Opalite Wires

and she was sure now that he was not, in fact, ignorant and a chick, but only humoring her by allowing her to "re-evaluate," as she had said; but soon enough he pursued her again, and this time he did not look frivolous and young and airbrained but determined and old and wise -- how could she have ever thought otherwise?

"I wish to see you," he told her, and this time it was her following his order, and there they were again, perched on the higher loftrees.

They sat in silence, the wind picking up and rustling their feathers. Some of Skaffwory's were sheared off and flew away, tumbling enthusiastically in the way of feathers that had finally escaped their use.

"No jibes or insults to me?" said Ckorassackea Cedrus, and Skaffwory shook her head. The perpetual fires at her feet were flickering erratically; her beloved salamanders were responding to her unease, and occasionally one of them would lash out, soothing its restlessness.

"No," Skaffwory said. She huddled, shivering on her branch despite the embers beneath her. She combed through the feathers on her right shoulder.

They were silent again.

"Are you done?" Skaffwory asked finally, and Ckorassackea Cedrus hung his head.

"You fear me," he said miserably. "This is why I didn't tell you before. I didn't want you to be scared of me."

"What other response would you have?" Skaffwory asked -- rather than demanded. His defeated posture touched her.

"Well," he said, "I'd rather that you love me as I love you."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"Surely you must know," Skaffwory said, "that this power is not something that can be forced easily onto another being, much less a passerine."

"Yes," he said, "I know the c-curse, just as well as you. Despite whatever other misc-conceptions you harbor about those who bear my name."

He sighed, strongly. She had never seen such a sigh in any other creature. His breast expanded to at least a quarter greater his entire bodies' size.

"I feel," Ckorassackea Cedrus said, "that it is possible to defeat such a c-curse. Think about it. Love is a c-coagulant for the sorrows of other beings -- they speak of it and write songs of it -- I refuse to think that we're any different. We must all adhere to some sort of underc-consciousness."

"What evidence have you for this?"

"I've been think-king," he said, "of the stories that have been told throughout our ages. Love and war. Maturity and spawning descendants. It's all the same -- no matter whether you bear skinned flesh or feathered, whether your hands are hooved or prehensile. Even the dragons have songs that speak to these timeless themes."

"You forget what passerine songs have nothing to do with love."

"This is false," Ckorassackea Cedrus told her sharply. "Passerine do sing of love. It is only the word itself that falters, and it does not live long in us, the same way that a flame struggles on a short wick-kuh. But I am sure, with the right bond...with the right pair...timelessness could be achieved."

She was wrong. He was a chick after all.

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but fortunately unpopular with the smitten. The loftree branch was short and they huddled together, breath fluffing out in big plumes. Skaffwory alternated tightening and loosening her grip on the branch beneath her. The stony bark began to glow and heat beneath her touch.

"I knew you from last Adarngack-kea," he told her. "When you did the dance. Ever since then I have been in love with you."

Skaffwory huffed. "Is that so."

"Yes. You are beautiful and awesome."

"And what," Skaffwory said, "you want me to take care of you? Do you want me to chew your food for you while you —"

"I am not a chick!" he told her — not, she noted, with the usual whining, but firmly. "My name is Ckorassackea Cedrus."

Skaffwory straightened at that. "Are you really?"

"Yes."

"You have no accent."

He placed a hand into his mouth, hooked thumb and index finger until his knuckles shoved up against the interior of his beak. When he withdrew his hand again, there was a glimmering coil twisted around his talon.

He spoke something to her that she didn't understand. Then he set the slyph back on his tongue and swallowed, grimacing and coughing, throat flexing as the slyph twisted back against the cords of his voice.

His voice came out rough at first, and he rubbed his neck.

"That is how it is."

"It explains a lot," she admitted, and shifted away from him slightly, on the premise of stretching her wings. Cedrus eyed her.

"Do you fear me now?"

"No," Skaffwory said, "but I must re-evaluate."

"Re-evaluate what?" he said. "What is there to re-evaluate? You are amazing. You make the air glitter. I love you."

