io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “A Saint Between the Teeth” by Sloane Leong. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!
A Saint Between the Teeth
Kharatet moistens his sightless eyes with his tongue as he draws his finger across the limestone tablet glyphs. His audience today is a clutch of toddling nymphs, motionless save for their short tails rippling the shallow water impatiently. It’s a good age to read to, while the little ulmuns are still young enough that the novelty of the world keeps them fearfully reserved and quiet. They likely won’t understand much of today’s reading but it doesn’t matter; tradition dictates that they be read to as soon as they’ve hatched and hatched they are.
His sensitive finger pads drift glacier-slow across the tablet’s surface, reading the minuscule cuneiform stark against his setae. The intricate carvings are as clear to the touch as a canyon is to a raptor’s eye on an unclouded day. Today he has chosen the poet Loraja to study, not because of her poetry—which explores typical ulmun subjects like the joys of solitude, slowness, the eating of telph—but because of her penmanship. He’d always admired the uniquely subtle expression of her mark-making and enjoyed following the path of a single glyph, tracking the delicate curve of the author’s talon as it etched into the substrate.
“For now, your body is content enough to graze on what our caves offer but as we grow, we must move onto more substantial sustenance. The First Egg saw to this, giving us our alliance with the telph. This poem is inspired by the poet’s first true Nourishment:
let me emanate like light
a tremor of warmth on the skin
pulsing dawn filling my body like bones
just as solid, sweetness waiting to burst—”
Pain snaps Kharatet’s mouth shut around the poem, buckling him over from a sudden knot of agony. The stone tablet clatters to the cavern’s unforgiving floor as his stomach twists into a hard crease of scalding steam. Panting, he curls into himself, tail wrapped tight around his waist as if he can cut the radiating cramp off with his own throttling strength. Beneath the roar of the stream, he hears his fellow scholars lift their heads, their breaths startled into speeding.
“Are you all right, brother-scholar?” one of the other scholars asks from a neighboring study cell. The nymphs before Kharatet are quiet but have balled up in distress, mostly submerged in the shallow stream. When Kharatet doesn’t respond quick enough, the scholar adds, “Someone gather the nymphs and take them to the dining chambers, please. They don’t need to witness this.”
Kharatet waves off an approaching ulmun in frustration then remembers his manners and contracts his feathered gills. “Apologies. It’s nothing, elder, really. Leave them to me.”
“Nothing, indeed,” the elder scholar bites out, growing muffled as he returns to his tablet. “You need to begin your pilgrimage. No more excuses, Kharatet.”
Kharatet can feel someone moving closer, rousing the nymphs to exit the study chamber. He grunts and grasps for a list in his head, things that hold other things, and wills the burning ache to subside with the recitation:
bones to marrow,
blood to heat,
mouths to teeth,
skins to meat,
The pressure builds under Kharatet’s translucent skin, a false nauseating heat. Then his stomach unclenches, so quickly it leaves him lightheaded and gasping. With limp and shaking hands, he sets aside the tablet back into its stone shelf and slithers weakly out of the reading alcove, back into the frozen stream like a tadpole. He parts his wide mouth and seals his nostrils as he sinks into the water, letting the stream slide past his teeth and over his gills. A drowsy chill swarms up over him like an embrace and he breathes out the remnants of tension in his gut, in his bones. A hand breaks through the cold, strokes down the length of his smooth back with the tips of filed claws.
“I think it’s time, younger brother,” a strong voice says over the river din, hiding within its amusement. “The poetry will have to wait.”
His elder sister Mhuretaj. Her touch stills across his shoulder, caught on the bony prominences no healthy ulmun should have. “You’re almost ten winters old. You need to eat. You’ve lasted longer than I on salt mites and moon louse, if that makes you feel better.”
Water sluices off Kharatet as he hauls himself up into a sitting position and anchors himself on a nearby rock. The current is strong enough to tug at his malnourished body, pluck at the vestiges of his strength.
“No, I’m fine. I . . . I can go until next winter,” Kharatet says. He drags his claws through the water as if his hunger hadn’t just toppled him over completely. In a whisper, he adds, “I’m not ready.”
