The Silent Colony by ShamanSquirrel < Submission | Inkbunny, the Furry Art Community

Keywords male 1282148, female 1167862, wolf 204825, deer 33522, squirrel 32938, pregnant 25762, pregnancy 16136, dragoness 13950, military 3173, furred dragon 1953, travel 542, guild 340, gheval 69

The Silent Colony

A Silvania Story — SY 4527, Mid-Autumn

~ I ~
The commission arrived on a Wednesday, routed through the Regional Medical Guild with a secondary note appended in the cramped official script of the Wide Rangers.
The flood-season survey of the Kigorith coastal settlements was routine work — the kind the guild sent out every autumn, when the inland rivers rose and the smaller communities along the coast lost reliable communication with the wider world. A healer-shaman made the circuit, documented conditions, delivered whatever supplies the pack animals could carry, and reported back. Jukrit had done it twice before, on the Silvania mainland. He had not done it on Kigorith.
The Rangers' note was less routine.
He read it twice at the kitchen table, then carried it to the main room, where Noraxia was stretched out in her feral form along the floor, her eyes half-closed in the thin autumn sun coming through the window. Her belly was unmistakable now — a fullness to the lower ribcage, a changed quality to the way she rested. Seven months. Eight weeks, perhaps less.
"The crystalid colony under Bluestone Priory has gone silent," he said.
Noraxia opened one eye.
"The monks aren't concerned. The Rangers are." He set the letter on the low table beside her. "They want a shaman to look at it. Specifically someone with crystalid experience."
She was quiet for a moment. He could see her doing the arithmetic — the journey to Kigorith, the survey circuit, the crossing back — against the arithmetic of her own body and its timeline.
"Go," she said.
"Noraxia—"
"Jukrit." She lifted her head. "I'm not unattended. Kalina is here. Chenar is here. Kyren is here, and Varena, and Raskon is twenty minutes away. Your mother is ten minutes away. Kex and Khari are next door." Her teal eyes were steady. "If something happens, I will be the least unattended person on this continent. And if you don't go, you will spend the next eight weeks finding reasons to worry about me that aren't about me at all."
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
"The network reaches Kigorith," she added. "We can talk every evening."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he went to send a message to Raskon.

~ II ~
Raskon met the idea of Kigorith with the particular expression of a person who is interested but wants to be precise about the limits of what he can contribute.
"I know nothing about sea crossings," he said. They were sitting on the steps of Raskon's new lodgings — a modest structure at the edge of Riverside Market that he had furnished with a practicality that stopped just short of comfort, as if he had not yet decided how permanent he intended to be. "I've navigated in vacuum. Ocean is a different matter entirely."
"The guild arranges the crossing," Jukrit said. "There's a regular ferry from the Silvania coast to the Kigorith northern port. We'd be passengers, not crew."
"Then I can manage being a passenger." Raskon was quiet for a moment. "Chenar?"
"He wants to come."
A small nod. "Good."
Three days later, they left Riverside Market in the gray early morning, Chenar riding in his preferred place just behind Jukrit's left ear, tucked into the collar of his travel coat. He had been fully himself for two weeks now — the shift completed cleanly, his coat settled back to its usual colors, his energy returned. If anything, he emerged from each shift slightly more himself than before, as if the crossing clarified something. He had been brisk and purposeful all morning and had supervised the packing with more opinions than were strictly necessary.
Noraxia had come out to the yard to see them off, feral-formed, her breath misting in the cold air.
Jukrit had pressed his forehead to hers for a long moment without saying anything. She made the low resonant sound that meant: I know, and: go, and: come back — all at once, which was something only she could do.
Then he went.

