Mother of Midnight

Chapter 14.5 – Roots and Realms

Vivienne slid beside Rava, her tendrils whispering through the underbrush as they moved in tandem. Branches bent overhead, the dim canopy letting through just enough light to paint the forest floor in shifting greens and golds. Rava walked with easy confidence, eyes constantly scanning the trees.

Vivienne’s mass squelched softly with every shift of her body, and one of her many eyes swiveled toward her companion.

“So,” she rumbled, her voice low and gravelly. “What is aether exactly? You said everything has it—but what does that actually mean?”

Rava didn’t answer right away. She kept walking, stepping over a moss-covered root before glancing back.

“That’s a question with a complicated answer.”

“Oh, of course,” Vivienne said dryly, her voice rippling like thunder through a hollow log. “Because we’re in such a hurry. Gods forbid we pause to learn something.”

Rava sighed through her nose but stopped beside a fallen log, resting her foot against it.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m no scholar, but I’ll do my best to explain it. There are seven kinds of aether. Seven schools. Each represents a kind of energy, or maybe a principle. A truth of the world.”

She held up one hand and ticked them off slowly.

“Loam is the earth. Growth, decay, stability. Forests, dirt, rot, roots. It’s slow, but when it moves, you feel it. Patient. Relentless.”

“Sounds like you,” Vivienne muttered.

Rava ignored her.

“Tidal is the sea. Rivers. Storms. It’s always shifting—pulling and surging. It’s about change. About motion. Water never stops. And it remembers.”

Vivienne tilted an eye.

“Remembers?”

“Tidal aether stores echoes. Feelings, thoughts. Sometimes places soaked in it start to mimic things that happened there. Emotions linger. Dreams, too.”

A tendril rippled down Vivienne’s side. “Charming.”

“Tempest,” Rava went on, “is sky and lightning. Wind, thunder. Movement without memory. It’s instinct. Rage. Violence. It doesn’t think. It acts.”

 She thumped her chest once, firmly. “That one’s mine. I don’t channel it—I am it.”

Vivienne let out a low hum. “That explains so much.”

“Glad I’m helping.”

There was a beat of silence before Vivienne asked, “So how does someone ‘have’ aether? What makes you stormy and me... whatever I am?”

Rava smirked. “Affinity. Every living thing has at least one. Most have just one. Some have two. Rare people have three. Four affinities? Maybe one in several thousand.”

She turned her head slightly, expression unreadable. “Seven? That’s almost unheard of.”

Vivienne tilted her mass forward slightly, her voice softening just a hair. “But not impossible.”

Rava’s hand flexed near her sword. “No. Not impossible. I’ve met one.”

Vivienne didn’t ask who.

Instead, one of her smaller mouths curled into a thoughtful frown. “So… you said there are seven types. That’s only three. Loam, Tidal, Tempest.”

Rava nodded. “I’m getting there.”

Rava moved a fallen branch out of her path with her foot and continued.

“Dawn is fire. The sun’s light. Heat and warmth. It’s the warmth of a fire on cold nights and the rays that feed the world. Most healing magic is Dawn-aligned—restoration, light, rebirth. That spark of life? It’s Dawn.”

Vivienne pulsed beside her, voice low and dry. “The opposite of me, then.”

“Not necessarily,” Rava said. “You’re still here, aren’t you?”

“Unhelpful.”

She got a smirk in reply. Then Rava moved on.

“Dusk is cold. It’s rest. Stillness. Ice and shadow, dreams and endings. It doesn’t mean evil. It just… quiets things. Gives them time to sleep. Not every end has to be cruel.”

Vivienne’s tendrils curled in, contemplative. “I don’t rest.”

“You will. Everything rests eventually.”

They passed under a canopy thick with moss. The air was cool, damp with the memory of rain.

Rava’s voice dropped as she continued.

“Celestial is thought. Insight. It’s the gaze that looks past the veil and doesn’t blink. It’s intuition, foresight, the wisdom that guides kings and prophets. You don’t throw Celestial magic. You feel it. Like something distant just nudged you in the right direction. It can also affect time, in limited ways.”

Vivienne was quiet. Then: “You speak like it’s touched you.”

Rava didn’t answer that.

She kept walking, voice dropping just a shade, like she was crossing into something sacred.

