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‘Home’ was still a concept they were learning to associate and feel for themself.
‘Hobbies’, however, had become a more pressing concept to figure out.
They’d had experience replicating behaviors they thought likely qualified as hobbies before. But none of them had really meant much. They’d not gotten much if anything out of them.
They were both unique and not unique in that regard. Walking around the palace meant they could see the quiet one engaged in all manners of activities. They’d sit with books, they’d sit with the queen-mother watching little shows done by small bugs, they’d fight in courtyards, they’d play music. But they were still so quiet throughout it all. All but the duels, where there would be activity within their shadows, shifting, reaching upwards, writhing, excitement. Then the tall one rarely could be found doing anything. They holed away in the room that the others weren’t allowed in, or they poked at the game board they’d recently picked up. So did the others really get much more out of things than them?
It did for one, who came in with colors and noise, who’d lived among talkative creatures before.
(They could admit to wanting to pick up more ‘fun things’ just to share the activities with their sibling.)
It wasn’t just an internal thing, though. Lately, the queen-mother wanted them to learn more. She’d introduced them to her gardens and encouraged them to seek her or others out, so they may be supplied ideas of hobbies. Fun things to do.
Alright. Acceptable. Even if they didn’t know ‘why’. Although, no, they…
Maybe it wouldn’t have really mattered, except they had two siblings who clearly did experience a lot of happy feelings and satisfaction from these hobbies. First, the red one, who was their sibling-but-not-quite. She was. She wasn’t their kin, though. She didn’t have a shadow, to cross into another’s and hear/see/feel/know from them. Instead, she was loud with her voice, a resonance that came from only one direction and did not echo around and envelop in complete certainty. She had a name: Hornet. She liked having a name. She saw a point in having a name. And she had hobbies. And duties and jobs and much more that sounded like Too Much, because they had enough to balance just living in one spot and she had three. She’d invited them to come with her to ‘the Hive’ before others had turned that down. And Deepnest, her primary home. She talked of hunts and rites and games there. Hobbies, weren’t they? And they might go, sometime. Eventually. They hadn’t left the palace grounds yet though.
Hornet liked dueling, harp, cloaks, colors, masks, grand statements, hunting, quite the variety. She was younger than them. She acted older than them. They weren’t sure what age they acted like, actually. But she had more responsibilities. They just flowed along.
Second, the loud one (except they made sense in this loudness, rather than it all coming from a strange mouth). They also had a name. Witch. They were the loud one but they were also Witch; they were Witch to themself and that just total belief in the name was a noisy thing. They had no idea what it meant, when the loud one first arrived. But meaning/memory/experience passed into shadows when merged, and they’d been offered the time that their kin got that name alongside far more about the odd person who they’d used to live with. That person made more sense with words than the flukes they’d once played some games with before. Their sibling missed that person.
They’d not really missed anything they’d left. Had they?
They didn’t miss the shelter they’d made. They didn’t really miss playing games with the flukes, though, they supposed, there was a sort of oddness in thinking about that- a small chunk of emptiness that existed less from emotion and more from an expectation, because routine made expectations. So there was a part of them that expected to stop resting and see the fungal walls and walk out to the metal pipes and slip down to let flukes poke them.
Witch’s old home was full of things for medicines and spells, paint, stuff to dress up in, all sorts of meaning attached to it from the shadow doing the sharing.
They liked the weird sick person, they liked paint, they liked ‘swishy’ cloaks (and had helped make theirs normal again after someone had folded the ends up all odd and sewed them in place), they liked and disliked music-
So Hornet and Witch. Siblings. They would agree with the queen-mother even though they didn’t know any conversation was happening to start with.
They followed along with all the ‘hobbies’ these siblings offered them, even if they felt like they might understand, a little, whatever the quiet one experienced when going through many of the activities they would daily.
The queen-mother had told them to take that garden. It was theirs now. They hadn’t asked for it. They didn’t know what they were supposed to do with it. Stay inside? No. She had made it clear what she expected of them in relation to their ‘room’. They hadn’t asked for that either.
