Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

What Earth Needs

Hye was playing with the space jellies. As a marine biologist, space animals were not his area of expertise, but that didn't mean he didn't have a special place in his heart for them. Coming home from work (helping arcadia scientists to populate their new inland sea with exciting new marine life to create a stable ecosystem, more complicated than it looked) he had made a habit of taking some time to feed the jellies. Once, back at his old university, he had done the same thing with a flock of crows that gathered in the park. And just like the crows, he had made friends with the Jellies, and there was a small float of them waiting, by the time he made it home.

He fed them from his hand, patting each one in turn and saying words of encouragement. He had given all of them names, and though he vowed that he didn't choose favorites, deep down he knew he did.

She was an elegant lady, pearl white with streaks of delicate gold running through her body. Her tentacles were unusually long and graceful, two of them longer than the others and ending with gentle feathery protrusions that rippled in the slight breeze. Though she was his favorite, he never gave her extra treats lest the others be upset, but he did give her maybe one or two more pats.

They trailed after him for a ways, up the walk and towards his new little house, on the outskirts of the Noxumber suburb, looking out over a vast plane that was slowly, overtime, going to become a forest. The door hissed open as it sensed him, and he stepped inside to find the room mostly dark. Flames danced within their glass prison along one wall, lighting up the room in a comforting orange glow. On the couch, in the middle of the room, he found both the large jellyfish plush, and the orca plush he had gifted to his....

He paused

He almost said late wife.

And while that was technically true, it wasn't quite the same.

She was dead in the traditional sense of the word. More than three years ago, he had witnessed her untimely death at the hand of Kazna only minutes after being sworn in as president of the UN. For the longest time he had worried she had been lost forever only to learn that she was..... Alive?

Alive but not undamaged.

It had taken years for him to get the full story out of her, how she had floated in an infinite blackness for what seemed like an eternity, thousands upon thousands of years seeming to pass away while she forgot who she was and what she had once loved. In the end it had all been an illusion designed by the void to cause her to go insane, to prove that they could corrupt members of the last cohort. Luckily for them Lord Celex had been there, and she had made a mistake in being unable to break him.

The emperor had been in captivity for a significant amount of time before she showed up, but Kazna hadn't exactly perfected her craft at that point.

The man had saved her sanity, and both of their lives, and was now welcome in their house whenever he so pleased. He was plight enough not to make good on the invitation, but Hye insisted he come over for sunday dinner when he could get around to it.

Hye set down his bag and looked around the room.

Tala was nowhere to be seen.

He frowned with concern and headed towards the back bedroom.

Ever since her return, his wife had been on the slow road to recovery. For the longest time she had not spoken, longer than that, and her body seemed to phaze in and out of existence, now she was almost back to her more human selfe, but the matter of her long term recovery was questionable.

He still worried about her.

He opened the door into their bedroom, and was relieved to find her standing before the mirror. He opened his mouth to say something but paused when he saw what she was doing. She was wearing a grey uniform, tight around the shoulders and sinced around the waist. Metals glittered on her shoulders. In her white gloved hands, she held a cap slowly rolling it between her fingers.