Chapter Eight: Perspective

Ashilis was shaken from his reverie by sounds in the darkness. Chains clanking, people stumbling, and quiet murmuring. A group of people, probably four or five, were approaching the Auditorium.

Pell noticed them too, and quickly started gathering his mushrooms. "They're back! Come on, we've got to get a good spot," he whispered, then hurried through the door and into the light.

Ashilis hesitated, worried that his lack of mushrooms when he had ostensibly been farming would be noticed, but he scurried after Pell after another prompting. Other Orators saw them rushing towards a section of flatter ground between the cooking plates and the wall of the dark room—where you didn't have to worry about the floods—and hurried to follow. A basin had been ripped off of its mounts and flipped upside down to act as a podium of sorts here. Ashilis found it ridiculous to waste the precious container for something so unnecessary, but the Orators seemed to get enough water with the remaining nineteen, so he supposed it was alright.

Pell sat down within a few feet of the podium, but Ashilis hung back, saying that he had promised to sit with someone else. Really, he just didn't want to risk one of the organizers picking him out as an unfamiliar face, but he did find Jenash, one of the cooks he had chatted with, and sat next to her near the middle of the crowd. Anticipation rose around them, like little crackles of yellow lightning frozen in midair or skittering across surfaces. Each little bolt grew slightly larger as the seconds passed.

Ashilis looked out over the gathering and marveled at just how many people lived in the Scarum. He had seen bustling crowds, but never stopped to consider just how many people made them up. The Orators had the smallest population, not counting Ashilis' own slice, and yet there were hundreds of people all sat in rows. It was no wonder that Ashilis had managed to blend in among such a massive collection of people. No one could possibly know all of the Orators by face and name.

How many morogrib had to be cooked each day to feed them all? Two per person per day, at least, so they probably had to harvest and grill close to a thousand. Suddenly, Divian's grilling methods were looking less like a high-minded attempt to improve a bad situation and more like desperation in the face of brutal necessity.

His mind reeled at the sheer responsibility of it all. Hundreds of people that had to be fed, organized, and kept track of. How was he going to do something similar? His slice was less densely populated, but he didn't have the benefit of cherry-picking who lived in it. The people of Ashilis' slice were those that either refused to join a gang, or weren't accepted by one. They wouldn't have the more uniform mindsets of the other groups. The Patrol gathered honorable and disciplined people, the Orators took the thoughtful sorts, and the Throttlers—as best he could tell with their insistent exclusion of him from their slice—took the wild and violent types. Taken uncharitably, that left Ashilis with dull-minded, dishonorable cowards. The dregs that refused to be part of something greater than themselves.

A hush fell over the crowd, drawing Ashilis out of his worries. Milo had arrived, flanked by the four Orators who had been sent to retrieve him. As he stepped up to the podium, the bolts of Anticipation started moving, suddenly bursting from near perfect stillness into frantic motion as they bounced around the crowd. Despite the umbra's activity, the Orators themselves stayed commendably quiet. Perhaps the Patrol didn't have a monopoly on discipline after all.

"According to Kishnar," Milo began voice trembling. Ashilis leaned forward, trying to hear him better. This is what all of the pretending had been building up towards. "Body amastya is one of the six fundamental forces that make up the world. An object or creature's shape, color, texture, and strength are derivative qualities of its Body."

What? Ashilis thought.

Milo paused, and immediately a voice form the crowd jumped in. "Reflectiveness is another derivative!" They called.

"According to Kishnei, not Kishnar," another corrected.

Milo cringed and started to step away, but one of his escorts gently pushed him back up to the podium with some words of encouragement. "H-however, in order to maintain their shape, all physical things require Bonds, another of the six forces," he continued, looking directly down. "Without Bonds, Body is pitch black and floats, formless, like smoke. We call this state darkness."

Another pause, but no one jumped in with any corrections this time, so Milo carried on. "Inversely, Bonds without Body manifests as energy, most often heat, cold, or light. Bonds manifesting as heat or cold has no observed effect on unbound Body, but light burns away darkness by binding it into shadows."

Jenash spoke up from beside Ashilis. "Physical Bonds behaves as you say, but there are also mental and spiritual bonds that connect people to one another in other ways. As far as we can tell, neither mental nor spiritual Bonds are affected by lacking a Body."

Someone else called out another correction, but Ashilis was too stunned to listen to it. Most of this was going over his head, even conceptually, which meant he probably wouldn't have known what they were talking about even if his memories had never been drained. He was totally baffled, but Jenash wasn't? A cook was assigned to memorize information relating to—if he was understanding this right—the compositional forces of reality itself?

"Jekenna theorized that unbound Body in the dark room is one of the reasons that morogrib grow so quickly. Their waving roots absorb the darkness and bind it into their own shapes, allowing them to mature at an accelerated rate," Milo was saying. Ashilis forced himself to pay attention. This part sounded like practical information, and he could understand practical things.

"However, living things require Continuity, a third of the six forces, in order to grow. This is why fertilizer and water are required to cultivate morogrib," Milo said. "Sources of Continuity are currently the main bottleneck in the farming process, but Jekenna again hypothesized that leaving portions of the dark room fully uninterrupted by activity would encourage Continuity to collect there naturally and negate the need for care. This hypothesis has yet to be tested, as creating reliable paths through the dark room has proven difficult, and we cannot be certain that any given area is constantly undisturbed by other gangs."

A few more corrections were made by the crowd, but they were each minor things. One posited that Continuity was actually the first of the six forces, though they offered no reason as to how that had been determined or why it mattered. Another claimed that Jekenna's hypothesis had been tested, and proven false. Each of them was a technicality that was so far beyond Ashilis' understanding that he couldn't fathom why they were significant.

