Ik lead the two of them back towards the hearth without further comment. Alicia was pretty sure she sensed some level of stress or haste to Ik’s movements, but seeing as she was almost as good as Lia to hide her inner thoughts, she couldn’t be all the way sure. As they approached the Hearth, the reason for Ik’s apparent haste became obvious.
Enkh was standing in front of the semicircle of assembled elders, his body language made it pretty clear he was in the middle of a rant or other castigation.
“You say they come bearing no ill will? Well I say they come bearing precious little good will, and we don’t need their precious distant star, we never have and we never will. I say we have shown them kindness enough already, we’ve warmed them at our fires, we’ve fed them, they’ve slept in our caves. Let them work for their stay. Let them go when they’ve settled their debt to us, and not a moment before…”
Enkh stopped talking, suddenly aware that the attention of the semicircle was split between him and Ik. He turned his head, and spat more than said “Voidweaver Iki…”
“Ah, many pardons Elder Enkh,” Ik responded with perfect tact and no underlying respect whatsoever. “I assumed your finishing comment would be done by now and went to fetch our guests, pardon my hasty nature.” The sting to it was obvious, ‘you talk too much, old man,’ yet Ik’s voice hadn’t held even the suggestion of scorn. Alicia made mental note to learn from Ik’s example.
“Who indeed can blame that,” Enkh’s reply dripped with venom. He wasn’t a subtle man, but the strength of his convictions were at least not a topic of doubt. “It matters little. If you think you can shame me to not speak the plain truth about your ‘guests’ then…”

“Then let us speak the truth.” Lia said as she took one short step forward. It wasn’t a huge thing, but the clarity of her voice and the timing of her joining the conversation made it hard to look away. “I am not, I believe, telling anyone here anything they haven’t inferred already when I say there is a schism between Enkh and myself. Old, Bad blood. Well, it isn’t even that old, but trust me when I say I understand how bad it is.” Lia cleared her throat. “It all started with the Cataclysm, what you call the Unmaking. During this time of high danger, I was put in a position to make an impossible choice. As a High Speaker, I am, or rather was, both a member of and a protector of the Council of Elders. Therefore, when The Cataclysm struck, my duty was to the Elders, to seek them out, to protect them, with my life if necessary, and thus safeguard the keepers of my people’s history and the spearhead of our power. As part of the Elder Guard, Enkh here was similarly bound to the leaders of our people. Fate, it would seem, wanted things differently.” Alicia was no mind reader, but she was willing to put good money on Enkh wanting to scoff at the comment about fate. She did, however, also notice that he didn’t. She considered his expression unreadable, but fairly transparently so, at least compared to what she usually worked with. Lia took a breath as if to steel herself for the next portion of her story, or perhaps confession. “The Cataclysm happened so fast, faster than any danger my people have ever faced, and so left with seconds to make decisions that could take hours, if not days, to properly adjudicate, I was faced with a dilemma. I was in a civilian part of camp at the time, and so the choice came down to this. Either I abandon the ‘common’ folk all around me for a chance, and even in retrospect it is not clear to me how good this chance was, to save the elders, or I discard my loyalty to the elders in favor of my loyalty to the people and save as many as I can.” Lia smiled, it was a sad smile, a smile to everything that was lost, to everything that would never be. “I made the decision. I would forsake the Elders, for the People. I’d do it again. Even if I knew the Elders were alive and potentially could be saved by my intervention, I’d do it again. Even if I hadn’t ended up saving strong, brave, adaptable people who has taught me so much of the silent strength of my people, I’d do it again. Even if I was hounded by someone who blames me for their own losses you bet your fucking lungs I’d do it again” Lia shot a venomous glance at Enkh, who met the gaze, but only for a second before averting his eyes. “And if anyone on this rock, or any other rock out there thinks that was the wrong decision I will gladly meet them in Steel Judgement and I’ll make my point with my fists, or any other weapon they name, because the truth is…” The steel in Lia’s gaze softened, at least a little. “There is no doubt that can be raised as to whether I did the right thing that I haven’t already thought to myself, and if this council” she motioned to the elders “think otherwise, I will merely plead that you do not punish my colleague for my transgressions, as she in no way was even an onlooker to this tale I have told.”

