“Access to the nation leaders is much simpler outside of the Sevens, although I cannot speak to how things work in Fief; but in Dominion their doors are open, ruling as they do by popularity.”
“I hope you know that you’re not special to her,” the Speaker said, standing in Hexadecimal’s room, Embodiment behind her and filling the space. Hexadecimal tried not to be intimidated, and was grateful to her past self who had chosen a flat monotone as the mode of speech for both courageous and cowed communication.
“Reproach was not what I had them give you my address for.”
“And that’s just it. You’re not staying with the Great Ken, you’re staying in the Teacher’s pet quarters.”
That was a mutation of “teacher’s pet” Hexadecimal hadn’t heard of before. Hexadecimal wondered, is she… is she angry and punning?
“I’m not calling you Speaker if you’re just going to be contentious. You’re… Glurch?”
“Glurch, of Glorp, of Beardworm, third in a line of Speakers for the Great Ken Dread.” The older woman looked incredibly proud of her hereditary position, but for Hexadecimal’s money it was the elected and popular positions that merited pride. She had inherited nothing from her mother except a mask she now kept purely for visiting Spirithome, and she was a respected chronicler.
Respected, except evidently in her own quarters in the Caverns of Dread. Try as she might, “the Fish” just felt… undignified, and would not instill proper respect of the civilization she was chronicling.
“If all you’re here to do is pick a fight, what say we declare you the winner and you leave?” Hexadecimal was being contentious, yes, but she also hoped that calling Glurch on her nonsense might snap the woman out of her tantrum.
Glurch sighed and slouched just a little, before assuming her shoulders-back posture. “I was hoping to have those notes you offered. On Dread’s behalf, not my own.” Oh yes, invoke the name of my crush to get me to make nice when you come in here and insult me.
“Were you too busy being imperious to retain the substance of the meeting yourself?” Hexadecimal was largely being contentious for argument’s sake, she had already copied the notes and had no intention of hindering effective diplomacy between the Oozekennen and the Amonites.
“They are foreigners and outsiders and they bring their ideas of how things should be run when the way things are has worked for untold generations! That the Great Ken is willing to entertain them suggests she spends too much time immer—” Glurch took a centering breath and cleared her throat. “Please, would you copy over your notes at your convenience.” Hexadecimal wondered at Dread’s force of will if she made herself heard through the flapper of this mercurial and combative woman. She picked fights with interlopers and Amonites alike, and she wondered if she wasn’t hostile to Oozekennen she felt were impertinent. She thought of Smooth and wondered if she’d even gotten to speak with Dread.
Hexadecimal fished them out of a stack of sheets of paper. “Already done. I copied them over as soon as I got back.” Glurch had the dignity to look abashed when she was given what she asked for out of hand, in good faith done as soon as Hexadecimal had possessed the time.
“You have my thanks. With respect—” Hexadecimal wondered about that, “—keep your distance from Dread. She doesn’t need you muddling her.” Right back to hostile as soon as she had what she wanted. She certainly was an exponent of a hereditary position of status and presumably wealth. Perhaps not wealth, aside from their dyed robes, Hexadecimal hadn’t even seen money exchanged by the Oozekennen.
Glurch bowed stiffly, and Hexadecimal was too much the outsider to know if it was disrespectfully shallow, and walked out of Hexadecimal’s room. The Embodiment remained, and Hexadecimal began to feel a little claustrophobic, a feeling she had hoped she had unlearned from her stay beneath the Orth. “Yes? How may I help you all? More vitriol to spew on behalf of your Speaker?”
The Embodiment bowed as one, leaving Hexadecimal little doubt that Glurch’s bow had been insultingly shallow, and one of them stepped forward as the others muttered amongst themselves. “We apologize for Speaker Glurch, honored Hexa. If Dread has decided to take a special interest in you… we are not ones to speak over the Speaker, but the Speaker is not rightly one to speak over the Ken. It is an uncomfortable position to be in.”
“Thus your apologizing after she had left, despite the indisputable fact she’ll know you stayed behind and could deduce why.”
