A Fortress of Pebbles

When they returned to their dorm room at around 6am (Blink: Woodpecker o’clock), Aissaba felt dizzy – like she wasn’t the same person as when she last crossed the threshold. The stone walls and low ceilings looked heavy, as if full of water and ready to rain. Might as well sleep in the courtyard, she thought.

The walk back from the Spire had been through a Fortress she hardly recognized, a ghost town full of shadows and sudden ambushes of lightning. In spite of the hour being a prime time for research and scholarship, they’d passed no students. No noses in books, no pens on paper, no pebbles to foreheads. Just closed doors and dark windows.

Tassadu set a map pebble aflame in the sconce above the washbasin. Then, he lit another, and another.

“Overcompensating much?” said Aissaba.

Tassadu didn’t answer until he’d lit every map pebble he could find – not just the ones in wall sconces, but all the ones that Aissaba had left on the stone floor and desks. With his mission to flood the room with light complete, he looked around for something else to do. Finding nothing on his side of the room, he started picking up Aissaba’s stray papers and dirty clothes, organizing things into piles.

“Is this dirty?” he said, holding up a pair of underwear that Aissaba had worn the day before.

She snatched it away. “No,” she said. “And maybe you should get in your tub.”

He ignored her and insisted on passive aggressively tidying her side of the room. She retaliated by tossing three map pebbles into his sleeping tub, bringing the water to a boil.

“Get in,” she commanded.

Tassadu began dividing her dirty clothes pile into sub-piles for workwear and partywear.

“If you don’t, I will,” she said, disrobing.

Tassadu pretended not to notice, attacking the mess of papers and clipboards on her desk – the backlog of bureaucracy generated by recruitment tours.

She ran one of her new mind pebbles over her unshaven leg, tricking her nervous system into misinterpreting pain as pleasure. Then, to show that she meant business, she placed her confused leg into the boiling water and moaned with pleasure.

Without looking at her, he held up a blinking blue language pebble that sat in a recess on her desk. “You have messages,” he said. “Want me to check them?”

She watched the skin on her lower leg turn bright red, forming blisters within blisters. “This feels amazing!” she exclaimed. “You should really try it.”

Tassadu gritted his teeth and held the language pebble to his forehead, activating the messages. The first was an old one from Koti, inviting them to the party last night.

Aissaba’s outer layer of skin, all blisters now, began to shed into scraps. The boiling water attacked the soft tissues underneath. It felt so good that she cried out, looking up at the ceiling and calling out to a god that she knew did not exist.

(Blink: Cassandra and Orion were looking in amazement at their mother, who had just informed them that they were to take the bus to school again. “Don’t argue with your mother,” said the voice behind the newspaper, preemptively.)

Tassadu played a second message from Koti, requesting that they bring alcohol of some kind, dealer’s choice. Then, a message that said, “Holy shit! I just heard about the ceremony. Where are you guys? Did you know it’s raining outside?” Typical. The Fortress Fuckups were always the last to get the news around here.

The bones of Aissaba’s shin and toes were beginning to show now. Fascinating. Through tears of pleasure, she watched her skeleton emerge – like that of a dinosaur, excavated from sand dunes by scorching winds. “You have got to see this,” Aissaba said, panting and biting her lip.

Finally, Tassadu cracked. He always cracked first.

He rushed over, lifted her out of the tub, told her she was “too insane for her own good,” and went to work with life pebbles. When her leg was back to normal, tingling and prickling as the blood began to circulate through fresh tissues, he took her by her bare shoulders and growled into her face, “You need to take better care of yourself. I might not always be here.”

“Get in,” she commanded again, pointing at the tub.

He sank into the water, scales immediately going from angry red to relaxed blue. The color of clear skies. His eyelids drooped, half-closed. She waited for him to sigh before she allowed herself to relax and began pacing the room, lost in thought.

After a few minutes, she said, “So… are you coming with me to Montana?”

“What choice do I have?” he muttered, eyes finally shutting.

Aissaba felt relief wash over her. If she had scales, they’d be skyblue. As long as Tassadu was there, everything would be okay.

This did not stop her, however, from kicking over the piles of clothes Tassadu had built, making small swirls of chaos where there had been order. Then, she took a long look around the room, trying to memorize it all, wondering when she would be back, wondering who she would be.

“Free will is a myth,” she told him.

He grumbled, “You’re a myth” and added something about getting some sleep, even as he slipped into dreams himself. Aissaba climbed into bed and watched him from her side of the room. His wet scales glittered from all the light he’d made, and Aissaba tried to memorize this too.