Farmhand

The lake's water matched the deep blue of the sky overhead and, on this windless day, reflected the towering cumulus clouds smattered across it.  Ahmdal wasn't looking out towards the horizon though; she was staring into the crystalline depths past the bladders and rippling bladeweed and preparing for her dive.  It was hardly fair to make the only daughter in the family do the diving work, but she had been blessed with a tremendous pair of lungs and that made her well-suited for the work.  In a way she sometimes enjoyed it, being so important to the family, but today was not one of those times.

An Observatory

Patref Ochilliet stood on at the edge of the observatory overlooking the the red and orange canyon glowing in the late afternoon sun.  He could feel the heat radiating from the stone below.  Quite suddenly, shadows bled onto his back and cascaded over the canyon.  He experimentally held out his arms to watch the dappled sunlight play across his hands before looking up and behind him.

Overhead he could make out a tremendous flock of birds swirling in silence on the thermals, the leaves of their wings a translucent and ornately variegated green.  Other households had noticed the change outside and were now gathering, murmuring, on their own balconies to watch the spectacle.  Patref chuckled and patted his pronounced belly like the taut skin of a drum.

The Unfamiliar

Hrochka woke to the beginning of the night's exhalation from the looming cavern mouth and rolled over.  The cool, slightly musky wave washed over him, displacing the muggy suffocation that passed for air in the jungle and making him almost chilly.  Tide-driven breezes were his friends, often just enough to keep Scribe-damned insects at bay, at least until they turned and drew air back in.

As he moved, heard the clatter of a falling stone maybe two meters cave-ward.  Doing the only sensible thing, he froze.  Adrenaline-fueled awareness crept over him with the buzzing of blood in his ears and the wide-eyed stare straight out into the pitch beyond the meager light supplied by the camp's single glyph lamp.  Without meaning to, he stopped breathing although the thudding of his heart certainly seemed to move his chest as much as a breath might.

An audit of the practical application of novel grammar

His eyes would not rest on the breastplate.  As his gaze skittered across the dull metal, he could catch the embossed edges of glyphs, but somehow could not see them.  Light almost seemed to, Czigerrol lacked a better term, twist away before reaching the surface.  The effect was incredibly unsettling, but nothing new.  His cell had been playing with variations on these phrases for months now.

Perhaps the iconoclasts are right, he thought to himself as he glanced at the silent, masked auditor at the back of the room, Who are we to alter reality so fundamentally that we cannot look upon it?

Czigerrol, careful not to touch the front of the armor for fear of losing a hand, finished strapping it to the dummy and jogged back towards the other end of the room before the test could start.  Sitting down at the a desk, he opened the log book.  As he wrote the heading, he read it out to the other three researchers.  The auditor's impassive and featureless mask nodded as he listened.  "Terminal reduplication of erbe-haffcom ligation test one: minimally curved surface and high-velocity projectiles."

An Exchange

Erewhon was a far cry from the docks where Olee had spent most of his life struggling with his family.

"Is it true what they say, sir?  'Bout the grammar?" he had asked so eagerly of Manni when first told that they would be traveling there for an acquisition.

"Hm?  Ah, the legendary ostentation of Erewhon."  The glyph pirate had tugged at his beard and smiled mischievously.  "The fabled city is drenched in grammar," was all he would say on the matter when pressed.

The Naturalist

The roar and hiss of the devices was utterly overwhelming, literally deafening.  Naturalist Nullwrit Fesciola hadn't been able to hear it for some time, but she still felt the rumble in her bones whenever she or one of her helpers fired them up again.  Her assistant wore heavily padded muffs over his ears, standing at the control wheels of the finicky setup.  Fesciola flagged his attention and with deft, slender fingers signed, FLYWHEELS  1 3 DISENGAGE BUT AGAIN SPIN.  MAGNETITE REMOVE-FROM-COIL.  She was not a large or sturdy woman and almost seemed enveloped by the soot-smeared and chemical-stained frock she wore.  Still, she commanded a presence that seemed to dominate even a room bustling with powerful machines.

The Myriad

Peering down from the rock face, Mother of the Myriad stared blankly but compassionately into the depths of the water below.  The twisted forms of her children tumbling from her open mouth had been smoothed and blurred by more than a century of warm spring water cascading over them into the pool.  Although their edges of the carvings had been simplified, the nearly-human abominations depicted still stirred faint disgust in any who approached.  The group shuffling towards the pool did not look to the massive carving, however, with heads respectfully hung low and veiled in coarse fabric of a vivid blue.  Heavy robes did not entirely disguise the subtle wrongness of several of their silhouettes.