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March 20th, 2016

3/20/2016

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Origin of Species (on Kylrock)

The Riotori are not particularly religious. But as it is with all creatures that achieve the intellectual development to contemplate their own deaths, they eventually come to contemplate their own existence.  They develop a theory of creation based on what their senses reveal and what the most philosophical of them concludes from that data.
So, how did they come to be?  Where from came hoporils and buffalo and crozards and Riotori?  Obviously they must have been put on Kylrock by the most powerful and untouchable of creatures.
That description fit the seldom seen condawk.  A full-grown condawk could carry off a Riotori child with no difficulty.  They flew to great heights and nested solely on the tops of the Great Mountains far to the west. Those peaks dwarfed the highest spars of the Ironcut Mountains and no creature could threaten them.
Obviously the creator of all plant and animal life was the greatest and oldest of these wonderful and fearsome birds. Kylrock had been spit out by Shul uncounted centuries before.  But as it cooled it hardened into the rocky ball it was.  And far beneath the surface the ultimate gift of the sun slept and grew.
Water pushed its way upward and spotted the world with lakes and streams. Clouds also wept their tears upon the ground, for there was no life.
Eventually the final gift of Shul emerged from the land.  It struggled upward, its beak cracking and pushing, digging upward until it fought its way completely out of the dirt and sat stunned upon the land, and looked around. The expanse of its wings was nearly forty yards, tip to tip.  When it managed to stand upon its feet the head with its massive deadly beak and piercing eyes, one black and one silver, was over fifteen yards above the ground.
Understanding its purpose and its gifts it flew over the world, but found nothing.  There was rock and dirt and water, but nothing alive.
It swept low to the ground and the Great Condawk laid eggs—thousands of eggs across the lands and waters of the whole world.  And wherever the eggs landed they opened and revealed the different species of vegetation and animal life.  And these creations spread. And reproduced and developed until finally, after uncounted centuries, the world was occupied by beasts and birds and fish of many different kinds, and the Riotori.
But the Great Condawk had no name, and no helpers or servants to attend it.  So few Riotori ever called upon it in time of need nor thanked it in time of gratitude or cursed it in time of sorrow.  It had fulfilled its function. Occasionally it would fly over the world and observe its creations for its own amusement.  Many swore over the course of centuries that they had seen it there, high above the ground, so far up that its size seemed that of a normal condawk.  Others scoffed at these claims.
In Groakpod creation was simply accepted as an accomplished fact and the Great Condawk was not spoken of, or too.  It was considered blasphemy to dare to address or reference the Creator.
Pyrite and his daughter Amethyst, the two Riotori rescued by the twins, were from the village the twins had defined on the map as their immediate goal. It was named Krakold. It was one of the exceptions to the general rule. It had an actual church (!) and even priests (!!) dedicated to the reverence of the Great Condawk.
After waking and thanking the twins for their recue the two knelt upon the turf and prayed their gratitude to the Creator.  Feldspar and Gypsum exchanged uneasy glances. The whole ceremony made them feel uncomfortable, but they maintained a polite silence for the duration of the prayers.  Feldspar grumbled to Gypsum later when the others were out of earshot that the span of prayer had been the longest fifteen minutes of his life. Gypsum replied that already he wondered about their compatibility with the population of the village they were approaching. Feldspar agreed and they both decided that this village was a mere stopping point on their journey. They would stay a night or two at most and then be on their way.
It would not be quite that easy.


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Rescue!