Mhuretaj hisses out a sigh and slides her arm beneath his, lifting him from the water. They’ve had this conversation before and she has relented twice already. Kharatet can sense there will be no refusing her demand this time. “You’re not supposed to be ready,” she says, leading them down a cave toward the dwelling quarters. “If you were, I would think you a monster.”
Panic starts to prickle at Kharatet’s spine but he’s too feeble to react to it. “J-just leave me in the stream. I’d rather feed on cave mould than eat one of the telph. I just . . . I can’t! I don’t understand how you can do it. How any of our family can!”
Mhuretaj stiffens beside him, her meager pace halting. He has insulted her. It is not his first time; they have had this particular debate many times, by themselves and in the company of others. He could not sway her any more than she could him. His gills press against his neck as a backwash of doubt flows up over his conviction.
How could something he found so unnatural and cruel be so inconsequential to everyone else? Could it simply be a flaw of his? He liked to think his creed had been founded around an innate sense of virtue and respect for life. But if he peered at the origins of his beliefs, he could see another side to the truth he’d cultivated. As a child, his brood mother had fed him a cave beetle and to this day he could still hear a chirrup of pain as he bit down into it. And even as his brood mother cradled him through tears, assured him its death was of no import, Kharatet could not shake off the slough of realization.
His existence required a brutality he could not stomach
“Don’t be a fool. This is what we have, what’s been agreed to by both our people. We’re past being martyrs for our nature,” Mhuretaj murmurs. Beneath their feet, the spring melt moves sluggish and steady through the lightless cave, filling the wide cavern with the cold bite of winter’s last breath. “I won’t force you to eat but before you curl up into a corpse, you need to go and meet the telph for yourself. If you’d still rather starve after that then . . .”
“Yes, I understand,” Kharatet says, feeling both relief and a great growing hollowness. The water rasps against the stone, sings itself back and forth through the tunnels, the depth of it swelling ever so slightly with accruing sediment. “Tomorrow then,” he says, trying to scrape together some amount of conviction in his voice. “I’ll meet with them tomorrow.”
The next wake cycle, Kharatet rouses to Mhuretaj shuffling around her room. Invigorating warmth has suffused him, a stark contrast to the icy stream in the archivist quarters. Normally Kharatet would enjoy the thermal spring heat that warmed the surrounding rock in his sister’s home but all it has done is stir up his body’s hunger, sharpened the sting of starvation.
“Did you even sleep?” he asks, padding over to a nearby pool and submerging himself. The water soaks into his flesh and gills, giving him a brief rush of renewal before his gut begins to pinch.
“A little. Hmm, what else do you need . . .” Mhuretaj says absently before disappearing into her sleeping chamber. Her home is naturally decorated with clusters of mineral straws and boxwork that swallows the ceilings and walls. He finds it disturbs and muffles the flow of sound and air, leaving him disconcerted. His own dwelling has been sanded down of harsh textures and angles, all smooth stone furnishings rounded for him to recline on or against.
“Here, you’ll need these,” Mhuretaj says. She shakes out something large and Kharatet grabs the edges of the object gingerly, feeling the density and texture of what he realizes is woven leaves. It smells rich and musky with age, like reeds from the forest overhead drift down the cave rivers, clotting and decomposing.
“What is this?”
“A cloak. You’ll need it to withstand the light and weather up above. The cloak’s fabric will keep moist for a decent amount of time so your skin doesn’t crack from the dryness.” Mhuretaj draws it tighter around her brother, knots it beneath his throat. It feels heavier than it did in his hands as it envelops him, muffling his bare skin of vibrations. Clothing was not a part of ulmun culture, unlike the telph’s penchant for garments, and wearing the cloak fills Kharatet with a prickling anxiety. What if they thought he was trying to ingratiate himself with them? What if his clothing was distasteful in some way?
“And this.” She slides something heavy and hard-edged into his palm. A crystal the size of an egg, constructed of harsh, uneven little cubes; payment for transport. “That’s all you need. Ready?”
Kharatet wrinkles his muzzle in affirmation. He follows his older sister out one of the entryways, a hole bored open to barely the circumference of their skulls. When the waters rise, which is rare, blocking the small entry hole will take only a moment. They slither easily through, limbs compressing to their sides, ribs folding up to fit the necessary width. They pass through community living quarters, twitching their gills so that they pop in brief greetings to passersby. The walls here are honeycombed with holes, entryways to small dwellings that echo in his peripheral hearing with movement, to shops and halls that make up the mundane routines of ulmun life.
