A vine was gently curled around her neck, and a deep breath she didn’t know she’d been holding slid out of her throat with a silent sigh. Her eyes gazed out into the abyss of space- no, wait, a holographic game board depicting said abyss. She was safe. There was no spark of fear in her heart.

Odd. Looking back down at the game, it seemed she had already lost. 

Her head tilted back, in an attempt to clear the morning dew from her mind, and through the droplets of her thoughts she saw the ceiling, high and vaulted above her, awash in green. Things hung from it, great chrysanthemums of shimmering foliage large enough around to look like dresses viewed from beneath. Some pulled up towards the ceiling at a lazy pace, others descended with the same glacial slowness. 

The ship was different from the buildings, the meeting halls, the expansive empty restaurants, she noticed. Back on Edifice, “up” was a direction for the tower cranes and the glaring white dust in the sky. Even after the city had gone verdant, attempts to climb staircases were argued against by 1.31 Gs of gravity- a 31% increase from standard spin that rendered falls dangerous and construction work beyond a few stories expensive enough that few bothered with it. 

A white and gold hanging chrysanthemum dropped precipitously toward her, and was caught by its vine just as soundly. She could imagine a ball-goer or bride from some fanciful old story falling from a loft in that breath-suppressing 1.3 Gs, herself watching from underneath some invisible glass floor until- She blinked, not wanting to imagine what happened next. 

A ship. She’d seen these from below, things with more right to be called edifices than her planet ever did, making shadows which looked like a cloud's. Spiraling and radiating in petals that scraped the horizons, undersides hazy and white-blue from the atmosphere beneath them, their arrival made the flattened-out city of Tay’s Fort look deader than it already was- a skeleton being inspected by archaeologists from above. And she had been taken back to the museum, she noted. A relic, removed from its context, placed somewhere that highlighted exactly how small and archaic it was. Good. Another sigh escaped her lips, and her head swung back down at a voice- many voices, overlapping, with a soft, hissing sweetness to them that made the droplets on the pane of her thoughts start to vibrate.

“Cerise? This soft reverie has again taken hold of you. Can you hear my voice?”

She could hear nothing except it. Each little voice in the chorus skipped between words, speaking the latter half of a word and the former half of the next before falling silent, to be replaced with the next voice beside it. The resulting combination formed a choir like a waterfall, the totality of voices making a sound that cascaded from one word into the next.

“Cerise, my jewel? What was it that had your mind so captivated?”

She didn’t want to lie. “I- I don’t know.”

The vine she forgot was wrapped around her neck began to move, and a warm, quivering golden light showered through her. Intermingling with the shimmers of faint pressure surrounding her body, the light percolated down and settled in her belly, a warm, welcome feeling which made her want to throw her head forward. Instead, the vine stilled, and Cerise’s thoughts settled back in their proper places. 

“What were you thinking about, little one?” 

She stared up at the massive wedding dress-chrysanthemums, before closing her eyes again. “All of… this? How different this is, how scary this is, compared to what I knew. Did you know that the tallest building on Edifice before you all came was sixteen stories tall, Apostasia?”

The vine lifted from her skin. “You will call me Miss, dearest Cerise, do you remember?”

She genuinely didn’t. It was not, however, a surprise. She nodded without meaning to, lips trying out the phonetics of the words. The vine settled back down, leaving shivering golden liquid light cascading in its wake.

“Ah, yes, your Edifice and its flattened face. As much a product of the space there was to spread into as the planet’s gravity, hm?”

Cerise thought of the Skytrees, the great floating things, the hanging gardens that the Affini had set up when they had come. 

“But you have more than that space, you have the whole galaxy to-”

“And here you arrive at one of the differences between your kind and mine.” She laughed like falling water. “Here. It is about time we showed you outside. Come with me.”

Cerise’s head once again swung back forward, just a touch, to meet the face of the being she had been speaking to. Her face was unlike any of the other Affini she had seen, and she had seen many, on her trips to the Affini quarter of Tay’s Fort. It was like a puzzle composed of strange oblong pieces- white petals striated with green, all coming together to create the semblance of a striking, smiling face. She could see the seams between them, and the finer petals moving behind those, layers and layers of subtly adjusting floral symmetry in the place of bones and tendons and musculature. Apostasia opened her mouth, and every petal of her face adjusted by millimeters to accommodate it.

“Up you go!”

Cerise moved, numb, unsteady, eyes running down past the affini’s face, past the two antenna jutting off downwards and to either side like pointed ears, and down a body of curling leaves dotted with orchids- each one unique, each one mirrored on the left as on the right. Clusters of tiny yellow flowers like clouds formed the backdrop behind them. Apostasia hooked a thin gold leash to Cerise’s collar- something which made her stomach flutter, and began walking with her out the door.

The light was strange. Morning light, or light reminiscent of mornings back on Edifice, but with a soft touch to it, like it was overcast. She looked down at nothing in particular, and then her head craned upwards, expecting to see a thick blanket of clouds. Instead, a clear lilac sky yawned up above her. Cloudless, oddly uniform in its brightness, like it was a-

“Miss Apostasia, we’re on a ship. Is that a screen?”

“Walk, dearest. It is a screen, Cerise, in much the same way that a Terran ship computer is a device for sending radio messages. Forward, look.”

