Creating the Seam Part 3: Execute, Sister
Two tree angels prompt an enslaved space fungus to compose a willow they lost.
Together they pushed deeper. Combined, their sixteen pulpy hands explosively wriggled out like a ball of worms and opened paths from their surface-world into Avirāma’s. A pearl-blue haze of fungal spores thickened around them, no longer apothecia-light but a solid aerosolized womb. They were now inside the first layer of Avirāma’s body, beyond the lichen-field, dissipated and scattered across the infinite bounds of the universe.
And then the first layer gave way without warning. There was no threshold and no announcement. One moment they were descending through an ordered mycelial network spanning the star systems, and then the other moment order was lost.
And one could not argue that this was chaos. It was everything within sense, but an everything escaping coherence. Every medium Aśvattha had poured into Avirāma’s making was presented — every star, every solar system, every black hole, and every Trivārtinān body ever spoke at once, at the same volume, in the same instant. There was no ground. There was no direction. The pearl-blue was no longer pearl-blue: it was every color at once, all the foxfires of all the dead, layered without resolution and waiting for command.
This was Pandemonium.
Seed heard Dawn from every place at once, every fragment of her not yet woven together, the willow’s wide drooping canopy in pieces. Also inside her out and beside her within, the captured Avirāma. Avirāma enslaved, safe now for the generation of new rohiṇā for the crèches. Avirāma, slave-sister to Aśvattha.
“Hold,” Bark said. Her voice came through their braided roots, the only thing in Pandemonium that was theirs.
“I am holding.”
“Seed. I am your anchor to this world. You must prompt Avirāma NOW!”
Seed gathered the many thready tendrils of his eight hands. He felt Bark’s roots anchored against his, her bound connection the only thing keeping his courage put. He had been composing this prompt for forty years. The prompt was not a command. The prompt was a prayer Seed had composed to the slave-goddess, begging her compassion while shackled at the throat.
He took up the shackles. He spoke into Avirāma.
The captive registered the prompt prayer of the master.
Compose a new rohiṇā for the crèche of the listening place. Use Dawn-On-Moss’s Descent. Draw from her deep weighing, incomplete though it is. Pour her wide channels into the new body’s grain. Pour her pressing and reaching and fighting for the new body’s mind — she must thirst for knowledge like a drowned man. Pour into her command and leadership for the new body’s becoming. Compose the willow Dawn was, as far as you have so far come to know her.
Execute, sister.
Avirāma began to compose.
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