The Faith of Beasts - ballagi.net

Background

Picking up after The Mercy of Gods, the human moiety has survived their evaluation and been formally integrated into the Carryx empire. The humans are no longer proving themselves — they are now working assets, being deployed across the Carryx moieties in different roles. The world-palace is becoming something like a home, which is its own kind of horror.

Dafyd now effectively runs the human moiety. He knows the swarm killed Jellit and is keeping that from Jessyn. He is working with the swarm against the Carryx in secret, not yet knowing how to use what he has. The humans are scattered: some still at the world-palace, others traveling, others being sent to places they’ve never heard of.

New major characters: Llian Andermus (head of security, the way she sits defines her), Bastien Korham (infrastructure, antagonistic to Andermus), Garral Pär (archaeologist, later significant to Jessyn), Surur-Tlassen (regulator-librarian, the most senior Carryx below the Sovran — new Carryx POV), Vaudai (a Carryx-subject slug-creature, Rickar’s working companion), Corvall (a black-armored soldier of unknown affiliation, key to Jessyn’s offworld storyline), Brun (manages the human baby project), Clae (the swarm’s new body after Jellit).

Part 1 — Structure

Chapter 1 — The Keeper-Librarian’s Archive, Ekur’s New Role

An archive entry from the regulator-librarian — Surur-Tlassen — reflects on the Carryx’s long project: not conquest for its own sake, but the construction of a vast living library of useful species, each contributing to the ongoing war effort. The philosophy is cold and total. Other species are instruments. What matters is whether they function.

Ekur of the cohort Tkalal has been redesignated as keeper-librarian — a step down in prestige but a specialized position, closer to the daily management of the human moiety. Its status is now tightly bound to the humans’ continued usefulness.

Chapter 2 — The Swarm Walks the Physics Lab

The swarm POV. It is in a new body — the body of the young woman Clae — and it walks the length of the physics lab with its hands clasped behind its back. The posture is one it has adopted from the humans it has inhabited, a way of looking thoughtful and contained. The swarm is cataloging: what the humans are building, how their science is progressing, what knowledge they are accumulating that might be useful to transmit to the enemy.

It is also watching Jessyn. The love it developed in Jellit’s body has not dissipated. In Clae’s body, it is quieter, but it is there.

Chapter 3 — Jessyn’s Glass Farm, a Private Ecology

Jessyn keeps a device beside her bunk: two glass panes with an enclosed ecosystem between them — bacteria, micronutrients, a slurry that needs careful maintenance. She started it because she needed something small to be responsible for. The bacteria between the glass panes don’t know she exists. Their entire universe is the space she maintains for them. She finds this comforting in a way that has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with scale.

It is also how she keeps her mind from going dark. She does not examine this too closely.

Chapter 4 — Rickar Back at Irvian, Memory and Present

Rickar is at what the world-palace’s human territory has made into an approximation of the old Irvian Research Medrey — the same discipline applied to alien biology in a completely alien setting. He is trying something: using the framing of the old lab, the old routines, as a scaffold for work that the old Rickar would not have believed he was capable of doing.

The memory of Irvian cuts both ways. Everything familiar is also a reminder of what was lost. He has learned to let it cut and keep working.

Chapter 5 — Tonner’s Survey of the Work

Tonner Freis reviews the sheets of work, scowling at the sampling data as if it has personally insulted him. It has, a little. The results are good — better than good — but the interpretations are not going where he expected, and a result that defies expectation is never purely good news, even when you need good news. He works through the anomaly. In the hours before everything changes, Tonner Freis is still Tonner Freis: brilliant, alone, contemptuous of anything that doesn’t meet his standards, and quietly essential to everything the team has managed to accomplish.

Chapter 6 — Captivity Reimagined, Infrastructure Below

For all the horrors that came with Carryx captivity — and there were many — the world-palace had developed a human infrastructure that created something like a working society. The moiety was not just scientists now. It had administrators, builders, teachers, security, all the functional strata of a small civilization. Bastien Korham is building the infrastructure that will, theoretically, house a stable human population for generations. The word “theoretically” is doing a lot of work.