Alicia cleared her throat. “Actually,” she said, taking a step to stand next to Lia again. “This woman is my mentor and my friend, and I will not accept any ill will fall upon her that she has not deserved, and for this decision she deserves none.” Lia’s gaze hardened, Alicia didn’t look her in the eye. They could hash out the ‘who made the most over-dramatic situation out of this whole mess’-discussion later, for now she, like Lia, had to follow her conscience.

“Seeing as calling for Steel Judgement would bring violence to this Hearth…” Enkh’s voice was strained, he was making an effort to not let his anger be heard, and it was only partially working. “I will concede that my disagreement with Deepspeaker Lia is not a matter that requires intervention by the Elders.” He took a deep breath, similarly steeling himself. “With this matter thus settled, I request to be dismissed, as I have other tasks to see to.”

Elder Omon nodded. “Go with the Void’s Peace, Enkh.” Enkh for his part did not look like he wanted to go with anyone or anything’s peace, but leave he did, seemingly deciding to let off some steam in the void. Omon waited for him to have gone before speaking up again. “This matter resolved in a way we do not usually see.” It was a casual remark, but not without a barb.
“Do pardon my overreach,” Ik said. It was clear from her tone that she wasn’t sorry at all. “The idea of discussing people without involving them doesn’t sit right with me.”
“It is, perhaps, a weakness in our Way of Things,” Omon conceded. “As it stands, we have rather good rules for how to treat members of Camp as well as fresh inductees in a fair and good way, at least we hope they are fair and good… but we have no good procedures for how to treat guests, as we up until very recently didn’t even know there were other places to have guests from.”

“Similarly, I suspect,” Lia answered, “we only recently learned there were other places to be guests at.”
Alicia felt there was a place for her to speak. She was a guest twice over, in Camp but also in the world, or reality, or whatever you chose to call it of Thereafter more generally, but that felt like introducing a metaphysical layer to the proceedings that’d only further complicate things. There was, at least so Alicia suspected, no way to bring people from these ex-lands of magic back to earth, and that was without even getting into what the political implications and proceedings would be. Perhaps it was for the best, she thought to herself, if it wasn’t enough that the people of this reality survive the horror of the cataclysm, then exposing them to the casual cruelty people of earth, at least the parts she was familiar with, could show to people they thought of as ‘other.’

“With the matter of Enkh’s objection resolved,” Omon continued. “The elders of Camp have come to the sad conclusion that we, as a society, owes you two somewhat of an apology.”
“Oh?” Alicia asked. “What for?”
“We have reason to believe,” Omon explained, “that the object that caused the accident and stranded you two out here, was one of our Rock Spheres, one we wrongly discarded as nonfunctional. We base this on your description, Honored Mountain Wind, as well as the deep understanding of our Voidweaver Iki.”
“Actually, I have been thinking…” Alicia said. “How is it that you control the Rock Spheres? It’s one thing I haven’t been able to figure out in all of this.”
“It’s… a somewhat arcane procedure,” Omon said. “Voidweaver Iki, if you would kindly enlighten us on this matter?”
“Certainly, elder.” Ik said as she stepped into the center of the semicircle. “We do not have a good name for it, but you may call it… channeling, I suppose. It’s drawing on a force that exists in all matter. By calling on this, we can make the Spheres move towards us, and by positioning ourselves just outside the sphere’s center of mass we can ‘steer’ it by simply shifting our bodies.”
“Ah, I see.” Alicia said. “Elders, with your permission I would like to try something. I may hold the piece we need to solve this puzzle.”
“Go on,” Omon said, there was a twinkle in his eye, like he too was getting curious about the thing Alicia had suspected for a while now.
“Very well, thank you. I am now going to do something,” Alicia said. “Please tell me if what I am about to do is at all similar to Channeling.” Then she took a deep breath, and called on the Deep Song.
Having just been told about how the denizens of Camp interpreted the Deep Song, Alicia could see it rather plainly. The Deep Song was in everything. In every cell in her body, in every molecule in every rock, even in the fire of the hearth, which wasn’t even matter.
A hush fell on the crowd of elders as the concave wall of spheres grew briefly tighter until Alicia let go of the Deep Song.

