On the Hills of Eden

Pallas’ eyes split wide open, meeting the dimly lit roof cover above and the giant shadow of some incomprehensibly mangled creature cast upon its surface.

She jolted up into a sitting position, pulling the blanket that covered her and the two other girls off of herself as she did so.

“Oh- Pallas?”

She turned to her left, seeing as Rumi remained atop her makeshift bed, arms stretched out before her and obscuring the light of the lantern placed just by her head; the mangled creature moving in sync with her as she rubbed the scars on her left forearm with her fingers.

“Rumi?”

“Sorry, did I scare you?”

“...No,” Pallas replied, looking away to see Soleiman sat slumbering by the other end of the wagon by the driver’s seat. She caressed her hands over the soft fluff of the bench she slept on, sliding it over to feel the relatively tough thinly-covered wooden surface of Rumi’s bed.

“You’re still awake?” she asked Rumi.

“Just doing some shadow puppetry,” she replied, quickly using the fingers of her right hand and the palm of her left to form the shape of an owl. “Since I couldn’t sleep.”

“You wanna switch beds?”

She shook her head.

“I’m fine. I'm more used to sleeping on harder surfaces anyway; anything soft makes my back feel horribly bent.”

“Oh, okay.”

Rei. The new name of that Kitsunite she saw in her dreams.

“Did you have another bad dream?”

Pallas nodded.

“It doesn’t seem like I’ve bled or anything, but…” she trailed off, trying to put to words the… intriguing set of events she bore witness to. “I think I’ve just seen my mother.”

She went on to relay the events of the dream to Rumi, pulling the covers back over her feet as Rumi sat herself up to better absorb what she was saying.

“What?” Rumi asked, dragging the word out in disbelief. “But you didn’t get to see their faces?”

“I… I just don’t remember,” Pallas replied. “It’s like what the two of them looked like were somehow omitted from the dream. From my memory, even.”

“And this has never happened before?”

“No,” Pallas replied. “I always remember everything I see in my dreams. Just not this time.”

“Huh,” Rumi huffed, tilting her head to the side. “I wonder what that could mean.”

Could that Kitsunite really have been her mother?

Pallas didn’t quite know what to think.

“You said they went to someplace called Manarat, right?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “It’s somewhere nearer to Shafraturriyah, if I’m not wrong. At the western end of the Silent Valley.”

“Well maybe we can ask the Kitsunites in Houzen if she did anything related to that too,” Rumi suggested.

“Mmm. Yeah, we should.”

If her dreams were somehow real retellings of events in the past- as suggested by the one she had outside of Porthopolis- then she would have a lot of reconsidering to do. Because that would mean that all those other dreams, all the hundreds, if not thousands of them she’d seen in her nineteen years of life, could be real too.

She just had to find out when the events of the visitation of Manarat occurred. Something the Kitsunites should be able to provide.

“Actually, maybe Soleiman could know a thing or two about that,” Rumi said. “We could ask him when he wakes up.”

“Mm, good idea,” she replied. Sometimes she forgot that her brother was a walking encyclopaedia. One that unfortunately had a gap in its database encompassing the past two decades or so since the entombing of the 2nd Soteira and the accompanying information blockade imposed by Lord Gravitas.

“Alright then,” Pallas said, shooting a glance at the miniscule sliver of orange off in the distant sky as she laid back down onto the bench. “See you when morning comes, Rumi.”

“Oh,” Rumi replied, only slowly inching herself back into lying down. “Goodnight, then.”

…

Sometime passed. Pallas opened her eyes again, looking to her left to see as Rumi stared wide-eyed at the cover above them.

“Are you sure you don’t want to switch?”

“No, really, I’m okay with the bed,” she insisted. “I just… had a bad dream of my own, too. And it put me out of the mood to sleep.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Mmm,” Rumi hummed. “It was about one of my old owners waking me up to clean their vomit off the floor. Their... alcohol-filled vomit, from a night out of drinking. And… I really thought I was back there. That I was still their…”

Pallas turned over, placing a hand on Rumi’s heart before she could draw her hands in in fear.

“Not anymore, Rumi,” she said. “You’re with us now, and we’re not ever letting them take you back.”

To hell with Thosmodeus’ notion of mercy not deterring the greedy.

“...Thank you, Pallas,” she replied in turn, turning to look softly at Pallas’ hand on her chest and placing her own atop of it. “Yeah. I’m with you guys now.”

