Derin Edala

February supporter bonus

What should the next bonus be?

14: Spectre

“What the fuck is that?!” I exclaimed, in English, which of course nobody understood. The amalgamation screeched and clicked back in what I was pretty sure was aljik, which I didn’t understand. And to complete the trio, the drakes started making a lot of very emphatic sounds and gestures that I couldn’t begin to follow. To their credit, they didn’t attack the thing until it swung a messy limb, with obvious aggression, at one of them; at that point, all bets were off and the drakes s...

Wandering Star 27: Rayjo Tau

The Green Hills hiveheart is made up of ten people, and as Tyk, Smon and Toi walk into the room, it’s immediately obvious that a slim, delicate-shelled woman named Hahn and the man who’d summoned them, who turns out to be called Kegalt, are the two real influences in the room.

The hiveheart don’t waste any time with long formalities, and get straight to the matter. “Smon,” Kegalt says, “I must pass on to you the apology of your hivemates for their early departure. While it c...

13: Maze Invaders

I knew we were getting near the centre of the labyrinth when the trees started to thin out. And I mean that literally – there weren’t less trees, they were just noticeably thinner, the thick bark black and peeling and clearly rotten underneath, the branches dead and broken, letting the bright sunlight touch the mouldering litter beneath our feet. There were clear lines of unnatural damage on their trunks, some kind of deep scoring that didn’t resemble the work of any saw or axe I’d ev...

Wandering Star 26: The Green Hills Hive

The next morning, the caravan wakes to the approach of some Green Hills women, who take their carts to the trader burrow so that the Redstone River visitors can rush on ahead and meet with the hive. Smon is reluctant to leave her farm in the care of strangers, so Mir volunteers to stay behind and handle that cart so that she can go on ahead and ask about her hivemates.

The first thing that Tyk sees approaching the hive is of course the communication tower, hung with half-woven silks and...

12: Fight or Flight

“I’m an engineer,” I pointed out.

“You are no kel,” the Princess said.

“W-well, okay, I mean, I’m not aljik. I’m definitely no Princess. It’s like the drakes – they worked for you without being a caste, right?”

“Drakes do the duties of atil, until they plant their core seeds and become Princesses. Which they have betrayed us by dragging us here to do.”

Operating a ship’s computers and water and air filters and stuff was considered atil work?...

Wandering Star 25: Red Water Rush

Three days after Smon starts riding in the cart, Bette’s old legs begin to fail her, and she caves to her childrens’ fussing and gets in a cart herself. Having two of their group riding slows them down significantly; not only is the weight significant and means that some of the goods previously in those carts need to be redistributed to others, making every cart heavier, but Smon and Bette’s path-clearing and foraging efforts had been doing a lot to ease their journey. Mir reflects that...

11: Ease of Identification

I don’t know what I am.

I know who I am, of course. The first shape I mastered was that of a perfect ceramic bowl with a fine white rim. My template had been produced by a large blue worm that, in the manner of its people, had first molded the ceramic clumsily before refining the shape by crawling around and around and around in perfectly even undulations, the resulting bowl a testament to its control and mastery of its body.

Even I, young and confused and without context, had f...

Wandering Star 24: Backup Plans

Tyk wakes the next morning early and restless. Everyone’s still asleep. The pale stars visible through the burrow opening wake her properly, although she’d rather doze back off – there’s something disconcerting about sleeping so close to the surface, without several tunnels and chambers between her and any potential predator.

A stupid thought; there aren’t any large predators capable of taking on a healthy girl, not on this continent, not any more. And myriad tunnels don’t p...

10: Friends and foes

“Ask me something,” Glath demanded as I paced the edge of the cliff, looking down into the fog below. It had been a few days since our investigation and the shallow bites of the crabs were healing well, but I was never going to forget their sting and the threat of losing my grip and falling to my death below.

“It’s okay if you don’t remember things,” I told him. “Nobody expect you to – ”

“I want to remember. And I want to relearn what I can’t.”

“Oka...

Wandering Star 23: On The Road

In a caravan, the carts are usually ordered from lightest to heaviest, to help prevent carts getting bogged down or stuck. Which means that as they set off, Tyk finds herself in the lead, with her mother all the way at the back and the entire caravan between them. With Ketoi and Kehta high in the sky to scout for any danger ahead and her own father flitting between her horns and the path immediately in front to check for steady ground, she puts her weight to the yoke and heads away from the R...

