Poguri’s Awakening

Gracie’s eyes followed the purple skyline – lavender where the sun blazed high above the city of Daywatch at one end of the world, and graduating to a rich violet as it touched the moon over Nightwatch at the other end. From her vantage point in the village of Haven – located halfway between the two capital cities – she could watch an entire “day” pass by with a slow turn of her head. After all, in the Land of Nou, day and night – and everything in-between – depended upon location instead of time.

Gracie enjoyed watching the shimmering white mist painting spirals and long arcs across the living canvas. Or the bubbleships buffeted by warm wind currents as they drifted daintily towards their destinations. The occasional glider soared from peak to peak in the Mountains of Mim. And every so often, miniature flying sheep could be seen poking holes in the clouds.

Gracie had practically memorized the view. So she was quite surprised to find a crack – a small hairline fissure – at the top of the sky. She might not have noticed it hidden amongst the clouds, except that as they passed, the crack remained.

“Ouch!” shouted a squeaky voice, drawing her attention back to the ground.

Gracie looked at the squirrel seated in front of her, a long needle poking through one side of her ear and out through the other.

She winced. “Sorry about that Abigail,” she said, carefully pulling the needle free.

“Were you daydreaming again?” the squirrel asked testily.

Gracie looked back up into the sky, searching for the crack, but it was gone. At that moment a massive cloud cluster was passing over Haven, making it impossible for her to find it again.

She shook her head. “No, not daydreaming,” she mumbled, “I thought I saw…”

“If this isn’t a good time, Gracie, I can always…”

“No!” shouted Gracie, with a little more enthusiasm than she intended, “I mean…no. I’m almost finished.”

With a swift undulating motion, she sewed a thin stitch around the outside of the squirrel’s ear, sealing it up where some of the stuffing had started to poke out from the inside.

“All done.”

Abigail the squirrel reached up a paw and felt all around her ear. She turned around to face Gracie with a huge smile on her face.

“Feels like it did when I first emerged,” she said, “Thank you so much.”

With that the squirrel skittered away on all fours, bristling with renewed vigor. And Gracie felt renewed too as she considered her life as a matterstitch apprentice – her small but significant role in the great story of Nou – whispered through the Dreamflow and brought to life from the prima materia.

The blue leaves of the pumpkinfruit trees, every blade of grass in Ambrosia Hills, the puffy white thistles in the Mallow Marsh – all were made of prima materia – that sometimes solid, sometimes liquid, sometimes neither or all-of-the-above-at-once stuff that made up the world.

The Dreamflow – capital D – was the network of channels coursing throughout the Land of Nou, carrying prima materia to and from the planet’s core to keep the colorful landscapes looking…well, Nou.

It was from the Dreamflow that Gracie and the rest of her fellow nouminals had emerged – walking, talking animals of cloth and stitch and filled with warm cottony stuffing – born from the materia as well. For them it was the dreamflow – lowercase d – a system of pathways channeling prima materia throughout their bodies that gave them life. Gracie felt her role in the great drama quite keenly; thinking on it now sent golden warmth coursing through her body from the tips of her ears to the end of her tail.

“Gracie!” yelled a piercing voice, disturbing her reflections.

She looked up to find a walnut-shaped head peering down at her from the end of a long neck. It belonged to the town herald – an ostrich called Gray, even though he was pale blue.

“Yes, Gray?”, she asked in her most pleasant voice.

It was the town herald’s job was to spread any and all news around Haven, and it was a job that he approached with great enthusiasm.

“You must come quickly!” he whined, “There is trouble at the dreamspring!”

Gracie didn’t move right away. She wasn’t ready to detach from her ruminations just to follow Gray on one of his wild goose chases. Ostrich chases. Whichever. Because the town herald also had a reputation for making a big story out of nothing.

“Tell me what happened, Gray.” she said, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth, “Did one of the adventurers lose an ear again?”

“No no no no no no no,” said the ostrich, his body turning around and around while his head stayed in the same place and his gaze remained focused on Gracie. He usually only did that when he was nervous.

“By the dreamspring there’s a… Well he’s…or maybe she’s a um…” Gray seemed flustered. “Look, I don’t know what it is, but you really should go down there and see for yourself.”

Now this was interesting, Gracie thought. The herald was never at a loss for words, so whatever was down at the Dreamspring must’ve been something he’d never seen before. Using her tail to spin herself upright, Gracie slid halfway down the roof before springing forward with both feet and landing softly on the ground.

“Lead the way, Gray,” she said, drumming the ground with her tail.

The ostrich sped off towards the center of the village, and with long bounces, Gracie followed closely behind.

