11 - Warbird, Warbird

Dag sat in trance, her mental fingers sorting through strands of data, a fading and faint weave cried for assistance in the depths of the wilderness.  Her forehead furrowed as she peered around the edges of the garden she’d built on the edge of the desert of code.  Her own insects foraged at the edges, dragging the tiniest bits of information out of the chaos on the other side of the fence, the bees fetching and moving and organizing it all for her, gradually moving the fence outward.

It was the image she had in her mind; nothing real.  It had begun with the space inside the bone walls of her own head, when Yasna had found and stabilized her edges. She had laboriously put herself together, from there outward.

The one room became two and then three, the walls moving upward and outward until her safe space was the comfortable little loggia on the edge of the chaos.  Then came the paths and the garden and the road that reached out to the other zardukar.  Her neighbours.  She’d thought for years that she was alone, trapped in the seed of herself, with the chaos inside her, trying to tear her apart.

Her loggia was on the outer edges of the city of data, as she perceived it, where the lost and broken strands of history coiled in the outer darkness.  Or in the outer light where everything was hidden by it being too bright to see instead of too dark.

Her fence, and her defenses, had come into being to save her carefully rebuilt self, when Nadian Basserus had revealed himself to be the one, or one of the ones, behind the deaths or madness of anyone who had sufficient owner’s deenay to be considered a threat to his attempt on the crystal throne.

Kyrus Talain, the elder, had changed as much as she had, the embittered young paladin who had struggled to not lose his innocence had become a more hardened man, though much deepened by his suffering, just as she had.  They were no longer the youths who saw themselves as doomed romantic heroes, but adults with mended hearts and a greater knowledge of their real strengths.  He was Emperor now.   

Not someone she even wanted to marry any longer.  But... strangely... a friend.  Not a good friend yet.  He hadn’t yet understood that she no longer wanted him and was acting skittish as if she would suddenly turn around and declare her undying love for him.

The code floated in tangled white masses like clouds beyond her fence and she lured skittish strands into her hands and combed them into order.  There was the single, delicate strand of code from Priority One. *two surviving. Warbird, warbird. Two surviving... safe... lin silence till further...*