Specula Scatinavia, Bass Rock, etc. etc.
September 5
497Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJZIeqMcRiA
For nine months out of the year, my island is home to a breeding colony of the solan goose, better known to the academic community as the northern gannet. I've estimated the population as over a hundred thousand during peak breeding seasons. From a far enough distance they can be seen to blanket the rocky, eastern shores of the island like new fallen snow. The gannet is as much a part of the ecosystem of this island as the air itself, and they fill the sky with their jagged staccato call as they swoop from rock to rock or plunge beak-first into the frigid sea to snatch a darting fish from the water's grasp.
They are completely vicious and evil little bastards, entirely without pity, fear or anything resembling a soul. They care not for the lives of men or the harmony between wizards and nature or my manservant's valiant but futile attempts to grow a vegetable garden without his crop getting encrusted in avian feces. Even in their docile months they've been known to take a grown man's eye out for so much as coming within visual range of their nests, and during the summer breeding months simply walking outside your home could mean coming back without your skin. Utterly distasteful. But delicious, and a great source of eggs.
The only time Fox and I appreciated their presence was in these early days of September, when they began their migration to far-off lands yet undiscovered. They had been leaving the island in starts and stops for the past week or so, a few family groups and nest-kin at a time, and the flock had thinned out considerably. Fox told me this morning that the flock was making ready to migrate and I dropped all the work I was doing faster than even the slightest provocation. We brought ale and cooked sausages over a fire and Fox brought out his special honeycakes he had made for just such an occasion. There were folding chairs. We were making an event of it.
"I don't see anything yet," I said, squinting and magnifying my sight. One of the few benefits of this Shroud was that it was equipped with a low-level transparency enchantment similar to what one would see on an invisibility cloak, just on the inside instead of the outside. They couldn't make it so that the shroud was invisible to outsiders, maybe have me look like a normal goddamn person, no, that's just beyond the limits of mortal wizardry. The most they can do is make sure I'm not blinded by my own life support equipment.
…I'm getting off track again.
When I started this thought, I was leading to the fact that my vision was actually facilitated by a spell. I learned how to alter that spell, do all kinds of tricks with it. The first thing I learned was how to alter the illusory lensing of the enchantment, letting me use the Shroud as a magnifier or for long-distance viewing. That was just a simple bending of light. Then I learned how to see in different wavelengths of light, in the spectrums of heat and starlight and far beyond, where light can travel through flesh and cloth as easily as water. Then I could teach it to understand and analyze the composition of any object I could see. I told the council that it could be used to identify the chemical makeup of stars just by examining their light and they agreed to subsidize my research for the next twenty years. I've been having 'inconclusive results' ever since the first month while I figure out a way to connect this thing to the aethernet.
But for now, I was happy to use it for birdwatching.
"Are you sure it's happening today?" I was scanning from bird to bird, watching them preen and call and hop about on the rocky hillside, going about whatever important business a tiny little sea bird has to do before embarking on a migration halfway across the planet. You might imagine that there is a lot of pooping involved, and you would be absolutely correct, but this does overlap substantially with every other moment in the life of a bird. "I'm not really seeing any signs."
"You're just looking at one bird at a time, Mr. Wizard," said Fox, flipping the sausages in his cooking pan. "You need to look at the whole flock, see the massive nervous energy building amongst them."
"You're just jealous because you don't have cool telescope vision like I do," I said, reeling back my field of view to something a bit more sane.
"I fail to see one bit of relevance in that malicious slander of yours," Fox replied. "More ale, Mr. Wizard?"
"Ale me, Fox!" I said, holding out my glass. "Oh, there's just about a week until the solar eclipse, Fox. I'm going to need to actually be awake in the morning for that."
"I'll be ready and waiting with a bucket of ice water, sir," said Fox.