Mhuretaj leads him to a rear passage beset by large stalagmites, familiar formations he has touched his entire life. Now they feel like jaws waiting for a meal. Is this all of what the telph will see of him? Fangs, a throat, his shameless appetite?
“When you get to the top, there will be a small hut,” she says. When he chatters his teeth soundlessly in confusion, she clarifies, “A dwelling made of wood. Yes, wood. An envoy will be waiting for you there and will take you to the telph’s village.”
He knew in theory how this all went but suddenly having to breach the surface himself, to trust in millennia of tradition and tales of the First Egg’s will, sent a needling panic through him.
“You’ll be fine,” Mhuretaj says, squeezing his tail with her own. “This path is old and well tread. Go, brother. Nourish yourself.”
Arteries of water flow down the cave walls, gravid with the scent of all the surface holds and growing richer as Kharatet moves towards the exit. The higher he walks, the lighter the air becomes, thinner and drier in a way that leaves him feeling bare even draped in the reedy cloak. New sound now, the reverberation against stone giving way as it funnels out into nothing.
Around a corner, molten heat spills against his skin, burning him. He’d read of daylight before but the actual experience of it thrashes away the tepid poetry that had tried to grasp it. It is a small bubble of blazing at the end of the tunnel, beckoning him forward with its insistent warmth. It takes him several long moments of moving forward, turning and hiding his face, and moving forward again before he feels it. The overhead, the outside.
When he walks through into the heat of day—true day!—the new, burning atmosphere and the filthy, turbulent wind shoving at his cloak ravages his senses. His body buckles into a spiral to protect itself. Moaning, Kharatet pulls his cloak around him tightly, shuddering under the thin boundary of cloth, half submerging himself in the shallow river feeding into the cave.
The worst of it all is how this surface world sounds: branches bow and crunch, bushes crackle, leaf chafes against leaf. How the cacophony of noise glances violently off the furious world around him and fades too quickly, absorbed by the great nothingness above him. It’s all too much, too much noise betraying too much life, too much texture.
Time dilates with his fright. How did any of his brethren tolerate this place?
A crunching close by, a predator’s approach. Kharatet tries to direct his hearing toward it, to feel its nearness through his skin, but it is too late. Something opaque and heavy is draped over him and he jolts, thinking it an attack for several frozen seconds until no bite follows. Rising, he touches what he finally understands to be a second fabric over him.
“Are you all right?” a voice asks, its accent filled with plosive air and clicking. Kharatet, relieved at being able to recognize this stranger’s language, shivers his gills in confirmation. Something roots around in his cloaks’ pocket and withdraws the smooth ritual stone. “Ah! What a lovely color. This will be fine for the fare. Up you go, then.”
A color, another facet of the world his nature did not give credence to. Four branch-like limbs, stiff with armor, suddenly compress around his back and haul him upward, scooping his legs from the ground. What was happening? Was this the envoy he was meant to meet?
“I . . . I’m not sure . . .” Kharatet tries to speak but this rough handling is his mind’s limit.
“Don’t worry, ulmun,” the stranger says. “I’ll turn the half-day walk into a quarter for you.”
Kharatet’s malnourished body sends out sprigs of panic that, in their effort to energize him, only founders his consciousness, relegating him to a sick and sudden darkness.
Wet warmth cocoons Kharatet as he wakes from cold, dark sleep. He shifts and splashes, feels the walls of the narrow hot pool he’s been immersed in. His underfed memories struggle forth, brief currents of time when he’d been jarred awake: the bumpy basket ride from the cave mouth down into the forested valley. The wretched cries of flying things. The being—a telph, he knows now—hauling him out of the basket, carrying him like an immobile nymph.
And now here he was, in one of their welcoming pools cordoned off by what feels like drapery, leaving him in blessed quietude. Tonguing the water, he finds it flat, lifeless, missing the natural sharpness of dissolved metallics and sediment. Boiled, then. He hisses in distaste.
“Oh, you’re awake then, visitor?” Something slips between the curtains, touching something to the back of his hand. “Please, drink. I’ve never seen a ulmun in such a sickly state.”
