Things started moving rapidly once the Council of Elders agreed to Alicia’s proposed deals. She had expected to meet resistance, some skepticism maybe, or at least a level of having to win someone over. The Elders, by comparison moved with such resolute optimism that Alicia couldn’t shake the feeling that they felt that they’d gotten away with something. As Ik would tell her once Alicia tracked her down in the busy bumble that erupted after the moot, ostensibly to prepare what was needed for helping the Thereafterians to get back home, they had.

“The Elders played their hand well, but they were sweating up a storm I reckon,” Ik said, as she worked on some kind of rune circle on a rough disc of stone ostensibly prepared for such a task. “Our laws state that causing someone else misfortune, even if it is by accident, makes you liable to fix the problem you caused or suffer it yourself. Seeing as someone in your position could easily argue that there’d be no bringing your lost comrades back to life, if they, of course, are dead, we could… well, it hasn’t come to that before so there’s no precedent or anything. If you argued Life for Life then we’d have to go bump off some of our own and I probably don’t have to tell you we don’t want that.”
“Huh,” Alicia said. “And if I did, were you going to let me?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ik said. It wasn’t a very convincing lie.
“Sure you don’t… I’m sure the Elders told you to go fetch us and you had no horse in this whole thing.”
Ik rolled her eyes. “Fine,” She conceded, “I didn’t believe you’d go on and do that… not just because you didn’t know that would be an option,”
“Although I did not”
“Although you did not know that could be a line of argument. I didn’t know you’d serve up this solid of an offering though.”
“I mean I get it,” Alicia shrugged. “I mean if it really was a Sphere like you said that caused us to be stranded here I’m just as much to blame”

“You and Lia,” Ik interrupted.
“What?”
“Lia drew on the deep song back then too, I’m willing to bet my chalks on it,” Ik held up the stick of white rock-like chalk as to illustrate.
“What makes you say that?”
“That old girl of yours is hard to read, but she was blushing when you admitted to drawing on the… Deep Song?”
“Yeah that’s what we call it”
“Alright, drawing on the Deep Song in anger. Her ears were red as embers, and fresh ones too.”
“Huh, so you think she did as well?”
“That’s my take on it anyway. I’m not a mind reader.”
“It… it wouldn’t be without precedent. We’ve had a bit of a history of getting angry and channeling the Deep Song… like… instinctively I guess?”
“That could be what happened then, but again, I don’t know for sure.”
“Yeah… I need to talk to her about it… but Ik, while I am here and we are discussing deep dark fears and what happened and all of that”
“You really know how to pitch a conversation…”
“I’m charming like that, but I have been thinking.”