Milo's recitation ended shortly afterward. It had been shorter than Ashilis was expecting, and the general rumble of surprise that ran through the crowd seemed to share the sentiment.

"I guess he's new here," Jenash murmured. "Barely has five paragraphs memorized." She elbowed Ashilis in the side. "Almost embarrassing, yeah?"

Ashilis forced a chuckle, but couldn't bring himself to agree. He wondered if anyone actually understood the things they were told to remember. Hopefully not. Knowing how to grill mushrooms better was one thing, but if everyone already knew all those things about the fundamentals of reality, then Ashilis was much further behind than he thought, and his grand aspiration to make things better would die the next time the Vicarts got a hold of him.

Slowly, the crowd began to disperse, and Ashilis went with them. He followed Pell into the dark room, but excused himself from any conversations and started back towards his slice. He tried to apply his mind to the task of uniting his segment of the Scarum, but what he had learned about darkness kept distracting him. He didn't think he understood it all, but they had basically been saying that darkness was composed of the bodies of objects or creatures that weren't bound together anymore. Where did it come from, then? Did things just spontaneously unwind into dark smoke, only to be consumed by light? Darkness arose from the ground, that much was observable to anyone, but did that mean that the world was slowly shrinking as more and more of it became unbound? Could people turn into darkness?

The idea that the smoky darkness around him was made of the same stuff as he was disturbed him. He kept imagining corpses dissolving into black smoke and joining the blackness, jealously obscuring the vision of the things that they used to be. Once he thought of that, he couldn't help but picture himself suddenly coming apart at the seams, body splitting like a freshly torn morogrib stem, ripped into smaller and smaller bits like an orator cook was pulling him apart for easier grilling. He would become darkness and be burned away by the light.

The waving morogrib roots stirred the gloom into horrifying shapes that Ashilis swore he could see faces in, and he couldn't help but interpret the clanking of chains in the distance as people puffing into smoky darkness, leaving their chains to fall to the ground. Ashilis was all but sure that he had shared the same fate. The anxiety got so bad that he almost didn't want to step into the light of his slice, for fear that he would puff away into nothingness or be permanently bound into a shadow. He had to take a few deep breaths, then close his eyes and march through the door, pretending that he wasn't actually leaving the darkness since he couldn't see the light.

Ashilis opened his eyes after a couple dozen steps. He hadn't turned into darkness and burned away. Of course he hadn't. Here, in the light, it seemed obvious that he wouldn't. If people could dissolve into darkness, he surely would've heard about it before now.

Right?

Ashilis shook himself, dispelling his fanciful anxieties. He had a goal now, one greater than the simple acquisition of knowledge. He needed a team of reliable people to help him improve the quality of life in the Scarum. He would also need a way to convince Drym. He might just go along with what Ashilis said, regardless of his own opinion on the matter, but Ashilis had resolved to make sure Drym was on board with his plans moving forward, and he intended to make good on that.

He began the walk back to his cell, keeping to the higher, flatter ground by traveling along the wall of the dark room at first. This let him avoid the glaring eyes around the basins and cooking plates, though it took longer. That was fine. Ashilis wanted to get an idea of the people here anyways.

How many people were in his slice? He thought it was less than the Orators, though most people claimed a cell and hid there most of the time. The rest prowled around the Scarum, searching for members of the first group to bully. Ashilis was surprised that these sorts weren't all recruited by the Throttlers. Perhaps they were too wild to work within the Throttlers' system—such as it was—or, more concerningly, perhaps they weren't wild enough for the gang.

Not everyone was active at the same time, by necessity, so it was hard to estimate how many people actually lived in the slice. Ashilis made a mental note to do a walkabout and peek into the cells. Most people operated alone, so each "lived-in" cell could reasonably be estimated to represent a single person. That was as good as he could get for an accurate count.

The crowd in the common area right now was relatively thin, which was how things usually were at the midpoint between floods. People were either farming in the dark room or resting in their cells. Ashilis didn't spot anyone that stood out as obviously capable, though he supposed that anyone truly skilled would know to avoid seeming like they were. That was how you got by in a place like this.

Ashilis grimaced. He would probably have to start talking to people individually. It wasn't likely that the people of this slice would accept a conversation as readily as the Orators did. They didn't have the same general trust that the Orators had. He was sure there were plenty of people like Bellavie, who took advantage of people's desire to have a friend so that they could take advantage of them.

Not for the first time, Ashilis wished that he could take Bellavie with him to talk to people. She had taught him a lot over these last few flood cycles, and Ashilis thought that, with proper direction, she could be very helpful. Ashilis felt that he had learned quickly, and he managed fine on his own in most conversations, but Bellavie had much more experience.

Not to mention her more supernatural advantages. Ashilis took a moment to make sure his thoughts were his own. He was still pretty far away from his cell, but Bellavie had never said how far her abilities could reach. Ashilis didn't notice any logical swerves or lapses in thought, though, so he was reasonable sure that he truly did want to see Bellavie freed.

The trick would be bringing her around to his plan. That felt even more challenging than convincing Drym that she ought to be freed. Though Bellavie was cooperative right now, and she didn't seem to hate him like she did Dyrm, Ashilis had no illusions that she would remain helpful once she got her freedom. The problem was that he didn't think he could convince her with high-minded appeals to her morality. He would need some kind of ironclad logical reason for why sticking with him would be to her benefit.

Would being a high-ranking member of the new gang be worth it to her? Not if Ashilis couldn't immediately prove its efficacy. Maybe he could release her, then slowly gain her trust by other means until she decided to work with him of her own volition. It wasn't as though she could run away. Though, as Ashilis considered it, she would probably have no trouble hiding from him.

In the end, it would come down to trust.