed them at him; still, he pitied their obvious abashment. “But you did still say you were young?” he piped up. “That you were new to the world. Surely your rulers could have had pity for that, unless—unless they were like the Skeksis?”

“We were new to our world, our true world. Meaning Homeworld,” the Heretic clarified. “We hadn’t Awakened there, and we’d never journeyed there before. You see, there are many worlds of the Crystal that host a group of our kind. There have to be.”

“’Have’ to be,” was Aughra’s laconic remark.

Brea tsked. “You’re doing it again, Mother Aughra.”

“Might we—I need to—never mind. Fine.” SkekGra massaged the arch of his beak. It was still a strangely un-Skeksislike sort of indignation, more fluting than hissing and more concerned than angry. But a tiny frustrated edge was beginning to make itself felt again as he spluttered onward. “There are many such worlds with such UrSkek groups. Whether Mother Aughra approves or not. It’s because Homeworld is such a—”

His eyes widened and traced over floor and sky, as though a poison flit had tried to bite him and he meant to spot it before it could try again, but the roving gaze ultimately landed on his other half. “A thing with the things, come on UrGoh, help me.”

“Low-degree, high-weight node,” snuffled the Mystic. “…Does that help?”

“Clears everything up,” Rian assured them. “Keep going.”

The Skeksis now fixed his gimlet eye on Rian, clearly debating whether to pretend to believe him or not. He cleared his throat with fresh determination. “We can do better. Homeworld’s like…like a little village out in the middle of nowhere. Except we’re actually more like a big capital city. But a big capital city that only has a couple of little roads connecting it to the other towns in the land, do you understand me?”

As he relayed this, the Heretic moved one claw hither and yon on some imaginary map that hung between him and his audience, and though he spoke of “little” roads, that claw was swooping rather crazily about. Not long ago, Gurjin would have have assumed that was just the Heretic (and the Wanderer), well, being crazy. Now he realized there probably was a vast star-map in the ancient being’s head, and these wild zigzags might not be that far off from an accurate plot. It wasn’t the Skeksis who was mad. Or, not only the Skeksis who was mad. The Uni-verse itself was pretty crazy, too.

“And now, make it so each of these little roads has all these little villages that they run through,” SkekGra continued, now stabbing the claw into lots of imaginary dots. “If something happens to shut the road down at any of those little villages, you’ve just stopped half the traffic to and from the big city. And that’s a disaster. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Brea.

“Depends,” said Kylan.

“I don’t know, could be a nice break in the colder seasons,” said Gurjin.

“Let’s proceed with ‘yes,’” the Heretic ruled, in relatively good humor given the circumstances. Though he did aim a brief heavy-lidded glance in Aughra’s direction along with the comment, “You’re still convinced this is useful? At any rate. GraGoh Awakened on a little world that was sort of branched out all by itself—off of one of those little roads, I mean. There was a colony of us there who mostly attended to…to keeping the paths clear, so to speak. All up and down the line. Seeing to anything that could stop the traffic, block Homeworld’s access to those Crystals.”

“Sounds like important work,” Naia acknowledged. Gurjin could tell his sister wasn’t convinced of the utility of this either, and now hoped to push on toward the summary, but at least her tone was amiable. She could be diplomatic about such things when she wanted.

“Yes, and tricky as picking pommerfruit from a mullip roost,” lamented SkekGra, sounding again for just a moment like the fellow native Thraling that Drenchen had always taken the Skeksis to be. “Dangerous, even, because sometimes paths will spontaneously shift and make some other set of connections, and what used to be perfectly traversable suddenly becomes a dead end. It took a number of us to keep up. That’s why, little as it was, our first world did have a…a.” He suddenly frowned, wispy eyebrows cocking to a steep angle, and turned to UrGoh once more. “I don’t know. Does that suit?”

The Mystic was tending to his pipe again—with two hands this time, since the third still held SkekGra’s—scraping ash out of the bowl with a tiny knife before refilling it from a soft leather pouch. “What? Cradle?”

“Yes, Cradle.”

“Cradles are for children. As you said, we were never a child.”

