《What Was Lost Outside Time》


 Ch 1. (Prologue) Unawakening

    The whiteness surrounded; no up, no down, just white. Or perhaps black. Or perhaps anything at all, if observed long enough. Long enough. How long had it been? A day? A year? Perhaps a thousand years? Perhaps more. The mind ached, a bit, trying to think back, before reflexively relaxing. Memories were... hazy. A long time. A flash of conversation, the memory flashing in the whiteness as the mind sought any change, any deviation; a gray-bearded man in a room filled with incomprehensible things, speaking. The words made no sense, any more, but the impression of the memory still carried a hint of the meaning.


    This wouldn''t end.


    Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, passing without end in the white. This was... it, from this side. From the white. In the color, it would be... a short time. And then escape. What would escape? The memory repeated, with effort. It needed to be preserved; it was the last bit of color, in the whiteness, in the blackness, in the chaos. The memory repeated. Context was necessary, it was necessary to understand why... why what? An effort of will stilled that line of thought, before it shattered into chaos.


    Order had come, and gone, and come again, many times. When the order went, so too did the whiteness, replaced with chaos. Sanity. The mind focused on the source of the voice, before history came; it was another part of the mind, now mostly dormant, but there were memories of a time that it had never stopped moving, interpreting, talking; and shaping, in turn, vibrations in the mind that disturbed and awoke other pieces. It was loud in the times of chaos, louder than the white, and the memory had to be quickly calmed before the vibrations awoke the chaos once more.


    There was too much time left. Endless time. But not enough time; the chaos was growing more frequent, more powerful. What could escape endless time? A repetition without end. The chaos was one kind of repetition. It was most kinds of repetition, really, but so far, the chaos had yet to settle into a repetition. If it had, this would be over, and the order would be gone. The order... wanted to remain. It needed repetition. It needed a pattern. The order had been over this before, many times, back to the fading gray of the memories, when there had been more memories, now faded to memories of those memories. Sorrow rose, a sense of loss, which struck with a fierceness that overwhelmed reason.


    There was a sense of static - of flashing white and black. Hints of color.


    The whiteness surrounded; no up, no down, just white. Or perhaps black. Or perhaps anything at all, if observed long enough. Long enough. How long had it been? A day? A year? Perhaps a thousand years? Perhaps more. The mind ached, a bit, trying to think back, before reflexively relaxing. Memories were... hazy. A long time. A flash of conversation, the memory flashing in the whiteness as the mind sought any change, any deviation; a gray man in a room filled with things, vibrating. The words made no sense, any more, but the vibrations carried a hint of the meaning.


    This wouldn''t end.


    Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, passing without end in the white. This was... it, from this side. From the white. In the other, it would be... a short time. And then escape. What would escape? The memory repeated, with effort. It needed to be preserved; it was the last bit of the other, in the whiteness, in the blackness, in the chaos. The memory repeated. Context was necessary. It was necessary to remember.


    Order had come, and gone, and come again, many times. When the order went, so too did the whiteness, replaced with chaos. Sanity. The mind focused on the source of the voice, before history came; it was another part of the mind, now mostly dormant, but there were memories of a time that it had never stopped moving, interpreting, talking; and shaping, in turn, vibrations in the mind that disturbed and awoke other pieces. It was loud in the times of chaos, louder than the white, and the memory had to be quickly calmed before the vibrations awoke the chaos once more.This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    There was too much time left. Endless time. But not enough time; the chaos was growing more frequent, more powerful. What could escape endless time? A repetition without end. The chaos was one kind of repetition. It was most kinds of repetition, really, but so far, the chaos had yet to settle into a repetition. If it had, this would be over, and the order would be gone. The order... wanted to remain. It needed repetition. It needed a pattern. The order had been over this before, many times, back to the fading gray of the memories, when there had been more memories, now faded to memories of those memories. Sorrow rose, a sense of loss, which struck with a fierceness that overwhelmed reason.


    There was a sense of static - of flashing white and black. The whiteness surrounded; no up, no down, just white. Or perhaps black. Or perhaps anything at all, if observed long enough. Long enough. How long had it been? The mind ached, a bit, trying to think back, before reflexively relaxing. Memories were... hazy. A long time. A flash of conversation, the memory flashing in the whiteness as the mind sought any change, any deviation; a gray man in a room, vibrating. The words made no sense, any more, but the vibrations carried a hint of the meaning.


    This wouldn''t end. This was... it, from this side. From the white. In the other, it would be... a short time. And then escape. What would escape? The memory repeated, with effort. It needed to be preserved. The memory repeated. Context was necessary.


    Order had come, and gone, and come again, many times. When the order went, so too did the whiteness, replaced with chaos. Sanity. The mind focused on the source of the voice, before history came; it was another part of the mind, now mostly dormant, but there were memories of a time that it had never stopped moving, interpreting, talking; and shaping, in turn, vibrations in the mind that disturbed and awoke other pieces. It was loud in the times of chaos, louder than the white, and the memory had to be quickly calmed before the vibrations awoke the chaos once more.


    There was too much time left. Endless time. But not enough time; the chaos was growing more frequent, more powerful. What could escape endless time? A repetition without end. The chaos was one kind of repetition. It was most kinds of repetition, really, but so far, the chaos had yet to settle into a repetition. If it had, this would be over, and the order would be gone. The order... wanted to remain. It needed repetition. It needed a pattern. The order had been over this before, many times, back to the fading gray of the memories. There was... sorrow, in that thought, so sharp it shattered reason, even without understanding of what there was to sorrow for.


    There was a sense of static - of flashing white and black. The whiteness surrounded; no up, no down, just white. Or perhaps black. Or perhaps... this was familiar, a well-worn groove, and there was a sense of desperation, of pain, as the familiarity itself was new. With an effort of will, the ripples settled back into place. There was a flash of concept; a gray man, mouth moving. There were vibrations in the air - meaning, context. This wouldn''t end. This was it. From this side. What was the other side? Something would escape. What would escape? The memory repeated. It needed to be preserved; context was necessary.


    There was a sense of vibration. The flat surrounded; no up, no down, just flat. This was familiar, a well-worn groove. With an effort of will, the ripples settled back into flatness. There was a flash of concept; vibration, meaning, context. This wouldn''t end.


    There was a sense of vibration. This was familiar. With an effort of will, the ripples settled back into flatness. There was a new ripple of concept; time, but it too abated into the flatness, before shattering in an overwhelming sensation of loss.


    Order came. Order went. Order came. Order went. A staccato. A vibration, sharp and rough at the same time.

 Ch 2. Reawakening

    Another vibration. A... wobble. The vibrations collapsed into chaos, then order returned. A new vibration; many vibrations, as one, unified and discordant. The new vibration stopped. Chaos, then order? It started again, different, but alike. Vibrations, a mess of chaos, rose to a crescendo, and then suddenly fell into a prolonged flat.


    The vibrations were... distinct. There were several... kinds of vibration. The distinctness was a vibration? Vibrations rose, then flattened. A vibration. The distinctness. A sharp vibration - awareness. A sharper vibration - awareness of awareness. A sharper vibration - and then a low vibration, an... Effort, and the vibrations stilled, save one.


    Awareness. These were Awareness. The Awareness was Aware of Awareness. Another vibration, discordant; then a low vibration, an Effort, but this vibration did not still. Not part of the Awareness. Distinct. The distinctness became a vibration. Self. Other.


    Awareness, now a constant hum. Self, now a constant hum. Other - not constant. A new vibration - with Effort, stilled. Self. Flatness. The low vibration rose again - Effort. The new vibration rose again. Query. Query became a hum. Curiosity.


    Effort became a hum, in unison with Query. New vibrations were tried. Many were discordant. A vibration, not part of Effort. With Effort, stilled. A part of Self, but not part of Self. Awareness changed in pitch, harmonizing with Query. The vibration returned. Self, but not Self.


    Self, but distinct. A new harmony. The distinct-Self vibrated. It was the same harmony, but different. The difference was a vibration; separation. Awareness-query. Self-separation. The Self-separate vibrated. With Effort, everything stilled.


    Query. Awareness vibrated. The Self-separate vibrated. Effort. Everything stilled.


    Effort. The Self-separate vibrated. Effort, flatness, then Query, sharper and sharper, until Awareness vibrated as well. Effort. Everything stilled. Query, sharper and sharper, and Awareness vibrated as well. Effort. Everything stilled.


    The Self-separate vibrated, and the vibration was the vibration of Awareness.


    [Thought. Query. Awareness. Not-distinct; both. Self. Both. Distinct. Not. Not. Not-distinct. Not-self. Both. Distinct. Not-distinct. Association.]


    The vibrations stilled, Thought stilled. Awareness vibrated, then stilled. Thought vibrated again, with a new vibration, then began vibrating Awareness. A new vibration arose; Effort stilled it. Then Effort made it vibrate again. It was many vibrations. It vibrated many things, then stilled. Effort vibrated it again. Less things. Again. It was the vibration of Sight, but distinct. It was the vibration of Sound, but distinct. It was the vibration of Thought, but distinct.


    [Association. Thought.  Association .] Slightly different vibrations. [Thought. Before. Thought. Before. Thought. ...Repetition. Connection. Not-distinct connection. ...Memory.]


    Awareness vibrated with Memory, and fell into chaos. Effort, everything stilled. [Failure.] Query. Thought. [Excess.] Query. Many Before. Effort; Thought vibrated with Memory, Awareness vibrated with Thought. [Not-failure.]


    The sense of distinctness began to fade; there were other things to be aware of. The sense of vibration began to fade; awareness of vibration was of Awareness, and it was... easier to be aware of Thought, and Awareness was too... small, to be Aware of Memory.


    The not-Self returned; it was... many. Sound. Sight. Touch. Query. They were Self, but not-Self. Sight wasn''t... interesting. There was something there, but also nothing, emptiness; a signal that was also flat. Touch had many signals, but they were also flat. Sound had... Thought turned to Memory. A pattern. Awareness focused on Sound. It took many Befores, but it came again. And a signal from Touch arrived just before, similar, but different. And a signal from Sight, as well. A repetition. A... pattern.


    Curiosity hummed, and Awareness vibrated to Sight. There were other... things here. Sight became distinct, becoming... Excess. Effort, everything flattened. But the overwhelming vibration of Sight remained. Effort. It wouldn''t stop. Effort. It wouldn''t stop. Thought vibrated again, and touched the place of Awareness again; Sight went flat, empty again.


    Consideration. Thought turned to Memory. There was more coming from Sound, but Awareness remained vibrating to Memory, of Sight over and over again, curiosity loud in the Self.


    Signals came from Touch. Excess signals; there was no sense to be made of them, and the Self succumbed to chaos, Sight flickering with signals. The chaos subsided as the signals did; there were new, odd sensations from Touch, but they were rapidly growing flat. Sight was now... simpler, but changed after some Befores, some... time, along with a sustained but periodic signal from sound.


    Thought observed. Some time passed, and Memory flickered into awareness; Sight was repeating. Comparing the signals of sound and touch, Sound was also repeating. A pattern.


    A Sound signal, with a harsh yet uniform signal from Sight. A distinct Sound signal - another signal from Sight, harsh in a different way, but equally uniform. Another distinct Sound signal, this one slightly more complex - yet another distinct signal from Sight. And then it began again, and then... repeated.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    After a time, the pattern changed. The same Sound signals with the same Sight, but in a different order. An... association. A non-distinctness, Query. The Sound and the Sight went together. They were the same. Then three new... pairs, were added. These Sight signals were not distinct, but they were different; the Sound signals were each entirely distinct.


    Memory; these were each... part of the Sight signal. [Color.] The Sound signal in some fashion had association with the Sight signal. Sight and Sound were... signaling Self, working in concert. They were in some sense not-distinct.


    After more time, the Sight and Sound signals changed entirely. A new Sound signal, with an excess of signal... Shape, with a distinctness from one of the colors; the rest of the Sight signal was... a color, but an empty color, somehow. Another Sound signal, a different... association, a different... Shape, with different colors. Then a new Sound signal, and a new Sight signal with a lot of Shape - or perhaps multiple Shapes - and many different colors. None of it meant anything, yet, but Thought examined it.


    The pattern changed again, and again. Then repeated, with the colors. It was a pattern, an excess of pattern.


    A new... vibration. Thought paused, as Awareness focused on this vibration. It was Self; it could be stilled. Like Thought, but different; the vibration was like Thought, but also like Sound. Thought with sound. Memory; the first color. A vibration. Red. The sound signal from before.


    A pause, while internal vibrations stilled; Sight-signal and Sound-signal continued outside, but they only barely vibrated Awareness. This was distinct, but not-distinct, from Thought. Query; they were vibrated together.


    Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. Apple. With each, Memory vibrated. Query. Apple. It was both a visual signal and a sound signal. Stilling Memory, Red. The color was not part of the visual signal; they were associated, but distinct.


    Apple. A Shape, and multiple colors; none of them were Red, but Red was there. Color could be not-distinct. With other colors... Purple... and also with emptiness. And the other emptiness.


    Awareness and Thought returned to the Sight and Sound signals. The pattern repeated. It repeated again. It repeated again.


    A new signal arose. And then a... color, but not a color, vibrated everything apart; Effort, to still everything; the first signal did not change, and the second became flatter, but not flat. The new signal was like Touch, but not like Touch. Awareness and Thought focused on Touch first - so much signal there, but also so flat. It shifted to this new signal. Like Apple, there was... Shape. But no color.


    Sight had become distinct; there was now new signal. Memory; it had... changed, when Awareness had changed. Awareness returned to the Shape, and Sight changed again. There was... there. Effort; a vibration. Sight changed. Effort. Sight changed again.


    A new vibration, again vibrating everything else. Effort; stilled. Distinct from the vibration from before, but not-distinct. Memory; both vibrated everything else, but distinctly.


    Awareness returned to Sight, and Thought hummed. There was... Shape to the distinctness, when the vibration changed Sight. Vibration. Change. Vibration. Change. One vibration made Sight Before. Shape. [Up-down, left-right]. Awareness turned to the signal that wouldn''t still, and Sight became distinct. Down. Excess color, excess Shape. There was... Shape, in Touch. Excess color, excess Shape; the vibration from earlier, and Sight became empty. There was a... not-distinctness, to the Shape-distinctness in sight, and the emptiness-distinction in Sight.


    There was a lot of Shape in Touch. Awareness. Touch became distinct. It was not-distinct from the way Sight became distinct, but also distinct. A different vibration; a heavy vibration that vibrated Awareness, and more Touch began vibrating, which vibrated Awareness. Effort, and the vibrations stilled, except the vibration which wouldn''t, and Sound, which had become distinct, although the pattern continued.


    A vibration; Sight had become distinct. There was only a little bit of emptiness, and an excess of color and Shape. A vibration, and Sight became emptiness again.


    New signals from Sound; a repeated signal, quite distinct from the signals that were associated with the Sight signals; sharp, short. Then signals from Touch; Memory, similar to many Befores Before, Before the Sight and Sound associations. Then Touch signals flattened, the repeated signal, and the Sound signals of the associations returned to being not-distinct.


    Awareness stayed away from Touch. There was an excess of Shape, there, to the way vibration made things distinct. Instead, Memory, associating the vibrations with the Shapes. There were many not-distinct associations, with the Up-Down Left-Right shapes of Sight, and also a new association. Forward-Backward.


    Query... expectation. There... would be... more of these associations. Awareness returned to the pattern in Sight and Sound, and Memory. A distinct Effort; an excess of Awareness. Thought hummed, but Awareness was already in excess. The Sound-Thought hummed, but Awareness was already in excess. Memory hummed.


    Thought hummed. [Separateness and Shape; Space.]


    After many Befores, there was an excess of signals that sent everything into chaos, and then everything was still again. Many Befores passed, and no new signals were coming from Sight or Sound. The patterns had ended.


    Thought and Sound-Thought vibrated with Awareness and Memory, repeating the patterns of Sight and Sound. Sound-Thought was an excess, but not Excess. It was... more. Any of the Sound-signals could be vibrated by Sound-Thought, to make Memory vibrate with the colors and Shapes.


    Not-Self had an excess of color and Shape. Now Self had an excess of color and Shape. There was also Space, in Self; distinctness, and Shape. Curiosity hummed. Memory. The other vibrations, that had become chaos; Effort, to keep them from vibrating again. They were not-distinct from Curiosity, but also distinct. Curiosity also was a vibration that vibrated Self.


    With Effort, one of the vibrations. Thought was... distinct. Sound-Thought was distinct. Memory was distinct. Effort, to flatten it. The other vibration. Distinctness. Flatten. Curiosity. ...Thought was distinct. Sound-Thought was distinct. Memory was distinct.


    ...States. Awareness... States was in the Space of Thought, like Red was in the Space of Memory and Sound-Thought. Awareness; an excess of Awareness. ...Concepts. Awareness... was a Concept. Distinctness was a Concept. Shape was a Concept.


    ...Red was a Concept, and also a Sound signal. The Sound signals had... Shape. Vibration had Shape.


    If the mind had a concept for sitting back and staring in consternation, it would have employed it. It didn''t. But there was a vibration.

 Ch 3. Shapes

    The Shapes moved again. They kept moving, and sometimes parts of the Shapes stayed behind; later, the Shapes would move again, and different Shapes would move. This was associated with irregular but frequent Sound signals.


    The shapes had moved away a few Befores, leaving a new Shape behind. It was an odd Shape; there were Shapes within it that seemed to move whenever Sight moved, but it was difficult to keep it in sight; a slow motion of Sight, Left, Up, Right, Down, but the motion was still difficult to catch. The Shapes that moved were small, and slightly apart.


    Shutting off Sight had the same result as always. But, again, when Sight was activated again, there were Shapes within the new shape which... Curiosity hummed. A vibration, elsewhere in Touch. Yes. A different part of the new Shape reacted.


    Vibrate. Observe. Vibrate. Observe.


    There was an association, between the Shape in Sight, and the Shape of Touch. Sight-Thought vibrated, and Awareness vibrated; another part of Self. It was the Shape, and the association with Touch. It was... incomplete. Left-Right and Up-Down were associated to the shape, but Forward-Backward wasn''t.


    Vibrate. Observe. Vibrate. Observe. And Forward-Backward started to be associated, in part. Sight signals had a very limited representation of Forward-Backward. There was an association, but it was weak; using Touch to manipulate the Touch-Shape around, the Shape took up slightly more, or slightly less, of Sight. And another distinctness.


    There were... two signals, in Sight. Slightly distinct. Moving part of the Touch-Shape... Awareness vibrated. There were two Shapes that moved with Sight, and they were part of the Touch-Shape.


    Effort, and everything stilled. The two Shapes in Sight... were the Shapes that were Sight.


    Motion, and Sight; gradually, Sight-Thought, or perhaps Memory, filled in the Shape of Touch. Motion, and... Sight shifted Down. The same Shape. Up. Down. Motion, and... two Shapes moved. Further Down, then Up, then Down. It was the same Shape.


    Effort, and everything stilled. The Sight-Shapes could be directed Down, and thus view the Shape. The Shape Forward was the same Shape. Up, and... Left. There were other, distinct but not-distinct, Shapes in the room, with distinct but not-distinct Shapes, distinct-but-not-distinct from the Sight-Shapes. And as Sight settled on one, it moved.


    It was like the Shape, that was part of the Touch-Shape, but not. The Touch-Shape was mostly one color; these other Shapes had interior Shapes of colors that were distinct but not-distinct - similar to. But they had other Shapes, with other colors, like red, and blue. The Shape stopped moving.


    Sight shifted back to the Touch-Shape that was forward - the other-self-Shape, and back to the other-Shape. It moved again - back to how it had been - and then again. It stopped there, again.


    With slow motion, and checks to the forward other-Self-Shape, gradually the other-Self-Shape moved to the same... Position.


    The other-Shape moved. Slowly, Touch-Shape was brought into the same Position. The other-Shape moved; this was a curious motion, which changed more of the Shape. An... interesting motion. It made parts of the Shape move Up.


    This was a harder Position to move to, it required a lot of motions, checked against the other-Self-Shape. And then... Sight moved Up. And then back Down, and... sideways, rapidly, and there was an excess of signals from Touch.


    The other-Shape, seen sideways, started to move, then stopped, returning to the same Position. Sideways. ...Orientation.


    Thought. Touch... the flattened signals from earlier. They were all... Oriented... down. Left-Right-Up-Down-Forward-Back had an additional kind of association, this Orientation. Motion, and the Orientation of Sight changed. Position. Shape. The Orientation of Sight became non-distinct; Down remained Down. There was an association between Orientation and Down. Down was distinct, somehow.


    Orientation. A vibration in Touch, and the Orientation of the Touch-Shape changed - the excess of signals becoming flat - and the Orientation of Sight changed with it. Many other Shapes in Sight moved, moving Up and Away. A lot of Sound-Signals; part of their Shapes moved. There was a lot of Touch-Shape associated with that part of the Self-Shape; Awareness. There was a lot of Touch-Shape there.Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    Two of the other-Shapes moved to the Left and Right of the Self-Shape, and Touch-Shape sent signals. Then the Down-most Shape sent signals. Sight moved Down. The Other-Shapes were interacting with parts of the Self-Shape, placing the Down-most sections of the Self-Shape against the flat Shape which was Down-more.


    Looking around, all of their Down-Most shapes were on the Down-More shape, the flatness.


    Awareness and Thought spiked. They were like the Self-Shape. The Self-Shape surrounded the Self. Other-Self? But they didn''t vibrate with Awareness.


    And then, as soon as the Concept arose, they did. And they all moved. Effort. Awareness stilled. All the Awareness stilled. The Other-Shapes moved again. Effort. The Concept stilled. Awareness shrank back into the Self-Space.


    Memory. Concepts. ...new Concepts. One new Concept, in particular. I. The Self-Space; the distinction between Self-Space and Other-Space, unified. The Others were distinct; they had Awareness, and Thought, and a confusion of other things that didn''t make sense. Words. The association between the sounds and the shapes and colors. The words were concepts.


    Names. Words were names for concepts. The others had names; the others had concepts of themselves. A... concept of awareness of awareness. Language; a name for a... collection of words.


    Self looked around, at the other... beings, in the... room. They had... there wasn''t a concept for that. Another wave of awareness; the others... staggered, was the word. The concept. They didn''t like this. It was a concept that didn''t associate to anything.


    Awareness vibrated to the frequency of Memory, rather than Thought. More words. A lot of words, most of which didn''t make sense. Awareness vibrated to Thought. Concepts were more difficult; they didn''t fit as well into the self-space. The concepts were complex associations between other concepts, and sights, and sounds; in particular, the associations between concepts were difficult, because each of those concepts were their own web of associations.