They continued to lie in silence, their view of the sky through the wagon’s entrances turning progressively more scarlet by the minute, the gurgling of the nearby river’s waters filling the background with a comforting white noise.

Gently, the wind outside began picking up speed, the heat of the morning sky once again kickstarting the northerly breeze that would carry the scents of Minerva all the way to the fringes of Otia’s Domain.

“Pallas?”

“Hmm?”

“Wanna go check on the traps?”

Surrendering to their inability to fall asleep again, the two of them put away their blankets and swapped into their day-to-day clothes, Rumi wasting not another moment to step out onto the grass in hasty excitement.

Careful not to rouse either Qingxi or Soleiman, Pallas quickly followed along, catching up to Rumi as she stood by the river’s edge.

They looked out over the river, seeing as its rapids parted and rippled slightly at four different points- indicative of the four bottle traps they’d affixed to the river bed sometime last afternoon in preparation for breakfast.

“You sure you’ll be okay with just one hand?” Pallas asked, both her and Rumi rolling their pants up to just below their knees.

“Absolutely!”

They waded out into the waters of the shallow river, feeling as its cool currents brought forth the meltwaters of the Houzen Peaks and ran them through their toes. Carefully, they made their way to the first two of the four traps, plunging their hands into the splashing currents and yanking the jars out of the river.

“Aw,” Pallas said, the trap she’d retrieved evidently lacking in any catch. “Any luck, Rumi?”

She turned around to see as Rumi peered into her jar, watching as a singular tiny fish aimlessly swam within it.

“Not really.”

They placed the two jars back on shore, returning to investigate the two traps they’d set up further away from the river’s banks.

And again, the jar Pallas retrieved turned out to be a complete dud. What excitement she had suddenly fizzled away as she realised the few brownish-grey specks she had seen within it were just some odd-coloured bits of bait.

“Well,” she remarked to herself. “If that isn’t unfortunate.”

“Pallas!”

She looked back up to see as Rumi pulled her jar from beneath the rapid’s ripples, water sloshing about her feet as she hoisted the fish-filled trap before her with her right hand. The individual little fishies swam about in a panic within the jar, their shimmering scales and frantic movements making it look like a mini blizzard had been trapped within.

“Look!”

“Oh, woah!” she replied, splashing over excitedly to closer inspect the bounty. “Great! I really thought we were going to have another biscuit breakfast again.”

“Well, it’s going to be a fish breakfast now!” Rumi replied, smiling proudly.

The two of them trundled back to the shore, their legs sloshing through the river’s flow as they did so. Looking down, the water was so clear that despite all the splashing and foaming and rippling atop its surface, they could still roughly make out the shapes of their feet.

So clear that before they even made it back to the shore, Rumi could pick out a familiar shape zipping by in her periphery.

A shape she knew would taste spectacular.

“Oh! Pallas!” she called out, splashing to close the gap between them.

“Yeah?”

“I think I just saw a shabout! Can we try catching it, please?”

“How big was it?”

“About the size of my forearm.”

“And you want me to try grabbing it with my hands?”

Rumi nodded excitedly in response.

“It’s one of my specialty fishes, I promise!”

“Alright, alright,” Pallas assented, smiling as she did so. If Rumi said something was her specialty, you can bet a pretty penny any of the other three party members would go to great lengths to let her get her hand on it. She set her jar down, reaching to take Rumi’s from her to see what kind of live bait they had to work with.

“But just to confirm,” she said, looking up from the jar as flashbacks to that one breakfast they had several days ago raced through her mind. “You’re sure you want to do this? You know the whole saying, right? One bird in the hand is worth two in the bush?”

Rumi nodded again, barely able to contain her excitement.

“Even though we might have to settle for a... biscuit breakfast if we don’t catch it?”

“We will catch it! I’m not letting an opportunity like this slip out of our hands!”

“Alright then,” Pallas responded, convinced by her unprecedented conviction. “Let’s catch some shabout!”

Pallas sank into a half-squat, blood armour rippling over her forearms as Rumi withdrew the first of the little fishies they would use as bait from the bountiful jar.

“Ready, Pallas?”

“Mhm!”