~ III ~
The ferry crossing took the better part of a day. Raskon spent the first two hours on deck watching the water with the focused attention of someone cataloguing a new phenomenon, then retreated below and read until they made port. Chenar showed no opinion about the ocean whatsoever, which Jukrit suspected meant he had decided to pretend it wasn't there.
The northern port of Kigorith smelled of salt and ambientite — a faint metallic sweetness underneath the brine that Jukrit had been told to expect but was still startling. The mineral was closer to the surface here than anywhere on the Silvania mainland. You could see it in the stone of the port buildings: blue-threaded veins running through the gray rock, faint and irregular, like something frozen in the act of reaching.
The Wide Rangers had a small detachment at the port. Two of them were waiting.
They were tall, both of them, which was the first thing Jukrit noticed. The Rangers were predominantly meerkats, and he had half-expected that. These two were exceptions: a solidly built cervine woman named Dara who carried herself with the economy of someone who had been in the field a long time, and a younger wolf whose name was Esthen and who could not entirely conceal that he found the situation somewhat exciting. Jukrit liked them both immediately, for different reasons.
"The survey circuit first," Dara said, as they walked to the Rangers' staging area. "Seven settlements. Five we've already checked — they're fine, stocked, accounted for. The sixth we've been keeping curious travelers away from."
"The observance," Jukrit said.
Dara looked at him sideways. "You read the full report."
"I try to."
"Good." She handed him a map — hand-drawn, detailed, annotated in the Rangers' shorthand. "We leave them alone. You document them as healthy from our report, which they are, and we move on. The priory is the last stop." A pause. "The colony has been silent for thirty-one days."
"And the residents?"
Esthen answered that one. "They say it's listening." He delivered this with the tone of someone who has repeated a thing many times and has not yet decided whether it makes sense. "That's all they'll say. It's listening."

~ IV ~
The circuit took four days.
The five accessible settlements were what the Rangers' report had promised: isolated, self-sufficient, in need of nothing that couldn't wait until the flood season ended except in one case a young otter with an infected dewclaw that Jukrit treated in twenty minutes and which the otter's family reacted to with a gratitude disproportionate to the service, which told him something about how long they'd been managing it alone.
The sixth settlement they circled at a respectful distance, Dara pointing out the Ranger perimeter markers — subtle, designed to read as natural landmarks to anyone who didn't know the system. Inside, smoke rose from the settlement's central structure in a pattern that Dara said had been continuous for eleven days. Whatever they were doing, they were still doing it.
Jukrit made his notation in the guild record: community present, healthy, observed at appropriate distance per community request. He signed it and moved on.
Raskon had been quiet for most of the circuit — useful quiet, the kind that came from someone paying attention without inserting themselves. He and Esthen had reached an understanding somewhere on the second day that seemed to involve Esthen asking questions about space and Raskon answering them with the practiced patience of someone who has explained things to curious people before and does not mind doing it again. Jukrit caught fragments of it: orbital mechanics, the way ambientite interference appeared on long-range sensors from outside the atmosphere, the color of Silvania's two moons from orbit. Esthen was storing all of it with visible care.
Chenar, for his part, had decided Dara was worthy of his company and spent the third day riding on her shoulder, which she accepted without comment, which elevated her considerably in Chenar's estimation. After all, she found him to be undeniably cute.

~ V ~
Bluestone Priory came into view on the morning of the fifth day, and Jukrit stopped walking without meaning to.
It rose from the coastal cliffs the way something grows — not assembled but accumulated, the lines of it following no architectural logic except the logic of the stone itself. The ambientite veins that ran through the cliff face ran through it too, uninterrupted, as if the priory were simply the part of the cliff that had decided, over millennia, to become useful. The blue threading caught the morning light and gave the whole structure a faint luminescence that was not quite glow and not quite reflection but something between the two. It was enormous and it was completely, utterly without grandeur — there was nothing about it that announced itself. It simply was, in the way that cliffs and old trees simply are.
"It's been growing for approximately three thousand years," Dara said, coming to stand beside him. "The first residents didn't choose the site. They found it — a cave system in the cliffs that kept them warmer than it should have, shaped itself a little around where they slept. They noticed after a few months." She paused. "Stayed. Told others. Families came. The order formed around the community that was already there, not the other way around."
"And stayed," Jukrit said.
"Generations of them."
It showed, when they entered. Bluestone Priory was not a monastery in the way Jukrit had imagined — it was a community, ancient and layered, smelling of woodsmoke and the particular mineral sweetness of ambientite and the less categorizable scent of a place where many lives had been lived for a very long time. Cubs ran through corridors worn smooth by centuries of feet. Families of badgers and rabbits and foxes and otters nodded to them as they passed. The devoted members of the religious order were identifiable by their undyed linen and their particular quality of unhurriedness, but they were one thread in the fabric rather than the whole of it.
The prior came to meet them himself — a broad-shouldered older badger named Reshal, who moved with the complete absence of hurry that seemed to be a characteristic of everyone who had lived here long enough. He greeted Jukrit with a warmth that held no urgency whatsoever, and showed them to rooms that were — Jukrit noticed immediately — exactly the right temperature, the acoustics exactly soft enough, the proportions somehow suited to rest in a way he couldn't account for.
"The structure does that," Reshal said, when Jukrit mentioned it. "It learns what its guests need. You'll find it slightly different when you wake." He said this the way one might say the kitchen is down the hall — a simple fact of the place, nothing remarkable.
That evening, Jukrit sat against the wall of his room after the others had gone to rest, and he put his palm flat against the stone. It was warm. Not the warmth of sun-heated rock — something steadier than that. Something that felt, if he was honest, paying attention.
He took his hand away. Then, after a moment, put it back.