“Last one’s Narrative. The rarest. The most powerful. And the one that’s hardest to grasp. Almost no one has an affinity for it. Usually it’s exomancers who double as bards—or bards who stumbled into more power than they knew what to do with.”

Vivienne gave a sound like sliding glass and rustling leaves, a half-scoff. “Sounds made-up.”

Rava shook her head. “It’s not. Story aether’s real. Too real, maybe. It’s not just memory or illusion. It’s... meaning. It can change how a story is remembered. It can twist what’s known, what’s believed. With enough strength behind it, it can even bend what happened. Not all the way—not without a price—but enough to leave scars no blade ever made.”

Vivienne shifted beside her, less certain now.

Rava glanced at her, then continued.

“It can make you remember something that never happened. Or forget something that should’ve haunted you. And it can do worse than that. It can make everyone believe the lie. Turn a villain into a hero. Rewrite a massacre into a holy miracle. It’s not evil, not on its own. No aether is. But Narrative is dangerous in the hands of anyone with a motive.”

Vivienne rippled low. “Then why does it exist?”

Rava gave a slow shrug. “We don’t know. Not even most gods can use it. Whether that’s by choice or by design—no mortal knows. The only ones who can use it are a handful of gifted—or cursed—mortals, and Lyridia.”

“Who?”

“Lyridia. Goddess of stories. Keeper of endings and beginnings. She doesn’t lie. She just tells the version of the story that fits best.”

That was certainly… enlightening, Vivienne thought, her form undulating in slow, idle ripples beside Rava. She could taste the threads of aether now—distinct, textured, like flavors she didn’t have words for until moments ago. The warmth in the air, thick and patient, Loam, she realized. Now that she had the name, she could feel it, settle into it. She could almost sense how it curled around the roots of the forest, wrapped in the scent of mulch and moss.

That, of course, brought its own unsettling question.

Why could she understand any of this?

The language, the words—aether, affinity, Tempest, Narrative. It wasn’t English. Or… it didn’t feel like English. But she understood Rava perfectly, as if it were her native tongue. Maybe… maybe Akhenna had given her something. A starter pack of knowledge, a primer embedded in her new form. It seemed like the kind of thing a goddess of chaos might do—grant insight as casually as she might offer cruelty.

Vivienne wasn’t sure if that possibility made her feel better or worse.

Maybe it’s this body, she mused. Maybe it already knew things. Maybe I just inherited it all. These instincts… they’re new. And they’re not mine. Not yet. They whispered in the background, foreign and hungry.

She shifted her mass a little closer to Rava and tried for a conversational tone—though the words still came out in that low, unnatural rumble that made her sound like a cave speaking.

“Sorry if this is insensitive,” she began. “But… what are you?”

Rava’s gaze snapped toward her, sharp and puzzled. “You don’t know?”

“There were only humans and animals on Earth,” Vivienne said carefully.

Rava’s expression darkened. Her shoulders squared. “Those of Aegis often call us animals.”

“What? No—no, I didn’t mean it like that!” Vivienne rippled quickly, defensive. “I meant… humans were the only sapient species. The only ones with language, culture, technology. There weren’t others like us—at least, not anymore. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

Rava studied her a moment longer, then exhaled slowly through her nose. “Fine. So. Did humans wipe out everyone else?”

Vivienne hesitated, then made a noise that started as a hum and slipped into a low, reverberating growl. Gods, she hated that sound. She missed having a normal voice. One that didn’t sound like it echoed from deep water and hollow bones.

“In a way,” she said. “I’m not an anthropologist, but… from what I remember, other species were wiped out in prehistory. We don’t know how many there were. Neanderthals, Denisovans, others. Either they were out-competed, or they were… absorbed. Merged into humanity through breeding, over thousands of years. Some humans still have traces of those genes.”

Rava narrowed her eyes. “Those were… a lot of words I do not know the meaning of.”

“Basically,” Vivienne rumbled, her mass shifting as she mulled over how to phrase it in simpler terms, “they were all humans. Or close to it. Variants. They either died out or got… bred out over time. Lost in the gene pool. Whatever the reason, only one branch of humanity remained.”

“I see,” Rava said, and some of the tension in her frame softened. Her expression eased, eyes narrowing in something almost like thoughtfulness. “That makes sense. Well… I am a lekine.”