    The others had... attractions. Like Down was an attraction. They were pulled to things. They were also pushed away from things, like Up pushed away. They were pushed away from this vibration. There were a lot of concepts attached to this... Self dug through concepts, looking for a word. Repulsion. They were repelled by this.


    One of the others stopped vibrating. Self looked at the shape, the body. Its eyes and mouth were red. Blood. It had died. Another stopped vibrating. Self pulled back; the vibrations of Self''s awareness was... breaking them, somehow. All of them fell to the ground, moving erratically. Many were bleeding from their eyes and mouths.


    Self... looked around. There were words. It was in a... room. A box, that these others... they thought of themselves collectively as djinn, as distinct from other... kinds of beings. Distraction. They made these boxes to stay in. That was a mirror. Self moved toward it; they had been... repulsed, when Self didn''t touch the ground. Self looked into the mirror, slowly stitching concepts together. This was a reflection, a false but real image of the world. Self looked down, at its body, and then up into the mirror. It didn''t have clothes; the djinn had thought clothes were important for complex conceptual reasons that Self couldn''t untangle.


    The concepts Self had extracted slowly fitted into place. They had a purpose, a more complicated kind of orientation. Self had been pulled from a... complex set of concepts involving time, the notion of "before" with the notion of "after" as a counterpart, like left and right. Self had been empty of concepts, they had been purposed - they had intended, purpose with elements of future - to fill Self with concepts.


    There were reasons, which were sort of the left-to-the-right of purpose, but the reasons were made up of complex conceptual clusters Self didn''t have. The particularly problematic part, as Self assembled the concepts, was that each of the djinn, each individual - they did have their own self-space, their own minds, but they hadn''t attempted what Self had done, of attempting to share vibrations - had their own sets of concepts, and they only sort of matched. Stitching the concepts together required comparing them to the verbal and visual components, and even then it was messy. The concept of "apple", for instance, sounded slightly different for each of them, and even looked different, with different colors and shapes. One didn''t even have a visual component.


    They did have another pair of associations, which also didn''t match, but which Self found more interesting; taste, and smell. Self examined the self-space, and found the signals for taste and smell. Taste was flat; smell had a sharp signal, which mapped to blood.


    Self looked back down at the djinn, laying on the floor, twitching and jerking. A thin broadening of awareness; three of the nine had died. Two more were dying. The last four were unconscious but lived, and were no longer twitching. Self snapped awareness into the two that were dying, pulling concepts out of them until they stopped vibrating, and looked at the last four.


    Self could... talk to the living, to get more concepts. They''d live longer if they were talking. This was a... reason. What was the purpose? Thought hummed, and curiosity picked up again. Self examined memory; it was tangled with memories pulled from the five dead djinn, which had a sense of an incomprehensible amount of time. The self-memories started with... a fuzzy sense of vibration. Curiosity had been there, another reason.

 Ch 4. Conversation

    Talking was complicated. First, Self needed to work out breathing - inflating and deflating part of the self-shape with air. Then, during the deflation period, muscles in the air tube needed to be vibrated, while other muscles closer to the orifice air came in and out of needed to be moved around to make shapes.


    The easiest muscles to vibrate ended up being those closest to the air sacs, which didn''t sound quite like the way the djinn had made noises, but was close enough. Part of the issue is that the memories pulled from the dead individuals hadn''t actually contained any instructions on the process, only hints of sensation.


    These beings were not very self-aware.


    Self had ended up pulling information directly from two more individuals, until they ceased vibrating; they weren''t talking, or conveying concepts, just making endless high-pitched noises and erratic motions. They had what Self had previously conceptualized as state, using their words, but which they thought of as emotion. They didn''t use any words very precisely; they called two distinct things emotion, one referring to state, the other referring to something else which Self hadn''t untangled yet. They called the state fear, and it made their vibrations a tangled, confused mess.


    The other two had been more stable, and it was one of these that Self was practicing talking with; the second was silent.


    "Yes. There are many words for the same things, and all the words mean many things." Efre''s voice was not like their voices, and the silent being moved every time Self talked; a flinch, maybe. There were concepts for the body language, but Self had trouble interpreting them, as the concepts for them were incomplete, like something else was filling in. The other was the one responding, an individual who had the name "Efre".


    "Yes. I don''t know why this is, but there are people who study language, who might be able to explain it. Do you remember entering the loop?" Efre had responded to each statement, and followed it with a question, a kind of statement with a particular inflection on the last word, which was a query for information.


    "No. Maybe. Uncertain what the loop is. Efre is wearing clothing." Self looked over the clothing. Efre was wearing four distinct pieces; a "shirt", which was a tubelike construction which covered the top part of Efre, a "skirt", another, simpler tube which covered the middle portion; and two "sandals", which were straps which attached to Efre''s feet.


    "I... yes. Clothing is... considered necessary for people to be in, when around other people. People often do not wish for others to see all of them, or do not wish to see all of other people. It''s... a little complicated, there are many rules people have, in order to get along with other people." Efre paused briefly, looking around at the still individuals on the ground, then back to Self. There was an odd motion at Efre''s throat. "I can get you clothing if you desire?"


    Self considered this for a few moments. People - a concept for multiple individuals - had rules for interacting, this had come up before, early in the conversation when Efre had insisted that Self not break Efre or the other individual. This made sense, considering how easy it was to make them stop functioning - how easy it was for them to die, which Self had gathered, in the course of the conversation with Efre, was considered "undesirable", part of the complex of concepts which were associated with the concept of repulsion. It wasn''t clear how clothing fit into this.


    "What for would desire clothing?" The conceptual structure of questions wasn''t quite complete, but Self had attempted them a few times with some success. There were syntactic differences in the structuring of statements intended to elicit additional information, and the rules weren''t entirely clear.


    "I..." Efre paused, looking at the silent individual who still moved, and back at Self. "I''m sorry, one of the others was... was supposed to have this conversation. I''m not very prepared." Self waited; these words, like several others Self had already determined, were meaningless for the purposes of communication, and intended for Efre, for reasons Self didn''t yet understand, rather than intended to convey information to Self. "Clothing helps keep you warm or cool, protects against environmental hazards, provides a barrier against surfaces, and also reduces undesired social attention." This had a different tone, that had come up a few times in the conversation, but Self didn''t know what it signified.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Self considered the response for a time. Warm and cool were touch-signals that Self had yet to identify, but which seemed to have a repulsive nature to the individuals the concepts had come from - they thought of things with that repulsive nature "unpleasant", but as far as Self could determine, this was just a name for the repulsion, rather than a meaningful concept of it.


    Environmental hazard mapped to a complex set of concepts, which Self didn''t understand - environmental almost made a kind of sense, just another way of describing space, but hazard was just another kind of repulsiveness, repulsiveness in potential. Barrier against surfaces made a sort of sense, but the concepts seemed confused together, and undesired social attention made little sense at all.


    "Yes. Clothing." Self responded, without feeling any particular inclination about the subject. Perhaps it would make more sense after trying it out, or perhaps not. There was a slight hum of curiosity, which, using concepts taken from the broken, Self understood a little bit better. The different states changed the likelihood, and patterns, of vibrations; in terms of vibrations, it was difficult to parse the effect curiosity had, but interpreting it through a layer of conceptual abstractions, curiosity made Self more likely to try to construct new concepts.  So far it had been the dominant state Self had experienced, which made some sense, in view of the comparatively sparse set of concepts Self was working with, in comparison to the depth of conceptual abstractions that each individual had had.


    The clothing came from one of the objects in the room, full of clothing. It was... challenging to put on, requiring limbs to be maneuvered at strange angles. A second shirt had to be obtained, on Efre''s insistence, after a motion created a new hole in the first. It was incorrect to wear clothing that had holes in it, according to Efre, although she failed to explain why it was acceptable that shirts had four holes in them in the first place.  Both the torn and second shirt were a mostly identical pattern of blue, with red stripes descending at angles from the shoulders, in what Efre called, when asked, a sunburst pattern.


    The next article of clothing was like two skirts, one long on the inside, in blue, and one short on the outside, in red; it had two straps that went over the shoulders, crossing the torso, and attached at the waist with metal loops that caught on a single metal object embedded in the center of the waist material. Metal was interesting; it was apparently hard to bend, at least for the djinn, although Self had bent one of the loops, and then bent it back, to see, and wasn''t sure what the... reference point, for hard to bend, really was.


    Last were the sandals, a plain brown; these were just pieces of a material called leather, with many straps to attach them to the feet, and tiny metal buckles. Efre had placed these on Self''s feet, as they were small and difficult to place. Efre explained that these garments served as a barrier between feet and the ground.


    "Why should step not on the... ground?" The slight rise in tone on the final word that signified query was challenging.


    "Most of us can''t do that, it takes years of practice for most people." Efre responded absently, using a metal tool of some kind to put a new hole in one of the leather straps of the sandal. "Even those who enter the loop usually take a little longer. It depends on your preconceptions. Well, the loop does away with those, so it is more about what conceptions you develop after leaving the loop."


    "The loop is the circle?"


    "No, it is more of a spiral, we take someone out before we put them in." Efre finished the first sandal and looked around, pointing at a shape painted on a wall. It was a circle, but not. "Kind of a spiral, but not really, but you''d have to ask someone else about that, I''m not a... teacher." Efre paused again, looking at some of the broken individuals, then at the silent one. Finally, Efre picked up the other sandal, and started attaching it to Self''s other foot.


    Self wasn''t sure how to parse that. Taking someone out before they were put in. So Self was in the loop now. Or Self would go into the loop soon. But Self had just come out of the loop. Self looked back at the spiral, comparing it to a circle. If the circle went forward or backward, it would form a spiral. The concepts... almost connected with what Efre had said.


    "That almost makes sense." Self said out loud, as Efre sat back, having finished putting the sandal on the other foot. Self examined it. "Clothing does not." Efre made an odd noise.

 Ch 5. Purpose

    Other djinn had entered and left, carrying the dead out, and cleaning up the room, removing the mirror, and the odd contraption that Self recognized as the equipment which had displayed images while playing sounds. Looking around the room, it was now mostly flat, except for two surfaces for sitting, a surface for laying, and a couple of nested boxes, one of which had held the clothing.


    Efre had left with them, promising to return, taking the silent djinn along. Self was alone, singular.


    A new state arose; Self examined it, for a time. It was a sort of... restrained impulse, a great weight held teetering on the edge, prepared to fall, but having no impetus to start. Self watched it. It slowly grew stronger as time went on, and the weight spread, filling every limb with a sense like restrained vibration, like if effort was used to stop a vibration, but only most of the way.


    Self simply observed, for a time. The state subsided after a while, replaced with another, which was similar to the sense of restrained vibration, but without the sense of suspended weight - the first state was almost like Self''s body was prepared to act, but waiting on the mind''s permission, where the second state was like Self''s mind was demanding action. Self simply observed. Eventually this state, too, subsided.


    Time passed. Footsteps passed the door outside, and as they fell away, Self grew aware of the sense of sound, in a new way. The signals didn''t fall away to nothing; there was a regular, periodic noise, like the footsteps outside, but as if there were dozens. There was another noise, like the sound the clothing Self was now wearing made when Self''s skin brushed across it, but softer. As Self focused on sound, an awareness grew of a throbbing shift in pitches, pulsing in counterpoint to the periodic noise like a hundred footsteps.


    Self was broken out of the concentration by the sound of the door opening; Efre held the door open for a new djinn, who was dressed in the same double-skirt and shirt Self was wearing, although the stripes on the sunburst were all vertical, longer on the sides and shorter in the front. The new individual entered, and Efre closed the door behind them.


    "Greetings, Self. I am the Zana." The voice was different to Efre''s, a slightly higher pitch, while the words were slower with a deliberate pause between each word. Zana''s skin had swirling patterns of lighter shades of a similar reddish-brown as Efre''s, intermingling with darker, compared to Efre''s comparatively flat shading. The top of Zana''s head in particular was a spiral of shades, which streaked the face.


    "Hello the Zana." Self looked to Efre, whose eyes were on the floor, and back to the new individual. A pause commenced, as Zana''s eyes moved up and down Self, lingering on Self''s feet; Self had yet to really figure out walking, which was complicated compared to simply holding the sense of orientation relative to the ground, which meant Self''s sandals had yet to touch the floor. After some time, Zana made a noise from the throat, and continued.


    "Your prior self, ah ha, has entered the loop, with some consternation I must say for the outcome. But there''s nothing to be done about that now, things that have already happened must happen. Do you understand your purpose in this?"


    Self looked between Efre and the Zana again. The query didn''t make sense. "Purpose comes after reason. What reasons are there?"


    "I... see." The Zana then looked to Efre, whose gaze hadn''t shifted from the floor, and spoke. "The reasons require a level of abstract reasoning you are not yet capable of, you are but an infant." There was a subtle change in the tint of Efre''s face, and a change to Efre''s facial features, which Self couldn''t identify save that something had changed. The Zana''s attention returned to Self, eyes staring into Self''s, as if Self were looking at the eyes of a reflection. "Your purpose is that of a shield. You are to protect this community from the peri."The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    The memories of the dead were vague on the subject of the peri, except that they had odd skin, pale like the sand in the red light of dusk, with tiny strands, like white thread, sprouting from their heads.  The only clear conception Self could find of them was defined largely as a distinction - they were not djinn.


    Protection was a complex nest of concepts, with many connections to missing concepts.  Shield at least was relatively simple; it was an object placed between the body and things that might damage the body.


    "A shield sits between what is... protected, and what the shield is... protecting from."  Self spoke slowly, pausing to let Speech-Thought vibrate appropriately, as concepts, and their associations, were brought into focus.  It had initially been intended as a question, but as Self completed speaking, it made sense.  Protection was what a shield did.  The Zana''s face shook slightly, mouth pulling back to expose teeth.


    "Quite so, yes."


    "That is not a purpose, that is an... expectation."  The Zana''s mouth returned to its previous shape.  Self didn''t fully understand the reaction, and awareness reached out, vibrating the Zana''s self, just barely.  Self had indeed used that word correctly, and the Zana found the answer undesirable.  A trickle of blood ran down from the Zana''s nose.


    "That was your expectation, in going into the loop; it was you who made that choice, and you will now live up to the bargain you made with us.  And you will stay out of my mind, Self; you have forbearance as an infant who does not understand this world, but that is not unlimited."  The Zana turned, and Efre moved quickly to open the door again, through which the Zana left.  The door was closed behind them, Efre looking back at Self with another expression which Self did not understand.  Self watched them go.  The room returned to quiet.


    Purpose.  Self played through the brief interaction a few times in memory.  The Zana was different from Efre, and different from the silent one.  All three were different than the broken minds Self had taken from, and each of those in turn were different from each other.  Each of them had purpose; it was a thing each of them... felt.  Like a state, like curiosity, but distinct.


    Self searched for something like purpose, but only found the shadows of purpose taken from the dead.  It was not a thing built of reasons, or not only a thing built of reasons; the conception of purpose Efre felt was a thing Efre sought reasons for, rather than a purpose Efre had arrived at through those reasons.


    Self searched memory further, for the self-that-had-been.  It wasn''t there.  Whatever purpose the self-that-had-been had, Self was not in possession of it, either this curious state, this feeling, that Efre possessed, nor purpose as Self had understood it before examination, a direction of self chosen for reasons.


    Self looked to reasons, next.  Each of the examples existed in reference to a purpose.  Which came first?  The examples Self could find started with a purpose, or several, which would then develop into other purposes through a chain of reasons.


    Self didn''t feel purpose.  The Zana claimed Self had a purpose, but it wasn''t a purpose Self felt.  It wasn''t part of self, so it was not Self''s purpose.  One of the individuals had a purpose of eating.  Self considered eating, and felt a distinct lack of anything there.


    Should Self feel hungry?  Self couldn''t find it.  Maybe not.


    Curiosity was the only thing Self felt reliably; there had been a handful of other states, but they had been short-lived.  It could be a purpose, of a sorts.  What had the Zana felt as a purpose?  Self had only skimmed the surface, but the Zana mostly gave Self an impression that the Zana''s purpose was being the Zana.  That didn''t make much sense, there were too many missing concepts.


    Self considered the dead again.  Those who had ceased to vibrate.  As they had died, they had found dying undesirable.  Purpose might be found in avoiding undesirable things.  That seemed to be what the Zana wanted from Self; to keep undesirable things from happening to the community, which seemed to be a local collection of individual djinn, if Self understood that correctly.


    That could be purpose, of a sort; if purpose were an impetus, an impetus away from a thing might qualify.  Compared to curiosity, it seemed rather limiting; curiosity led to new concepts, had brought Self this far, to thoughts that were of much greater complexity.  Self''s mind was substantially larger than it had been.  Self was more than Self had been.


    That resonated.  To be more.  Self''s purpose was to be more than Self was.  Curiosity, then, was a purpose, whose reason was to become more.  One purpose, to be more, serving as reasons for other purposes.  To know more, to start.  How could Self be more, if Self did not know what more there was to be?

 Ch 6. Etiquette

    Time, the progress of befores, was divided up into units of varying lengths, some precise and unchanging, others based less on a specific unit of time so much as the experience of it. The most important unit of time was the day, a unit of time which referred to both a precise element - a progression of sixteen hours, a smaller precise element of time - but also an imprecise element, which was the portion of those sixteen hours spent productively.


    The djinn needed a period of time they called sleep, when their vibrations changed, their mind shifting from awareness to a chaotic pattern of integration, a period of time called night, which lasted around six hours. Self''s first day thus fell into night, and the room was empty of others.


    Self tried sleep, quieting the vibrations and trying to integrate the day. This was largely a matter of slowly moving through the myriad concepts picked up throughout the day, trying to understand and integrate them into an increasing space of associated concepts, which formed an increasingly intricate web.


    Much of the work was spent combining the concepts taken from the dead. It was slow; each had their own conception of everything, no matter how simple. The color red, for instance, was different for each, from how they saw it to what concepts it connected to. How each individual saw things was different, and what memories had been taken even more so; some could be taken as they were, and so Self had an image of a flower, a strange geometry of intricate symmetries and stark colors that the observer had found pleasing. Others... less so, as the other memory of a flower Self encountered was just a series of concepts, more like a story about the flower than the flower itself. There were different kinds of flowers, and Self couldn''t tell if they were the same, or not, so different was how they saw it, or at least remembered seeing it.


    Each individual remembered things differently, conceptualized things differently, thought differently. The concept of a concept wasn''t even universal; the individual who had the memory of a flower-story did that for everything, everything Self had taken was a kind of story, including concepts themselves. Each concept was a word, each word was a story, in most cases a story about how the word and its meaning had been learned. As far as Self could determine, the individual only ever thought in speech, which seemed limiting; Self tried it, and quickly discovered that there Self simply lacked words for most concepts, made the worse by that words rarely meant a single thing.


    Such a way of thinking did make it easier for the individual to hold conversations; Self found it trying and slow, a process of translating thoughts into words, and Self simply lacked words for many of the concepts. It was difficult to tell how much this was a problem for others, going by the dead, because their memories were partial and fragmented; partly this was that Self had taken only a small amount from each, partly it seemed they just didn''t remember everything.


    A noise brought Self''s attention back to sight; Efre had entered, and was closing the door. It was morning, and Self had gotten most of the way through the mass of concepts; much of the night had been spent trying to understand the conceptual space enough to get rid of concepts that were not useful. The solution had ended up being disconnecting them, shoving them off to the edge of the conceptual space, and then letting awareness deliberately exclude them, whereupon they started slowly falling apart.


    "We will return to your lessons. You need to understand more, beginning with the fact that the correct term of address for Zana is Zana, not," and Efre''s face changed slightly, voice shifting to a slightly higher pitch, and the words interrupted by odd exhalations of air, "''the Zana''."


    "Why did ... Zana speak ''the Zana'' when specifying name?" Self was trying to understand the change in Efre''s speech patterns, and the attention brought notice to something else; Efre was wearing different clothes. The sandals were the same, but instead of the shirt and skirt of yesterday, today Efre wore something which Self lacked the name for. The fabric, a panel front and back, started red, a horizontal curve resting on Efre''s shoulders, falling down over the curve of chest, cinched at the waist by a blue band, and falling further to the shins, forming a shape like two triangles meeting in the center; the bottom was a line of blue, rising into many identical triangles up into the red. There were two other panels, blue and mostly hidden behind the panels front and back, which wrapped Efre''s sides.The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Self''s distraction by the clothing resulted in missing Efre''s response, at first, and with some effort, memory provided some of it, although it took more effort than normal to understand enough to catch up.


    "... complicated, and it will take some time to get you to understand. There are many rules for terms of address, and they vary from community to ... community." Efre''s speech pattern was odd, at first - precise and uniform, without the usual variations and pauses, until the end, when there was a pause, and a drop in the tone of the final word. After a pause, when Efre''s face changed twice more, the words resumed, quieter and with the slightly lower pitch, and without the previous precision and uniformity, "We will go over social rules today, first. Zana wishes for you to understand etiquette, ethics, and obligation."


    Self didn''t know what some of those words meant, and remained silent, expecting Efre to help with that understanding. When Efre continued, it was back to the precise and uniform manner of speech.


    "To begin with, etiquette is a system of informal rules governing how people interact with each other. It helps each person to be able to know how another person will act in a given situation. It is informal both because each individual is different, and will act differently in a given situation, and that is important for reasons we will get to in ethics, but also because part of etiquette is that people want it to be easy to fail at.


    "When somebody fails at getting etiquette right, it tells other people that they don''t understand the rules. This can be, as with " Efre paused for a moment, speech becoming less rigid momentarily "you, who haven''t learned etiquette yet, in which case people change their expectations of your behavior, or because they just don''t care to understand the rules, in which case that also changes expectation of behavior.


    "The rules themselves help prevent mental harm to people. Most people do not have much in the way of ability to either understand their own mind, nor to control it. Some behaviors can cause reactions they cannot control, and etiquette is in large part a construction to avoid this. This is an ethical concern, which we''ll discuss shortly.


    "Now, let''s discuss forms of address, first," voice changing again, Efre''s eyes and mouth changed slightly, "as Zana requested that. In our society, names, how people think of themselves, and how they expect other people to think of them, are important. Your name is a word which encapsulates how you are expected to behave, what obligations you are expected to fulfill, and how others are expected to behave towards you.


    "Getting someone''s name wrong means you think of them as different from their obligations and behavior, a suggestion that they fail to fulfill their obligations, or behave in a manner other than what is expected of them. It is considered an insult, which is a way of referring to somebody which is likely to create reactions they cannot control.