Andermus manages the security architecture. She and Korham are growing increasingly antagonistic, and Dafyd is trying to manage the tension before it becomes a fracture.

Chapter 7 — A Death in the Medrey

Oh, Dafyd. I’m so sorry, but they aren’t. Someone has died in the human quarters — someone Dafyd cared about, or something has been lost that was irreplaceable. The team processes grief in the compressed, airless way of people who have used up their allotment of prolonged mourning and must fit it into whatever space is available between the work.

Chapter 8 — Jessyn’s First Medrey Memory, Choosing Research

Jessyn as a girl at her medrey, choosing her first specialization. The memory is vivid: the specific texture of the lab’s light, the smell of the equipment, the feeling of standing at a threshold. She had been drawn to biology partly to understand the chemical processes that made her own brain go rotten from time to time. Understanding as protection. The same instinct that makes her count people in holding cells and analyze fence materials.

The memory is not nostalgia. It is an attempt to remember who she was before she became what captivity has made her. She is not entirely sure the person she was then was better. She is not entirely sure the person she is now is worse.

Part 2 — Antithesis

Chapter 9 — Dafyd and Andermus, Security Architecture

The thing Dafyd associates with Llian Andermus most is the way she sits — economically, with her weight slightly forward, like she is always half a second from standing up. The rest of her security discipline follows from that posture. She is good at her job. She is also, slowly, acquiring more authority within the moiety than Dafyd is comfortable with.

Their conversation about the swarm’s activities — Dafyd can’t say the swarm, can’t explain what Clae is — is the longest sustained act of diplomacy he has performed since becoming the moiety’s de-facto leader.

Chapter 10 — Jessyn and the Glass Ecosystem

Jessyn decants the liquid from the bottom of the glass sheets drop by drop — the careful maintenance of her private ecology. The bacteria are doing something interesting, and she has stopped being certain whether it is the bacteria doing it or herself. The line between studying a system and becoming part of it has always been her professional hazard. Here, it is also her coping mechanism.

Chapter 11 — Campar and Tonner, Dark Humor Under Pressure

“They nibble each other hello,” Tonner says, and takes another bite of whatever he’s eating. Campar and Tonner occupy the same dark frequency of humor under pressure: the joke is how you know they’re both still here. Campar is preparing to leave on a Carryx assignment — he’s being sent to observe another moiety’s operations on a distant world. Tonner, for once, says something close to “be careful.”

Jessyn is walking blind. A man has taken off his blue jacket and gestures for her to follow. She is not at the world-palace anymore. She is on a captured planet — one of the worlds the Carryx have processed — and she has been assigned to work alongside alien groups whose language she does not speak. Corvall (a black-armored soldier of uncertain allegiance) is her primary contact. Garral Pär is there too, and his presence is both useful and confusing.

She is adapting to being the alien, the one who doesn’t understand the language or the culture or the stakes. She has been the alien for two years now. She is getting better at it.

Chapter 13 — Surur-Tlassen, Regulator of the Empire

Surur-Tlassen’s POV. He is the regulator-librarian — the most senior Carryx below the Sovran herself, the conduit of the living empire’s information to its ruler. He manages the empire’s flow of knowledge the way a river manages water: the channel exists only to carry what passes through it.

He waits near the private creche — the sealed section of the world-palace where the Sovran’s children are raised. The former regulator-librarian Urur-Atlak (now a pale remnant within the creche, its fighting arms withered to white sticks) has summoned him: the Sovran has a new daughter preparing to meet her. Surur-Tlassen must make the arrangements. He crushes a service animal that doesn’t move out of his way quickly enough and finds the correction comforting.