"I am old and I am going to rest," Skaffwory told him, and raised her head, sensing a gust; she opened her wings at the right moment, loosened the grip of her feet. The wind plucked her from the branch with a sparkle of dying flames, a thin trail of ash.

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and they met several times after that, Skaffwory using each moment to scrutinize and gauge him ruthlessly, buffeting back his kindnesses as appropriate, trying to goad out his true character with all she could muster. He brought her other gifts, which she accepted flatly — they were simple things, jeweled anklets and polishers and expensively spiced food which she made great show of putting for sale in her rental space the next day. She kept the initial basket of antimony, but shoved his next offering of it out of his hands with her beak, scoffing: "What, this again? Old news!"

This took him aback and she could see a flicker of infuriation, which he hid with a huff and bulge of his throat. "Very well," he said, merely, and was rather quiet for a while, and she wondered if finally he would reveal his frustration and true intentions, and leave accordingly.

He did not. He continued to sit beside her on the loftree branch, looking down at the world below with great thought, the wind brushing the feathers of his long crest. Shadows fell across the two of them, of the other passerine crowding the air, and finally she felt a great annoyance with him and decided to end this ridiculousness.

"Be gone," Skaffwory told him, wearily. "You bore me. I am too old for your chickling games."

"I won't go," he said. "I love you, Sk-kaffwory."

She ground her beak with irritation and sighed. She opened her beak, her breast growing more prominent as she took breaths of the air, and she exhaled a low note, stirring yet slightly cracked and airy. Immediately the branch began to heat; the buzzard didn't notice at first, but soon did when fires began to manifest as if from the core of the branch, easing up in little tendrils between the slivers of bark, between the scales of their toes.

Now the buzzard noticed, and he started in alarm. Passerine feared fire like no other creature — what other creature was more akin to living tinder? — and so Skaffwory fully expected him now to flee with angry squawks, but instead he closed his eyes and tightened his grip on the branch.

Skaffwory was surprised. She let the fire grow, up so that it began to lick against her stomach and at his hunched, stooped shoulders, and he cried out but remained.

"Abate," she sang to the salamander now, and the fire quelled down to a smoulder beneath their heels. Trembling, the buzzard looked up at her, and then at himself in wonder. Skaffwory did too — he was not completely unhurt, but he wasn't close to dead. And his feathers were mostly intact as well, only crisp around edges, which actually served to complement his taupe-tawny plumage rather well.

The buzzard examined his wings, which were both also intact. These were singed as well, but still usable, with effort. He looked at her, and said, with the most sincerity she had ever heard from any passerine male still in his prime:

"You are amazing."

"I threaten you with death by flame and you c-call me amazing," Skaffwory cawed at him, but her feathers fluffed in embarrassment.

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found herself in walkers' Quartzal far more than she liked, squatting in the stench of the dirt while walkers trudged back and forth, mushing their grubby heels or else creaking along in carriages crusted with Quartzal mud, which was famously iridescent and for that reason was not as thoroughly washed off as other hues of mud.

Still, it was a little bit better than being up in the skies at this time of the year. It was just the sort of day that was both bright and sprinkly with warm rain, the time when much younger passerine than she would launch themselves through the showers and clouds to veil themselves in beads of glistening moisture. The traffic in the skies about Quartzal was horrendous, but because passerine romance was not necessarily a holiday, administration did not see completely fit to oversee detours in advance, and so everyone was always scrambling off to somewhere else in lateness, covered in damp down feathers and decidedly less innocent than they had been hours prior.

Though Skaffwory usually recognized her offspring when she happened to run into them, and remembered the fathers and members of each of her clutches, she didn't necessarily keep up with anyone, and had grown a little tired of the whole affair, and hadn't done the whole water-droplet-veiling thing for at least two years. She had wondered at the waning of her own desire for mothering and had thought that maybe, finally, her age had quenched it. But, recently --

In fact, there he was now, the buzzard. Skaffwory's feathers fluffed as he approached. It was easy to avoid such folk in the sky -- her skills far outweighed any other there -- but here on the ground, and especially within the limits of her rental space, she couldn't do much from this frequent, annoying visitor but tilt her head to the side with scrutiny and say, gruffly, "And what is it that you want today?"

