Logistics
With the mathematical minds of the gigagoyles on their side, they were spared the most difficult calculations of roster and rendezvous. That isn’t to say things went smoothly and without argument, there was in fact no greater concentration of interpersonal discord in the history of life on Earth than occurred between those tens of gigagoyles in the days immediately preceding departure, it just happened in channels of infinitely high bandwidth and thus took only microseconds for each barb to be thrown and countered.
In the strictest terms, acquiring their army should have been child’s play. Gigagoyles had unfettered access to most ferrier software, as they were always intended to be compatible. Plenty of couchgrousers were without pilots who might disconnect their machines from networks when not in use. Any of Onthinice’s recruits could zap to a machine they detected, insert themselves as a pilot program, and be just as effective as a flesh and glitter-blood pilot.
The problem was that they were all so picky, given this mission was the only task they had been awoken for. When they were done their choices would be to return to an inhospitable Castle Bountybyte where there would now be too many of them to hide inside away from Gigamillion, or to live as caretakers of the ferriers they inhabited, as Gigafive had in Snakewaist until migrating to Onthinice’s ondashboard computer.
Picking their new homes took predictive precision, and there was much grousing over certain grousers deemed the most capable and comfortable. Every argument was had, but almost none of them were necessary, as the gigagoyle with the higher number always had the most authority, something the lower integers would come to recognize when they tired of the argument at least one ‘nuh-uh, you’ sooner than their opponent. Sometimes this process was expedited by Gigafive, who received his first respects from his own species, as they considered him the expert on living inside one of the fairy war machines.
Preening before he spoke, puffing up, taking more microseconds than necessary, and having waxed himself with a higher bit-rate polish than usual, Gigafive gave them a thousand tips, forty percent of which were useless since most of his experience was with first generation ferriers and not the ones born with Fairnet access they’d be dropping into.
He advised them not to sleep on the hard-drive-to-live, as it got too hot. Don’t feed its mind weather reports, you’ll just make it anxious. Listening to various nature sounds like the current in a conch shell and cricket song counted as randomly mutating software updates, and were quite healthy, like a ferrier taking vitamins.
As he went on that percentage divide in his helpfulness and his gloating became clearer to him, convincing him it was worth his time to fret over whether or not he could do a couchgrouser justice. Between his waffling and having the lowest number, and thus processing speed, of all his kin, Gigafive was actually the last to select a candidate from the evolving list of feral ferriers they’d all been working to compile and remotely access since the sticky brush with Gigamillion.
His insecurities were expressed with dragging claws, courtesy of his new digiplasmic body, on the front of Ladyspiller’s flight suit as she made last minute checks on her oiling of Damseltry’s claws. Their ferriers were on the roof of Onthinice, which had gone off-road and was now slowly trundling through tall grass and rocks toward a drop-off point, where Snakewaist and Damseltry would depart their fair city for the expedition to Antarctica.
“What if my ferrier sees me as obsolete?” the gigagoyle whined, hanging off the front of her, making it all the harder to bend down and wipe away any grease. He’d already put holes in the suit, which she tolerated because she had so many. Any old clothes could be worn while piloting, but the interior of Damseltry’s head produced the suits in abundance, they peeled off the very walls, so Ladyspiller did her best to wear and discard one every flight.
“Lots of people are proud to have antiques,” she said, half-joking, only amusing the jeering critics Gigafive confabulated. He shifted to her side, over the iridescent blue stripe on the suit, and clung tighter, pretending he had tears to wipe off in her armpit. “You’ll be less in the way in any ferrier’s head than you are now.”
“Lady, we set?” Chaxium asked through her earpiece, already in Snakewaist’s cockpit beside the metal damselfly. “They popped the trunk.” Inside the trunk was the heartbox Cosmos Pops, which they would be hauling along. As far as they knew ferriers piloted by gigagoyles were perfectly capable of joining to form a fairanquin, always handy in a fight. The first time they’d crossed swords and wings with Clove they’d managed to construct one out of mostly ferals, though it did wind up quadrupedal with a gait somewhere between a jackrabbit berserker and an undercover coyote.
“Yeah, Five just needs some words of encouragement. He’s not feeling like the prettiest girl at the ball.”
“Good luck greasing that squeaky wheel.”
“I’m glad you two are having fun,” he blubbered. “Cozy in your ferriers while I sink into the tar pit of suffocating black rejection.” Wallowing in misery would draw less of their attention once they were guiding their machines, drawing his attention back to their preparations. “Wait… How are we crossing the seas?”
“You’re literally just asking that now?” Lady said with a snort as she broadcast a thought to Damseltry. They were on the same wavelength, and did not need a spell or radio to communicate. Its head descended and turned, one globular eye opening from the side and extending cascading steps for her to climb into the cockpit. Its interior was just as brilliantly blue as the exterior, seats blown up from a bubble spigot in new configurations each time they were needed.
Pinkish refractions created hologram screens, projected off the gulfs of fizzy floor bubbles in place of a more typical console, allowing Lady to make adjustments with sweeps of her hands and taps at the air. Wherever she sat, a seat would form to catch her and slowly drift into the optimal piloting position. A lattice of metallic foliage covered the entire ceiling, sound and motion of the leaves delivering information about wind speed, direction, magical character, and temperament.
“Damsel is in the tower,” Ladyspiller joked, yanking Gigafive off her side, two little handfuls of flight suit included, and dropping him right into the seat that rose for the occasion. He sank into the bubble enough to still his limbs, claws hanging out like the feet of a dead duck.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said as he scrunched his shoulders in search of the least humiliating way to escape the bubble.
“We put out a call for help on Fairnet at the same time you guys started shopping for ferriers. Someone got back to us almost immediately, and definitely not who you’d expect.”
“Lady, I’m going to roll ahead. Don’t forget Pops,” Chaxium said in the channel.
“Affirmative.” Through Damseltry’s blue-tinted lenses they watched as the long emerald lizard wormed once, twice, and then into a leap where it bit its own tail. Onthinice came to a complete stop so the wheel could push forward, roll down the windshield and hood, and disappear into the grass. As a flier, Damseltry would be the faster, even with its payload, so there would be no trouble catching up.
“Who wouldn’t I expect?” Gigafive asked himself, tapping his chin. Each time he flinched, unaccustomed to feeling the gesture. “Gigamillion!” He covered his eyes.
“Oh no that guy definitely hates us,” Lady assured. Her fingers danced in some pink lights; outside the wings vibrated in calibration. After two tests the damselfly ferrier hovered off the roof and circled around to the trunk, where Cosmos Pops, looking like a breastplate reflecting the entire Milky Way galaxy, rose to meet her under its own levitating power. Her hands grabbed the pink greedily, and the claws of Damseltry’s forward limbs closed around the heartbox’s collar. Then they set off, following Snakewaist’s radio beacon. “Tell you what,” she said as she reclined, bubbles squeaking, hands behind her head, “I’ll tell you once you’ve got a ferrier picked out and it picks you back.”
“But… but I’ll want one that will be comfortable on whatever mode of conveyance we’re taking all the way to the world’s frozen bottom!”
“This isn’t going to be a one-time thing Five! A bond with a ferrier is forever, even if they get a new pilot. They never forget and you can’t wipe their memory without breaking it. Whatever you pick should be what you’ll want to pilot most often.”
“Often,” the gigagoyle repeated, almost wondrous, fascinated by the idea that another entity might both expect and want his company habitually. “Well there are a lot of birds available, since all couchgrousers are descended from Nestledown, but we’re already in the fifth generation as far as the youngest ones we’ve detected, so there are also those with no visible connection to their progenitor. I think I’d like one of those, so as not to associate the enemy with my ferrier-pilot relationship.”
“Not a bird, good start. What else?” Damseltry settled over the wheeling Snakewaist, locking their pace together. Hours yet before they reached the shore, but soon gigagoyle-piloted ferriers would converge on their position.