9: Danger above, danger below

One day, as Captain Nemo was almost ready to lay her first batch of eggs, an atil on scavenger duty wandered too far from the guards and went missing. She reappeared the next morning, slightly battered but intact, and with a message from the drakes.

The drakes had built a telescope. Recently, they had started detecting ships, multiple ships, in orbit around the planet. It was hard to be certain at such a distance, but they looked aljik.

Captain Nemo gathered her dohl to discuss th...

Wandering Star 22 : Nailing It

One of the older diggers, Maiza, comes to find Tyk while she’s on soil clearing duty in one of the peripheral tunnels. “Hey, Tyk. You can understand the skyborn visitor, right?”

“About two thirds of what she says, yeah.”

“Two thirds?”

“Sometimes she talks about rocks with poisonous light, or tiny shapes in food that hold sunshine. I can only do so much. Is there a problem?”

“She’s helping us build the carts. And she found a nail.”

“So?�...

8: Dream Team

“It’s the carbon dioxide,” I lied. “It’ll suffocate us all if we’re not careful.” I pointed at the part of my tangled twig map that, according to Harlen, was supposed to represent the tunnels near the water we’d crossed. Water would seep through the sand and be collected and further purified.

The gathered atil dutifully looked at the map, then back to me.

“I noticed in when we were sailing over,” I explained, with a small nod to Lln. “The carbon dioxide level...

Wandering Star 21: Star children

“What in there?” Smon asks as she and Tyk walk away from the burrow.

“Just a fight,” Tyk says. She inspects her leg; exoskeleton and joint are intact, Ayan hadn’t split or torn anything. There’s barely even a mark.

“For Bette?”

“Yeah.” Tyk considers not explaining, but it’s not like the truth is a secret. Bette’s friends, presumably, know, and Tyk herself should have noticed, if she’d been paying attention. “Kebette’s dead.”

“Truebroth...

7: Best-laid plans

It was two days later when I looked up from a complicated pile of twigs to see Ain walking past on his way to the surface.

“Hey! Ain!” I jogged over.

Ain shrank back at the sight of a human yelling and running toward him. I adopted a less threatening pace. It had taken several days of relying on each other for mutual survival for Kit to stop being jumpy around me, too. Dohl were smart, and a healthy level of caution towards a nightmare being of legend hanging around their nest...

Wandering Star 20: Family Commitments

Smon listens to Tyk explain the issue. “And now hiveheart think to send or not send messenger?”

“Yeah. I mean, they’ll send people. They only need to go to two locations, and it’s pretty important. So they will.”

Smon tilts her head. The echo stone doesn’t convey tone, and even if it did Tyk wouldn’t know how to read Smon’s tone, but she gets the impression that she’s amused. “You no think that. You think, maybe yes send, maybe no send.”

“I trust my...

6: Home

We found an unconscious Kerlin not too far from where Kit had dragged me out of the water. He was lying half in the water, but through some miracle, his face wasn’t submerged. I dashed over and put a hand to his side to check if he was breathing.

Scaly skin under my hand slid free of his body. I shrank away. After a few moments of panic, I realised that there was no blood and reached out to touch him again. Under the broken, slipping skin was fresh skin – I’d forgotten that male a...

Supporter bonus (December)

What should December's bonus chapter be?

Wandering Star 19: For the Hive

Half a season ago, Tyk wouldn’t have dared approach a member of the hiveheart directly, but with the welfare of Smon’s hivemates in the balance she tracks down Hetta that very night, cornering her and Kehetta as they line up for food.

“I need to talk to you,” she says, and then, under the wilting glare of the pair, lifts her mandibles and adds a timid, “Um, please, when you’re not busy.”

“We are busy right now, little one,” Kehetta says scathingly from his truesi...

5: A-sailing we shall go

Things seemed to be going well. The waves were low and gentle even as the shore disappeared behind us, and the call of the nest grew stronger and stronger as I rowed. There had been a couple of reasons why I’d split up the teams as I had, putting the drakes with myself and the atil with Charlie. The main reason was that I thought Charlie and Kerlin were the least likely to be able to take the strain of the oars for long, so they made obvious choices for the rudder, but there was also the fa...

