One nice thing about hangars for flying machines that can move straight up was that the roofs could open. This allowed Avalyn to still look up at the stars from her bed on Stargazer. In her simulation, she would have worried that the light pollution from the major city would stop any sight of the stars, but a magical and technologically advanced society apparently figured out how to stop light pollution.
The addition of Bryst’s moons to the sky was a pleasant variation compared to the view of only stars she had grown used to. In a strange way, they were a relief. A relief that she wasn’t stuck anymore, that she had been found, and that she wasn’t alone anymore. However, though she enjoyed the view, she felt she had more pressing matters to attend to than just stare at the sky.
Looking away, her gaze dropped back down to the book in front of her. She had spent a little while debating whether she should start the general history book or the books on the ancients. On the one hand, knowing general knowledge about the society she now lived in was useful, but the yearning to know more about her own people was too great. Now she had been reading the first book for about an hour, and though it was intriguing, she was finding those instincts inside of her getting annoyed. Sometimes Avalyn knew the book was wrong, and sometimes it was clear what was wrong and she knew exactly why, but other times she had no idea what the truth was.
One thing out of all those wrong things upset her more than anything else, to the point that she actually cried a little over it. People of today thought the ancients called themselves Kestevk, which was a real word in Melcarna, but it meant first and that wasn’t what her people were called. Having their name lost to the people of today was upsetting, but the thing that made her cry was that she didn’t know what the right answer was…
Sensors suddenly flared to life as every reading suddenly went off the charts. Her systems suddenly felt like they were about to burst with an overload of power, but it never pushed too far to actually happen. Instantly, Avalyn looked up to the sky, ready to find the goddess she knew was there looking down at her. There was nothing in the sky, though. Confused, Avalyn wondered if she was invisible, but then she noticed a gentle amber glow lighting up the ceiling of the hangar. Then she felt a very strange sensation of something moving along the floor of the hallway. Never had she felt any sensation from the hallway. Not even when she, Gramps, or even Hugh walked through them.
Getting out of bed, she neglected to put any clothes on as she went over to the door. Before opening it, Avalyn paused, a slight worry and nervousness building up inside of her. There was a goddess in Stargazer; how was she supposed to greet her? Regent instincts might have told her who Eternity was, but they didn’t tell her how she was supposed to act in front of her goddess. What kind of relationship between regent and goddess did her people expect? What if she did something wrong and ruined this? There was only one way to find out, and that was going out there and asking, but would asking be the thing that ruined it? With no other choice but to act, the door slid open and Avalyn stepped out into the hall.
Eternity stood before the sphere in the cockpit, her size more reasonable than the giant from they had first met. It still looked as if the slightly over seven foot tall woman with tightly tucked in wings was a little cramped in the ship. Clearly, Stargazer wasn’t built with the dimensions of an ancient in mind. That being said, it did quickly become clear that nearly all the height came from the digitigrade legs, and maybe just a little from a slightly longer chest built to have four arms.
Her masked face didn’t look at Avalyn right away; instead, her gaze was fixed on the sphere. One of her four hands reached out. It was only now that Avalyn noticed small feathers running down the sides of her arms. A single finger on her four-fingered hand ran along the outside of it. Avalyn gasped slightly at the sensation of touch. It was very light, but she felt the finger run along her sphere. The gasp finally drew Eternity’s attention as her hand pulled away. There was an awkward moment of silence as the pair stared at one another, neither of their faces able to display the emotions that either of them were feeling.
Avalyn was the first to crack. “Hello,” she said in Melcarna, her instincts actually letting her use her people’s language to talk to Eternity this time.1Normally I would italicize words that are spoken in a different language to show the difference between it and English, but since this entire conversation will be in Melcarna I won’t do that this time. Her hands nervously fiddled together in front of her, and she almost missed that Eternity’s lower set of hands were doing the same.
“Hello, Avalyn.” There was so much warmth in the Goddess’s words. “I see you’ve picked a name.”
If Avalyn had been organic, she knew her face would be on fire at the way Eternity said her name. It made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside the ghost of her simulated body. “I-I’m just t-trying it out,” she stammered nervously, not looking directly at Eternity’s mask.
