Dery Zomo was angry. His long, furry ears were high above his head, as rigid as stone, and his furry face was balled in anger. His black eyes were menacing and he stood, resting on his hind legs with a wooden staff in his furry hand.
“This is unacceptable,” Dery said to the gathered soldiers. He looked down at the beaten and bruised azizas that his soldiers had captured. They were unconscious and their opaque wings were crinkled and bent. “I said to bring me Tracia, not any aziza with wings!”
“Your Highness,” one of the heavily armed soldiers said as he stood on his hind legs, “we have scoured every inch of the Disc, and there is no sign of Tracia anywhere. We kept these captives for questioning. We have never been able to take aziza prisoners before, they should help in our search. Everyone knows that the winged aziza are Tracia’s offspring…”
“You fool!” Dery shouted. “Tracia doesn’t have offspring! Do these azizas have feathered wings like Tracia’s? No, they do not. They have opaque aziza wings that some have been born with since the first aziza mound was pushed up from the soil. They probably never even laid eyes on her before we took the Northern Jungle from Golden Trumpet. Feed them to the hyenas, then lead your warriors to the labor camps. It is clear that you are not fit for this mission. You and your warriors are dismissed.”
The armed soldier half bowed then called for his band of warriors to leave the hollow where Dery Zomo coordinated the warriors of the Zomo Monarchy. There were many camouflaged structures in the hollow that included barracks for warriors, an impressive armory, and a strategic headquarters used by Dery and the Trusted Leaders who oversaw various branches of the military. The Monarchy had vastly expanded its military following Agê’s partition and they boasted that the West was the safest place for any dweller of the disc. The Honored Monarch managed to convince Agê that Golden Trumpet was unable to properly secure the North because she was sedentary, unable to see and truly appreciate the difficulties that some of the dwellers of the Jungle experienced. Despite her reticence to dishonor Golden Trumpet, there had been calls from the dwellers of the Northern Jungle for more effective leadership.
Dery stormed away from the remaining soldiers, toward the camouflaged strategic headquarters, flanked by two other leaders of warrior bands.
“Any other insolence you leaders want to burden me with?” Dery asked angrily as he swiped the vines away from what looked like a pile of stones to reveal the entrance to the strategic headquarters. Inside, the ceiling was high and the interior was gray and sterile. There were desks with monitors along the wall and groups of soldiers were busy at each.
“I am honored to be in your confidence, your highness,” one of the leaders said cautiously as he walked clumsily on his hind legs. Most lepusraj moved around on all fours, but all members of the Zomo Monarchy walked on two legs and encouraged others to do the same. “I must say that this search for Tracia has been exhaustive and we have yet to recover her. I wonder if we should extend our search beyond Agê’s disc to the others. Maybe even to this other realm that the other Mmoatia has abandoned the Endlands for. She knows that we are hunting her, and she is wiley.”
Dery stopped in the middle of the busy headquarters and turned to face his leaders. They both immediately dropped down on all fours out of respect.
“Your search is here on our Disc. It is your only concern, leader. I do commend your assessment, I like that you are using your brain, unlike an alarming number of our ranks. If Tracia is still on this Disc, you will find her and bring her before the throne for interrogation. If she is not, then someone extraordinary will bring her to me soon enough. The Zomo have eyes everywhere. Now go and reconfigure the bands in light of your losses. Today could be the day you drag her kicking and screaming before the Honored Monarch.”
Dery continued to the back of the long corridor where grand leaders and their teams did their part to advance the objectives of the Monarchy. He walked without the aid of the staff he carried and as he passed, everyone stood to salute him. He took the large staircase up to the second floor where his office was located. His office had a large table that was a mound of earth with dense grass on top like a carpet that was meticulously maintained. The table occupied the middle of the room and comfortable wooden chairs surrounded it. Dery’s chair was the largest at the short end of the rectangular table and it swiveled to a monitor hanging on the wall behind him like the ones used on the first floor, but much more elaborate with smaller screens attached. The monitors were wooden and they seemed to be wired with floral vines that glowed light blue from the Essence coursing through them. The screens of the wooden monitors glowed light blue as well but they displayed whatever information, audio, or video recordings the user uploaded to it, or that other users uploaded through contact with the set up, and any other monitored with connection to it.
Dery sat in his chair and faced the screen that lit up in front of him.
“Contact Bric,” Dery said aloud and waited impatiently as the color of the screen changed to show that the call was connecting. He couldn’t know how long it would take for the device to locate Bric and connect them for communication. There was no way to know if Bric was still in the Endlands and if he was in the other realm, Dery could be made to wait a long time, but part of him is happy to be alone in the quiet of his office. Leading others required him to be constantly listening, always alert, and it felt good to close all of that out for a while.
“How do you call someone in your sleep?” Dery heard and he startled awake. He didn’t realize he had dozed off, and he noticed Bric’s furry face grinning at him on the monitor. “Looking run down over there. The weight of Monarch Leader seems to be crushing you.”