“What about a cat?” Five suggested, wide-eyed. His body allowed his whimsy to sparkle in his eye for the first time, prompting Ladyspiller to take him seriously. There was a natural flow to the idea; Gigafive had always seemed somewhat feline when upon all fours. And that had been much more pleasant to watch than his baboon waddle upon hind legs. Were he a human she would have no trouble believing he was the owner of a cat treated like royalty, to the detriment of friends and family around him who didn’t think they were obligated to serve as its scratching post.
“Don’t look at me,” she encouraged, “you’ve got the list in your head. How many viable cats or cat-things are in range?” He bowed his head and closed his eyes to search his memory banks.
“Four! More than I thought. Let’s see, there’s a skeletal cat haunting a graveyard, a fat and fluffy tumbleweed cat, an arboreal squirrel cat, and a waddly little sausage cat that looks like a rolling pin covered in pepperoni scales. How on Earth do I pick Ladyspiller?”
“You might not have to! Send them requests to see if they’ll pick you, and act on it quick; cats can be fickle.”
“Not my cat,” he muttered, with Lady deciding not to voice the sentiment that, yes, his cat, unless it was intended to be a compensatory cat who made up for all of his own weaknesses. There was no such cat; every cat on every shoulder stood on the same side as the little devil that told you to eat donuts, steal them, and take twice as many, especially if you weren’t hungry.
She was about to ask him how it was going when he suddenly collapsed into a pile of transparent goo that kept the consistency of lava cake filling made from aloe gel. The sight of it shanked her with a flashback to their bathysphere egg before she remembered that Gigafive had neutralized its harmful properties. Now she could poke it to her heart’s content, which was hundreds of times, as Damseltry didn’t require any hands-on while simply following Snakewaist.
Hopefully the gigagoyle had gone because one of the ferriers agreed to his provisional pilot status. Few things could halt their mission in its tracks, but a rejected Gigafive might be one of them.
Minutes passed without his return or an update, so she was forced to transition into the boredom of long distance ferrier travel. Their cockpits were usually full of little sounds, as if blood cells were traffic capable of horn honking and tire screeching and rolling down their windows with primordial radio waves blaring.
Lady heard Damseltry’s thrumming rubbery wing muscles, the clinkety-clack of its arthropod joints armored in the same stuff that made sleigh bells jingle, the pops of the sluggish bubble geyser under her seat adjusting to her shifting weight, and the singing spin of the little weather vane between the eyes that tracked not the wind’s direction, but in which direction it carried the most magic.
Altogether it sounded very alive, and its rhythm told her the countdown to their face-off with Clove was running hot. Her plan with the hurricanes of Squall Tormenta had worked enough to get some people killed. Foiling her had allowed her to radically invent a new kind of self-sustaining ferrier. From that loss and luck she’d come howling back with a plan that would be all the more pervasive, and need her own command all the less.
Was she ever going to stop? Or were the two of them just going to foolishly defeat her without neutralizing her, succeeding only in teaching Clove how to strategize and fight all the more effectively the next time? It wasn’t like her hatred of humanity was unjustified; Lady had the same hate. And she’d shifted the paradigm with it too. In her family tree years she’d still never heard tell of another human who had joined the ranks of the fae so directly. Somehow she had turned her hate into love. Looking back, it seemed she’d forgotten how she’d done that. Chaxium was the conduit. Without her it never would have happened, but she wasn’t the mechanism.
How? Lady asked herself. What exactly was she feeling, manifesting, when she was squeezing her chubby cheeks into the rocks hiding Beezgalore? It had almost been a clumsy demonic ritual, since the scratching had offered up her blood, smeared across earth. Humans could be demons, the demons that walked under the sun instead of over the coals of the underworld.
An element of it came back to her as she watched the rolling grassy hills thin and yellow closer to the coast. Most humans weren’t all bad. She had been focusing on the good of herself, the part that deserved to be with Chaxium, that could genuinely enrich the fairy’s life despite having to be extracted from a gargantuan, sweaty, hairy body that was more pore than anything else.
Everything she had left behind, the 99.8 percent of her mass, was the bad. Her fairy self was all of her good, and it was humbling how small it was. Maybe other people couldn’t do it because the good in them, when scraped together from all across the inner rind, wasn’t enough to add up to a single fairy, that what wasn’t capable of injuring their own kind.
That idea felt extremely true, frighteningly true, putting her in emotional free fall while reclined safe and sound in her levitating bubble chair. For if that was it, if she’d just hit the golden nail on the head, it meant the same couldn’t happen for Clove Parcelbough. There was no reverse method, no filling her up with human greed, gluttony, wrath, and lust until she was lost in a tower of hot mean lunch meat. She couldn’t be sweat-lodged with gym sock stench until she understood how hard it was to be that lumbering gross thing, and only one of eight billion, no two billions getting along.
If it was possible it would be cruel to perform. Ladyspiller wouldn’t make anyone live that way. The winds of change had forced her to briefly relive it, and she’d never been closer to suicide. Clove would never empathize with mankind, and she might’ve been right not to, lest she wound her own soul with evil. But what could she connect to then?
Thinking back to their first encounter, Lady remembered how Clove had automatically treated her with familiarity, fascination, and even desire, as if they’d shared a romantic past as well. She knew, Lady thought. She knew Lady was good because that was all that could be left after pushing a human through a fae sieve.
Clove could be icy, but she was never faking her grip on others, which felt so tight because it was so form-fitting, so based on earnest interest and understanding. Clove took hold of you by recognizing you at first glance. She was a super fairy, if there was such a thing.
Logic dictated that if she was super, then every fairy she liked and thought she could learn from was super too. That meant Chaxium and Ladyspiller, whose moods took a boost in that direction once their own plan started visibly coming together.
Tree scarcity created an abundance of ferriers, now that there was nothing to hide them. An army of outfitted gigagoyles coalesced by burrow, land, and air, Snakewaist able to keep the lead, as no matter how high their number none of the Fairnet creatures trusted themselves to operate their mounts as well as one of the fairies they were originally designed for.
The data they’d gathered was reflected in the menagerie, with a high preponderance of birds and bird-like ferriers, particularly flightless ones with gaits like roadrunners. They flocked together, making the outliers stand out all the more, enough that Lady could get a good look at some of the wilder things conjured up in ferrier breeding, presaging truly insane morphology down their snaking branching line.
Birds and bees had combined in one rather emblematically: a hive with wings. It was escorted by a hundred drones too small to take pilots. In its scattered shadow loped an antlered rabbit with too long a neck. Bounding along, it jumped clear over a pig-faced armadillo with a wind chime tail. The noise of its dragging drove away a bipedal praying mantis with sword arm on one side and shield carapace on the other, a new more Lovecraftian version of the green knight.
“I’m glad we keep it simple Damsel,” Lady told her ferrier, stroking the arm of her bubble chair. “We just fly together.” In their flight and its relative quiet they assumed their army was successfully uniting, not jockeying for position and stratifying, those gigagoyles of higher number congregating in the front.
That only became clear when Gigafive returned and was forced to fight his way forward from the back of the pack in order to show his dearest friends and closest confidantes his spectacular ferrier. Its squat shoulders and dwarf legs made this difficult. When impolite orders to make way had no effect, he swung the front end of his war machine wildly, like a rolling pin, knocking the competition out of his path.
If they attempted to nip him back he ordered his mount to retract its stubby limbs and roll on its side, even more like a rolling pin, until it had pulled ahead and escaped their irritation. Ladyspiller heard some of these impacts and had Damseltry tilt to its side, allowing her to look through one of the eye domes at the parade below.
“Ladyspiller,” she heard Five’s voice crackle through the radio. “Look at us. Aren’t we magnificent?” She saw some running birds bend out of the way of a brick-red cocktail sausage, its gait a gallop in every way but the necessary length of the legs.
“I think I see you Five. Is that the pepperoni cat?”
“Thank you for noticing, yes. Its name is Pepurroni in fact, but it’s a pun because-“
“Because purring, yeah I get it. Apparently the fairy penchant for punnery is in their blueprint DNA or whatever it is they have.”
“That would be the adaptocantic code, present in all the couchgrousers, so richly expressed in this gorgeous, smoky, feline form. Its muscle fibers are unbelievably dense Ladyspiller; they could be floodgates for magma. It sleeps cozily in active pizza ovens.”