She’d shown plants and talked about seeds and watering and styles and benches and it registered in their mind- ah. Activities. Meaning. Hobbies. This again. Would it mean anymore here than with flukes?
If she wanted them to do something in this room, it should be familiar. A little bit. They’d tried to go jump and hover enough outside the window of the tall one’s dirt room to see inside. They knew they were not supposed to go past the glass or metal door, with this garden. ‘Particular’ about who went in there, Hornet had called the tall one on their first day here.
There was nothing in there to give ideas. The tall one seemed to spend so much time in there because they brought something else with them.
They considered that former shelter they’d tried to emulate a home with. It’d had something that could crawl around in dirt and plants too, just like the tall one’s did in their dirt room.
Maybe if they followed the queen-mother’s prodding, they could end up being able to join their siblings even better. They wanted to.
(And how odd it still was, to realize slowly what wants and wishes and bonds were.)
They hadn’t left the palace since coming here. And that had been…long? Short, compared to the rest of the time they’d existed. But full of things. Much more full of noise and activities than life had ever been before.
Part of them almost hesitated at the gates.
They’d come up to them before. They’d intended to leave before. It wasn’t their home, so they shouldn’t stay. They hadn’t then. If they left now, would it all just stop? Everything that had passed since getting here- would it become some quiet whisper? Would it fade into a past that could almost feel unreal?
They had another sibling closer to them in size and experience (lack thereof) in this palace now. They did not want to leave and forget what it was like to have kin around them. They wouldn’t want to be surrounded in the dull, grainy sort of silence that was out there. And if they changed their mind outside and decided they liked it there better and didn’t return, who’d keep the fun one company?
But if they thought about them, and even the tall one who had shoved strange ‘game pieces’ at them while they’d been hurt, they realized that they really didn’t need to even wonder about forgetting anything. None of them were forgettable. They’d be back.
Maybe it wasn’t quite a home yet, but it had shadows like them and they were all more whole together. Not completely. In the library, they’d been introduced to puzzles. It could be explained a little like those. They were a piece. The rest were a piece. The quiet one was the whole and still not the whole because they all wandered about in bodies instead of slipping into a mass of unified shadow. The more that came around, the less it seemed like they’d never feel ‘right’. Never be natural. Never get to understand and enjoy natural concepts, like homes and hobbies.
Hobbies. Here they went again.
This time, right through the gate into the cold basin beyond.
The cave by the waterways, in the ‘Fungal Wastes’, was messier than they’d left it. Oh well. The new growths of mushrooms didn’t bother them. They didn’t care to clean it. Although Witch might like the fluke skins. They had an affinity for collecting dead things' remains and then trying to use them to cheer up others. So they did let their shadow swallow the old husks and then went back to their actual business.
Home, hobby, hobby, home. What did many of the books in the libraries portray about it all? Pets. They’d seen the concept around the world first. Now they had the queen-mother following them and trying to get them to do…something.
There weren’t expectations with the others. That was nice. There had always been expectations with everyone they’d come across before. And they would try to match those expectations and wait to get something out of it.
The queen-mother was not a part of them, so they could not begrudge her for having expectations. They’d thought it was interesting enough when she’d first ushered them to a side garden that she said they could have full reign of. Did she expect them to have ideas? To do anything without her guide? Maybe they could poke dirt. Thrilling. Their loudest kin would have many more ideas. Sometimes, they might have even thought to envy Witch for the ease that it came with. Think it, sure. Feel it, not so much. It didn’t worry them.
The tiktik was still here. They stared at it for a while. It did not stare at them at all. They turned their head to follow its movements. It made a circuit oblivious. Up a wall. Across the ceiling. Down a wall. Across the floor. It wasn’t a very unique thing and it didn’t do unique things.
It may have been the sleeping cycle back at the palace before they finally walked up to the tiktik and pulled it off the ground.
She said to find hobbies. They hadn’t thought they really got anything out of the tiktik before. This was still where they’d headed after her expectations.
They didn’t need to understand a whole lot. They didn’t really have to think much at all while they walked back to the basin with the sort-of pet thing they’d tried before once.