“It’s a very beautiful traditional name.” The hidden smile was clear in Eternity’s voice.
Now Avalyn did look up at her. “Really?” Somehow that was extremely affirming, even with the implication that her simulation had more framework for Ancients society than she had thought.
Eternity nodded and said, “It means hazelnut.”
Well, that was a little eye-opening and caused a strange whirlwind of emotions to flood Avalyn. It was almost strange to hear the real Melcarna word for hazelnut, but all she felt by that was happiness. Happy that she had actually known what her name meant, even if it was from the Ancients and not humans.
“Avalyn?”
She looked up from the sphere, not having realized her gaze had drifted down to it in her haze of whirlwind feelings. It took a second to realize that there was worry in Eternity’s voice. “How much of what I know is actually from our people and not just nonsense the sphere made up about humans?”
An uncomfortable silence grew as Eternity didn’t answer for a while. “There are many things for you to discover about our people.”
That answer frustrated Avalyn. “I’m not asking for all the answers about our people.” As the words came out, she realized second-guessing a goddess to her face wasn’t maybe the best idea, but the floodgates were open and Avalyn felt like she needed to express herself. “I don’t want you to tell me everything. I can’t describe to you how amazing the idea of exploring old, lost, and forgotten ruins of our people to learn about them is. To discover who they were through what was left behind. That’s the kind of life I could have only dreamed of in my simulation, and I am so dearly excited that I get to live it now.”
“You have no idea how deeply you honor me, Avalyn,” Eternity said, albeit a little quietly.
For some reason that made Avalyn so deeply happy, but that wouldn’t stop her from finishing her point. “But there are things I need to know about myself now. I don’t think I was built to come into this world alone without any help. I understand this maybe isn’t what a relationship between a goddess and regent is meant to look like, but I don’t have anyone else.” Now that she had voiced her thoughts, the worry of talking this freely to a goddess filled her.
There were a few moments where Eternity looked at her before the goddess appeared to look down in shame, even if her facial expressions were hidden behind a mask. “You’re right. You weren’t meant to come into being alone with no one to help you understand what was happening and who you are. You deserve far better than that from me.”
Avalyn waited a moment before asking, “How much of me is human?” That felt like a good place to start.
Eternity looked up at the sphere before saying, “None of you is human, Avalyn. What happened with your cradle was not something that was supposed to happen, or something we even thought could happen. You found the genetic material inside of it?” She nodded. “The first is your more direct lineage, and the genetic code that you need to be able to be made in the first place. The second is not as important but adds variation to you and at the time that person is almost meant to provide a more detailed description of the society you would be born into. Then, once you were born, they would look after you.”
“So those two people would be my parents?”
There was a slight hesitation before Eternity said, “Yes, but for you only the original sequence would be your parent. The cradle wasn’t designed to use genetics that weren’t of our people, so when Heather unwillingly provided her own, it didn’t fully know how to mix the two. Instead, from what I can tell, it used human genetics as an outline for how you would experience life in the simulation it would make for you. So in a way it limited you down to human levels, as much as it could with your being not actually being human, but now that outline and limits are gone.”
“So even stuff about myself that I feel is human really isn’t?” Eternity shook her head. While the answers the goddess provided satisfied what she wanted to know, it didn’t make her happy.
“Does that upset you?” Eternity asked gently, taking a step towards her.
“I… Yes and no.” It was clear in her voice that she was crying a little. “I’m very happy to have a clear answer on what I am and now I feel like I have the path forward in front of me. At the same time I feel like I’ve lost all I knew. That I’ve lost things I didn’t even know I had.”
Eternity tilted her head to the side, which wasn’t something that might have normally stood out to Avalyn, but when she did, the feathers in Eternity’s hairline on the higher side also rose. “What do you mean?” she asked, taking a step forward.
“I don’t know how much of what I experienced in the simulation was based on our people or what the cradle pulled from information on this ship. While I love the idea of finding that out, it’s still frustrating that I don’t have the people who were meant to be here for me to help. I wasn’t really expecting as a regent to have parents, but now I’m sad to know I was meant to have them, but they’re dead. That I’ll never have the chance to meet them…” The audible crying only got worse as it really dawned on Avalyn that she had a parent that she would never meet. Naturally, she went to wipe tears from her face, but only found dry metal. “Fuck, I know crying sucks, but what I wouldn’t give to feel actual tears again.”