“Is it an arm or a leg?” she asked, judging it as a fairanquin limb based solely on its elongated form.
“Ambidextrous arm, and equippable as a weapon too. Looking at the data the others have brought with them, it also appears that the second generation is more flexible in fairanquin roles; they average 2.2 functional fairanquin configurations, whereas the first generation is only 1.7.”
“So how does it feel Gigafive?” Lady relaxed her muscles; they took up Damseltry’s vibration. Together they became the air, felt like the nothing everything was built upon. “No numbers, only feelings.”
“…It loves me and I love it. No two beings have ever been more closely bonded. This is the pinnacle of existence and I don’t know if I’m more concerned about this giddy infusion fading away or perpetuating forever.”
“Yeah, that’s what it feels like it. Becoming a fairy, getting a ferrier, being in love. Gems of Bottomless Magic.”
“Could you pass me my body?” Gigafive asked. “I want to experience this in my body. If it’s more intense, I might die.” Lady sat up and leveled Damseltry out, rolling the transparent glob of neutralized Fairnet to the floor. She wondered why he didn’t just teleport back to it and exit, but it made sense considering where he was: the first moments. To leave Pepurroni with an empty head now, even for a second, was unthinkable. Also like being in love, there was this instinct that if you looked away from your partner their silhouette would become a hole in the world sucking everything out into a falling void.
After calculating carefully, licking the side of her lip to enhance the process, Ladyspiller performed a barrel roll in Damseltry, opening the eye shutters just enough for the blob to roll out and drop. Pepurroni bucked and opened its mouth to catch it. Gigafive confirmed collection, then quieted to a rare degree. He must’ve been enjoying himself so much as he explored the nooks of the physical controls that he forgot what Ladyspiller was going to reveal.
Once they reached the shore he remembered, just as all the ferriers were coming to a stop in the sand, some turning in circles so the pilots could get a good look at the first foot, paw, talon, and tail prints they’d ever made. Snakewaist was closest to the surf, risen on its hind legs in an S shape, signaling an approaching raft with the glow of its eyes and the glint of its fangs.
“That must be our ride to Antarctica,” Gigafive said. “What is it then?”
“Kind of an old friend,” Chaxium said, entering the channel. “At least someone who has forgiven us more than Clove has.” Pepurroni did not have strong vision, but there were many ferriers about all sharing sensory data as they readied the network they would use to battle the enemy fairy’s forces. A sharp-eyed goblin hawk submitted the details of the approaching vessel: bare branches with corkscrewing tips, radiating roots like the warped back of a fan boat, and several buoyant human-made containers lashed to its sides by the entwining forces of wind and water, yet strangely even in their arrangement.
“Parcelbough!?” Gigafive croaked correctly. It was indeed Clove’s family tree, last seen by the Onthinice founders still standing in populous glory, the central hub of a lane-filled swarm of goods-delivering insects. In the same storm season where they had fought and redirected a hurricane, one of its brethren had ripped Parcelbough loose and set it adrift.
Just as with their old family tree Beezgalore, human interference had been its downfall, this time more indirect. Parcelbough’s brackish lagoon would have been safe for generations more if not for the avalanche of carbon mankind had dumped into the air, sometimes with literal dump trucks. Hurricanes had grown in strength faster than the fairies could make adequate preparations, and past a certain point only a great spell would be sufficient.
And as Beezgalore had become Beesnomore after it was abandoned by fairy and queen alike, so too had Parcelbough’s name changed when its people moved to trees further inland rather than try to tough it out on the high seas hoping its driftwood revenant would never sink. The new name came to them, not over the radio or Fairnet, but in the flesh of their memory like a cobweb drifting onto the precious belongings of their youth.
“It’s Vesselbough now,” Ladyspiller said. “Who knows how it got wind of what we were planning, but I bet it’s still full of communication equipment the fairies left behind. It volunteered, for us and itself. No one will use it as a ship unless it demonstrates its seaworthiness first.”
“Which it has, yes?” Gigafive asked. “Pepurroni has all of the talents there are… except swimming.” His ferrier meowed unprompted to second him. Chaxium and Lady took only a little pleasure in telling him they had no idea, just that it was too late to turn back now. If any of the other gigagoyles were apprehensive it hardly mattered, since they were awoken to perform this task. It wasn’t in their nature to disobey, not until it was over.
And there was hardly any space for their apprehension, as turning Vesselbough on its side could only increase its carrying capacity so much. Fifty ferriers was a big ask, so once the tree had beached itself enough for docking they went two at a time and tried to find the deepest nook in the branches or roots and the most compact configuration to stay in for the duration of the journey.
Without the various containers lashed to it providing both space and buoyancy, Vesselbough wouldn’t have been able to handle the army. It also helped that every gigagoyle except Five weighed absolutely nothing at all, and his congealed body was only as heavy as a dollop of mustard.
The last pairs to board were either waterfowl that could act as escorts and aid in shoving off or aquatic ferriers that would be attaching to the tree’s underbelly and riding like remora. Snakewaist and Damseltry moved to the branch that functioned as the bow, settled onto each other and formed an impromptu figurehead, from which they would captain their thing that could perhaps be called a ship under these specific circumstances.
Before they coordinated navigation they had to first instruct a few of the gigagoyles in the assembly and operation of a fairanquin. They’d brought only one heartbox along, Cosmos Pops, and planned to use it themselves in battle with Clove. During the voyage there would need to be interviews, and perhaps drills, to see which gigagoyles and paired couchgrousers would be best to partner with in the fairanquin. Everyone would get a shot, let it not be said that fairies weren’t fair, likely as it was that the highest numbers would be the most competent, since each was meant to surmount problems greater than the last.
Only Gigafive would be allowed to jump the process and join automatically, with the excuse that he had been working with fairies and ferriers longer than all the others, giving him valuable experience as a lubricant between all three lifeforms in their makeshift assault.
But for now Chaxium and Lady hoped they could get the gigagoyles to cooperate amongst themselves long enough to get Vesselbough moving. They’d shoved off, and it was time for some momentum. The tree could only nudge itself onto specific currents, not power them across the sea. Speed would instead be provided by the magic spell they’d installed in Cosmos Pops before departure: churning gargle.
Channeled from heartbox to attached ferriers, the magic would disturb any water directly in front of its casting with sufficient force to turn them into a speedboat, assuming the gigagoyles could agree on whose ferrier got to do the channeling. Gigaforty was ahead of the rest enough to get her ferrier attached between the heartbox’s shoulders. Gigathirty-seven noticed and followed her lead.
Then there was a mad scramble to fill up the other slots, shut down when Snakewaist swiveled and stared daggers at them. So much as a scratch on the heartbox could cost them the chance to be part of the fairanquin in the icy showdown. That threat kept them from rocking the tree, many slinking back to give their outboard engine some room to work.
So would the hydra goose acting as the left arm do the working, or the humming-woodpecker serving as the right? The two hands were thumb wrestling over the privilege, a terribly noisy affair with metal thumbs and a three-headed goose involved. Meanwhile, the tide was washing them back toward the sand.
Loath to shift their comfortable ferriers, Chaxium and Lady were about to do so in a manner much too like a parent threatening to vault into their minivan’s backseat when the woodpecker won, best two out of three, and aimed itself at the sea. The heartbox’s exterior galactic pattern twinkled all the more as the spell revved up and coursed into the limb. An invisible ray fired from the humming-woodpecker’s thin metal beak, slapped the water, and continued on, the tree’s limbs creating a pleasant drag of wind that the other perched ferriers leaned into. The trip to Antarctica had begun.
It was good that questions had no weight, or the founding couple would have been sunk immediately. Mysteries as great as the spell they hoped to prevent dropped into their coasting minds. They were so big, so encompassing, so like the horizon itself, that Lady and Chax didn’t even notice they’d just answered a very significant question by silently scolding their troops: whether or not a fairanquin could operate without any fairy pilots in the ferriers.
