“It was a time of great changes,” the Gleeman began, “when the Schism had made our cosmos raw and ready for new beginnings. From beyond, our new beginnings came to us.”
That was the way the Gleemen began all their stories now. If they wanted to keep their heads. Amea would hardly say that the coming of the Illithid to their system was a ‘new beginning,’ but she wasn’t about to make a big scene. Not here.
She could remember the days before the invasion, if only as distant memories, wreathed in the fog of her middle years, when seeing the patched and multicolored cloak of a Gleeman sauntering down the road to her grandmother’s village elicited cheers, laughter, and a mad dash to welcome the traveling bards from the children her age. She could never run as fast as the others, because of her foot, and was never the best at smiling with her teeth, on account of two of them being missing, ever since her older sister Area had popped her in the mouth during the Autumn dance for sneaking Slaad spit into her good dancing shoes. No, Amea was never the first or the cheeriest to greet the Gleemen in those days, trying to dust the hem of their cloaks or pull at their face whiskers as they were led into town by babbling children all her age, all petitioning to hear their favorite stories told immediately. Amea was the smart and sweet girl who, waiting by the well with a ladle of good, purified water and a damp rag to wipe away the sweat of the road, always somehow managed to hear her favorite stories told first.
Now, though, the Gleemen could not tell anyone’s favorites. Now they “composed” poems and stories and songs about the great Mindflayers of the Imperium. More often than not, such stories were the works of the subject Illithid themselves, who, with very little to preoccupy themselves with, besides their incessant and cruel rule over the system, had taken to inflating their own egos in an attempt to create a lasting legacy for themselves. It seemed to Amea that theirs was a psyche not unlike some of the cruel and temperamental elves she had known all her life, that there was some throughline of evil that was bland, uninspired, insipid. It seemed to Amea that greed and cruelty were a most boring and banal temperament, flat and lifeless even at the height of their power, that sapped the vibrancy out of the Gleemen’s stories, as the life was sapped out of First Tenicoatl.
Garakoo Amea Moti-Tole was not a philosopher, however. She had a far more pressing task ahead of her today. She tugged at her long, heavy braid, fingers nervously stretching and retwisting the three long tightly-bound strands together at the bottom of the length of hair. She tucked the end of the braid into her red and brown leather sash, belted around her midriff, keeping her otherwise loose linen tunic and breeches tight to her sturdy frame. Stuffing her hands in her wide pockets, she limped down the road away from the small crowd gathered at the feet of the orating Gleeman, her heart betraying her outer calm.
She shifted the broad package strung about her back, the wooden box covered with paper, trying to look as casual as possible as she approached the imperious Gith soldier, standing guard at the checkpoint near the border of the town. The Gith wore a long conical helmet of polished steel, and a breastplate that shone with the reflection of the swirling heaven along the horizon. Amea glanced up at Tenicoatl, the massive storming planet where heroes ventured in death, and back to the stern psychic warrior.
Like the eyes of a spider, the red rubies studding the Gith’s armor stared back at Amea, their gaze almost as harsh as their bearer’s.
“It will be curfew soon, elf,” the Gith sneered, “better to scuttle back into your warrens, lest your mind wet my master’s appetite. What is in your bundle, dirt-farmer?”
Amea looked across the Gith’s shoulder, not meeting his eyes directly, her heart straining at her chest.
“Simple things we cannot manufacture ourselves, my lord. Bolts of cloth, some forged tools, a—”
“There are rebels in the countryside, dirt-farmer. Dangerous people. My master would not want anyone falling under their influence,” he said, sizing up Amea.
Amea bowed her head, curtailing her indignation. She spoke to the ground in front of the Gith’s boots, saying simply,
“My business is done in the City, my lord Gith. My dwelling is in the countryside, and I hope to reach home before dark—”
“City?” cried the Gith, “why, you are a more provincial people than I thought,” he laughed cruelly.
“I meant no offense, my—”
“A city indeed. Why, my master’s assignment here must be some mistake. I’ve fought on five planes,” he said, voice rising, “across leagues of the Astral Sea. I pulled these,” he slapped his glove to the rubies inset in his breastplate, hard, “from the scales of the Corpse of Ylnthilidarn! This system deserves a fate worse than Boranduil, and yet my master and I are stuck lording over grubs here.”
Amea could feel tears welling in her eyes. She tugged at her braid, holding to it as if it was the only thing keeping her from tumbling across a cliff towards utter despair.
Her grandmother had always called Garakoo-land “the City,” for in her time it had been a city of sung forest, a dense construct of living things, with spires and ports and all manner of trade, a hub from which the Tangle weaved its energy out across First Tenicoatl.
Now Garakoo-land, and all of First Tenicoatl, was charred and barren, decimated by the Scythe. The Scythe, a plague that had distorted the weave of magic, disrupting the flow of life-energy, sundering bonds and undoing braids that sustained the City.
In between the gouache painting that was Tenicoatl’s storm and the horizon, the air rippled and a deep thrum turned the heads of both Amea and the Gith, whose abuse faltered at his lips as he licked them. Space folded in on itself, air shimmering, and from another plane, an oily Nautilus shell emerged, trailing long tentacles that thrashed as they entered the moon’s atmosphere.
“You are lucky for my master’s sudden arrival, maggot,” jeered the Gith, “go, run to your dirt-farm and pray I do not see you soon, for you have greatly displeased me.”
He stalked away, eyes upwards at the Nautilus-ship, leaving Amea to wipe the moisture from her cheeks.
Many hours later, Amea limped into the small camp in the thicket of mean, tangled brush. Even these hardy plants were beginning to wilt, and grow smaller with each passing month. Soon, all of Tenicoatl will be sulfurous, blighted land, Amea thought sadly. Greeted by three or four others in outfits of similar make, Amea gladly accepted a dented metal cup of nettle tea (all her grandfather’s beautiful, spun-wood cups had long since unraveled), and slung the box from her shoulders onto the ground in the middle of the camp.
The others unwrapped the box, peeling the paper from its frame and feeding it to their small fire. Amea helped open the top, revealing stacks of finely crafted wooden flutes, each of a different lacquered wood. Once, before her grandmother’s time, the clans of First Tenicoatl had sung the trees of the moon’s verdant forests into cities of unimaginable complexity with such flutes. Perhaps, one day far from now, when the world is different, they will again, Amea thought, feeling melancholy.