Yeehaw

Having had your fill of these amenities, you ask your hosts what lands lie nearby. The older catgirl's ears perk up with visible delight, for she has spent most her seventeen-and-seven years of holy service here coming up with this speech.

"Seven days' walk dawnward — perhaps eight, if you lack spirit discipline — begin the Uncountable Pillar Marches, once the edge of the now-defunct Pattern Egg Empire. Its towering pillars of basalt and malachite still stand, though oft askew. Each pillar is home to one of a clangorous and unruly mass of scorpiongirl philosophers, cranegirl god-speakers, and fennecgirl charlatans, all shouting to be heard. Bring wax to seal your ears, offerings of food and coin, and a traveling companion with a strong throwing arm."

"If, instead, you follow the sunset for longer than I'd care to, you'll find storied Attar-in-Mourning. Long ago, its shrikegirl sorcerer-queen plucked out her eye and replaced it with a shard of a slumbering primordial godgirl's sapphire brain. She is thus incomparable in all subtle art, and a monster infinitely worse than the rock lodged in her skull. If you must visit Attar-in-Morning, be sure you travel alongside snakegirls, for the sorcerer-queen is inexplicably fond of them."

"Go at night by the polestar till you reach a river, then follow its waters, and you'll reach the great port-city Chryselephantine. It's been in uproar ever since a catgirl crime syndicate stole of a copy of the Crucible Phoenix Manual. Now all the catgirl mobsters have spirit discipline, gun arts, and ascended forms, and they've overthrown Chryselephantine's royal beasts. It is perhaps mildly more dangerous than its neighbors, though the price of arsenic there is quite modest."

"Now, see that mountain on the horizon? Set out that way, and you'll find yourself in the magmatic demesne of the Girl-Eating Pantokrator, who knows the ways of death-without-action." Here, the older monk frowns, and departs from her script. "Please direct any questions about her name to my companion." The younger catgirl stifles a laugh, having mastered the art of doing so in the months since the elder monk last gave this speech.

"And to the beith, there are the Aerial Ziggurats, five-times-five-thousand." (all catgirls know what beith is). "Before the seas were salt, the ziggurats were flying palaces and world-smiting warships. Now they are tombs, and like all tombs, they draw scavengers. Vulturegirls and scarabgirls and opossumgirls steal away into the ruins in search of forbidden secrets and long-forgotten wonders. A wretched lot, they, and best avoided."

she doesn't even know Seth's name at this point, and she's bragging on them to strangers because they're friends

the egg is a state of unknowing. you do not know you are transfeminine. you might be drawn to femininity, you might know this consciously and seek it out or even publicly express femininity, but if you either do not know your own transfemininity or are in deep denial about it, you're in the egg.

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whatever i guess nobody've read that so imma just drop the screenshots