The answer was yes, since it was purely gigagoyle ‘cooperation’ powering them. Dark possibilities abound, invisible to them in the moment. What if leprechauns or pixies got their hands on a full suite of fairanquin components? Neither of those fey tribes had the same sort of connection to Bottomless Magic; both lacked the eusocial instinct that prevented fairies from physically harming one another directly. A fairanquin already enabled fairy violence, so what might it do with their impulses?
No, Chax and Lady were instead hung up on perhaps being the first fairies to ever set foot on the southernmost continent. Clove might beat them there depending on how easily she could wrangle the descendants of Nestledown, but aside from that they’d never heard a story of their own kind experiencing the place. If it had happened before it was likely a stowaway on a human endeavor, be it exploration or research. And they hadn’t published the record to Fairnet, assuming there was one.
Fairies forced to travel long distances, especially those in comfortable well-stocked vehicles, have but one recourse: snack. And while snacking they needed something to do. Chaxium joined Ladyspiller in Damseltry’s cockpit, as the insect’s eyes made for better viewing screens while they trawled forums, message boards, and social media for opinions on their efforts. None of it was secret, not with the Family Roots established, allowing anyone and any information to come and go from Onthinice as they pleased during the preparations.
Various sites were ablaze with discussion. Both fairies knew it wasn’t the healthiest thing to do psychologically to consult the peanut gallery when the spotlight tended to grant one a peanut allergy, but Lady was poor at resisting that particular urge and Chaxium suffered the same way when Clove was involved.
To brace themselves against criticism they half-burrowed in piled treats prepared for them by supporters in Onthinice and sent from abroad by bug courier: cloudy birch lemonade in secondhand glass bottles, pudding skin rolls, spicy tofu dandruff, rainlogged sunflower seeds on the half shell with lemon and horsefly radish, blind boxes of edible cosmetics featuring blackberry mascara, artichoke heart bars, potato straw poutine pockets, artificially flavored dove tears, powdered sugar snap peas, ultra-microwaved diaspora goulash, shatter-fried mint, watermelon fuzz in waffle cone trays, peach marshmallow striped smoothies, and all the magically-applied secondary flavors that could be licked off the inner part of fairy food packaging, for a nice little palate cleansing surprise, often indescribable, sounding like ‘dragon breath smoking’ or ‘glacier moon harvest’ if you tried anyway.
Fairies were bad at losing their appetites, yet Chax and Lady soured on whatever was in their mouth when they saw a negative opinion; tactically they swapped their half-finished snacks at that point so they could press on, the best way to eventually learn that public thought was at least divided on the subject of Clove’s next great spell. Most everyone was firm on the Family Roots being a good thing, and not just because it made international tourism far easier for such minute creatures. Even Onthinice and its founders would begrudgingly agree that, as human encroachment and their climate disasters worsened, fairies becoming closer knit was an advantage.
But turning ferriers into an invasive species? That was a declaration of war, as close to it as any fairy would ever come. One could argue that Clove was perhaps an evolutionary offshoot, she was so willing to create this history-ripple of violence between two scales of being. Did she misunderstand the ferrier’s initial purpose, or did she not respect their role as heroic suits of armor for rare and righteous feats? The fairy of swept-away Parcelbough might only see what could prevent such future events, something she could subvert and redesign to act justly, but also aggressively, by its now-fecund nature.
It’s just a reflection of what humans are doing to animals, isn’t it? Their often mechanical violence is mirrored back onto them, the closing of a steel-clad encyclopedia. Our part in the fight is the dark knowledge of creating it, but the ferriers can endure it better than we ever could.
-posted Blownkissinger Fireheath on the fairy social media site Morgarcana
Ferriers are meant to have pilots. They are an extension of our decision-making. Mean ms. Parcelbough has bred something out of hers and our control, but which is still our fault. Invading mankind will only make everything worse. A fat no to her and her plans, but thanks for the roots though.
-posted Wigstrid Ol’ Gumball on Newswing
I’ll wager every preservative sandwich MRE I’ve got on Clove, and those are my fave. Any takers?
-posted Humdrum Acacia-Daplague on Wannabet
The rest of the species had their thoughts too, but these were the last three the couple got through on their commentary bender between sleep taken in shifts, since one of them needed to be awake to mediate any disputes between gigagoyles, with mediation mostly consisting of the assertion that fairy orders needed to be followed since there were definitely more generations of them than there were individual gigagoyles, and thus their number was higher.
Vigilance wasn’t lacking, or so the fairies thought even as they unglued their eyes from Damseltry’s every fifteen minutes to observe Vesselbough’s passengers, but at some point the gigagoyle casting their spell had found the task becoming tedious and had switched out with another, some kind of color-shifting cardinal-jay couchgrouser with an exceptionally long tail.
Other soldiers had shifted around as well, painting a different picture of the tree than they saw at departure. In wondering how they could miss such a difference it struck them that they didn’t know what day it was. The date had been in the corner of Damseltry’s eyes the entire time. All that mattered was that they had arrived.
Frigid air. Wind whipping snowy dust off a shelf of ice and rock rising out of the sea. Foreboding thinness of the light, as if the distant sun asphyxiated. Here was the bleak gauntlet to the nesting site of the next great spell, one way or another. Arrived were the fairies in no man’s land.
Musical Chairs
Peppered into their commentary bender were bouts of remote strategizing, where the couple connected online to various older fairies of greater experience who had insight into the casting of great spells, either as witnesses or researchers. Hardly anyone existed who could advise them in battle, let alone a large scale clash of organically grown unmanned ferriers.
The consensus from these elders was that Chaxium and Ladyspiller should try to arrive first, and if they succeeded immediately seek a ‘nesting site’ that would expedite the casting of the spell. To order the ferriers to breed out in the harsh open was antithetical to the notion of nesting, and thus not conducive to the casting of the spell. Any such actions would be taken as occurring in bad faith, which canceled all magics immediately.
Having the ferriers dig one would take far too long, and might even be out of the scope of their ability, since the ground was solid rock when it wasn’t solid ice. No, the only thing that made sense was surveying the shore with flying ferriers, of which they had ample supply, and scouting up a natural fissure in the terrain filled with enough homey safety to facilitate the machines’ coupling and egg-laying.
Upon Snakewaist’s first slithering steps on Antarctica’s gritty edge, they knew they had beaten Clove there, or been allowed to do so. If they hadn’t they would’ve quickly received a call or taunt of some kind. Clove had their number in more ways than one. She wanted a confrontation, and ultimately collaborators. She wanted Chaxium because of their history, and Ladyspiller for her radical existence. It was starting to feel like she would accept no other friends, no other connections, even as she opened tunnels between all the cellars of the fey world.
The survey was ordered, and a dozen couchgrousers took to wings of every color, fanning out across the horizon in search of a suitable site. Meanwhile, Chax and Lady made their final decisions for Cosmos Pops, as they needed at least four teammates to form and operate a fairanquin. It was their assumption that Clove would also be heading one filled out by the feral spawn of Nestledown, having learned such a thing was possible from the couple the last time they met in the field of conflict: in and around the eye of a berserker hurricane.
Damseltry was also on foot, all six of them, claws clutching the icy threshold as tightly as they could. Attempting to hover in such strong winds was a recipe for wing damage that would take weeks to regrow. The periwinkle ferrier adjusted its wings repeatedly, failing to find a comfortable way to fold them so they wouldn’t catch the wind. Snakewaist coiled up behind it, laid over top to keep the daintier creature from being ripped away and tossed.
Together their heads turned to the disembarking ferriers of their nesting army, right around the time those doing the scouting realized they’d foolishly volunteered to not participate in the fairanquin recruiting process. Gigatwenty-two took it particularly badly, their rattlesnake-tailed raven ferrier plunging into depression, managing to recover before impact.
The most straight-forward solution was to just pick the highest numbered gigagoyles. They had the largest intellectual capacity, the fastest processing speed, and if Gigamillion was anything to go by, the greatest devotion to the one task they were awoken to perform. However, this was an army, and morale had to be considered. A strong fairanquin would mean nothing if the forty-five ferriers behind it were getting cold feet, or worse, resentful. Peppering in some lower numbers, not too low of course, would be good enough representation to quell dissent. Besides, the lowest numbers were already covered, as they wouldn’t dream of leaving Gigafive behind.