Chapter 14 — Garral and Jessyn, Alien Children

“Hey there!” Garral calls out. He is not a scientist but an archaeologist — a person whose training is to observe and record rather than intervene. He and Jessyn are both trying to figure out what role they serve in a situation that neither of them fully understands. Corvall (the black soldier with one rebar-and-hope prosthetic leg) leads them through a landscape of local ruins. There are alien children here, being cared for by Manta.

The children are the reason Corvall and Omco are where they are. The reason becomes clearer as the day goes on.

Chapter 15 — Jessyn’s Dream, the Weight of Violence

In the dream, Dafyd knows he is dreaming. It doesn’t help. Jessyn’s dreams have changed since she arrived at the world-palace and have kept changing as she has traveled. Her body now knows things her mind is still catching up to: what it feels like to act violently, what it feels like to be effective at it. She tells Garral, matter-of-factly, that she was an amateur war leader back at the world-palace and killed some fellow prisoners who had it coming. He asks if she’s joking.

She was not joking.

Part 3 — Pressure Drives Convergence

Chapter 16 — Ekur as Keeper-Librarian, Living at the Bottom

Ekur-Tkalal’s POV. It lives now at the bottom of a great chain of being. The redesignation to keeper-librarian is not a punishment — it is a functional reorganization — but the distance from the top of the hierarchy is an objective fact of its daily experience. It manages the human moiety’s day-to-day operations, a closer and lower-status role than it has held before.

The library it keeps is producing results. The humans are useful. Ekur’s assessment is: they are among the more cognitively flexible subject species, which is both an advantage and an ongoing management challenge.

Chapter 17 — Jessyn in the Cave, the Children of the Enemy

Jessyn is in the back of a cave with children and the woman named Manta. Corvall, Garral, and Omco sit at the cave entrance, talking and drawing diagrams in the dirt. The children have been without sufficient food for a long time; when Jessyn offers her ration bars they fall on them with desperate enthusiasm.

She watches the conversation at the cave entrance: Corvall speaks, then Omco and Garral argue in their language for minutes, then Corvall speaks again and settles them. The dynamic is clear. When the two boys start hassling a red-haired girl, Jessyn claps her hands and barks at them. They don’t understand the words. They understand the tone. She points at each of them in turn: “Don’t start it, you little shits. I’ve taken down worse than you.”

Chapter 18 — Rickar Aboard a Carryx Ship, the Battle of Ayayeh

The violence on the ship comes and goes according to its own logic. Rickar’s cabin shudders and stills and shudders again. Vaudai — a slug-like Carryx-subject creature assigned as Rickar’s working partner — has access to the Carryx tactical display: a volumetric spread of light showing the solar system with enemy fleet positions, exclusion fields, and decoherence zones.

“The battle is in essence already over,” Vaudai’s translator says. “What remains is for the enemy to choose the manner in which they lose.” Rickar scratches his leg and says how humiliating for them.

Around them, the Budon of Luus (beetle-like creatures) respond to the battle stress by producing thousands of tiny nymphs that spread through the ship and die. Evolution’s optimism: throw as many babies at the future as possible and hope that this apocalypse isn’t the last one. Rickar finds himself wavering between pity and admiration.

Chapter 19 — Surur-Tlassen, the New Daughter Approaches

Surur-Tlassen’s POV, waiting. The time is coming for the Sovran to meet her new daughter. The ritual of meeting — the Carryx succession ceremony — requires preparation. The private creche is sealed from the outside; only the neuter remnants of former regulator-librarians live within it, their flesh changed beyond recognition. The thought that Surur-Tlassen may one day enter the creche himself comes unbidden. He does not welcome it.

He reflects on growing old as a conduit for the empire’s knowledge. One day a subordinate will sense weakness in him and challenge him, or the Sovran will signal that he should ascend to the creche. Either way, his preferences are irrelevant. His daily renewal of loyalty through exposure to the Sovran’s pheromones is both comfort and cage.