“It would seem the Spheres answered the question for me,” Ik said after a while. “But yes. What you did is similar to Channeling, except if Channeling is a rock…” She picked up a rock that half-floated near the ground. “You pulled out something more of that size,” she gestured with the rock to one of the bigger rock spheres. “I take it you don’t use it to make rocks go?”
“You would be right,” Alicia agreed. That was what we call the Deep Song. Lia here is something of an expert at it and about it.”
“You honor me,” Lia said, brushing off the compliment like Alicia suspected she’d do. “My people draw on the Deep Song to bolster our own strength and endurance, but we have also learned to use it to do a number of other things, mostly to our own bodies, like strengthening my voice as I did to be heard a little while ago.”
“Is that so… huh.” Omon said, taking all this information in with what Alicia considered pretty flawless composure. “This is starting to draw a clearer image of what happened, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Alicia agreed. “Before the accident, I was drawing on the deep song, and I am afraid that this in some way re-activated the sphere that then smashed into our platform, destroying our transport artifact.”
A murmur arose within the crowd. Ik silenced them with a raised hand. “If that is the case… pardon our change in topic, but this is highly interesting to Us.”
“Go on?” Alicia was so into the conversation it didn’t feel like they were having it in front of a handful of people any more. It was just her, Lia, Ik and Omon, working one problem with motivation that bordered on the feral. She wanted to see this matter solved, she needed it to be solved, and she was not alone about it.
“Our Spheres are very important to us, this should come as no surprise” Omon chimed in. “We rely on them, and one of the most worrying things to happen since the Unmaking is that some of them will, with no apparent rhyme or reason to it, stop working. The light in them wink out, they stop responding to Channeling. They’re usable for storage or as housing, sure, but every time it happens, our ability to host beasts and melt water diminishes. Early on we could on occasion find spheres spared by the Unmaking, but those are few and far enough between that we’ve come to the conclusion that we’ve found the majority of what is to find… in our areas of the void at least.”
“It happened before the Unmaking too,” Ik added. “It was very rare, but it did happen. Much like how the knowledge of how one makes such a sphere, any knowledge of why a sphere stops working is lost to time… it is a grim thing to witness, to the degree where we prefer to get rid of the larger spheres that stop working entirely rather than have them stay as a reminder of what we do not know.” She shrugged. “It would perhaps be wiser to keep them in the off-chance we learn of how to re-activate them but… well, despair can be a very dangerous thing to dwell on.”
“That it can,” Lia agreed.