“I didn’t realize anyone was here! My apologies I—”
“Drink now, dear one. We can speak after I’m sure you won’t faint again.”
How embarrassing, splashing around while his host was watching, not introducing himself. Kharatet takes what he feels now is a goblet in embarrassment, not wanting to offend them further, and gulps the contents down.
The sensation of it sliding down his throat, the instant relief expanding in his belly makes him whimper. A deep savoriness shimmers across his tongue, like the nuttier aspects of cave snail shell, but then surrenders to a lighter sweetness like sugared wormmilk. It heats him from the inside out, pooling in his stomach and expanding outwards like liquid light.
“Oh,” is all he can manage, a syllable teetering on the edge of a relieved croon.
“That good, ah?” the telph says from behind the curtain, amused. “Or perhaps you’re just too starved to tell the difference in quality.”
Kharatet slugs the rest of the liquid back and nearly passes out from a vibrating rush of energy. The telph scoops up the goblet before it falls from his hand and Kharatet tries to catch at their arm. “You . . . you must tell me what that is! I’ve never tasted such a thing!”
“Never?” The telph doesn’t pull their arm away—an armored arm, he realizes, shelled—but he can sense a curious tension in it. “It’s me, of course. What else would you eat?”
“You?”
“My crop. My, you must be quite young if you’ve never . . .”
The rest of the telph’s words do not pierce the sudden froth of shock that whites out Kharatet’s attention.
Their blood. He’d drunk their blood.
He’d resolved not to partake in this odious ritual and yet he’d gobbled the offering down without thought! But of course, why else did he come here? In the end, he’d made the journey because, in the back of his loud and righteous mind, he was a coward, afraid of death, afraid of dying slow and hungry.
“Oh no, have I lost you again?” the telph asks, touching his brow.
“No, no, I’m well. I’m here,” he says feebly, lowering himself into the water up to his eyes. “I didn’t mean to do that. And all without proper introduction. Or why I’m really here.”
“Hunger makes us all clumsy. Do you think you can manage more? Or should we wait and see what of me you can keep down?”
“No!” The shout fills the room, which, from the traveling echo, Kharatet now realizes is quite large. The telph stiffens and retracts their claws, a motion that makes Kharatet’s feathery gills pin to the side of his head. “I didn’t come here for a meal. I came here to understand . . . to understand why you acquiesce to such a one-sided arrangement. And I’ve come here to . . .” To die, his mind supplies but his mouth refuses to shape the words.
“I see,” the telph says slowly as if measuring the veracity of his statements. “I find it hard to believe you don’t know anything of this tradition.”
“Of course I know all about it,” he hisses, tone somewhere between exasperated and petulant. “But I don’t understand why you do it. I want to know from your own tongue, not from the voice of a ulmun or a tablet.”
The telph clicks its claspers in worry. “You don’t have much time left.”
“Yes. But I need to know.”
The telph introduces himself as the monk Anul and Kharatet stumbles through his own introduction, his lineage, and current scholarly pursuits, all of which Anul chitters politely at. As they walk from the reception baths out into the warmer halls, Kharatet moves closer so he might be able to glean the telph’s appearance from vibration alone, touch if he’s lucky enough to brush against his host. His behavior, it seems, doesn’t go unnoticed.
Anul stops, drops a claw onto Kharatet’s arm to stop him. “Before we go further, would you like to touch me? It seems unfair I can see you clearly and you’ve no idea what kind of being you’re walking next to.”
“I’ve some idea,” Kharatet says shortly. He lifts his hand to his shoulder to guess at Anul’s height. “I can hear you. The weight of your steps and how your,” he clears his air-roughened throat, reaching for another word besides blood, “. . . pulse echoes in your body. How the wind and sounds strike against you as well. It all gives me a general shape.”
“Impressive,” Anul says, pacifying. “But touch would give you more clarity, no?”
Kharatet can’t argue that; he nods.
“Come here then.” Something shuffs to the ground, some garment Anul was wearing, too light for him to notice.