Chapter 20 — The Day Tonner Freis Died

The day starts unremarkably. Tonner wakes up next to the woman who was Abbasat’s finance minister and is now being trained to help build human moiety infrastructure. He knows the relationship is ending. He gets dressed quietly and goes to the commissary for almost-tea, then heads to the labs to check on something he has been keeping private.

The lamb sacks: 107 of them hanging in rows, each containing a developing human fetus. Tonner is officially the researcher who designed the artificial gestation protocol. He is also, in violation of the guidelines he wrote himself, the biological father of one of them — sack thirty-four, whose genetic material he assembled from Else Yannin’s post-mortem tissue samples and his own. He taps the sack gently. The fetus inside presses its lips together like it’s trying to shit. He says: “Hey, kiddo. It’s me. Daddy.”

The chapter opens in his life and closes in his death. What kills him is not specified in the opening lines, but the gentleness of the morning makes the death afterward land harder.

Chapter 21 — Jessyn and Garral Leave the Cave

The black soldier Corvall leads them out. Jessyn and Garral walk behind. Garral asks her how she learned to think through implications so quickly — to put together solid lies and see why he needs to stay behind while she returns to their cover story. She says she was an amateur war leader at the world-palace.

They have fabricated a story: they were investigating signs of habitation when they were attacked. The notebooks and packs were left behind in the flight. Garral got killed; Jessyn got away. It will hold up, she thinks. The footprints and evidence of the children will look like what they were investigating, not what they were protecting.

When she asks why Garral can’t come back with her, the answer is that he has people on the other side — people Corvall’s group needs him to return to. He is going the other direction. The conversation at the end of the path is short and has the feeling of something that should have been longer.

Part 4 — Dogs and Wolves

Chapter 22 — The Swarm’s Disinterest, Ghati

The swarm (in Clae’s body) is involved in an argument with someone named Ghati about something the swarm doesn’t find important. “I don’t care,” Ghati says, but the petulance in the words makes clear that she cares quite a lot. The swarm navigates the conversation with the precision of an entity that has processed thousands of human arguments from the inside and knows exactly which responses will de-escalate and which will accelerate.

The swarm’s primary concern is not this conversation. It is information. It is always information.

Chapter 23 — The Swarm Sits on the Floor

The swarm sits on the floor of its room, its back against the wall. It is in Clae’s body, which sees the world differently than Else’s body did or Jellit’s body did. It shifts through the spectrum, checks the arc of forces in the high air above the world-palace, feels the subtle difference in the electromagnetic signature of this new host.

The remnants of the dead — Else, Jellit, and others — are present in the way they always are. The swarm has begun to think of them less as captives and more as consultants. It does not tell them this.

Chapter 24 — Ampar’s Inspection

Ampar (Campar) stands stripped to his skin with his arms out to his sides. He is being examined — medically, functionally — after returning from his assignment on a distant world. His back aches; it has ached every day since he was made to sit in increasingly unsuitable environments on the Carryx ship. He is alive and more or less intact, which he has decided to treat as success.

The examination is part of the process of being returned to the moiety. Before it is done, someone will debrief him.

Chapter 25 — Jessyn Hurts

Jessyn hurts. The wound in her side — a gunshot wound she treated herself, imperfectly, in conditions that were not sterile and did not allow for proper healing — has healed into a dark knot of scar tissue. She has decided to be comfortable with it. She runs her fingertips over it regularly: the ridges, the valleys, where the skin is numb and where it has grown more sensitive.

She is going home. She is going back to the world-palace. She tries to figure out what she thinks about that.

Chapter 26 — Rickar’s Shortest Transit

The passage through asymmetric space is the shortest Rickar has ever made — barely a shudder and then they are through. He has accumulated enough transits now to be able to compare them, which feels like a kind of expertise he didn’t ask for. Vaudai is ready to work as soon as the exit from asymmetric space is complete. The slug does not appear to experience motion sickness or existential distress. Rickar finds this admirable.