(They thought they might want to think more though. Understanding wasn’t necessary, but they lived in a slog, a haze, mirroring and mimicking life they saw and not knowing what they got out of it. Their kin made sense . Nothing else they’d met had. And they’d avoided the tall one back when they were small and over the years they grew. They could have started having noise and meaning in their mind a long time ago if they hadn’t.
Their kin made sense.
Even if they were behind in joining the rest with actually finding what mattered and didn’t- ‘tastes’, people who tasted stuff called the circumstances, which was helpful - to them rather than just sampling anything. What did they have a taste for over other options?
Kin. Kin. Mattering. Matters. Meaning. Family. Kin. Kin to love.)
They ran into the queen-mother on their way to the room they’d been told was theirs. It’d stopped being useless to them a while ago. This hallway had the rooms of their kin. Therefore the hall mattered. They’d be in it anyways. It was acceptable that they were expected to have a space too.
They still liked to just slip into the other's rooms better. They could be there and then they’d have company. Or they might not be there and they could still just look at all the things they’d collected (or hadn’t, in the case of the tall one). Their favorite of the rooms was their littler kin. This maybe was amusing because the way the thought came in words- Witch used that word for them, after all. Well. Likewise to the room. It had the best collection. The quiet one’s room was still clean and shiny and full of things from the palace. Witch’s was like a little cave that had been tugged out of a wall and dumped in the palace. It didn’t match the outside of the hall. They liked it best.
A taste, then? Except they did not want a room for themself. They wouldn’t make theirs look like it. Didn’t that mean it wasn’t a taste at all?
Why’d they have to be stuck thinking about tastes when they’d never tasted anything? The sensation could be anything itself!
Witch had many ideas to help, though. No shortage of them, really. They liked long cloaks. They’d helped fix theirs. Didn’t that mean they’d wanted it fixed? That they’d liked it better when it was long? Swish. Swish. It’d stopped tripping them a long while ago. Its ends coiled up funny on the floor. They were a bit like tendrils, like what the taller kin could do with their void while fighting the knights, like what shadows coiled and constantly moved in each of them. They liked it.
Their loud kin had so many offers- paints, clothes, colored dust, kitchen baking, little pieces of dead things that might shine or otherwise be thought of as neat by them. They’d taken some of these offers to add to the room that was supposed to be theirs.
It was better than the one they’d made for themself out by the sewers. Going back there today let them conclude that. It was still more empty than the quiet one’s and Witch’s and the red sister’s room here (and that was just one of the ones she had to have). They got more out of things that weren’t in the room. They’d rather move around the palace trailing Witch and seeing every new action that their kin came up with. They had more creativity than the rest of them. The one they’d lived with before coming here had encouraged it. They wanted that person to come back again more. Clearly, they mattered to Witch. Hm. They could take Witch and go find this shaman person themselves. It wasn’t like their smaller kin didn’t leave the palace plenty. Witch didn’t have the same hesitation to step out. But they didn’t think they would either anymore, after today. Nothing had happened. Nothing would. They’d like to see the strange loud color-producing noise-making potion-concoction-creating person too. Both because it seemed like they would not be boring and because if Witch was there then Witch would be happy.
They liked making their favorite happy. The rest, they were a bit more passive about following. They were used to following. To watching. To trying to replicate and mimic what they’d seen.
So why did the queen-mother look so confused to see them replicating all the bugs with their happy hobbies?
She’d been passing down the hall while they trotted up it, and she came to a halt when the tiktik gave another wiggle in their arms.
“Ah. What are you doing with that?” she asked.
She had a nice voice, even though it was as wooden as she was underneath the tinkling sounds. They wouldn’t know much more than that. It wasn’t like any of them made vocal noises. None of their kin- only their other sibling, but she was not the queen-mother’s blood and so she got her voice from something else.
In response to her nice voiced question, they held the tiktik up with both arms to show it off to her. See? Creature. It will do creature things here. They had acquired (reacquired) a pet like other normal beings with all their normal hobbies.
Except she continued to stare down at it.