“There is more politics between the Kens and Speakers than, perhaps, is ideal. Bringing in the Amonites to a position of respect and power only complicates things further. But other Oozekennen have been agitating for changes that the Great Ken has opposed, with the help of her Speaker. You have seen her only as combative, but it is a virtue when it comes to opposing the politicking of self-interested Kens.” Wherever you went, people were people. Evidently even access to the foundation of Creation didn’t change that. “She is also legitimately concerned for our Ken. Over three generations she has wasted away, and presumably even before that, and you have stirred her to greater action than in living memory.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. I met her up in the Necropolis, something which nobody has believed, and that is a considerable distance from the primordial ooze. I would wager her concern is that Dread is slipping the lead.”
“That is entirely possible. You may not have noticed, but there was a… magnetism between the Great Teacher and our Ken.” Oh that I hadn’t noticed. “They fascinated one another on sight, and that also threatens our Speaker. The Ken is free to dismiss her, or worse yet to eschew the position of Ken and take up a lay life.” If she’s been leading the faith for three generations, hasn’t she earned some kind of break? She lives in terrible pain, does anyone listen to her about that?
“And if she does that I wish her the best. Going back a bit, what’s the issue with other Kens? I would think they would be in a similar position to Dread, from immersion in the primordial ooze.”
”Alas, that is not the case. Immersion is subject to the whims of the Ken, and might be as little as a hand or foot. Some even take the primordial ooze to a pool and dilute it in regular water and then make a display of full immersion, as though the pool had been filled entirely with the primordial ooze, and then allow their ego and will to drive their Speaker and their students.”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“So it’s not a friendly contention that Dread faces, with fellows of her faith all aspiring to the most effective path to enlightenment.”
The Embodiments laughed quietly. “If you want friendly contention, you want the Amonites. They have made an art form out of it.” And a relationship archetype, evidently. But good-natured debate, or even bad-natured debate, seemed to Hexadecimal to be an essential aspect of developing a faith. And the Oozekennen were a developing faith, given that they were the remaining exponent of one which had failed or fallen or whatever.
“But surely, if a Ken speaks from their own will, their students can simply leave? When I was coming from Abyss to Fish,” it was just too clunky to say Cavern of Dread conversationally. Now Hexadecimal saw the reason for the acronym neologism. “I met with a pilgrim—I mean, there are specifically pilgrims’ quarters for those who came to see the Great Ken!” Hexadecimal was getting a little excited, having the feeling she was getting the inside scoop on the workings—or failure to work—of the Oozekennen faith.
“If they know that other Kens exist, that they can leave an abusive Ken without incurring weight upon their soul, they surely do. But that is not always something they know. If the Great Ken were like the Amonite Teacher, traveling from place to place, that might simplify things. That could be the Great Ken’s reasoning for slipping away so high up as Abyss. And then, again, sometimes the Kens are sincere and the Speakers are corrupt. So as you can see, our Speaker has a great deal to worry about, and her combativeness, while perhaps not the best for her own enlightenment, has maintained our Ken’s position of primacy amongst the Oozekennen.” And that position of primacy maintains the capitol, the monastery, and the Oozekennen’s reign over the Amonites. A lot was riding on Glurch. It didn’t make her any less rude, but it did explain some of why she acted the way she did.
“I would think the solution to abusive Kens and Speakers would be to send out more like you. The… Embodiments.”
“We are honored that you think so highly of us, but we are among the least of the Ken’s helpers. We would be dismissed were we to oppose a Ken.”
“You couldn’t do any worse than a lay person.”
The Embodiments turned to face one another and muttered amongst themselves for a few moments in response to this. “We will broach it with the Speaker.” You might do better to broach it with Dread, but Hexadecimal was not going to tell the acolytes what to do entirely independent of their will. That would make her no better than an abusive Ken.
Speaking of which… “There are other sincere Kens out there? Or is this religion all riding on one woman’s bony shoulders?”
“There are other sincere Kens out there, of course. Wherever you go, you will find good people and bad. But they don’t know how Dread immerses herself so long. They have sent pilgrims, Embodiments, and even their own Speakers to ask Dread what her secret is, but she just sways her head and shrugs. To her, it is a necessity. To others, a trial to be endured. Generally, it is ascribed to a state of great purity, for those who emulate her recklessly are pulled from the waters and simply stare into space.” That reminded Hexadecimal of the way she had felt from just the brief contact with Dread’s hand. She had felt as though she herself had ceased to exist.