Chapter 27 — Dafyd Doesn’t Remember His Mother’s Funeral

Dafyd should have been able to remember his mother’s funeral. He was there. He was of an age to form memories. But all he has are impressions: color, cold, the sense of other people’s grief being larger than his because he didn’t fully understand yet what he had lost.

He thinks about this the way he thinks about a lot of things lately — in the circling, insomniac pattern of a mind with too many problems and no place to put them all down. The swarm is working in Tonner’s old lab. Jellit is dead, subsumed, and Jessyn does not know. The babies will be decanted soon. He needs to know what Garral Pär represents. He needs to sleep.

Part 5 — Kinds of Life

Chapter 28 — Under Vaudai, Hard Work

“Work more efficiently. Do not take rest breaks,” Vaudai tells the group. The slug’s management style is precise and entirely indifferent to the humans’ biological requirements. Vaudai shares more Carryx information than any other alien the moiety has worked with — tactical maps, resource allocations, structural data about the moiety’s hierarchy — but this generosity does not extend to acknowledging that human beings need to sit down occasionally.

The work itself is important. Dafyd has requested this deployment specifically because of what the data might reveal. The cost is everyone’s lower back.

Chapter 29 — Jurupe System, Exterminated Animals

The animals of Jurupe system have been, for the most part, exterminated. The planet’s native ecosystem was cleared to make way for Carryx operations, and what remains is a managed monoculture — the biology of utility. Jessyn walks through what used to be a forest and notes the absence: no insects, no soil fauna, the ground hard and dead beneath managed crop growth.

She is thinking about what the Carryx do to things. She is thinking about what they have done to her. The categories are not the same. She holds both things.

Chapter 30 — Dafyd Visits Ekur’s Cell

For the first time since Ekur became keeper-librarian, Dafyd comes to its cell voluntarily, without a summons. The keeper-librarian’s cell is the same one that Dafyd has gone to many times, but the power dynamic is different now: Dafyd is here because he has something to ask, not because he has been called to answer.

The conversation is about access. Dafyd needs something that only Ekur can authorize. Ekur is, in its way, interested. The interests of keeper-librarian and leading human are still aligned, as they have always been. What neither of them says directly is that this alignment is also a foundation that Dafyd is considering building something on.

Chapter 31 — Holom Coombs Checks In

Holom Coombs asks: “Are you all right? How are you doing?” It is both the simplest possible question and the hardest one to answer honestly. He is asking Dafyd. Dafyd says something that is technically true.

Holom is one of the humans who functions as a kind of moral temperature gauge for the moiety — not a political actor, not a strategist, just someone who pays attention to whether people are okay and asks when they’re not. Dafyd finds this both comforting and destabilizing.

Chapter 32 — Brun Prepares the Decanting

Brun and the new technical crew walk along the rows of lamb sacks for the final inspection before decanting. One hundred and seven. The numbers are all good. Brun is professionally calm, which is a choice he is making moment to moment.

The preparations involve more than biology. The entire human moiety has been briefed, signup sheets circulate for feeding and holding rotation. Displays are being set up in the common room and the courtyard where the half-built school will eventually stand. A generation that never knew Anjiin is about to exist.

Part 6 — Ducks and Rabbits

Chapter 33 — Jessyn Returns to the World-Palace

Jessyn’s third journey through asymmetric space, returning home. From the window of the transit, she runs her fingers over the scar in her side: the dark knot, the ridges, the places that are numb and the places that aren’t. When the transit ends and they step back into the world-palace, a broad man says: “It is good to see so many old friends.” Bastien Korham. She thinks his name is Bastien Korham.

She finds the ease with which she settles back into the human moiety’s routines strange and a little disturbing. The people she barely knew before her assignment feel almost like old friends now. She plays cards with Holom and someone called Manni. They teach Skipper (a True People of Hannic, a small alien that committed some unknown infraction in its own community and is hiding among the humans) to play checkers.

