I Want To Go Home - 21

Lost Temple

My surroundings were vague and foggy. It looked a bit like the one mall nearby my old apartment. Different enough to be disorienting, however. The floor pattern seemed deeply wrong, for one… Though, I supposed it was more someone else’s memory of the mall, which was probably as accurate as my own. Just… in different ways.

That didn’t make it any less disorienting, though.

“Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?” a voice mumbled, drawing my attention through a slowly forming sea of indistinct figures.

More the feeling of a crowd than an actual crowd.

The actual person in their midst, however, was quite easy to locate. Lena was swerving about, trying to avoid the misty figures, and not making much progress. I walked ahead, brushing the wisps aside.

“The restaurant is around here,” she muttered to herself. “Isn’t it?”

“Lena,” I said.

She blinked, pausing her slowly winding route to stare at me. “Emily?”

“Hey,” I said, still feeling weird about this whole ‘entering people’s dreams’ thing.

“Is everything alright?” she asked, the flowing ‘crowd’ around us dispersing. “It’s really you, right?”

“It’s really me and things are… they’re ok. I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you for a while. There was a siege, and I didn’t have much time to—”

I was interrupted by her leaping forward and kissing me. That was a surprise. A pleasant surprise, though, so I happily returned the kiss. Still, there was a hunger to it that left me wondering.

“Are things alright on your end?” I asked.

Her eyes dropped a little, though she continued to hold the chest of my tunic.

“Krys and I had a fight—not anything for you to worry about. Just a dumb little thing. But… it made me really want some physical attention,” she said.

I nodded and pulled her into a hug, also wrapping my wings around her.

“Ooh. A girl could get used to this,” she said, leaning her head a little, so that her cheek brushed against the feathers. “Soft…”

“How… how are things with you and Krys? Like, generally? I haven’t had a chance to ask,” I said, suddenly feeling rather rude for having been so wrapped up in my own worries.

She looked up at me, a few tears starting to dampen her eyes. “I—it’s been weird. Your… well, we had your funeral, you know? Before you visited me. Your parents have been super good to us, actually. You… have you contacted them at all?”

“Uh… n—no. I… it seemed less urgent?” I muttered. “Parental love doesn’t really fade, so I thought I could get back to see them whenever I got back. But relationships can break, and I panicked about that…”

She clearly took a moment to weigh that, before giving a nod. “With your parents, yeah. I can see that you’d feel that. You should reach out, though. Your mother… she’s… Krys and I don’t know if she’d believe us if we told her you’re alive, but it’s so hard not to.”

Guilt built up in my heart, and I accepted I’d been a terrible daughter. “I will. As soon as I can. But first… I… I needed to tell you and Krys that I’m… I’m sort of getting married?”

Lena pushed back to stare up at me, confusion more than anything in her eyes.

“It’s not quite the same though. It’s—you know how… well, I think Catholic nuns say they’re married to Jesus, right?” I said, before getting second thoughts. “They do say that, right?”

She nodded slowly. “It sounds familiar?”

“Ok, good,” I said, continuing. “So, because I’m sort of a deity here, it’s like that? Apparently it can help unlock—uh… something? It’ll let the others become divine heroines and… probably gives them access to magic powers or something? Um… everyone else seemed to understand what it meant so well it never occurred to me to ask what it actually was.”

“It’s to help save the world?” Lena asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then do it, but Krys and I will both be expecting you to propose as soon as you get back,” she replied with a smile, before leaning in to kiss me again.

Before I could reply, the dream began to dissolve. All I could think to do was to give her another kiss goodbye.

Then it was back to the beach. Aara’s drumming slowed, until the sound of the waves and crackling fire were all there was to hear. I sat up, thinking it all over. Then I started to cry, as the weight of what my parents must have been going through hit me.

At least I wasn’t crying alone. Aara, Sukura, Ne’avo, and Uké’el all hurried over to provide a group hug.

-

The second day of searching was coming up empty. The sun was still high in the sky, but it had taken Uké’el and I hours to get out this far. As such, it would take us hours to get back. I glided over, landing on the float carpet to rest my wings a little.

“Is there a limit to how long the carpet can fly for?” I asked, sitting down.

“It depends on the background flow of magical energies. That, in turn, depends on how close it is to life and spirits,” she replied, handing me a roll of bread. “With you being a goddess, it can probably last much longer than usual, but I wouldn’t risk staying up overnight, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It’s just annoying that we can only cover so much of the search area in one day, especially with having to turn around,” I mumbled, between bites of bread.

“I’m not sure we can do anything about it, though,” she replied.

“Mhm… I miss having access to global satellite imagery,” I said, staring out at the ocean.

“Global sate—whatnow?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, um…” I paused, not quite sure how to explain them. “Do you guys have cameras here?”

“Camera obscura?” Uké’el replied in a tentative tone.

“Ah! Well, sort of. Like, you know how artists use those to draw portraits sometimes? Mhm, yeah, it’s like that, but… automated? Anyway, they have those on satellites, which,” I found myself hunting in my brain for another description. “Well, you know how the air gets thinner when you get higher up, right?”

“Mhm… yes? It took a bit to get used to that when I moved to Guuji. Especially as my lungs were not the best then,” Uké’el said, looking a bit lost as to how that connected to anything.