“I can’t think of anything else. Seedbed? Trumpet?[*] They sort of spiral up like a trumpet, and we come out to music.”

“Incomplete, and also terrible, metaphor.”

“Which one?”

“Both of them.”

“But now I really can’t think of anything else!”

UrGoh shrugged all four shoulders in a deep, wavelike roll, then sent his remaining hand to fetch the lamp from the stone step behind his head to relight his pipe with. “Then Trumpet must do.”

“Arrrrrggh. All right! It had a Trumpet, and up we popped,” trilled the Heretic, following it up with a gusty long-suffering sigh. “Honestly. So GraGoh grew up, metaphorically as it were, don’t we dare start with us, doing that work over dozens of worlds off in the outer nodes. And there was an elder one we traveled with too, who was an…oh bother.”

“Oh bother,” echoed Gurjin in unconscious dread.

“Suns’ mercy.” SkekGra gave his head-nail one of those terrifying little tugs. “Ohhhh, apotEIE-fgu’uUotin—a Rigger, maybe?”

“Yes,” nodded UrGoh, even as he flinched and gingerly touched his own topknot of hair. “Although zuwei also served as Wayguard for our sector, which is the greater honor, but was never formally granted the title…”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter. Zuwei’s name was IyPuy. We could just say that.”

“We could…” The Wanderer looked doubtful. “It sounds a bit eeUAtoLmli. A bit disrespectful, considering.”

Kylan threw a hand over his mouth in a failed bid to stop the squeak of a giggle that had just escaped it. “Stop it,” Brea reproved him. “You’re being disrespectful.”

“I’m not,” insisted Kylan. “I’m just—beginning to understand why GraGoh might not have told Mother Aughra or the Gelfling every single story there was to tell. It all sounds so very different from our life here on Thra.”

He made silent practice fingerings on his firca while he spoke. It was one of his awkward tics, and often accompanied his more thoughtful sentiments. Gurjin couldn’t help a fond smile creeping up as the Song-Teller earnestly continued. “And it’s hard enough to explain something of a song without having to also…explain the explanation, and then explain that explanation as well, and then try to bring the song back to center. I would find it very difficult. I’m not at all sure how I would explain…children…to a world that’d never had them.”

“Thank you,” the Mystic and the Skeksis both blurted in a unison so perfect it seemed to startle even them. But Kylan had evidently startled them more, because they were frankly staring at him.

Aughra threw her head back for a barking laugh. She sent the mild-mannered Spriton one of her very rare gap-toothed smiles, which he didn’t know quite what to do with. “Yesss! Wise Kylan.”

“To be fair, children you wouldn’t have to explain…” demurred SkekGra.

UrGoh hummed warm agreement and finished for him. The eyes of both halves of GraGoh seemed almost to shine now. “…because Homeworld has many other species with juvenile forms, and the UrSkeks there do study the peoples of many worlds, even if it’s just from afar. But thank you, Song-Teller, for recognizing some of the difficulty. We wish we could have you tell this for us. You might sing it clearer.”

[*] The technical term in English—or at least, the term proposed by English-speaking scholars of UrSkek—is actually Chorion (see “Urskeks and UrSkek Crimes”). But neither SkekGra nor UrGoh being either scholars in English or used to explaining UrSkek matters, you're getting what they can come up with on the spot.

Chapter Text

“Any questions so far?” asked the Heretic, noticeably more cheerily than before.

The Gelfling looked at each other. It wasn’t that there weren’t questions, there were many questions; but so far none of it seemed to have much to do with Thra at all, or even with heresy, and they certainly didn’t understand yet the work of the young UrSkek that the Great Being had once been, so it was difficult to know exactly what to ask.

Gurjin tentatively raised a hand curved as though to request a speaking-shell, even though the other Gelfling clans never bothered with speaking-shells; luckily, the gesture was understood regardless. Everyone glanced expectantly at him.

The Wanderer blinked. “Yes…young Drenchen?”

“What’s a zuwei?” he volunteered.

“Oh, zuwei, oh,” said SkekGra immediately. “Well, it doesn’t really mean anything.”