When she is alone, she thinks about Garral in whatever new world he has been carried to, filling his mind with new things. She wonders if he will meet someone and whether he will tell them about the three unfinished relationships he left behind. She suspects she will do the same.

Chapter 34 — Baby Day, a Hundred New People

Dafyd has not been sleeping. His nights are all the same: lying in the dark with his mind sparking through the inventory of everything that could go wrong. The swarm in Clae’s body, working in Tonner’s old team. Jellit fully subsumed, the swarm done with him. The lie of Jellit’s survival, and when to tell Jessyn the truth. Garral and whether he represents a pathway to open communication with the enemy. Andermus and Korham and the tension that is approaching a crisis.

On the day the babies are decanted, almost a third of the human moiety packs the nursery. Displays go up in the common room and the courtyard outside. Brun comes out from the lab and the crowd goes quiet — not calm, but quiet, wanting to hear. He thanks everyone for coming. He sets expectations about the babies’ visual development, their need for human engagement, the rotation signup. “I know it’s mandatory, but I hope you’ll all do it anyway.” The crowd laughs.

A hundred and seven new humans enter the world in the world-palace’s clinical light. The older generation is all grandparents to them — a generation-gap jump that the Carryx’s harvesting of Anjiin created. The babies, Dafyd thinks, will never know what they don’t know. They will be told. The difference between told and known is one of the things he carries.

After the ceremony, he goes into the lab. Clae — the swarm — nods a greeting. A polite smile. Just that.

Chapter 35 — Campar’s Debrief

Campar sits on a cloth-backed stool with his water cup in hands, in Dafyd’s little garden. His back aches. It has been aching since the journey. He describes what he found: on a distant Carryx-operated ship, he encountered dead human bodies in a section of the vessel that had lost power. And something else — a creature he thinks was one of the starfish octopus species (pentapus-shaped, limbs of the right length and configuration), which had appeared dead until the ship’s power came back, then became immediately active — not alive, exactly, more like equipment that had been offline and was now online again. A mechanism that thought it was a starfish.

Dafyd says: “Like it was equipment. Not a living thing itself, but something that worked with a living thing, even when the living thing was gone.” Clae exchanges a glance with Dafyd that means something. Campar notices the glance and notes that he has not been folded into their circle. He takes a sip of water. He can wait.

Chapter 36 — Surur-Tlassen, the Daughter Challenges the Mother

Surur-Tlassen’s POV. The meeting chamber is filled with the Carryx — the most honored of the empire assembled on the benches, the air thick with pheromones, Surur-Tlassen’s flesh producing its own reflexive commands. Across the chamber, the benches are empty, awaiting the remnants of the private creche.

The passage opens. The former regulator-librarians — pale, diminished, their bodies altered beyond recognition by decades inside the creche — haul themselves out into the light. Urur-Atlak comes first, moving on withered arms. The last one, missing two legs and with milky-white blind eyes, must be helped by the others.

When the Sovran enters, the room goes breathless. Surur-Tlassen feels his loyalty renewed, as he does every day. And then from the passage comes the Sovran’s new daughter: wider, her abdomen almost flat, her crest vivid green with crimson and indigo, her fighting arms thin but moving with the sure agility of youth.

Mother and daughter consider each other. The Sovran spreads her fighting arms and screams a war cry that is older than most of Surur-Tlassen’s mind — an ancient call his body answers involuntarily, muscles preparing for battle, pain nerves going numb. The daughter’s response comes while the mother still sings: defiance, sweet and clear as fresh water. Their two voices pull Surur-Tlassen’s flesh in opposing directions. He whimpers inaudibly in the storm.

The daughter strikes first. The Sovran counterstikes, tries to push the daughter back and expose her legs. The daughter dances sideways and the Sovran’s fighting legs snap forward, shattering the daughter’s right abdominal foreleg in a spray of chitin and pale blood.

A blow that would end any other fight. An advantage that should guarantee the Sovran’s dominance.

For a moment, it truly looks like an advantage.