When the scouts returned they bore witness to the first ever fairanquin mixing first and second generation ferriers, fairy kin and gigagoyle pilots. The typical five was increased to the maximum of eleven, with six equippable ferriers that were not connected to the heartbox but still wielded by it. The body plan was as follows:
Heartbox: Cosmos Pops.
Head: Gobblecone, piloted by Gigathirty-nine. Turkey ferrier clad in pine cone ridges.
Left arm: Snakewaist, piloted by Chaxium Onthinice. Short-legged serpent ferrier.
Right arm: Pepurroni, piloted by Gigafive. Sausage cat ferrier.
Left leg: Ossowary, piloted by Gigaseventeen. Bird bone bower ferrier.
Right leg: Pistilstop, piloted by Gigaforty-four. Tulip hummingbird feeder ferrier.
Equipped: Damseltry, piloted by Ladyspiller Onthinice. Damselfly ferrier equipped as flight pack.
Equipped: Clipwing, piloted by Gigatwenty-six. Sharpened gray jay ferrier equipped as boomerang weapon.
Equipped: Earshears, piloted by Gigaforty. Twin-tailed earwig ferrier equipped as extending spear.
Equipped: Cloudhammer, piloted by Gigathirty-three. Winged hammerhead worm ferrier equipped as first bandoleer.
Equipped: Rapturibbon, piloted by Gigathirty-seven. Ribbon-tailed dove ferrier equipped as second bandoleer.
Equipped: Mailshell, piloted by Gigatwenty-eight. Chain mail snail ferrier equipped as belt.
For one brief moment, surrounded by its adoring army, the fairanquin stood proud and strong on the Antarctic threshold. Then its legs quivered and it collapsed into the bestial posture of a lowland gorilla. Snakewaist’s neck coiled to take the weight, Chaxium’s view turned sideways as her ferrier’s cheek was ground into the icy grit. On the other side she was face to face with Clipwing and Gigetwenty-six, whom she’d been attempting to wield. The hologram gargoyle shrugged aggressively, silently claiming this definitely wasn’t their fault.
“No, no don’t try to stand up,” Ladyspiller advised from the shoulders, Damseltry vibrating its wings in bursts to prevent listing. “Status reports first. Let’s find the kinks before we iron them out guys.”
Fairy pilots would have bristled at the word iron, but gigagoyles didn’t suffer from the fey elemental weakness, being derivative constructs rather than intrinsically magical lifeforms. They could not cast spells, except there and now, with a victory over Clove. Then their numbers would forever be etched in magidigital space, even if they melted off Antarctica in the world’s stricken climate.
“Okay, okay…” Chaxium said as she thought over the reports getting sent in. “It looks like there’s nothing we can do.” The gigagoyles groaned. They weren’t used to it yet. Ferrier nature just had to be accepted, not reprogrammed, and that was doubly so for the second generation. When Chax and Lady had allied with ferals to produce a fairanquin, the result was quadrupedal. Here, with a second generation tamed in mere hours and piloted by programs, some of that animal nature was still expressed in the posture.
“Everybody put yourself through the configuration paces one more time,” Lady instructed them, referring to a series of stretches and weight shifts that attuned each ferrier’s balance with the rest of the fairanquin’s. Doing so now would help the arms understand how best to put weight on their ‘knuckles’ or ‘palms’ and work as both sorts of limb as the legs adjusted to having two more partners.
While the recalibration was underway the scouts delivered their own report, having returned successful. There was a fissure not far from their landing point that went deep enough to shift from split ice to flat rocks. In order to nest there each ferrier would have only to gouge out a nook in the frozen walls large enough to curl up inside.
“Let’s not waste time then,” Chaxium advised everyone through the radio. “Form up around the fairanquin tightly and grab a neighbor if you can. We don’t want anyone getting blown away.” Snuggling up with lower numbers was far from a gigagoyle’s favorite thing, but they were smart enough to know their bird-like ferriers with hollow bones and flimsy feather fletching were especially vulnerable to the snatching winds. Every machine fell in line behind the heartbox, forming chains of tail and tendril, a cloak of thick strands that transformed them into an armored trilobite trundling across the wasteland.
Their transit time was less than half an hour. The crack in the land was bigger than they needed, extending off into the distance and only cutting off their view with a sharp turn. Breaking into pairs, those with flight and those without, their army grabbed and escorted each other to the bottom, everyone relieved the moment the whipping wind gave way to silence as they dropped out of its path.
Hard ground bore the thousand shed scales of glacially-weathered shale, striations visible on every piece from scraping and fluid lapping in equal measure. It had the appearance of a photographic negative showing a cumulative overlap of high and low tide. Rising on both sides were walls of shockingly blue ice like those cheap drink powders that claimed the existence of the cryptobotanical blue raspberry. The blue almost glowed.
“She’s not here,” Lady noted. “Maybe she’s already started at another site?”
“No, she’ll be here,” Chaxium said, knowing she wasn’t bursting her partner’s bubble. Ladyspiller also understood Clove, she just didn’t have experience enough with her to lose hope. Clove was too cool and collected to call petty or vengeful, yet Chax knew her ex had never passed up a single opportunity for a winnable confrontation. Her games were never called on account of rain, and she expected you to meet her on the field without an umbrella, to enjoy nature’s every drop the way she did or be branded a failure who needed to tune back into the world.
Chaxium also anticipated the question that was sure to follow: should they start nesting? Two options lay before the improvised army. If they got to work boring divots in the ice they might succeed in meeting the spell’s casting conditions and prevent the need to fight entirely. Assuming they did, Clove then had the perfect chance to attack from the high ground, pouring her ferriers into the trench and catching them off guard in the middle of the work.
After conferring briefly on a private frequency, Lady and Chax agreed to split the difference, both knowing it was best to keep moving instead of patiently waiting for Clove to take the turn she acted so entitled to.
“Everyone listen up,” Chaxium announced. “Pick spots equidistant from your neighbors. If you’re better at flying or climbing go higher on the ice. Start digging a nest, but do it in reverse, facing into the crevice, that way nothing sneaks up on you. Yes, I know it will be slower that way. Those are your orders. Get to it; let’s save a species!”
They’d hardly enjoyed the silence five minutes before it was replaced by fifty flavors of drilling, grinding, and boring. A snowfall of shavings dusted the rocks to the immediate left and right. The only ones who weren’t building their nests were those in the fairanquin, patrolling back and forth with eyes to the sky. Clove’s ferrier was a bird, and most of the early couchgrousers too, so it seemed unlikely she would attack from any other angle. The continent had no family trees, and thus no interlocking roots for her to exploit either.
Tensions mounted as the holes got deeper; the further each ferrier went into their burrow, the less of their surroundings they could see, field of view narrowing more and more to a spyglass circle. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Gigagoyles began checking in, reporting slight changes in ferrier behavior. The couchgrousers had an instinct, and were ready to stop going deeper and start going wider.
“Don’t get too cozy,” Clove’s voice told them all through the open channel. Shavings stopped falling. Ferrier heads poked into the crevice without leaving the holes that already felt safer than the chasm.
“Where is she?” Gigafive asked. Pepurroni almost unbalanced the fairanquin by lifting and waving skyward to give its pilot a view.
“You’re a limb Five, act like it,” Chaxium warned him. “Lady is our eyes. I know you’re the head Gobblecone, but keep yourself facing forward. Momentum is head first.” Gigathirty-nine corrected their positioning. “It’s our command but your lead.”
“I’ve got nothing above,” Lady updated, both Damseltry’s spherical eyes trained high. None of them had more ocular coverage than her.
“It’s not a long range transmission,” another gigagoyle said. “They’re here somewhere.”
“A cloaking spell?”
“For a fairanquin maybe, but not the rest of them!”
“Underground?”
“It’s too rocky. They’d be slow to emerge; we’d have the advantage.”
“I’ve got leg tremors; my ferrier’s losing its nerve!”
“You’re all losing your nerve,” Clove said casually, correctly.
“I’m sick to death of you standing on ceremonies you concocted,” Chaxium spat into the channel. “Win or lose, can’t we get on with it already?”
