Genes & Gentle Waves (1)

Gouache on paper

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Part 72.  After their dangerous encounter, the group needs answers.

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Dominic yawned. ‘That’s it then, I’ll head back to my cabin.’

‘You’ll do no such thing!’ I cried, grabbing him by the collar before he could run off. ‘So nothing happened just now, did it?’

‘You were there. Why do we always need to talk about stuff?’

‘And you don’t when there’s someone cute around?’

‘That’s different!’

I could have slapped him. No one would know… I could blame the train. My blood pumped ferociously and my chest felt tight; the world around me swam in dots of faint light. The sensation of the corrupted creatures and the spores around them clung to my skin like sweltering bruises that wouldn’t fade. Questions thickened in my veins and I needed answers to purge it. ‘Dominic,’ I said blankly, ‘that was your sister.’

‘Well, yeah. You know I have a sister, remember?’ He looked around and muttered to himself, ‘Now where was his cabin last time-’

‘Oh no you don’t.’ I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him into the cabin where the rest of our group waited, with the distracted, awkward expressions of people stuck in a room trying their best to ignore two people having an argument. Lirita was trying her best to melt into the chair while Y’oona could barely hide her excitement at the drama. Flora didn’t flinch once at our shouting and continued to calmly knit her tea cosies.

Dominic looked at Flora who gave him a cute smile in return. ‘Maybe I don’t need to rush off just yet.’ He forcefully squeezed himself between Flora and Lirita, the latter of whom gave him a look so hard that, if it solidified, it could have pushed him off the train.

‘Now will you finally let me give you a check-up?’ said Flora to him.

‘Darling, there’s too many people here for that-’

Flora seemed unfazed by this and continued to check him. ‘Now turn your head and give me a little cough…’

‘Dominic!’ I yelled.

‘No no no!’ Lirita pushed her way out of her seat and wriggled in next to me instead. Dominic slid into the available space and slouched back, with his legs wide.

‘We don’t have time for this, you two! We need… we need…’ My voice petered out until it was little more than a croak.

‘Will someone please tell me what’s going on?’ demanded Lirita. ‘What was that-that thing? Hey, you’re shaking! Dew, are you okay?’

I nodded weakly. I closed my eyes and in the darkness, they felt hot and heavy, like stars burning out into supernovas. Everything, the cabin and all the people around me, felt a blur outside reality. I rubbed my arms and scratched to peel away the sting. No spores touched them, I knew, but my senses betrayed me and I could feel them there, covering my skin, like insects burrowing into me, burning and pinching my flesh. So much time had passed and yet that place always remains, an open doorway in my mind, hiding in darkness as dense and wide as the cavern itself.

‘Hey.’ A hand touched my wrists and opened my eyes to see Flora kneeling next to me. ‘It’s okay.’

I opened my eyes and found my arms smeared in blood.

Flora reached into her bag and retrieved a bottle of water and some herbs that she mixed together. As she did so Fez unrolled some bandages and wrapped them around my arms.

I turned my head as if doing so would shake the memory away. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling a swelling of shame within me.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. Drink this,’ she said.

I looked at the mixture curiously and then sipped it. ‘What is it?’

‘Just a herb, rhodiola, it’s called. It helps with stress. I can tell trauma when I see it. You’ve been through a lot.’ She stroked my hair. ‘Take some deep breaths.’

‘I wouldn’t be stressed if Dominic would just tell me what’s going on!’ I placed my hands on my abdomen where I still felt the tip of Brighid's knife pricking my skin. ‘What does your sister want? Why does she want to kill me?’

‘Kill?’ gasped Lirita. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Look, how was I supposed to know she wanted to do that to you? I really don’t know what she wants,’ he said defensively. The look in Dominic’s eyes told me he was telling the truth, but he certainly knew more than he was letting on. He leaned forwards. ‘Brighid and I didn’t part on the best of terms and we rarely made contact.’

‘Until Rosecloud.’