“You cannot let it in your room.”
Oh?
They didn’t understand why. But she was the queen here. So they crouched and put the tiktik down. Bye. Enjoy the hallway and rest of the palace.
“No,” the queen-mother came up closer to them and roots slipped out of the trailing robes she used to block off her glowing light. One picked up the tiktik and the other picked up their arms in order to plop it back on them. “You cannot just leave it for the retainers. Why don’t you release it outside?”
Because then they wouldn’t be having it. And that defeated the point. And this had been her idea in the first place!
They had gotten more accustomed to giving gestures at expectant vocal people. They shook their head at her and pulled the tiktik into their front while their limber arms circled it round and round. Their darkness could block off her vision of it. See? See nothing. Gone. Not for you.
She continued to stare at them, expectant. Expectant for what?
They didn’t know. Others were not so easy to share and understand, compared to their kin.
They hesitated before trying to head for their room. Paused. Tried to set the tiktik down again. Paused. She’d thrown them off.
She came up behind them again.
“You are keeping that?” she asked. She still did not sound glad for it.
They squeezed their arms around it again. Not hers. If they were as big as the quiet one and tall one, this would be much harder. Their arms were all brittle and jointed. Unfortunately, they couldn’t prevent ‘molts’ from happening here. They’d lose this advantage over the others.
The queen-mother touched their shoulders to give a light push (not to steal the tiktik, as they abruptly first thought). “Then put it in your garden, dear, not here.”
Right. ‘Their’ garden. It was hard to remember they had two rooms now when they didn’t think they had the first.
But the queen-mother didn’t know that. How could she, unless she asked?
They found out it was not so easy to take in and expel things from their shadows as their kin made it look. They were one molt ahead of Witch to start with and they’d dealt with another one since coming to the palace. It left the shell that constrained them even better at that. They weren’t too unused to it, because of the molt that had snuck up on them while they’d been spying in the basin years ago. Now, it was even more…solid. They had to actually will it go break open to get at the less tangible shade within. They used to just be soft all over.
The fluke skins were fragile already and broke into tiny pieces and flakes by the time they had figured out how to split the solid shell to spit them out.
Oh well.
It was not as if Witch’s recent gift to their other kin had been used. It was appreciated. It just didn’t make any sense for someone who didn’t eat like bugs did. Bugs talked about tastes and flavors and textures. Putting things into void didn’t mean making that out, whatever that was.
It was appreciated. They’d liked helping with it. They’d known it wouldn’t get used in eating by its recipient. It wasn’t the part that mattered.
The queen-mother hadn’t seemed happy about how the flakes got stuck in rug fibers, though, but the gift had been for Witch and not her and that was also the part that mattered.
The sister they all shared came with gifts for them. She’d gotten them from the Hive. This was one of her homes.
She didn’t know it because she couldn’t hear them, but they’d learned to pat people based on how others did it. They patted in pity for her. One home was hard enough to grasp. She had three.
The Hive was described as a golden, open space, hidden away and secretive. Hornet talked about wanting to invite them to see it, but they could not yet. They weren’t well known to the public, the queen-mother said, and the areas that they could go were apparently limited. The dark third home of their sister was fine. The old sewer entrance was less fine, apparently, because it was near mantids. Mantids and the Hive alike were decorated up as special, different, very important allies rather than just a part of the nest. Technically, so was Deepnest. They’d never gone around showing off their presence in all the places they’d been before, so they didn’t see why it mattered. And Witch went out to ride trams all of the time. But that was acceptable, yet going into land that belonged to other queens wasn’t.
They didn’t really want to go to the Hive that badly, but being restricted meant knowing of it only from Hornet’s descriptions and she clearly wanted to take the four of them there someday. The quiet one was the only who had gotten to go, before their own entry to the palace.
