If you haven’t yet read Verse 1, check it out here!
Chapter 1: as in names
Verse 2: sane mains
The frailty of things surprises Yahde. As she wanders the palmscape—a word she invents, and which she finds both funny and fitting—she sees evidence of the fragile balance that sustains this place. A disease of some kind has withered a swath of the land. The large fungi are desiccated and brittle. The tiny plants that survive in the diffuse light from the puncture, relying on the nutrients provided by the fungi, have wilted and blackened.
Unchecked, the disease seems capable of destroying the entire cycle of life in this place. Yet, she observes, at the edges of these dying fields, some of the larger creatures exhibit wondrous behavior.
They have strong limbs and mandibles that they normally use to shape the sandy earth into dens and warrens situated at the edges of the land, where her father’s hands meet. But here they have used that strength and coordination to cut a gap around the perimeter between the diseased shrubs and the healthy ones, lowering the risk that the disease might spread further. Crafty.
In them she doesn’t sense the same kind of intelligence that she possesses, but there’s something behind their physical forms that moves them with intelligent purpose. Perhaps they are more suited to the other place than she was. As this thought enters her mind, she tries to grab hold of it and ask it, what other place? But the more attention she pays to the thought, the faster it flees.
No matter.
This place suits her better, though the confinement of the palms begins to gnaw at her. As she comes to know the land, it begins to feel smaller. At the edges, she explores the warrens, unmolested by their occupants. Their glassy eyes and clacking jaws follow her through the darkness. Perhaps over time erosion has opened a furrow through which she can reach the outside…
After some days, Yahde resigns herself to methodical, rigorous exploration of the warrens, especially those near the fingers. She looks regularly at her own cupped palm and sees the spaces between the fingers as the most likely points of egress.
In the only region that can be said to have hills and mountains—where the thumb presses up against the palm and into the incline of the thumb pad beyond—she spends weeks hiking up and down the smooth valleys and canyons. She finds areas where rivulets form from the condensed mist running down the rock, seeking a way out. The water has carved only narrow paths out, and Yahde cannot fit.
Between the first and second fingers, she finds nothing. The tunnels between the second and third fingers reveal a narrow fissure through which she can hear the wind and smell the brine of the ocean. The sandy earth, thick with clay and silt, has piled high over the area where the third and fourth fingers meet, so it takes her many days to navigate the labyrinthine dens down to where she finds her father’s flesh.
Here, she gains her first view of the ocean. Through a crevice large enough for her to squeeze into, she comes within a meter of the open air and a long drop to the water below, but the opening is too narrow. She gazes longingly at the waves crashing against rocks and what must be a shoreline just out of view. After a long time, she sighs and climbs back out.
Now that the land in shadow is entirely known to her and entirely useless, she turns toward the one region she has ignored: the Forest, with its wild mystery, echoing bestial shrieks, and tireless hunger. Today the sunlight shines a spear of light down onto its towering trees, with the mist swirling an ethereal halo around it. If she is ever to find a way to the outside world, this is where she must go.
Anamnesis 1:2
Stunning imagery! I am so so into this.