Dery yawned and pawed at his face with his furry hands.
“It won’t get the best of me,” Dery said. “Have you found Tracia?”
“We have eyes on Pultine and if she goes to the Earth realm for a visit, we will know. We are also keeping an eye on Metatron. If she is here, we will find her eventually. But there is only so much we can do but wait for her to make a mistake.”
“We have to find her,” Dery said angrily. “I know she is planning something, and if we don’t find her, we will all regret it.”
“It is hard to help without all of the information,” Bric said, echoing the leader he had spoken with earlier. Bric looked away from the monitor in front of him at something beyond the scope of Dery’s view. “Since you insist on keeping me in the dark about the true reason you are hunting Tracia like a mad hyena, I remain in the dark about her whereabouts. The two things are related, Monarch Leader.”
“I don’t see how,” Dery said. “Your Monarch has asked you to find something, that is reason enough to turn the realms over to find it.”
“But calling Tracia a something robs her of so much. She is not a prized deep-cup cast in rhasd, she is the first of her kind, daughter of the first of their kind. She has shown over the course of her adolescence and young adulthood that she is a born leader. Tracia is Agê’s heir if she has one. Knowing why you seek such power could give me a better understanding of the struggle between her and the Zomo Monarchy. I can better deduce what she might be planning and look more closely in the places she’s likely to be with the relatively limited resources at my disposal. Anything could be helpful after so long with nothing.”
Dery sighed and his ears folded down as he exhaled. He did look very tired. Even though the rest of the Monarchy was content that Tracia was out of sight and out of mind, Dery knew that she was planning something to take back the North that many inhabitants of the jungles who were not content with Zomo rule believed to be her birthright. But soon after the death of the asanbosam, Red, in the North by the guards of Golden Trumpet, Tracia fled the North and stirred up resistance against the partition. This puzzled many who saw Tracia as Agê’s favored, that she would openly oppose the will of the Vodun, but her defenders said that Tracia’s defiance was a service to the Vodun who needed more from those loyal to her than just blind obedience.
The Zomo Monarchy was rewarded for openly defying the will of the Vodun by suggesting that they could be better stewards of the North than Agê’s chosen steward. Dery knew that Agê would not intervene in whatever conflict was brewing between Tracia and the Monarchy. Agê would watch and reward the victor, whoever maneuvered the circumstances to their advantage well enough to make their will a reality, while also serving her goal of supporting the life of the Disc.
Dery was desperate to find Tracia to thwart whatever it was she was planning, but he didn’t want to tell Bric the details because he had no idea what Tracia could be planning or even that she was planning anything at all. It was maddening and kept Dery up at night.
“Just find her,” he said gravely and ended the call as Bric shook his head and gestured to something or someone off screen.
***
The lepusraj are skilled at burrowing into the rich soil of the Disc of Age, but even they avoid the Deep, the underground system of tunnels that exist as a physical curiosity considering how deep into the soil it goes. The underside of Age’s Disc is a desert, but it seems that one could dig infinitely down into the soil of the top side and never encounter the Underside. Exploration of the Deep by curious dwellers of the Disc has revealed variants of the fauna and flora on the surface of the Disc that managed to subsist in the underground ecosystem, and at extreme depths, a vast body of water, a veritable ocean, populated with kin that normally populate Agbe’s Disc.
“There is no Endlands word for what they are,” Tracia said to Ahdis who looked like a nude alabaster statue with striking red, feathered wings against the darkness of the vast space they inhabited. They could have been on the Disc of Sakpata, but they were in the Deep, in a large cavern created by the millions of miles of soil above their heads, relaxing next to the glowing blue waters that bathed the rocky walls and ceilings around them in a soft light. Tracia rested on a moss-covered coast of the ocean amidst the luminescing mushrooms that grew with tall stalks and large caps that created spots of light in the moss underneath them. Ahdis had emerged from the water. She grabbed her fiery red tunic that matched the red of her hair and slipped it over her body before shaking her wings dry, then lying next to Tracia.
“Pultine’s word might be fitting,” Ahdis said. “Bitches. She says it means bad witches, like those powerful women from Legba’s Disc, but instead of running things, a bitch just wastes Essence on petty stuff. The Zomo sound like a petty waste of Essence.”
“The Zomo are a bunch of lepusraj bitches,” Tracia said angrily. “They would never think to look for me here in the Deep. Even though they despise me, they still think of me as too good to descend. But no one on the surface is worthy of this place,” Tracia said as she surveyed the beauty of the Deep Ocean. “Thank you for bringing me here. I will admit that I was terrified of the Deep before I met you, surface dwellers think only bad things could live down here.”
“I think the same thing about the world up there,” Ahdis admitted. “But I am thankful that Age urged me to seek out my sisters. We are all so different, but we are all somehow the same. I can be my whole self with you and know that you will understand. And I cannot charm you, you are immune to my Immaculate skill. I can only be sure that my sisters are acting as themselves around me, and the same is true for you.”
Ahdis lay her head in Tracia’s lap and she ran her fingers through Ahdis’ thick, red hair.