Her gifts ranged from ‘honey’ that they couldn’t eat to lots of pretty fragile things that almost acted like glass. They sat on the floor of her room wrapping everything in either ribbons or full silk coverings. She talked while they did it. They listened instead of drifting. Since she had told them who got each gift, they helped and picked different bows for the different recipients. Blacks for Witch. Blue for the quiet one. Soft plain cloth all around the little box she’d gotten for the tall one. Fancy beaded ribbons of greens and whites for the queen-mother. She would like fancy. The frills looked like her plants. There were things for the knights, and for a few select retainers that they didn’t really know but she did, and something for the pillbug their sister had taken to sparing with (when he came over to teach them and Witch things they didn’t need to know) (the queen-mother would tell her to stop distracting the tutor, but the scolding had the habit of drifting off and she’d drift away too), and a different box that would inevitably also go to the tall one instead of its recipient- Hornet avoided conversation about him and sometimes acted uncomfortable she’d brought anything with her, when gifts meant acknowledging he was around- …She had a lot. That was all. She had very many things. That was why they were helping her. They’d been here long enough to start guessing what wrappings the different recipients would want.
Of their kin, it sometimes seemed like they spent the most time with their sister. She said the quiet one had always humored her before and still did, but they’d likewise been older than her despite their initial size and they were so busy all the time now. They were the same age as the quiet one, but they supposed they were far less busy. And they were smaller. Taller than Hornet, but that had taken a recent molt.
It wasn’t because they were the only one that wanted to sit with their vocal-yet-mute sibling. The rest did not mind that she was completely silent to their reach and prodding, lacking something crucial, something that tied them all together. It just was how things tended to end up.
The loud one couldn’t go to her dark home with her. So they only got to see her when she did come to the palace.
The two of them had been trying together to learn to write better. If Witch could not visit, then they could write. Except writing was not easy. Neither of them had very good hands yet. They were a little stronger once shaped, but it took effort to control their arm and make it the right form at all. Their own fingers currently were stubby. They’d never tried making hands in all their years alive.
Sometimes they gave up and just dipped their arm tips into the ink. But the resulting glyphs were very large. Then the red sister would get a letter of one word. Or half a word, because they’d run out of room. And they got ink on the floor. It was messy.
They’d been trying to get better at it though, even if being told by the queen-mother or tutors didn't make them want to. The difference here was that it was the red one. And she sent letters to them. And they’d started taking her up on her requests to visit with her, but Witch hadn’t. Here was the opposite problem. Before, they’d not left the palace at all and Witch would. Now, Witch still left more than them, but they would not go to that place. That place happened to be where the red sister was.
They would show Witch everything upon returning, but it was not completely the same as if they’d gone themself. So they had to do more to include them in the experience. They would write and ask Hornet to describe things about her dark home and maybe even draw little pictures? For them to give to the louder one? Maybe?
The only problem they’d both had with this approach was that they wrote so large with the inks and paints they’d tried that their context and request alike was not really included on the paper.
They were almost finished wrapping her gifts when Hornet changed the subject.
“Do you have a name yet?” she asked.
Oh, this. She’d asked them about that the very first time they met. It was explained as something that she and the quiet one had and that the tall one didn’t. ‘Yet’. That got thrown on pretty often. As far as they knew, the tall one still hadn’t told her anything special to call them. ‘Vessel’ got used instead, sometimes. Out of habit, she said. She’d always known them as just ‘vessel’ in the time that they had lived here with the whispering light, years ago, before they had been sealed away with a different light. Neither were shining anymore. They thought that might be good. They’d come to understand that the tall one’s demeanor came from being burned by such. And they would not let that happen. They’d just kept away before. That was before. They’d not known how whole a life around kin rather than isolated from them was.
They finished the tricky process of tying a knot with only stubby-half fingers and then shook their head for her. The red sister did not look surprised.
“Has anyone talked about giving you one?” she asked.
Probably. They hadn’t paid attention. Voices and talking were so much harder to concentrate and understand than the simple process of darkness meshed with darkness.
“Are there any you would pick? Knight picked theirs, even if they hardly sign anything with it. Father said they picked theirs.”
They didn’t know. So they shrugged for her. Maybe someday? Witch did have a name. They very clearly had a name. It was a loud thing, evident, present, whenever they were heard from. It came from another. If they had a name, they could match Witch. It would be two on two for the loud presence of ‘this name thinks this’ compared to the taller two.