"My god, thousands of years of wizardry and that's the most efficient way we have to wake up in the morning," I said, taking a full mouthful of ale. "Yeah, I noticed that when I was checking the calendar, trying to update it all to that new system I've been working on."
"Oh sir, I must protest," said Fox. "You're going to throw off all my patient records-keeping just so that we can avoid gaining, what, ten minutes a year?"
"Ten minutes and forty-eight seconds," I said. "Erroneously added to the calendar. Each year. That adds up, Fox."
"Oh yes," said Fox, stoking the firepit. "In another thousand years we might have an extra week to go on vacation."
"Don't exaggerate, Fox," I said. "We're astrologers. We need to be able to know when the moon is going to be full or new, or whether the day is dominated by Virgo or Libra or when the chelestials take their migratory swim to lay their star eggs on the galactic shoals. We can’t do that if we can't accurately predict what day it is."
"Very well, very well," said Fox, sliding a hot sausage into a split roll. "But with all due respect, sir, don't we already have leap years to compensate for errors in the calculation of the year?"
"Of course we do," I said. "But the leap years are calculated incorrectly. We've already gained three days within the last four hundred years alone!"
"…you don't think you're making a tiny bit of a fuss, sir?"
"…I may be," I said. "I don't know. Doesn't everybody fill the time with things they think are important?"
"I wouldn't know, Mr. Wizard," said Fox. "I fill my time working."
"Right, well not all of us can be so lucky," I said. "Why did you decide to do this, Fox?"
"Well what's a migration without hot sausages and ale?" said Fox, handing me the aforementioned party foods.
"No, not that," I said. "Although your work is greatly appreciated. But why did you decide to become a valet? It can't be that rewarding having to cook and do laundry and fuss over my domestic needs every day."
"There is a certain element of soul-crushing routine to the position," Fox said, sitting down in his own Halfling-sized chair beside me. I bit off half of my sausage in a single bite. "To be honest, I can't explain it myself. There are times when I wonder just what it was that drove me to this position. I suppose I think of it as a sense of duty."
"To me?" I said, spewing bits of meat and bread with each word.
"…in a way," said Fox, calmly running a handkerchief over his waistcoat.
"…oh."
"Well I couldn't very well feel a duty towards you before I had even met you, could I?"
"I did save the world that one time," I said. "You might have heard of it."
"Yes, that was rather impressive," said Fox. "But it's not a duty to any specific person, more to… to a higher order."
"Do you mean like a priest or a monk?"
"Not exactly," said Fox. "I wouldn't say that I worship anything. It's just… the order exists, and it's all around us, all different pieces moving together. The stars above us turn. Because of that, the seasons change. And because of that…"
As if on cue, the great flock of gannets lifted from the rocks, drifting up into the air like a vast cloud of steam rising from a volcanic fissure. The flock spread like a drifting cloud, swirling and dancing about my tiny little island like a vast, spreading hurricane.
"…the birds fly south," said Fox, incredibly smug at his timing.
I didn't care. I was enraptured. I had seen this fifteen times before today, and each one inspired as much reverence and wonderment as the very first. I stood there, my eyes trying to follow individual birds as they darted above my head before losing focus and getting lost in the endless cycling spirals. And the good part hadn't even started yet.
Flight is just a mechanical process, of lift countering the gravitational forces. To get that lift, birds use the speed of wind rushing over their wings. To get that speed, sometimes birds take near-suicidal nosedives off of cliffs, letting the high air velocity propel them upwards. These flocks of gannets were no different, and my island had a rather spectacular cliff facing the northern sea. As the first leg of their journey, the birds dove en masse towards the jagged rocks and unforgiving sea below, wave after wave of shining white avians plummeting endlessly downwards, only to arrest their motion at the very last instant, turning a fatal fall into a triumphant rise.
Those who escaped the selkies, that is.
