Aleph tried to follow what was going on, She really did.

There were the broad strokes that she was able to keep track of. But this whole thing was turning out much as it always did when she tried to get a straight answer on what the after life and dying was like. Everyone who had experienced it did that nodding understanding, or they just started talking in metaphors and prefacing everything with “It is like this and yet nothing at all like this”.

It was the same routine, she appreciated the history lesson though. What she could discern from it all. It connected with some of the myths and stories she had listened to during her research of the outsiders and extraterrestrial beings. Stories that Aleph suspected she was possibly listening to one of the original authors there of.

It was a bit of a heady feeling honestly to consider. To really think on it. This manic and filthy mouthed, most of the time near gibbering mad woman was also one of the eldest terran souls!

Actually considering what she was describing about staying ‘dead’ for so long and all the things she had witnessed it made sense she might be a bit off. Aleph kind of suspected if she tried to describe Redweed or Pylo to anyone back home she would come off as a bit off kilter as well.

“All I have said we saw and heard were like smoke, figments, disconnected delusions and memory dreams ephemeral. But with Insight finally we could grasp what was and what was not. Until that point we were dead and removed from the world of the living, it makes the afterlife seem separate and wholly apart. It’s vagaries of space and dimension and association a place that extends out into far distance and only vaguely akin to any form of life in flesh”

Aleph nodded along, more bombastic random hyperbole and abstract poetry. She had grown up on second and third lifers speaking senselessly about this for as long as she could remember. She only half listened at this point because there would be another salient event. Something concrete to tell her what had once been.

“But with Enlightenment the connections become obvious, the implied patterns clear. And with this new sense of things to rally and organize the others we could finally make sense in a physical world of the flesh way of our reality.”

Omega jolted a little bit at that and leaned forward.

“You could orient to physical space?! Can you STILL do that?”

Aleph jolted a little in surprise at the outburst and tried to track what was surprising. Something something something... reality making sense so-

“Wait you mean you are going to stop using triple layered metaphors to explain this now?! You can even do THAT?!”

Quarti made a bit of a face at all of them and stuck out her tongue.

“Of course, gribbling jabber-wock-nibblers! Why think I be such tah yordli all this wordsome wisdom intah ya ears like a grabbahgabbawong? Sit tightstitch-headed now snubsluts so I can learn ya propah laik!”

The tonal shift, quality of dialect, clarity of word choice and grating accent all crashed across Aleph’s ears so hard she felt like she was smacked upside the head.

“Now as I was say-such wot before stupid sasslers... The World was clear for the first time from that side of death. Before we were adrift and unmoored somewhere in a wilderness, lost amidst the turns and uncertain of how we had gotten where we were. But after We could see, we had barely traveled the length of our home valley in depth into Terra’s skin”

Aleph rubbed at her brow. Somehow knowing Quarti COULD be eloquent if she wanted made this all so much worse.

“Insight made the chaos and strangeness and associations of spirit and the death lands anchor and moor to the living world. And also by a slight tilt it let us view things from other more sparse and heady abstractions of association with equal clarity. And in this way I can finally say to what we had been dealing and in what manner we were dealing.”

Aleph held her tongue from simply shouting ‘get on with it you kook!’. She was pretty sure Quarti was holding off on the final reveal and explanation with any sense on purpose at this point though. However in contrast to that Quarti spread out her hands and then let loose a sympathetic resonance glow. Drawing lines of blue light along the air to illustrate as she spoke.

“The spirit to which we felt was was so vast and old and unknowable, and yet was flat and squat and thin headed? The warmth of one turn and the cold of another? Terra and solid and the meat and bones of physical living things was the warmth. And deeper still, in the stone skin that was seemingly dead and cold to living flesh there was a life a roiling and on those lives and the lives of Terra herself and the grasses and trees and the beasts minute and vast were we the dead and all the spirit riding.”

Quarti drew more lines, sweeping arcs and rivulets, gestures and whorls. And then she drew them in together into tight little knots until Aleph began to recognize it as something like a diagram of a cell. A living cell. And then with a crushing gesture the cell shrunk to a mote of light and then a tapestry of veins and tissue sparkled into being. Sweat pooling along the storyteller's skin as she twisted and contorted her resonance light with the air.

“To live is to tell a tale, to breath is to shuffle the tally and move the count. From the minutest and seemingly invisible eldest of life, which I at last then saw sits in the crystal chains of dead stones singing away. To the flesh and blood of Terra herself we did finally know the churn. To live is to tell a tale, and spirit and soul live amongst the words of those tales. Breathing the beat of songs and taking a few stuttering syllables as their own to tell their own tale.”