As Rumi's eyes landed on the silvery blur of a shabout rapidly closing in on them from upstream, she threw the live bait forth to intercept it- the little fish splashing down just in front of it. Then, she quickly sloshed over to position herself behind Pallas, tucking the jar under her left arm so her right would be free to catch anything that may slip through Pallas’ hands.

The silvery blur stopped for a while, before spiralling about and making a beeline straight towards Pallas’ feet as the bait flowed along with the current in its disorientation.

“Now!”

Pallas threw her hands into the water below, her fingers digging into the hard scales of the shabout.

“Rah!”

Stepping backwards, she tore the fish from the rapids, the entire metre-long behemoth spasming about and sending streaks of water soaring through the air with each flick of its tail. Pallas clamped her hands down on the thing to try and get a better grip, but every ounce of pressure she put into ensnaring it was played against her.

The fish jerked about, causing her hands to slip off of its slippery form as it flopped its tail against her face and dove back into the water.

“Rumi!”

“On it, on it!”

She sloshed around hurriedly, nearly falling over into the water in her excitement as she repositioned herself to intercept the fleeing silvery blur. She threw her clawed right palm into the blue, poised perfectly to grab the fish.

But it closed down on nothing, as the shabout slipped past and through the gap in her legs.

She spun around, swirling her left leg through the water and feeling as it collided with the fish’s body. Wasting not another moment, she speared the rapids with her hand again, this time grabbing a hold of the shabout’s tail.

“I got it, Pallas!”

“Don’t let go! I’m coming-”

There was a glint in the water. No, there were several glints, all silver. All blurs. Speeding on down the current directly towards them. Towards Rumi.

“Watch out Rumi!”

A surging torrent of fish then split from the raging rapids of the river’s flow, shabout after shabout taking to the skies in one grand orchestrated operation to rescue their captured fellow.

Rumi spun about on the spot, facing the oncoming fish storm just in time to get clocked in the face by one.

“Rumi!”

She struggled to get to where Rumi was, inching her way forward as the shoal’s deluge sent arcipluvian sprays of foam into the air and fought to throw her off of her feet. The blitzing blizzard of fish filled the air with silver and overwhelmed her with an unstoppable barrage of fish attacks so intense she had to close her eyes to avoid being blinded by a rogue flopping shabout.

“Rumi!” She called again.

She fought to open her eyes, cracking them open just in time to see as Rumi was hit simultaneously by five different shabouts. Their coordinated movements and elegant flailing akin to that of a veteran troupe of ballet dancers pirouetting across the surging stage of the river.

She saw as the fish twirled and spun about in the air, curtsying just before they disappeared back under the rippling surface of the river’s waters. Taking their fishy friend and the jar of bait along with them.

The deluge seemed to die down, the last of the shoal’s stragglers flashing by them beneath the waters as they stood, completely disoriented, in the river.

Pallas finally managed to get to where Rumi was, putting a hand on her shoulder as she stood hunched and with her back turned to Pallas. Shaking, ever so gently.

“Rumi?”

She turned around, a stymied smile plastered onto her face.

“Are… you okay?”

“Yeah,” she responded, half giggling. “Yeah, I’m fine. Did you see that? The fish…”

She trailed off, putting her hand on her knees as she laughed silently.

“Huh?”

“I… sorry, sorry,” she continued, getting back up as he put herself together and wiped the water off of her face. “Yeah, I’m okay. But… we lost all our catch.”

“Ah, well…” Pallas trailed off. “Biscuit breakfast isn’t all that bad, anyway. I guess.”

“What are you guys doing?”

They turned around, seeing as Qingxi, roused from her slumber by the smell of frenzied fish, poked her head out of the wagon.

“Oh, we were just checking on the traps, but, uh…” Pallas trailed off.

“We had a good catch!” Rumi cut in, trying to salvage the situation. “But… I saw a shabout and I’m really good at cooking them, so… we tried to catch it. Which… uhm… didn’t turn out really well, since they all got away and took our catch with them.”

“Oh,” she replied, sitting herself down on the stairs.

“Well we technically have one fish left,” Pallas said. “So, uh… It’s not an all biscuit breakfast, at least.”

That one fish in question was barely the size of her finger.

“Where did you say they swam off to again?”

“Downstream,” Rumi said.

“Funny,” Qingxi remarked. “They should be migrating upstream this time of year.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Shabouts usually migrate upstream every summer to try to get to the cooler waters of the mountains,” she said. “I used to go fishing a lot to catch fish for my mother and the other ladies at the dojo. Especially shabout, which I quite like too. So we could probably catch them if we chase them downstream.”

