What the Roof Kept
Session: 2019-11-18
His page for this day is blank as well. The account that survives was written after a long silence. Its author says as much: there had been a long hiatus, and it was hard to get the momentum back. I mention it because the silence is in the records too.
There is a day missing before this one. The last account left them resting in the dark of the third cavern. This one picks them up at a rest of ten minutes, already moving down a corridor none of the earlier records describe. A day passed in the rock between the two, and no one wrote it down.
What we know of it comes from a later summary, written to remind the party where they had been. It says they found strange tunnels and strange alien technologies, and computer codes that none of them could make sense of. It says they found the "bodies" of the crew, and the quotation marks are the author's own. I do not know what they mean, and I will not guess. Somewhere in that day they also found the corpse of Captain Moriko Nash, and Grek took her data-pad from it. Her last will and testament was on the data-pad.
That is all of it. I will not fill in the rest. Every novitiate is taught to count what is missing as carefully as what is there, and this day is one of the things that is missing.
When the account resumes they are walking a hallway of alien make, past computers showing a language none of them could read, toward the one door they had not yet opened.
Bren Talic waited at that door. The account is surprised by this, and so am I. In every earlier record he went through doors first and looked afterwards. This time he held back and let the party see what was on the other side before anyone went in. The account wonders whether this is growth. I think it is too early to say. Animals learn caution from what has already hurt them, and a great deal had hurt him by then.
Beyond the door was a large vaulted room, a landing bay or hangar. Just inside it lay two human bodies, mutilated, their organs laid out around them. The account says artfully, and I have thought about that word more than I should have. In the forests we know predators that arrange what they have killed. They are never doing it for the sake of the meal.
At the far end of the hangar stood a ship with its boarding ramp open. They started toward it slowly.
Note the branch that is heavier than the branch.
Look up. The patient ones are above you.
— the Observances, from the Readings on Ambush
The order tells what happened next from the Fragments. It is a short telling, and I have never heard it told any other way.
And they crossed the hall that was made for ships, and the roof of it was high.
And Grek saw that the roof was wrong, and before he could say how, the roof came down.
And it had wings, and it was a thing of the Drift, and it was called the Garagakal.
And Deku the Vesk was sick from the stone, and his strength had gone out of him,
and he went between it and Grek.
And it bit him once.
And Deku did not get up, and he will not get up, and the telling does not soften it.
And they struck at the thing and it was hard to strike, and they saw what it was, and they ran.
And they came into the ship, all who still lived, and they closed it behind them,
and the thing came through the hull as water comes through a net.
And she who kept the record asked why Kopalo is not in this telling.
And the one who taught him said: Because he was running, as they all were.
— Fragments of the Keepers, the Kopalo cycle, as it is usually told
The Fragments are right to keep Deku at the centre, and right not to dress it up. The records give his death a single sentence. He was still sick and weakened from the Akata disease, and he put himself between his companion and the charge anyway. If novitiates learn anything from this passage, I would want it to be the last line. There is no shame in the running.
The Garagakal could pass through solid matter. Closing the ramp had not kept it out, and it met them in the ship's main corridor. Some of the party were already further forward, and they worked their way toward the bridge in turns, each one opening the next internal door for the one behind. The account calls it teamwork, and for once it is not joking.
Qwitch threw open the doors to the bridge. A glowing hologram stood in the way. It said it was the Shipboard Telepresence Unit of the Sunrise Maiden, and that it preferred to be called Stu.
Grek held up Moriko Nash's data-pad. Her will left the ship to whoever found it. Grek had found it, and he gave the ship's control authority to Qwitch. The account calls this selfless, and I agree. It was Grek's ship to keep, and he gave it away moments after Deku had died for him.
The party could not fight the Garagakal and survive. Qwitch knew it, and gave his first order as master of the ship: activate the anti-boarding protocols, and mark the creature as hostile. Stu electrified the deckplates.
The electricity hurt the party a little and the Garagakal a great deal. Taeon was the one who noticed that it was vulnerable to electricity. The account gives him half a sentence for this, in parentheses. I think that is about the right size for it. He watched the animal, and the animal showed him what it could not bear. The creature screamed and went down through the deck, the way it had come in.
— A xenodruid would tell you that a creature that can pass through anything has never had to learn to avoid what hurts it. I do not know whether Taeon thought that. I think he might have.
It gave them enough time. They powered up the Sunrise Maiden and left the Drift Rock.
There were four of them now. Deku stayed behind in the hangar with the two who had been laid out before him. The rock still held the Garagakal, the strange tunnels, and the codes no one could read. The party set course for the Acreon, where they had left ED210 and the gear they could not carry. The account ends by hoping that nothing bad happens when they get there. Accounts of this kind usually end that way.
The records do not say where Taeon stood on the bridge as they pulled away, or whether he looked back. I would like to think he looked up.