Whirlwind of a Story

"Let's hurry, shall we?" Gale huffed as Kipo hesitated. He glanced around the cabin, and Kipo would think he was annoyed if his voice wasn't also touched with worry. "We don't have all day."

"I know," Kipo answered, but still, she hesitated. She hadn't been lying before, she DID have questions, but she also knew that Gale had gone through a lot of trouble to keep this stuff secret, as easily as Kipo found it. She had to ask it right, or she wouldn't be getting any answers.

"What can you tell me about this god that hates us?" Kipo asked him. Gale looked momentarily surprised, before looking suspiciously at her. Kipo, for her part, tried to keep a straight face.

"That's what you want to know?" he said, a sneer in his voice.

"That's not everything..." Kipo said slowly. "But yes. I want to know about this God we're fighting against and about this offering."

"You don't have any other choice, you know," Gale told her. "The god will destroy you and your village to get what he wants."

"Hm," Kipo said, nodding. "Okay... so what can you tell me about him?"

"Why do you even want to know this...?" Gale sighed. "Look, he's..."

"He hates us," Kipo offered. Gale nodded.

"That's right," he said. "He despises your group because you're encroaching on his territory. This god commands the skies and rules over his kingdom from the sky. When your group came into this world, he felt as if that was an insult, so he's going to kill you unless you give him the flowers to make him happy."

"Why does he want the flowers?" Kipo asked him. She wanted to ask more, but she closed her mouth. Asking too much would allow Gale to pick and choose what he wanted to answer or to derail the conversation. Kipo needed to keep her questions on track.

"Why does he-?" Gale cut himself off suddenly, thinking. "Why? Well... those flowers are his favourite, and represent 'good will' and 'health', so he takes them as a sign of faith."

"He takes the flowers that grow out of people's dead bodies as a sign of faith?" KIpo asked sceptically, before she remembered something. What had Anne called them...? "The wish flowers?"

Gale rolled his eyes. "They'd mean different things to a god then an ordinary person."

Kipo sighed. "Alright. But... about this god, who worships him?"

"No one," Gale told her evenly. "He rules like a king, and does not need simple worship like a different god might. He just wants respect and control, and to rule over his kingdom."

"...Huh," Kipo said, thinking about why that sounded weird. "Does he have any legends? Like other mythology? Like how he was born?"

"There are a million different stories about that," Gale told her condescendingly.

"Like what?" Kipo pressed. "Which one do you believe?"

"None of them," Gale snorted, and Kipo blinked at him. Sighing, Gale elaborated.

"The myth and legend about that god is exaggerated," he told her. "Truthfully, it's not all-powerful or all-knowing. It's just a creature, like the Bone Dragons or the flyboys. A powerful one, yes, but not omnipotent."

"So it's a bone dragon?" Kipo asked him, but Gale shook his head.

"No..."

"Then what is it?" Kipo pressed. "A flyboy?"

"Obviously not," Gale snapped, as if personally offended. "Look, no one really knows what it is, or what it looks like, least of all me, okay?"

Kipo shrugged. "Can you tell me about the legends?"

"...Hmm." By now, it seemed that Gale had visibly relaxed now. He was still snappish and awful, yes, but something in his tone was less defensive than it had been before, and he almost looked like he was enjoying talking about this.

Interesting.

Gale leaned forward. "I can do more than that, I can show you one of them. My favourite one."

The desk screen was lit up once again, but this time, it was not a real place that it showed. Now, the screen depicted cartoon clouds and a stylized sun, smiling down on a land on fire.

"This is how the world was in the beginning," Gale told her. "'Hell on Earth', as you can see. Nothing, plant, animal, nor human was able to survive out here for long, and for aeons, the earth was scorched by what was called the Dragon's Sunfire."

Kipo stared at the screen, not only entranced in the story and in the imagery, but of what he was telling her, and how familiar it sounded.

