The Verdant Tower

Day 2

The girl grasped at the ledge as she fell, debris slithered from under her feet and cascaded into the lush glittering depths below. The edge was sheared and sharp, a ruptured steel composite. But it was weathered and pitted like stone that had worn the veil of millennia of rainfall. It had been softened enough to make for a narrowly adequate handhold. Her grip was slipping. She considered just letting go. Her memory was still fuzzy. She couldn’t recall how she had ended up here, what she had left behind, or even who she was. Like she had blinked into existence. She questioned what she was fighting for since she woke, bare and empty like the day she was born.

She looked up to the overhang above her and found her only companion perched atop a thick woody vine. The owl stared at her. A round white face. All white plumage. A typical snowy barn owl if it wasn’t for the third eye centered in its forehead. The girl found her resolve bleeding back into her through the bird’s gaze and heaved her dangling arm to a sturdy root that flowed over the shelf. She drained every ounce of energy she had left and hoisted her body back to the surface above her. She crawled to a tangle of vines and branches that had found a stranglehold on the precipice and collapsed from exhaustion.

Day 1

The girl woke from a dreamless sleep staring straight up into the cloudless sky above. Framed on all sides by towering outcroppings lush and verdant like a familiar yet ephemeral jungle. She felt tiny skittering on her back like a swarm of ants trying to carry her back to a nest. She leaped to her feet, flailing limbs to shake the insects off. She hated insects, or at least she thought she did. She couldn’t seem to remember much. A few worried moments passed as she shook her body and brushed all of her skin that she could reach. There weren’t any ants at all or any other crawling thing with an unnatural number of limbs for that matter. She stood in the center of a mat of short grass with that same unsettling sensation squirming under her feet. Despite the stillness in the air, the grass writhed under her, animated in a way that no plant should be.

Her eyes drifted up and out across what might be called a field, except it was surrounded on all sides by sheer cliffs. The cliffs were saturated with plant life that rippled in the distance.

She felt a cold presence over her shoulder and pivoted. She settled into an anchored defensive position without a thought. All she saw was more field and an unnaturally large white owl with its head cocked to the side with three eyes staring directly at her. It began to shift its head and body in a hypnotizing rocking motion.

The girl couldn’t help herself as she began to walk towards the animal. It was calling to her. Some deep, visceral part of her could feel the pull and despite herself, she drifted closer to the night raptor, perched so anachronistically in a shaft of sunlight that pierced the column of air between the towering walls surrounding her. It had no shadow and shimmered like it was glowing from within rather than from the reflecting beam of sunlight. A flame of an animal. Beneath its talons was a weathered pedestal that appeared to be stone at distance but took on a metallic quality the closer she moved.

She took one last step and was close enough to see the eyes, each more human than any bird should have, each a different color, blue, brown, and hazel.

The owl called out and ruffled its plumage before opening its wings to full span and leaning forward in a bow. In a flash of luminescence and a rush of wind the bird launched to the sky. The girl reflexively looked down to the ground and shielded her eyes. When she opened them again, the bird was nowhere to be found. Her eyes glazed from the heavens back to the perch the owl had occupied. She clamored over the debris of stone, steel, and scrub. She reached out to touch the top surface without a thought and the spire bloomed open. It unfolded in unexpected patterns without a sound. A light blossomed from the depths of the shimmering metallic petals. The girl reached inside and pulled at what appeared to be a glowing fruit of glass. It clicked and disengaged, the light dimmed inside of it, and the world became silent.

It wasn’t that there had been a great deal of sound before. The girl hadn’t noticed there was a sound at all until it vacated her ears. A constant white noise of grating and shifting plants coming from everywhere without the aid of gusting wind. And now there was only the subtle crunching of the grass under her feet, the distant shifting of the walls stilled like they were frozen in a photograph.

Day 3

The girl woke as the sun pierced through the opening above her and scorched her bare skin. Her hands and feet stung, blistered by the ascension up the walls of the hollowed-out tower. She felt desiccated, having found little in the way of water during her climb. There was enough to survive but little more. Her muscles ached to the bone but there was little to do but press on or give up.

She lay there questioning her motivation. Still, her head was devoid of memories of herself or much else. There were shadows and then whispers that had progressively held on longer over the days since she woke, but the echoes still eluded any active efforts to retrieve them. Naked, starving, trapped in a colossal pit of a ruin. And still, she pushed on. With every doubting moment, the owl would show up to guide her on the path out, its piercing eyes burrowing into her mind without managing to get a foothold.

She heard a swooping from above and looked up to see the bird for the fourth time, it sat on a gnarled trunk that bridged the level she was on with the next one above. Above that, she would be nearly home free with what looked like only two more levels to go. She picked up the crystalline drupe from its precarious placement on the edge and began to walk to where the bird had been perched but was now mysteriously absent. How it came and went seemed not to make sense. She would call it magic if she ever had eyes on it when it disappeared.