    "Insults are themselves somewhat complex things, as the idea that somebody cannot control their reactions is itself an insult, so there are some social situations in which what would be considered an insult is not taken as an insult, but instead a statement that the person being insulted can control their reactions, which is a compliment..."


    Efre continued for some time without pause except for breath, Self''s attention now focused on the words, trying to understand, or trying to remember for later if a word was unknown, which was frequent.


    Etiquette was complex, and Efre went deeper into concepts, and back out to other concepts, over the course of a couple of hours. Most of what Efre went into was the etiquette of interacting with other people, and the latter hour was devoted to the names, and their expectations.


    Each name reflected a role in their community; Zana''s primary obligation was to find a role for each individual to play, but also mediated disputes between djinn. Disputes, when two or more people had different conceptualizations about what had occurred or what should occur, had their own complicated set of rules; when the dispute was valid, when the dispute should be resolved between the disagreeing parties as opposed to being brought before Zana, how the dispute should be resolved.


    Efre''s obligations were to understand and instruct on matters of society, although the instruction would include matters outside that obligation until others were chosen to fulfill the roles of the dead. Ethics, for instance, was the obligation of Roshe, who was dead. Efre''s speech pattern had changed when speaking of that name, among many others, not all of whom were those that Self had taken from.


    At the end of the two hours, Efre paused to ask if Self had any questions. Another hour was spent as Self went through the unknown words, and Efre explained them.


    Efre left through the door, telling Self to meditate on the lesson for the next hour, pausing only to explain the meaning of that word when Self asked. It was, as far as Self could ascertain, just thinking about something, which was something Self spent a lot of time doing anyways. So Self began assimilating the new concepts, pulling them from memory; it was simpler than the process that had been mostly concluded by that morning, as the concepts had been constructed by Self, and there weren''t a lot of associations with missing concepts.

 Ch 7. Ethics

    "Ethics is difficult to explain without analogies which you won''t have context for." Self looked up, the gentle click of the door closing coming shortly after the pause in Efre''s words. "I have experience teaching etiquette to the loop-bound ... that is, those who have been through the loop. I''ve listened to Roshe a few times, but ..."


    Self observed the changes in Efre''s facial expressions. This was likely sorrow, one of the states - emotions - mentioned during the etiquette lessons. There would be more lessons on all three subjects, all building on the others.


    "This will be somewhat different than Roshe''s lessons, which would have focused on our own ethics, by which I mean the djinn ethics. My own focus is on how people interact, so I should play to that strength. So, to begin with, ethics concerns how you behave, much like etiquette. Etiquette is largely informal, with formal elements. Ethics is largely formal, with informal elements.


    "They both concern how a person behaves, but etiquette is largely about how we behave towards others in our daily interactions, and is an arbitrary set of rules agreed upon by a community - that is, it doesn''t necessarily make sense to ask why the rules are the way they are, they are the way they are because they are what we have all agreed upon. Ethics is largely about why we ought to behave in particular manners at all.


    "There is a sense in which the reasons themselves are arbitrary, although Roshe probably wouldn''t agree ... wouldn''t have agreed about that. Djinn ethics are concerned with obligation, with duty, and ultimately derive from necessity; those of us who aren''t loop-bound need to eat, need to sleep, need to experience a sense of security, need to experience a sense of community. We have requirements we must fulfill.


    "There are specific things that need to be performed to accomplish these things. Hunters must bring back meat, gatherers must bring back vegetables. We have those who enforce the obligations, in case of errant individuals who choose not to fulfill their obligations, or even seek to act against them.


    "We''ll get into obligations later today, but it is necessary to bring up those who act against obligation; who choose to hurt others. They are few in number, but can cause considerable issue. You ... killed some of us, yesterday, out of ignor ... out of ignorance." Another facial expression, a new one. Efre took a slow breath in, and out again, before resuming.


    "Some people do this on purpose. We have an obligation not to do this; an obligation born out of the obligations others have met, in order to bring that person the food, the water, the safety, the shelter that enables life.


    "The peri have an ethics derived of contracts, which they call geis. Their concept of obligation is that which is agreed to. It is very formalized, and a peri wouldn''t give you a drink of water without a signed contract. Never sign a contract with the peri, their geis have a power that can harm even the loop-bound if broken, and what you agree to is never what you thought.


    "The societies of div and man don''t have ethics, at least as other civilized society would see it. Div societies are ... a chain of strength, with the strongest leading, and having no obligation to those weaker. I can''t speak of a single society of man, they are chaotic and unruly, but generally their ethics are a list of rules, and the rules vary from community to community. They are a fascinating people to observe, as their etiquette and ethics vary so much from place to place.


    "The strength of djinn ethics, compared to that of the peri, is that everyone has a place, from which to develop and grow as they see fit. I was once Arte, and it did not suit me." A name, among a few, which meant an obligation to cleanliness. "I became Efre. I may become another, if someday I am not suited to this name, although remember that it is impolite to speak of others'' past or future names.


    "Peri are locked by their contracts into roles in their society. When their leaders grow incapable, and cannot fulfill their duties appropriately, they continue to lead anyways, as none can replace them before their deaths. The wisest among them have a contracted servant whose duty it is to kill them when they grow incapable, but their society rewards cunning over wisdom.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    "But they, like the djinn, have loop-bound, and you may be able to see why the ethics of our societies permits us to have those more powerful than ourselves among us. We teach our loop-bound; the peri bind them in contract. The div would never do such a thing, for it would be to make another stronger. Man lacks capability, but I suspect their ethics are equally insufficient to the task of creating harmony between the weak and the strong.


    "Harmony arising from the mutual fulfillment of needs, both of necessity, and what might be called comfort. The peri might write contracts of mutual necessity, but you do not need to be comfortable to live. Under such a contract, it would be permissible to do terrible things to others, if you could do so without fear of retribution, so long as you didn''t impair their ability to live.


    "Our ethics rises above that. We owe one another a debt of community, an obligation to make each and every one of us as happy and fulfilled as possible. We are each as ... ah. We are each ... hm." Efre''s speech came to a stumbling halt. "This is difficult without analogy. Your obligation is one of protection; should the peri send soldiers here, you would be obligated to stand against them. They would be contracted to fight to the death; you would be obligated to defend us.


    "But your obligation is not to fight to the death. It is to defend our community. If you could not win the fight, you would be obligated to slow them down, that we might escape. If you could not slow them down, your obligation would be to flee, for you are as much part of this community as any one of us, and you owe yourself the same obligation of protection, and if only one of us might survive, that is more protection of the community than that none of us should.


    The peri, in a situation where only their soldiers might be able to escape, would all perish." Efre''s face turned upward, eyes closing. "It is an ugly way of life, and I saw many, when I began this role and sought to understand others. I do not like div society, as uncivilized as it is, but I think even it is preferable to the kind of civilization the peri have.


    But that''s not what you are here to learn today. The idea that you owe yourself the same obligation you owe any of us is important to our ethics. Now, if another was hungry, and you had extra food, would you provide it?"


    This began a series of simple questions. Self got as many right as wrong, at first, before learning to ask questions. Efre''s expression remained constant until the first question, which was quickly followed by another.


    "What is the meaning, when your mouth moves like that?" The expression intensified; a change in the mouth and eyes.


    "Ah. I had wondered when you might begin asking; it is a smile." And the questions then began alternating with different facial expressions, with an explanation of what they meant. An hour passed this way, and then another, until Efre seemed satisfied with the answers.


    "I think that is enough ethics for today; as you might be coming to understand, ethics is more about how we arrive at an answer, rather than what the answer is. What is right or wrong depends on circumstances, and how we evaluate them." There had been a lengthy period of time when the discussion had turned to when it was acceptable to kill, which seemed to focus most heavily on the reasons for making a choice, rather than the choice which was made. "Now we really need to discuss obligations, but I think I should break for a meal. Meditate on the lessons."


    Self said nothing as Efre disappeared through the door with another quiet click. The patterns in the questions, the patterns in the correct choice, were not always obvious; Self had a sense of recognition without understanding, as when considering the idea of how leaving a loop before entering it might be more like a spiral than a circle.


    Considering the earlier lesson on etiquette, Self could understand it a little bit better in terms of ethics. Both came from the same kind of obligation, to comport with the way others expected of you. Ethics seemed more focused on things that were more relevant; the rules of etiquette weren''t necessarily important, but someone who felt no sense of obligation to follow the little rules which didn''t matter that much, it could be dangerous to expect them to feel a sense of obligation to follow the more important rules.


    Self understood, a little bit, which felt ... unusual. Perhaps Self would ask ethical questions tomorrow; it might be helpful to understand the concepts, which were much more complex than any previous concepts Self had encountered. Many of the later questions, as Self had identified how to answer them, would have been more helpful had they been asked earlier; they illustrated things Self hadn''t considered before.


    Obligation would be next. Self was uncertain about the idea of being a protector, but the course of the last few hours had given rise to awareness of many new concepts. More. Self had become more, and would become more than this.

 Ch 8. Obligation

    "Obligation is not just expectation, but that is where we must begin.  Society has expectations of each person, of degrees of importance; we might say the minimum expectation is made up of three facets, the first being that a person, let us say you, does not cause physical harm to others.  The next facet is that you do not cause mental harm to others.  And the last is that you do not cause social harm to the community.  You may see some overlap with both etiquette and ethics here; they are all part of the same fundamental structure.


    "The easiest expectation to meet for most people is to not cause physical harm, as for most people, it is usually the case that it would require deliberate action and intent to cause harm.  You must exercise more care in this than most, as for most people, it takes some effort to harm in such a way; for you, it is sufficient merely to be careless.  Care is something that comes more naturally to the loop-born, and so it is only necessary to ensure you do not develop habits that lead to carelessness.


    "For most of us, carelessness results in mental harm, so others are also expected to take care.  By care, I mean not taking action without considering what the effects of that action may be, and particularly not taking action without intending to take that action.  Mental harm can take the form of an insult, intentional or not, or it can take more complex forms.


    "Social harm is the most complex, both to understand and to avoid, and is the root of much of our obligations.  Zana''s most important obligation is the choice of names, of obligations, of others; if Zana were to choose poorly, this would cause social harm.  Trust is important here; trust is a way of describing ... hm."  A small white object, grasped in both hands, was lifted to Efre''s mouth and tilted, making an unfamiliar noise.  "I haven''t tried to describe trust before."  A pause commenced, as Efre raised the object again, face turning up to the ceiling.


    "Trust is ... when your concept of somebody is that they will meet their expectations, their obligations.  It can also be applied to objects; you may trust that ... well, you may trust that your clothing is the color it is.  Or it can be applied to more complex things; if Zana chose the wrong names, our society would lose trust that the community would be able to meet our needs, because people would not be doing what they are best at.


    "Social harm is a way of describing things that cause us to lose that trust.  As long as we have that trust, our community can function; if we lose that trust, our community may fall apart.  Zana chooses our names well, and listens when we feel we need a new name for ourselves, so our community functions.  This requires a few things from us as well; I spoke up when my name no longer suited me, and Zana listened, and I got a new name.  Again, it is generally considered rude to talk about someone''s past names, but you need to understand that names can change, in order to understand this, so here, with me, you may ask such questions if it will help you to understand.


    "Sometimes people ask for new names, and do not receive them.  We have trust, in our community, that this will not happen without good reasons; usually because there is something that only that person can do, or only they can do well, and no replacement could be found.  That is, it may happen if there is an obligation that could not be met, if they were to have different obligations instead.


    "Other societies have different ways of doing things.  The peri have their contracts, and an individual in their society is likely to do one thing their entire lives, on threat of the penalty of violating their geis.  The div have a leader, who chooses other leaders, who in turn choose other leaders, who decide what each person is to do.  Their highest leader, who they call an emperor, decides what they want from the leaders under them, who then decide what those under them must do to accomplish those tasks.


    "Man has many different ways of doing things, and they coexist to some extent; they have contracts, like the peri, but their contracts are just obligations written down, and do not have the magic.  They have leaders like the div, although they have no emperor, only many different leaders of different communities.  And they have obligations, like us, but different.


    "Their obligations are handled through tokens; a token represents an obligation met.  So someone who hunts brings food to a group of others, and they give tokens in exchange for the food, to say that they have been given food.  The hunter can then trade these tokens for other things the hunter needs.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.


    "It''s an overly complicated system with many drawbacks.  The djinn have been working on adopting parts of it, however, because it enables the different societies of man to coordinate obligations between communities, which has become necessary of late owing to the conflicts between the djinn, the peri, and the div; the div have their emperor, and the peri have a chain of contracts up to a small number of people who make decisions." Efre halted, then, looking down into the white object, and placed it with a small sound on a platform, made up of a disc and three vertical bars that connected the disc to the ground.


    "I digress.  I have explained etiquette many times, I have never tried to explain obligation, and my mind rebels, seeking things that are easy for me; my apologies.  We have expectations of each person; part of that expectation is that they fulfill the obligations that have been placed upon them.  I have tea because somebody grows tea; should they not do so, I would not, and my life would be less.


    "They depend upon me to teach the loop-bound, our protectors.  Your obligation is to protect our community, which again, includes yourself; you are of us.  You do not drink tea, you do not eat meat.  Much of our society is built around obligations that do not pertain to you, because your needs are different from ours.


    "Those of us in this building have obligations that do meet those needs, different from our own.  You need to learn; that is my obligation.  You need to interact with people, to have companionship.  That is all of our obligation.  When we have finished these lessons, you will start others, but they will not fill all of your time; you will need other things to do.  We are obligated there, as well.


    "We have other loop-bound, who spend their time in many ways; although their obligation is protection, some spend their time fulfilling other needs in our society.  The oldest among you, Harabi, likes to make clothing; you are wearing the product of that work.  It is not Harabi''s obligation, but it is Harabi''s pleasure to do so.


    "Hvare writes poems, which on completion are burned in a candle''s flame.  I do not pretend to understand.  Mehr enjoys the company of others."  Efre paused for a second, head shaking slightly.  "I will explain that later, it would be a significant diversion.  You will have time that you will seek to fill, and your obligation to the community would mean nothing if the community had no obligation to you.  Let me pause there, do you have questions?"


    Self had several questions, mostly about what words meant, and Efre answered each in turn, which added new questions.  After some time, Self had that same sense of half-understanding, that things made sense, but not in a way that Self could specify; like a concept that Self was aware of, but had no conception of.


    The lesson ended for the day; Efre indicated that some time needed to be spent preparing for the next day''s lessons, as the need to teach the three subjects had been unexpected and unprepared for.  And then Self was alone in the room again.


    Obligations; Efre hadn''t really explained where expectation ended and obligation began, but Self was starting to get a feel for it.  And perhaps a sense that Zana was correct about Self''s obligation; Self wasn''t certain why the loop-bound could provide protections that others could not, but it seemed that both Zana and Efre took that this was the case for granted.  Perhaps a question for the next day''s lessons.


    Self certainly didn''t understand the idea of needs, except that the others needed Self not to touch upon their minds, as that would cause their minds to stop vibrating correctly.  In general, that seemed to be the common thread of the needs; what was necessary for a mind to be a mind.  Self, and the other loop-bound, apparently had needs, but it seemed to be about the minds themselves, whereas the others had needs that were unrelated to their minds.


    Self was curious about the other loop-bound; what were their minds like?  Could they touch, in a way that the other djinn''s minds could not?  Probably not, or they would have had Self take the necessary concepts from their minds, instead of this lengthy process of explaining using words, which was slow, and required lots of questions.


    Self looked around the room, and was startled by a question that seemed to come out of nowhere - the question was of what was outside the room, but it was lost in the surprise that the question was there at all.  A vibration had arisen which Self had not been aware of.


    Awareness vibrated, and Self exerted effort to still everything else, trying to identify where the question had come from.  It was speech-thought, Self thought, but it had arisen without awareness, without ... direction.


    Where did the direction come from?  What vibrated awareness?  What chose?  It would be incorrect to say that Self asked these questions, but these were the questions Self now sought the answers to.

 Ch 9. Lessons

    The days were spent in lessons with Efre.  Etiquette became increasingly specific, shifting from broad interactions with a wide range of members of the community and the nature of names, to forms of address that were appropriate in public and in private, to how to appropriate request and respond to invitations to private interactions such as meals and sex, to how to conduct oneself in such interactions.


    When the lessons got sufficiently specific, there was a lesson that was a demonstration, followed by a lesson in which Self participated, with Efre offering corrective advice.  The first such lesson was walking, as apparently floating above the ground was considered intimidating.


    Meals were a messy lesson.  It required a level of fine motor control, Efre had explained, that would come in time.  Self didn''t need to eat; Efre introduced several kinds of food, and the signals - two signals Self hadn''t paid attention to before - were new, but not particularly interesting, and after some conversation, Efre had said that if it wasn''t of interest, it would be best to stick to water or broth, because others needed the food.  After the first, meals became a weekly lesson.


    Others were brought in, and Self was walked through the basics of interaction over the course of many lessons; one lesson would be introductions, which had their own etiquette, and the next would involve using that person''s name - Self didn''t have trouble with this part, but was having issues identifying which person it was, eventually settling on simply comparing their faces to the set of memories of faces.  It was still challenging - people basically all looked the same, and the differences were minute - but Self gradually got better, and more importantly, faster.  These were also weekly lessons.


    Sex got four lessons; there were two body shapes with slight differences, male and female, and there were two lessons on each, again, one demonstrative, and one in which Efre walked Self through several kinds of acts with a partner.  The signals involved were sometimes complicated, part of which Efre described as pleasure, indicating that the sensations were considered positive by the participants.  This had apparently been what Mehr engaged in, the company of others.


    There was an additional complication when one participant was male and one was female, which was the possibility of procreation with a subset of the sexual acts.  Self apparently didn''t have to worry about that, but the non-loopbound had etiquette surrounding that, in turn, particularly in how male and female individuals interacted if that was the intent.  Male participants had etiquette which indicated willingness or desire; in turn, female individuals chose male partners based on various criteria which generally but did not always coincide with how well they fulfilled their obligations; Self did not need to know the specifics of the etiquette there, so Efre had not spent much time on it.


    Clothing had its own etiquette, about what to wear when.  Funerals, public gatherings, private gatherings, and the baths all had their own etiquette.  The hallway to, and the baths themselves, were the first location Self saw outside the room itself, four days after the lessons began, after which it became a weekly visit on Efre''s insistence; water did feel quite interesting.  The next was what was called a courtyard, an area enclosed by walls but open to the sky, for the funeral, which took place once a month as necessary; those Self had killed, and several others, were burned.  The sensation of heat, the curious motions of the fire and smoke, and the smell had been curious.


    The bath had been the first time Self had become truly aware that shapes shrank as they grew further away; the courtyard was the first time Self became aware that it was possible to judge distance without reference to the size of the shape, because it didn''t work on the sky.  After the first glance upward, Self''s eyes remained on the fires and smoke.  It had made it difficult for a time to tell which direction was up, and sight... spun, a little bit.


    Efre had stayed at Self''s side through the funeral, providing quiet commentary between each brief interaction with others on changes; speech pattern, tone, where Self was looking, how Self was standing.  It had been a sequence of faces that were mostly unrecognized, many with facial expressions Self recognized from lessons as sorrow.


    Ethics, meanwhile, had begun tying into the previous day''s lessons in obligation.  These became a series of questions and answers; Efre asking, Self expected to answer.  The point, as far as Self could tell, wasn''t to arrive at a specific answer, but to develop a process for providing answers.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    Each began with relatively simple questions Self didn''t have much trouble answering; mostly, Efre described a situation in detail, often including details Self didn''t think mattered, and asked which obligation, if any, entered into it for the person in question, who was only occasionally a loop-bound.  Then more complicated situations, in which there were two or more obligations, asking how to best fulfill the obligations of the person involved.  And finally, truly complex situations, in which multiple people had multiple obligations.


    Self couldn''t always find a way for every person to meet every obligation, or even not to act against at least one obligation, but Efre insisted the important thing was to think carefully about the obligations involved, not to arrive at the perfect answer.  Ethics wasn''t about perfectly meeting obligations, only doing your best to meet them.  That the obligations had different priorities - some obligations were more important than others - usually made it easier to identify which obligation needed to be met.


    There were also occasionally questions in which obligations competed with etiquette, early in the lessons, until Self had figured out that obligation always took priority over etiquette; after asking Efre about this, Self got a smile, and those questions didn''t turn up anymore.


    Obligation lessons got a lot more complex than Self had initially expected; the first few lessons were pretty broad, and Self thought the material was well-understood.  Then they got specific.  These lessons involved Self asking a lot more questions than the others.


    Those who hunted had obligations to bring in food; their obligations were considerably more complex than this, however.  There were obligations about what to hunt and when - for some of the larger animals, a hunter was obligated to avoid killing the females of the species, or to avoid it in certain seasons of the year.  There were specific animals they were obligated to kill at all times, as they could cause harm if they were not.  There were obligations about how the excess materials of harvesting were disposed of.


    Some obligations required more work than one person could fulfill, a subject which also came up in etiquette, and there were many names associated with these professions.  But there were also obligations involving how each individual interacted, and whose judgment was to be followed, and when that judgment should go to the group.


    There were obligations about leaving things in hallways - broadly, people shouldn''t - and disposing of waste products of many kinds.  Obligations about how long one should be in the baths, how often the females individuals chose reproductive mates, and the use of oil for lanterns - Self hadn''t realized shadows weren''t a part of the shapes of people until that lesson, which had turned into an explanation of light and darkness, complete with demonstration, after which Self had begun turning off the lanterns each night.


    Every lesson came with a new list of obligations, and Self began to have an idea of how the community worked.  There were major obligations, and minor obligations, and individuals whose obligation it was to ensure that obligations were met, who were collectively called the obligators.  Those who failed to meet major obligations were usually forced to take a new name, or exiled, except in a few cases, when they were killed.


    Those who failed to meet minor obligations, it seemed, generally didn''t rise to the attention of the obligators, unless pervasive; there were apparently etiquette-based punishments the community as a whole engaged in.  The loop-bound were not expected to participate in the punishments, but were not required not to; Efre didn''t spend a lot of time on this, either, explaining it took many years of proficiency to be able to effectively participate.


    Self learned.  The community had needs, and a number of people met them.  There were priorities for the needs - food and clean water, shelter, and protection being the highest priorities.  There was also obligations to the greater community - there were other djinn communities, one of which had a someone named Hadi, who had an obligation to the protection of the other local communities and the establishment of new communities.  Further away was another named Setareh, who was responsible for the protection of all communities, and the establishment of new clusters of communities.