3/4/2016

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Fortunately, the walk along the river presented no hardship, of either the weather, the topography, or hostile animals.  The brothers enjoyed the respite. Sort of. The flow of the river did not encourage an optimistic attitude.  Although their walk upriver seemed barely uphill, the river rushed past them as though down a much steeper slope.  The speed of the water was not as fast as an adult Riotori could run for up to a quarter mile, but the mass of it was powerful. What the river pushed along further dampened any chance of optimism.  There was rough furniture, battered rafts, equally battered carts and wagons, and livestock.
A few buffalo and two of the large and very vicious reptilian predators also rushed by. One each of the buffalo and reptiles were still alive, fighting the current and struggling toward the bank.  They were swept out of sight and the twins would never know their fate.
And then over the deep and steady roar of the water they heard cries for help.  Their sharp eyes looked upstream and made out the forms of two Riotori thrashing against the current and fighting to simply keep their heads above the water.  One was an adult, the other a large child.
The twins neither hesitated or discussed.  They had been trained with uncompromising demand to react together and correctly in emergencies.  They ran back downstream about fifty yards where the closest decent-sized tree stood a few yards from the bank.  They uncoiled their ropes as they ran.  When they reached the tree they immediately sloughed off their loads and tied their ropes around the tree and then to themselves leaving an additional length of several yards.  Each one broke off a long thick branch and tied it to the end of that extra length.  They had little time, and waded without hesitation into the rushing current.  The river revealed a depth they had not expected; they were chest-deep in three steps and shoulder-deep in four.
It was only their strength and the powerful claws of their feet that gripped the rocky bottom of the river and kept them from being swept downstream.
The two strangers were almost upon them.  Feldspar shouted at them to grab a rope as he and Gypsum hurled the ends of the ropes with the branches in front of the two and as far across the water as possible.
The adult successfully grasped Gypsum's rope and hung on.  The child, though, missed her chance.  Feldspar reeled in the rope and threw it again, aiming beyond her, but again she missed.
He cursed while releasing himself from the rope and attacking the water as it shoved him roughly downstream.  The child continued to struggle against the force of nature.  Her struggles slowed her enough that Feldspar was able to catch up. 
Meanwhile, Gypsum and the adult forced their way to the shore, aided by the rope, and climbed onto the bank.  The adult male was nearly exhausted from his long battle with the river and he collapsed, gasping his gratitude.
Gypsum barely heard as he cut both his rope and Feldspar's from the tree and coiled them around shoulder and elbow as he ran downstream.  He could not see his brother when he started, but he soon gained enough to see Feldspar and the child.
She was perched shakily upon his neck and back, her hands clutching the larger horns on his head.  Feldspar was trying to push his way to shore while seeking to get a purchase with his feet.  But, although he had been able to resist the river's force when standing, the impetus of the water now kept him moving and his feet slipped and skidded along the bottom, unable to dig in.
Gypsum, though nearly at the end of his endurance, broke into a sprint and gained a slight lead while calling to his brother.  Then he hurled the end of the rope, still with a branch attached, into the water directly in Feldspar's path.  The older twin grasped it and hung on.
Gypsum played the rope out slowly to the current, like playing a fish on the line, and wrapped the rope around his wrists twice as it neared the end.  He had slowed to a walk and was moving slower than the water.  The life line taut, Feldspar and the child were slowly belayed toward the shore.  Gypsum had his feet planted firmly into the sod of the bank, but the weight of the two and the pull of the water threatened to drag him along.
Then the rescued adult, still short of breath, joined him in the struggle, grabbing the rope and pulling away from the shore as Gypsum was then able to do likewise.
Finally, nearly twenty minutes after they had first spotted the need for a rescue attempt, the brothers and their new acquaintances were safely out of the water.
They all sat or lay on the ground, recovering.  Three of the four intermittently retched up river water.  Feldspar was even too tired to curse.
After a brief time, though, he did look at his brother and laughed sarcastically.
"We still have to cross the damn thing!"
The other three contributed half-hearted laughter of their own, and three drifted quickly into involuntary sleep.  Gypsum remained awake, mostly, and tried to keep watch.

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    The story: This serial is about the "mascot" shown at the top of these pages. There are actually two of them, identical twins, Feldspar and Gypsum.
    The people call themselves Riotori, and their planet is Kylrock. The twins have been journeying for hundreds of miles, across many hazards, in search of mates. Please visit the archives to read their whole story.



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