Haven’s dreamspring was one of many places throughout the Land of Nou where prima materia gushed from the depths of the world and pooled on the surface. They came in all sizes – some as small as puddles, others as big as lakes. This one happened to bubble up on the outskirts of the Sand Ocean, a vast desert that became a popular site for adventurers and explorers. When a band of wanderers discovered the spring, they used its prima materia to grow giant pumpkins, squahses, and gourds, carving them out by hand to create buildings for a new village. Those wanderers became the first settlers, and the village came to be called Haven.

Gracie arrived at the dreamspring to find a crowd of nouminals – Havenites and travelers alike – gathered at the shore.

“Are those…rabbit ears?”, asked a local koala.

“Must be…” answered an aardvark, “There’s the tail right there.”

“Yeah, but what’s that knotty rope attached to it?”

Gracie started to ease her way through the crowd. Then Gray announced in his booming herald’s voice, “Step aside, nouminals, matterstitch coming through!”

This quieted the collective mutter of crowd, and everyone parted to give Gracie room to pass through. All except a bear named Bixbe, and a turtle named Murphy, who appeared to be having a disagreement.

“Bixbe, I’m thinkin’ you might should get your eyes looked at by Mother Widow,” grumbled Murphy, “That ain’t no fella.”

“Ears, coat, shoes, cottontail. Looks like a fella to me.”

“Them’s just leftovers, Bixbe. Ain’t no fella gonna have his coat and his boots and his…ears all scattered about like that.”

Gracie put a paw on both of the nouminals’ shoulders and beared her biggest smile.

“Hullo, Murphy. Bixbe. What’s all the…”

She looked past the turtle and the bear to the shore of the dreamspring, where a dark blue overcoat lay in tatters – frayed edges and full of holes. A dark boot sat nearby, the other several yards away. A pair of long fuzzy brown ears, not attached to a head or anything else, lie in a loose bundle near the shore. The rest was little more than tubes and fluff, not so much a nouminal as the assorted pieces of one – either incompletely formed or completely torn apart.

Dreamsprings had another curious property: they provided instant transportation between any two points where they were located – no matter how far apart. Haven’s spring made it a natural center of activity – a starting point for nouminals coming to the desert in search of adventure, a place for merchants to share their wares, and recently a site for a traveling theater troupe to practice its routine before heading to Daywatch for the Solar Festival.

So the arrival of a new visitor should’ve come as no surprise. The condition of the stranger, however, was a different matter entirely.

“Great nouminals…” said Gracie breathlessly.

As she took in a full measure of what lie before her, fur bristled up and down her body, and a chill ran from the tips of her ears to the end of her tail. In all her time as a matterstitch apprentice, she had never seen anything like it. She felt like she was coming apart at the seams.

“Why are you all standing around here like this?” she shouted suddenly, her voice trembling, “We have to get him to Mother Widow!”

“Him? But Gracie, that’s just a pile of…”

Gracie wouldn’t hear it. She ignored the muttering of the crowd and set to work gathering the stranger up, using her pouch as a makeshift sack.

“Do you really think it’s a nouminal?”, someone in the crowd asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” wheezed another, “Any nouminal in that condition would’ve already returned to the Dreamflow. Gracie of all people should know that.”

“I know. Then why is she so…”

“Look,” said a matter-of-fact kind of voice, “That thing doesn’t even have a face.”

There were a few more mutters amongst the crowd. “Huh. Yeah, I guess that settles it.”

Gracie wasn’t listening – couldn’t listen – if she was ever going to be able to help the stranger in time. She may have only been a matterstitch apprentice, but her intuition screamed that this was an emergency situation. Once she was certain she had gathered everything, she bounced her way towards the largest squash hut at the far end of the village – Mother Widow’s stitchery.

****

Mother Widow was always busy. All eight of her legs were always in motion. One of the four Great Nouminals, she was the world’s first matterstitch (the Nou equivalent to a doctor) – conducting her work in the caves beneath the Sand Ocean even before the village of Haven was built.

She had seen countless nouminals during her time. Injuries were common enough in the Land of Nou, afterall – a missing nose or a torn ear; even some extreme cases where a limb or tail needed to be replaced. She had fixed them all without batting even one of her six eyes. These things were especially common amongst would-be adventurers, who wandered out into the desert without a guide only to be spit back out in Haven in a variety of poor conditions.

But this stranger, this thing that Gracie found by the dreamspring, it was hard to imagine that it had ever been whole, or what sort of ordeal would’ve left it in such a condition. It had been a long time since Mother Widow had to use all of her legs, all of her eyes, and all of her attention for a single project. And there had never been a time when she wasn’t sure of the outcome.

Until now.

The uncertainty was exciting. After taking one look at the stranger, she rushed everyone out of her stitchery, closed and sealed all the doors, and ordered that no one disturb her for anything. The hapless adventurers and all their frivolous injuries would have to wait until she was finished. Only Gracie was allowed to stay, to collect prima materia from around the village whenever the stock ran low.

