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Ancient Alternia, One Millennium into Her Imperious Condescension’s Reign
Miruka picked up the troll child and held it, examining it from each angle squinting as much as a creature whose eyes were decorative emeralds could squint.
Nearby, Chimera tossed hers into the air with her tail, and grabbed it again with both hands as it whooped and hollered.
The wyvern gave her an irritated look as her own squirmed and struggled to be put down. It tried to bite her, but only found tough green scales its small fangs had no hope of piercing. It hissed.
“Have it your way, then.” She grumbled, and put the small creature back down in its cocoon full of green slime, where it settled it and closed its eyes.
“Chimera!” She called sharply, looking across to her irritating companion, now on the crest of another sand dune. There was a perfectly good city nearby, too, but they were out in this featureless wasteland. It was just like her.
“Hmm?” said the furred creature absentmindedly, now balancing her child on one foot as she floated upside down, wings beating occasionally, not that they strictly needed to.
“Stop playing with that; do you really want to go find a new one?”
“The blue ones are tough.” She replied, still sounding like her mind was half in a different galaxy. Knowing her irresponsible tendency of splitting herself, it very well could be. “Besides, it likes it! Don’t you, little buddy?”
The child was clutching the webbed foot with wide eyes, its curly hair bouncing as it shook.
Miruka counted to ten, and then exhaled as a gesture of impatience.
“Chimera.”
“Mm?”
“How long has it been since you’ve dealt with mortal children?”
“I want to say it was that empire of multiple eared people? Taor?”
“It was the Sylvites. That was only eight hundred and - “
“You do know that if I damage it I can fix it. Put it right back in its egg! Then speed it through developing.”
“A waste of power.”
Miruka still wasn’t used to the two different colors of moonlight shining on her idiot companion’s golden fur and her own green scales. It was ridiculous, but then, this whole universe was patently absurd. Even if the creatures lurking at its edges were anything but.
Chimera put the child down gently in its own cocoon before spreading her wings wide and leaping over, sitting down on the cool sands. A scorpion scuttled past them, and she scooped it up, admiring the creature whose tail her own resembled. Miruka humored her for a few breaths, and then teleported it out of her palm, somewhere out of sight.
“Do you really think we’re going to die soon?” she said, looking up at the stars as a breeze ruffled her fur and the feathers in her ears.
“Even we cannot cheat death forever. We were both mortal once, and we have debts to pay. Perhaps a thousand years, likely less.”
“That used to seem like so long. Now it’s hardly enough time to watch a civilization grow.”
“Is that why you’re even more irritating about using our power? Because, if so, you just - “
“I am trying to get you to focus.” She spoke over the protest. “I am better at conserving my energy regardless.”
Chimera rolled her eyes.
“Sure, Jan. Anyway…I’ve been calculating, if I age them about three more years they should start developing their powers. They won’t miss it, we can just give them implanted memories to make the transition easier on everybody.”
Miruka missed the expressive luxuries of ears and eyebrows at times like these. She settled for pulling her clay mouth back in disapproval.
“Oh, don’t give the ‘that’s immoral’ look, you’ve killed thousands of people for less. I remember the puddle incident, don’t test me.”
“Don’t dodge the subject. If they turn out psychologically unstable, they will be hunted down by others of their kind, and they will be no use to us. We’ll have to reset the timeline, again. I remember the ‘Chimera let the blue one get eaten’ incident.”
“Every single time! That was not my fault, that…whatever it was…popped out of a hole in the ground and before I knew it, bam!”
“Very convincing. No, we let them grow up naturally. It was prudent to age them past pupation, but I spent far too long ensuring the stable mix of genetics in the green one for it to wind up with issues before it’s even an adolescent.”
Miruka’s tail coiled and uncoiled, the arrowhead drawing lines in the sand as Chimera grimaced but nodded.
“We must also avoid attracting too much attention from our…neighbors.”
“We’re nowhere near the ocean, what do we have to worry about?”
“You know as well as I that the Rift’s Carbuncle is far from the only threat on this planet.”
“She keeps the rest of them in line, as long as we don’t piss her off we’re golden.”
“Mm. Do you regret coming here?”
Chimera looked down at the endless shifting grains, toying with a strand of fur.
“Kind of. It’s definitely not ideal. I can’t help but think that was sort of the point, though.”
“It likely was.”
The universe worked in stranger ways than even they could imagine, despite having been to so many worlds across so many times and dimensions. Alternia was one of the most hostile they had ever been to, and had been chosen primarily because it was already claimed by an entity far greater than either of the pair, forcing them to cooperate.
Forcing them to work with what they had, or die with no hope of return from the grave.
Perhaps it was a judgment on both of their meddling in countless lives and planets, of reshaping solar systems at their wills. They could command time and space, but they answered to the cosmic forces of judgment no matter where or when they were.
“Who do you think judges us? We never found out, and I know you investigated for ages.”
Miruka ground her emerald teeth. It had always been a source of ire that by gaining her powers, she had also become subject to whatever strange force put limits on Chimera’s actions as well.
“All I ever found were scraps and half-truths, some of them contradictory. Whatever manner of being they are, they have no desire to be known. Some kind of star creature, perhaps. There were a dozen other potential leads.”
“Why didn’t you chase them?”
“I had to keep an eye on you. I had already been gone too long.”
“How sweet. My people were doing just ducky until you turned up out of the blue.”
“That’s irrelevant now.”
“Easy for you to say. I buried all of them myself.”
“Including the ones already suffering from your plague?”
“It was nonlethal until you decided oh, hey, let’s poison the water! That’ll REALLY help the situation of trying to keep them from starting a war peacefully!”
“Regardless of the war, they were fundamentally corrupt, as their treatment of the other species showed. There was nothing left to salvage.”
Chimera was now growling in her face, having edged closer after every word.
“That wasn’t your choice to make.” She said, voice dangerously low, devoid of humor.
Miruka stared her down with gemstone eyes.
“You’d choose to abbreviate the lives of two children for your own convenience.”
The furred creature hissed, threw up her hands, and moved back, getting up and pacing as her stinger tail lashed back and forth.
“Oh, I’m sorry! Is that somehow a bigger crime than modifying them for our own needs? I didn’t realize we were debating chickens and sheep now!”
“You’re overreacting.” said the wyvern flatly, her wings shifting slightly. “This isn’t a disagreement, Chimera, it’s a comparison of motives.”
“I disagree with your bloody comparison. I’m trying to get this over with, and to do it as painlessly as possible for them. Are you any good at raising children, Miruka? I had a son once. I had to leave him. Even his mother didn’t want me to stay, and she was right. We are not meant to be parents. So yes, I’m choosing for them because they are literal infants and this is for their own good.”
Her hand lit up with a pulsing ball of green energy.
“So you’d have them believe we were?” Miruka replied softly. “I remember when you told me that your entire purpose was to undo the lies I let my people live.”
The energy was extinguished with a whoosh of air as Chimera’s green eyes welled up with a haunted sort of hatred.
“I don’t want to die.” she said softly.
“We will not.” Miruka said firmly. “Now pull yourself together and stop acting ridiculous.”
Chimera turned her back on her old enemy, picking up the cocoon her child slept in, shielded from the planet’s psychic tide of troubled dreams.
“I’m going somewhere else. Don’t follow me.”
Miruka watched as she vanished, and stayed unmoving until the red sun began to peek over the horizon.
She picked up her child, extended her batlike wings, and flew away into the shimmering heat of day.