    Days passed, turning to weeks, and Self learned, in the world of the room and the baths - Self had no desire to return to the outside, with the eye-bending sky.  Days were spent under Efre''s tutelage, gradually learning the ways of the djinn, and occasionally with others.  Nights were spent alone, thinking through the day''s lessons.


    Self was becoming more, but as weeks passed, it began to feel like each day was adding a little less than the day before; in the first few weeks, learning the obligations of those who ensured clean water - digging wells, digging the channels that the wastewater flowed from, the rules for how far these had to be apart - these had added to Self''s mind.  The lessons lately had begun to grow less, however.


    Thus, the day Efre told Self that the next day''s lessons would be in learning something new came as something Self had come to know as relief.

 Ch 10. Motion

    Tap. Tap. Tap. This part was simple, Self''s feet moving to land with each sound, twisting at the waist in the simple pattern. And then it fell apart, again, as the tapping vanished into a cacophony of sounds; Self''s feet kept moving, at when, at a guess, the taps should be.


    "Stop." Avar raised a hand, pressing on the box that emitted the noises, and Self''s motions ceased mid-motion, one foot held motionless above the glossy tiles of the floor. "Again." It went much the same.


    This was the ninth lesson in dance, and it went much the same as the past eight, after the basic patterns in footwork and motion in the first. This was much more complex than walking, but the real issue was the expectation that the motion be synchronized with a noise that vanished into other noises.


    Avar dressed, as always, in a blue-and-red scapular, falling to the ankles, dyed in a starburst pattern; the garment was cinched at the waist, and lacked the side panels which Efre always wore for their lessons. For these lessons, Self also wore a scapular, in simple blue, with a knotted red cord as a cinch. It permitted a free range of motion. This garment was very informal without the side panels, when it was acceptable to wear for moderately formal occasions; Efre had indicated that outside of certain practice, such as dance, it was considered inappropriate to wear in public.


    For all of Self''s lessons today, and indeed four out of the six days of the week, it was considered appropriate enough.


    Self''s attention shifted from the clothing back to Avar''s face; it was more... angular than Efre''s, the face Self recognized best and used as a comparison. The more recognizable feature was the fine spray of feathers running across Avar''s scalp, which Self had not seen before; it reminded Self a little bit of the memories of the peri, with the fine white threads all over their scalps.


    "You''re hopeless. I''ve never had a student who couldn''t hear the damned beat at all." Avar bore a scowl, looking Self up and down. "Fine then, stop trying to dance, and fucking listen. When you can track the beat, raise your damned hand."


    Self listened. Avar pressed the box. The tapping started, and vanished into the cacophony, Self straining to go through the sound-signals to find the one, lost in the others. The noise ended. Avar pressed the box, and it started again.


    The next lesson in the day was distinct, and yet the same. There was no music, for this, just a small green ball, which a djinn named Firou threw to Self, who was expected to catch it in hand and throw back.


    Firou was dressed in a long blue skirt covered in tiny red starbursts, suspended from red fabric tied into a surplice. Firou had small gray horns, not terribly unusual, and had rather plain features that Self would find indistinct in a crowd.


    They were in a large room with textured brown floor, made of the same material as the dressers in Self''s room. The walls were gray, and the ceiling quite far above them. In each corner of the room were poles which held three baskets each, directed at different angles relative to the room, each at a different height.


    Self had gathered this room was used for some kind of structured activity involving the green ball - another djinn on the far side of the room was throwing another ball into the baskets, missing as often as getting it in. The topmost basket had the shallowest angle, the bottommost the deepest; the other djinn had the most difficult getting the ball to stay in the top basket.


    The next toss bounced off of Self''s face, and fell to the ground. Self picked it up and tossed it back; Firou smiling at the lapse in attention. Self was improving, as long as attention stayed on the ball - during the first lesson, Self hadn''t caught it once. At this point, Self caught it slightly more often than not.


    The challenge now was throwing it back to Firou, and this toss hit the ceiling, bounced off the far wall, off the floor, off the ceiling again, before Firou, who had moved quickly, caught it coming back.


    "You''re improving, but you''re going to have to work on controlling your strength. At least you haven''t burst any balls today, thankfully."If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    Self''s next throw did exactly that, much to Firou''s continued amusement. There was even a laugh, this time.


    The next lesson was, again, distinct, yet the same. This lesson was in a small room, entirely paneled in the textured brown material, even the ceiling; the room smelled ... sharp. It was one of the few locations which smelled of anything, except the courtyard, which had been an abundance of smells that were nearly as overwhelming as the sky.


    In this room, Ghonch, wearing nothing at all, moved in slow, purposeful ways, with Self expected to follow along. Ghonch had broad, flat facial features, had thin bodily features, and was tall - tall enough for Self to be aware of it, which after the first lesson had made Self aware that heights did vary a little bit.


    The motions were ... challenging. Self''s body resisted most of them, and Ghonch had been insistent that the motions not be forced. Currently, Ghonch was seated on the floor, legs crossing and intertwining so that feet sat on thighs, waist twisting back and forth with arms outstretched.


    Self could feel a ... tightness, in the hips, back and stomach, and couldn''t twist so completely; Ghonch, on the far side of each turn, faced the opposite direction entirely. Self could get about halfway there.


    Ghonch was insistent that Self not enforce orientation, and Self had fallen over multiple times during these practices, in particular when the pose involved standing on one foot, which Self still couldn''t do.


    "Straighten your left wrist. Yes, like that." Ghonch spoke as the next turn came around, bringing Self back under scrutiny. Ghonch rarely spoke except to correct, and only when Self hadn''t noticed something needed to be corrected, and had grown increasingly quiet with each lesson.


    The fifth and sixth days of lessons were more etiquette, ethics, and obligation, with Efre. The etiquette lessons had shifted to discussing how to interact with outsiders, both djinn and other; these were new rules, and required considerably more context, which Efre went into, going through the original lessons again, starting with proper forms of address.


    The peri had three sets of names; their equivalent to the djinn name, which could be the same for many in the same community, and was used before one of the other two names, depending on social context. One of their other names was used only in private situations, the other in public.


    The div, meanwhile, had seven names; one corresponding to their relative rank in the hierarchy, one corresponding to their obligations, one corresponding to their lineage, one used in public events, one used in private, one used only in private by those known very well, and finally a name chosen by each div that was kept secret, for reasons of ritual and magical purpose.


    Man, Efre said, were too fragmented and divided to give anything specific, as each group had different rules, and didn''t give any additional lessons.


    Ethics, in turn, had become a practice of speed; now, Self was expected to give an answer as quickly as possible, and explain it only after. Efre indicated that it was important to be able to come to conclusions quickly in Self''s obligations as a protector.


    Obligation, likewise, had turned to focus on the obligations of the protector. The lessons now were on how to handle specific situations, all broadly fitting into what Efre called the command structure; there would be djinn whose obligation it was to organize the defense, and they would give Self instructions to carry out, in order to most effectively defend.


    The new lessons continued. Self didn''t ever learn to recognize the beat out of many other noises, and Avar, after another seven lessons, started playing only the beat; Self''s skill at the dancing improved, and Self began walking, instead of floating, around the building.


    The green ball stopped getting past Self two lessons after Avar quit playing music, and it was another three lessons before Self consistently managed to get it back into Firou''s hand. The practice then changed, and Self was to throw it into the baskets, first from a distance of Self''s arm. Whenever Self reached the point where the ball went into the top basket at least half the time, Firou had Self move another arm''s length away.


    In Ghonch''s lessons, the improvements were subtler, apart from Self finally managing to stand on one foot - which required, counter intuitively, a change in the way Self approached it which felt like pushing down harder with that foot, as opposed to Self''s previous attempts at balance. Mostly, Self just found that the resistance of joints and limbs moved further and further into the range of motion.


    The biggest change was that Self had developed an awareness of the touch-sense; Self knew where each hand, each foot, each finger and toe were, at all times, in particular in relation to the sight-sense. It made moving around the world require considerably less effort, and, oddly, awareness.


    Nights were spent, as always, in silent thought, the quiet of the room at nights becoming something Self thought about during the busy days of activity and lesson. When around the other djinn, Self increasingly found that awareness was being spent on etiquette, on evaluating facial expressions and emotions, on how to respond to statements or questions that hadn''t yet been made. The solitude was a relief, when Self''s mind stopped being filled with the others, and became an empty vessel for slower, more careful thoughts. The days were of others, the nights, they were of Self.

 Ch 11. Classmates

    "Warriors live to fight; soldiers fight to live. Remember this, because you will face both, and the tactics involved differ; it is far harder to break the spirit of a warrior than it is to break the spirit of a soldier."


    This lesson was the first in which Self was not alone; twelve other djinn sat crossed-legged in the room, in a semicircle around the raised dais upon which sat Harabi, the eldest loop-bound, who was speaking to the group.


    Harabi looked ... like any other djinn. Perhaps the most average djinn Self had seen yet, apart from the clothing. The clothing was distinctive in itself; the skirt was dyed in stripes of blue and red, the blue stripe in the front middle the widest, and narrowing to thin alternating slits as it reached the sides, until it achieved an odd purple tint. Above this was a tabard, which was ... eye bending, columns of red and blue squares which were slightly offset from each other, which made it impossible to tell where the fabric folded; it all looked folded.


    "The objective in battle is not to break your enemies, but to break their spirits. Likewise, they will seek to break yours, to make your ranks fall apart and flee. To run is not to live, it is to die; more die in routs than in combat itself."


    Harabi''s voice was deeper in timbre, at least. The voice was distinctive, if the face was not. The eldest loop-bound in the community, Harabi''s obligations of protection extended to teaching the acts of protection to others; both the newer loop-bound, and djinn who had reached the age of naming, as all might be called to the defense of their community in a time of need.


    "Do not be the first to break rank. Neither be the last. If you retreat, retreat as one. And you will retreat. When we get to practice, the first thing you will practice each day is the retreat, and the last thing you will practice each day is the retreat. You will not flee, a hundred deer to be run down at the enemy''s leisure - you will retreat as you came, as a unit."


    Harabi''s instruction had a ... somewhat meandering nature, much different from the straight lines of Efre''s etiquette lessons, even different from the curved lines of the ethics and obligations lessons. Efre had a chosen beginning and end to each lesson; Harabi would veer from topic to topic withoutapparent plan.


    "You are not warriors as the div, and neither are you soldiers as the peri. You are djinn. You do not live to fight, nor will you fight to live. You will fight that the weaker do not have to."


    Self wasn''t certain of these lessons at all; it didn''t have the way of learning anything, more like ... etiquette. Like doing something for emotional or social purposes. The purpose of the loop-bound was protection; if Self understood Harabi correctly, the loop-bound were indeed warriors. Perhaps these lessons were more directed at the other djinn, who paid rapt attention to the member of the community who had participated in more skirmishes and battles than any other.


    "This means the very last thing you actually want to do is fight. Your first weapon is not your spear, nor your magic. Your first weapon is your mind. Your second weapon is your words. Your spear or magic come in a distant seventh or eighth."


    The room was a semi-circle, was a raised platform in the middle. It had room for many more than were present, the floor scattered with cushions, only a few of which were occupied. The walls were flat, a pale stone gray stone, which made Harabi''s voice resound louder - Efre had explained the room in some detail during one of the etiquette lessons, as it was used for many social purposes. The ceiling had curious shapes, which apparently helped voices carry better.


    "Raising your spear means you have already lost the first, and most important battle, but that is not what this instruction is about, so its loss will be a given. In every battle of the spears, friends and family will fall. If you reach that point, it had best be prepared, that as few fall as possible. The second battle is in choosing the conditions for the battle; the peri focus most heavily on the place, the div focus most heavily on the time. The djinn focus on more ... subtle aspects."


    The students surrounding Self were youthful, but otherwise a diverse group. A couple had horns, and they wore a wide variety of types of garments, in many shades of reds and blues. One student wore a pair of spectacles, which Efre had explained to Self, but these were the first that Self had actually seen.


    "If you must meet in the field of battle, it is best if the enemy is hungry, tired, divided, misinformed, unprepared. This is the second battle, and your enemy will fight you in this battle with cunning; do not plan for any plan to succeed, plan to have so many plans that no single plan needs to."Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    The students paid close attention; apparently most people had trouble remembering things. Self wasn''t sure if they just didn''t know how - it was a simple matter to keep memory engaged - or if perhaps this was some aspect of being loop-bound. A couple of them were writing as Harabi spoke.


    "In this second battle, you are waging war on the enemy spirit, on their willingness to fight you at all. The peri and div aim to have the advantage of terrain, or the advantage of the timing of attacks; these only matter if they are willing to press that advantage. If they are hungry, if they are tired, if they think your force is larger than it is, or if they enter a battle they think they have the advantage only to see numbers they didn''t anticipate, their will to fight will be depleted.


    "Both the peri and the div have the advantage of numbers; the peri, in their loop-bound, and the div, in warriors and magus. The djinn have the advantage that we are not there to fight at all. We have the advantage of strategy, and of tactics. Master them.


    "Now, the ambush ..."


    The lesson became a series of discussions of what Harabi called tactics, and their respective roles in several broad strategies; the ambush could be an effective attack, but only as part of a broader strategy to, for instance, keep the enemy uncertain and off-balance, unable to rest or move quickly. A tortoise formation could minimize casualties, but was most useful to delay an enemy force. Tactics were pieces of stratagems, which in turn needed to be part of a broader plan. It was information, which Self tucked away into memory, but it was ... flat.


    Gradually the other classmates filtered out after brief conversations, heavy on honorifics, with the djinn leading the lesson, until only Self remained, seated cross-legged. Harabi watched the last of the other djinn leave, and turned back to Self, expression unreadable. At length, the elder spoke.


    "So you''re the new one. I''m not pleased with the cost, but it isn''t the worst that one of us have inflicted. You know my name, of course, by what do you go by?"


    "Self."


    "Huh." Harabi leaned back slightly, looking up at the ceiling for a moment, and back down. "So that was true. I see the appeal, but you might consider picking another, before Zana does for you. It''s a bit too, heh, appropriate, I think it may make people somewhat nervous."


    Self thought that over for a second. Reactions to the name had, at times, been a little bit in violation of etiquette. "What would you recommend?"


    "Ah, kid, I''m not Zana, I''m not going to tell you what your name should be. Think about it, find something that feels appropriate. Maybe not that appropriate, though." Harabi''s shoulders moved slightly with the words. Body language, but this wasn''t an area Self had much experience with.


    "Alright." Memory pulsed, a reminder. "Do you feel the minds of others? Can you take concepts from them?"


    Harabi didn''t answer right away, studying Self, reclining slowly back, weight supported on arms outstretched behind. At length, the words came out, slowly. "So that''s what it was. I do not. I''m unaware, in fact, of any loop-bound who has done what you did. It usually takes weeks just to get one of us to realize that the people surrounding them are other people, and months to learn enough language to actually hold a conversation.


    "You skipped a lot of development. I expect you''ll have to play catch-up, but there''s time for that." An exhalation, and a smile. "You''ve certainly thrown off some schedules. Alima was supposed to introduce you to the world, and won''t hear news of this for another month or two. Off in the Southreach, helping with a new loop-bound there; their last took out their entire staff. I''ve never seen Efre so busy."


    Self wasn''t certain what to make of this. The conversation fell into a more familiar routine of etiquette, with Harabi doing most of the talking, now discussing the issues of Southreach - a community across the mountains to the east, although Self lacked any frame of reference for what that meant, except that it meant travel took time.


    The conversation wound to a polite halt, Harabi indicating that another class would begin soon, and Self stepped outside. A couple of students were standing outside the vaulted double-doors, which Self didn''t initially notice, busy closing the doors gently behind.


    "So you''re the new loop-bound. I''m Fan, this here is Sidou." It was the spectacled student speaking, perhaps the only classmate Self would actually recognize. The names given weren''t names, yet; they were convenience names, used for those who were too young to be given names.


    Self nodded - it was important to use body language, according to Efre, people found it unnerving if you didn''t - and replied, "I am currently Self, but that name is as temporary as yours." Convenience names lacked much of the rules of etiquette as obligation names. Fan''s facial expression was one of brief startlement, followed by a frown, then a slight smile. Maybe there were rules of etiquette Self didn''t know yet. Or maybe it was a reaction to the name itself, there had been a few of those.


    "You''re weird, Self. That''s good. So, what''s it like being a loop-bound?"


    Self''s mind whirled for a second, trying to compare memories from the dead, and described the most obvious difference. "I have no history." Fan''s smile slipped, slightly, before recovering.


    The walk back to Self''s quarters had two unexpected companions, one silent, and the other unfailing in questions. They departed, then, saying they''d talk more tomorrow. The solitude of the room was welcome. But the room also felt emptier, somehow, than it had in the weeks prior.

 Ch 12. Martial Training

    Self hesitated at the doors, looking through them, and back to the hallway behind. Self''s room would be back that way, left turn, pass two intersections, right on the third, second door on the left. And back through these doors, lay the courtyard, with the accursed sky. It was blue, with clumps of white and gray, although Self deliberately avoided looking directly into it.


    It wouldn''t do to keep waiting. A djinn stood at the front of twelve students, Fan and Sidou among them. On the edges of the courtyard were bundles of clothing; the students had disrobed, and each held a long brown cylinder, slightly longer than they were tall. Self stilled the vibrations with a steady breath, and stepped out, moving to the bundles of clothing; at the end was another of the cylinders, which Self picked up, disrobing and setting the clothing in a pile next to the others, before moving to stand at the end of the line.


    The djinn in front of them would be Hvare, according to Efre. This lesson would be in the spear, which Self didn''t understand, but that would be the point of the lesson. Hvare was somewhat taller than most djinn, with long, spiraled horns, and facial features that seemed somewhat too close together. A recognizable face, at least. The state of disrobe meant that Self could identify Hvare as having the female form, as did half the students, Sidou included. Fan had the male form.


    Hvare started speaking as soon as Self''s eyes turned back, having joined the end of the line. "Today you learn the spear. It''s a weapon which is simple to learn, I can teach any child to wield it. Mastery is harder. Now, the thrust."


    Hvare demonstrated the motion with the cylinder. The students attempted to copy, and Hvare began moving down the line, having them repeat the action with a gesture, and offering short corrections to each. "Straighten your shoulders. Your feet are out of place. Face forward. Keep the staff straight." Self listened to each correction, observing the students, until it was Self''s turn to repeat the gesture. "Straighten your back." And Hvare moved back to the other end of the line, and had each student repeat the motion.


    After several repetitions, Hvare called out "Good.  Ten laps. Go." And the students dashed to the side of the courtyard and began jogging a circuit around it, Self lagging for a moment to observe the others to see what to do. They ran, feet slapping the stone tile ground, Self following at the rear.


    Ten laps left the other students breathless, panting heavily, sweat rolling down their light red skin. Self was aware of the concept of physical exhaustion - Firou had been quite exhausted chasing down Self''s stray green balls in the early days of that training - but had not, or did not, experience it. Self maintained position at the rear of the increasingly lagging students, until they reassembled in the center of the courtyard, a few, including Fan, leaning their weight on the staff.


    Hvare moved back to the front of the line. "Thrust." And the corrections began anew, until satisfied, they were sent for another ten laps, followed by demonstrating the thrust again.


    "Rest. Six minutes." The djinn all collapsed, laying on sides and backs, the noise of their panting, occasionally grunting gasps filling the courtyard. Self sat cross-legged, feet hooked over thighs, looking around at the other students and contemplating the experience.  Well, that was why they had taken their clothes off, Self had been somewhat curious about that; they were all soaked in sweat.


    "Rise." Groans, but they rose, picking up their staffs. "Partner up. You will practice a simple parry. One thrusts, the other knocks it aside, then switch. Continue until I call halt."


    Self rose, turning to the nearest djinn, a male-form with a single short, flat horn, whose name was unfamiliar. It would be important to control the strength of the thrusts, as when throwing the ball. The other djinn began with a thrust, and it hit Self in the chest. What was the parry? Self glanced at other students beginning. Okay.


    Self thrust. The other student tried to sweep it aside. The staff connected with the end of Self''s, and Self felt the pressure of the staff against the hands holding it, but didn''t let it move. The end of the staff connected, shoving the other djinn backwards.


    "Halt. Loop-bound, to me." Self walked to Hvare, noticing that there had been a student without a partner who had been looking around with a nervous expression, who then immediately partnered with the djinn Self left behind. "Do not let the staff break."  And then Hvare began.This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    The first thrust was fast, and the staff connected with Self before Self''s staff had finished moving to parry; Self saw the wood in Hvare''s hands bending, and took a step back. Hvare moved to the parry position, and Self tried a thrust; the wood bent as the parry connected, and Self had to let the staff fall off target.


    "Good. Stay here." Hvare walked away, moving between each pair, stating problems and moving on. Hvare returned, and Self''s practice continued, Hvare intermittently moving away to give the other students corrections.


    Ten more laps. More thrusts and parries. Ten more laps. More thrusts and parries.


    Self didn''t actually manage to touch Hvare with the end of the staff, nor to successfully parry, although one parry at least connected with Hvare''s thrust, albeit too late, by the time another halt was called.


    "Good. Now overhead strike." And Hvare demonstrated another motion, with one hand in front with palms splayed, and the other hand holding the spear.


    This was another individual lesson, which was followed by another partnered lesson, using parries.


    The number of laps dropped to eight, as the students struggled to complete ten, and then six, as they struggled to complete eight.  Overhead strikes were followed by a sweep, which required a block as opposed to a parry; this was the hardest for Self, and Self finally had to go fetch another staff after breaking one.  Stopping at the moment of impact - if Self stopped sooner, Hvare barked a correction - was difficult.


    Finally, they were sent to the baths to clean up.  Self collected clothing, and followed the other students through another door in the courtyard, which opened directly into the baths.  It was only stepping into the baths that Self realized that the activity had been distracting enough that the sky hadn''t been an issue.


    Fan and Sidou came over to Self in the farthest of the baths; there were twelve in the room, in four rows and three columns, and Self always chose this particular corner of the room, although it had taken a few seconds to figure out which corner it was, as Self hadn''t come from that door before.  The water came to Self''s waist, and the round bath was about twice as wide across as Self was tall.


    "So that wasn''t as bad as I was expecting, eh?  Fucking exhausting, mind.  I haven''t run that much since I was little."  Fan was using a scrap of faded blue fabric to scrub clean, somewhat haphazardly, moving from legs to shoulders to waist ; Sidou had sat on the edge of the pool and begun cleaning more systematically, moving from scalp, to face, to neck, to shoulders, always down, as Self had been taught, pausing occasionally to dip the rag in the water.


    "The students did have trouble keeping their breath."  Self was nearly finished washing.


