#the ea

Emma Hatch.. hatched into her full potential, haha.

Be forewarned of spoilers through 6.25 and the Omicron Tribal Quests.

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The Elysian Playground was like nothing Keimwyda had ever seen. In fairness, it was probably like nothing its occupants, the Ea, had ever seen, either. Or rather, the shades of the Ea. At least, the shades of the memories of the shades of their former selves that they already were… 

This was complicated.

At any rate, it was beautiful, and it gave her time to think.

At a glance, the isle was a drab, arid-looking place in the midst of the otherwise colorful, lush Elysion—the miracle of its very existence notwithstanding. But a closer inspection quickly set it apart from its morose counterpart in Ultima Thule. The crystalline dwellings glowed a soft green, their amorphous inhabitants coming and going from them as they pleased. The jagged rocky outcroppings sported engravings which glowed in the same pleasant hue. And while Keimwyda had not the slightest inkling how to read them, she suspected they held a much more hopeful message than their likenesses at creation’s edge. Azure pools of (presumably) water dotted the sandy ground, sparkling as much as the swirling, starry sky above them.

Various Ea drifted about the playgrounds, fussing over the—Miw Miisv, was it? Keimwyda could never confidently pronounce the name. But the blue gelatinous creatures burbled through the air cheerily, always with an Ea or two in tow supervising them as concerned but proud parents. Whether or not they bore any resemblance to the Ea’s original forms, not even they knew, but they had found something to nourish and cherish in them. They were their reason to look forward to the future, for whatever finite eons they had.

She smirked as a Miw Miisv emitted an exuberant burst of lightning, frazzling the Ea who accompanied it. She shook her head to herself as that Ea reeled from the impact, but nonetheless gloried in the fact that they had actually sensed it. It didn’t look like her idea of a good time. But who was she to judge?

On her first journey through the Ea’s main abode, there had been no time at all to process what she and the Scions witnessed. But now, as she let her eyes wander among the twisting, crystalline shapes that comprised their new refuge, she had time to reflect more deeply on what they were—not as an obstacle to her progress, but a people. 

She remembered the way their forms had confused her upon their first appearance—the unsettling calm of their indistinguishable voices as they spoke, their incorporeal bodies that she could only tentatively describe as an oily liquid which was actually vapor. What passed for their heads periodically detached and floated around at the worst possible moments in conversation. She considered every “excess” they had shed: their bodies, their speech, their appetites, their pleasures. All were discarded as extraneous hindrances to their existence. They were limits. Constraints. Finitude.

Little wonder their discovery that creation itself was finite was the thing that drove them to despair. 

She remembered the dread and pity she had felt as she watched them struggle to define who they even were, while being utterly unalarmed by their own losses. She still found it haunting to recall how they spoke of their brethren whose very souls and minds had unspooled. They were dispassionate. They were bored. She had heard people more broken up over the death of a potted plant. 

And she thought of the absolutely alien feeling of them examining her like a specimen, excited that they could finally gather data on what it was like to have physical form—a state of existence so undervalued that no one had bothered to remember it.

She could still see the way they had stared at her, their literally blank expressions somehow agog, as she fumblingly attempted to explain how eating worked. Some called it quaint, some called it primitive, and others considered it barbarous. All agreed it was ludicrously inefficient and unnecessary. And yet, they had been unable to simply ignore it. They pressed her for more details about taste, and touch, and sound, and speech. They were repulsed but fascinated—for all their ancient wisdom, they seemed like children poking a stick into a foul-smelling puddle of swamp ooze, tittering amongst each other about how disgusting it was, only to go right back to experience more. 

And now, in this place, on the other side of the brink, when despair’s song of oblivion had been replaced with a whisper of hope, here they were—rediscovering what it meant to live.

Keimwyda ran her fingertips over the back of her own hand, tracing the outline of her gloves. She had never really considered being tangible as a gift but… she could not now but feel that it was. She carried with her a frame that often felt larger than she might wish. It ached, it bled, it drenched itself in sweat. It craved sustenance and rest whenever it deemed fit, with no consideration whatsoever to her convenience or to polite timing. It hurt like another calamity each time the Echo took over. It was a tool, a burden, an asset, a limitation.

Yet it had also borne her to new vistas, to draw astonished breath at sights never before seen, to inhale the heady aromas of new flora. It had given her strength and mass to place herself between danger and ones who needed protecting. It had basked in the warmth of a crackling campfire shared among unlikely friends. It had partaken of meals made not just for keeping it going, but for fellowship, a gift of love from someone who had labored to craft something that would delight or comfort her. It had given her arms that would embrace the broken and lonely and hurting she met on the way. Fingers that would entwine around another’s, with eyes locked in intimate gaze, breath mingling into a warm aura between their faces, ilms apart.

Life as a swamp ooze was not so bad.