The passerine said nothing, only eyed her very seriously and held out a basket. Skaffwory blinked at him and for a moment did nothing, but her curiosity got the better of her, and she stretched out and took the handle of the basket with her beak, flipped it off and to the side. The basket was filled with clumps of silvery-white, crystalline material.

Skaffwory snorted.

"Little one," she said, for the passerine really was quite young, if a buzzard in his tenacity, "I have received gifts of gold and pliant wool beaded with power, tame dentsa and the eyes of dragons, and you seek to woo me with mere rocks?"

The passerine's feathers ruffled with offense that he -- she granted him this much -- was good enough not to verbalize, except to say, "Sk-kaffwory-lady, I am not little, I am an adult, and I love you."

"You are a child. Your feathers are hardly out of the first molt." She plucked one out of his head just to prove it and he winced, slightly. "You can hardly speak without your beak clacking between each word."

She exaggerated. He was young -- compared to her. She was suspicious of what his true intentions were. There were some who tried to bait her for her rapport with salamanders, and she did not want to risk either her life or the rest of Quartzal's by somehow angering the fickle things.

Indeed, his eyes flicked down to the salamanders, and Skaffwory hissed at him.

"Be off with you, you buzzard, do not anger me or you will burn to a crisp!"

"No Skaffwory, only look!" He set the basket down beside another one, and the salamanders immediately perked up with interest. The salamanders she soothed were usually very calm and jaded, and so Skaffwory herself became interested as well; unblinking, she watched as a couple salamanders slid over from their basket and amidst the silvery rocks, and immediately the basket began to emit sparks, a vibrant and loud glitter which made all the rest of the marketplace turn about in shock, which made her realize how soft and frantic the pounding of her own heart was, which made even the constant, protective illumination of the opalite wires seem dark.

The crackling and shining persisted, the salamanders writhing in a certain sort of cheer, and despite herself Skaffwory found herself quite impressed. It was the first time that someone had appealed to some aspect of hers specifically. Anyone would be pleased with gold or pliant wool of the highest grade, but there was only one passerine who dared nearing salamanders.

"The whole marketplace is looking," she said, and took the lid of the basket with her beak and set it back on, containing the glitter, though the basket continued to shine from the inside, and light dripped with sharpness from some cracks in the basket. She looked at it with pleasure and used her smile to comb out feathers whose filaments had become disengaged from the rest.

The passerine was looking on at her nervously. She nibbled at down and told him, "Meet me again when the market hours end."

His beak clipped and clacked with pleasure; he nodded at her, crest feathers all risen and ruffled, and flew off.

Labels: skaffwory

Skaffwory began immediately to verse Chimbeeriun in the trade of an elementalist, first by teaching him how to shave feathersticks and select swatches of linen or jute to heat into charcloth. She realized soon that she had against succumbed to her tendency to spoil the runts of her clutches, and struggled at first to force the spoiled brancher to sit still, and then to pay attention, and then to practice. He greatly disliked the salamanders and she could see his feathers sticking out on edges whenever he looked at them. He also disliked the labor that she put him through, both its tediousness and required dexterity.

He quit study and she refused him food, and ignored his tenacious cries for it, advising him gently that he could put his voice to other tasks that would be more likely to result in a fuller stomach. When he became obnoxiously loud she moved her sitting spot to an isolated loftree limb with no neighboring boughs for him to perch on, and she summoned larger salamanders to engulf her perch. He could not near her and was terrified of the larger salamanders and for a week's passing of sunrises she did not see him at all, and wondered if he had maybe found himself a different trade, or died.

Sure enough, however, he returned, his beak stained with gruel that the walkers gave to their poor, and he had such sad eyes that she was moved to consider feeding him, but didn't. He couldn't survive this way. She was old already and her profession was not the safest. In any case, she was disinterested in nourishing stupidity, and it would not be the first time such an unfortunate pattern of brain waves had arisen in her offspring.