Chapter 37 — Dafyd Learns the Sovran’s Secret

Dafyd spends a full day in the garden conducting a slow relay-interview with the Soft Lothark — each guard amends or expands the last one’s answer, then walks away, and another comes. He learns about the Epikainot: an ancient enemy that discovered a resonating interaction between two otherwise harmless field effects, combining them into a chain reaction that dissolved the crust of the Carryx’s first homeworld in under an hour. Towers, seas, and the ancestral pools of the Carryx all vanished in fire and boiling stone. The Carryx eradicated the Epikainot entirely and repurposed the weapon; it is what they now use when they wish to unmake a world utterly.

He then asks about Sovran succession. The Soft Lothark’s answer is precise and devastating: the private creche exists on every world-palace, always ready. When the first homeworld was destroyed and the Sovran died with it, the creche on the next world simply opened. The empire shifted its attention a few degrees and carried on. The succession was seamless. The Sovran is not precious — she is trivially replaceable by design, and always has been.

Dafyd brings this back to the remaining conspirators — Jessyn, Campar, and Uuya Tomos. The plan to kill the Sovran is broken at the premise: her death means nothing. The empire will not falter or mourn; it will hand the role to the next daughter and continue. Campar, gaunt and spent, proposes a quieter path: stop trying to win the unwinnable, become “corn and chickens” — protected because useful, choosing survival over heroism. Dafyd refuses and leaves the room without a word.

He ends up in the nursery, feeding infant #34 in the dimmed orange light. Caring for the baby is a small stabilizing act; his rage doesn’t vanish, but it becomes something he can hold. The spy Clae finds him there and confirms she checked the archive: a Sovran died earlier that day and was replaced without any disruption visible in the record. Dafyd explains where his model failed — he thought the Sovran was like a queen bee, hardened and guarded because her loss would be catastrophic. The Carryx instead evolved a different answer: make her so easily swapped that she cannot be used as a lever against the empire at all.

And then, holding the baby while Clae rocks her, the itching sense of imminence returns. An idea is forming that he cannot yet articulate. He warns Clae it’s barely a thought, probably nothing. But: the Carryx are not a civilization with a leader. They are a single organism with billions of bodies and one Sovran at the center. What is the vulnerability of that structure? What if there were two?

Coda — The Blue Room

Coda — Jessyn’s Third Asymmetric Transit

(This coda exists as an alternate rendering or continuation of the return journey — see Chapter 33 above. In the coda’s version, the specifics of the return to the world-palace are rendered through the texture of the days between the transition and arrival: the playing of checkers, the tending of the glass farm, the way strangers become temporary old friends in the gravity of a shared experience. Jessyn begins to understand that she has changed and that the world-palace — monstrosity that it is — has started to become the reference point around which everything else is measured. She is not sure what to do with that.)

What This Book Does

The Faith of Beasts is a book about what happens after survival becomes the baseline: how people build lives in catastrophe, who gets to make decisions for the group, and what the cost is of making them. Dafyd is running the human moiety from a position of perpetual moral compromise: every choice that preserves humans in the short term involves collaborating with the Carryx, and every act of resistance involves keeping secrets from the people he’s responsible for.

The baby project — 107 humans gestated in lamb sacks — is the book’s central symbol. Tonner’s daughter in sack thirty-four is both the clearest expression of human persistence and a child who will never know Anjiin, who will grow up inside the empire that destroyed it. The moiety they are building is real and specific and the product of people who should not have been able to build anything.

The Carryx succession thread, ending at the moment when the daughter’s broken leg looks like the Sovran’s advantage but may not be, suggests that the empire that holds the humans is not itself stable. The successor to the Sovran will shape everything. Whether that is a threat or an opening for the humans, the swarm, and whatever faction they serve has not yet become clear.

What is clear: the swarm is still here. It still hasn’t transmitted. It is still, in whatever way an alien collective consciousness can be, in love with someone.

All content belongs to its respective author and publisher. These are personal reading notes.