“You don’t have to pick one, though. I’m not sure if they would tell you that here,” Hornet said. “I was given a name. One of my mothers gave me mine, after I learned from her people. Otherwise my mother would have…She’s proud of my name. And who I got it from.”
Oh. They were something given? A word or feeling that was directed at and about them repeatedly?
That made it easier. Nothing had to be felt for themself with that. It just Was.
They did have a ‘name’, then.
They got the quiet one to write what they wanted out on a tablet for them and then carried the big thing with them until they’d found the queen-mother. The quiet one had not added any sort of input about what they’d requested, but they’d obliged. They helped the rest. They’d also been ever so slightly amused, and that was it, from them.
When they found her, they held up the tablet from both sides. The quiet one had written: Have a name. Witch gave it. It is Favorite.
That was what Witch would call their attention over with, and it was how Witch thought of them, and so it was what Hornet described. It was something given.
“That cannot be a name,” the queen-mother dismissed, even through smiling eyes.
Yes it could.
“It is not one.”
Yes it was.
“For others, we shall think of something else. Among your siblings, be what you may.”
Yes. They would be.
They wandered up to the roof with a bit of frustration. Why did ‘others’ need something else? To be presentable? To be as a bug?
Hornet said names were often given by others that mattered and they had been given Favorite as theirs.
So she could deny it all she liked but they did not think they had misunderstood, so that denial made no sense.
The tablet was long forgotten by the time they found Witch out in a courtyard with Isma. They thought it might have slipped off the roof. They couldn’t remember.
Isma greeted them, but they did not focus well on her and she eventually left. That gave them the chance to ask Witch to make it all make more sense.
They let it stream over. What the red sister said, then what the queen-mother said. A query ran under it, prodding softly- share? They were named by someone. Could they share what that someone said about it? What it felt like, to have a name? How to tell when someone did have one?
Then, while Witch had not had time to begin opening those memories for their prodding to access, they pushed pouting words over.
They will not let me have your name.
‘Pouting’ was certainly new. In the years they had spent alone, they’d never done it. But they thought this was an insult on the loud one’s behalf, and this much could be said about all of them: they protected each other the way they would protect their limbs and body.
They were doing it all wrong, they found out.
(Names, pets, plants, all of it, apparently.)
They’d started doing all the plant things that the queen-mother told them to in their ‘garden’ and the tiktik just walked up and down the walls here like it did everywhere except their arms.
“You must feed it,” the queen-mother walked in once and told them.
That was just the start of what they’d been doing wrong, apparently.
They tilted their head. Feed it? They thought tiktiks just walked circles around tunnels. They didn’t get fed anything. Why were they automatically supposed to think it did?
She’d come in and closed the entrance behind her before going to look at the tiktik up on the ceiling. It meant craning both their heads back. They waited for it to get to the wall and crawl through moss until it was almost to the floor before they went and pulled it off. There. Now she could see it easier. They lifted it up to her and her tendril-branches (they were called branches but they didn't think there was that big of a difference between them and their current limber arms or the tendrils of the bigger ones) came down to maneuver both it and their arms.
“Hold it legs down,” she told them. Her branches were correcting it as she talked. “This is its top.” She brought the tip of their arm and ran it down the pointy thicker-plate-covered side of the tiktik. “Bugs do not like to be turned onto their top.”
Oh? Oh, there was a right and wrong way. They did not know.
They tried to wiggle it and their arms til they could take hold of it the way she told them to. It did wiggling of its own. More of it, this way, compared to on its side or ‘top’ or head or back-
“Keep the head even,” she corrected further.
Their arm pushed bit by bit to get beyond its stubby neck and fit under its chin. She hummed for them and so they had apparently done it right.
“When you carry it, be sure to do it like this: gentle and firm. You are much stronger than it, little root.”
She directed them to sit down, still with the tiktik, and then left with a command to stay. When she returned, she had brought much with her. There were different shallow trays and bowls and bags.
“Bugs require water and nutrients, just as plants do,” the queen-mother said. “You have remembered to provide this for your garden here?”