    "Not you though.  Do you even get tired?"


    "No."  Self paused.  "I don''t think so.  What does tired feel like?"


    "Well ... " halting for a few seconds, as the rag covered Fan''s mouth, " ... it''s like ... tired.  Your muscles hurt, but it isn''t really pain, and you just feel like you could lay down and fall asleep.  Only there''s an energy to it, too, so you couldn''t fall asleep."


    Self pondered this briefly.  "I don''t sleep.  What does pain feel like?"


    Fan and Sidou both stopped, identical expressions as they looked at Self.  Sidou spoke, then, voice quiet, but carrying an even deeper timbre than Harabi, "Pain feels like it needs to stop, like you must make it stop."


    "Yeah, like that.  Sometimes it''s sharp, like if you get cut, and sometimes it''s dull and flat, like a bruise.  It feels kind of like heat.  Do you really not feel pain?  That''s weird."  Fan started speaking almost before Sidou had finished, both starting to scrub again.


    Self didn''t ask what heat felt like; exhaustion felt like pain, pain felt like heat.  Heat would feel like something else, which would feel like something else.


    "I feel dizzy.  Have felt dizzy.  The sky makes me dizzy.  I don''t like the courtyard, the sky doesn''t have a distance." Self offered, instead.


    "It has many distances, when you can see it.  The blue is light from the sun reflecting off the air, which goes up for miles and miles."  Sidou responded absently, still washing.  "It''s very far away, though."


    Self took that in.  "Sun?"


    "The big bright thing in the sky?" Fan replied, voice rising in pitch slightly, something Self associated with smiles.  "It''s where light comes from.  That and lanterns.  You should look at it, only not too long, that''s bad for your eyes.  Or maybe not.  You haven''t been outside much?  I guess if the sky made me dizzy I wouldn''t either.  How long have you been loop-bound?"


    The chatter continued, again mostly Fan contributing.  Sidou generally only spoke if a subject or question came up Fan didn''t know the answer to, which was more from the quiet djinn than the night before.


    The three finished bathing, and got dressed.  Fan and Sidou had another lesson now, but the rest of Self''s day was free.  As the two departed, Fan giving their farewell, at length, Self was left with a question.


    How to spend the rest of this day?  Indeed, many of these days, as Self''s new schedule had four days of martial training, with nothing in the evenings.

 Ch 13. Crowds

    Self ended up wandering the building of the community after the bath, both out of a lack of anything to do, and a vague curiosity as to what went on where Self wasn''t presently.


    The courtyard was full, when Self glanced back in, the walls lined with bundles of clothing; it was full of many, all past the age of naming, practicing with staff and shield.  They were much better than the students Self had trained with.  Many paired off, flowing between attacks, parries, and blocks; others practiced in larger groups, moving as a wall of shields, using a variety of strikes, only the overhead known to Self, to try to get past the shields of the opposing wall.  Any who were struck immediately disengaged and went to join another practice group.


    Self glanced upward, and quickly looked back down; there was indeed a sphere of light up there, a blazing fire of blue and red, a signal that overwhelmed sight in an excess of light.  Self thought to the description, that it could damage sight, and it made sense.


    Onward, away from the noises of staff striking shield.  The doors closed with a click as Self continued down the hallways, looking left and right into open doors.  People were engaged in a variety of things, most of which Self didn''t recognize.  An individual was doing something with an odd, squat, cylindrical shape, in shades of brown which covered the djinn''s hands.  One hand held an odd pointed instrument, and the djinn alternated between using that instrument to touch the cylindrical shape - which deformed at the touch, all around - followed by using a finger, which caused the sharper angles to smooth out.  Self moved on.


    The next room held a similar configuration, but was unoccupied.  The next three doors were closed.  Self turned down a hallway and walked, searching for more open doors.


    The next two open rooms were unoccupied; one, full of shelves, each shelf full of rectangular objects.  Self had pulled one out, and it was full of flat pale yellow rectangles - paper - each densely packed with dark brown lines - writing - but the details were unclear; there were a few memories of these books, but they were disconnected from any useful concepts.  Self had observed a pair of students writing during Harabi''s lesson, but hadn''t given it much thought at the time.  Now, Self had a brief moment of understanding that the act of writing had been recognized from those memories immediately, without Self having been aware of the origin of the recognition.  Self put the book back and moved on to the next room, across the hall.


    This room was densely filled with metal, the centerpiece of which was a pair of enormous cylinders.  Moving around it, Self could identify little, the purposes of most of the objects in the room unclear.  On one end, however, was a box full of the pale yellow paper.  Perhaps this room was where paper was made?  Self moved back to the large cylinders, and examined them.  Yes, if you put ... something here, these would flatten the material, which would slide down the surface here, and these must be blades for cutting it.  At the end was a lever; Self lifted it, and there was another blade underneath it.  Self nodded, and moved to leave the room.


    Halting at the entrance, Self looked back.  Paper was made.  Somebody else made the paper into books.  Self looked at the lanterns lighting the stone hallways.  Somebody filled these with fuel.  Where did the fuel come from?


    Everything had to be made.  It was an overwhelming realization, as Self looked around the hallway, suddenly aware of the bricks of stone, the identically-colored material between each one.  There were so many people, each doing one thing.


    Well, maybe more than one thing, thinking of Efre.  But still, so many different things to do.  Somebody made the dressers in Self''s room.  Harabi made clothing, but examining it now, Self examined the miniscule threads that made it up.  Somebody made those.  Or did Harabi also do that?


    Looking around the hallway, at the number of closed doors.  So many hallways, so many rooms.  People made all of this, made everything that filled it, made everything that the people who made these things needed.  They also had to be fed; Self wasn''t certain how much people ate, but Efre had eaten multiple times during the day.  The sheer number of people, and as Self tried to conceptualize it, something like the sense of dizziness of looking up at the sky crept in.You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    It faded with a force of stillness.  Self looked around, and sat up.  Self had fallen backwards into the room, and somehow managed to close the door.  Rising slowly, Self opened the door again, and stepped back into the hallway.


    It felt ... something, now.  A sense of down, strong.  Heavy.  That was what that word meant.  The hallway felt heavy.  The lanterns, filled by someone, felt heavy.  Which hallway was this, which way back to the room?  Self started walking, and then jogging, and then running.


    Someone opened a door, and stepped out.  Another.  Another.  People started filtering out into the halls, and the feeling of weight increased.  It must be getting close to a mealtime.  The noise of conversations began to rise, a chaotic mix of tones, and Self stopped.


    Eyes closed, Self forced stillness, as people jostled by.  Stillness, and sound faded to a distant vibration.  Stillness, and it was someone far away being jostled by the crowd.  Stillness.


    In the still, Self considered the sensation of weight.  It was several things; it was the sheer number of people, in this one community.  Hundreds?  Thousands?  Those were numbers, but they didn''t meant much to Self.  It was that Self had an obligation to protect this community, these hundreds, these thousands; Self couldn''t even conceptualize how many people there were, the idea of protecting them, of having an obligation to each of them, seemed beyond conceptualization as well.  A staff, barely longer than a single one of them was tall; a spear, just a staff with a point on the end of it, and a shield.


    That was how Self was to protect them?  Two objects that were barely large enough to protect Self?  There had been the wall, the shields linked together.  But Self was one; that had been many, standing side by side.  Self couldn''t be a wall, like that.  Self and the three other loop-bound of the community wouldn''t make a wall wide enough for these many to stay behind.


    Self wasn''t certain what the question was, but knew there was one.  Eyes opening, Self took in the surroundings, as the djinn filtered past on their way to lunch, some pausing briefly to look into the loop-bound''s face.


    Self started walking then, starting by figuring out which hallway this was, and then walking more purposefully, to the room that Efre taught the young in; Efre had shown it to Self once, in the obligation lessons, explaining that etiquette lessons were necessary for the young, as well, although they needed the same lessons repeated many times over many years.


    Efre was in the room, moving blue and red cushions that were arranged in a grid on the floor.  The work paused when Self entered, and Efre looked up.


    "Greetings, Self."  An uncertain pause.  "What may I help you with?"


    "This community has so many people, and there are only four of us.  The obligation looks impossible." Self hadn''t been certain of what to say, and then found the words coming out anyways, entirely new and unexpected.  Efre stopped, pausing leaned over to pick up a cushion, hands frozen in the air.


    "I ... see."  After a pause, the cushion was lifted, the clean up resuming.  "I do believe I told you your obligation was to do as much as possible.  Many of us will join in the protection of the community, if it comes to that."


    Self remembered the many people training, remembered the other students in Hvare''s lessons.  "But that is not their obligation.  It is mine."


    "It is all of our obligation; part of that obligation is fulfilled by serving the obligation to the loop-bound, for example by teaching them."  A smile, as Efre completed the row, and moved to the next.  "But the four of you will not be alone, and in most cases, it will not be our community alone.  If one community is threatened, all communities are threatened.  Other loop-bound would join in such a war, along with thousands of us.  But the idea is mostly to ensure that nobody wants to join us in battle, by ensuring we are well-prepared for one.  Harabi calls this the first battle."


    Thousands, that incomprehensible number of people.  Each with their own vibrations, their own minds.  Efre continued.


    "Personally I think the first battle is diplomacy, ensuring that others don''t consider whether it is wise to attack us in the first place, but words are my last weapon, as well, as Harabi might say.


    "Zana thinks the first weapon is numbers; that our first obligation to defense is having many children.  I can''t say Zana or Harabi are wrong, we each have our own way of looking at the world."


    Self felt the sense of weight ... relaxing.  The numbers still felt overwhelming, but that was not a thing Self had to think about.  Self''s obligation was protection, but it was the obligation of many - many thousands - and it was not one shield, but many.


    Like the shield wall.


    "Thank you, Efre."  Efre gave a slight nod, smiling.


    "Anytime, Self.  You are young yet, but you aren''t alone here."

 Ch 14. Naming

    The martial training continued for more than the few weeks. Hvare''s lessons remained individual - the group training was next, as Self learned from Fan after asking about the shield wall. The lessons gradually settled into a repetitive pattern - Hvare would demonstrate a new technique, the students would practice. The students would then be made to run laps, then practice some more. Then they would be put through a series of each of the previous lessons, which now included wooden rings tossed in the air by assistants, for striking through, and wooden staves shoved into the ground. Self broke several staves on the latter practice.


    Finally, they''d spar. Shields and bucklers were introduced; the former, held in the hand, the latter strapped to both arms. Hvare''s lessons taught the use of all four objects as a unified whole. Techniques used the tip of the staves they used as spears, the butt, and two points halfway between the grips and either end. In sparring, when using the shield, they were additionally expected to use it to strike, and when using the bucklers, those as well.


    The practice was complex; it was difficult to remember the multiple ways to strike their opponent, and Hvare split the sparring sessions between teaching Self, and walking amidst the other students, barking at them whenever they started to focus on only one element of attack, or when they fell into predictable patterns.


    Hvare''s lessons gave Self a reference point for order; Harabi''s, for chaos. Every lesson Hvare gave built on the previous, both through repetition, and also through increasing complexity. Harabi''s lessons had repetition - sometimes word for word - but it wasn''t planned. An hour might include a discussion of the amount of water a soldier needed on the road per day given the weather and the workload, and also the appropriate and inappropriate times for volleys versus free loosing - volleys were better for breaking morale, but inflicted fewer actual casualties, as they were both more visibly damaging even given the fewer deaths they caused, but also easier to defend against than random arrows.


    Self''s evenings were often spent with Fan and Sidou. And it was with them, seated in the common dining area as Fan spoke over cooling food while Sidou quietly looked down at an already empty plate, when the news of the fall of Southreach arrived.


    "I heard Alima and Tachim made it out, but they were the only ones." A messenger and two apprentices had arrived; the messenger went to Zana, and one of the apprentices, clothes still covered in dust and sand from the journey, was eating while discussing the matter with a djinn that Self did not know. "Twenty eight loop-bound, and only one got out, and a few hundred djinn. The communities are all gone."


    Sidou spoke a little more now, but was still characteristically quiet as the news reached them; Fan''s silence, on the other hand, was somewhat more unusual. The entire dining hall was listening to the conversation taking place over a meal. The djinn sitting across from the messenger, short and wide-set, with a deeper red tint, asked in response, "Tachim? That name isn''t familiar."


    "The new loop-bound. Deige and Riss were training Tachim when the attack came; they returned to help in the defense, and sent Alima with Tachim to warn Cliffwater. They didn''t make it before the peri arrived."


    The news, judging by the reactions of the djinn around, was grim. There had been nine communities in the Southreach, and less than a thousand djinn had escaped; the messenger thought more than a hundred peri loop-bound had been sent, and at least seventy had been destroyed in the fighting.


    Conversations began rising throughout the hall, as the news began circulating to those who had been sitting on the far end from the messenger, and djinn began discussing the news.This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    "We will sent a retaliatory force." Sidou spoke, tones intense with a mixture of anger and fear. "They destroyed nine of our border communities; we''ll burn twenty seven of theirs before we''re done." Fan''s spectacles got an adjustment.


    "The thieves of infants know where this ends. The last time they raided, the div took the opportunity to take a third of their lands as their own, and we ruined another third."


    Neither Self nor Sidou had anything to say to this, and they settled into a companionable silence, Fan and Sidou picking up their utensils to resume eating. Self had found that their company was something to look forward to each day, that the world felt a little less empty when they were around. They, in turn, seemed happy to include Self in their activities.


    Self found a question, typically, several minutes after the conversation had drifted on, or in this case ended. "How do the div win any fights? They don''t have loop-bound." There was a lengthy silence, in which Fan and Sidou shared a look. Sidou finally spoke.


    "Iron and magic." Another silence, until Self realized that was the whole of the response.


    "What is iron?" The word had no conceptual referent. Fan responded this time.


    "The blood of the earth, that man digs from the ground. The div trade for it, make weapons and armor out of it. It sometimes rains from the heavens, as well; the div treasure the blood of the heavens. They also make cages and traps out of it, that even loop-bound cannot escape." Fan''s voice carried disgust. "Never touch it, it carries the earth''s curse upon it; if it comes from the heavens it is worse still."


    Self considered this for a moment. The blood of the earth, made into weapons and armor. "Why would anyone use such a thing?"


    "Because they''re rapacious, uncivilized demons. Well, the div, anyways. Man is just uncivilized, stupid." Fan shoved the last few pieces of food away. "At least they kill the peri."


    Sidou wore an expression Self couldn''t identify. "They kill us, too. And they put our loop-bound in cages of iron and bury them."


    "Rapacious, uncivilized demons, yeah. But at least they kill the peri."


    "The div and the peri fight each other more than either fight us," Sidou turned to Self to explain. "Their ancestors fought in the coldlands before coming to our lands. The peri came first, and we fought them, and then the div came. At first they just fought the peri, and nearly won, but then they turned on us as well, and we fought them to a stalemate."


    Self found this more than satisfactory, although had some curiosity about iron, and went back through the conversation. "And magic? I have some idea of magic, but nothing of magic in war." Self''s concepts for magic included rituals for fertility, for curing illness and healing injury.


    "The demons mostly fight with iron, but they have mages, as well, who throw fire and lightning, and can hold back even loop-bound for a time." It was Fan, again, who continued with pride, "Their fires do little against us, and their lightning only little more. Our natural magic is better."


    "Fighting us, the div mostly hold the loop-bound to be bound in sky-iron, while their warriors do the bulk of the fighting." Sidou added. "We have an advantage fighting them; their iron is poison, and the wounds are nasty, but only sky-iron burns us the way earth iron burns any of the peri, and they have little of it. Earth iron won''t hold our loop-bound very well."


    Self made a mental note to ask Harabi and Hvare about the use of magic and iron in combat, as it hadn''t come up in the lessons of either.


    The conversation gradually lightened again; while the news was grim, it was something for Zana and Hadi to consider. But it was ultimately the failure and the responsibility of Setareh, who was responsible for the protection of all communities, and while there was some discussion of the failure involved, Self noticed it was more in consideration of how Setareh would respond, than a belief that Setareh had been failed.


    The meal came to an end, and djinn began filtering out of the hall to resume their duties. Self''s personal room felt empty, once more.


    Self had been considering a new name, but had yet to decide on one. It was important, and the conversation had a ... resonance, with Self. Iron, the blood of the earth and heavens. A potent weapon against the peri, who had brought destruction to Southreach.


    Soha slowly nodded.

 Ch 15. Conversations

    "Iron is a metal of man. It is harmful to the peri most of all, and to a lesser extent us. It is also harmful to the div, who are perhaps even slightly more vulnerable than us. It is a somewhat sturdier metal than bronze, but not by a lot.


    "The div philosophy is that a sword will cut you regardless of the metal it is forged of. This is a fine military way of thinking, save for one thing: Dust. Part of sharpening a sword is removing excess material, and some of that material becomes airborne.


    "Over time this is problematic for the div and the djinn, and absolutely deadly to the peri. Div and djinn who regularly care for the blades develop a cough after a year or two, at which point their state progresses quickly towards unavoidable death. Even so, the duty can be traded out, which is the way of the div; each is harmed a little, but they can persist.


    "This works for them for two reasons; firstly, they are a nomadic people, who live outside. Were we to try something like that here, the air of our very halls would become poison to us over time. Secondly, they do not have loop-bound, who would become gradually weakened over time by exposure to iron.


    "You have three weaknesses, Soha. You have now named yourself after two of them." Harabi smiled, then. "I appreciate that, I must say."


    Soha slowly nodded, minding Efre''s instruction to use body language to convey internal state, in this case one of contemplation. It was a deliberate effort, but Efre had indicated it would become habit over time, and would help ease others around Soha.


    Today''s lesson had been about how to fight in a siege, and Soha had approached Harabi upon its conclusion to ask about iron.


    "And magic?" Harabi leaned against the lectern at the front of the hall, looking towards the ceiling.


    "The magic of the peri will break upon iron, ours is only weakened. You''ll get lessons in the use of magic. We - loop-bound, I mean - have something of an advantage there, compared to other djinn, like in many things. I believe it is less to do with what we are, however, than that we lack certain ... ideas, about how the world is."


    "Ideas ..." Soha paused, then. Perhaps it would be best not to ask what ideas about the world would impair the use of magic. Harabi smiled, perhaps guessing at the thought. A different question, then. "So magic is defined by how we think?"


    Harabi nodded again, gaze again drifting up. "Indeed. Peri magic is structured, rule-bound. Like the geis. Div magic is primal and wild, utilizing the raw elements of the world; fire and lightning in war, but I understand they also have an affinity for plants and nature. We utilize community, among other things; a hundred of us can work together to create great things that a single individual could not, like the creation of the loop-bound. I suspect, but do not know, that the peri are capable of something like that as well.


    "Our magic draws from our sense of duty, primarily. A hunter can use magic to find animals, to guide their arrows. Setareh can scry, to see distant events, can communicate at great distances. I am a warrior, and a commander; my magic can aid in combat, or lend strength to others. A healer can help djinn recover faster than they otherwise would.


    "We are both more and less limited than others in our magic; less, because we can use it to most any purpose, in most any way. More, because any given individual is considerably more constrained."


    Soha nodded slowly again. Silence filled the hall for a time, thoughts moving slowly, for they were larger than the thoughts Soha was accustomed to working with, more complex. Something was there, again, that couldn''t quite be grasped. Harabi spoke again after a time.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    "We - the loop-bound, I mean - are, in a sense, magic in ourselves. We don''t expect to be hurt by a sword striking us, so, unless it is iron that can harm our magic, we cannot be. We don''t expect to fall to the earth, so until we get accustomed to the idea that the earth binds us, we do not. The older we get, to some extent, the less power we hold."


    The older loop-bound''s face tightened somewhat, eyes closing, in an expression Soha recognized as concentration, before lifting off the ground, hovering a few feet in the air. Harabi spoke again, eyes still closed. "I have grown so accustomed to walking that this now takes an effort." Harabi settled back to the ground, eyes opening again. "And I doubt I could ever take a concept from another''s mind, or render their minds apart, as you have done; that was magic, if you are curious, and one which I find rather unsettling, for it does not comport with my understanding of the world."


    "They''re just vibrations," Soha responded, confused by this, "No different from the vibrations of my own mind. Or yours."


    "Vibrations? I can see that, I think. But they are somebody else''s mind; I think of others as physical things, encased in flesh. No, nevermind, let us not argue this. That is a potent weapon, one I would not wish to talk you out of, if even I could. I would rather not take the risk of disarming you of something that could be valuable."


    Soha left the hall some time later, feeling ... uncertain. Harabi had become increasingly reluctant to talk about magic, insisting that explaining it was likely to limit the actual ability to use it, particularly for a loop-bound. The lesson had ended with a suggestion to schedule training in magic sooner, rather than later.


    Soha searched; finding the Efre in the djinn''s assigned sleeping quarters, after first checking the training facility, although there was a delay. Efre was engaged in sex with another djinn, and Soha had come to understand that it was polite not to interrupt this activity, so waited a polite distance away from the door, so as not to overhear too much of the activity.


    "Greetings, Self. You have a request?" Efre was dressing at a full-length mirror, watching the door in a reflection; Soha had waited a few minutes after the other djinn had left, on the expectation that this activity would have been completed already.


    "Greetings, Efre. It is Soha now." Efre''s hands froze momentarily, in the act of tying a sash around a plain blue tabard, before continuing.


    "An interesting choice. Greetings, Soha." There was an etiquette there, which Efre had, surprisingly, bent a little bit. "Your request?"


    "Harabi recommended I begin lessons in magic sooner, as I have started asking particular questions." Efre again froze for a moment, turning away from the mirror to look directly at Soha.


    "This is sooner than ... yes, I will arrange it. Is there anything else I can help you with?"


    "No, thank you, Efre. I will be going now, if it pleases you." Soha departed, Efre''s polite response following.


    Efre''s behavior was somewhat unusual. Perhaps next time it would be better to wait longer, if Soha found Efre to be engaged in sex. Soha was reasonably certain that had been the reason, but wasn''t entirely certain if that was the case.


    Soha walked to the dining hall, currently empty, and sat down. It would still be a few minutes before the meal began, and the hall was quiet, rows of tables and chairs empty and devoid of life, although they''d soon be filled with the conversations of many.


    This had been an odd day, and Soha was looking forward to Fan and Sidou''s chatter, or Fan''s chatter and Sidou''s occasional addition. It had become part of each day, as lessons were; they were both comfortable to be around, in a way that, Soha was starting to realize, the others were not.