The old Skeksis settled back, as though that were perfectly satisfactory, and then seemed to register the distinct lack of satisfaction on surrounding faces. “Oh. That is, it’s just a utyy’rlOUttem…a—a, well, a stand-in for a name or a title. You know, the way Gelfling will say she instead of Princess Brea or he instead of Gurjin, to keep things short. So zuwei is IyPuy. Although that…didn't actually make it shorter in this case, did it."

“Oh,” nodded Gurjin. The Gelfling tongue had no formal term for such things, but the idea was easy enough. She was an exceedingly common word—it could refer not just to Gelfling girls and women, but to any Gelfling whose sex was unknown. The only exception was when speaking of a handful of ceremonial roles performed exclusively by Gelfling men. “Does it mean she, then?” he asked. “Or he?”

SkekGra glanced mild surprise at his Mystic, then at Gurjin. “Eh? What are you nattering about? UrSkeks don't have shes and hes. Didn’t you hear me before? No children.”

Gurjin felt his mouth open, but nothing was ready to come out.

“So why would there be boys and girls?” the Skeksis finished on an irritated, Gelfling really are slow! sort of note.

“Oh.” The Drenchen soldier gazed pleadingly at his twin, who offered no help whatsoever. “I—suppose you're right, I'm sorry. It’s just a bit strange. Er, different from Thra-ways, that is. If the being you came from didn’t have—wasn’t made like—or, um…didn’t have a she or he, as you put it. But then you two came out as boys, that must have been a bit—”

“We’re not...boys," the Mystic interrupted, which was nearly unheard-of for him.

Gurjin really did feel very stupid, although he suspected any of the other Gelfling here would be floundering just as wildly, and probably Grandfather Tollup as well. (Probably; then again, Podlings never seemed to care about shes and hes quite as much as Gelfling did. They even let boys rule over their clans sometimes.) Was it really that crazy to have assumed the Skeksis were male? True enough, now Gurjin thought of it, that they dressed in an odd manner one could as easily call womanly as manly. It must have been the lack of wings, he decided. Or perhaps the voices, which sounded exactly like cranky old men's voices to Gelfling ears.

Or then again, maybe there was no really good explanation. Maybe some maudra somewhere had just chosen to call the Skeksis he for suns knew what reason hundreds of trine ago, and every Gelfling since then had fallen in line. The older he got, the more he learned of how many ‘traditions’ were simple habits that could just as easily have taken some other form…and how often they did take very different forms among other clans and peoples. And how often they worked just fine that way.

“Oh no,” Brea was saying now, her hands flown to her mouth. “We’re so terribly sorry, Grand—I mean, here we’ve been calling you Grandfather all this time, when we should have been saying Grandmother? Goodness, we should have asked.”

“We were all thinking…” said Naia. “Well. I don’t know what exactly we were thinking. Maybe it was the lack of wings? Or no. Somehow you just felt, uh…”

Now Grandfather Tollup evidently felt obliged to weigh in, to save Naia (because of course it was never worthwhile to try and save Gurjin). “So much Podlings and Gelflings don’t know of Skeksis, even after all this time,” he remarked kindly. Gurjin had a feeling he was being overgenerous: surely Podlings had seen enough Skeksis in the bath, at least, to have learned whatever there was to learn about their wizened bodies.

“That’s enough!” Aughra shouted, at exactly the same time the Heretic cried “Ahh, tut-tut-tut!”

“Yes, that’s enough,” he (or she?) went on, when the Gelfling clamor had subsided. “Moons’ sake, such a fuss. We’re not girls either! Skeksis also do not have she and he. Neither do Mystics. We also don't have children any more than any UrSkek ever did, or did you ever even notice that? That’s all...Thra-folk business. You’ve just never bothered to ask.”

And that was true. Not a single one of the Skeksis had children, not that Gurjin had ever heard of. How odd. And how odd that Gelfling had never, ever remarked on it until now, when almost everything else alive on Thra gave new life, at least once in a while? Even some of the old gods and goddesses did, although not all—although one wouldn’t necessarily know, would one, given how impertinent it might be to ask.