“But please, tell us. We were busy being a barrier to the crowd, what has our Ken told you? The Speaker proclaimed nothing of value came from the conversation, that it was first year student material.” She did, did she? Hexadecimal was not going to try and do the woman any favors when she wrote about her. While her attitude might be explained, it was not excused.
“Well, I don’t know how any first-year student might find that my nephilim heritage made me ‘feel like home’ to Dread.” The Embodiments sucked in a breath at the familiar address, but Hexadecimal was committed having said it once. “She also found my aura comforting.”
“Your aura? We saw a light but did not know its source.”
Hexadecimal made the God-Star and let the Embodiments bathe in the light of her aura for a few moments, before dropping her arm.
“That is beautiful. What is the sign you made to invoke it?”
“The God-Star. It represents the eight-point star of God as infinite and without bounds. How else would one invoke God? Even those of Godswood use that sign.”
“The only thing without an end is without a beginning. Thus a circle is the embodiment of the Endless. Yet you are able to invoke what appears to be a holy aura with a different sign.”
“It is indubitably a holy aura; it keeps out impure spirits that would approach me, including undead.”
“You are indeed no Amonite, then. They consider spirit magic to be forbidden.”
“I don’t know… I got approached by one Amonite who said it was my mother who had sinned, and that it was not my fault I was an ‘abomination.’” Hexadecimal laughed. “Which went over incredibly well, as I’m sure you can imagine, but it does suggest some degree of tolerance.”
“Amonites trace their lineage through the mother.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“No, anyone who isn’t born to an Amonite mother is not an Amonite, unless they go through specific arcane rituals to earn their place amongst the faithful.”
“One could say the same of the Oozekennen. Study, discipleship, immersion of even a finger in, as they put it, ‘the waters of nothingness.’”
What the Embodiments would say to that, Hexadecimal would not find out, as the door opened and Glurch reentered the room. “I have given you more than enough time to say your goodbyes, what are you doing staying and gossiping with an outsider? There are words of Dread to memorize, to say nothing of what she might be uttering that we’re missing by our absence.” Then go back and memorize it yourself, Hexadecimal thought. She was learning a great deal from the Embodiments. Albeit not their names. Eight names would be a lot to memorize all at once anyway though, she supposed.
“Our apologies, Speaker. We will go back to the monastery immediately, and scrub the floors as penance.” Fairly standard penance. I wonder if they have to use a small brush or if they’re allowed two-handed brushes. Still, it seems a bit harsh…
“You will do nothing of the sort. You will attend the Great Ken, as I clearly need to have more words with Hexa regarding meddling in spiritual affairs.”
Hexadecimal thought to herself that she wasn’t the one to meddle. They approached her. However, she didn’t want to voice this sentiment and heap more punishment on the shoulders of the forthright and helpful embodiments. The worst Glurch could do to her was make it harder to see Dread, which might not be an entirely bad thing given her entirely doomed crush on the Great Ken.
The Embodiments filed out, and the Speaker closed the door behind them. Hexadecimal remained sitting on her bed, disinclined to show Glurch the respect of standing when she was, and unimpressed by her relative height. “Well? Go ahead and upbraid me for corrupting or detaining your acolytes. Maybe have them take a dip in the primordial ooze, if you’re so concerned about it. Catatonia sounds to me like the spirit being elevated beyond the material plane, so maybe you’re holding them back by not pushing them down the stairs.” Hexadecimal knew she was provoking the older woman, but she had borne quite enough of her pique.
Glurch colored and her face contorted, but once again she took a deep breath. Hexadecimal was almost ready to believe her fury served a practical purpose politically, given what she’d just said to the woman and her display of self-control. “You presume too much. I will not oppose Dread in seeing you, but the moment she tires of you, do not imagine that I will advocate on your behalf.”
And with that dire pronouncement, the Speaker slammed the door behind her and left Hexadecimal alone with her thoughts and a bit of bad air.