“You’re still no fun Chacha. I used to think it was cute how your fear turned instantly to bristling. And Ladyspiller, I love you too, but you’re not bringing life to this party either. I have to do that. Your dynamic is just so droll without me. Don’t worry. I brought a party-size bag of life with me.”
“Where is it then?” Chaxium goaded.
“Still nothing up he-” Lady was saying when they all heard it: a terrible metallic writhing, the worry of colossal titanium and tin rosaries in dense rings. Behind the fairanquin. Gobblecone whipped them around, the limbs barely keeping stable. It put them face to face with a layered ball of squirming ferriers hovering several feet off the shale. Probably fifty or so. The vaguest resemblance of a face emerged, created a word on the false lips that came blasting out of all their enemies’ voice boxes.
“Boo.”
The ball burst, spraying machines in all directions. They ran down the walls, grabbing or biting the heads and necks of burrowing ferriers that had leaned too far out. Chaxium and Ladyspiller didn’t have orders for their fairanquin, because it was utterly unclear what exactly was happening or had happened.
As with the cloaking theory the simplest explanation was that Clove had installed a teleportation spell inside a heartbox and had her ferals cozy up tightly enough to get inside its radius. Simple, and significantly wrong.
“Let’s not get washed away,” Ladyspiller suggested as she urged Damseltry to pull them airborne on thrumming wings. There was only time enough to clear the coursing wave of the ball’s collapse, not the flight path of the ferrier directly targeting them.
“What is that!?” the gigagoyles in the fairanquin asked as one. A good question that, unanswerable by either of their fairy captains. They’d never seen such a ferrier either, as electric as a severed sparking power line, as serpentine too, with segmented jaws dripping something that made the fairies’ skin crawl with recognition.
This flying worm, body segments spinning asynchronously, flashing with every neon color all the downtowns of the world had ever seen, collided with the fairanquin midair, mandibles first. It ferociously ground away at Cosmos Pops’s exterior, the shriek of metal on metal getting both arm ferriers to reach up and strike down with their equipped weapons. The light show worm lurched and flopped, deftly avoiding the guillotine blow. Then it jetted away and disappeared right in front of them, into a flickering hole in… perhaps reality?
“Fly us out of here!” the legs begged, least happy about the dueling swarms of ferriers below.
“Our ceiling’s low, we can’t let the wind take us,” Lady reminded them. “Gigafive, any ideas about what just attacked us?” Their sidekick gigagoyle had been by their side for years now, and seen plenty of strange things. Maybe he knew what was familiar about it.
“I don’t see Nestledown anywhere,” Chaxium added, trying to handle the battle while Lady did her impromptu investigation. “Put us into a glide so we can pick off ferriers that pounced ours out of their nests.” Everyone followed through, the turn requiring they run along the ice wall given the suddenly cramped battlefield.
As they swooped the gigagoyles got their wits about them, started targeting foes to throw Clipwing at while they used Earshears to pluck more off their allies.
“Bandoleers and belt, lash at anyone that goes for the heartbox,” Chaxium advised, “especially that worm thing.” The equipped ferriers confirmed, prickling, heads swiveling to create 360 degrees of awareness. Mention of the worm returned some awareness to Gigafive, who remembered that Lady was in need of his expertise.
“Yes, the worm,” he sputtered. “Did you see that saliva simulacrum? Unpleasant as it is to say… oh it literally gives me the shivers! How novel! Ah, but! It’s the same substance as my body! That’s magidigital substrate brought here from Fairnet.”
“So it’s a… computer worm!?” Lady blurted, cutting herself out of the channel so they wouldn’t hear her groan at the pun.
“I think so,” Gigafive said as he adjusted Pepurroni’s grip on Earshears. The weapon had nearly been ripped from their hands when they snagged a heavy-shelled turtle dove off a teammate. “It must have the ability to travel between the two realms at will. It’s not teleporting, just going digital. It could’ve brought them all here.”
“And that’s how Clove got in to see Gigamillion in the first place!” Chaxium shouted, then grunted as she swung Snakewaist into a wing-disabling pinch-bite. The gigagoyles were smart enough to deduce the rest. Their rival must have been cataloging and tracking as many ferriers descended from her own as she could, and took note of this couchgrouser computer worm’s unique ability, never designed, elegantly adapted through rapid evolution and code mutation. If that was the case, Clove could’ve traveled to Antarctica almost instantaneously, as long as she had gathered an army of couchgrousers loyal to their common ancestor.
“Now that you’ve introduced us,” Clove said ominously, voice rippling as her and her signals both passed from one plane of existence to another, “here we are.” The computer worm reappeared out of an internet pilot light, high up near the lip of the left ice wall. Its configuration had changed, now that it was connected to a heartbox.
Its flashing gateway ripped and spread, large enough for a whole fairanquin to emerge. Nestledown sat atop it as its crown, with ferriers so wild in shape acting as the limbs that across all of Cosmos Pops no one could guess what they were in their animal forms. Something like a phoenix was strapped to their back to keep them airborne, blasting the glacial walls with jets of fire, creating a steaming waterfall.
There was no telling where she had scrounged up a heartbox, but it wasn’t difficult to believe that she’d been lent one by a family tree for installing her roots. It even matched Clove’s earthen rebrand, molded into an ancient subterranean temple gate, equal parts bedrock and woven root. Later they would learn its name: Gaiaport.
What spell Clove had installed was much more apparent, since she fired a projectile from the heartbox’s molded gate as if it was a cannon barrel, before the fairanquin had even finished downloading itself off Fairnet into the Antarctic cooling fan. A net of semi-digital vines rocketed at Cosmos Pops, a devastating binding that couldn’t immediately be removed, since it ensnared ferrier code instead of bodies. Only Ladyspiller’s quick wingwork barrel-rolled them out of its path.
“Don’t get intimidated; take her head on!” Chaxium roared. “She has to recharge a spell like that. We’ve got a window!”
“But I just got this ferrier!” their left leg whined. “We’ll scratch it up!”
“I’ll scratch you up, now move!” Lady maneuvered their flight path to the left, forcing everyone to enter another wall run if they didn’t want the ice to deliver the first dings. Clove’s crooning laugh filled the channel as she got her feral fairanquin to match. No fairies had joined her in her cause, whether or not she’d bothered to invite any, seeing as Gaiaport’s opposing wall run was quadrupedal.
Neither party would back down, even if they had a chicken ferrier somewhere in their assembly. When the collision was imminent Clove pulled a stunt, spinning. Her phoenix wings melted a swath of ice, and one of her hydrophobic clawed feet slapped the resulting water into a blinding arc that hit Gobblecone.
Cosmos Pops faltered. A tackle became an embrace. Both fairanquins wrestled through the air, bouncing off the walls in a rain of icy chunks, wings vying for control while they tried to avoid getting bent by the impacts.
“I think Pepurroni gets motion sick,” Gigafive complained. “Or is that just me?”
“Just you, punch!” The thrusting cat face fist was caught in one of Clove’s eldritch claws. Gigafive frantically searched for a way to electrify his ferrier’s whiskers, which didn’t exist. Chaxium moved on to chastising the equipped bands, reminding them they were supposed to lash out. The ensnaring spell was inches from them, and would be recharged in moments. They could already hear it warming up, like a giant spherical boulder rolling down a narrow tunnel.
Mailshell, Rapturibbon, and Cloudhammer struck, attacking Gaiaport’s barrel in hopes of disrupting the attack. Once Gigatwenty-eight figured out their ferrier could fire chain links off its eye stalks, they aimed straight into the dark gate and let loose a rapid fire spray. And it actually worked, cheered the gigagoyles.
Gaiaport sputtered out enchanted sparks, then a stream of aurora smoke. Cosmos Pops couldn’t meaningfully return fire, as they’d used their one installation on locomotion, granting absolutely nothing in combat. At least it was a fair fight now, the Onthinice team thought as one. Clove thought differently.
“How about a little trip?” she cackled into the channel, her arm ferriers tightening their grip as they tumbled along the chasm. The worm shone all the brighter, segments spinning like a bike lock. Jarring nauseating lights enrobed them as they lurched. Antarctica was gone.
