The Still Pool, Part 1 by ShamanSquirrel < Submission | Inkbunny, the Furry Art Community

Keywords male 1292662, female 1176942, dragon 161579, lion 47274, squirrel 32988, dragoness 14065, alternate universe 2582, story progression 2225, story series 2190, tropical 819, travel 544, elderly 514, grandmother 352, cub clean 274, alternate reality 146, cliffhanger 65

The Still Pool

Part One: What the Other World Holds

A Silvania Story — SY 4529, Early Winter

~ I ~
Noraxia had suggested the trip — not as a question, not quite as a statement, but as an observation that contained its own conclusion.
"Your grandmother wrote again," she said, setting the letter on the kitchen table in front of Jukrit. "That's the third time this year. She wants to see you. She wants to meet Tassa and Lev. And it's going to be a cold winter."
"Those are three separate observations," Jukrit said.
"They combine into one obvious one," she said.
He had not been to the tropical reaches of Silvania since before Noraxia, which meant it had been over seven years since he had seen Orava and Rona, which was long enough that he felt the weight of it when he considered it directly. He had written. They had written back. But there was a category of person — the very old, the irreplaceable — with whom correspondence was not sufficient, and his grandmother and great-grandmother both belonged to it.
He wrote to Orava that they would come in early winter, before the cold fully settled over Riverside Market, and her reply arrived within two weeks. Good, it said, in her spare script. There is something we need to tell you in person. It has waited long enough.
He showed Noraxia the reply.
"What does that mean?" Lev asked, reading over his shoulder with the cheerful persistence of a nearly-six-year-old who regarded privacy as a concept that applied to other people.
"I don't know yet," Jukrit said. "We'll find out when we get there."
"Is it bad?"
"I don't think so."
"Is it interesting?"
Jukrit looked at the letter again. There is something we need to tell you in person. "Yes," he said. "Almost certainly interesting."
Lev nodded, satisfied, and went to find Tassa.

~ II ~
They traveled south by coastal ferry, which took three days. Noraxia flew alongside in feral form for the stretches where the weather allowed and rode as a passenger in anthro form for the stretches where it didn't. She found this to be a fundamentally philosophical exercise.
The cubs were a different matter. Tassa had never been on a ferry and found the whole arrangement a subject of sustained investigation, shifting between forms at irregular intervals as she worked out how each one experienced the movement of the water differently. Lev had apparently decided that knowing everything about ferry operations was both possible and urgent. He had by the end of the first day established a functional working relationship with two of the crew members who answered his questions with resigned warmth.
It was on the second morning, in the stretch of water where the coastal current turned warm and the color of the sea changed from the grey-green of the north to something deeper and more luminous, that they saw the oartails.
Lev spotted them first — half a dozen small pale shapes riding a natural raft of flotsam, a tangled mass of wood and weed and the kind of coastal debris that collected in certain currents and stayed there. The creatures on it were compact mammals, low-slung with long necks, their fur a damp silver-grey that made them hard to see against the raft's pale surface. Each one had a mostly bushy tail that was longer than its body and flattened at the end into a broad paddle, and they used these tails with continuous unhurried precision. They seemed like oarsmen who have been at their work so long it required no thought — dipping, pulling, adjusting the raft's angle against the current with coordinated ease.
"What are they?" Lev said, pressed against the railing.
"Oartails," Jukrit said. "They live on the open water. The flotsam is their territory — they build on it, defend it, raise their young on it. They only go ashore when absolutely necessary."
"How do they steer?"
"The tails. They work as a unit — six or eight to a raft, each one responsible for a section. If they want to go left, the right side rows harder. They can make a surprising amount of headway against a current when they're all pulling together."
Lev watched them until the current carried the raft out of sight, his chin on the railing, the wind in his lion-tawny fur. Then he said, without turning around: "I want to live on a raft."
"You live in a very good house," Noraxia said.
"The raft is also good," Lev said. "I could have both."

