8. Sea of Support

On the way to the final food storage to destroy, the Rescue Squad passed Dilova’s restaurant. Torches flickered inside and outside. A line had formed that stretched all the way to the forum, where it split and moved into the Richersoul district too. A line of hungry animals who read the sign that Dilova would feed anyone for free.

“Oh please,” said Mmhmmhmm, “you can’t be serious.”

“It’s a lie. Ignore it.”

“I’m smelling a high chance of it not being a lie, though,” said Wilplink.

He started pushing creatures aside, forging a direct line to the entrance.

“Yes, yes, we are very important animals, step aside, get out of the way, no, get your paws off me—”

“Hey! No jumping the queue!” several wolves and boars yelled behind them. As soon as anyone moved to stop them, though, Ruby turned around and showed her impressive wingspan to shut them up.

They stumbled into Dilova’s restaurant and saw a familiar sight.

“You again?” asked Wilplink.

“You again!?” replied a chameleon. He was hauling bucket after bucket through the kitchen, towards Dilova, or towards two horse-like creatures in the corner.

“What are you doing?”

“I came as SOON as I heard Tattlerat’s NEWS. I vowed to bake a THOUSAND loafs of bread every day, sunrise to sunset, to make sure NOBODY in Amor goes HUNGRY! That’s my NEW passion!”

“No, no, noooo,” yelled Wilplink. He made the chameleon clumsily drop a bucket, and a customer trip over their own tail, but it didn’t satisfy his rage. “You stupid rainbow salamander-or-something!”

“EXCUSE me?” The chameleon swapped a bucket with raw grain for a finished, steaming loaf of bread straight from Dilova’s wings. “I worked ALL DAY yesterday to collect ALL these buckets. Somehow, many animals said they’d already given away everything they had to a BOAR. Without sleep, we then collected ALL GRAIN I could find, in the dirt, or the ashes. And what have YOU been doing?”

Wilplink instantly moved to grab as many buckets as he could. Ruby breathed fire, though her energy was too low to hit everything. Mmhmmhmm broke some glasses, and Wilplink made sure the shards just happened to arrive near his paws, so he could use them to stab the buckets and destroy them. They were quite effective at killing the chameleon’s new efforts, again.

Everyone, and that really means everyone, attacked Wilplink. They soon made it impossible for him to continue. Or move at all, with that many tails around his paws.

“Let it go,” yelled Ruby. “Save ourselves!”

She ripped Wilplink out of the antlers of some hungry deer. Mmhmmhmm bit the chameleon’s fingers to gain freedom, then rapidly dug a tunnel.

The Rescue Squad mostly rescued themselves. A handful of creatures had managed to keep Amor’s food supply working, and they lacked the power to stop that.

Ruby grudgingly lead them all away, wondering whether to continue with the last step of their plan or return to their hideout. Those fires burning throughout the city would soon consume Dilova’s restaurant, and all inside, anyway, she told herself guiltily.

As soon as aid reaches a critical mass, dear reader, it becomes a snow ball that rolls faster and faster, thickening and thickening, until nothing can stop it. Not even mad emperors, confused criminals, or power-hungry wolves. As long as enough beings fight to sustain life instead of break it down, the chances of them winning are so high that even Wilplink can’t turn them around.

But someone still needed to do it. Someone still needed to wake up with fire in their heart and do what needed to be done, even if it felt useless, even if there was no reward—monetary or otherwise.

And a certain smart fox was working hard to remove this passion from everyone …

Alix the Alchemist stood in his lab and cursed the phenomenon called gravity. It didn’t make sense. Where did the energy come from to make everything fall back to Somnia’s crust? Energy couldn’t just stay around forever, everywhere. If you heated up an object, it would not stay hot forever—in fact, it would quickly cool off, heating the rest of the room instead.

So why did it work this way? What were the rules? Was it truly … magic?

On occasion, his experiments had yielded something he called a magnet. Two pieces of metal that automatically moved towards each other. But gravity was different. Besides, he had no reason to believe everyone and everything was made of that metal.

Was it something about the particles inside? Was there a “gravity particle”? And it simply occurred a lot inside the core of their planet?