Alicia took a deep breath. In the middle of all the desperate surviving and tribal politics and meat and relationships and discovering things that she didn’t even think was possible, she had just about forgotten why she was out here in the first place. With things now as settled and ready for things to resolve as tidily as they were going to get, it was time to remember the question that motivated this whole expedition for her.
“I’m… not normally one of the people who go out here from Thereafter,” Alicia said. “There was a question that brought me out to the void in the first place. As I told you, we scavenge food and resources from the void..”
“Yes,” Ik said. “It struck me as a desperate thing to do but I suppose we do the same looking for clean ice so how different are we really.”
“Right. Well, lately we’re having troubles… of some kind or another. Scavengers, people who go into the void, start quitting the job, disappearing from public view. Isolating themselves… and I’m trying to find out why.”
“As well you should,” Ik agreed. “I wish I could help you but I don’t think…”
“I am not going to lie, I did suspect the people of Camp was involved for a while,” Alicia continued, unwilling to slow down now that she had achieved the necessary velocity for the line of inquiry. “But seeing how genuinely shocked people seem to be that Thereafter even exists around here I don’t quite know what to think.”
“Hm…” Ik said, followed by a long silence. “That is a good question,” She said once the silence passed. “But I think I may have an idea? It’s not quite proof of anything but, well, are you familiar with the genre of Fright Tales?”
“The name is not familiar to me,” Alicia conceded.
“Well, they’re tales told about frightening things and ideas that aren’t real. You know, Ghosts, Void Maws, Outsiders and the like.”
“Outsiders are real,” Alicia found herself saying. “My friend Lex tangled with one back in her childhood... back before The Calamity”
“Huh…” Ik said. More silence. “This Lex, they the sort to make up stuff?”
“No,” Alicia answered truthfully. “In fact they’re truthful to a fault some times.”
“Well I’ll be…” Ik said. “The implications of this new knowledge is terrifying, but I guess we can hope The Unmaking solved that problem for us.”
“Fingers crossed, they seem quite the terrifying type of being.” Alicia agreed. “Anyway, you were saying about Fright Tales and that? They’re a bit like the Scary Stories we tell back home from the sound of it.”
“Right,” Ik said, only slightly bothered by the apparent nightmare made real. “There is one series of tales that perhaps can tell us something, and that is the tale of the Brown Wanderers.”
“Brown Wanderers?” Alicia could not help raise an eyebrow at that.
“Yes,” Ik agreed. “They aren’t described to be the same shade of brown that you are, people tend to talk of them like people from their own world, but like they’ve been out in the sun… whatever that is and whatever that means.”
Ik, Alicia realized, had no concept of sun, sunlight, or the effects it had on the human body. How she and her fellow void dwellers got any vitamin D at all, she was sure she didn’t know, but the Beasts had to be a decent source of it somehow… or maybe that was one of the purposes of the Invigorating Brew?
“Right, I’m familiar with it,” Alicia said. “The Sun is a pretty big deal in my world as well. We have… a halfway decent replacement for it in Thereafter, but it’s not the same. I guess you’d tan a bit from it though.”
“Anyway,” Ik cleared her throat. “These Wanderers are… strange creatures, who move around in the Void for reasons we mere Campfolk can’t quite understand. Most of the time you don’t even see them directly, but you pick up signs that they’ve been around. A campground filled with strange detritus, a cloud of remnants from the Unmaking distorting as if someone entered it, tracks of someone or something moving along a bridge of remnants you’re pretty sure weren’t there before. It’s dangerous to follow the remnants, or so it’s said, as they care little for us voiddwellers, and could take us away or show us awful truths from the deep void if they were to discover us.”
“Huh,” Alicia found herself saying. “You think these Wanderers are scavengers from Thereafter, then?”
“Perhaps,” Ik hedged. “I think both your people and mine have discovered signs that we’re not alone out there. Over here in Camp there exists… a bit of a taboo I suppose, of talking about the Brown Wanderers. It’s… seen as a bad omen, like it could attract unfavorable attention.”
“Hmh” Alicia connected two dots, this was starting to look like it made sense. “It’s like The Dark Forest.”
“What’s that”
“It’s an idea from my homeworld, granted the situation is a bit different, but in our equivalent of the void, we assume that any being who is able to live and travel through it also is able to be a threat to humanity, and so discovering their existence can be scary because it means they can discover us as well.”
“Hmm, yes, that does seem to translate,” Ik agreed. “Granted, turns out both void-dweller and star-dweller were fairly benign in this case.”
“Yes, that’s the counter-argument, I suppose, one could easily argue sapients are the same all over, and that we don’t HAVE to be jerks about it.”
“Sapients, so, like, intelligent creatures?”
“Basically, yes, creatures with a human-like intelligence. We have a bunch of folk who aren’t human in Thereafter, rhinofolk, elephant-men, various humanoids like elves and dwarves, birdfolk, molekin, and so on, and so we feel a little weird talking about humanity like that’s the size we operate on.”
“I can see that. We don’t quite have the distinction in The Language, since it was made specifically to reflect our current situation.”
“So,” Alicia said to summarize. “You suspect our scouts and your scouts have been dodging each other out of fear of the unknown?”
“It seems to match the available facts of the matter,”
“It does… you know, for the first little while when I was here at Camp, I feared that you had some kind of dark secret and that was the reason people didn’t want to go into the void. I feel stupid for it now of course, but, well,” Alicia shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt being honest, right?”
“It is fair,” A faint laugh haunted Ik’s voice. “I certainly had my suspicions about you, if we’re being honest at this point, but I assume you had that one figured out.”
“I had an inkling,”
“I guess we’ll see how it changes now that we know that the Wanderers probably are just people like us, unless you’ve come across any other evidence that there’s something else out there.”
“Apart from this place? Not so much. I’ll probably ask the scavengers to keep more thorough notes about what areas they scavenge and when, so we can get to the bottom of this.”
“We do not have all that strong traditions of record-keeping,” Ik said. “But I suppose getting down the basics could help in this regard.”

After Alicia was done talking post-return changes in procedure to scavenging with Ik, she went looking for Lia. The talk had been very productive, but the comment about Lia also drawing on the Deep Song still burned brightly in her mind against the brain fog of it. Alicia and Lia had a bad habit, Alicia was starting to realize, of letting things go unspoken in the often misguided hope that the other part would “just get it.” At least she knew she was guilty of this, and while it was POSSIBLE that Lia wasn’t, the alternative explanation was that she was being a panzer-bitch about a bunch of stuff, and Alicia liked to think that her de-facto mentor was better than that.