They’d not really done much of anything with their…they had a garden now, they guessed. Their garden. They’d only done what she first showed them to do. There were pipes in the palace that led to every courtyard and green room, so they’d splashed some water everywhere when they came.
This was also not quite enough, apparently. But she was focused on the tiktik first.
“Which bowl do you like best for your…pet?” she asked them.
Their first reaction was to think they would not have one. They didn’t often. They didn’t used to, really, at all.
But they kept the tiktik in their lap and leaned over to poke through the different ‘options’. One was clear. One was metal. One was white. Another was also white, but painted in parts. The tiktik was mostly white, but it had more gray and brown under it. They pointed at the final bowl. It was the most like it.
She showed them how high to fill the bowl from the faucet and where to put it, partway in the dirt, so that the tiktik didn’t knock it over and spill it in one go.
They ended up having to pick another tray for the ‘food’. It seemed like it could eat enough of what was in the room to start with, but what did they know? They did not eat enough to know. They did not eat at all.
“Would you like to plant anything new while you are here?” the queen-mother asked, after all this. She didn’t ask things very often. She just sort of told, with anyone.
They watched the tiktik sleeping in a mossy bush. It wouldn’t die soon here where it hadn’t had puddles from the sewers to drink from. If it had, what would they have done then? Just found an identical tiktik? What did they get out of the first one? They didn’t think they understood, but they hadn’t in the first place either. She’d known what to do with it even though they did not think she’d wanted it in here to start with.
And she spent a lot of her time in her own gardens. She must enjoy it. They nodded for her. She could teach them how to enjoy it too, just she’d taught them how much more complicated ‘pets’ apparently were.
Actually, it was a bit enjoyable. They didn’t think dirt was especially thrilling, but keeping track of all the different types of plants they’d put under different mounds and remembering that each had to be watered or ‘fertilized’ in different ways meant they had to actually think instead of being unfocused.
Even though this was their ‘secret’, as the queen-mother had put it the first time she brought them here, she’d brought Isma and Dryya in once and the knights came back with her more times too. Who were they keeping it a secret from?
It didn’t have to matter. The queen-mother was weird sometimes.
Dryya didn’t do anything but stand back (she had complimented their tiktik once too and that had almost felt like a compliment to them somehow). Isma got in the dirt though. The first of the plants were poking out by now. The queen-mother showed them how to get rid of some that were all too close together, how to prune back the bushes that grew on the walls when they started getting too big and creeping over for the garden, and more. She also said she was glad one of them liked gardening.
Isma brought their attention over when she had them pull out a larger flower than the former they’d gotten rid of. It was big underneath. How was it big underneath? They shook gently to get some dirt off and poked at all the plant under. It wasn’t green. It looked like a different plant altogether from the flower. Was it a different plant? Parasite. All fragile and busy and wormy.
But Isma told them they were looking at roots and the queen-mother mostly listened, looking pleased, sometimes adding to the knight’s explanation. Roots were a part of the plant, not a parasite. They’d seen some before on the smaller seedlings they’d gotten rid of. They kept growing down there just like the plants did.
The queen-mother said she was a root. She didn’t look like the wispy clumps under their hand. Hm. The more dirt they shook loose, the more they supposed they could see some resemblance.
She was supposed to be their mother. That meant a part of them came from her. Not all of it came from the place below.
They reached to touch their own curving horns. Hm, hm. They didn’t look much like hers. Neither did Witch’s. But the other two…They could see it. Part plant. They were all part plant. Or root. Part root. These were roots. Scraggly branching things that went in the dirt and grew really fast when out of sight under there, as long as they got watered and ‘fed’.
The discovery felt exciting.
(Maybe the queen-mother was right. Maybe they did like this. Not a whole lot excited them.)
The quiet one wasn’t near and Witch was riding trams, out of reach. But they weren’t the ones that looked the most like the queen-mother anyways. They didn’t have branching roots like she did.
They reached around the palace, excited.
Tall One. Tall One, they called, through image, through will, through feeling. It did not need to be made of words. Will was enough. Come here. Come here, Tall One.