“But we only have one bait left,” Pallas countered.

“Oh, we won’t be needing bait,” Qingxi responded, diving back into the wagon. “Because…” she started, emerging again.

“We have knives.”

They rode on, their horses galloping alongside the rushing river as they kept their eyes glued to its waters. And soon enough, they had caught up to the shoal.

They dismounted, Qingxi hurriedly distributing the three knives she had on her between the three of them.

“So… what exactly is the plan?” Pallas asked.

“Simple,” Qingxi responded, standing just by the river's edge to carry out a demonstration. “We stay still, wait, and then when a fish comes within range…” she trailed off, twirling her knife in her hand in preparation.

She burst into motion, swishing the knife downwards and scooping it back up.

“We strike.”

“Just like that?”

Qingxi nodded.

“What happens if there’s another fish storm?”

“Oh, Pallas,” Qingxi responded. “I’m a Chitite. We’re practically made to hunt fish.”

And so they got into the positions as directed by Qingxi, standing as still as stone as the waters rushed over their feet. So still, in fact, that soon those silvery streaks began to swim about them too.

“Now!”

Their three knives splashed against the currents, tearing through them and ripping their way back out into the air.

Catching…

Nothing.

Except for Qingxi, who had managed to spear two fish at once, somehow.

“Caught them!”

Almost as if on cue, the streaks began to rage once more, piercing their way into the air and engulfing the three girls in yet another deluge of fish.

Before she could have her catch stolen from her, though, Qingxi cast the two speared fish back out to shore, guiding them using a tunnel of her wind to keep them on course.

A series of shabouts managed to spring forth in immaculate coordination, synchronising their interception to meddle with her swirling winds. Just enough such that one of their kind could break into that tunnel, saving one of their friends from being tossed to shore.

Qingxi stood gobsmacked as fish after fish flopped around about her, filling the air with a misty spray.

Well, at least they still had one catch.

...

She caught a glimpse of iridescent scales snaking their way across the shore. A chain of scales, in fact, formed from several shabouts linking up tip-to-tail that reached out of the river.

Snatching their friend back.

“You've gotta be kidding me,” Qingxi said. Alright, fair enough. She'd dealt with pesky shoals before. This one would be no different.

Rumi splashed her knife back into the water as a grey shadow crept up on her, feeling as its blade met scale and flesh and coloured the currents crimson.

“Oh! I got something!”

She hoisted the knife out of the water, scooping the giant haul out of the water. Revealing…

…It to be a catfish. A massive, metre-long catfish, all balanced upon Rumi’s tiny wrist and her tiny knife.

It didn’t take long for the creature to realise the vulnerability of its attacker, and at once it began squirming and seizing about, flopping all over the gaff and splashing water over Rumi.

“Eek! Help, Pallas, Qingxi!”

The great catfish wormed its way off of the knife, but before it could splash back into the water Pallas pounded it from above with a killer hammerfist, slamming it into the riverbed.

Before the stunned fish could react, she immediately followed up with a kick, her bare foot and shin slicing through the rapids to catch the creature and send it careening back up into the air.

And for a moment, time froze. For the three of them beheld as the grey body of the catfish flopped about suspended in the air, surrounded by a shower of shabouts and airborne droplets of river water that shone golden in the light of the morning.

Pallas clenched her fist.

And slammed it straight into the body of the catfish as it fell, the bones of her fingers digging deep against its scales and sending the poor thing flying back upstream, where slammed into the rapids and quickly swam away.

She felt the fingers in her hand for a moment, unclenching her fist.

Dang. She had missed her bloodburst again.

“The shoal!”

They turned to see as Qingxi hurriedly splashed upstream, alas to no avail as the last few silvery streaks that disappeared back beneath the currents quickly reformed and raced back upstream. Leaving the three girls standing there, wet and smelling of fish, with nothing to show for it.

“Well,” Pallas sighed. “We’re done for-”

Except for Rumi, who, in the chaos of Pallas’ attack on the catfish, had managed to spear a decently sized shabout. One that was getting chased by that very same catfish.

And she stood before the two of them, holding the still weakly struggling shabout pierced upon her knife like a child holding a lolly. Smiling that same silly smile she always put on.