Work Text:
The Osmium Court was a total backwater, Rhulk resolved when the claws of his toes caught in a crevice between pavement slabs for the fifth time. Even with his form shrunk to the point of discomfort he still towered over the passing Krill, their heads arching up to eye him with the fearful suspicion of a people whose language used the term “unknown” as a synonym for “deadly” — close-midedness, perhaps, or pathetically mismanaged survival instinct. Palace officials did not even question when he introduced himself as emissary of the “court of Lubrae”. Being generous, Fundament housed thousands of species, and only the most determined scholars managed to keep track of the rapidly shifting politics between hundreds of continents; it was easy to lose oneself in the stream of diplomats with alien names flowing through the palace gates daily. But Rhulk’s nature was anything but generous, and so he still considered it parochialism stemming from a deep-rooted, pitiful fear.
Freeing himself from the tangle of narrow streets and out onto the jagged cliffs surrounding the Court like fortified walls, he could finally stretch out and breathe easier. The air was awful here, biting his nostrils with an acidic tinge, and though a sun-shape could be discerned on the sky behind the layers of thick atmosphere everything was desaturated and dark, as if suffused in perpetual twilight. He observed the commotion in the port below, workers unloading cargo, sailors checking ship hulls for damage from the rain and seawater, merchants yelling and gesticulating from behind their stalls. This was the only place on the small continent that did not seem a dead tissue. There was life—unbridled life, vibrant, crawling and crowding like the small white vermin under the bark of a rotting tree. He enjoyed watching them scuttle as he would enjoy watching ants carve their paths through a sandy terrarium; devoted to their irrelevant purpose and bringing it forth dutifully, oblivious (or just wilfully ignorant) of the infinitesimalness of their own existence against the vastness of the universe beyond that dull sky.
“You are not from here,” a thin voice, coming from somewhere below, caught his ear suddenly. “Have you come to see my father, like the other emissaries?”
Rhulk glanced down to find a small Krill girl looking up at him, arms wrapped defensively around her body but the bright and wide eyes betraying curiosity. She was garbed in little more than a short tunic, the like of those the port workers wore not to ruin their clothes had they needed to wade through water, and from the carapacial plate on the back of her head a thin veil flowed down gracefully, tugged by the breeze. The Krill’s insignificant lifespan made it difficult to assess her age—was it days they measured it in? or years?—but she did not look at him with the careful fear of an adult who already realises they are a prey crossing paths with a predator. No, this was a child’s curiosity, unsated and burning, three hungry voids staring back at him.
“So you’re a daughter of the Osmium King?” He spun his glaive, marvelling at her lack of fear, and watched her gaze follow the weapon’s movements. “You should pay more attention to who you’re letting in on your knowledge.”
The girl frowned as she pondered this, then her eyes flicked back to him with newfound focus, “What if I wanted you to know this?”
Rhulk knelt to match her face level. “Then you should ask yourself why you’d want a stranger to know you’re the heiress of the Osmium Court.”
“I’m not the—” she shut her mouth instantly and glared at him with suspicion. She was a fast learner. “If you’re here to see my father, why do you bother talking to me?”
“Maybe I want you to lead me to him, past the court officials and the queue of diplomats.”
Something lively sparked up in those eyes of hers, and by her tone Rhulk could tell her own answer thrilled her, “I could lie to you. I could lead you astray.”
“Maybe I’m not an emissary.”
“Then why would you want to see my father in the first place?”
“Maybe I want to kill him.” He expected the girl to finally recoil in fear, but she only tilted her head and kept looking at him with the same poorly-masked fascination.
“What good would it bring you?” Her tone was devoid of emotion, purely analytical. “You’re not a Helium Drinker. You’re from somewhere far away, distant enough that you’d need to sneak your way to see the King because court officials wouldn’t deem you worthy of an audience.”
What had the cold officiality of the court raised this kid into? Rhulk barely remembered the younglings his clan ferried around back on Lubrae, but they had seemed to him as little more than snivelling and kicky half-animals who cuddled and crept, and died off quicker than flies on a cold evening. But there was some dignity in this one, a (surely intentional) veneer of distance and calculation she tried and failed to mask her curiosity behind — shoulders squared and back straight, arms still folded over her chest in a somewhat comical display of both wariness and dominance. She carried herself like someone whose father saw emissaries and diplomats more often than his own children.
“A fair question to ask, Princess,” he mirrored the inquisitive tilt of her head, somewhat mockingly, “So tell me, if you were a foreign assassin from far away sent to dispose of the Osmium King, why would you do this?”
The girl mindlessly dug a pattern in the dirt with her foot, thinking. Rhulk watched her glimmering eyes and frowned brow, and when her silence began to bore him, he prodded,
“Would you not like to claim his power?”
She looked up, “But wouldn’t I be just a mercenary on someone else’s orders?”
“You would be the assassin who killed a king. What is another regicide for one who’s already felt the warmth of royal blood on their hands?”
“There are other ways to power than killing.” Her expression grew stern, confident. “Taox rules the court, even though she is not even a Minister.”
Such a Krill thing to say; but what other weapon does plankton have against a shark, if not the foolish pride of the belief it could talk its way out of the snapping jaws? Rhulk had seen this Taox, an old Mother with narrow shoulders and broad wings, watching over the courtyard from the top of the palace stairs. He could see the princess was mirroring her imperious posture, if he though about it—laughably so, the tiny form drowning under a mantle far too large for her—and thought that the stern not-Minister must have been at least the girl’s idol, if not a role model or a guardian. It bothered him about as much as it would to snap Taox’s rigid spine with a flick of his wrist.
“Words are small knives made for those with arms too weak to wield a real sword,” he said.
The girl’s gaze dropped to her own flat, tiny palms with twig-like fingers. Modest as his current form was, they were still two-three times smaller than his.
“You’d still need my words to get to the king,” she said thoughtfully.
“Sathona!!”
A cry broke through the air suddenly, echoing among the cliffs, and the princess twirled around looking as if she had just been caught red-handed. Another child, equally small and gaunt, was running down the jagged slope, dragging a massive cleaver behind with one hand and clutching something small and bright in the other.
“Taox says we must go back to the palace, rain clouds are gathering.” She slowed to a stop just short of smacking into the first girl, and instantly wrapped an arm around her protectively when she noticed Rhulk, “Who are you talking to?”
“An emissary,” the first girl said without as much as a stutter. She wriggled herself free from the other’s embrace and took her star-holding hand, the flicker of warmth instantly pulling Rhulk’s eyes. “We should go, least she eats us.”
“Don’t get dissolved by the rainfall, stranger!” the other called, already being tugged away.
Rhulk watched them run hand in hand up the cliff and off into the distance. The princess glanced behind at him only once, the tendrils of her veil fluttering in the wind as she turned her head; against the gathering clouds she looked even frailer, as if the first strongest gust of wind could push her down and into the ocean below. The Krill all learned and adapted quickly, but this one was exceptionally sharp. With enough guidance she could have even pierced the blister of fearful ignorance her kind had wilfully locked themselves in, could have reached out for a star more distant than the one in her sister’s hand, had she not been fated to die in irrelevance after a blink-short, meaningless life. A pity.