“Well, when the air gets thinner there’s less friction. So, uh… if you shoot a cannonball—right, there’s also the bit with things falling. But they fall on an arc, right?” I hesitated for a moment, waiting to let her nod along. “Yeah, so, you fire a cannonball hard enough, it goes up above the air, where there isn’t any friction, and so it keeps moving forward fast enough that it falls with the curvature of the Earth? Or, if it were here, the curvature of Haquaria? It’s, uh, it’s not actually a cannonball, they use rockets, but it’s the same idea. And they put a camera on there, and it takes pictures of the whole planet.”

She blinked, before bending her neck to stare up at the sky. “All the way… they must have an amazing view from up there.”

“Oh, they do. It’s—wait. How high do you think I could fly?” I asked.

“I do not know. They say the realm of the Gods is above the clouds, so… perhaps that high?” she offered.

“I wonder if I could get a better view from up there,” I said, standing up. “You can start heading back. If it doesn’t work, I’ll probably be able to glide back down fairly quickly.”

Uké’el wished me good luck as I stepped off the float-carpet. I fell a bit, but was able to turn that into a swooping dive, which I then pulled up from, to push higher. Between the circling dives and flaps to try to push higher, I slowly made my way up. The air began to get thinner, though it only seemed like a change in flavour to my lungs. I had noticed a similar thing in Guuji, but hadn’t really thought about what it meant there.

Here, though, I pushed further, and the feeling of the air shifted even more. While the lack of oxygen wasn’t bothering my lungs, the lack of air pressure was starting to make using my wings trickier. Each flap had less and less benefit.

However, it didn’t matter. I spotted something. From up here it just seemed like a small rock, but I decided to drop into a diving glide towards it, to get a better view. Dropping altitude offered me speed at a faster rate than I expected, and I was soon close enough to make out that there seemed to be a large structure of some sort on the island.

I tilted my wings, though, and turned back. I wasn’t sure how good of a first impression I would make on my own. Eventually, my speed still benefiting from my continued gradual descent, I caught up with Uké’el on her carpet. I fluttered to slow down and then land, excitedly telling her the news.

-

That night I proved too full of anxious energy to manage to contact either of my parents through dreams. I was disappointed, but I was sure it could wait another few days.

We left as soon as there were thermals to ride upon the next day. While we had a good idea of the direction I had not exactly made a compass bearing, so I flew higher than the others. Not as high as the day before, but still enough to taste the thinner air.

It was several hours before I spotted the island on the horizon, and longer still until we reached it. It was another rock in the sea, though it was much bigger than the one we’d been on. I could see now that I was closer that the temple did not in fact rise from the island. It had been carved out of the dark rocks of an ancient and spindly volcanic-looking thing.

We circled around, and found a small village at the island’s base. It had a dock full of small fishing vessels and sat between well tended terraced fields and a sandy beach. The beach seemed a decent place to land, having plenty of room.

After landing, though, and walking towards the village, we realised it was small in more ways than one. The buildings were tiny. Smaller than any Dwarven buildings. The inhabitants had to have been less than a metre tall, and even then the ceilings would be low.

I decided to walk a bit closer, curious about the lack of life from the village, when suddenly every shuttered window and closed door seemed to burst open. The inhabitants spilled out, all armed with improvised weapons: pitchforks, harpoons, shovels, and the like.

They were also…

“Puffins,” I said, staring down in surprise.

Well, puffin-like. They had arms and hands in place of wings, and I was pretty sure they were larger than puffins, but they had the beaks and general colours of a puffin. They were also squawking away in voices that sounded like I thought puffins sounded.

I couldn’t grasp any of what they said.

Aara rushed ahead, hands raised in a placating manner. She proceeded to whistle and chirp. Then she let out a nervous laugh when that did not seem to work, slipping behind me for safety.

“W—what did they say?” I asked, backing up slowly as the villagers started marching out towards us, waving their simple weapons.

“Heh, heh… They were told to trust no outsiders. Only priests,” she replied, backing up with me, squeaking out a few more nervous giggles.

“I’m… I’m sure we could take them,” Ne’avo said, stepping forward.

“Well, sure, but would you be able to sleep at night after destroying a whole village of these little things?” I asked, gesturing towards them and hoping I knew the answer.

“Uh… no,” she mumbled, shoulders falling in defeat.

“Can’t we tell them you’re a goddess?” Sukura asked.

“I told them,” Aara hissed. “They didn’t recognise her name and decided she was from the Forces of Discord.”

“Oh,” Sukura replied.

We were slowly being pushed back by the advancing puffin-folk. Sukura backed into the pegasus, which let out an indignant whinny. While the rest of us were put off by the tiny angry villagers, it seemed to be far less impressed. Sukura reached for its reins, though she didn’t look to have any more of a plan than I did, when a voice called out, drawing the attention of ourselves and the villagers.

“Now what’s all this then?”

Turning, we saw a man in flowing white robes descending the path behind the village. He was full sized. An elf. And a rather ancient one at that.

“V—Lady Vazehr?” he called out in surprise.

The puffin-folk mob froze in place, before turning to stare at him. They then erupted in a wave of confused squawks.