~ VI ~
The caves beneath the priory went down a long way.
Dara came with him — she and Esthen both, Rangers' lanterns in hand, moving with the practiced silence of people who had made this descent before. Reshal had declined to accompany them. The colony's business, he said gently, was its own. He would wait above.
Raskon waited above too, though for different reasons. He had looked at the cave entrance for a long moment, then looked at Jukrit, and said simply: "Below ground is not my element." Jukrit had not argued. He understood the shapes of what people could and couldn't do.
Chenar came. Of course Chenar came.
The crystalids were not hard to find — they had never dispersed, which was itself significant. They were gathered in the deepest accessible chamber, clustered along a formation of raw ambientite that jutted from the cave floor in a rough column, their usual faint luminescence completely stilled. In the Rangers' lamplight they looked like glass, or like sleeping things. The chamber was utterly quiet.
Jukrit crouched at the edge of the formation and opened his shaman senses the way he would open a door — carefully, without assumption.
The crystalids were not dormant. They were alert in a way that was almost painful to perceive — a concentrated, collective attention directed entirely downward, into the stone, into whatever the ambientite connected to beneath the floor of the cave. He could feel the shape of what they were attending to without being able to read its content: something deep and slow and very, very old had changed in its pattern. Not broken. Not wrong. Changed, the way a long-held note changes when it finally resolves.
He stayed with it for a long time.
Chenar, beside him, was very still. Chenar had been around enough of Jukrit's shaman work to know when to be still.
When Jukrit finally stood, his knees ached and the Rangers' lamps had burned low.
"Well?" Dara asked.
"They're listening," he said. "The prior was right."
"Listening to what?"
He looked at the column of ambientite, at the crystalids clustered around it like a congregation.
"Something changed beneath the surface," he said slowly. "Something in the deep mineral structure — something old enough that I can't find a reference for it in anything I was taught. The crystalids registered it before anyone else could." He paused. "I don't think it's dangerous. I think it's significant."
"Significant how?"
"I don't know yet." He looked at her. "But I think someone should. The Guild's geological records on ambientite go back two hundred years. Whatever this is, it goes back further than that." He thought about the Helix Plague. About four thousand years of history living in the bones of the furfolk. About the way the priory's stone had been warm under his hand in the dark. "I'll write it up carefully. The Rangers should have the report too, not just the guild."
Dara nodded once. "Good enough for now."
They climbed back toward the light.