~ III ~
Orava met them at the southern port.
She was Veverka's mother, which meant Jukrit could see the lineage clearly — the same compact build, the same quality of self-possession, the same eyes that assessed a room the moment they entered it and filed everything they found. But she was older than Veverka by a full generation, and what Veverka carried as capability, Orava had converted into something slower and more certain. She moved with ease, having nothing to prove.
She looked at Jukrit for a long moment when he came down the gangplank. She read something in him that he had never been entirely sure was his present state or his distance from his past one.
"You look like your father," she said. Which was not what she usually said, and which he filed away.
Then she looked at Noraxia, who had descended the gangplank in anthro form for the port's sake. Orava looked at her thoroughly.
"I've been curious about you for seven years," Orava said.
"And I you," Noraxia said.
"You're larger than I pictured."
"Most people underestimate," Noraxia said pleasantly.
Orava's expression did something that was recognizably a smile in the family manner. Then she looked down at Tassa, who was in furfolk form and looking back with attention. And then at Lev, who was looking at the tropical port with focused acquisitiveness.
"The cubs," Orava said. She looked at Lev for a beat longer than Jukrit expected. Something moved behind her eyes. "Yes," she said, quietly, to herself.
"Grandmother," Jukrit said. "What did you mean in your letter? What has waited long enough?"
"Not here," Orava said. "Your great-grandmother will want to be present. And you'll want to see the pool first, during daylight. Come. We have time."

~ IV ~
Rona was waiting at the house, which was built in the lowland tropical style — wide, open-sided for the heat, the boundary between inside and outside more a matter of shade than structure. She was very old. Jukrit had known she was very old the last time he saw her, but seven years of addition had put her somewhere beyond the category of old into a region of age that had its own quality.
She looked at him when he came through the open wall of the house and said: "There he is."
"Here I am," he said.
"Sit down. All of you. Orava, get them something cold — they've been traveling three days." She looked at Noraxia with the same long assessment Orava had given her. "I see why," she said, apparently continuing a thought that had been in progress before they arrived.
"You see why what?" Noraxia asked.
"Why you," Rona said. "For him. Sit down."
They sat. Lev, who had been carrying a piece of tropical fruit he'd acquired in the port, ate it with focused pleasure and watched Rona with the wariness he reserved for people he couldn't immediately read.
Rona looked at him.
He looked back.
"Good bones," Rona said. "Good instincts." She shifted her gaze to Jukrit. "Is he happy here? With you?"
"I think so," Jukrit said. "Yes."
"Good," she said. "That matters more than you know yet." She looked at Orava. "Tonight, then. At the pool. He should see it while the season is right."

~ V ~
The pool was an hour's walk inland from the house, through a forest that changed character three times on the way — the open lowland palms giving way to denser canopy, then to a transitional zone where ambientite deposits showed themselves in the rock faces as concentrated blue threading that made the forest floor luminous in the afternoon light. Jukrit ran his hand along an exposed face of it as they passed and felt the warmth that was never simply geological.
"It's everywhere here," he said.
"The whole region sits on a deep formation," Orava said, walking beside him. "Related to the one under Kigorith, we believe, though the connection is deep and hasn't been mapped. Your grandmother Rona has been in correspondence with the Guild's geological survey team about it." A pause. "And with a Cygnagon researcher named Vethran."
Jukrit stopped walking.
"You know Vethran?"
"Rona does. They began corresponding before your visit to Kigorith. When she heard you had met him she was pleased, but not surprised." Orava looked at him with the family eyes. "The things that connect in your life are not accidents, Jukrit. They never have been. You are a confluence point. Our lineage produces them occasionally."
"What does that mean?"
"It means the pool will show you more than it shows most people," she said. "It means some things have been waiting for you specifically. And it means — the cubs you raise, and the cubs they become, and the decisions that create and preserve them — these things matter in ways that extend beyond what you can see from inside them."
She walked on. He followed, thinking about what she'd said and finding that it refused to resolve into something smaller than it was.
Lev, walking ahead with Tassa and Noraxia, had found something interesting on the forest floor and was crouching to investigate it. Tassa was in dragon form, her nose an inch from whatever it was. They were entirely absorbed.
Jukrit watched his cubs in the luminous forest and felt, without being able to name it, that Orava was right. That it mattered. That he was not going to fully understand why until the pool showed him.