Chaxium and Ladyspiller held their breaths, prepared to fall into Fairnet and perhaps see Castle Bountybyte far below amongst the artificial forest. They swallowed those breaths in shock, painfully. Dirty purple air. Parasitic swimming lightning bolts swinging half their bodies at a time. Murky clouds of toxic and fraudulent behavior drifted by menacingly, stewing in themselves. Unfathomable monsters born of Bottomless Greed and the litter of the digital scam economy battled for dominance nearby, then fused into a sickening interbred mosaic of bullshittery.
“It’s the human internet!” Gigafive shrieked. His fellow gigagoyles cried out as well, but didn’t use any words. No number was high enough to prepare them for this. Chaxium had cautiously perused it through the filtering safety of a showing glass all her life and she wasn’t prepared for it. Ladyspiller grew up deeper in its trench, contributed to its sludge, and she wasn’t immunized either.
Nobody gave orders. Any moment now they would surely suffer explosive decompression, be disintegrated in an instant by the cosmic force of disingenuous snottiness. While they were paralyzed in this certainty Clove shook their fairanquin to keep them rattled literally and figuratively.
One good swipe of her claws would open them up and doom them. She could have. Instead the worm worked its magic again and sucked them back into the icy chill of their nesting crevasse. Then Clove dropped them. Damseltry was facing the ground, and the limbs weren’t coordinating. Impact would’ve grounded Lady at the very least, and she would’ve felt it like a broken back given that she was on the same wavelength as her ferrier.
Clove plunged after them, latching back on. Back to the human hell. Chax was lightheaded. She’d only thrown up once in her life, when most fairies threw up none, and she wasn’t ready for another dose of that rainbow splatter. She reached for Snakewaist’s controls only to learn she was on the cockpit floor, crawling like a roach, searching for her bearings.
Lady was a little better off, but still paralyzed with her hands on Damseltry’s instruments. What could they do? She didn’t think they were two minutes into the fight, yet Clove already had them cornered in four dimensions. As they were repeatedly thrown from frozen wasteland to its intellectual counterpart and back again the former human had only the composure to understand the genius of their rival’s tactics.
Their ferriers being intact was the only reason the brief exposures weren’t destroying them. One leak would let in an even more virulent strain of the blob that had infiltrated their escape pod. The human contamination would make sure gigagoyles would perish or mutate beyond recognition if they were exposed to it as well.
The revolutionary fairy had frozen them in terror without harming anyone, without letting them recover. She could release them and reel them back in endlessly while her army, no doubt trained together for much longer, defeated theirs. She was even protecting herself, as fairies who bring harm to their own kind, even indirectly, cannot escape the shadows of the suffering they create.
Not a wound on them, and not a spot of guilt in Clove’s spirit. Wait, Ladyspiller managed to think. She held onto the idea viciously, pulled on it like the rope suspending her over a pit of alligators. Clove was protecting herself from guilt because she was vulnerable to it.
Casting great spells wasn’t her only goal; if it had been they would’ve lost already. No matter how cool she acted, Clove didn’t want to do any of this alone. She wanted a community as much as any other fairy, and over that friends, and over that companions. Chaxium and Ladyspiller had already been chosen, antagonized with thrown hurricanes until she had their attention, teased with tickling roots and gifted a ferrier egg they never asked for.
Beating her was just issuing a challenge, and there was no way around that. As long as they were themselves Clove would like them, would read her revolution into their semi-heroic deeds, and forever have them as prospective recruits if they refused to enter her official fold. This dance was perpetual, and the Onthinice fairies would faint to the floor long before their infatuated opponent.
Ladyspiller resolved not to win this time, but to show her that she’d made the wrong choice. The evidence of it was all around them, mostly underneath, the occasional shrapnel shard of it flung by in a deadly spin.
The grappling fairanquins were soaring along the trench, flitting from one frozen hellscape to another that only froze when too many tabs were open. Cosmos Pops was Damseltry-side down. Lady let herself drop onto her ferrier’s eye domes to get a better look, like a glass bottom boat speeding over a sunken mass grave.
What she intended to inflict on Clove she had to first suffer: watching ferriers tear each other apart. A cobra with a winged hood constricted a flower pot on waddling penguin feet. Two spoon-billed amphibious owls dueled with their blunt beaks, perhaps siblings, somehow on opposite sides of the conflict. A bed sheet ghost of layered netting hauled a fat beaked skink into the sky, to a destructive height.
The sights turned Lady’s heart to rusty junkyard scrap and then shore it in half. Tears filled her eyes, and then by way of their connection, Damseltry’s eyes flooded with the equivalent of windshield wiper fluid. It splashed across her hands and knees as it reached the bottom and started to rise up her limbs.
Sorrow wasn’t slowing this down or fixing it. She needed to see, grab the right piece. It couldn’t be done alone, especially not while equipped. Lady rose, reached for the controls to pull herself back up, but they were too far. She could only right her orientation if her ferrier struck out on its own, leaving the others wingless. That wasn’t an option either.
Jarring impact gave her perhaps her only opportunity, throwing her into the air along with globules of aquamarine wiper fluid. She latched onto the top of her bubble chair, one of the most difficult objects to climb in all the world, somehow managing to clamber up and reach the controls, though not without a cavalcade of squeaks like wrestling balloon animals.
A jabbing press put her earpiece into the communication channel she needed, one Clove wouldn’t overhear. Then she shared her plan as concisely as she could. One of the bandoleers needed to slither around to the back and grab the biggest most emotionally devastating piece of ferrier wreckage they could.
With that effort underway, Pepurroni and Snakewaist used their weapons not to dismantle Gaiaport, but to anchor the two heartboxes together. Jamming Clipwing into each metal collarbone united them as if by paperclip. Wrapping Earshears around Gaiaport’s back and latching its jaws to a thigh furthered the bond. Rapturibbon went for a piece with its feet, long tail keeping it wrapped around Cosmos Pops. The grab was good, but happened in the wrong world, bringing back talons full of hateful bot comments that dissipated in the Antarctic chill.
“Keep trying,” Lady told them, stabilizing their angle as parallel to the ground as possible. Clove’s wings flapped and sprayed engine fire simultaneously. She was getting antsy about the stable trajectory, likely suspicious too. Her thrust was greater, and immediately started peeling them away from the precious salvage. “Chax, we need to be lower!”
The only response was a snarl as Chaxium pushed Snakewaist’s limits of agility, trying to reach to the back and maim the phoenix wings. Clove and Nestledown met each attempted strike and turned it into a duel, the bird ferrier partially transforming to reach with its beak, enough to cross swords, not far enough to suffer disconnection and shut down their fairanquin.
“You’ll have to stay once you’ve lost,” Clove both threatened and invited them. “I want you to see what I’m going to do with the place. It’s so perfect; you’re both excellent real estate agents.” Such a profession was alien to fairies; Clove had been doing more research into the human world than Chaxium had ever known her to. In fact, she had never looked at Chaxium more scornfully when they were together than when she caught her picking through the bumbler web, looking for giant friends like Ladyspiller who wouldn’t know the first thing about her failing to keep up with the duties of a ferrier pilot.
Chax knew she had been stewing as well as plotting, scoffing at every new thing she learned, and was unfortunately correct in most of her reactions. Everything that came out of the species that regularly murdered each other was going to seem suspect at first glance. But if she was being truly honest, if she could blow away the cloud of hate she too suffered whether or not she could act on it with her fist, she would see that humanity had goodness. It was right in front of her, in the irresistible shape and voice and goofy sparkling eyes of Ladyspiller, who never could’ve crossed the species barrier without Bottomless Magic in her heart.
“Then let’s have an open house!” Chaxium quipped questionably, really just trying to keep her distracted from what Rapturibbon was doing in the back. Snakewaist deployed its fang-fingers and went instead for Nestledown’s connection to Gaiaport. If undefended she could peel Clove right off her heartbox like a scab. The bird ferrier struck down to prevent it, but being the head meant she changed the whole assemblage’s momentum from up back to down.