Locals called them the water horse, or the sea serpent. Some lakeside villages had their own selkies, traveling upriver as youths and then overgrowing their exits, trapped inland and revered as gods. I called them the last remnants of a long-extinct family of sea reptiles, the last of a legacy tens of thousands of times older than the whole of humanity. With their long, articulated necks emerging from the water it was easy to see why most men thought of them as tremendous serpentine beings, but I knew that beneath the water there was a scaled, limbed body like that of a reptilian seal. Each of their necks was nearly three stories tall, and there were at least half a dozen of them, darting back and forth like the heads of some mighty sea-hydra.
On occasion, when a gannet got too close to the water, the selkies would dart their heads through the air and snap at the birds as a man slaps at a fly. Swiftly, angrily and with next to no success. When the birds migrated they could swallow them a dozen at a time. But there were enough survivors that, on the whole, the species could thrive.
This was the good part.
"Yeah, that's what happens!" I shouted, pumping my fist in the air. "That's what you get, you stinking, shrieking skyte-hawks! You get naturally selected!"
"Yes, very good show this year," said Fox. "I do believe they're learning to fly higher every time."
"Well the selkies will just learn how to get longer necks," I said.
"I don't believe that's how that works," said Fox.
"Who's the wizard here?"
Fox sighed.
"You, Mr. Wizard."
"Anyway, that was some great timing, Fox, but I'm not exactly sure what kind of lesson you're trying to impart," I said.
"The lesson is that the natural order isn't equal," Fox said. "Sometimes you jump off the cliff, your wings catch the wind and you soar into the air. Sometimes a giant sea-dragon rears its slimy head from the bottomless depths, snatches you up in its mighty fanged jaws and swallows you and a dozen of your friends in a single bit."
"…that does happen sometimes," I said, resting my chin on my folded hands.
"I feel that my position helps me to prevent the latter and enable the former," said Fox. "Anyone can fall, Mr. Wizard. All it takes is a single step, sometimes. But anyone can hold out their hand and save somebody from the depths."
"So you're like, diving off the cliff with a sword in each hand and a pair of Icarus wings on your back, bashing at the selkie heads and trying to keep them from eating a swarm of tiny little mes," I said.
"Not… no," said Fox, putting a hand to his temple. "Mr. Wizard, I think you're… there's… metaphors can only be stretched to a certain point, sir!"
"Oh I know, I know," I said. "But can we go with that for now? I really like that mental image."
Fox sighed.
"It's not exactly dignified, sir," he said.
"No, but it is amazing."
"If you say so, sir."
"But that leads to another question," I said, draining the last of my ale. "Why help me out?"
"I thought I was already answering that one," said Fox.
"I mean why just me," I said. "If that's what you want to do with your life then why not become a priest? You could help dozens of people that way."
"The church and I have had our disagreements," said Fox, his voice suddenly losing its cheer. "Suffice it to say that this is where I am supposed to be, and I would appreciate it if it was left at that."
"Alright, alright," I said, getting off my chair and stretching. "I mean gods know I don't mean to imply anything. I would be dead within a week without you here."
"Nobody is more aware of that than I am, sir," said Fox.
"Come on, Fox," I said, starting up towards the rocky hillside. "Lot of empty nests up there now. Let's go see if they left any eggs behind."
"You go on ahead, sir," said Fox. "I'll have to snuff the fire and bring my pans inside and store the leftover food and probably half a dozen other meaningless domesticisms."
"Oh… yeah…" I said, suddenly feeling a stabbing of guilt between the second and third ribs on the left side of my chest. "…you don't need a hand with that, do you?"
"Wouldn't hear of it, sir," said Fox. "This is just all part of my job. And I am being paid exceedingly well to do housework."
"I might have lead with that explanation," I said.
"It would be rude to mention it," said Fox. "Although if I may be honest? The wizards council actually pays me more than you."
"That cannot be right," I said. "The next time I write a report I am going to have to talk to human resources."
"Good luck with that, sir," Fox grinned. "I'm not human."497Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfGVO3oNyno