Mother Widow worked tirelessly. Staring down a variety of lenses and scopes, she pulled, cut, stitched, molded, weaved, stuffed, and mended. Her pincers regulated the flow of fresh prima materia into the work as she needed it.

But the mending wouldn’t take. She had practically rebuilt the stranger from scratch, but the composition simply would not resolve itself. The dreamflow pathways would not reconnect. It was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and later finding out that you only had half the pieces from five different boxes.

Exhausted, Mother Widow set her work aside. She had done all she could. She couldn’t help but wonder if her intuition had been wrong, if there was no stranger, and the thing had never been alive at all.

“Now we wait,” she said.

****

Gracie had never seen Mother Widow so out of sorts, so frustrated, looking so tired. She walked over to the not-quite-nouminal and squatted down for a closer look.

For her part, Mother Widow had managed to make something whole out of what had been little more than parts. The overcoat had been thoroughly restitched, the many holes covered with multicolored patches. The red boots stuck out from the bottom, and the two bunny ears poked out through holes at the top of the hood.

Inside the hood there was only darkness – a darkness of such depth that Gracie had to look away briefly to convince herself that she wasn’t falling inside.

“Who are you, stranger?” she whispered.

****

Focused emerald green eyes, deeply set in an honest brown face, ears twitching with curiosity: These were the first things the stranger saw. From a place of endless darkness and pervasive cold, he climbed up into a world of such vivid color that it took his eyes time to adjust. For that matter, it took some time to grow accustomed to his eyes themselves. First vision, then feeling; waves of warmth coursed outward from his center to bring life to plush limbs. He felt a need to touch, a sort of hunger dwelling inside his gloves, his boots, and at the tips of his ears. But when he reached up a hand towards the brown wallaby, she leapt back in a hurry, her expression flashing from intrigue to surprise.

“Mother Widow!” she shrieked. But it wasn’t fear in her voice. It was excitement. A coy smile appeared on her face.

The stranger felt the movements of something large – something huge – something whose presence was bigger still. High within the hazy gray reaches of the squash hut, the giant thing stirred, a movement the stranger saw inside his mind before he saw it with his eyes. Then, all at once, with a speed that should’ve been impossible for something so massive, a majestic black spider appeared on eight fingery legs and filled the entire room. It bore down on him with six red eyes, each of them a different size as viewed through the various lenses and scopes affixed to the spider’s furry head.

“Hmmmm?”

A rumbling voice started somewhere deep inside the spider’s abdomen and crested in a sort of harmonic chime before resonating between her pincers.

“So you’re awake.” she exclaimed, moving closer and surrounding the stranger with her legs.

He blinked – feeling the glow of his eyes suddenly dying out and being rekindled again shortly afterwards. The answer to the spider’s question lingered at the edge of a dark crevasse, a memory hesistant to surface. His throat was an hourglass, words like dry sand barely able to slip through. He couldn’t even feel his mouth.

Finally, he reached out and took a hold of one of Mother Widow’s legs, and with all he could muster, projected a single word from the void inside his head, down the length of his arm, out through his fingertips and up through the spider’s leg.

“Poguri.”, he said, directly into her mind.

“Poguri!?”, screeched Mother Widow in her reverberating voice, shaking the walls of the stitchery. She withdrew forcefully, rearing on her hind legs, all six eyes wide with surprise.

Gracie looked at Mother Widow in confusion. “P-Poguri?” she repeated.

“This one.”, said the spider, her breathing heavy, “That is his name.”

“Poe-gyur-ree,” repeated the wallaby, sounding out the name delicately as if it might shatter in her mouth. She extended the final syllable, showing all of her teeth in a bright smile.

Poguri looked back and forth between the spider and the wallaby and nodded his head rapidly. Gracie returned his nod, her green eyes sparkling. Mother Widow spread her mandible wide and leaned her face in very close – which could have either been her way of smiling, or advance notice that she was about to eat him.

“Poguri?” she tittered quietly so that only he could hear.

His ears curved like question marks.

Yes?

“Don’t ever do that to me again.”

His ears fell to either side of his head and his eyes dimmed. Then he nodded very slowly.

I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.

After a moment, apparently satisfied, Mother Widow eased her large body backwards and scaled halfway up the stitchery’s rear wall. Gracie glanced back and forth between the her mentor and the stranger, uncertain as to what had just taken place between them.

“Is something wrong, Mother Widow?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the spider, “It seems our friend’s condition is worse than we thought.”

Gracie’s eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

“In addition to being unable to speak,” Mother Widow said matter-of-factly, “It seems he has no memory of who he is or where he comes from.”