“Then, let us not dwell on despair,” Alicia found herself saying. The simple plan she held in her head was expanding, ballooning really, with all this new knowledge. Part of her wanted to hold back a spell, not play her entire hand, but she knew damn well she wouldn’t be able to. She couldn’t solve all of Camp’s problems in one fell swoop, she was quite aware of that, but she could help them with some of them, and could she really hold back from that? There might be consequences, every action had consequences, not acting in fear of somehow making everything worse was little better than actively working to make things worse, or at least so Alicia thought. “I want to suggest two… let’s call them deals, between Thereafter, The Shining Star as you call it, and Camp. These deals will, I believe, benefit us both greatly. Pardon if I’m moving fast, my brain has been trying to get this puzzle to fit for a while and I believe I have now found all the pieces.”
“Go on?” It was Omon’s time to be on the backfoot. If Alicia had even the slightest desire to extract concessions or set up an uneven deal now was the time. She didn’t want that. She wanted a better world, or as much of a better world as she could make.
“First is the question of the Deep Song and Channeling.” Alicia held up one finger. “There is clearly much left to understand and discover here, and I think it would benefit us both to facilitate some free travel. As luck would have it, the Deep Song users of Thereafter have a tradition for the youth centered around traveling to different lands, Rumspringa, which the city of Thereafter have trouble making happen as, well, a surplus of different lands is hard to find in the current state of things.” This drew a chuckle from Omon and Lia both. “So, my suggestion is the following: If Camp allows the Steppefolk Youth that desire to do so to travel to and live in Camp for a period, and there is a way for those youths that desire it to become permanent residents if they so wish, then me and Lia here will lend our expertise, such as it is, with the Deep Song to you to figure out this whole Stone Sphere thing. We can’t guarantee that we’ll find the solution of course, but I swear on my name and my honor that we’ll try.”
“There is also the outside chance,” Lia added, “That any of the rumspringa youths end up putting some pieces together but I am not going to lie to you, it’s mostly going to be clueless teenagers.” Another round of chuckles.
“Second, I want to propose a trade deal. Water is a limiting factor to you out here in the Void. It is, however, something, the only thing arguably we have more than enough of back in Thereafter. A magical artifact provides us with as much clean water as we can drink, and although there probably is an upper limit to how much it can produce at a time, I do believe it’s more than enough that it would be cruelty of the highest order to not share it?”
“Even if Thereafter and Camp could drink all the water we can currently produce,” Alicia added, having clearly thought this through, “it’s a question of throughput, not output, so with a little bit of work we could expand the infrastructure involved.”
“Trading water…” Omon seemed almost star-struck at the idea. “It would take building of some kind just to facilitate it…”
“Yes,” Alicia agreed. “At first it’d probably be kind of clumsy, we’d get an outpost set up somewhere conveniently close and send water by the barrel, but eventually we could wrangle together some holding tanks and make the entire thing quite seamless, I imagine.”
“And what would you ask for in return?” Omon asked.
“My first idea was meat or other animal products,” Alicia said. “We have no stable agriculture on Thereafter at time of speaking, and meat is a rare pleasure indeed. When I heard how you could produce large amounts of meat if you didn’t have to melt and filter your own water, my brain started going on this thing. As far as I’m concerned, we’d need to get the water transfers good and solid first before you start scaling up your pastures, so while I don’t know what kind of ratios we’d talk about yet, I do think we on the Thereafter side wouldn’t expect too high returns initially.”
Alicia took another deep breath, and allowed the side of her that wasn’t ferociously pitching these ideas to take the reins for a little bit.
“Listen,” Alicia said. “I am no trader. I have little talent for this. Back where I’m from I’d be considered too naive to be one, probably.” She smiled to herself. “But that, I think, is fine. I’m not suggesting this to earn anything. I am suggesting this because there’s no purpose to your people struggling everyday for water while we could drown in it if we had the mind to. I believe Camp and Thereafter can help each other. I believe we should. I do not speak with any official authority here, but I give you my word that I can present what we agree to here today to the Council and that I will…”
“As a member of the Council of Thereafter,” Lia spoke up, a casual ease to her words that made Alicia shut up more efficiently than any thunderous voice ever could. “I bequeath upon Mountain Wind Alicia Thorn the Authority to make agreements on behalf of The Council in this matter.”
Alicia met Lia’s eye. She felt bad for not running all of this past Lia in the first place, but there was a twinkle of pride in Lia’s gaze that told Alicia that she had her support. A certain “go get ‘em, kid” attitude that while it was, perhaps, slightly patronizing, also felt incredibly heartening.
Alicia cleared her throat. “Well, there you have it,” She said, feeling all of a sudden more confident in herself than she could recall feeling in years. “These are my two deals I propose between Thereafter and Camp. We would need to reconvene on these matters at a later date, to agree on how much of what products is a fair price to pay for the water you need, to review how we handle rumspringa teens misbehaving, or adjudicate any number of edge cases. For any of these things to happen, though, one thing remains true. Me and Lia have to make it back to Thereafter in some way, and it is with this matter in mind that I now turn to you, esteemed Elders of Camp. Is what I suggest amenable to you? If it is, can you help us get home so that we may make it reality?” Alicia asked, but in truth, the question was like a formality to her. The hubbub of the Elders discussing among themselves was quieter this time around, like there was less disagreement but more at stake. Alicia didn’t feel like she had forced them to help her get home exactly, but she had sure as shit presented a strong case for it happening, and it happening soon being important.

Author’s Note: Oh this chapter was a doozy. I didn’t really want to pack all the Politicking Going On into one chapter, but it ended up lining up so smoothly that I couldn’t help myself but pull the pin on it. Also this one is a bit late as proofreading and making sure I didn’t accidentally a couple of words or sentences in my haste to get all this out there ran somewhat long. Speaking only briefly on my professional insecurities here, I do find it interesting how I keep feeling that the politics going on are simplistic, while I would actually argue that they are merely going back to basics. Politics aren’t inherently complex and full of conflicting interests. Sure, some complexity is inherent to the question of how resources and people are managed, and the more complex the system that is managed, the complexity of the politics also rises. That said, this idea of politics being these intersecting steel wire spider webs populated by spiders with knives for legs, or whatever the metaphor is these days, I believe, is the result of consciously presenting politics as this difficult unapproachable thing. The purpose? Well, to alienate the governed from the systems that govern them, thus further disempowering them, of course. It shouldn’t be taken as gospel or any kind of reflection on human nature, is what I’m saying. Anyway, it seems I can’t help but Get Into It even in the brief humorous asides letting my readers know how I’m doing, so you are stuck with my understanding of politics with this one it seems. Catch you all next time.

VSD