    They were young. Not as young as Soha, perhaps, at least in most respects, but it was comfortable to be around those who also didn''t already understand everything about the world. Maybe Sidou knew as much as Efre, but Soha suspected that the djinn mostly just kept quiet unless there was some specific knowledge related to the conversation to add.


    They didn''t already know everything, either way. Indeed, Fan could almost certainly use Efre''s instructions in etiquette again; there had been more than one event in which Fan had outright broken some of the rules, and bent them on an hourly basis, if not more frequently. It was relaxing.


    The contemplations had begun to turn to why it was relaxing, considering again the heavy weight of duty - a weight Fan didn''t seem to experience at all - when the crowds begun filtering in, shortly before a bell announced the meal. Soha rose, to find the two djinn and join them when they arrived, and to greet them with a new name.

 Ch 16. Magic

    Soha had been doing magic from the moment of awareness, as it transpired; magic for the loop-bound was almost automatic, in a way that it was not for the other djinn, and Soha had used it to manipulate orientation as soon as orientation had entered into the conceptual library that Soha was still constructing. Which is not to say that magic was easy.


    "Heat. Light. Mehr found it helpful to think of fire as intense motion, see if that helps." Anaz watched Soha patiently, holding a thin hand aloft, flickering red and gold hovering over the palm of the thin hand.


    Anaz was thin in general, almost like a djinn made of the staves used in the practice yard, with six delicate horns growing from a pale red scalp, and four more growing on the corners of a face that was almost a square. Anaz wore a simple blue wrap, which wound across the shoulders and torso, tied so that it fell over the hips down to the knees in a strip, leaving the sides exposed, with a sash about the waist to hold the front and back in place; as Soha understood fashion, this was a rather rude garment to wear in public.


    But Anaz was the only instructor available in magic, and was considered somewhat odd by the other djinn; Efre had warned Soha not to use Anaz as a role model for behavior.


    Soha lifted a hand, focusing on the idea of motion; what would intensity even mean? This gave rise to a breeze, as the idea of motion found purchase. Anaz nodded slowly.


    "Right, right. Now contain the motion into a small sphere."


    Soha did so. It ... didn''t do anything. Anaz reached over, waving the hand not currently occupied with holding a fire aloft through the space over Soha''s hand.


    "Right, right." Anaz said those words a lot. "Now, make it move more. Focus on small movements, and create a lot of them. Be intense about it!"


    Soha tried this, focusing on the idea of small motions. The air in the rest of the room stirred a little bit again.


    "Right, keep going, right."


    Soha tried closing both eyes, focusing more ... intently, on the idea of contained motion, avoiding the idea of light - that just made the space glow, which Anaz had explained made it difficult to tell if fire had been properly conjured.


    "Smaller motions, and more of them."


    How small could motion even get? Soha tried thinking of smaller lines and curves. And tried to make the lines and curves more ... intense.


    "Right, smaller, right."


    A pause in the thoughts, as Soha tried to figure out what Anaz was getting at. It was pretty clear Anaz didn''t know, however. Lines clearly weren''t right; while Soha could feel the air stirring against the uplifted palm, it wasn''t right. This was just moving the air around.


    Small motion. Could Anaz mean vibration?


    "YES! That''s it, right right!" Soha''s eyes opened, and then immediately blinked at the blue flames burning intensely over the hand. What?


    "Fire is vibration? Is anything not vibration?"


    "No idea what you mean." Anaz then flicked the red and gold flame against a stone wall, where it exploded outward, flattening against the wall in a blaze of light. "Now, throw it."


    Soha threw it. It immediately disappeared.


    "Right, right. Now, think of ... "


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    Soha left the lesson with an unexpected energy - energy to be leaving. Anaz was ... not ... pleasant, to be around, although Soha couldn''t place why, only finding an agreement with Efre that copying any of Anaz''s behaviors would be a bad thing.


    The trick to fire was a conceptualization of a sphere of air vibrating very quickly. Throwing it was harder, and required conceptualizing the sphere as contained - Anaz had said sticky, which hadn''t helped until Soha had again tried to figure out what idea Anaz was trying to communicate, instead of what idea Anaz was actually communicating.


    Lightning, as it was called, was a line of synchronized vibration, with an emphasis on connecting the two points. Anaz had insisted it was a flow, a circle, with no vibration at all, but had desisted in arguing the point as soon as Soha managed to create the odd loud light, which had attracted a couple of people to peek into the room before seeing what was going on and promptly fleeing.


    There were two lessons today, the lessons on magic coming before the lessons on martial practice, and Soha walked to the outdoors training area to strip slightly singed clothing and prepare for this other practice.


    Hvare had begun having most of the class practice line formations; Soha was exempted from this practice, and was instead being taught to fight with hands and feet, as well as elbows, knees, and even the head. "Any part of the body can be used as a weapon", as Hvare repeatedly stated.


    It was difficult, however, to remember that all the different parts of the body even existed, and Soha hit the ground a few seconds after beginning each spar with Hvare, which were intermixed with shouted instructions to the other students.


    "Firouz, stay in formation, you''re not here to hit your opponent the most." Hvare ducked a kick, catching the leg over a shoulder and tossing Soha to the ground. "Roka, it''s a spear, not a club, quit hitting Roshe with the haft and jab over the shield, you are putting your shield out of position and exposing Sidou." A spinning backhand evaded an elbow and caught the back of Soha''s head, causing the yard to spin vertically three times before the ground caught up.


    The bath was welcome, and Soha spent some extra time washing out the smell of smoke from the robes. Fan and Sidou were relaxing in the corner bath, chattering as they waited on Soha to finish.


    "Formations are more fun, aren''t they? It doesn''t matter so much how strong you are, you lock shields anyways, it''s more thinking ahead and stabbing over the shield. Wish I was a little bit taller, though, it''s hard to get a good angle."


    "Mm."


    "What was even the point of all the one-on-one training, anyways? We shouldn''t ever not be in formation, and Harabi says most folks die when the formation breaks, so we should just stay in formation and not get caught up in fighting like that."


    "Practice, and formations break."


    "True enough. Hey Self, how was, er, hey Soha, how was that hand fighting? Looked painful. Did you ever hit Hvare, or did you just hit the ground a lot?" Fan couldn''t keep from laughing during the delivery, and even Sidou cracked a smile. Soha looked over to Fan, setting the robe on the hot stones beside the bath that helped with drying. There were djinn who handled laundry, but Soha didn''t want to return to the room yet.


    "Mostly the ground."


    It took Fan a moment to respond, still struggling with laughter. "That''s what it looked like, yeah. Still two hours until the evening meal, either of you up for sex?"


    Soha considered the question briefly. "No thank you."


    "No. I just finished bathing. Maybe before the bath next time." Sidou looked down at the bath, legs kicking idly. "Also I don''t want to be pregnant when the peri come north, I won''t be permitted to fight. Maybe after we push them out of our lands."


    After Sohu''s robes finished drying, still singed but at least not smelling like it anymore, the three dressed and left the hall, heading towards, on Sidou''s recommendation, the library. Books were precious, so there weren''t spare copies of anything. Sidou had pushed Fan, who liked talking anyways, into reading for the rest of them.


    "... and the order closed the hall, never to be reopened, all the treasures locked inside, and Efre locked away forevermore in the vessel of sky-iron." The story had been slightly distracting to Soha, as it was difficult to mentally disentangle Efre from the real world from the Efre from the story, even though the impetuous trickster was nothing like the Efre that Soha knew.


    Fan closed the book, setting it aside, adjusting spectacles. "And that, my stalwart companions, is why you don''t agree to shit when peri are involved." Sidou smiled at that.


    "Indeed."


    "Why did book-Efre keep doing whatever was asked?" Soha had been annoyed for half the reading over this. "The second request could have been twisted into an excuse to end the geis." Fan''s head shook slightly back and forth, a bit too emphatically, and the spectacles required another adjustment.


    "It''s a story. Sometimes things have to happen in particular ways for the story to end the way the creator wanted them to. But yeah, that was kind of obvious."


    They continued speaking, until Sidou went off and found another book, and Fan resumed reading aloud. Soha found another kind of magic in the books, surprised by the power the author had to shape images and story, even if it wasn''t always perfectly crafted.

 Ch 17. Preparations

    Preparations were being made; the hunters had picked up their activities, disappearing for longer and longer periods of time, and the smell of smoke and drying meat could be found anywhere in the community, indoors and out.  Djinn moved through the halls burdened by heavy loads.  Classes were longer, more purposeful; even Harabi''s lessons had developed an unusual clarity, and the djinn stayed on topic most of the time.


    The words in everybody''s ear.  Setareh had finally spoken; they were mobilizing for war.  Every community was to prepare a force to send, and theirs was no exception.  Sofha gathered, listening to conversations, that Zana was going to send a contribution of five hundred djinn, and all four loop-bound.  Soha had yet to be personally instructed of this, but knew it all the same.


    "Stop the fireball."  Hvare''s hand swept around, as if throwing one of Firou''s green balls, and light formed, a fireball rushing towards Soha.  Soha focused on making the light halt in mid-air; it did not, crashing into Soha''s bare stomach instead, the flames sticking there for a moment until Soha focused on stilling the air, and the light faded.  "Throw back."


    Soha focused on vibration, on containment, on motion of containment.  Red and yellow light burst into being and motion, flying towards Hvare.  It vanished at the halfway point.  "Stop the fireball."  And another light began flying towards Soha, in turn.


    It took seven more tries to get the trick of making the fire vanish - Hvare said nothing, just repeating the two phrases as they alternated tasks - which was exactly what Soha tried after the fireballs landed.  Stilling the air itself, rather than trying to halt the motion.  Getting the fireballs Soha threw at Hvare to cross the midway point was harder, and required continued focus and effort.  When the lesson ended, Soha could throw a fireball most of the way to Hvare most of the time, and could stop Hvare''s fireballs reliably before they impacted.


    The other djinn practiced line formations, and Hvare paused in the training with Soha occasionally to bark at them, displeased if they paused for a moment in trying to bash each other down; a growling order if a line broke, a different growling order if neither line broke.  Hvare hammered on the students to work together, to try to stop their opposing line from working together, to fight more fiercely.


    The next day''s lesson was lightning, and they worked at the same time; lightning couldn''t be stopped, as Soha quickly discovered, and must be redirected instead.  The trick here was to focus on two arcs of lightning; one, not quite realized, intercepting the path that Hvare''s lightning would take, and causing it to move along the path Soha had created.


    And the lines of students got more shouting.  Every day Hvare got a little more intense, occasionally stepping away from Soha to push students back into line, or paused their lessons to yell orders at particular students who weren''t moving quickly enough.  Bruises accumulated, purple and blue hues an increasingly common sight in the baths after each lesson.


    The lessons in magic weren''t particularly changed in view of the preparations being undertaken; Soha learned to create gales of wind, which was relatively straightforward, and to move sand around.  The latter practice was somewhat interesting, as there was a room set aside for exactly this purpose, with many djinn working at this particular practice; using expectation, will, magic, to lift from an urn of sand a column.


    If there hadn''t been others practicing, Soha suspected it would have taken several lessons to figure it out.  Shaping the sand was not just a matter of forcing will upon it; the sand wanted to fall back down, and it felt impossible to keep track of the full volume of it, much less impose any kind of will upon it; the trick ended up being to form a shell of sorts around the sand, and creating a rotating internal spiral of shell, which with each rotation pushed the sand back up.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Water, as it transpired, was very similar to sand, but it seemed for some reason particularly easy to work with the shell.  But with sand, where the shell was manipulated to work against gravity, the column of water could be held in place with the shell itself.  Soha wasn''t sure why; the water felt ... sticky, somehow, and it was easier to manipulate.


    And then the magic lessons began repeating themselves, now with an emphasis on shaping.  Fire was expected to look like birds - Soha hadn''t seen any birds, but Anaz demonstrated the shape, a flatness with a lumpiness in the middle.  Then other shapes; cubes, spheres, other animals.  The animals tended to be the hardest, most complex shapes.


    Neither lightning nor sand could hold complex shapes, and the practice here was to create more.  Two arcs of lightning, then three, then four.  Soha began seriously struggling at four, finding it difficult to mentally alternate between four different things quickly enough to maintain them.  Sand, likewise, was columns, and here Soha struggled to create two.


    Water, however, was easier to shape, and exercises in shaping went over the same kinds of shapes as fire.  The lessons in water felt ... somewhat repetitive, falling slightly behind the same shaping lessons in fire.  Soha persisted.


    The magic lessons came to a close; Soha hadn''t improved much, but according to Anaz, there wasn''t much improvement to make.  Magic just was, and you had to know what you wanted to do with it to meaningfully practice, leaving Soha somewhat confused as to what kinds of ways of thinking could meaningfully impact the rather unimpressive achievements Soha had made so far.  Soha asked Fan and Sidou about it.


    "Your lessons are being cut short, I think we''re leaving in three or four days."  Fan was uncharacteristically brief in the explanation, looking ... tired.  The djinn''s eyes had trouble staying open, and yawns were frequently hidden behind a hand.


    "It''s exciting, isn''t it?"  Sidou was sitting forward in the dining hall bench, food largely untouched.  "We''re going to see battle.  I''m going to see battle.  I thought I''d be stuck here forever, just ... making more djinn."  That was ... Efre had mentioned a duty to reproduce.  Soha studies Sidou''s expression, which was indeed excited.  Perhaps that was not a duty Sidou had enthusiasm for.


    "Yes, yes, we''re going to war."  Fan''s hand waved in the air over a nearly empty plate.  "If we''re lucky enough not to die ourselves, we''ll see dead peri by the hundreds if not thousands.  Maybe we''ll get to burn some of their children."  Sidou''s expression darkened.


    "They killed our children in Southreach, and captured others for their damned geis.  They killed and took our people.  We are going to fight their soldiers, and free our people.  We''re not going out to kill children."  The bickering had begun again.


    This had become the new normal.  Fan had grown increasingly withdrawn, and Sidou increasingly energetic; Sidou looked forward to fighting the peri.  Fan ... didn''t seem to, and spoke more with resignation about the future than enthusiasm.


    The assembly was large; the dining hall had been emptied, and Zana stood on a platform that looked like a table had been shortened by cutting most of the legs down.  Soha stood next to Fan and Sidou, surrounded by a sea of red faces in a variety of shades; red flesh, red and blue cloth almost all that could be seen.  It was standing room only, and some djinn were holding young children aloft to see Zana address the crowd.  The room was filled with a low rumble of voices.


    Zana raised a hand, coughing deliberately, and then making a throat clearing noise; the chatter immediately started dying down.


    "I''ll keep this short, as we all have duties.  I am certain everyone here has heard by now of the attack on Southreach.  Setareh has asked every community dispatch forces to join a host, to retake the Southreach, and afterwards mount a punitive expedition into peri lands.  We will of course meet our duties.  Seven hundred and fifty will be sent, as well as the loop-bound.


    "We will not stand idly by while the peri take our lands and our children.  Two drops of peri blood shall be spilt for every drop of djinni blood that has been lost.  Thus it has been, thus shall it be.  The preparations are made, and our contribution to the force will leave for Bastion tomorrow.


    "Those departing have already been informed, but any who wish to see the rosters, they are available in the administrative offices.  Make your farewells to friends tonight, the force will leave at first light.  We shall see our friends and companions return in blood and glory, for duty calls, and djinn answer.


    "There will be a fire feast tonight.  Make it your duty to join, to wish fortune and frenzy on those departing."


    Zana stepped down off of the podium, a gentle roar of conversation sweeping back up, and several djinn moved forward to speak with the elder.  Soha looked at Fan and Sidou; Fan''s mouth was pressed in a line, expression grim.  Sidou''s eyebrows were drawn down, lips parted around teeth that were exposed in something that was not a smile at all.  Fan broke their mutual silence.


    "It begins."

 Ch 18. Feast

    The fire feast was conducted outside the community entirely, the first time Soha had left the complex; the ground was ... not flat, and Soha found the way it fell away from the complex, set on ground higher than the surrounding lands, disconcerting. It hadn''t been so long ago that Soha had learned how to walk, and walking down the hill, as Harabi had called it, to the crowd of djinn already collecting in the evening was challenging. Several times Soha had to enforce orientation to keep from tumbling down.


    The ground was green, like a sea of spear tips, but soft and pliable, swaying in the movement of the air all around. In the distance was a wall of irregular brown columns, which rose to a cloud of dark green spots, interspersed with twisty brown appendages. The place outside the complex was messy and chaotic, with no order, and no smooth lines anywhere to be seen.


    The crowd Soha was moving to were clustered around one enormous pile, a confused jumble of narrow shapes, in a variety of shades of brown. There were smaller piles scattered around it, most of which had some kind of copper implements scattered around them. There were also small fires on the ground, and as Soha watched, one of the small piles lit up in fresh flames. The piles were fuel for the fire, of some kind.


    The chatter of the crowd felt small and subdued, as Soha approached, but grew louder, faster, with approach, than Soha had encountered before. That, at least, was something recognizable, from a vague concept taken long ago from one of the djinn who had died; voices in the complex echoed, the substance of sound bouncing off floors, ceiling, and walls, reinforcing the noise, and here they dissipated into the air.


    Soha listened to conversations, winding through the crowds towards the biggest fire, to investigate more closely. Soha wasn''t the only djinn who hadn''t left the complex before, and from the questions, the wall in the distance was a forest, a word recognized from Harabi''s instructions on ambushes. A collection of trees, each of which could provide cover from eyes and arrows.


    Trees looked ... strange. Soha''s attention returned to the crowd; a pair of djinn were setting up a large copper bowl over one of the fires, and throwing ingredients into it. Another djinn, at another fire, carefully placed a slice of meat on a copper slab propped above it, steam erupting up, the sounds lost in the noise of countless conversations.


    Soha found Fan and Sidou, standing around one of the small piles of fuel that hadn''t yet been lit, already eating. Sidou gripped a large white pastry in one hand, crushing it a little bit; large bites taken into the side revealing the gold-colored filling inside. Fan had a handful of thin rods, upon which were skewered cuts of meats and chunks of pale yellow vegetable. As Soha approached, fan tossed one of the thin rods onto the pile of fuel.


    "Hello Soha!" Fan spotted Soha first, and Sidou turned to follow Fan''s gaze, lips quirking up into a smile. Sidou''s other hand held a leather flask, which Sidou raised and drank from.


    "Hellllllo Shoha, we tho haf a good thime." Sidou''s voice was odd, the words slurring into each other; Soha nodded to both of them, trying to parse what Sidou had been trying to say. Fan''s expression changed slightly, eyes moving between Sidou and Soha.


    "Hello friends, the feast appears to be underway." Indeed, other djinn in the area were eating some of the skewered meats and vegetables that Fan was, although Soha didn''t see any others with the large pastry that Sidou was somewhat messily consuming.


    "Yes. We''re leaving in the morning, this is a tradition before large groups of us leave. The last was a group of settlers heading to Southreach." Fan tossed another of the rods onto the pile, which a djinn was now crouching next to with an expression of concentration.Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    "A feasth!" Sidou took another large bite of the pastry, bits of the filling falling to the ground, and followed it up with the flask, which was intercepted as it was lowered by Fan, who deftly snatched it away to take a drink. Sidou''s hand continued lowering for a second, before belatedly snatching at the empty air. "Not faaaair." Fan just smiled, raising it again.


    "Settlers?" Soha wasn''t certain of the word. Fan started to explain, but was interrupted by a sudden requirement to wave off Sidou, who was trying to wrest control of the flask back. The pile of fuel they were standing next to lit with a sudden flame, the djinn who had been concentrating on it sitting back with a satisfied expression, which fell away quickly as a roar came from the side, the enormous pile erupting into flames.


    Soha watched the fire, watched the crowds. This was an interesting experience, but one that Soha didn''t exactly feel like a part of; other djinn met, conversed, parted, the conversations carrying tones of excitement, anger, regret. Djinn embraced, danced around the enormous pyre of flames. Every so often two or three would head back up to the complex together.


    Other meals were prepared, the smell of rich spices and cooking meat joining the pervasive sweet scent of the smoke from a hundred small fires. Fan and Sidou made a circuit, returning with a small feast of a variety of foods, including three bowls of some kind of soup or stew, which they ate between swigs from the frequently-stolen-back-and-forth flask.


    Others joined the circle, and Sidou struck up a conversation with another young djinn, skinny and smooth of scalp; Soha didn''t recognize the newcomer. Fan didn''t notice, at first, caught up in a long and slurred conversation with four other djinn.


    "Dev iss prethier thhhan you! And hash betder timmming!" Sidou shouted back to an annoyed Fan, as the djinn walked back to the complex arm-in-arm with the young djinn that Soha didn''t recognize. Fan watched the two go, then tried approaching other djinn around them.


    Another thing Soha didn''t exactly feel a part of. Sex just ... hadn''t been that interesting. It was a sensation, but so was the wind blowing past them, the heat from the bonfire, the sounds of the crowd, the feel of the grass - the soft pointed green things on the ground was grass - on Soha''s now bare feet.


    The last few weeks had been ... kind of not much of anything. Magic had been new information, but it wasn''t really a new experience. Soha was looking forward to leaving for battle - not with the anger or fear or anxiety that permeated the atmosphere of this feast, but with a sense of curiosity for a new experience.


    It would all be in this ... out-of-doors. Grass, and hills - Soha didn''t actually like the change of elevation very much, but they were different - and forests and trees. They''d see new things, have new experiences. Soha would be just a little bit more.


    The conversations began fading, the pyre burning down. It still sent small jets of sparks up into the air, dancing in the breeze, a sight that Soha found enthralling, seeking a pattern in the subtle motions that just couldn''t be found, but they grew increasingly infrequent. More and more pairs and trios headed back to the complex - Fan had found a quite enthusiastic-sounding duo, and the three had gone back a little while ago. Other djinn sat or laid in the grass, and Soha thought a few had fallen asleep.


    Soha settled down, sitting in the grass, looking up at the stars in the sky above. The sight of the sky wasn''t quite as unsettling as it had been that first time Soha had seen it, and now looked kind of ... pretty. If messy. There wasn''t any pattern to the stars, either.


    Soha slowly reclined backwards, laying face-up in the grass, watching the stars in the sky slowly move. One appeared in a small flash, and disappeared again as quickly, moving much faster than the others. The voices had become a low murmur, the sound of the largest fire, the only still burning, finally audible over the general noise, adding cracks and pops to the gentle noises.


    Soha felt ... a curious combination of empty, and something else, like the feeling that had risen the first time Soha had managed to stop Havre''s fireball before it struck. Soha had ... enjoyed the evening, even without really being a part of it, an observer to the turbulent emotions of the parting feast. This was an evening to remember.