Before he can move forward, Anul’s hard claws are pulling him forward by his wrists, the supple skin pinching under the telph’s chitin. He puts Kharatet’s palms on his chest first and the ulmun can do little but suck in his breath, overwhelmed by such intimacy. His setae read every infinitesimal crack in Anul’s exoskeleton, track the great seams between his joints, the fine hairs that fleck his mandibles and palps. He moves around Anul tracking his unique form; a sharply-sculpted head crowned with antennae, a frighteningly narrow waist followed by a near spherical stomach—warm, so warm—more than half his size, and all perched atop three stickly sets of legs.
“Impressive,” he echoes, though this with a little more unease. “No, more than impressive. You’re quite . . . solidly built. I’m surprised you were able to cart me all the way from the ulmun caves to your village.”
“Oh! We don’t all have this body type,” Anul says, his palps clapping laughter. “The crop you felt in my stomach is something only monks carry. For ulmun, specifically. Otherwise, the telph are quite a lissome people. And they could carry a good ten of you easily. Twenty with effort.”
The crop; what the monks cultivated in their bellies specifically for the ulmun to feed on. What a weight it was to carry. What incredible strength needed to bear such a burden. And he’d touched this warm, life-giving body so easily. Like it was nothing. When Kharatet makes no move to shake himself from the shame of his thoughts, Anul tugs him by his hand, hard against soft.
It’s not a long walk but the dryness and the leaf-mangled wind drains the dampness from Kharatet’s cloak and then skin. A few brief stretches of Anul carrying him up a wall of woven vines, across thatched hanging bridges, and before they arrive at their destination, the answer to Kharatet’s guilt. When Anul lifts the heavy drape from the entryway, it is not what he expects. He can sense it is a modestly sized room, no bigger than his own in the caves, not particularly extravagant, at least to his skin. As he moves around it, he feels low tables with inscrutable objects atop them, some hard and others soft as mud.
“This is your . . . home?”
“Just so.”
“It’s quite . . .” Kharatet waits for Anul to lend him an adjective but in the ensuing silence, he settles for, “restrained.” Another confused beat of silence. “What exactly am I meant to understand here?”
“My work,” Anul says, gesturing as if it were obvious. “I get to do whatever I like as a monk. Well, after seeing to my duties, of course. Currently, I’m interested in recording what I see of the green world. Those sculptures are my impressions of plant life I’ve observed. Fascinating how they change and die, the forms they take upon their return. My mentors say I have a knack for exaggerating them into interesting forms.”
“. . . Sculptures.”
“Indeed. And before this it was cooking, with lessons from some of our finest gastronomes. Before that, dance and before that, poetry.”
Kharatet perks up at the last subject but then flattens his gills in irritation. “I thought you were going to tell me why it is you’ve taken on this sacrificial role. Not your hobbies.”
“I did. As a monk, I can do whatever I like under the tutelage of any I wish.”
“And that’s . . . enough?”
“I’d say it’s quite a fine life I have. Isn’t that what you’re concerned with? That the density of pleasure I’ve known balances out my death? Most telph work as scavengers and brooders, cooks and builders. Not the most entertaining work. And very tiring.” He smooths a hand down his arm, shining his shell. “And then there is my faith to consider, obviously, but I have a sense that my desire to become a saint does not your concern.”
“Well, of course I understand you believe what you’re doing is right. That other telph think it’s right.”
“Ah ah, I know what I’m doing is right. Regardless, am I supposed to impress upon you the extent of my life’s faith in the mere hours we have together? Maybe a day or two if you’re fortunate?”
“I can’t imagine it would take all that long,” Kharatet mumbles snidely then snaps his jaws shut at the insult. Telph only lived for two or three years at most but that didn’t mean they only had a child’s understanding of the world or of their faith, though he could only bring himself to think that on the surface of his thoughts, without any deeper acceptance. “I only mean your life is but a blink compared to mine.”
“And the brevity of my life makes it lesser?”
“Not at all!”
Anul takes a seat on a moss-covered platform, carefully adjusting the great swell of his stomach, “So has this made it at all easier for you?”
“Easier?”
“To take your nourishment.”
“That’s a fine way to say it,” Kharatet says shrilly. “I’m not going to eat you.”
“Perhaps you need to read more of the experience. From the perspective of the telph, not just ulmun.”
“I’ve read all your holy doctrine as I’ve read mine,” Kharatet says sharply. “I can’t believe that this is the only way for my people to live. For yours not to.”
“You act as if there is no benefit to me.”