It came on him like a thunderclap then that the Skeksis had been gods to the Gelfling. That was why. They'd never called them gods, only lords, yet they had revered them as much as any proper deity—if not more. And there were so many things they had never dared to ask their lords, come to think of it. Whether they were boys or girls might have been the least of it.

UrGoh nodded. “At least…I haven't been asked…for hundreds of trine.” The Mystic’s eyes traveled lazily over all those of the company, finally landing once more on Gurjin’s.

“Well,” the latter stammered, even though there was no particular condemnation in those deep amber pools. “We’re—sorry we haven’t—”

“True enough,” the Heretic mused, having already plainly moved on. “I think a few of you did ask at the beginning, but heh! Even then you didn’t entirely listen. Not even to the Emperor. For a good while zuwei actually tried to get you to call zuwei a she, and you simply wouldn’t.”

“She did?” returned Brea merrily. “But it didn’t work?”

“Not at all. Not sure why it didn’t. All your other maudras are, well women obviously, so naturally zuwei wanted to be addressed as a woman too! But no, Gelfling just kept calling him him, and then apologizing from here to the Gruenak shores exactly like you're doing now, and it all got so embarrassing that he finally just gave up. None of us ever tried to fuss about it again, except the Mariner. She got her way all right. But then again, SkekSa tends to get her way on anything she wants to. Mystics have never bothered about it one way or another, as I recall...”

UrGoh shook his head, or rather his entire neck, long and low. “Most of us…didn’t see other people…often enough to matter. I was an exception…but I also…gave up, more happily than the Emperor did. Among ourselves…we still use zuwei. Again, however…few asked.”

Brea laughed again. “Well, it can be hard to ask a Mystic anything and get an answer! Or, well, an answer we can understand. It just leaves us feeling like idiots.”

At long last, someone had said it! Leave it to the young Vapran princess that it should be her.

UrGoh regarded her very earnestly at that. “Gelfling…” he said at last, “are not…idiots. And need not feel so. I do not mean, ever, in this world of Thra…to create that feeling. Please… ask me…until I make sense. —Even…even if it takes a while. Forgive us. Sometimes…we feel a bit stupid…trying to explain. Or…like it may be…interfering.”

Brea looked almost emotionally moved at this, but was brought down at once by the Heretic, who declared with great finality, “Bah! You never trouble yourself over interfering.”

“Skeksis never spoke truer,” Aughra fired back, quick as bowshot. UrGoh looked doleful and said nothing.

“Speaking only for myself—I don’t mind at all the ways in which the Wanderer has interfered,” Seladon broke in, employing her most maudrenly tones despite the self-effacing words. “Nor have I forgotten the lesson I learned so well about what I once wrongly called Mother Aughra’s ‘interference.’ I will always welcome their counsel and assistance with gratitude.”

Kylan spoke up too. “As will I. Well, if that matters. Would you both—prefer zuwei, then? It seems a useful word. I even know a few stories that might call for it. I know the legend of the Gelfling boy who asked a Gruenak wizard for wings, but still said he wasn’t a girl…or a boy. Just a Gelfling who liked wings.” The song-teller smiled. “That was the chorus in fact, ‘Just a Gelfling who liked wings…’ And his name was Tun, so it was easy enough to just call him that, but not everybody—never mind. What I mean is, I’m happy to learn a new word, and to use it where it’s wanted.”

SkekGra took in a breath and then eyed the young Spriton. “Councilor Kylan,” he said. “I’m hoping we only have to say this once more. With the greatest respect. We—don’t—care. Whatever Gelfling or Podlings want, we can live with. And while I suppose Arathim will do as they please, for what it’s worth, we don’t care what they want either! You’re the ones who care about all that nonsense, and I’m telling you you don’t need to. We like Grandfather just fine.”

“…You do?”

The Skeksis’ eyes bulged at that, and UrGoh had to lay two hands on his lap to restrain him.

Fortunately, Kylan was, as Mother Aughra had reminded them, Wise. “That is! You do! Oh, good. I mean, you do. That’s good!”