As she walked, the plants would animate in a few-meter radius. They rustled and creaked under stretching forces that were more animal than plant in tempo. It was unnerving how they all reached for her as she passed. Tiny worshippers prostrating to a god as it moved through a city. She was no god, she was barely a woman with her empty memories, cracking skin, and no direction but the path a mystic owl guides.

On the last level before the crown of the structure, she lucked upon an intact ramp and made her way to the crest. Looking out from the center she found herself perched hundreds of meters above the landscape, higher even than she had climbed over the past days. The height was dizzying and freeing. The air was crisp and had a gentle caressing movement that cooled her aching skin. A memory lingered at the edge of awareness, standing atop a mountain with… with her…

“Q’ori!?” a familiar voice called out from a distance behind her. She turned. Standing a quarter rotation around the cusp of the tower were two women. They felt familiar, but the girl couldn’t place them, couldn’t name them. Behind them, perched precariously on the side of the tower was a ship that looked worse for wear. It stretched out of the surface of the tower, a mere spire in comparison. The form was organic and bird-like, almost like an owl on a roost.

The girl meandered towards them as they limped towards her, both leaning on the other for support. They moved slower than she did, but had an urgency that she lacked.

“Thank the goddess you are okay!” Said the woman on the left, her eyes a piercing blue.

“Where are your clothes? Here, let me cover you up your skin looks raw.” Said the other, her eyes a warm hazel, she unwrapped a large shawl that was wrapped around them both. The two women separated, the latter limped her way closer with the cloth and wrapped it around the girl’s shoulders. She hugged her and kissed her on the face. The tension that had built since she awoke on the ground began to melt away. The other woman came closer and wrapped her arms around her.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” and she kissed her as well. Her hand slid under the fabric caressing at her skin. She caught her hand and gently pulled it out into the open. “What did you find?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t remember anything.”

“You don’t remember how you found your way back?”

“No that is all I can remember. I woke up, found this, and climbed up…” the girl hesitated, “Who am I? Who are you?” Her flesh knew them both. She was comfortable in their embrace. But her mind was still vacant. The two women looked at each other, their faces suddenly washed with worry.

“The ssai link must be severed. That isn’t good.” Blue eyes said with a worried timbre. “Let me take this and let’s go back to the ship.”

Both women reached for the glass fruit. The moment the three had hands on it a shimmering surge of energy raced up the girl’s spine. Her muscles, weak as they were, drained of every remaining joule of energy. She felt herself and the others begin to fall before she lost consciousness again.

***

Q’ori woke, laying on the ground, half-covered by the shawl that Xia’la had wrapped around her, the wind trying to pull the rest of it off of her. Xia’la and Cier’sha were there with her. They all slowly roused out of whatever spell had come over the three. She felt a presence in the direction of the ship and looked toward it at the same time as the others. There standing on the edge of the tower was the owl, one eye to match each of the three women.

“Good morning, sleepyheads,” the owl spoke without moving its beak. The sun had set twilight was slowly flooding the landscape.

“Alba, what in the hells happened? And where have you been since the crash?” Cier’sha barked.

“Apologies, Sha-sha,” Cier’sha rolled her eyes at the nickname she was none-too-fond of, “Q’ori’s connection to the ssai network was degraded when she was thrown from the ship at impact. Without all three of you connected, my faculties were limited. As for your recent fainting spell, that would be an unfortunate side effect of our new compatriot melding with the ssai. Q’ori’s link has also been re-established.”

“It is, I have my memory back,” Q’ori confirmed to the Ship Synthesized Artificial Intelligence interface, the ssai for their ship the Tyto Alba. “Who is this new compatriot Alba?”

“The artifact that Q’ori found in the crevasse below created a field around this ruin. It attempted to connect with the ssai network. It contained an ancient ai analog made by the civilization that left this all behind. I have integrated it into the network.”

“You what?!” Xia’la yelped.

“The field may also have been the cause of the error that led to our untimely fall from the skies.”

“Why in the goddess’ name would you connect that to our network Alba?!”

Out of the ground next to Alba’s ssai projection, a plant began to grow out of the ground. It increased growth rapidly, branching and wrapping vines around themselves into a nest-like mass. It grew about a meter in diameter before stopping and unfurling in front of them in the same way the pillar where she had found the crystal fruit had, only larger and in wood rather than metal. Inside sat an infantile anthropomorphized plant staring out blankly with deep green leaves in place of eyes.

“This is Tsito,” Alba said, “Or at least a visual representation of them. They are still learning to communicate with me, and it will be longer before they can vocalize, but as far as I can tell they are the last of their kind.”