~ VII ~
That evening, Jukrit sat in the room that the priory had made comfortable for him and opened the communications terminal the Rangers had set up in the guest quarters. The signal to the Silvania mainland was reliable this time of year, before the winter storms came.
Noraxia's face appeared on the screen. She was in her anthro form — evening conversations, he'd noticed, she tended toward anthro, as if it suited the intimacy of the terminal's small frame. She looked well. She looked large. She looked like someone who had been waiting to talk to him and was not going to mention it.
"The colony?" she asked.
He told her all of it. She listened the way she always listened — without interruption, her eyes steady, asking the right questions only when he paused. She had a particular quality of attention that he had come to understand was rare, and which he had probably not told her often enough he valued.
"Something changed in the ambientite," she said, when he finished. "Something old."
"Old enough that the crystalids noticed it before any surface instrument could."
"And you think it connects to the Plague's origins."
"I don't know. I think it connects to something we don't have the history to read yet." He looked at his hands. "I think I need to find someone who has spent more time studying the deep mineral record. Someone who knows what ambientite does over centuries, not just decades."
Noraxia was quiet for a moment. Outside the terminal's frame, he could hear the faint sounds of the household settling — Kalina in the barn, probably, and the small domestic noises of a house being looked after.
"She moved again today," Noraxia said.
The shift in subject was so natural he almost didn't catch it. "Feral?"
"Furfolk. Stayed that way for almost an hour." A pause. "She's getting more decisive."
"She's practicing."
"She's stubborn," Noraxia said. "She gets it from you."
"She gets it from her mother."
Noraxia's mouth curved. For a moment they were just quiet together across the distance — the comfortable quiet of two people who have learned that silence between them is not empty.
Then she said: "I've been thinking about names."
He looked at her.
"Tassa," she said.
He turned the word over. Felt the weight of it. It was short enough to travel across both forms without losing itself, and it had a quality he couldn't fully articulate — something that felt like arrival, like a thing that had been true before it was spoken.
"Tassa," he said.
Noraxia watched him say it. Something in her expression settled.
"Yes," he said. "That's her."
They talked for another hour — about Chenar, about the priory's impossible warmth, about Raskon's conversation with Esthen about orbital mechanics, about a small thing Kyren had done with the communications terminal that made Noraxia laugh. When the call ended, Jukrit sat for a while in the quiet room with the blue-veined walls, the priory warm around him, thinking about his daughter's name.
Tassa.
Eight weeks, perhaps less.

~ VIII ~
They left Bluestone Priory the following morning. Reshal walked them to the cliff path, unhurried as always, and at the top he paused and put one hand briefly against the stone of the outer wall. Two young fox cubs who had apparently decided to escort the departure stopped a few paces behind him, watching with the frank curiosity of the very young.
The gesture was so natural Jukrit almost didn't notice it. Then he did.
"Does it know we're leaving?" he asked.
Reshal considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "It knows something has changed," he said. "Whether that constitutes knowing you're leaving, I couldn't say." He lowered his hand. "Come back, when you can. It will remember the shape of you."
Jukrit looked at the priory one more time. The blue veins in the stone caught the morning light and held it in that particular way — not glowing, not reflecting, something between.
"I will," he said. And meant it.
The journey back was faster than the journey out, the way return journeys always were. Esthen saw them to the port and shook hands with a formality that was slightly undercut by his evident reluctance to stop talking to Raskon, who bore this with the patience of someone who had found, late in life, that being someone younger people wanted to learn from was unexpectedly agreeable.
On the ferry, Jukrit stood on deck while Raskon read below and Chenar dozed in his coat collar, and watched the Kigorith cliffs diminish behind them. Somewhere in those cliffs, deep in the ambientite, something old had shifted in its pattern. The crystalids were still listening. He had written his report as carefully as he could, knowing it documented a question more than an answer, knowing that was sometimes the most honest thing a healer could do.
He thought about Tassa.
He thought about what kind of world she was going to grow up in — a world with ambientite in its bones and questions in its deep places and an impossible household full of creatures who had all found their way there by routes no one could have planned. He thought about the priory, which had not been built but had become, over three thousand years, exactly what was needed.
He thought that was not a bad thing to grow up in the shadow of.
The mainland coast came into view. Behind him, he heard Raskon's footsteps on the deck — the Iskret coming to stand beside him without invitation and without awkwardness, which was how Raskon did most things these days.
They watched the shore come closer and did not feel the need to say anything about it.
Riverside Market was three hours from the port. By evening, Jukrit was home.

— End of Episode —

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