Chapter Text

“Now. Any other questions?” the Heretic tried again.

Brea raised a lissome pair of fingers. “Yes. You said earlier, you’d explain what you saw that your elders didn’t want seen?”

“Oh, yes! That. Well, we’re getting there.” The Skeksis scratched his mostly-bald pate. “I think. Where were we?”

“Traveling with IyPuy the Wayguard, keeping the ways clear,” said Naia crisply.

“Right!” he agreed at once. “And so we did. Until the day came…”

“When we wished…to see our Homeworld at last,” finished the Wanderer.

“All that time going everywhere else amongst the stars, but we’d never…” The Heretic blinked a couple of times, and suddenly seemed to have a bit of difficulty continuing. “Never gone home. To the place our people were from. IyPuy was not keen on the project, as I recall. Not keen to lose our labor, probably.”

“Or…in retrospect…perhaps zuwei understood the danger for us,” the Mystic put in.

“Danger?” Seladon stirred. “What danger could there have been in that? It should have been a place of belonging, of welcome for you, shouldn’t it?”

“Should have,” said the Heretic quietly.

“Forgive, Gelfling…” the Wanderer began.

“Yes, forgive,” SkekGra echoed. “We suppose, even after all these trine, too much of us still…just wants to go home.” Gurjin was shocked to see tears starting at the corners of the Skeksis’ eyes, and his Mystic half didn’t look too far behind. SkekGra pressed his sleeves to the holes sunk deep in his corded skull. “It’s no longer possible, but—at that time, nothing stood against our going, so we went. Heedless of any questions or quibbles.”

“What was it like there?” Brea asked. Curiosity had fully seized her. Instead of matching their mournful tone, she sounded eager, her eyes burning bright at even the thought of a whole world that was not Thra. (Gurjin, for his own part, found the idea fascinating enough, but there was also something a bit off-putting about it. Its not-Thraness might be disturbing, might feel hollow, might not feel…like home.)

Fortunately, the Heretic was recovering himself in any case, though his eyes too remained over-bright. “Oh, glorious!” he assured her. “Splendid! Imagine—great spires by the dozen, each taller than the Circle of the Suns itself, gleaming in all kinds of crystal, quartz and chalcedony, bismuth and beryl, shot through with veins of gold!”

UrGoh nodded, chiming in with, “Picture, if you will…fields of lichen, lit up like glow-moss…and tall dendrites, like the skeletons of vast trees. All…is bright…”

“…not just from the suns or the crystals, the spires or the lichens, but from the thousand forms of light given life from our people’s magic. Oh, I wish I could say otherwise—”

“—but it was…wonderful. And all…with its own song…”

“Like the Song of Thra,” Mother Aughra interjected, but it was in tones of reverence.

“Well,” said the Heretic. “Yes, exactly. From the heart of our Crystal. You all understand, but especially you Gelfling.”

And it was at that moment that Gurjin began to feel he did understand something that would prove important, as little as he knew of how exactly it would prove so: that there was indeed a Song within the Great Being’s dual breast, and there was an echo of that Song that should be resonating with it from without—the harmony of within with without—but stranded as the two of them were on alien shores, that echo was gone, missing. A piece was ever missing that could not be restored, because its source was so distant and the way back to it so shut. And that had done…something, to everything and everyone. Something had been broken on Thra long ago, even before the Darkening. And Thra’s Crystal could not replace that lost music, however beautiful its own Song might be. Just as Gurjin might feel somehow hollowed out on the world of the UrSkeks, an UrSkek (or zuwei’s halves) would feel just the same here.

“Your world has a Crystal of its own!” Brea suddenly said, in great excitement. “Like Thra!”

“Didn’t we say that? No, I suppose we didn’t, not in so many words,” the Heretic corrected himself. “But that’s exactly what we mean by ‘worlds of the Crystal,’ Princess.”

“Then our worlds are sisters,” she pursued. “Homeworld and Thra! Does every world out there have a Crystal too? How many sisters do we have?”

“Not every world,” answered the Wanderer, stretching his old lined hands out toward the heavens. “But countless…thousands.”