He shook his head, muttering theories to his son Permiox, who did his own experiments. Or was really, really clumsy. He carried different objects towards the ceiling, climbing a ladder, then dropped them to the floor and measured how long the fall took.

What Alix knew, but didn’t accept, was that he never muttered any new theories. Long ago, he’d asked his son to freeze his love for Feria. That was Permiox’ special magic: pick something and keep it the same forever, from now on. That part had been a success. There hadn’t been a single day when Feria and him had loved each other less—neither had there been one where they loved each other more.

But love comes in many forms. Love for learning. Love for knowledge. Since that day, Alix had been unable to remember any new facts or gain new wisdom. His son had carried the burden of research, while Alix desperately wrote down anything that occurred to him. Wherever he went, he carried a large trunk filled with books containing his own scribbles.

“Gravity is everywhere,” said Permiox. “What if it’s not something about the particles, but like, like, a sea.”

“What?”

“It’s all around us. We’re standing inside the sea of gravity right now. And the waves, well, the waves here just happen to send objects back down to the earth.”

“That’s—”

Alix’ eye fell on the aqueduct running past his home. He couldn’t imagine new knowledge out of thin air, but his senses worked fine. He could still see things in the real world. He could still modify them and see what happened.

“Give me your biggest object,” he said. As he ran outside, Permiox put a stone chair on his back. With effort, he reached the aqueduct and looked over the edge.

The water flowed. From the top of the hill where the aqueduct started, always down, until it ended in a pool somewhere inside the city. This happened automatically. Anything you threw into the water, would be pulled along by the stream.

Perhaps his son was onto something.

He grunted and threw the stone chair into the water. It was too heavy to move. It sunk for a bit, until it stopped against the bottom, creating a small stone island.

The water, as expected, now went around it. Adding something, given it was heavy enough, changed how everything else around it flowed.

Could gravity be the same? Aqueducts all around us, always streaming down. The aqueducts wanted to just move forward, but their planet got in the way. And now their paths have changed because of their large, heavy planet.

His son was onto something. The universe was the sea. Gravity wasn’t inside objects, it was everywhere, and the objects were just obeying its streams and wherever they had to go.

As soon as he had the thought, however, it slipped his mind. The information was too new. The theory too innovative and creative. His son had tried to write down his mutterings, with a sharp feather between his teeth.

Alix kicked the stones in frustration. He needed more energy. More! More! That would surely fix it.

It had started with an attempt to steal wisdom from others. To steal knowledge, brainpower, the thing that Alix feared he would never get again. That’s how he discovered that passion was also energy. Desire, wishing for something, wanting to live, it was all a very strong kind of energy.

And so it turned into secret fire-theft. Stealing the energy that radiates from beings who want to live and who want to achieve things. He’d become rather good at it, he thought, even stealing every ounce of passion from an entire elephant latel—

That exact elephant now stormed at him.

“You!” yelled Olfaman. “You used to be good! Feria’s pride! And now … what happened to you, Alix? Does Feria know?”

“I got cursed,” he said, while his son said “he got old”.

Alix narrowed his eyes.

“This means your passion returned,” he mumbled. “Fascinating! This is great news!”

The elephants lowered their tusks, ready to repel a new attack by Alix. His son raised his paws defensively.

“Please don’t tell Feria,” said Permiox. “It’s hard enough as it is for father. He’s nearing death, while Feria will live eternal—”

“I am not that old! I still have plenty of years to study the universe and learn everything!”

“You … you’ve studied aging and dying, father. You should know bet—”

The fires inside the city raged on. The elephants started drawing water from the aqueduct, while Alex violently pulled the chair out of the water again.

Both were obstructed by something else coming down the stream. Piles and piles of bottles, platters, mugs, bags, anything that could contain a message. The objects climbed over each other, pushed along by the waves, to get down the aqueduct faster.

Alix snatched one of them out of the stream, unrolled the papyrus, and read the message.

It gave everything away. The criminals’ plans. The lies inside Tattlerat’s rumor. Locations where more food could be found. And even the address of their hideout. Most interesting to Alix, though, was a note at the bottom thanking a busy chameleon for the idea to do this. The message was signed Anonymous.

Alix grinned at his son. “Are you in for a little exercise in building traps, my son?”