~ VI ~
The pool was bioluminescent and perfectly still.
It sat in a natural bowl of stone deep in the ambientite formation, fed by a spring so slow it left no ripple. The water was clear to the bottom — perhaps four feet deep — and the light it produced was a blue-green that was neither the color of the sky nor the color of the ambientite veins in the rock but something between, something that existed specifically at the intersection of water and mineral and the living organisms that had made this place their habitat for longer than anyone's records ran. The trees around it did not overhang it. The clearing was open to the evening sky.
Rona had come. She moved slowly but she had insisted, and Orava had not argued.
"Look at the water," Rona said. "All of you. But Jukrit — you look longest. You'll see more."
Lev crouched at the pool's edge and looked down. His face was reflected back at him, tawny and serious, the great squirrel ears framing the lion features.
Tassa looked for approximately four seconds, shifted to furfolk, looked again, and appeared to decide that whatever was here was something she could sit with. She sat.
Noraxia lowered her head in feral form to the surface and was still.
Jukrit looked.
At first there was only the pool — the bioluminescence, his own reflection, the deep clear water over pale stone threaded with ambientite blue. Then his reflection began to do something it shouldn't. It did not move when he moved. It looked back at him, and it was him, but something was different. The ears were the same. The healer's vest was similar but not identical. The expression was different — less careful, more immediately present, the face of someone who had grown up in one place and never had to find his way back to anything.
Alternate Jukrit.
He was looking at himself from another world.

~ VII ~
The vision was not a window, exactly. It was more like a resonance — a place where the ambientite's long memory of everything that had ever existed converged with the bioluminescence of living things and produced something that was not quite a reflection and not quite a sight and was entirely unlike anything in his healer's training or his shaman's education.
He could not hear. He could see.
The alternate Jukrit was in motion somewhere — a forested landscape, similar to Pansilva's interior but not identical. He was moving through it at a speed that was wrong, a speed that no furfolk could sustain, a blur of precise movement between trees that resolved only when he stopped, which he did abruptly. He stopped and looked up and for a moment seemed to look directly at Jukrit across whatever distance separated the two realities, and his expression was surprise — and recognition — and something else, something that Jukrit could not name because it had no equivalent in a life that had grown up in a convent.
Then the alternate Jukrit turned.
And there was Noraxia.
Not his Noraxia — the same lineage, the same teal eyes, the same brown mane, but entirely feral, with no shift, no anthro configuration available to her. She was larger than his Noraxia, or seemed larger, perhaps because there was no smaller form to anchor the eye's expectation. She lay at the alternate Jukrit's feet with ease. She was watching the direction the alternate Jukrit had turned with attention — a quality of directed focus that was not sight.
Telepathy, Jukrit understood. She was speaking to him in a register no one else could access. And he was listening, and whatever she was saying, it made him straighten his shoulders and look again, harder, at the place in the air between his world and Jukrit's own.
Alternate Noraxia's eyes moved.
They found the pool.
They found Noraxia.
It was not possible, exactly, to have eye contact across realities. But what happened between the two Noraxias in that moment was something that had the structure of recognition — the specific, physical shock of encountering yourself in a form you have never been, a version of your own life organized entirely differently around the same essential core. His Noraxia, watching at the pool's edge in feral form, made a sound he had never heard from her before. Low, not distressed, the sound of something very large encountering something it had no category for.
The alternate Noraxia was very still.
Then she put her head down slowly and pressed her nose to the ground in a gesture that was unmistakably a greeting — the oldest, deepest form of Cygnagon acknowledgment, used only between those of equal standing or those who shared something fundamental.
Noraxia's head lowered in the same motion.
They held it for three seconds. Then the vision shifted.