“And each Crystal merely one facet of a still greater Crystal, the Crystal of Crystals,” SkekGra added. “Yes, Princess. We are all children of the Crystal, here on Thra as well as on Homeworld. Across the trackless gulf, from here to the furthest star, we are one.”

That was a lot to think about, and it was difficult for them to think of anything else for several long moments.

“Then how did everything go so wrong?” Naia finally dared to ask. “I mean for you, not for us, though...I admit I'm curious on that question too.”

“Yes!” The Skeksis pointed at her, startling her a little. “How did it? We’re still not entirely sure! But remember, we weren’t exactly like the other UrSkeks. Most of them had never ventured beyond their own world, nor met all the folk who dwelled in the great beyond. Strange, discomfiting, primitive creatures, don’t you know. Like Tengeze, or Chiff’Ur, or Gelfling, heh-heh! They hadn’t picked up any foreign ways or ideas, as I—as GraGoh had, in the course of our work.”

“And that was enough, that you were different?”

“Yeah!” the Heretic affirmed in a cracking trill.

Gurjin shook his head. “Why is it some things have to be the same everywhere?” he said bitterly.

“Don’t……” The Wanderer was momentarily back to his ordinary speed. Everyone waited politely for it regardless. “……know.”

“But among UrSkeks, even more so than among Gelfling. The long and the short of it is, we kept getting into trouble,” explained the Skeksis.

“Once…when we actually deserved it.”

“Well. We played a prank.”

“It was thoughtless.”

“It was funny.”

The Mystic’s lip twitched dangerously, but he refused to dignify this with a reply.

“Go on, Grandpa,” Brea urged him with a giggle.

UrGoh sighed. “Our elders decided...” he went on at last, “we would perchance benefit from better breeding. Thus…they sent us to school.”

“School?” Naia echoed with incredulity. “As punishment?”

Granted, she was probably thinking of school as Drenchen knew it—classes in some very specific thing, usually given to no more than a few childlings at a time. Certainly there were a few arts, like taming muski or mastering the sling, that carried cultural significance far beyond their practical scope, that were believed among their clan to build character and harden the spirit; but even training in those would never have been prescribed as discipline. It would have been disrespectful.

“Not just school,” the Skeksis was protesting in his own pique. “The great Academy, the Ya’HEN-lautmi A’ASwohKU-anhNEM, abode of sages, the school of schools on Homeworld!”

“Yes, yes,” said the Wanderer almost irritably.

“It was as much honor as punishment!” SkekGra insisted.

“Yes, yes…”

“To teach you to be a proper UrSkek.” Seladon remained All-Maudra, betraying no hint of amusement except for one brow that perhaps arched a trifle high. “And did it work?”

“It worked,” the Heretic declared. “It did work! We did very well in our studies. But that in itself may have been our downfall—because it brought us to the attention of our Philosophy Master, SoSu, who would become our dear mentor and chiefest friend.”

He met the baffled silence that greeted this with a confused look of his own.

Then he added, “You know him, or part of him, as SkekSo the Magnificent, the Crystal’s Light and the Empire’s Splendor; Giver of Gifts, Subduer of Hordes; First and Only Emperor of Thra.”

Chapter Text

Gelfling being Gelfling, and Grandfather Tollup a Podling, this revelation was met with an immediate chorus of boos. Naia spit to the side (though with the polite hedge of a hand partly covering her mouth).

“Yes, well do you jeer now!” the Heretic exclaimed. “The Emperor’s crimes are endless. But understand that he too was not always as he is now. Like us, he was once a being of light, and not yet one who had been cruelly banished from his home, either! Long ago, he was respected, nay celebrated by other UrSkeks—and with reason. Not only was SoSu the wisest of the teachers at Ya’HEN-lautmi, he was also the kindest.”

“The kindest? Truly?” Princess Brea had to cross her arms at that.

“By far!” chirped the Skeksis.

UrGoh drew a long drag on his pipe and let out a plume that flowed like the cascades of the Black River before answering with, “He…and he alone…never cared whence we came, nor how different we were from the others.”