“Any benefit we’ve made to entice you into this sick tradition is a farce. It is . . . unnatural!”
“The ulmun have preyed on the telph for as long as we’ve had words and further back still. I can’t think of anything more natural.”
“I’m not going to feed on you,” Kharatet grits out. “It’s not right, no matter what you believe.”
“Because?”
Kharatet regards Anul with his nose, his skin, and finds the telph’s poise unbreakable. “Because I don’t want you to die. I don’t want to take a life just to keep mine going temporarily!”
“But I am going to die. Quite soon, actually. I’m one of the eldest monks in our order. And by rights, I’ve the luxury of choosing how. Not a choice we telph often get.”
“But what about your . . . your hobbies? Your art? You can’t tell me you want it all to stop. That you don’t desire to continue making things?”
“I do enjoy it. But my joy in my ‘hobbies’ is less important than your life.”
Kharatet spits out a short burst of offended air. At the core of their reasoning, they held the same values towards the preservation of life; values that were now directly at odds. “How . . . how do you know I’m worthy?” he asks with no lack of smugness. “What if I’ve hurt others and been cruel? What if I destroy things? What if that’s what I plan to continue doing?”
“Your worthiness and nature, none of you is of any consequence to me. The gift here is me being able to continue a life that is equal to mine.”
“But not your life. What about having children? I know you telph love having large families.”
“Ah, family. It’s not something I can do alone and I don’t have the temperament for a home full of broodmates and walls full of cradlechambers. But this,” Anul gestures between Kharatet and himself. “This I can do alone. And continuing a life is quite a different gift than creating a new one. One could say it’s incomparable.”
Kharatet paces, lashing his tail. “You know the ulmun have been doing this since the gods created us. Hunting you. We’ve made the whole process pretty now. Easy, even, for us. Clawed out a holy story that feels good to our fingers. How do you know you’ve not been tricked into doing this? That lies have not stripped you of your will?”
“Some of my brother-monks have withdrawn from being nourishers. Some do want something other than this and they are never compelled to stay.” Anul’s voice grows quiet, thin as his own skin. “But not I.
Kharatet growls and itches madly at his drying skin beneath the reedy cloak. “And if . . . what if this is all just a story we’ve told you—told ourselves—to soften the blow of your death? To ease our consciousness of . . . of murder!”
“You act as if I’ve never considered it,” Anul says with an irritated click. “After all, we are your only source of nourishment. Of life. I’d say your word can’t help but be quite biased, indeed. But you’ve also adapted to us. Given us a provision in exchange.”
“We’ve adapted?”
“Your venom.”
“I’ve . . . never used it.” Kharatet wonders at that; as a child, he’d been forced to eat small cave creatures and had never felt his venom sacs engage. He flaps his feathery gills, disturbed at his own ignorance. “I’ve never been in danger so there has been no need for it.”
“It’s not something to protect you. It’s something for us. That is to say, your prey.”
Kharatet gags in disgust. “Don’t use that word! I’m not a predator!”
“Nor am I prey, not anymore. But a lesson on telph anatomy: your venom temporarily paralyzes the receiver and for us, it’s a particularly amazing sensation. Divine even.”
He’d read of this so-called sensation, the euphoria the venom induced. Lies, he assumed, to persuade the telph to give themselves up. Suspicion pins Kharatet’s gills to the sides of his head. “How would you know the sensation? You’re still alive.”
“Upon initiating into the order, we’re given a small phial of venom. That’s how we decide if we want to pursue this path.” Anul’s voice softens to trickle. “It is unlike anything I’ve known. It melts our minds from our bodies, grants us wingless flight. Allows us to peer into the vast sea of memory, the legacies made by telph and ulmun and all living things.”
“Pah. The forged dreams of the eaten, carved by secondary claws.”
“Not dreams. Doors, thrown open.”
“And if it is only dreams? Wild, envenomed fantasies?”
Anul’s body sags, his exoskeleton creaking, joint against joint. “Even if it’s unpleasant or nothing at all . . . I’m still helping keep you alive, no?”