However, Kipo suddenly reminded herself, as interesting as it was, she was still on a mission. She glanced up at Gale, and he seemed just as entranced in the story as she was, if not more so. He didn't even notice when Kipo reached into her hidden pocket, and pulled out the old notebook. This was a good opportunity to continue searching through it.

"This continued for years," Gale continued as Kipo flipped open the notebook. "At least until the singular most important creature was born: the one we call our god."

Kipo leaned forward. On the screen, a small little white bird appeared in the flames on the earth. The egg shells it hatched in were nearby, but the tiny little creature had ditched them, walking away through the field of fire. The little bird looked to be in pain.

Kipo started to lean away, glancing down at the notebook, but when she did, she paused. She only had the cover flipped open, but on it, the light from the screen had highlighted something. Kipo titled it up more, revealing more of the notebook into the light, and nearly gasped at what she saw. A name.

"The creature was small and weak and frail, like all of the creatures born into hell," Gale said, sounding sad. "Any other creature like it would have perished on their first, and who can blame them? But this one persisted beautifully. Breaking out of its shell, then taking its first steps... and then finally rising into the air. It's scarcely believable, a miracle, almost."

The name written in what was probably invisible ink was horribly written, even with the years of wear and tear on the notebook. Still, Kipo managed to puzzle out a name: Piers. She frowned. This was undoubtedly the author of the notebook, but the bigger question was... was it Gale? Why would Gale change his name? To be more mysterious? To hide?

Kipo supposed she wouldn't find the answer by puzzling it out. She continued flipping through the pages, looking for more invisible ink. From what she saw, a lot of the earlier entries used invisible ink, and then the later ones all used a normal pen. Did Piers run out of his ink?

Gale was still telling his story. "The hellish landscape made the little creature strong. Not only did it survive its first few days on the earth, but all the ones after that. Soon, the little creature had risen up above everything else and was soaring through the skies, on top of the world! But it wasn't enough. The creature was tired of suffering, and decided it had enough. It decided to fight the sun."

Like much of the rest of the notebook, most of the entries were completely destroyed. But Kipo was able to find one, near the beginning that was mostly intact:

'I can take care of myself but... I'm also afraid. Luckily, I found some kind people to take me in so I'm less lonely! There's [unintelligible], Starfinder, Alli[unintelligible], Hurricane, Ocelot, [unintelligible]ha, Snowflake, Pine, [unintelligible], [unintelligible]...'

The rest of the page had been torn off. Kipo nearly groaned out loud. Was that all that was in here? Kipo flipped through the rest of the invisible ink pages, but there was nothing else that was possible to make out.

Sighing inwardly, Kipo refocused her attention on the rest of the notebook.

"It was a long, terrible fight," Gale explained. Kipo glanced at the screen. Now, it depicted a much larger, much more beautiful bird than Kipo saw before. It almost like an angelic dove, and was racing towards the sun, now with a horrifying face on it, glaring over to the bird. "But the creature was determined, and though it wasn't as strong as the sun, it could fight, and survive, much better than the sun with its complacency in the sky. The creature killed the sun, and extinguished the fires. It had thought its work was done, but at that point it had no idea what it had really done."

There was only one entry left, Kipo noted, and she devoured it, desperate for any clues at all.

However, even though it wasn't destroyed, Kipo found it difficult to read, because the entry was scrawled out in suddenly terrible handwriting. Kipo frowned at that. The first three entries she had read had been far neater than this one, but this messy scrawl looked just like the name written inside the cover. Kipo couldn't say if it was different people writing each one, but it was definitely odd.

'It's been 2 weeks and no ones come back yet. I wonder what's keeping them. I'm really tired. Too tired. Sometimes I try not to fall asleep because I'm worried one day I'll never wake up, but I can never stay awake for too long. My colds been getting really bad. I don't think it's a cold anymore. I haven't been able to eat my food very well and I find it really hard to write. I don't think I'm going to do that anymore. I miss...'