As if hit with a spotlight, the path ahead was lit with a shimmering light, as if reflective snow were falling through the air. Her eyes shot upward, and a miniscule strip of the sky glared down at her, brighter than all the rest, like a crack had appeared to an impossibly bright nothingness above. Other cracks, hair-thin, now that she looked, danced across the skyscreen, and the path ahead of her- 

She was in a park. It was very obviously a park, and not a forest, for although there were trees on both sides, gaps appearing naturally grown wound between them, paths paved with something that looked like opaque glass filling those gaps as if the paths and the trees had grown right up alongside one another. Given what Cerise knew of Affini engineering, maybe they had. 

This was okay, Cerise thought. This was… This was something. She didn’t know what, exactly. A feeling like a massive invisible bubble was welling up in her, threatening to pop. The fact that the sky had cracked at the command of her- she was not going to think about that right now- at the command of the affini that was accompanying her, the fact that she hadn’t even seen any use of a touchpad or tool to make it happen. It made her-

“Did you do that to the sky, Miss Apostasia?” she said, voice thin.

The affini’s body began swaying in a subtly different way, the orchids extending off of it on stalks changing their manner of movement slightly, before commencing. “The sky, as you so magically portray it, simply knew that we would need light before us, and so light is what it gave. I would rather not breach the magic for you, darling marble.”

“And behind the magic? Since I assume you do know the tech behind it.”

Apostasia didn’t answer.

The trees began to clear, the paths growing denser, before weaving together like a basket into a wide-open plaza. Buildings like strange jungle flowers lined either side of it, with gaps for more paths to extend laterally to either side, and the plants- the plants moved. Affini, all of them, only a small portion humanoid, and not many more with shapes she could recognize as any animal species at all. A dusty green affini in the shape of a trail of spheres, a gargantuan beaded chain as high as her chest and longer than a sports field, glided past her, rearing the largest sphere of the chain up in greeting. Tied to it, as it passed, was a much smaller, much more metallic beaded creature, complex patterns anodized onto its surface gleaming in the sky’s light as it sped up to let Apostasia pass. Another, in the shape of what looked like two tentacled sea creatures locked in a graceful pirouette, flowed past, singing briefly at Apostasia before passing behind them. The notes made Cerise’s head vibrate. 

“Nobody here has your name.” The lyrics came to her head unbidden, following in the wake of the sea creature affini’s buzzing notes. The bubble in Cerise’s chest grew, as she continued to walk. 

“Don’t ask me, I’ll never say the same.”  the song continued.

Apostasia was talking to another affini, humanoid and with a thick tail of woven vines wrapped around her legs. She caught “...blanket acquiescence” followed by a few names listed off, and some jargon she didn’t recognize. Things that sounded like medicine names. 

“Don’t look back, girl, our ship has hit the air.”  the voice from the song crooned in her head.

“Cerise Merinoi, Twentieth Floret,” she overheard. Twentieth? How many florets did affini usually have?

“Close your eyes, as people stand and stare.”  she hummed along, as the song in her head continued to play. 

“And you’re content to sit back and watch, aren’t you?” the tailed affini, looking at her, spoke. 

Lead pieces strewn on a game table. Feet hitting the ground. Cerise’s stomach was in freefall. All the way over here? Did she know, somehow? The song rang out between her thoughts. “Don’t let your life decay…” 

“Um…” she stared up at the thick-tailed affini, analyzing its wooden face. Did it want something from her? “Um… I’m not home anymore.” 

How did that make sense? Who greeted someone with something like that? What kind of… 

“I mean I’m far from home, so please be…” the affini looked curiously down at her.

“Please be understanding if…”

The plant spoke an alien language to Apostasia in rapidfire. The orchid-studded affini responded back. 

“If…” 

The bubble situated inside Cerise’s chest and all through her neck and her arms and her belly had finally popped. Something about the way her body moved had felt very, very wrong, for what she could remember of the entire day. Which wasn't much more than the past hour, she realized with a deep shock to her chest. The telltale exhaustion, the small twinge that let one know that they had, in fact, been using their body- it was missing. Tears streamed down her face, as she stood stock-still in a respectful position, posture unnatural, hands by her sides. 

The quick conversation in Affini continued, and Cerise felt a vine wind around her neck again, dashing away her thoughts and leaving only the next verse of the song playing in her head, persisting despite it all.

“Hollow skiiiii-ies that you walk among!”

Her skin felt strange. Something was between it and her clothes, all around her. The air blew through it and through her dress, wicking away sweat.

“Don’t show your face to the masses if you’ve lost your tongue.”

The affini with the tail pet Cerise’s short black hair with a vine, said one final thing to Apostasia, and walked away.

“The unhappy girl in your skin

Was without what you now lay within,”

Cerise tried to turn, to move. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t move? It was like something had been pulling her body along on strings. The thought that throughout the entire day, not a single movement of her body had been her own made its way through her numb, clouded mind. Apostasia was speaking to her, and she could barely make out what the overlapping voices were saying.

“Don’t let your life decay,”

Cerise took a deep breath, one of the only things she could still do under her own power. “What did you do to me?”

Her affini wrapped her up, pulling her close, as she deftly stepped aside to avoid tripping. She would’ve stumbled there, wouldn’t she?

A prick to the side of the neck, under her collar, made the world go gray. Heavy, comfortable safety, rightness, suffused her where she hadn’t known what she was feeling moments before, and her eyelids were suddenly as heavy as cast lead. Things were dark. Things were silent. The song from her past on Edifice, and the scenes that came with it, rang through her thoughts.

“Just let me take you far away.”