“No, no, no,” Kharatet says, resuming his pacing, his itching, trying to peel out of his chapped hide. “Like the bee is drawn to the flower, even the blooms that eat it.” Kharatet’s skin prickles and numbs, his ears grow muffled by his own pulse. The floor gives way beneath his feet. “You’ve been fooled, Anul, there is no kind way for me to say it. No, no way at all—”
A different room vibrates into being around Kharatet as he wakes. Larger than Anul’s studio, made of denser material as well. He guesses stone instead of bark, but when he shifts in the woven chair of wherever he is, the echo catches and shudders through it differently than any rock he knows. He shifts again and this time takes note of something restraining his waist and legs.
“You fainted again.” Anul presses a hand to his shoulder, keeping him sitting. “Stay. I don’t trust your legs anymore.”
“Apologies. Why . . . why am I bound?”
“For your own safety. But that is of no importance at the moment. Tell me: did you come here only to hurl insults at me and my people before dying?”
“No! Well yes, I suppose I most likely will die here,” he touches the grumbling concavity of his stomach, the hollow dizziness of an appetite unaddressed expanding in his head, “but that’s not why I came.”
“Then tell me why.”
“To . . . I wanted to know what you were like,” Kharatet says, tipping his head up towards where Anul’s voice is coming from. “Your lives. Your beliefs. If you simply didn’t realize the injustice of it . . .”
“And are we as guileless and gullible as you thought?”
The sting in Anul’s words doesn’t miss. “You can’t fault me for wanting to know how we could do this to you. I thought maybe you were different in some way. Simpler.”
“We are different.”
“Different in a way that made it easier.”
“And it’s not easier?”
Kharatet dips his head.
“If it were, if we were simpler, crueler perhaps, would you take nourishment then?”
“No,” he says, but the firmness in his voice is false. “Where are we? Not your private quarters.”
“The temple’s feeding chamber,” Anul says. “It’s empty save for us now, but during the ceremony proper it would be filled with other monks to witness the Nourishing.”
“Proper?”
“I’ve decided you’re not in any fit state to decide whether you want to live or not. The lack of Nourishment has made you erratic and dispirited. In this situation, we simply cannot rely on your irrational judgements.”
“How dare you call me irrational! I am an ulmun scholar, trained by learned elders who’ve seen hundreds of your generations pass! And you—you’re nothing more than a child playing at holiness!”
Anul’s voice sharpens. “Kharatet, you will eat. You will eat and live and I will receive the honor I am due.”
Before Kharatet can think to cry out for help, to snap for Anul to stop, his jaws are forcibly parted and the telph’s forearm is shoved into his mouth.
Immediately his mouth overflows with saliva and venom as Anul forces his jaws shut around his arm. The first crunch through the telph’s chitin is a revelation of flavors: the smoky fermented shell gives way to a herbaceous meatiness, so rich it brings tears to his eyes. Tears of horror because there is no fighting what his body so painfully demands.
Kharatet knows how the ritual is meant to go as he has read of it time and time again: he would paint Anul’s body with a softening salve before sunrise, which would weaken the telph’s hardy exoskeleton into a soft cartilage-like consistency. Other telph would escort them as the sun steps above the horizon, both monks and star ready to bear witness. Once upon the altar, Kharatet would start by consuming Anul’s limbs so that he might experience the euphoric envenoming the longest. Next would come Anul’s belly, which would first be minimally punctured by a ritual thorn; his crop will flow down onto the altar which has been carved with a lip to catch every drop, funneling it down to a narrow channel from which he could drink. Then Kharatet would eat Anul’s abdomen followed by his antenna, palps, his chest, and finally his head. Digesting Anul would take him a handful of years, perhaps even more. He wouldn’t feel the clutches of starvation for a decade at least.
He wouldn’t feel—
He wouldn’t—
But there is nothing sacred in the temple today. Kharatet watches his body from a distance, lost in a feeding frenzy fugue. The only grace in this bestial gorging is Anul’s voice as Kharatet tears through the hard parts of his body to find the tender treasures within him. The telph sounds beatific, singing a hymn of chitters and whistles, melodies only a telph could make. Anul only stumbles in his song when Kharatet tears too roughly at his flesh, jerking his voice off-kilter. The song goes on and on as Kharatet eats, so steady and lovely that he almost forgets that he is ending a life, making a feast of Anul’s faith.