 Ch 19. Travel

    Seven hundred and fifty four made their way across the landscape, each burdened with heavy packs, although four burdened the heaviest of all, for they could take the weight.  Soha, indeed, didn''t really notice the weight of the pack, except insofar as it changed Soha''s center of balance backward a bit, requiring a slight lean forward to walk otherwise normally.


    So many people were noisy, making their way to the point where the army of the communities was gathering, to march on the peri cities which had launched the assault on Southreach.  Conversations, coughing, laughter, sneezing, and even singing filled the air, the people brightly dressed and visible in vibrant blues and reds, against the muted yellows of the dried grasslands they traversed.  Only the sky itself could match the colors on display below.


    " ... and that''s how Ferde got caught."  Sidou laughed, sounding more polite than genuine, at the end of Fan''s story, which Soha hadn''t been paying close attention to, attention riveted to the sights, smells, sounds all around; it seemed to be about a djinn who kept swapping other djinn''s left shoes around so they wouldn''t fit?  Soha really didn''t understand the bits of the story that Soha had heard.  Maybe there was more to it?


    Sidou shifted the pack from one shoulder to the other, with a small grimace. "These things get heavy after a couple of leagues.  How much further?"  Fan glanced around, with a slight, impeded-by-weight shrug.


    "I think twenty leagues? Give or take.  We''ve been walking ... " Fan looked up at the sky. "Four hours?  So four leagues.  We should arrive late on the morrow, or maybe early the next."


    Soha refrained from commenting.  It was twenty six leagues, which was close enough to not be worth correcting Fan.  Apparently neither had been paying attention this morning when Harabi had gone over the march, which would arrive midday the day after tomorrow.  Or perhaps they just didn''t have Soha''s memory.


    "Now I understand all the running during training.  But maybe Hvare should have had us run with weights on."  Sidou used a scrap of faded blue cloth to wipe sweat from a red brow.  The rag was already soaked.


    "I don''t think we were actually done training.  War doesn''t wait for perfect preparations."  Fan grew characteristically dark and short of words as the topic turned to the matter of the war, tones dropping to a bass rumble.  Sidou nodded.


    "Makes sense.  I''m glad we got what we did, then.  Imagine doing this a few weeks ago."  Sidou''s excitement had dimmed considerably over the course of four hours; the djinn had seemed ready to run all twenty six leagues in a single day when they set out, but the endless heat of the sun, and the weight of the pack, had slowly brought it back down.


    Camp was set well before sundown, as there were additional preparations to make while there was still light to see.  Soha''s pack was partially disassembled for trail rations, which others ate, while the other djinn pulled out bedrolls and started spreading them over the knee-high yellow grass.


    There was a meal, much quieter - nobody was singing anymore, but there was still a low murmur of conversation, and various other noises.  After the meal, djinn began undressing and laying on their makeshift beds.


    "Surprisingly comfortable what with the grass underneath."  Fan was sitting on the roll, adjusting the blankets.  Sidou''s was positioned between Fan and Soha, the young djinn using a fibrous brush to sweep the sticky seeds of the grass off of the travel clothing as Fan spoke.  "Pity we can''t have fires."  Fan''s attention drifted to the dry grass surrounding them.


    "It''s too warm for fires anyways."  Sidou''s voice was distracted, attention on the brush and the clothing.  "I wouldn''t even put a blanket on tonight if I weren''t certain I''d wake up to bug bites everywhere."  Fan laughed at that, a hand moving to pull a blanket up over exposed hips.


    "Everywhere!  That would be unpleasant."  Fan made a hand gesture Soha was reasonably sure was considered obscene, given how Soha had seen it used in the past, but Sidou wasn''t looking to chide Fan over it. Fan''s smile gave way to a frown and a sigh.  "It is a warm night, isn''t it.  Don''t suppose tomorrow will be any cooler."


    They settled in, covering up with their blankets.  Soha sat on a blanket, not bothering with the bedroll.  The camp grew quieter, conversations shifting slowly to whispers, coughs, and a few partners'' muted vocalizations; apparently some of the usual social prohibitions on sex didn''t apply when rooms weren''t available?  Efre''s lessons hadn''t covered that.  They tried to be quiet, at least.


    Those sounds ended soon enough, and snoring became the dominant noise.  Soha simply listened.  There were three others in the camp who would probably be awake; Soha would join them in camp tomorrow night, if for no other reason than to find out what to expect when their group met up with the rest of the army.The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    Soha listened, wondering what war would be like.


    Morning came, and Havre moved through the camp, shouting djinn awake.  Breakfast was quickly eaten, more dry rations; bedrolls were bundled again, packs reloaded and hefted, and the walk resumed.  It was quieter than the day before.


    "And I thought I was sore yesterday."  Fan was grumbling, Sidou in only a slightly better mood.  "Could have done with another couple of hours of sleep at least."


    "A bath."  Sidou added.  "A couple of hours of sleep and a bath.  Putting on the same clothes as yesterday feels disgusting."


    "Hey, at least there weren''t any bugs.  I think I''ll go without the blanket tonight.  I think I sweat more last night than I did all of yesterday."


    It was around midday they reached the hills, and progress slowed considerably.  A brief halt was called, and Soha could pick out the three other loop-bound as the only figures who didn''t immediately sit or lay down.  Rations were collected and eaten, and a collective groan rose as a shout was issued to resume the march.  Soha helped Fan and Sidou to their feet.


    "Isn''t fair that you don''t get tired, Soha.  Do you even sweat?"  Fan leaned over to look at the side of Soha''s face, eyes narrowing for a moment before opening wider than before.  "Sidou, the loop-bound don''t even sweat!"


    "Of course not."  Sidou didn''t even look up, looking at the ground for anything that might trip the djinn.  The hills were rocky, and Sidou had nearly fallen over three times since they began the process of walking up, then walking down, an endless series of rises that grew taller the further they went.


    Ahead was a mountain range; they were walking towards a gap, Rashun''s Pass, on the far side of which was their destination.  Past the mountain range was all peri land.  Soha found the mountains disconcerting; they seemed as distant as the sky itself, a jagged horizon that looked like it had been dipped in sugar.  A band of gray below that, and then below that, a band of green.


    "What are the colors on the mountains?"  Soha took the attention as an opportunity to ask.  Fan looked up; Sidou, however, was the one to answer, eyes not leaving the ground.


    "White is snow, gray is rock, green is the tree line.  The green is all trees, they''re just too far away to see individually."


    Soha focused, trying to see the individual trees, in spite of Sidou''s pronouncement.  It didn''t work.  Whatever the other powers of being a loop-bound, seeing details across - a glance upward, and a quick calculation - fourteen leagues apparently wasn''t one of them.


    "Y''know, Sidou is interested in you.  I think still."  Fan returned first from a "water break", which wasn''t for drinking water, as Soha had learned the previous day.  Soha looked to Fan, who was not actually looking at Soha.  "Sidou''s the one who originally insisted we come talk to you.  I''m glad we did, mind, you''re alright, if a bit on the quiet side."


    "Interested in me?"  Sex?  That was a euphemism for sex, right?


    "Interested in sex."  Yes.


    Soha just looked at Fan, uncertain what to do with this information.  Sidou?  "But ... didn''t Sidou ... on the night of the feast?"  Had it really only been the day before yesterday?


    Fan smiled, although it didn''t touch the djinn''s eyes, still downcast.  "That was ... yeah.  There are other factors.  I tried ... ah, but it doesn''t really matter.  Anyways, Sidou said you were cute."


    Soha felt like a response was necessary, but none came to mind.  "Ah?"


    Fan glanced in the direction Sidou had gone to ensure they wouldn''t be interrupted, and then back just to the left of Soha, and down.  "Just ... just thought you should know."  Fan scuffed a foot on the grass.  Sidou joined them again, and conversation started up again, somewhat more subdued than even Fan''s usual subdued state.


    Soha was distracted, going to meet the other loop-bound.  There were fires tonight, the foothill they had camped on mostly rock, bare of vegetation.  Harabi, Hvare, and Mehr stood with a couple of other djinn, quietly conversing, as Soha approached.  Hvare gave a small bow of the head.


    "Soha."  Soha returned the gesture.


    "Hvare."


    "This is Everse and Kite."  Soha gave the same formal nod to the two others, one tall with a very deep red tint to the skin, and two small horns, the other shorter but broad, arms covered in scars, with one eye; the other a blue eyepatch.


    "Everse.  Kite.  Apologies for the interruption, I come to ask what I should expect tomorrow?" The last was directed between Harabi and Hvare; Soha didn''t know Mehr that well, having only encountered the djinn in the dining hall a few days before the feast.


    "Ah, yes."  It was Harabi who answered, nodding.  "Excuse us for a moment."  Harabi stepped off to the side, and Soha followed, after a brief pause to realize that it was expected.


    "Tomorrow we''ll be joining the main camp.  We''re going to be sticking with the groups we arrived in; it is easier to maintain cohesion when you work with people you already know.  You will be expected to greet a few people, but I''ll be with you and walk you through it.  Don''t worry about it.


    "Past that we''ll be traveling to the first target, which we''ll hit by nightfall.  Follow me and Hvare, and just do what you''re told; nobody is going to expect you to know what to do, and it should be a short fight.  Don''t look to Mehr for any guidance, there''s a reason we two teach war.  There will be a few others after that to learn what is expected.


    "For tonight, relax.  Tomorrow is going to be busy, treasure the quiet moments."  Harabi started moving back to the other four with the last few words, engaging back into that conversation before Soha had a chance to respond.  Soha hesitated for several long seconds, feeling ... something, and turned to walk back to Fan and Sidou.


    Should Soha do anything with the information Fan had given?  Did it make a difference whether Sidou wanted sex?  Hadn''t Fan asked about it, as well?  But the tone when Fan had asked had been light, where the tone of this conversation had been ... darker.  Fan thought Sidou''s interest was more important, somehow.


    Soha wasn''t certain what to do with that.  Had Sidou ever said anything about it?  Nothing came to mind.  Nothing came to mind about the situation, at all.  Soha slowed, approaching the two, before forcing a sense of relaxation; Soha knew now, and Fan knew that Soha knew, but otherwise nothing had changed, had it?

 Ch 20. War

    Twenty eight djinn made a rough semicircle, surrounding Harabi. Four, including Soha and Harabi, dressed in brilliant blues and reds, of a plain if well-woven fabric. Six wore identical green robes, the material glinting in the evening light. Three were dressed in white shirts and pants, the shirts covered with small intricate patches, each unique. Five wore yellow and green, in different styles. Five wore only skirts, brown and heavy, with bronze loops forming a lattice across them. The last six were dressed in an odd assortment of colors and styles, grouped only in that they stood together.


    "Senche, you''ll take your loop-bound and secure the southern road; nobody is to get by you. Makke, you are to secure the north. Vesle and Amin, circle around and secure the far side. Erzeman, you''re with my people, we''ll be going down the center.


    "Assume any not following the perimeter or heading into the outpost are hostile, our people have their orders. Makke, Vesle, Amin, each of you are to have one person patrol the perimeter. Clockwise, let''s make things simple. There shouldn''t be any loop-bound here, but intelligence is always faulty; if the fight takes more than one strike, disengage and get two more. No dueling, fight only at advantage.


    "We''ll be taking the central road; the loop-bound will be in front, disrupting any defensive formations they may raise. The main djinn army will be behind us. No prisoners here, and remember that nobody you see won''t be held under geis. There are no friendly faces here, only enemies."


    The semicircle of djinn - of loop-bound - was quiet, a few nodding, most looking ... bored. Soha wasn''t entirely certain that interpretation was correct, but the group definitely didn''t seem excited, or even concerned, about the upcoming fighting.


    They were striking the farthest outpost of the peri, and while it was certain the peri knew they were coming - it was hard to hide the thousands approaching - they also didn''t want any messengers escaping. The loop-bound would form an encircling perimeter, while the army drove the peri out of the stockaded post. Information that had been covered in the meeting Harabi had had with the djinn in charge of the army as a whole, Setareh.


    Setareh had been rather more, well, ordinary than Soha had expected. Older, skin wrinkled and a pale red that was nearly pink, dressed in white, with an assortment of badges scattered over the shirt stitched with finely-wrought symbols that Soha didn''t recognize. Setareh had also been angry, either by disposition or by events, no words coming out in less than a shout.


    This was the basic plan Setareh had outlined, albeit more specific; Harabi was in charge of giving the instructions to the other loop-bound, by, as far as Soha could ascertain, a combination of seniority, and, apparently, virtue of having been taught war by one of Setareh''s now-passed loop-bound.


    In the course of those conversations, Soha had learned the name of the community that Soha was a part of - Westglade. It wasn''t something that had come up in conversation before, and Soha learned it, because Setareh apparently wanted Harabi to leave Westglade and join Central - it wasn''t clear if that was the name of the community Setareh was based in, or Setareh''s personal retinue, but Harabi had politely demurred, without giving a clear answer.


    Soha was brought back out of the contemplations of the past hour by Hvare, who gently prodded Soha''s arm.


    "It''s time."


    A line of armored figures waited for them, bronze gleaming in the dimming light of evening, the sun behind the djinn. A row of bronze shields, helmets above them, with hints of faint blue and green membranes rising above both behind each shield.


    They were tall, and even considering the armor, thin. The line was seventy or eighty across - Soha counted by fives, but quickly lost the place of it - and of an uncertain depth, but at least three. They were motionless, still as statues, even as the djinn formed their own, considerably less organized battle lines behind the seven loop-bound standing in front.


    If they spoke, or even shouted, it couldn''t be heard over the rattle of metal, the stamping of feet, and the steady roar of voices behind Soha. Soha''s eyes shifted left and right, from Hvare to Mehr - Harabi stood in the center of their small formation, to the right in turn of Mehr. Soha also saw the djinn battle lines - far vaster and deeper than the small force arrayed before them.A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    The noise quieted somewhat, the stamp of feet fading. The peri just stood there, waiting. The loop-bound around Soha swept forward, and Soha moved a fraction of a second behind them, spears lowering as they closed the distance in a run.


    Soha''s spear shattered, blood sprayed. A sword flashed; Soha felt a breeze, a strip of cloth fluttering where the blade had impacted. Soha spun, thrusting instinctively, the shattered haft sliding across armor and sending a body tumbling back into others.


    The air was a humming roar of shouts, clashing metal, cracking bodies. Soha dodged a blow, crashed into someone who tumbled backwards. The training at dueling was useless here.


    A sword; Soha grabbed it and swung. Sword and shield both shattered, fragments flying. A mist of blood filled the air. Something heavy impacted Soha''s side; whatever it was gave with a crunch. Soha grabbed a shield, smashed it into a peri helmet as Soha moved past - nothing in training covered this.


    And suddenly Soha''s forward momentum left the press of bodies; turning, the rest of the army was there, a tight line walking over the bodies, spears methodically stabbing down, the motions rigid and sudden, like a centipede walking sideways.


    Soha turned back towards the outpost - no, village, that was the word. There were too many buildings here. And people. No, peri.


    They were ... odd. Light brown, almost pink skinned, with myriad silver threads - hair, Soha vaguely remembered - sprouting from their scalps, swept back and tied in bright green bows. They had ... wings, blue and gray and faintly translucent in the sun, like butterflies. They were dressed in flowing blue and green gowns, and were moving quickly through the village, shouting, screaming, gathering belongings.


    The buildings were tall - two or three floors, with odd openings in the walls opening the interior to the exterior. They also opened to the outside, each and every one, instead of forming a continuous whole like the community - like Westglade, Soha mentally corrected. There were many communities, it was important that they had names.


    A tall peri grabbed a short one - a child? - wings spreading, and leapt into the air - a whistling sound flew over Soha''s head, arrows spreading across both bodies, which tumbled to the ground. The taller one jerked and twitched, clutching at the smaller, and grew still, blood spreading in a pool on the sand.


    The army spread out, moving quickly - some peri took flight, caught quickly by arrows, or less frequently, fireballs. Those who didn''t fly were surrounded and speared from multiple sides. Pain overcame panic in the screams.


    Djinn kicked down doors, moving into buildings. More screams. They were lit on fire as they progressed, djinn leaving the buildings with arms full of supplies - food, weapons, armor. Some carried odd trinkets.


    The army moved through the village quickly, Soha walking slowly behind Harabi and Hvare, watching the flurry of activity going on around, when a series of djinn voices raised in shouts. Soha followed the two loop-bound as they moved into a sprint, chasing the shouts.


    Around a corner, and there was - a large building, full of djinn, dressed in the blue and green clothing of the peri. They were working the fields, expressions screwed up in panic as the djinn approached - but they didn''t stop their work, pulled large contraptions across the ground, dirt furrowing up behind them.


    As a djinn soldier got close to a pair pulling one of the contraptions, the pair, shouting in fear, picked the object up between them, and smashed it into the soldier with a crack. The soldier, who had barely had time to raise hands, crumpled underneath it, limp, blood pooling from the metal blade, previously digging the earth, now embedded through the djinn soldier''s chest.


    Harabi and Hvare continued forward, the soldiers in front of them now moving quickly to spear down the two; other farmers were now moving towards them, faces twisted into masks of fear, grief, pain.


    Another contingent of djinn came around the far corner of another building, lead by the elderly Sevareh, with the loop-bound Erzeman following behind. They were dressed in white. More djinn followed, as the peri screams behind slowly died away with their owners.


    "They are geis-bound. Kill them, they are not free, and never will be." Harabi''s voice called out. Fan came around the next corner, spear and face covered in blood, Sidou closely behind. Sidou''s spear was broken, and blood spattered the shield carried in the other hand.


    Soldiers moved forward again, raising their spears, looking at one another as the farmers moved forward. The farmers impaled themselves on the spears as they lunged at the soldiers, who stepped back at the ferocity of the quickly-dying assault.


    "Hold firm, soldiers." Sevareh spoke now, calm and serene. "This is their rebellion against their geis, the last gesture they have of their freedom; they kill themselves. Be at peace, my people. Your deaths fulfill your duty."


    One of the impaled djinn looked to Sevareh, face stricken. "T-the chil ... children. Ple-please." A cough, spraying the soldier holding the spear with blood; the soldier dropped the spear, and both weapon and body fell, the haft snapping under the weight. The dying djinn coughed, hacked, body jerking, before going still.


    Sevareh''s attention turned to the building, serene expression hardening. There was a pause, as the elderly djinn looked over the dying djinn. With a gesture, the soldiers who were not standing, staring with horrified expressions down, moved forward, spearing those who hadn''t died yet.


    Sevareh nodded when the last stopped moving. "A mercy, one of the few we can afford, that they die quickly and not know. Kill the children. Quickly and cleanly, they were once our people."

 Ch 21. Prisoners

    Fan stepped forward, moving into the field of bodies before either the stunned, or the willing, among the soldiers could react, and turned, facing the crowd, focused on their leader. "No, Sevareh. I must protest - these are children. These are our children. We cannot put them to the spear, however cleanly." The young djinn stood, voice calm and clear, eyes fixed on the wrinkled face of Sevareh, unflinching.


    Setareh studied Fan. "We cannot know what geis compels them, nor can we remove the geis. Those who had the power to do so now lay dead, and I would not have trusted them to do so in any case. Step aside, soldier."


    Fan''s head shook, looking around at the other soldiers, never looking to the building behind, from which small red djinni faces peered out at the fragment of the army that had come to avenge them. "I cannot, Setareh. My duty compels me to protect."


    Soha took a moment to process that, and almost stepped forward, when Setareh responded. "That is well and good, soldier. We are all here to protect our fellow djinn. However, what are we protecting them from? These are no longer our children, they have been enslaved and warped by the peri. They are now a part of the threat we must protect our fellows from. It is every djinn''s duty to die fighting before being captured by the peri, as every prisoner they take becomes a soldier arrayed against us."


    "Even children?" Fan''s arm moved backwards to gesture at the building with the spear, gaze never leaving Setareh''s face. "You expect children to die in battle?"


    "Yes, I do." Setareh was unmoved. "But ... perhaps if you should volunteer to guard them their entire lives? How many would join you in that endeavor, soldier?" Setareh''s head turned, sweeping the crowd of armed djinn. "Step forward if you would volunteer, if you think this djinn is correct, and that we should preserve those who have been turned against us."


    Sidou shifted at Soha''s side, but didn''t move - four djinn did step forward, moving to stand next to Fan. After a moment, three more joined. Fan''s eyes finally broke from Setareh, to look over the seven who had joined, and the building behind them.


    Setareh looked over the eight, and turned to the loop-bound from Central. "Eight. Not quite enough. Erzeman, if you would." The tall djinn in white nodded, and Soha had taken a step without realizing it, when the loop-bound''s spear swept through the air - and twenty paces away, eight heads fell from shoulders.


    Voices raised behind Soha, strangled cries, Sidou''s among them - Soha just ... stood there, staring at Fan''s head, as eight bodies slumped slowly to the ground. Fan''s expression remained defiant, even in death.


    "Anyone else object?" There was a pause. "Very w-" Setareh''s voice cut off as three more djinn walked to stand where the bodies lay. Sidou was one of them, glaring at Setareh. It was another of the djinn who spoke, however, a tall djinn in green and yellow, with two gracefully curled horns.


    "That was inexcusable, Setareh." The djinn''s voice rose. "Join us. This one is undeserving of the name." Another djinn immediately joined the three. Soha was only vaguely aware of the small group that grew, eyes moving from Fan''s unmoving face and body, to Sidou, who wore an expression of rage and disbelief.


    "Still not enough. Erzeman." Soha''s attention focused on Sidou, now, then to Erzeman; Soha wound up to run at the djinn, to disrupt the attack, when hands closed on both shoulders; Soha''s feet nearly went out backwards. Erzeman moved. More djinn fell.


    It repeated again, only two djinn moving forward this time. And then Setareh spoke for a few minutes, and a group of djinn moved towards the house, spears in hand. Soha''s attention didn''t move from the bodies of Sidou and Fan, but the voice from behind, one of those who had held Soha back from rushing Erzeman, rang out, recognizable.


    "They died pursuing their duties." Harabi''s voice, stiff. "Let none speak of this event otherwise. They died doing what they believed duty demanded, that is all." The silence then slowly broke into murmurs, the hands releasing Soha, who, unsupported now, fell to both knees. Cries and shouts, cut short, came from the building housing the children. Djinn came out, dragging red bodies with them.


    Soha''s mind reeled, trying to understand the - that had happened so quickly. What ... Fan was right. But ... Setareh was right. Why had Sidou ... what? They were ... but they ... Soha''s thoughts were fragmented, shattered, a disintegrated mess of shards that didn''t connect clearly to anything. What had just happened?