Wandering Star 18: Silk and Stone

If the hive is working on the assumption of no trade, there are two critical industries likely to suffer more than any other – silk, and blackmoss. Silk is made by spiders high up in the tower, harvested and woven by men, and generally, Redstone River can provide for itself just fine, but the spiders eat silkvines and silkvines are easily sickened by high-flying pollens. The silk farms are far too low to have been caught in the pollen storm itself, but the whole reason for pollen to travel ...

4: The Parable of the Child

No way. No way. There had to be another explanation. He couldn’t… he couldn’t actually be alive? I’d been trying for this, I’d been planning for this, but…

I scooped up a few spiders and moved them a little way away from the pile. Not too far, only a finger-width or so. Slowly, sluggishly, they crawled back.

He was alive!

Why wasn’t he moving, then? I wish I knew more about ambassador colonies. Maybe he didn’t have enough mass to relay a thought more complica...

Wandering Star 17: A New Hive

Slowly, haltingly, nervously, and with Tyk’s help, Smon tells her story to the hiveheart. The room is crowded, with Tyk and her two parents and Smon all crammed in with the hiveheart itself, and Smon’s nervousness isn’t helping Tyk feel calm. The hiveheart, by contrast, listen with calm interest.

“Fascinating,” says Kerial, the master stargazer. “So there are other Earths, far away.”

“You don’t need to look so happy about it,” Kepat says. “Do you realise how ...

3: Clarity is suspicious

Onward we walked, bravely taming our very own planet, the new masters of Sanctuary. We surveyed our kingdom day by day, and…

Okay, it was super boring. Walking is really, really boring. We did it for days. Slowly. Walk for a day, stop to stock up on food and water for a day, do it again. I lost track of time pretty quickly. My wounds healed, vision returned in my left eye, whatever was in the atmosphere that was making me red and itchy didn’t let up at all. We were moving in a zigza...

Wandering Star 16: Dangers of the Sky

“We’ll come with you,” San tells Tyk as the family head out of their residential chamber that morning.

“Aren’t you needed in the tunnels?” Tyk asks. “The collapse – ”

“It’s mostly handled. And I’m sure that the rest of the girls can handle the dirt without me for one day.”

“A whole day?”

“The guards at the egg will want replacing,” Kesan points out. “Pol and Kepol are still out there, aren’t they? Kepol will bite my legs off if I d...

2: Hello, void

By the next morning, the squid tentacles in the trough had dissolved completely and the trough contained a long layer of transparent gelatin-like substance that was safe to eat and fairly full of energy. Harlan cut it into blocks for storage and easy transport on the journey while Kerlin spun all of our gathered fibres into string (something that drakes can do using only their tails – it’s pretty fascinating to watch, actually.) While the aljik butchered their dead so that we could carry ...

Wandering Star 15: Pollen Storm

Tyk doesn’t have time to worry about Smon right now. The hive needs her more. If Smon does anything particularly alarming, the pair guarding her egg will let the hive know; until then, there’s work to be done.

Tyk has been in cave-ins before, and knows that the last thing that one should do is dart about like a light-confused riverfly. She looks about for a coordinator and spies Hetta, standing on top of the hive entrance and easily visible, her astounding array of carapace jewels g...

Charlie MacNamara, Intrepid Explorer 1: Building a Sanctuary

Here’s some friendly life advice for you: don’t ever go to space.

I mean, I guess if you’re an astronaut or whatever, and spend years training to leave the prison of Earth’s gravity and behold the universe, more power to you. But otherwise, don’t go. I guess what I’m specifically saying here is that you shouldn’t get kidnapped by aliens and taken far from your home planet with no hope of return. And if you do, don’t put together the perfect escape plan only to chicken ou...

Wandering Star 14: Broken Brakes

“Smon Earth make forty three Javlyn, Smon kind inside, eggs inside, food inside. All go to other suns, other Earths.”

“Do all the sentinels have people on them?” Tyk asks.

“No. Smon people see no other people. Only Smon people on Smon star.”

“People on Tyk star?”

“Not see! When go from Smon star, not see people, grass, moss, crabs anywhere different, only Smon Earth. Only us. We go to other star.” She places another large rock and scatters some smal...