She waited until his hunger encouraged him to ease closer and closer to her perch, one gripping step after another, and was pleased to finally see his eyes and back harden as he stepped over the coiling salamanders. She could see his determination and the shaking of his legs, and could only just barely see his hardened eyes peeking over the huge ruffled ruff. The salamanders in their relaxation and contentment had seeped their figures mostly into the branches of the loftree, so even to Skaffwory they were only semi-transparent, a vaguely colored shimmer of the air; but she knew that Chimbeeriun hardly saw them at all, especially the large serpentine one whose coils overlapped most of the branch. He was stepping over it now, and without warning a coil unraveled itself from the branch and gently encircled his ankle.

Chimbeeriun screeched with alarm as a seemingly weak smolder of flame flared to life around his left leg; at the sudden noise the fire abruptly grew louder and hotter, as the salamander moved from being disturbed, and Skaffwory called out at it sharply.

"Be still!"

A flicker of an ice blue eye, rolling to regard her; then the salamander rolled about, and settled. The flames abated. The feathers on Chimbeeriun's left leg were either ash or gone. The heat had also nibbled on the feathers beneath his left arm and wing, and swiftly Skaffwory jumped and pulled at the radiale, stretching out the wing and examining it for damage. The other primaries were damaged, slightly.

"That will teach you to lose your calm," Skaffwory snorted, dropping the wing, and Chimbeeriun grabbed at it and held it to his chest, looking horrified.

"It wasn't my fault," he said, "I didn't even see it --"

"That is because," Skaffwory interrupted him, "you are selfish, and too concerned about yourself to see beyond the end of your beak. Rather, the end of your tongue. Until you get over yourself, you will be unable to reach any other destination."

Chimbeeriun's beak clipped shut. He looked -- angry. The salamanders stirred. For a moment Skaffwory had the slightest warning sense, but she shook her head.

"I'll purchase mending for your feathers and we can fix them tomorrow. For now, tell me what you remember of feather sticks and charcloth."

Labels: skaffwory

She was well versed in many trades but her best song involved the soothing of salamanders, which she spent most of her days calming and collecting into baskets woven of water-proofed wools and treehatch palms. She was quite a good fire elementalist, which was evidenced by the fact that she had a constant stench of smoke and smolder and her talons and nails and feathers were stained and crusted with ash, but most greatly evidenced by the fact that she still managed to keep any of her feathers at all. Fire was a thing terrifying for most passerine and she profited from that instinctive fear quite nicely.

She did not only sell to passerine, of course. All manner of walkers from Quartzal would purchase little salamanders for their fireplaces and stoves and simple lighting solutions. Hers was the best name in the business of Anthem Low, the one associated with the least number of accidental burning-downs of entire buildings; often other "elementalists" would sell off improperly soothed beings who would jump their wire fences and stone barriers and proceed to destroy everything in sight.

She only ever sold the lowest class of salamanders, most of which no larger than the knobs of her beak, several of which could be held in the fist of her hand. Skaffwory was a humble and realistic person and only very rarely trusted herself to sell any higher classes of salamander, though she had become popular to the point where she would not uncommonly come across salamanders with bright blue points, which could be almost the length of her forearm.

Every once in a while she solicited a sylph into her throat to smooth her voice and make it intelligible to listeners, and then she would rent out a square of space in the day-rent distribution of the Quartzal marketplace, baskets piled up high all around her, glowing gently.

"Salamanders," she would crow, "Salamanders for sale! The sweetest-tempered salamanders in all of Quartzal, indeed in all of Anthem Low! Heat your home and cook your food with greater efficiency and speed! Skaffwory's salamanders have never burned down a house or a feather! Unless you are stupid," she would append with a cough at a passerby, "which you, sir, most certainly are not -- and especially not stupid enough to pass up such a deal, yes? Yes? Each basket contains at least half a year's worth of salamanders, for only seventeen sixths!"