He nodded. ‘Until Rosecloud. I can sense when she’s watching me, that shift in the maya stream, just as she had sent eyes to watch you there. I never understood why she was interested in you, other than you being human, perhaps. I had a feeling she was around in Varla… but I was never certain. It’s like when something’s off but you can’t work out what it is, y’know, like a tiny nagging feeling in the back of my mind. Then I saw you wander off. That’s not unusual by itself, but that feeling was stronger, and something didn’t sit right.’

‘So you let me go in there on my own?’

‘I was watching!’

My voice cracked. ‘Dominic I could be dead by now!’ Another notch to add to my list of near-death experiences. ‘I don’t understand… why did she want to talk to me and offer me her help? You knew what she meant when she said she wanted to fix things, fix something left behind by your mother. What did that mean?’ No matter where you go, you will never be safe. ‘Please Dominic, I need to know. I want to understand.’ The feeling of those corrupted creatures surrounding her continued to crawl over my skin. I went to scratch my arms without thinking and surfaced back to reality when I pressed into the bandages. Something was wrong, so wrong with what happened in that building and I needed to know the truth.

‘Our mother?’ He sighed. ‘There’s only one Brighid could mean, and I can’t believe she’s making me say this, but… well, I can’t say I’ve ever met her, but in a way everyone has.’ He smirked and chewed on his next words as if he couldn’t trust what he was about to say.

‘Who is it?’

‘She’s talking about Pharmae.’

‘What?’ Everyone in the room turned towards Dominic. ‘That’s impossible,’ said Y’oona.

Dominic shrugged. ‘Whatever you want to believe, in a strange way it’s true.’

Pharmae, Mother of Feilahn, was the immortal being who took care of the world’s maya stream and ensured it remained free of impurities. Although her life remained a mystery, and many tales and myths from every culture surrounded her, I had heard many stories of people seeing her, and even meeting her, in the form of a giant wandering the world with a magnificent train of blossoms. She was very real. But people had not seen her for a long time, and we started to believe that, without her power to cleanse the stream, the corruption had been left to spread freely. The corrupted maya left to fester beneath the ground had already claimed the lives of people close to me. On thinking about it, I had to wipe my eyes and push down those memories.

Many cultures had legendary figures people claimed were the children of Pharmae from aeons past, but no one knew the truth behind these stories. For Dominic to sit there and boldly declare that he and his sister were children of Pharmae to a room full of feilish would come across as a kind of delusion or, more likely in Dominic’s case, as part of an elaborate joke.

‘Have I lied to you before?’ he said.

‘No. I’ve had to listen to far too much about the things you get up to.’

He scoffed. ‘I’m not letting you edit my memoirs when I write them then.’

‘I won’t need to. It will be a tiny book; everyone will just need to read it a hundred times,’ I sneered.

‘Only a hundred?’

I cried out in frustration and thumped the seat. ‘Dominic! There’s corruption here! Does that not worry you at all? That is the reason why we’re here!’ I reached into my pocket and wrapped my fist tightly around the marble containing the Dragon. Or was there another reason I came to Varla after all?

Y’oona listened with a hungry glint in her eyes. ‘Typical guy, saying whatever anyone wants to hear just to make people go gooey-eyed for him.’ She scoffed. ‘How many times have you tried that one? It’s one of the wildest I’ve heard. Not like I would know, but who’s going to fall for that?’

‘It normally works,’ Dominic muttered quietly to himself. Then he said, ‘It’s not in the way you think. Sure, it’s possible Brighid and I have a part of Pharmae in us, but if we do, then we’ve never known her as a mother.’

‘This isn’t as certain as I was hoping for. A part? What do you mean a part?’ I asked.

‘Her genes. You’ll enjoy this; it’s all to do with our good friends at Bantammina.’


It was strange how a single world can fill me with such dread. Bantammina, a company associated with the era when humans ruled the world, and with it, their eventual collapse and disappearance. The echoes of what they did to the feilish people, my mum, and my human friend, followed me like a spectre. Even now, in this changed world, blood continued to fall in streams from its offering hands.