When Kharatet comes back to himself, he is near as full as Anul once was, his belly sphereing out uncomfortably in front of him. He is out of the chair, the twine bindings now tatters on his legs, sitting where Anul once was on the altar of Nourishment.
There is a sludgy wetness all around him and when he runs his hands along the surface of the altar, he find sharp bits of shell, a stray claw. The air is filled with the smell of old peat and loam and honey. He touches his face, feels where the watery blood has begun to dry into a thin, flaky paste on his muzzle. He runs a finger around the inside of his mouth, flinching at ragged cuts in his gums. He hadn’t salved Anul, softened him for consumption.
Had it hurt more, being devoured like this? Had he screamed? Had his faith broken on the final bite? Or had he gone with a righteous smile, smug all the way down his throat?
Between his teeth, the saint sours. Kharatet wails on the altar until the other monks arrive, hushing him with throat-caught hums. They wipe at his tears with slender claws, the unintended scratches a painful solace from the numbing stretch of his heresy.
The summer current moves swift and warm through the lightless cave, filling the wide cavern with a heavy and humid air, dotting the ceilings with constant droplets of condensation. The tiny splashes of cave rain fill the space with sounds, vibrations that patter at his skin, sharpen the shape of every object and ulmun in the room.
“You look well, brother,” Mhuretaj tells him as she passes by with freshly hewn stone for writing. Pausing, she adds, “I’m pleased and I hope you are, too. You are worth any and every telph, my dear.”
The most Kharatet can make himself answer is with a flick of his gills. His voice sits behind a driftwood dam, building up with a bitter detritus. He feels Mhuretaj depart for her duties and the space between them fills with a toxic plume of resentment. What were any of them truly worth?
Brood mothers lay a clutch of freshly-hatched nymphs before him for their daily reading. They are quite young, young enough that they have no language, only bleats to voice their discomfort. They likely won’t understand today’s reading but it doesn’t matter; tradition commands and the ulmun obey.
Kharatet draws a new limestone tablet from the shelves and places it on his lap. His stomach bulges against the tablet, forcing it farther from his body. By fingerpad, he begins to read glyph by glyph. Another favorite poem of the ulmun by the great wordsmith Loraja:
the warm wine of mites fills my nourisher’s belly
and in the sweetness of your holy wellspring,
here Ii, a river-lustered heart, lie
smoothed for your claw’s contentment
It is the prettiest of lies he has read in his time as a scholar. The nymphs begin to cry as he trails off into silence, already desperate to be back in their mother’s pouch. Their helpless bleats and the splashing droplets fill his skull to brimming. All thought since he has left Anul has taken on the same foamy quality of meaninglessness. Even now, with his attention directed at the nymphs before him, he cannot find a seed of solicitude, of deference to life he once had. They, too, would grow and eat their Anuls happily, year after year, life after life. Little predators in the making. Just like him.
The tablet slips from his lap as he stands, chipping as it clacks loudly onto the ground. A scholar snaps at him from an adjacent study cell but he cannot make out the words.
“Come here, little one.” Gingerly, as though Kharatet were touching the telph’s soft belly, he lifts a nymph to his face. It whimpers but this time nothing in him flinches.
“Do you want to see something truly holy?” he asks the little ulmun, opening his jaws wide, letting the honey of its curiosity lead it further behind the temple of his teeth, the honey of its hollow mind pressing against the comforting warmth of his tongue, then throat, to a nourishment never to be had.
bones to marrow,
blood to heat;
teeth to saints,
nymphs to meat
About the Author
Sloane Leong is a cartoonist, illustrator, writer, editor, and labor organizer of mixed indigenous ancestries. Through her work, she engages with visceral futurities and fantasies through a radical, kaleidoscopic lens. She is the creator of several graphic novels: From Under Mountains, Prism Stalker, A Map to the Sun, and Graveneye. Her fiction has appeared in many publications including Dark Matter Magazine, Apex Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Analog, Realm Media, and more. When she’s not making something she’s helping run the Cartoonist Cooperative, an organization working to improve and protect the labor rights of cartoonists around the world. She currently lives on Chinook land near what is known as Portland, Oregon with her family and two dogs.
Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the January 2024 issue, which also features work by Rachael K. Jones, Lowry Poletti, Ben Peek, Adam-Troy Castro, Aimee Ogden, Thomas Ha, David Anaxagoras, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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