That, almost made sense to Aleph, it touched on something she could construe as sense. It lined up with the arcane and ever distorted literature on the topic of death and souls. But at the same time it did not quite touch on things precisely enough for her. Leaving Aleph frustrated and lost on the edge of the answer finally making sense.

It made Pylo finally speaking after remaining more or less entirely silent through the whole story rattle her a bit more than usual, the words like a shocking touch close to her ear and more.

“ Why tease your fresh young waifs with this tale of tremulous seeds? ”

Quarti laughed and then met each of their gazes, although with Pylo it was more meeting a grin to a frown.

“Spirit and deeper, stranger, wonderous and vast creatures dwell in all matter, they are thick as weeds where life churns hot and sweet and full. They are vast and slow and cold with distance from the close frenetics of solidity. Layering over and over and over each other, living on the life of each and with each layer twisting out and out into strange unspaces. Stealing a few words or even pauses of the tales of those that make their foundations to weave ever more rarified and whispered lives”

She gestured one last time, flicking a dollop of sweat from her brow as the light flared one last time to sketch what at first Aleph did not recognize as anything but abstraction, until she recognized the positioning of a few astronomical objects as foci for wide sweeping bands and patterns of light.

Then she could not help herself in the realization.

“That’s Terra! But what is all the rest? Those aren't magnetic lines, it’s MUCH too big”

Over the course of the display Aleph realized that Quarti had been expanding out a sketched view, wringing the air into blue phosphorescence until there was a map of Terra’s own star and home system. The thought of sustaining so complex a manual working of the symbiotes made her back and headache in sympathy. And if the sweat was any sign it was exhausting the narrator to maintain the resonance required.

Quarti laughed and spoke softly.

“Those are the lines of the spirit of Terra, and the lesser and greater beasts of the dead lands and the great empty cold things beyond and within them. It is a whispery threading of the matter which they stood upon, living and unliving. It is comfort and safe and has nurtured me and your mothers and even fathers for all my memory and most like well before any of us”

Aleph ran the story forward and back in her head before she felt it starting to click together.

“It’s like a crystal program. The afterlife... It’s”

Quarti shushed her and tried to continue. But this was too much Aleph had to expound, expand, exasperatedly burst with the idea she had realized.

“It’s computation! Tales using parts to tell others?! Quarti! OMEGA?! Why did none of you tell us! Why does no one EXPLAIN IT PROPERLY! It’s a um... It’s an Infosphere! The afterlife and the souls are a resonance INFOSPHERE?! Like they had at Redweed? It’s just lik-mf!”

Quarti was RIGHT there with her hand covering Aleph’s mouth with a bright light and a too pointy grin.

“Right you are dear, right you are it’s much like it, and yet that thing you wos seeing and poking and prodding, and all the little crystal likes you tweak and twine are civil things, made things. Grown out of matter and for matter and the use of living flesh types. They are not wild wilderness spirit things, They are not shaped and made and formed from the OTHER end!”

She shoved off of Aleph back to her spot across the way. And she was gesturing again, a new shape emerged, but where the Terra system and its star were sparse spidery webs and loops with a only a few focuses. This was more like a raging inferno made of incandescent scrawls and brambles. Great big whorls and twists.

An inferno and a pyre of blue light that was so bright it made Aleph’s eyes hurt and spine ache in sympathy of just how many calories Quarti must be burning to simply illustrate a story.

“And now we come full circle to the reason for all of this tale and the secret and spartan bits shush all of my insistence in the place of Redweed. This you behold is the spirit and outer-beasts of Redweed. Of which they were vast and terrible to know. And as with all of spirit like life they would know you if you knew of them. For none of you young uns are anything but worm-sighted in spirit, or anything but deaf in spirit, and you are unenlightened and uninsighted! You wos skimming surface of a pond all through Redweed whilst great deep beasts passed yon by buried in the matter and even your own thoughts and meats whilst we dwelt there. Beasts so big upon themselves they make all of Terra an unreckonable gnat! And all it would take is you to knows of dem to badly have yons soul prod the big oafs in the nose and BRING THEM DOWN UPON YA!”

The resonance light sputtered out at the last words. And heaved a heavy sigh and went limp in the air breathing heavily. Droplets of sweat hovering in a misty cloud around her. A slick shine of exhaustion to her skin.

Aleph could only blink before looking back to Omega.

“Wait... so wait... What did all that mean?”