Isma and the big upside-down root didn’t know what they did. The knight had kept talking. But they carefully pushed the plant back down into the soft dirt they’d recently upended. They scooted some more of it over. The tall one had been in their room before. They were coming closer, now.
They got up and walked to the hall when the proximity drew near. The Tall One was close, by now, but they crossed that distance and reached up with one arm. It was an obvious gesture, as learned around this palace. Up. Take.
Their bigger kin obliged and let put their hand around the tip of the arm. The hunched one was a slow walker, so they didn’t go too fast as they headed back to their open door. Their kin went where led, still holding on.
At least until they turned the corner of the doorway and went in, they hadn’t seemed too upset. Inside, Dryya stood against the wall half-asleep while the tiktik was napping on her shoulder. Isma was humming on the ground, weaving vines along the pipe of a faucet. The queen-mother looked at their entry.
Their hand and body had gone a little more stiff upon seeing her. But nothing came from them. It was a turmoil silenced and locked away.
That was not why they were here. This was not going to be upsetting for them. They just took their kin over to where they’d been a moment before.
They pulled on the hand. Tug. Tug. The Tall One finally understood. One knee bent and let them down to the dirt slowly. The other followed. Good, good, they were sitting now. Tall or not, in this pose, they could reach and push them enough.
They sat too and patted the dirt, before beginning to carefully push it around. They pulled the plant out and brushed dirt from its teeny roots. These, they held up towards the Tall One’s face. Do you see? Their free hand lifted and prodded along the sibling’s tall, splitting horns.
Do you see?
Locked. Quiet. Maybe they didn’t see yet. Maybe they did.
They’d show more clearly. The plant was supposed to go into composting, because it had been overcrowding some new ‘bulbs’. They tossed it aside so that they had freed both arms.
Here, tall one. Will show.
Water made the ground even softer. Mud. They did not like or dislike mud. The queen-mother always made them take a bath after getting in it, though.
A worthy sacrifice.
Plants needed water anyways and they were plants. Sort of. It was more believable with the tall one. They spent most of their time locked up in a room of dirt and mud by their choice! They weren’t allowed in so they couldn’t see what they did in there with him, but it made sense now.
The tall one was still kneeling patiently, a little hunched over, on the ground. There was slight pain from them. From kneeling like that, from their back. Pain came from them rather often at movements.
So they would be very careful with the bigger sibling. First, they went up to be in front of them. They pushed their neck gently and the tall one began to oblige them. They allowed the smaller sibling to bend it all the way over and push into the mud. They piled more dirt around that, before looking to the queen-mother. See! See? Was this right? They were all born from her. She was a plant. With roots, like things here, even if she also had some on top of her head too. She was covered in long silks that got muddy and then washed soon after and they rarely saw what was underneath. It was very bright. There were more roots down there though. Just hidden by the robes. The flower only had the roots under. If they put the green side in the dirt and left the brown scraggles out on top, they would not do well.
They continued to pile dirt up absently until the obliging patience got too twanged with pain and they realized how the tall one had to stay bent like this. They couldn’t pull their legs up in the air to straighten their back. Too bad. Their time in the watered dirt would have to be short.
When they undug and- just as gently- pulled their kin’s horn’s back up, they were a little disappointed to see that none of the branching-points had grown longer.
That was not as disappointed as the tall one was, to get pulled off for a bath before they could escape unnoticed.
By the time a fifth sibling showed up, their garden wasn’t something they needed directions with. But they still liked help and when others came to provide ideas. That was mostly just because it would be others around, working on the same things they were.
They’d organized where flowering plants went by colors and had bushes and vines up on one wall, rather than all of them- the way their horns went high only on one side. Since the flowers died quickly, they kept a routine for planting new ones.
In the meantime, they would cut a few on the stem the way the queen-mother showed them and put them in vases in their room until they wilted and went on the ‘dead things shelf’ instead.
The others didn’t have something like that in their rooms, most of the time.
But that was fine.
Their rooms were theirs.
This one wasn’t.