~ VIII ~
What came next was harder to look at.
The alternate world unfurled in impressions rather than scenes — flashes of a life that was his and was not his, a cubhood with Veverka that he had not had and that the alternate Jukrit wore without knowing it was a thing to be grateful for. A shamanism that had come from his mother rather than a convent, more instinctive and less structured, less precise and more immediate. The super speed was part of this — a shaman gift that his own training would have refined differently, perhaps, but that in the alternate timeline had grown wild and direct from a different kind of instruction.
He saw the alternate Noraxia growing up alongside him. Feral always, communicating only into his mind, the two of them developing a language across the gap of species that had no words and needed none because it had never needed to be translated into words for anyone else. They had not become lovers the way he and Noraxia had become lovers — slowly, carefully, across the distance of separate lives that eventually found each other. They had become lovers the way water became part of stone: by long proximity and no alternative.
He watched this as though reading a book about a life they might have had, a book that was not sad and not wrong but simply belonged to someone else.
Then the vision showed him something that stopped him entirely.
The alternate Veverka — recognizable, his mother but a version of her who had kept him, who had raised him inside a life rather than sending him toward one — was handing the alternate Jukrit a book. He could not read the title from where he stood across the boundary of realities. But he knew the cover. He knew the dimensions of it, the weight it would have in the hand, because he and Noraxia had held the proof copy three weeks ago in their own kitchen.
“How to Please Your Dragoness.”
Not their edition. An older one — the binding different, the paper aged to the particular yellow of something nearly a century old. And inside the front cover, in script he could not read at this distance but whose style suggested the formal hand of an earlier era: a name. His great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Figbert, who had apparently written the same book ninety years before Jukrit had thought of it. This carried the implication that Figbert, like Jukrit, had been involved with a Cygnagon dragoness. This edition had been passed down through the family until alternate Veverka had placed it in her son's hands when she understood what was growing between him and the feral dragon who had been part of their household since cubhood.
The alternate Jukrit opened it. He read the first page, which in his mind reorganized a great deal of what they thought they already knew.
Jukrit stood at the edge of the still pool in the tropical dark and thought about two years of secret writing, and a manuscript left on a kitchen table by accident, and Noraxia reading it over three evenings with fourteen folded strips of paper. He thought about the chapter they couldn't agree on, and the chapter that Lev had accidentally summarized in two sentences, and the chapter eleven that neither of them was ready to write yet.
Figbert had apparently managed it ninety years ago.
He was not certain whether this was encouraging or humbling, and decided it was probably both.
Then the vision showed him what was absent.
The alternate world's version of Riverside Market. The street. The neighbors, some familiar and some different. Orava's house in the tropics, the same pool, the same luminous water.
He looked for Lev.
He looked everywhere the vision would show him. He looked in the household, in the street, at the school Tassa apparently attended in the alternate timeline, in the barn where the ghevals lived in some alternate configuration he did not take time to analyze.
Lev was not there.
Not different, not older, not yet born. Simply absent. A space where a person had not happened.
He stepped back from the pool's edge.
"Grandmother," he said. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "What does it mean when someone exists in this world but not in the other one?"
Orava and Rona looked at each other.
"Sometimes," Orava said carefully, "it means the person arrived through an exceptional circumstance. An event that should not have occurred, but did. Something that redirected a life from the path it was following."
"And sometimes?" Jukrit said.
Rona spoke. She had not spoken since the pool. "Sometimes it means they were not supposed to survive long enough for the divergence to matter. That the other world simply reflects what would have happened if the circumstances that created them had gone differently."
Jukrit looked at Lev.
Lev was crouching at the pool's edge, looking at his own reflection in the bioluminescent water with stillness. His reflection looked back at him. Just him. Only him.
No double.
No alternate Lev in the still pool's memory of what was and what might have been.
"His stepfather," Jukrit said. "Orro. Who threatened to—"
"Yes," Orava said. "We think so."
The forest was very quiet. Somewhere above them, through the open sky above the pool, the first stars of the tropical evening were appearing. Noraxia had come to stand close behind Jukrit, her breath warm on the back of his neck, her presence a steadying weight.
Lev looked up from the pool.
He looked at Jukrit.
"There's no one else," Lev said. Quietly, without drama. "In the water. Just me."
Jukrit crossed the distance between them and crouched at the pool's edge beside his son.
"Yes," he said.
"What does that mean?"
Jukrit put his arm around Lev's shoulders. Lev, who was five years old and had already traveled further and endured more than any cub should have needed to, leaned into him without resistance.
"It means," Jukrit said, "that you're here because of a very specific set of choices. Your mother's choice. Your choice to travel. The merchants' choice to help you. My choice to keep you." He held on. "It means we need to make sure you stay safe. And we will."
Lev was quiet for a moment.
"Is Orro coming?" he said.
Before Jukrit could answer, Orava's communication terminal in the pack she carried gave the particular sound of an urgent incoming message. She read it, and her expression told him everything before she said anything.
"There is a large lion furfolk," she said, "asking about you at the southern port. He arrived this afternoon. He is telling people he is looking for a cub."
The still pool reflected the evening sky above it, luminous and patient, holding everything it had always held.
Lev's hand found Jukrit's arm and held on.

— End of Part One —
To be continued in Part Two: What This World Keeps

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