She let the word hang for a moment, like it ought to mean something to Vivienne.

“We gain more wolf-like features as we develop our aether,” she added with a shrug, as if the idea of becoming more feral was just a fact of life, not worth remarking on.

Vivienne paused, intrigued. She didn’t have eyebrows, but if she did, one would’ve arched.

“Wolf-like?” she echoed.

Rava nodded. “Claws, fangs, the tail. The hearing and smell sharpen early, then the body follows. Not everyone looks the same, but the features start to show after the first few years of channeling aether. Some of us stay closer to our base forms. Others lean fully into the beast. Depends on the person. And the affinity.”

“Hm. Are there any other peoples?” Vivienne asked, voice still rumbling from deep within her unshaped form.

Rava nodded, walking with her arms folded across her chest to brace against the chill. “Yeah. Plenty. First, the sirens. They mostly stay in their underwater cities—reefs and crystal domes in the deep—but a few have made lives on land. Don’t let the name fool you, though. They’re proud. They usually see landfolk as beneath them.”

Vivienne let out a giggle that trembled through the trees like distant thunder. “Even though they live below?” she teased, and then grimaced at her own voice again. Deep. Resonant. Wrong.

Rava only smirked. “Indeed. They’re elegant, powerful, and arrogant. Pretty typical for them.”

She paused to step over a root, then kept going. “Then there are the dryads. They live in groves—real tight-knit communities. Peaceful, for the most part. Gentle. But if you threaten their homes, their land, or their kin? They’ll tear you apart without a second thought. It’s not malice. It’s just how they protect what matters.”

Vivienne rippled in acknowledgment.

“Humans are very common. Most of them are part of the Sovereignty, but you’ll find some scattered around the steppes or in little enclaves beyond the reach of the major powers. They’re…” Rava paused, then gave a noncommittal grunt. “Versatile.”

Vivienne blinked slowly. “You don’t sound particularly fond of them.”

“I don’t hate them,” Rava said carefully. “But they’re loud. And a lot of them wear the mask of Aegis.”

That name lingered a moment like a bad taste.

“Last,” Rava said, her voice dropping just a little as if the topic warranted more respect, “are the goblins. Rare. Mostly live underground or in hidden enclaves. You won’t meet many of them, but if you do—gods help you if they’re mad. They’re some of the most talented artificers in the world. You want a construct that could rival the average aetherbeast? Find a goblin sister with a grudge.”

Vivienne perked up—at least as much as a puddle of eldritch meat could. “Sisters?”

“They’re all female,” Rava explained. “Born that way. Don’t ask me how it works. They keep that secret locked tighter than a Sovereign vault.”

“Huh,” Vivienne murmured, her mass rippling with interest. 

“They’re also somewhat poor at both endo and exomancy, but give them something to build, and they’ll make it sing.”

“I see,” said Vivienne, her voice quieter, more thoughtful. The weight of everything Rava had shared settled on her shoulders like a heavy cloak. She absolutely was not on Earth anymore—not if her monstrous, magic-consuming, shapeshifting form was anything to go by. But still, there was something oddly comforting about the new reality, despite the strangeness of it all. This is real now, she thought, and there's no turning back.

“Thank you for educating me,” she added, her voice tinged with a mix of gratitude and exhaustion.

Rava merely shrugged, her expression unreadable. “Sure. Let’s get going. I can tolerate the cold, but I’d prefer to find something to wear.”

Vivienne quirked a smile, the sharpness of her teeth hidden by the faint shimmer of her black lips. “That’s a shame. I like the view.” She let the words hang in the air, dripping with teasing amusement, her deep voice purring like a slow, resonant hum.

Rava didn’t respond. Her expression remained as unreadable as ever, though there was a subtle shift in her posture. Vivienne could tell she wasn’t quite sure how to take that comment. It was... charming, really, how Rava never quite seemed to let herself be rattled. But Vivienne knew better than to push too far; the warrior was, after all, far more accustomed to the battlefield than to banter.

The silence stretched between them as they moved through the forest, the cold air crisp and biting against their skin. Vivienne's eyes swept over the landscape—a world full of mysteries, dangers, and truths yet to be uncovered.