25. Peace Talks (Patreon)

"Um... hey, mom," Hsthressis mutters awkwardly, shifting her weight back and forth under the pressure of her mother's silence.

"Hsthressis," the chieftain intones, a complicated mix of doubt and hope dripping from the name. "Come here."

It's difficult to not think of the chieftain's audience room as a throne room, despite how Sthrenslian aesthetics almost completely invert that idea. In a throne room, the king and queen sit on a big fancy chair, usually at the top of a bunch of steps, so that anyone meeting with them has to crane their neck upwards to look at them. Which is rude, of course, but kings are like that. Chlrehistra has no chair at all—as far as I know, Sthrenslians just kind of don't have them. If they want to rest they lie on their stomach. She has also not positioned herself above us, but in fact significantly below us. She sits in the middle of a stair-carved pit, like the stage of an amphitheater with walls that match the contours of her body so that she can snugly squeeze into a patch of earth. We don't stand on the metaphorical bleachers of this amphitheater—we aren't in the pit at all, and in fact I don't have line of sight to the chieftain. Line of sight in general seems to hold absolutely no value to the Sthrenslians, probably because they are, you know, blind.

Hsthressis scuttles quickly down to see her mother as her mother rises from the… I don't know, inverse chair I guess. No, that's dumb. She rises from her comfy hole? No, wait, that sounds dirty. From her… rock bed. No, that's already a thing. Um... dirt cubby? Sure. She rises from her regal dirt cubby, wraps her tendrils around Hsthressis's whiskers, and yanks on them.

Hsthressis shrieks in agony and I do my very best not to do the same as the pain quite thoroughly bleeds into my other minds. I think I manage to pass off my reaction as a sympathetic wince as Chlrehistra starts berating her daughter.

"What were you thinking!? Hsthressis I have told you a thousand times not to go anywhere near the surface!"

"I-I was looking for tubers! I was going to help—"

"Hsthressis we have plenty of mushrooms we do not need surface gatherers anymore!"

"But I hate mushrooms!"

Chlrehistra yanks the whiskers again, and I let out a small whimper with one of my surface bodies.

"You do not get to risk your life just because you hate mushrooms!" she shrieks.

"Um, excuse me, ma'am?" I interrupt, clearing my throat. "Hsthressis just recently recovered from her injuries and her whiskers are extra sensitive."

"They really fucking are!" Hsthressis agrees, rapidly scuttling out of tendril reach.

Obviously, Hsthressis's recent injuries aren't why her whiskers are abnormally sensitive, her whiskers are abnormally sensitive because one pair of them is actually my antennae. Er, her antennae, I guess. I'm not sure I have a good way of explaining that, though, so I'm just going to be quietly regretful of the half-truth.

"You must be one of the demons, then," the Chieftain glowers. "You and your kind are not welcome here."

"I…" Well damn, I'm already off to a great start aren't I? "I'm not a demon."

Chlrehistra flicks a single whisker, the Sthrenslian equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

"I know I technically live on the surface," I quickly clarify. "But that's not where I'm from. I was stranded there. I'm not... I'm very far from home."

"Why does my daughter look different?" she asks bluntly.

"It was part of the healing process. I had to… uh."

A sudden spike of panic from Hsthressis cuts off my words. Okay, so maybe explaining the regeneration process is a bad idea?

"...It's just a side effect," I say, again cursing myself for the half-truth, but Hsthressis relaxes immediately so I suppose I didn't say whatever she doesn't want me to. "Apologies."

"You have much more serious things to apologize for," the chieftain intones. "I am gladdened that you've returned my daughter to me, but three of my warriors are still dead."

"Yes," I agree, the words stabbing me in the heart, "I'm sorry. Their bodies were too damaged and I could not save them, and I am fully aware that is my fault. I should have tried to communicate sooner, but again I… am far from home. The surface is not a kind place. I... I mean we, um, have come very close to dying many times. I was hasty and angry and I did not know who you were. I just thought the closest thing I had to a home was being invaded."

"So now you wish for peace," the chieftain finishes for me, sounding less than convinced.

"Yes," I confirm. "I just… we are lonely. We made a horrible mistake. We want to make up for it. We can help you! Whatever you need, I… I know we can't make up for murder, but..."

The chieftain taps a leg, which I intuit as my cue to shut up.

"You claim to not be a demon," she says.

"That's correct," I nod.

"Yet you live on the surface."

The surface of this planet?

"Not by choice."

Her tendrils curled into a Sthrenslian smile.

"Is that so? I suppose you seem comfortable in our tunnels, and you apologize for actions that are not your own. We remember our enemies, and they are far too large to fit in our home. They are barred from Sss's warm embrace, massive in size, glutted on Khlasinas' cursed bounties. You do not seem like them."

Shit. I guess it was pretty stupid to just hope that the multiple body thing never came up, but I can't lie worth a damn. What am I supposed to say? Chieftain Chlrehistra seems to interpret my panicked silence as an indication for her to continue speaking, and I suppose I'm okay with that.

"I think I understand," she says in the kind of knowing tone that indicates to me she has drawn an incredibly incorrect conclusion. "Hsthressis, is this the… creature that healed you?"