“We would have done anything for him,” said SkekGra, “anything.”

“Well. I know how that feels,” Rian said with a grave face. “Once I would have done anything for the Skeksis.”

“Yes,” nodded UrGoh. “Just as many here…would do anything for you.”

“I never asked for that,” the young general replied even more gravely. He gave a plaintive sigh. “I’m not sure it’s good for me. Or for anyone.”

“It may not be,” said Aughra gently.

“Gelfling need leaders to follow.” Seladon ran a hand along the granite of the ancient seating. “I no longer see it as bad or good—merely something to be ever mindful of, to serve every day with our work, in hopes that we can be worthy of those who trust us.”

Naia (who after all was also a maudren daughter) echoed this sentiment with a murmur of, “Thra grant.”

“Nevertheless,” the Heretic continued, “as we came to know him, we did learn that our beloved teacher had some, eh-heh, peculiar beliefs. Well. Peculiar by UrSkek lights!”

“Such as?” Brea wanted to know.

“That we should think for ourselves, for one thing,” he said.

“But that doesn’t seem peculiar! Or—not very peculiar…”

“And for the Thra-kind, it isn’t. Or historically hasn’t been. But here there are many voices to the Song, many melodies that sometimes crash together like waves off the Sifan coast. But for our people, all melodies must serve one Song. One truth and one only.” A twirling claw punctured, or rather punctuated this. “It proceeds from the voices of the Eldest, who receive it, so they say, directly from the Crystal itself. And to say any differently is to cast suspicion onto one’s own head.”

“Oh. But that…”

UrGoh gave her a lugubrious blink. “Yes, Princess? Speak your heart.”

“But,” she said, dithering a little before finally going on, “I don’t want to insult you, but that—that does sound like the Skeksis. There being only one truth, and that the truth the lords decide on.”

“That is no insult,” the Mystic reassured her.

“Although neither is it quite the case,” put in SkekGra. “Remember, Skeksis actually rewrote history to propagate our ‘one truth.’ UrSkeks have never done that…”

“…that we know of,” UrGoh cautioned.

“No, it’s a far simpler matter there. They just expect everyone to agree…”

“…on everything…”

“…all the time.”

“I think I’m beginning to see where the problem might have come in,” remarked Gurjin.

“But everyone can’t just agree on everything all the time,” Naia scoffed. “I mean…can they?”

“Certainly not,” the Wanderer agreed. “But—they can pretend to.”

“Well, that sounds completely awful,” was her verdict.

“We thought so!” The Skeksis emitted a few screeching peals of laughter. “Nor were we the only ones. A number of us, especially among the young, were getting rather tired of pretending—and some of us even worked up the courage to start admitting it to others of our kind. And this, Gelfling…this was our Heresy.”

He bowed low. His Mystic, however, didn’t follow suit, and in fact gave him a bit of an exasperated look.

“That’s it?” asked Brea.

“Yes!” He waved his claws airily. “Oh, I could go into details, refinements, whitherbys and whencefors, but yes, in sum, that was it.”

“You were exiled for nothing more than that—” Gurjin began, only to be interrupted by a deep thwack from Aughra’s walking-stick on the dense soil. He at once shut up tighter than a locksnake.

“I am dubious,” the sage declared. “Yes, Aughra is dubious, that that alone is all there was to it.”

“Well, no,” allowed the Wanderer. “It wasn’t…quite so simple as my other half has it.”

“Nearly that simple,” SkekGra argued. “Everything followed from there. We wanted the freedom to disagree, to be ever so briefly dissonant if we felt there was good reason to. But our concern was not only for ourselves. There were many among the UrSkek who had been punished for such dissonance in the past, yes, often severely. We felt there must be gentler ways to return even those who had been…unusually disruptive to the bosom of our people. It didn’t occur to me until very late indeed that I might ever find myself in need of such a service, but leave that for now!—there were plenty of other poor souls who assuredly needed it. We thought this might be done through a special rite of reconciliation with the Crystal, and we set about devising it.”