“How is Metatron?”Ahdis asked sheepishly. When she first met Tracia, she was with him and Tracia made Ahdis promise not to tell Agê about them interacting.
“I don’t know,” Tracia said sadly. “I haven’t seen him in so long, only a few times since the first Brook Festival and that was the last time we really had time together. He is probably very angry with me for disappearing without talking to him, but he thinks he is stealthier than he is. They would have found me by now if he knew I was here.”
“They would know where you are but they would never come for you,” Ahdis said with a laugh. “They would try to pay someone to retrieve you and that would only be disastrous for the idiot who accepted the payment.”
Tracia laughed softly and tried to put Metatron out of her mind. If their love meant anything, it would endure the difficult situation in which Tracia had found herself.
“What will you do to them, to the Zomo?” Ahdis asked after a moment. “Whatever you decide is Agê’s will. She orchestrated this whole thing to test you, but you know that don’t you?”
“Of course,” Tracia said. “I hope that I am passing. But more than anything, I am concerned with the agenda of the Zomo Monarchy. They are obsessed with control and power and I fear the future where they are not strongly checked. But who am I to play with the lives of so many just to teach a family of idiots that there is more to life than being worshiped? That is all I have known despite my very loud protest.”
“Before I tamed the Burrow Wurm,” Ahdis said, “I had the same thoughts. The Wurm is ancient and the societies that exist in the Deep owe their livelihood to that behemoth. If not for her, the soil would have been too dense to make it to these depths. But as more time passes, more life has thrived even at this extreme depth, and the Burrow Wurm wasn’t used to avoiding things as she tore through the soil. She moves where she wants, when she wants. Someone had to do something to stop entire settlements from being wiped away on her whim, something that wasn’t just killing her. But I didn’t want to do it because who am I to tell that ancient beauty what to do? She does as she does. But I have to protect life, I would only know sorrow if I let the dwellers of the Deep suffer needlessly. So I tamed the Burrow Wurm and everyone is happy. The savoir bit gets annoying, but you come to appreciate the perks of it after a while. Your struggle on the surface seems much more intricate, less gargantuan and more…”
“Fascist. I wonder where that word comes from, is that one of Pultine’s?”
Ahdis giggled.
“What will you do?” She asked again and looked lazily out at the still waters.
“I will have to embarrass them. The very idea of their leadership must be a joke to the average dweller of the Disc. A bloody war would only create martyrs and boring legends.”
“Aren’t the lepusraj pets?” Ahdis asked.
“Some are pets to other kin, but even the aziza can be pets to something.”
“You are my pet,” Ahdis joked.
“And you are mine.” Tracia said. “Will you come to the surface to rule with me? I think that I can coax Pultine into joining us as the unofficial rulers of the Disc. We can challenge the Zomo to deny that we are the second to Agê, even if pulling rank pains me.”
“I have no desire to do that,” Adhis said with a groan, “not even for you, big sister. Pultine will absolutely not do it, and neither will the others. Why would we want to flaunt our favor with Agê like that makes us more important than the Burrow Wurm, or the Zomos for that matter? We are here to correct the mistakes that can be made by dwellers of the Disc with more power than others, not to rule over everyone.”
“But the dwellers of the Disc are more than just unwieldy elements that occasionally get out of order,” Tracia said thoughtfully. “They are the living kin of the Disc, imbued with the life of Agê herself and granted free will to live their lives how they see fit. Of course they have ambitions and a desire to secure the best for themselves and their loved ones, and of course that causes conflict and power struggle. There is no way to avoid that unless Agê takes away the will of dwellers of her Disc. I do not believe in that. So, we will have to show ourselves as their superiors who dwell among them to discourage the type of aggressive acquisition that defines the Zomo. They want the favor they see Agê has given to us and they will not stop until they have it. We must show them that they will never be as powerful as we are.”
“Why not do it yourself? You don’t need anyone to overpower anything under Agê.”
“Because then I fear that the power will go to my head. I need checks and balances. Say you will come to the surface with me? We can legitimize the Deep as the wonder that it is, and we can address all of the concerns of our sisters who are caring for the life that Agê has created.”
Ahdis was quiet and Tracia assumed that she was thinking about it carefully before answering. After a while, Tracia realized that Ahdis had fallen asleep and she shook her awake.
“What were we talking about?”
“We will be a council of some sort. Mmoatia Council maybe?”
“The Supreme Mmoatia Council,” Ahdis said enthusiastically before she remembered what Tracia had asked of her. “Wait, I still don’t want to be a ruler of the Disc.”
“But didn’t you say that this was Agê’s plan all along?” Tracia said. “She wanted us to come to it for ourselves, and very reluctantly I have arrived here. Enjoy the time we have left here on the mossy shores, sister. Soon, we will become vaulted witches.”
“Supreme witches. Switches!”
“Maybe just Supreme Mmoatia,” Tracia said.
The Encyclopedia of the Known Multiverse Vol. ∞ 