Now Hsthressis seems to pick up on something, and she quickly flicks her whiskers in an affirmative.

"Yeah, this is her! She talked to me while I was injured and she helped me walk around when I got back on my feet and she made sure I survived the trip here from the surface!"

"And yet she is trapped on the surface, ordered around by demons," the chieftain muses.

"...Wait, I'm what?" I ask.

Holy shit shut up, Hsthressis thinks loudly, although I don't think it's her intention to communicate with me this way. I am just doing really, really badly at ignoring certain thoughts I have because my god of course I am what the fuck was I expecting. Either way, I pick up on the context: Hsthressis thinks she has found a good cover story, and she wants me to go along with it.

"Exactly!" Hsthressis says out loud. "She's like… a prisoner. Way less scary than those giant demons. She's innocent, and—"

"No," I say firmly. "Hsthressis, I appreciate what you're trying to do here, but lies like this don't help. They only make things worse when people find out the truth."

She's not going to accept the truth. She never does, Hsthressis grumbles internally.

"And if that truth causes problems, we will deal with them," I continue. "Chieftain, my exact situation is difficult to describe, but I ask for now that you consider me an ambassador from a clan of people—" I actually use the word 'Sthrenslian' here, but emphasize it in a different way that I hope culturally tracks— "that wish for positive relations with you."

The chieftain sighs, scuttling the rest of the way out of her dirt cubby and approaching me directly. She doesn't stop to face me or speak with me as I expect, because again such gestures are meaningless in the city of the blind. Instead she just continues on her way with a simple command.

"Walk with me."

So I do. I catch up and walk side-by-side with her, which for whatever reason seems to palpably increase the tension in the room. Hsthressis follows us and I do everything in my power to not just steal the answer why from her head. Chlrehistra also seems mildly annoyed, but I figure at this point I just risk adding to whatever insult I just gave if I try to correct it blindly.

"Even if you are not within Khlasinas' clutches by choice, you still live with nothing but his silent fire overhead," she tells me. "I cannot in good conscience endanger my people by inviting you into our halls."

I frown, struggling to dig through all that cultural commentary at once.

"Sorry, can you explain why?" I ask.

"The world above is infused with Khlasinas' evil," she says. "From above he sends fire to burn us, he sends water to drown us, and he sends his demons to devour us. Only the protection of Sss, god of the deep earth, the warmth without fire protects us. You live without Sss' grace between you and of the demon king, so you could be of his ilk. Knowingly or otherwise."

Huh. So, historical religions are far from something I'm an expert with, but it's my general understanding that they tend to arise from helpful superstitions. Like, ancient peoples had no idea that diseases are caused by microorganisms, but they might have some idea that cooking meat makes you less likely to get sick. So they might decide that cooking meat purifies it in the eyes of some higher being and then ten generations down the line animal sacrifice by pyre is a thing. Humans are crazy fucking good at seeing correlation, even if we happen to be phenomenally bad at not jumping to conclusions as a result of correlation. Sthrenslians, obviously, are not human, but there is a startling amount of similarity in the general way they seem to think. A convenient bit of convergent evolution, I guess, from all the way across the stars.

...I wonder if I'll find a bunch of crabs here. Carcinisation is just so fucking cool.

Anyway, being on the surface tends to kill Sthrenslians, so that's probably why Sthrenslians created an evil surface god. Still, there's sort of a glaring problem in the accusation I'm facing here.

"...But I lived in the cave until you attacked me and forced me to leave," I point out. "I promise, I'm doing everything I can to get a roof over my head."

I actually ended up using the English word for 'roof' there, because I guess the Sthrenslian word for 'cave ceiling' just doesn't have the same connotations. Oh well, she can probably figure it out through context.

"My people attacked yours because you attacked my daughter," Chlrehistra dismisses. "But you make a valid point. When attacked you fled for a cave. Perhaps the warmth of Sss still radiates within you."

What an arbitrary fucking way to determine whether or not I still count as a person, but you know what? I'll take it. The chieftain heads towards a staircase carved out of a stalactite-stalagmite column. It is startlingly thin, and completely lacks guardrails, only wide enough for us to travel single file. I suppose, now that I think about it, there's a good chance Sthrenslians would be completely unharmed by a fall from this height, so the lack of guardrails makes sense.

I step off the stairs, flick my wings, and start to fly. No need to take up space on the stairway, and if I do this I can continue walking next to the chieftain.

...And that's when I get an overwhelming sense of 'you've got to be kidding me' from Hsthressis and I realize that I was supposed to take the hint and walk behind the chieftain rather than next to her. Whoops. Still, flying is awesome, and at this point it would be awkward to stop.

Especially with everyone's attention so firmly centered on me.

"I… you walk on the air," the chieftain points out, dumbfounded.

"Well it's not really walking, but… yeah?" I confirm. "Is that a problem?"

Pregnant pause passes through the air, but I eventually get the answer I'm hoping for.

"No," Chieftain Chlrehistra confirms. "No, I don't think so. Shall we eat while we discuss the terms of your… surrender?"

"That would be wonderful, yeah," I tell her. "I really just want all the fighting behind us."

I follow the procession of Sthrenslians down the staircase, unable to shake the feeling that I'm still making some kind of massive mistake.