“That makes sense,” said Kylan. “After all, here on Thra, to be in harmony with the Crystal is to be one with the whole world.”

“As you say, young Spriton,” UrGoh returned almost fondly. “And that sacred bond is indeed the birthright of all Gelfling…of all Thralings.”

“But just imagine for a moment if you were to show up at the Castle gates right now and try to exercise that birthright up close,” broke in SkekGra, “with the Skeksis in charge. How that would go.”

“Oh,” said Brea. “Yes…”

“You’re saying that your elders—well, GraGoh’s elders—control who may approach the Crystal,” Kylan guessed.

“Precisely! Now mind you, as I said before, Master SoSu was a celebrated elder himself, good suns, he was on the Council of Eldest and had every right to approach in his own name—so at least as far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with all our experimenting. It really should have been fine.”

“But it was not,” sighed the Mystic, and Gurjin was dismayed to hear how heavily the tones of mourning lay on his usually-resonant voice. All these trine since this had happened…how long ago had it happened? Now there was a truly frightening question—and yet it seemed as though it might have been yesterday, so far as the Great Being was concerned.

“No! No new rites, especially for the grubby likes of us!” SkekGra muttered.

“Is it possible,” Aughra suggested, “possible mind you, that what by your lights seemed the most natural thing in the world to do as your Crystal’s children, by their lights…”

“They saw as…tinkering…toying with the very beating heart of Homeworld?” said the Wanderer. “Yes. ‘Reckless,’ they deemed it.”

“I still don’t see how,” sniffed the Skeksis, “but at any rate, here is the part I promised to explain, Princess Brea. You see, reckless or not, my fellows and I did succeed in establishing a deep and true communion with the Crystal…and in the very center of that attunement, in a truth that rang from the inmost corner of the heart to the remotest reaches of one’s being, like ripples from a stone that is thrown into a pond—”

“I heard our Crystal’s cry of pain,” finished UrGoh, almost coldly cutting off his other half’s flight of rhetorical fancy.

This was followed up by gasps and murmurs from all the assembled, even Aughra. Gurjin himself felt an almost physical stab. Not only was the thought itself unbearable—a Crystal’s Song, turned into a scream—it echoed too much of what was still happening on Thra even as they spoke, the great hole in the Dark Crystal, bleeding the lurid violet light of madness out into the chamber, the hatred given form that had devoured poor Deet. How was such a power ever so hobbled and bound by the hands of those it had given life? And yet it had absolutely happened, the greater brought to the most miserable subjection by the lesser, and apparently it would never break free on its own.

But SkekGra would not be denied. “A cry to shatter one’s being!” he insisted (and Gurjin believed him). “Truly, my friends, I believe Homeworld’s Crystal is no less a prisoner than Thra’s is. Its truths spoken for by voices who no longer listen.”

“But didn’t you tell anyone, warn everyone, as we did?” Brea was sitting bent forward now, hands on knees, entirely bespelled.

“Of course I did! But who would give heed?” SkekGra shook his angular head wildly, like a bird trying too shoo off a judfly. “From the moment we were discovered I was a criminal, a—a freak tainted with heresy, so branded by the Eldest! You don’t understand, Princess. To be dissonant on our world of ageless harmony, and especially deliberately; to spread false teachings about the specialness of the individual, so that others fall into heresy as well! We were not just wrong by everyone’s else’s lights, my fellows and I. Or even mad. To all our world, we had become…” His breath stopped and trembled a moment on the cusp of the word. “…Evil.”

“You’re not evil,” she said vehemently.

“Really?” It almost sounded as though he were sincerely asking. “Are you so sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. What you’re talking about—if that’s really all you did that got you exiled, that will never be treated as a crime under our law. When we are the Castle’s masters, every person, every creature on Thra will have a right to approach the Crystal. All will have a right to speak the truths it gives them. And it would get to decide for itself who to receive. No one need presume to speak for it.”

Her eyes narrowed a little as she spoke, and it was then that Gurjin suddenly remembered that even the younger daughter of All-Maudra Mayrin was still maudren through and through, and there certainly were things and people she did presume to speak for. “This, I swear.”