Eternity’s gaze drifted down again, and following it, Avalyn could see that all four of the goddess’s hands were nervously fiddling with each other. With the mask, it was hard to tell what she was thinking, but to Avalyn it looked as if she was struggling with something internally. “You were meant to have far more than this metal body, Avalyn. You deserve far more than this.” There was such a heavy and tearful tone in Eternity’s voice.
Avalyn processed that for a moment. Was a goddess crying for her? This time it was she who stepped towards Eternity, some part of her wanting to make the goddess feel better. This wasn’t her doing. “I can work towards getting a body that feels right. It might take time, but it’s something I can do. I don’t suppose I could also work towards resurrecting a parent who’s been dead for tens of millions of years?” The last question came out with a slight jest, but even Avalyn could hear the honesty behind the question. Ancients could so wonders with technology and magic, so maybe that wasn’t fully out of the question.
Eternity’s hands stopped their fiddling and gripped themselves tightly. Her wings tucked themselves closer in as she clearly thought about something. All the feathers on her body lay flatter against her body. Even with the mask on, she looked so nervous. After a few moments of silence, the goddess finally looked back up at Avalyn, the mask disappearing in a shimmer of light, revealing a truly nervous face with tear streaks running down it. “You already have.”
Silence filled the ship as Avalyn tried to process what Eternity had said. “What? How could I have done that? I’ve barely been alive for half a hept…” Finally, the truth of Eternity’s words caught on in her mind. “You?” Eternity gave a gentle nod, tears still running down the goddess’s amber face. “B-but why didn’t you say anything before?” Admittedly, they hadn’t interacted much but still shouldn’t she have said something when they first met?
Looking ashamed, Eternity said, “When our people were still alive, we didn’t tell people that regents were demigods. We didn’t even tell the regents until they were more developed, if we ever told them.”
Now that was a very upsetting thing to learn. “Why wouldn’t you tell children who their parents were?”
Shame wasn’t leaving Eternity’s face any time soon. “We were afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” What did they have to be afraid of?
“How that knowledge could change someone as powerful as you.”
“You were afraid it would all go to my head?” she asked through invisible, frustrated tears. Eternity nodded again, no longer able to meet her eyes. In her frustration, Avalyn took another step forward, bringing her almost within arm’s reach of the goddess. “You were so afraid of me that you just neglected to tell the only other living Vysven that you’re my literal mama because of the tradition of people who have been dead for millions of years?” It didn’t even register to her that she had just said the name of her people for the first time.
“I’m sorry, Avalyn.”
The apology didn’t help Avalyn’s crying. “I don’t want an apology!” she yelled far more aggressively than she had intended, but her emotions were running wild at the moment. How was someone meant to react to all this? “I don’t want an apology.” She was crying harder now. “I know you don’t know me, but I’m not the kind of person who would let this all go to my head. I don’t care about the power I have. I… I just want a mama…”
Now Eternity did look back up at her. “I know I don’t know you.” Nervously she took that last step forward and reached out to cup Avalyn’s cheek. “But I so dearly want to get to know you and be the mama you need, my darling Avalyn.”
Avalyn started shaking as her hand reached up to the hand on her cheek. A sob broke free before she said, “I can feel your hand.” Laying her hand over her mama’s she sobbed at the feeling. “I-I can feel y-you as if you w-were touching my s-skin. You’re s-so w-warm and soft.” She had forgotten the feeling of softness, and that made her sob so much harder. Her hand gripped her mama’s, terrified that she would pull away and Avalyn would never feel again.
“Avalyn.” With no hesitation, Eternity reached out with all her arms and pulled the sobbing regent into her, which just made the sobbing so much worse.
Eternity was so warm, and Avalyn latched onto her so tightly, she was sure should would be breaking the bones of a normal person. She couldn’t help it though; she could feel something again, and she never wanted to lose it. Sobbing, she held on tightly, even as her shaky legs gave out from under her. Eternity brought them down to the ground gently as her amber wings unfolded and wrapped around the pair of them.