Closer. Closer. Their sensors were picking up individual pieces of grit and ice, dating them back centuries. This was a fresh laceration of the climate catastrophe. It made too much sense for new life to spring forth vengefully. Closer. Rapturibbon reached again, snatched something cleanly. Closer. Gigathirty-seven shouted for them to pull up. Closer. Damseltry’s back scraped against the rock.
Internal alarms screeched in agony as Ladyspiller steadied her hands. Pain bristled across her own back, giving a stark reminder of her transformed wings now bearing them all through the ferrier battlefield. They needed space to move their cargo to the front, shove it in Clove’s face.
The wings couldn’t move far without hitting the ground and shattering. Instead Lady deftly adjusted the level of vibration in each one. Lift on the left side had to cease before the right was sent into the rock. Then it had to rise before the first fell to its starting position. It was like trying to parallel park a biplane into its slot on a carousel. Were they not so connected that circuit flowed into synapse they would’ve crashed and took out a swath of ten ferriers. Ladyspiller pushed, pumped, adjusted, reoriented, aligned, and even remembered to breathe for the both of them.
By force of will and ferrier Cosmos Pops spun, dragging Gaiaport along and putting its phoenix wings against the ground, where their chugging flames blasted fallen debris ice and framed their racing path in plumes of engineering steam. Damseltry’s vibrations beat them away in perfect swirls, keeping the space between the fairanquins open enough for the salvaging bandoleer to slip its prize between the two head ferriers, aiming the empty eye sockets of a destroyed ferrier right at Nestledown.
The victim of the battle over nesting ground bore one of the strongest resemblances to Clove’s ferrier. Its bill was wider, more shovel-shaped, now stuck open by the blow that had put its lights out, a dust pan lost in an apocalyptic junk heap. Its name, later mourned, even given a grave that fifty fairies dug themselves, was Loveshove.
Clove was struck by the sight just as Ladyspiller intended, but not so strongly as Nestledown, having laid that egg directly. It was a child, not just a descendant. Inside Gaiaport’s head, alarm lights throbbed the crimson of tragic fury, accompanied by no sound at all: the rage of a face unable to breathe. For the first time ever, Clove’s palms sweat onto her controls. Her grip slipped. Suddenly both her arms were limp at her sides.
No order was issued, and it didn’t matter if both minds inside Nestledown’s metal skull had come to an accord. The cry would’ve sounded either way. A cry that haunted the icy gash. A cry that twisted hearts in chests and rippled through hard-drives-to-live and adaptocantic code. A cry that bruised Clove Parcelbough’s pride.
The fighting halted, dozens of ferriers freezing mid-bite and mid-slash, weapons lodged in each other as they looked to the wailing Nestledown and all those stuck to it. Fire and life drained from phoenix wings. That entire ferrier turned ashen as the pair of heartboxes reoriented upright and landed, bestial postures temporarily undone as they leaned into each other with their shoulders, a hug of collapsing fatigue.
“If you make them an invasive species, this is how they’ll end up,” Chaxium said, her voice dripping from every speaker like the melt water of a frozen hell. “So few have been destroyed up to now. You’ll change that. They’ll throw themselves into fights they can’t win. A victory for fairies is death for them, by the thousands.”
“I’m ahead of you,” Clove answered, bluster gone. Chaxium had thought it an inextricable quality of her sound. “What would I do without such wonderful teachers?”
“Stop all this Clove,” Ladyspiller begged. She’d known only hardship and frustration from her partner’s ex, but still a part of her wanted that icepick-on-a-harp voice to go back to its old tenor. It was awful to see someone so cool weaponize themselves, an escaped zoo animal eating grandmas right out of their suburban windows. “The roots are good. You did good. You don’t have to keep trying to destroy something. Building is plenty.”
“Not something,” Clove said, the wrong emotion returning. Her words flagged then licked like fire in heavy wind. “Humans.”
“They’re not all bad!”
“The ones who aren’t will find their way to us,” Clove argued. “Your way… or like that friend of yours… Charlie the dragon slayer. The rest are mine, because if they’re not mine they’re left to their own devices. Those are built in bottomless evil. Mine aren’t. You’re right; I can’t use them as if they are.”
“So… what now?” Gigafive asked. Pepurroni wanted to get back on the ground. A paw extended and doggy paddled in the air. Gaiaport pulled away and dropped to its haunches as if ready to howl at the moon. The computer worm’s light show intensified; internally coordinates were arranged.
“Now, enjoy my latest gift to you,” Clove said. “These ferriers are here to nest, and I have no need of the hatchlings now. You’ll know what to do with them, my Chacha, my Ladybug. I must make land back on the drawing board. When you landed I saw that Parcelbough was no more. Its new name is not mine. Just like you I made my own family tree.
So say goodbye, just for now my loves, to Clove Enroot.”
“Clove, don’t leave w-” Chaxium started shouting while Gaiaport was already being swallowed by a magidigital portal that vanished like a revived pixel. Activity resumed around them, ferriers disengaging and sweeping away the wreckage of the few that had been destroyed. Those limping ignored it as if undamaged.
Reports came in across every channel that the gigagoyles couldn’t control their couchgrousers; each one was acting on instinct. The fairanquin stalled and collapsed as its every limb but Snakewaist and all its equipment but Damseltry struck out into their nature forms and abandoned Cosmos Pops to its idle hover.
“I’m pretty sure we can’t stop them,” Chaxium said. “Even if we could, we’d just do more harm.” Damseltry detached and crawled to the heartbox’s collar for the best view. Ferriers scaled the ice walls, found burrows, resumed sculpting. They paired up based on inscrutable factors, fully against the wishes of the gigagoyles trapped inside solely by their unwillingness to abandon their new homes. Mortal enemies mere minutes prior were now nuzzling, exchanging and remixing their blueprints in the sparks of static that hopped from snout to lip, paw to crest, belly to back.
“It’s confusing and beautiful and I feel like we lost again,” Lady said as Snakewaist wrapped around the shoulders and reared up to Damseltry’s eye level. She looked to Chaxium across the gap, who put her hand against Snakewaist’s parietal eye dome. “That’s wrong, right? I can’t feel this as a loss. Look at all the ferriers being made. Everyone should have one. The whole world should be paired with theirs.”
“However you feel has to be correct,” Chaxium said, “because we’re the ones stopping Clove from killing. If we weren’t good before, we are now, since Clove is worse. We can’t just sit around anymore. She won’t stop. It’ll be something else next year, or next season, or next month. I don’t want to go on any more surprise dates with her; she always sticks us with the check.”
“You mean we have to go on the offensive and hunt her down?” Chaxium nodded. “Boo. I hate the offensive.” Lady put the back of her hand to her forehead, pretended at half a fainting spell. “It offends me.” The other half of the faint was in there somewhere, she realized, as she felt it winding around her bones like a ghost. The toll of every single day since the roots connected the family trees finally fell on her, and on Chaxium.
“You just leave it to me you precious delicate bud of my desire. I’ll draw up the war plans. We are about to have an army, looks like. It’ll need something to do.”
Couchgrousers were more unique than the first generation ferriers, extending to every aspect of their dual existences across Earth and cyberspace. One expression of this individuality was the speed at which they could construct an egg inside their body and lay it. Not long after Chaxium spoke of their army the first egg was out, warmed by its parents forming a ring around it, doing their best against the shelves of ice in all directions.
Together, as one, Chaxium and Ladyspiller spoke their great spell into reality. Recalling the way they had done so after being drafted into the Wild Hunt, they put the same emotion into their declarations. No, not while they lived would these lifeforms, would this technology, exist for violence. They existed for themselves, to die only to nature, never at the behest of another.
Ferriers would never become an invasive species, by the power of Bottomless Magic, wielded by Chaxium and Ladyspiller Onthinice, and seen to by the gigagoyles of Castle Bountybyte and their couchgrousers.
They invaded the species first.
Never.
Never.
Never would fe-
“Fine!” Gigamillion erupted, clapping his great hands to the will of the casting. “I’m putting a lock on the door,” he grumbled.
The End
Chaxium, Ladyspiller, and Clove with return in
Snakewaist
Lost Designs
Blaine Arcade 