The painful truth about the truth, however, was that recognizing that there is a shortage of it is only half of the solution. The hard part, the really really necessary part, the part of it that frequently sucked the most, was that one had to square up and go on talk about it.
Alicia did not hate the truth, she didn’t resent it, but she recognized that it could have an effect on her. She didn’t want to rage at Lia, even if she had pulled on the Deep Song with her and let her think that she didn’t, even if that was a conscious dodge of responsibility, which Alicia doubted, it was more that she felt like it was important that they talked about the Deep Song thing. They had a problem, it seemed, and seeing as they both were doing it, it only stood to reason that they both had to put in some sort of effort for it to stop. Alicia could imagine a world where Lia denied any wrongdoing, and that would piss her off, it would piss her off enough that she was pretty sure she could chuck Lia most of the way to Thereafter the less-than-gentle way. There was, however, nothing to be gained by getting angry at a version of events that hadn’t happened. For better or worse there really was nothing to do but to put on her big girl pants and talk to Lia.

Lia, it turned out, had made herself the manager of efforts to load up the large Stone Sphere that had been designated as Lia and Alicia’s Transport out of Camp space.
“How goes,” Alicia greeted her.
“Mountain Wind! We’re making good time, this thing will be ready to fly within too long, and after the Elders have seen us off properly we can shoot into the void again.”
“Hm, fingers crossed we’ll make it back at a decent clip. Do you have any idea about how fast this thing can go?”
“Not precisely, but it’s not like we have a clear idea of how far we need to go either. The thing can accelerate pretty well, but we’ll probably need to steer it from the outside to keep us aimed perfectly at Thereafter. Odds are good it’s going to be kind of fiddly.”
“Right. Hey Lia can I talk to you for a second, in private?”
“Sure, uh, let’s… go check out the beasts?”
“Yeah that works,”

As they strolled along the concave sphere wall, Alicia couldn’t help notice that Lia’s shoulders were very tense. “I’m, uh,” Alicia started, two possible angles of ingress colliding in her mind. “I talked to Ik just now.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. We discussed the whole ‘missing scavengers’ thing, it might be a mutual misunderstanding, in that case it should resolve itself once we start spreading information about this place and these people.”
“That would be a relief,” Lia agreed, by the way her shoulders didn’t stop hunching it wouldn’t be quite the relief Lia needed.
“Also she talked a bit about the accident with the stone sphere and the teleportation crystal and that…”
“Did she tell you I channeled the Deep Song too?”
“Actually, she did. Well, she said she thought you did, based on your reaction to me admitting to it.”
“She is damned perceptive, that Ik.”
“She got a good pair of eyes on her,” Alicia agreed.
“Well… I’m… I’m sorry. I should have told you I did it too, I shouldn’t have let you stand there and take on the entirety of the blame at the moot. I should be more disciplined, I’m not a teenager any more.”
“Neither, I suppose,” Alicia said. “Am I. We’re both adults aren’t we?”
“We are but… it’s different. I’m supposed to be an authority in these things. It’s me people are supposed to come to when they can’t rein in their emotions with the Song. I’m the one who’s supposed to offer wise words of guidance and all that. That was my job. Used to be my job, for decades.”
“Yeah, well, just because you know better doesn’t mean you automatically do better, right?”
“I suppose,” Lia looked to the wall-ground. “It’s just embarrassing…”
“I feel that,” Alicia found herself saying. “I’m not… I guess a natural fit to be tutored. I have a problem with authority, I’m a quick study but only if it aligns with my passions, I ask ‘but why is it like this’ and ‘why is it like that’ a lot and I have little patience for bad answers to those questions.”
“I see… why Exhalted Lex cares so deeply for you Mountain Wind,” Lia mused. “They’re a lot like that, but perhaps quietly?”
“I mean… you’re not wrong…” Alicia said. “But, well, I’ve been thinking. You and me, we have kind of a… well it’s not a problem, but it does feel like it could become one.”
“Our tendency to flare up in each other’s company?”
“Basically yeah. I respect you immensely, Deepspeaker Lia, but we do tend to drive each other crazy.”
“Yes…” Something about Lia’s tone made Alicia wonder if there was some cultural context she was missing. There always was background radiation of that when she interacted with Lia she felt, and she was decently sure Lia felt the same way about her. On Earth, Alicia was pretty sure this would inevitably turn into a conversation about attraction, hell, arguably it was one already, but she wasn’t sure if the reverence for the Deep Song colored things differently for one of the steppefolk.

