Quarti sighed under the strain.

She had thought when she set herself on this course she was ready. That millenia being eldest in the flow of story and the weft of all of her humankind was enough.

That she was tired and worn and jaded to all that Terra once Gaia could give. That she was muted, polished and left unchangeable and unfatiguable.

A perfect gemstone to be flung loose and shepherd the people of Terra.

Quarti thought she knew what it would entail to go out and restart civilization again. That she could ride the cultural wefts of the alien as she had the spirit, and the even more endlessly mutable and forever branching reality that was the great choir of all terran humanity.

That notion had long since been shaken loose.

And the first crack was not even what she thought it would be.

It had not even seemed like it at the time.

The quiet had gotten to her.

It had itched, nagged, burned. Never very much, never more than she thought she could handle.

She had managed it like the pain of a lost troupe among spirits. The loss of a story that no one ever told again, that no one even remembered but her.

Terra was full of those, the endless churning story telling, and enacting and performing and sharing and witnessing and engaging with every other soul eventually spurred on endless tales, literally as well as figuratively.

And such endless meandering stories and treatises and ever exploding variety were as often cut short abruptly as they were borne.

In spirit even a terran soul could experience a story beyond all limits of eye and tastes beyond any tongue. There was a freedom in between time from one life to another that every newly dead brought fresh and yet adorably familiar fancies too.

The first timers were the most precious.

The second lifers always carried some of that effervescent other with them out of death.

They always returned with a roughly assured familiarity. Cliques and interests they would revisit.

Sure every life changed you, every birth unmade and rebuilt you. Eventually to the point it was custom to pick a number and say beyond that you were no longer who you were.

Some cultures had made big deals of it, three were ever popular. Seven too.

Almost no one actually thought ten was short enough and those few random clouds of souls that insisted on it were of course properly and thoroughly mocked.

Quarti knew it was all of it personal and individual. She had lived far more times than most. But the way of it was not always appreciated.

Then again NOTHING in death was appreciated by every soul. Everything had some part of the choir who hated it.

Some even insisted that to be reborn was abominable!

Quarti sighed heavily.

By her own stupid cult she missed every horrible little corner of it. Every enfolded fractal stupid bland absurdity of it. She missed the welcome and familiar eroding chaos of Death. The chaos she could hear just slightly muted after she was born until Terra grew distant a few days into the journey.

But the lack was not what hurt at first she thought.

It was not the silence that did it for her. She knew how to recover from the loss of a way of being. A story once told, a play that was never to be performed, a fad that would never again rise. She knew how to shore up your soul and wean yourself off the lost and unrememberable.

Quarti had voids the size of a dozen life times in her memory she had carefully learned to heal over.

The relief of the quiet had been amazing actually. It had made memories blossom that barely had ever shone in her mind.

Dark treasured beloved lost memory.

But then the absences grew.

She would want to hear from Omega some random thing she had brought back from the cloud of death.

She had found herself worrying over the memories of the times of death in each of the charges in their care. Stored statically in crystal lattices that kept the soul frozen and still to degradation.

And that had helped for a time.

But then there was nothing new.

Nothing but the tiny little pinprick of experience that was a single living life.

The troubles of just Aleph and Quarti and Omega and their strange alien caretaker.

It felt stifling.

But then came Redweed.

And she had to admit it had been equal parts humbling, terrifying and exhilarating. Omega had rode the fostered, shorn and filtered trinket that was provided by their local authorities.

For all the genius the shaman held, Omega was not well versed in interpretation or endowed with senses capable of what Quarti’s own soul held.

And where as her fellow terrans lived the pale echoing pre filtered shadow familiar to them and their relatively sterile and delicate approximation of the ‘living choir’.

It was nothing compared to Redweed as it was.

Glittering chaos flowing and ebbing in a way that opened up her senses and soul in a way that had not been felt since terra.

And then beyond, and then more, and where as the divide of the afterlife and the living network was rather stark and stilted. A wall of mutual incomprehension between living senses and dead ones leaving only dry and sparse communique to pass.

This palace of seeming infinity that was Redweed was integrated smoothly.

Integrated and full of behemoths.

They watched Quarti, they noticed her. She was stealthy, tricky and tiny. But they were built in chains and with systems as much of the living material way as they were the ethereal spirit.

Her living brain had hallucinated great tusks and eyes and scrolls vast as worlds all crushed together in idleness and metaphor as her attention turned away from the physical.

And though she was surrounded and they loomed with threat they were CIVIL.

But dangerous and foreign and they had scriptures and warnings wreathed over them that made what quarti needed to do obvious.

She had stilled and silenced the daft youngsters from going where they were unwanted. She doubted such enruled beings could have actually acted against them in a mortal way.

But it was a risk not worth taking.

So she had, and been left to partake of this new fresh horror-wonder every bit as corrugated and diverse as her own home of terra.

Just as much but so much more.

That had humbled and shook Quarti.

It had shaken her and showed her that despite her millenia of riding the growing depths of Human society and the random ramblings of older spirits that her little corner of seemingly infinite stories and wonders was like a speck.

The Human choir was bland, sterile, empty, practically uniform in contrast.

And it continued from there. She had been a bit drunk on that place as much as the chemical libations when they romped and fettered about.

Then back into the pit of void, the emptiness, the silence, the painful smothering blandness.

The journey was barely more than a few years.

But it was years without sitting in the very heart of a civilization of stories.

And then just as she thought she was done bracing herself.

She got shored apart by a brush with a STAR!

And while having to tend to the astral healing of Omega they ran into another vastness even greater and more inimical to human life and ways then Redweed!

Gods.

Or so their Ship Mistress described them with the nonchalance of a particularly obstructing tree.

And as they swung through the forest it came to pass this was not even the full extent of such whirling madness.

Those parts of the 'gods' it turned out had been their most distant tendrils, sent out for early warning against threats, and only the gestalt of the gods themselves bothered extending that far.

The noise in the astral of The wild spirits of the forest that gimbled when Tunie closed through wabe were something entirely different.

It was a way to be that was totally different.

And the oppressiveness of this new way was everywhere.

Terrans and the spirits of the world beneath and around them were practically one voice compared to this.

Harmonized and harmonizing. Fitted and coherent and melodious.

The forest was screaming.

Its spirits howled, they did not pause, merely shifted and either bellowed and called and screeched ever over each other or they bullied and partitioned by sheer force and mass of content.

There were harmonies, but they rallied and banded together into single coherent spearing challenges and roared against one another.

Masses larger than all of Terra and her ectosphere barreling against each other, held in check by the sheer pressure of all the others.

Every one of them was a drop in the sea of the forest itself.

And here she was.

Having to try and play peacemaker and diplomat and nanny to her fellow terrans. With a people that had lived here in this place still with a horrified enforced QUIET for as long as she had shepherded humanity Upon Terra besides.

The still of the presence in spirit around the people was the silent held breath of prey lurking beneath the maw of vast predatory beasts.

But the beast was the boughs of titanic tree they even now lurked in. The same one that protected them, like a frog beneath a tarantula.

Quarti honestly was equal parts terrified and amazed at the chance as to what could possibly live in this place and have any resemblance to the quaint practice of Omega’s Shamanism.