The writing cut off. So, this child, Piers, was sick then. Kipo flipped to the next page, but that one was impossible to read. So was the next one. And the next. And after that... the page was destroyed, but there was no ink on it. It hadn't been written in. There were at least... twenty pages that hadn't been written in. Perhaps he had just forgotten his notebook somewhere or gotten bored of it... but Kipo doubted that.

And that was it. That was the last thing Piers wrote here. That's all Kipo had to help her.

"The creature soared the skies for a long time, unaware of the winter it had unknowingly brought raging beneath it. Some could have said that the ice and snow was just as bad as the hell that came before it. It was only when the creatures yelled up at the creature as one, finally bringing its attention from which it came. Finally, it saw what had happened; what it had brought."

Kipo thumbed through the notebook, feeling horrible and, somehow guilty. She knew she should focus on what is in front of her, i.e. Gale, but she couldn't stop thinking about Pier, and how he dies, alone, without his friends...

Suddenly, Kipo froze, remembering her last theory. If Pier was dead, then how could he be Gale? Unless that isn't what happened.... Perhaps something else happened between the writing of the events of the notebook and now. It wasn't impossible... but Kipo was still stuck on Gale's name. There was a pretty good theory that presented itself: Gale was Pier and he came from another world, like her, and then he started dying of a mysterious illness (or, maybe, he was being killed, he had mentioned one of his friends wanted to kill him earlier...), but then he survived, and made that one god angry (probably the same way that it got mad at Kipo's group), and changed his name to hide. It made sense, and everything lined up... but something still stuck out to Kipo.

Why from Pier to Gale?

"The creature saw its mistake immediately, and knew what it needed to do. The world and the beings on it deserved more than the hellscape they faced every day. So, in order to fix the world, the creature become the sun, the clouds, the wind and the rest of the sky to make up for it. Its sun warmed the earth, melted the snow and ice into the oceans of the earth. The creature brought balance and peace to the world at long last."

Kipo's mind flipped through the names in the notebook.

'Piranha, Starfinder, Pine, Piranha, Alligator, Snowflake, Ocelot... and Hurricane.'

Interesting. Hurricane and Gale had more of a connection than Pier and Gale... but who was Hurricane?

"And since then, it's been watching over the land, keeping the skies in check and keeping the awful winters and oppressive hellscapes away. It rules over us as kindly as it can, keeping watch over us," Gale finally finished, and the screen went black as he leaned back, sighing. "Well, that's one of his stories. What did you think?"

Gale's voice was twinged with pride, and Kipo smiled at him, flipping the notebook closed and tucking it away into her pocket discreetly.

"It's pretty interesting," Kipo told him. "I liked it!"

Gale seemed pleased. "Of course you did, it's one of the best. Hm, that did waste a lot of time, though. We should get moving. Any other questions? I should remind you that we don't have a lot of time."

"Just one more question," Kipo said, and Gale almost seemed a good mood, because he nodded without complaining.

"This god..." Kipo started, wondering if this was a bad idea, but she needed to confirm it. "What's it called?"

"Huh?"

"I mean, the people here must call it something," Kipo pointed out. "So what do they call him?"

"Ah." Gale seemed to get what she was saying. "Usually, it's called 'Amenos'."

Kipo's heart sank. "Oh... that sounds pretty impressive."

"Yes, a name fit for a god," Gale nodded. "Don't let the story fool you, though, or the name. He still wants to kill you."

"I know," Kipo said. She knew that all too well.

"So, as agreed, that's your last question," Gale said. The screen flicked on between them. "We should get back to the quest. Ah, look, they've all made their way back to the town."

"Most of them," Kipo agreed, her stomach twisting into knots. So, Hurricane, Gale, and Amenos. Kipo couldn't say she knew a lot of Greek, but she knew enough to know that 'Amenos' meant wind. It almost seemed a little too on the nose, but... no, that practically confirmed it. The god outside trying to kill them was not actually outside, but in here, with her, telling her stories about himself he calls 'made up'. It was ridiculous.

Now, Kipo was wondering why he chose names that were so similar.

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