“And…” Alicia found herself continuing, hoping she’d uncover the path in the process of walking it. “I don’t want to drive you crazy, Lia. I care for you a great deal, and even if I didn’t this situation is dangerous enough that I need you if I am to have any chance to make it out of this.”
“Is this… anything like when you proclaimed Lia of the Fire Eyes your Weapon Sister, Exalted?”
A red-hot flush spread through Alicia’s cheeks and forehead, a sudden gout of hot, pressurized embarrassment that had aged like fine wine in the back of her memory.
“Ok, first of all,” She said, hoping to high heaven her voice didn’t betray how utterly devastated that remark had made her. “I didn’t know exactly what it meant, I was basically a child. And secondly…” She took a deep breath. “If I did know I’d have said it anyway.”
Lia was somewhat taken aback by this, and Alicia wasn’t quite sure why. As far as she was concerned, Alicia’s profound attraction to Lia of the Fire Eyes, as history had chosen to refer to “her” Lia, was an historical fact. Unfortunately, then, so was the various faux pases Alicia had made. The proclamation of Weapon Sisters and claiming the Dragon Thane as their quarry was, as best Alicia understood it, telling the whole world that you and your situationship wouldn’t fuck nasty until having defeated global warming. Granted, they HAD defeated the Dragon Thane, but fate would have it they never got to the “fucking nasty” part of things. Hell, Alicia hadn’t even directly confessed her feelings, although she was decently sure Lia of the Fire Eyes knew. She was blunt, sure, but no fool.

“Pardon my ribbing, Mountain Wind,” there was a slight chuckle to the Deepspeaker’s voice. “It’s just… you hold a very unique position in Steppefolk culture.”
“Go on?” Alicia inquired.
“You’re kind of famous as the direct opposite of Lia of the Fire Eyes, a strange unpredictable foreigner to her… well, phrases such as “epitome of Steppefolk morals” do come up a lot.
“Oh an epitome, is she, Lia of the Fire Eyes?” Alicia’s voice was dry, but clearly amused. However much part of her wanted to disillusion Lia, though, dreaded nuance seemed like too much of a conversational warcrime for the occasion. “I mean, I get how she got turned into that but, well… to me she was just a person, you know? Messy, the way people tend to be… not suffering from an absence or a glut of virtues.”
“More sober historical sources seem to back that interpretation,” Lia noted. “But you know how folk tales get. Trending to the most incredible interpretation.”

“Yeah…” Alicia said. “Anyway, we probably should be a bit mindful of this bad habit we have. Especially for this long haul we’re planning.”
“I agree,” Lia said. “Let us agree to shelve any disagreements until we’re back home?”
This felt an awful lot like declaring that the ocean should stop having tides, but Alicia didn’t want to make a fight about not making fights. That seemed spectacularly un-self aware even rating on the scale of her earlier exploits.
“We’ll shake on it.” Alicia agreed, deciding that if Lia thought that she could do it then surely Alicia couldn’t be any worse.
“I presume this is an Earth Custom?” Lia looked at Alicia’s extended hand.
“Yes,” Alicia said, “It started as a way to check each other for knives in a way that didn’t disrupt the mood.”
“Wouldn’t want any errant knives to ruin the fun,” Lia replied, every bit as dryly as Alicia had spoken. They shook hands. It struck Alicia, even in this emotionally invested if a bit ambiguous moment, that Lia’s skin was rough. Not only was this a woman who had grown up in a world without moisturizer, she had grown up using her hands, and not entirely for peaceful pursuits either, if Alicia understood her right. By comparison, Alicia’s hands felt immaterial. There were some calluses there after various lifts and dips, but they were islands in an ocean of softness. Alicia couldn’t help but resent it a little bit. Her life hadn’t been easy, no matter how soft her hands currently were, but then again, while she wasn’t the most avid user, she HAD grown up in a world that had invented moisturizer.

Author’s Note: I can’t help but be fond of Lia and Alicia. They’re both kind of used to being “the sensible one,” so it stands to reason they’d grate a little bit against each other even before any homoeroticism got into the mix. Let me tell you, though, the homoeroticism helps in that it makes everything ambiguous and confusing, which is good for the author and the audience but more than a little frustrating for the characters.

We’re really moving into the end of the story here, and I am not 100% sure on exactly how many chapters we have left right this second, certain segments may actually fit better in two chapters than one, and some of this stuff I’m just going to have to feel out, I’m decently sure we’ll have Voidhearts wrapped up before the end of May at the very latest. In much the same way as I did after The City After The End, I plan to take a hiatus of a couple of months to outline Stone Souls, update my worldbuilding bible, and other writerly pursuits (ya boy is also going to have a proper vacation for once.) I am very excited to get started on Stone Souls (I’m not 100% married on the title, may make it ‘Souls of Stone’ instead,) as we’re back in the Urban Fantasy mood and the city of Thereafter in particular. At this point I have decided that the plot of SS will happen after the entirety of Voidhearts. The reason why may surprise you dear reader, but I hope you find it delightful all the same. Either way, we still have some chapters with these broads in space the void so buckle up for things to get complicated both physically and emotionally!

Catch you later

VSD