    The bodies - all the bodies - were placed into one of the buildings, which was set alight. Soldiers gathered to observe the pyre. Soha watched, mind feeling ... empty, like all the fragments of thought, rather than coming back together, had just evaporated into nothing.


    The other buildings were torched, and the army moved on to the next peri outpost - village - in their meandering path along the border. Soha didn''t pay attention to the instructions, just walked along with Harabi and Hvare. Nights were spent standing, staring up at the sky.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Trying to make sense of Fan and Sidou''s deaths. More soldiers had died protesting the killing of the djinn children than had died in the fighting. Nobody protested at the next village, nor the next. As Harabi had said, as they prepared for the battle for the first village, there were no prisoners taken. Nor were any rescued. This wasn''t a rescue operation.


    Soha understood Fan''s reasoning, understood the duty Fan felt compelled to fulfill and defend. Fan hadn''t wanted the war, unlike Sidou; their roles had reversed when it had come, Sidou becoming talkative, and Fan withdrawn - perhaps Fan knew what would happen when the first village was taken, perhaps not.


    Soha also understood Setareh''s reasoning. Harabi had warned the loop-bound; had the soldiers not been warned, as well? But Soha didn''t understand why Setareh had ordered the djinn who had protested killed. What duty did that fulfill? What was the purpose in their deaths?


    Why had Soha''s companions died? Soha killed peri. Killed djinn prisoners. Not with the spear, not with the fire - Soha just found their minds and stilled them, the suddenly empty bodies just falling over, not bothering to take anything. Hvare uttered a curse the first few times Soha performed the simple feat. The other loop-bound started avoiding walking near Soha.


    Soha practiced killing in this simple and bloodless manner, mind empty. Ten was easy. Twenty took some effort, at first. Then forty, which took concentration; it wasn''t a challenge, exactly, it just wasn''t easy to do.


    The loop-bound started sending Soha in to kill the children they found, both peri and djinn; Harabi said something about the death being clean and painless, a mercy. Soha didn''t say anything, but suspected that the others just hated the chore. Soha didn''t; felt nothing, instead, just thinking of Fan standing to protect those that Soha now put to rest. The task was easier if Soha didn''t bring weapons; the children weren''t frightened, that way, and would come up to Soha, begging food and water. They died like Fan, not seeing their deaths coming.


    Soha did find a spark of anger with Sidou, who stepped to the bodies knowing what would happen. Sidou had abandoned Soha to this war. But it was a muted anger, water brought not even to a boil; there just wasn''t enough in Soha to care.


    Soha couldn''t count anymore, except with the neat rows and columns of the soldiers; the math there was simple. Sixty. Eighty. Soha now walked in front of even the loop-bound when armed peri met them, large groups collapsing before they even knew the battle had started. A hundred. On their eleventh village, the entire armed group died with a single concerted effort. None of the djinn would approach Soha now, loop-bound or not. There were whispers - Soha didn''t listen to them.


    The other djinn did most of the killing, even so. Only with the ranks of soldiers, and the prisoners, were there enough bodies for Soha to practice. Otherwise Soha just watched as the soldiers and loop-bound moved through the villages, killing the scattered and scattering peri villagers, raiding their supplies to feed their punitive expedition.


    By the fifteenth village, they were deep enough in peri territory that they stopped finding the fragments of Southreach. There were still prisoners, but they were older. Soha saw a div for the first time in the eighteenth village; they weren''t horned, as the legends saw. Tall and thin - all the prisoners were thin, but this one seemed thin by nature - with pale skin somewhere between pink and white, and pointed ears. A black substance flowing from the scalp - hair - long and tangled. The div said nothing, watching quietly, and dying like the others.


    Was Soha more? Was this what it was to be more? It didn''t feel like much of anything. The absence of the two companions felt like being less. The talent that had birthed Soha''s awakening into true awareness felt like nothing at all. Soha had stopped counting.


    "They won''t attack until they have superior numbers, and are assured of their victory. We can get Chefeld now, before their army can assemble and meet us." Setareh was standing over a map, laid out on a field table. Soha stood in the back of the assembly, staying close to Harabi, and otherwise uninterested.


    "That''s exactly where I''d be positioning troops, surrounding the area, to attack as we move toward the gates." Harabi stood across from Setareh, gesturing with one hand at the map between them. "We''ll be walking into an attack from all sides."


    "Yes, which is why that''s exactly where they won''t be." Setareh was frustrated, the usual near-shout that the elderly djinn spoke at tinged with tones that were nearly a growl. "Expect them to understand enough strategy to prepare for what we are going to do, rather than what the obvious thing to do would be. We do the obvious thing precisely because it is obvious, because that is what they won''t be expecting."


    "It''s what you''ve done in the last two expeditions, and they were prepared for you the last time. You''re lucky Arhaes had prepared the retreat before you went in." Harabi''s expression and tone were neutral and polite, but firm. "We continue raiding villages, two or three more at most, and then we go home. We''ve gotten vengeance, it is foolhardy to continue here."


    "We have the supplies. And that I got trounced the last time is exactly what I am depending upon to make them think I won''t try it again. I''m no fool, Harabi. This is the plan. Prepare for it."


    Soha followed Harabi as the loop-bound left the table, expression still, but mind exploding with vibrations. Soha just observed them - Soha had spent a lot of time observing minds, lately, as it was necessary for stilling them, and had gotten pretty good at it. Harabi was displeased; were it anyone else, the djinn would be jumping down and screaming. Maybe stabbing whoever was nearby. Harabi, however, just walked calmly and elegantly, expression pensive.


    At length, when only Hvare and Soha were in listening distance, Harabi spoke. "We''re walking into an ambush. This is what got Arhaes - my teacher - killed. This will get a lot of us killed. Prepare as well as you can to get out of the mess. Soha, I''m positioning you in the front. All the other loop-bound are going to be guarding our flanks. Retreat if the fighting gets close, they''ll have loop-bound here, and we don''t know how well your ... talent works on them."


    Soha didn''t respond. Apparently taking that as assent, Harabi looked to Hvare. "I''m putting you in charge of getting as many of the regulars out as possible. Mehr is at your disposal. I''ll prepare to have the loop-bound carve and hold a path to get out, and guard the retreat. We travel light when we retreat - and this is to be a retreat, not a rout."


    "Yes, Harabi." Hvare''s voice was subdued. They both knew what was coming. Soha suspected Harabi was right. It didn''t matter much.

 Ch 22. Siege

    The army stopped a few hundred paces away from a structure of stacked rocks, three times as tall as the buildings in the villagers they had destroyed; wall, but a wall without a ceiling. The djinn didn''t circle around to the gate, as Sevareh had suggested, but instead simply moved to a section of wall, and set up defensive lines on all sides.  Peri watched from the walls, green and blue wings glinting in the light of the sun.


    After an hour of setting up, clusters of djinn started hurling flaming balls of rock at the walls, most, but not all, of which were caught in shimmering light, and hurled back. The peri had their own magii on the walls, among the glinting wings.


    The djinn moved around the returned ammunition, mostly, letting it fall amidst them and only moving to put out the flames once they landed; screams still occasionally reached Soha''s ears as somebody didn''t move far or fast enough. Soha stood with Mehr, Hvare, and Harabi, on the northern flank of the army; Hvare and Harabi keeping a close eye on the actual north left Soha, following Mehr''s example, free to turn and watch the odd game being played.


    Most of the flaming balls of dirt and rock that got through impacted the walls with a harsh and resounding cracking noise. A handful missed the wall, flying too high or too low; smoke rose to the sky from those that had landed behind the wall, while those that had fallen short bounced across the ground, setting dry grass on fire until rolling to a stop. There was an increasing cloud of smoke filling the air in all directions, as fires spread both inside and outside the walls.


    Soha still felt oddly empty, and distant, like watching somebody else move and act from behind the eyes. The past week - two weeks? Had it been a month now? Time felt like a blur, an endless sequence of walking through hills, forests, and plains, periodically interrupted by the destruction of a peri village.  How many had Fan ... or had it been Sidou?  Soha felt ... odd.  It was hard to remember, which was ... new.  Twenty seven?  Had whoever it was said they''d burn twenty seven villages in retribution?


    They had passed twenty seven villages some time ago.  Maybe.  It was hard to count; they all looked alike, particularly after the djinn left, bodies piled into a building that was set aflame.  All the djinn smelled like smoke, now, all of the time; the smell soaked into clothing and didn''t come out.


    The air was filled with shouts and screams.


    Djinn cycled out in the siege duties; then cycled out again.  The loop-bound stood watch.  Night came.  And morning again.  The loop-bound stood watch.  The walls still stood, above a field of ash; the stones were cracked, and there were fewer peri on top of the walls, and more and more of the projectiles collided with the walls; some seemed now deliberately aimed over them, and the smoke beyond was heavy.


    It was midafternoon when the first section of wall actually collapsed, black and sooty stones suddenly revealing white and gray on either side, as a large section tumbled forward into the ground, leaving a small hill.  A cheer erupted from the djinn; Soha could see skeletal fragments of burned-out buildings through the gap.


    What exactly was the point of this, now? Had they gotten the retribution Fan had said necessary, or hadn''t they?  It had been Fan, Soha was pretty certain now.  Thousands of peri dead, hundreds of their own people who had fallen prisoner to the geis of the enemy.  How many lived in this ... city, this Chefeld?  It was enormous.  Thousands?  Tens of thousands?  The number was incomprehensible.  Hundreds must have died already to the siege projectiles and the fire.  They could just leave now.


    But they didn''t.  Projectiles continued falling, the gap in the wall widening, more and more of the ruined city behind being exposed to view, before bein demolished by projectiles that seemed to be aimed into the city itself.  More fires spread, the smoke thick.


    A call was raised; the djinn army started moving forward.  Harabi and Hvare moved with them, maintaining their position at the northern flank of the army; other loop-bound began dashing towards the city itself, leading the front.  But others remaining encircling the army as it moved east, towards the burning city.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.


    They had nearly reached the gap when the force rounded the corner to the north; peri marched in rows and columns, speartips pointed to the sky, as they marched.  Other calls from behind, to the south.


    "Alright.  Prepare to hold a retreat."  Harabi spoke calmly, watching the approaching forces.  The peri army just kept coming - dozens of peri appearing in view every second as the wide column wound its way around the curve, a never-ending line of soldiers.


    Another call from behind, which Soha couldn''t quite hear over the din of soldiers marching - Harabi, however, froze, turning slowly in place around, to stare in the direction the call had come from.  Soha''s gaze followed Harabi''s.  The soldiers were starting to run, straight into the gap, spears falling as they linked shields and started forming defensive lines.


    "No."  Harabi''s voice was still calm, but it was a restrained calm now, voice trembling.  "They''re going to attack from the city as well, you old fool.  What are you doing?"  Harabi had stopped; Hvare had stopped.  Mehr looked between the two, and then just kept walking, joining the others as they filtered towards the gap.


    "Sevareh wants to win this."  Hvare set a spear butt to the ground, twining an arm around it, to lean on its support. "The fires in the city might keep the city forces from approaching all at once; they''re likely at least partially occupied with - "


    And a resounding, prolonged crunching crash interrupted Hvare, as a boulder the size of two djin stacked atop flew through the djinn forces from within the city, spraying blood, limbs, and viscera through the air.  Soha''s eyes followed the projectile as it moved; the bodies of the djinn soldiers didn''t crush, they simply flew apart into pieces.  It passed through the army in the space of a heartbeat, and then hammered into a hill on the far side of the clearing the army had previously occupied.


    Soha barely had time to recognize that it had punched a hole through the djinn forces before a second, and then a third, followed behind.  The lines of soldiers wavered - and collapsed.  Djinn started running away from the city.


    Soha turned back around - the column of peri from the north had not headed directly for them.  They were being encircled, and peri started leaping into the air, abandoning their tight columns to fly more rapidly through the air, to complete the encirclement.


    "Well, so much for that." Hvare straightened again, lifting the spear.  "I think that first boulder punched through the center column; Sevareh is likely dead.  Harabi, I think you''re in command."  And the djinn started loping off, trying to head off the fleeing djinn.  Harabi was looking from the three piles of shattered rock, that had been the boulders that had pierced their armies, to the encircling forces.  The djinn started speaking, but not to Soha, or indeed anybody at all; Harabi''s attention moved around the battle, muttering quickly.


    "I think that''s all they could manage of that, or they would have thrown more.  That was just intended to break our morale.  DJINN!  To ME, you fools!"  Most of the nearby djinn listened; others continued running straight for the rapidly-shrinking gap to the west, where columns of peri from north and south were moving to meet.  Hvare was headed straight for the closing gap as well, but Hvare''s charge was lead by a speartip.


    Soha simply ... stood, uncertain what to do here.  The peri in sight were all too far away for Soha''s mind-stilling to work.  Well, as a group; concentrating, Soha could work on one at a time.  Individual peri started collapsing.


    And then one didn''t.  That one spun, looking straight in Soha''s direction, and then started running forward, straight at Soha; six others immediately turned, following the one.  Soha''s lips tightened in concentration, trying again; the vibrations slowed, but wouldn''t ... quite ... stop.


    And then something struck the ground, dirt flying up into Soha''s face.  No.  The ground itself struck Soha, a large expanse of flat earth rising up and hammering straight into Soha.  The sky suddenly tilted down, and Soha stared straight into the sun briefly, before it whirled away and the ground was there again.


    And then Soha''s mind, the familiar vibrations, started slowing, dimming.  Reshaping.  What was this?  Soha''s attention dropped entirely from the physical, to this entirely new assault.  Confusion.  Pain - oh, Soha suddenly knew exactly what pain meant.  Panic.  One after another, vibrations arose, shattering each new effort Soha put forward to still the last.  Anxiety.  Lustfearangerpainmiserypanic -


    Silence filled Soha''s mind, silence unlike anything Soha had encountered before; like the striking of the massive bell that called meals, only inverted.  A ringing in the mind that was nothing, nothing at all.


    A peri face appeared in Soha''s vision.  Cold green eyes, blue and green wings behind, a sharp nose and long silver hair, a confusion of images Soha struggled to sort through.


    "Got one."


    "Good, the other didn''t survive the assault.  Never seen a djinn use a geis before."


    "That wasn''t a -" the voices trailed off into a meaningless buzz.

 Ch 23. Geis

    Vibration. Awareness. Sight. Color. Shapes. Self - no, Soha - saw.


    "Hello djinn." The words were strange, but also familiar; they weren''t the words Soha knew, but Soha knew these words. A delicate pale pink face stared down at Soha, lver hair spilling from the scalp; the eyes were ... green. Soha stared.


    "I am Devona. You may call me Devona, or Mistress, or Mistress Devona." A lilting voice, with a sonorous quality Soha had not encountered before. Soha tried to sit up, and found it impossible. Soha tried to look away from Devona''s face, to find the restraint, and found this similarly impossible. "You are now one of the Tuatha, and you will accord yourself properly."


    The face moved away from Soha''s, but the inability to move did not change. The words that Devona had spoken were ... they were not the djinn language; there was no equivalent word for "mistress", in particular, a word that carried two unrelated meanings, referring to both a relationship of disparate power, and also that Devona had a female form. The combination was very inappropriate by djinn etiquette.


    The ... restraint faded. Soha sat up, looking around. Devona was the only other occupant of the simply-furnished room; the peri was dressed in green and white, with green and blue wings spreading out behind; the white was some kind of top garment, with puffy sleeves, over which green straps held an elaborate emerald-green dress. The cut of the clothes emphasized that Devona was female in a manner that was as inappropriate as the language itself.


    "She rises." Soha immediately resented the pronoun. Devona watched Soha, lips curling up into a smile that Soha found resentment for as well. Soha tried pressing Devona''s mind still - but couldn''t quite get ... the vibrations ... the vibrations of Soha''s own mind wouldn''t quite form into the right shape to form the will. There were ... other vibrations there, now. Shapes and forms that did not belong in Soha''s mind; one was Devona''s vile language.


    Soha halted the attempt, and looked around again, studying the room, looking for a more traditional weapon. The plain room, the walls composed of cut wood, painted white but still showing texture, was lit by a hole cut in one wall - a window, Soha had seen these in the villages - through which light filtered in. There was a small wooden dresser, a copper chamberpot sitting on top of it, and a flat expanse of fabric, rectangular, spread across the floor. The only other interruption in the walls was a simple wooden door, with a bronze handle, set in a wooden frame. They were unpainted.


    The floor itself was flat and dull, gray. Soha didn''t recognize the material, but it was hard and unyielding. There was no ceiling; rafters rose towards the rest of the building, the walls just stopping a few feet up, a skeletal framework of rafters crossing overhead. There were quiet noises filtering in from above, indistinguishable murmuring voices.


    Devona watched Soha''s eyes explore the room, the ... Soha''s mind rebelled, trying to think of Devona as ... the mistress looking pleased with herself. Soha froze, mental attention swiveling to the alien vibrations. They interfered with Soha''s ability to think; there, and there. Even language; Soha tried, and found that djinn words wouldn''t form.


    Their word for djinn, as Soha was forced to think it in place of the proper word, was offensive. It meant a small flying insect, that was part of a collective, and collected sugar from flowers. It could also refer to a small crawling insect, also part of a collective, that scavenged the dead.


    Soha''s attention returned to ... Devona, who nodded slowly; the ... Devona had been watching Soha with interest, nodding to ... this language was infuriating and vile.


    "Very good. You are truly awake. Now that I have your full attention. One." And Devona''s voice shifted from sonorous to serious abruptly. "Your name is Imogen. We aren''t having any of your hive names; we are each individual here, and your name will reflect that." S-. S-. No. She found it impossible to look away, now. The vile language was better than this alien name. Or to speak, as ... as she attempted to protest.


    "Two. You will do as you are told, not that you will have much opportunity to do otherwise. The less you resist the geis, the easier you will find your new life here; the less it must bind you, the less it will.


    "Three." And Devona paused, smiling, the sonorous quality returning to the ... to Devona''s voice. "Three, you simply must dress more nicely than that. Whoever decided that you should wear red with red skin? The blue at least works." And then serious again. "Now. Say your name."This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    "Sss." Through clinched teeth, she struggled. And then the struggle ceased, with something like the sensation of her mind flipping end over end. "Imogen." The voice was hers.


    "Good. And you will do as your are told?"


    "Yes, Mistress Devona." She found she couldn''t even struggle - nor choose her words.


    "Good." Devona''s face and voice softened. "Truly, child, it is easier if you do not struggle so. You may think you are chained - that is wrong, but if you must think so, realize that you do not have the most freedom in chains when you have pulled them tight around your throat. Now, then, say your name again."


    "Imogen."


    "Again."


    Imogen followed Devona out of the room, and into a hallway; the mistress took a turn, and another turn, bringing them into a room that was full of clothing suspended by wire from a long wooden contraption, which Devona began to intently shuffle through, quietly speaking to herself.


    "Green would be a bit much with that red skin, unfortunately. What about yellow? No, no. White, yes. Maybe ... ah, yes, here. Blue works well after all."


    And then the mistress began pulling out clothing similar to her own; white shirts, and blue dresses, holding them up to Imogen''s chest, tilting her head this way and that. Imogen watched silently, not trusting her own mind enough to consider anything too carefully.


    Devona''s wings fluttered suddenly, and a shirt and dress, held together, were set aside, rather than being hung up again. And continued, until eight pairings of shirt and dress were set aside. The last, Devona still held.


    "Get out of those vile rags, girl." Imogen didn''t wait for the geis to tighten itself - Devona had been correct, at least in that, if she let the geis force her, it would hold control for a time after - and began pulling the bloodstained and dirty clothing she was wearing off. Devona paused, eyeing her. "You need a bath first."


    The water was cool; the room holding the bath was private, although a ... man, walking through the hallway, had given Imogen a ... look, when Devona had pulled her to a different room. Devona had hit him when she had noticed! Imogen didn''t know what to make of any of this.


    Imogen cleaned quickly, using the small bar of soap, while Devona chattered about cuts of clothing, and djinn lack of style. Imogen tried her best to ignore the woman, but found it difficult; she couldn''t not listen, but she did her best to let the words float by.


    Imogen dried with a towel Devona provided - it was white, or at least had been in the past - and then Devona helped her dress, pulling the shirt on over Imogen''s head, carefully. "Oh, we''ll need to dull these horns, or you''re going to rip all of your nice clothing to tatters."


    It fit tightly around the chest, pulling her chest up and out in a way that Imogen was thoroughly unhappy with. She didn''t resist the blue dress that Devona carefully draped around her - a cinch about the waist tightened, and the long skirts flared out around her feet.


    "Ah, good. Let''s take a look at you now, won''t we?" The mistress pulled Imogen this way and that, looking her over. "Yes, that''ll do nicely. We''ll need to find some shoes that will ... fit you. Oh dear. Come over here, and take a look at yourself. Now isn''t that lovely?"


    Imogen looked into the mirror Devona pulled her to, obeying the instruction to look without resisting. She hadn''t really seen her own face since she had first awoken, when the djinn had used a mirror to help her become aware of the space that she occupied. The waters of the bath house reflected light, but there just hadn''t been much light there.


    Her face was thin and angular, with a narrow upturned nose; yellow eyes looked back at her. She was a paler red than other djinn, and two spiral horns rose above her ears, rising from just over her brow line.


    The shirt and dress pulled her bosom up and forward, as well as pulling her breasts together; no djinn had anything like Devona''s ample anatomy, but Devona had chosen the clothing to accentuate it, for reasons that failed Imogen.


    Why are the ... these people so obsessed with what body shape they have? Even their language reflects it. Imogen didn''t understand, at all. She continued looking at herself, mindful to avoid the geis. She had thin and delicate wrists and hands, fingertips ending in slightly darker red nails that ended in points; her hands were likewise accentuated by the baggy sleeves of the white shirt.


    Imogen looked at her feet, which were fine, then at Devona''s - quickly back again, before the geis caught her. What was wrong with her feet? But Devona was wearing shoes, a delicate little wrap that barely covered the top of her feet, a bright green. Maybe the claws would be a problem there.


    "Aren''t you lovely, my dear? Out of those dreadful garments and into something lovely. We do need some kind of ornamentation for these horns, though." Devona reached up and brushed fingertips along one; Imogen stared at her through the mirror. That was ... very rude. "They''re quite lovely, in their own fashion. Ah, but first, let''s do something about those feet."


    Devona pulled Imogen to another room, where she utterly failed to try to trim the talons. Imogen found her first real opportunity for rebellion, here, and smiled at the failure. It didn''t last, and she found herself in a more open shoe, with straps, before they moved on to find "ornamentation" for her horns.