Labels: skaffwory

was atop one of the broadest loftrees in Quartzal. The bough itself stretched out into the air quite nicely, farther than any plank could without necessitating ademic or engineerical reinforcement, and this allowed her to oversee the Avuckka cliffsides, as well as a grand portion of walkers' Quartzal, whose most populated, public areas lay exposed to her vantage like the interior of a cracked-open bowl of honey infested with insects. The thought of it made her stomach ache somewhat and she shifted her weight back and forth, felt the branch creak beneath tightening talons and dip as she guarded her balance with fans of her wings and tail.

The air aside Quartzal was a chaotic thing. It was beaten constantly by motion of wings and tails, tongues, bus ferry motors, not to mention the passage of various classes of sylphs and vayu and the occasional flicker of demon, and then there was the Westerly, whose exhale was relatively even but whose inhale indicated the end of a passerine year, and some period of greater cold and precipitation in the sky.

Skaffwory of course had lived in this air for most of her life and so navigated it with the ease that one might have navigating the rooms of a very large and complicated house that they had inhabited since childhood, whose innards were littered with toys and sentimental baubles. Still, that didn't mean that she chose to breach this great mess all the time, or at least not for reasons so trivial as just wanting to or feeling like it, and so when she heard (from a particularly nosy and noisy slyph whose attentions she come somehow to garner frequently) that one of her youngest hatch was searching for her, she merely waited, baiting little salamanders near her with feather sticks and charcloth for warmth. Her eyes were still keen even at this age and from a distance she could spot a tiny figure colored white and herringbone sorrel, beating his way through midair traffic.

She crooned with amusement, throat bulging. It was clear that he had attempted rowing through the clearer perimeters of sky around Quartzal, but the Westerly's eventide coughs had buffeted him back into more crowded quarters. He was the runt of his clutch and still looked newly cracked, all large eyes and a certain scrawny, disproportionate look to him, like his body still hadn't quite filled in to his good-sized wings and fan. She'd named him Chimbeeriun, with a cheerful flourish at the end that no walker could manage whenever they were cursing the poor thing for crashing into their buildings.

He made it finally to her by crawling along the roofs and boughs of loftrees, launching himself from one to the other, appropriate antics for his brancher age. He was cleanly exhausted when he came within two boughs away from her, and drew no nearer, eying the salamanders twining and smoldering around her roost with hesitation. She ignored him, until finally he called out, piteously, "Skaffwory! Skaffwory!"

"What need have you, Chimbeeriun?"

"Skaffwory," he said, "I'm hungry."

"Where are your siblings?" Skaffwory asked, and Chimbeeriun shuffled on his perch, looking down and picking at a feather on his neck.

"They have food but I don't."

She huffed, feathers fluffing out; she tilted her head and eyed him imperiously, debating. He was not too old yet for her to refuse him, but indeed the others of this hatch had already stopped coming to her as frequently as he did, and she had heard that one of the more robust had already cast off his nest name. Something else that she found troubling about the youngest of this roost was that he had yet to express any real talent or interest in anything, and she wondered if she should begin to train him in ferrying to earn his living. He wasn't quite big enough though -- she imagined it likely that he would fold in half with a harness on his shoulders and drop like a rock.

"Come here," she told him, and Chimbeeriun lifted his head, pleased, and extended his wings to propel himself the distance between him and her; but then he saw the salamanders that made her roost glow, and stopped again.

"Don't fear them," Skaffwory advised him, and lifted a talon to scratch at her right brow even as she held out another scrap of charcloth to a salamander approaching. Her decisions were impenetrable; she waited and finally Chimbeeriun eased himself onto the boughs with a squawk, wincing as he set his talons to the heated bark. The salamanders skittered at his approach -- they were but weak ones, and left nothing behind but a veil of ash and embers.

Except for one. As Chimbeeriun settled against her side, Skaffwory saw that one salamander had stayed and was eying the runt with a remarkably curious sulfur-yellow eye. This one was larger than the rest, and therefore a higher class than the rest; she noted too that it had faint, bright blue points, and the other salamanders were beginning to eye and ease back onto the branch.

"Well," Skaffwory said with some measure of amusement, "I suppose it isn't hopeless for you after all, my runt."

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