How to tell what cannot be described?

How to bring into words that vision and all mortal senses falter to contain?

How to shape in crude metaphor even an approximation of the shape of an experience which the very brain quails to render?

Quarti held her hand out to run along the shimmering surface of the bubble. Which would not let unprotected terran flesh to pass into cruel vacuum though it allowed Pylo and the strange new passengers as readily as the skin of water.

She looked back to her audience of two humans and two foreign and unsouled beings.

Then she wore a face as she would have worn at that time deep in her memory. The face of a child who has stumbled out of the warm comfort of home for the first time and into a cold dark night.

Night...

Another thing that no other living human seemed to remember. Despite how much she tried to convey it.

“Hold and imagine the feeling, of reaching out to touch the feathers of this ship we find ourselves within. Imagine that your fingers could stretch for the yards and then kilometers they would need to begin to realize the greater shape of our conveyance”

She gave a heavy sigh, a gasp of wonder, the slight flit in resonance of much the same to reach out and run light touches along the sympathetic connections of her human audience. For the aliens Quarti reached to the translator and spoke richer and deeper sub-meanings. Prevocal analogues of body language and tone.

It was different to tell tales to the inhuman. To speak to the unsouled. There were fewer cheats, and little common ground.

But Quarti would endeavor to continue in this strange and new medium with listeners unlike any she had ever told tale to before.

“Think also of looking upon a great cliff, straight ahead it is close and you perceive little of it, now sweep your gaze to left and right, above and below. Realizing the hugeness of it stretching past your sight in every direction. Taste that vast apprehension inside at the scale of it. The rushing knowing of it’s scale? The unease in your belly as the mountain begins to turn and move. As the foundations you thought were solid anchors for you become like the hair upon the brow of this behemoth as it TURNS”

She draws them close, she lowered her voice a little at a time, calling attention to her. Now she can whisper and they will feel the closeness and pay heed to her tone. She struggled with the apparatus and protocols she understood from the translation box. It was foreign and strange, but over the ages language had always become foreign and strange to her.

“It was like Obbie a little bit, in the faintest textures. A comforting slice of familiarity for me. But so much vaster, roiling and folded over and twisted in ever larger and LARGER shapes of it. The spirit sight I had bought for a price unknowable faltered in apprehending it. And it moved!”

She used the space she had dug with her softer tones to cut with volume and emphasis. Striking on the mood of dream like awe with sharp notes of fear.

“And lo did the behemoth before us speak.”

Quarti had been struggling to convey the speech that had taken place, burned into her soul with harsh memory. It had not be words, Like with Obbie it had hardly been speech. But a deep arrangement of knowing that crashed over them. Gravitas and terror of a flooding river threatening to wash her and their fragile caravan away.

How to tell the exchange of moments correctly? How could she make it both legible and true when literally no words would suffice? Well sounding stuffy and old timey would have to suffice because she was out of time to come up with something better.

“Ho, children of surface flesh and spritely mote of my kind. You traverse where you ill are suited to places far twisted from your proper shapes. To what do you strive so perilously here in my demesne?”

It had not been like this really at all of course, the sweeping waves of expression had as they pulled back drawn the answers from her soul by force. Dragged and stripped her soul of the meaning of their visit. But this was not a story about the deeply wounding violation of that had taken her life times to recover from. She would save that tale until Aleph was older.

“We travel here in search of secrets, all the flesh of ours and our people are lost and gone. We are dwindling souls only and seek knowledge and skill to survive.”

She lowered herself as if kneeling, peering up to her audience as the supplicant soul. Pure theater and yet also true to the meaning of the story. A fiction and a lie that would land closer to the reality then the facts.

“And if perchance it is possible we seek means to wrought our will in the physical world and kindle our flesh anew. To ensure our peoples are born again and our lineage is restored”

Yes that was a heroic note, a good contrast to the god like beast thing the size of mountain ranges. It would suit the cadence better Instead of the wailing horror and psychosomatic whimpering panic attack that had rendered her insensate and forced Obbie to take the reigns for the exchange for a while.

She had held off on making Obbie too vital a character or an influence in the story. Even though the spirit truly had been one of the pillars of her second life. It was easier to allow the audience to forgive the creature that was never doing anything but its nature if they did not have to dwell on all the horrors and cold calculous it had enacted. The sting of the betrayal was not as harsh if there were fewer of those seemingly tender moments when Obbie was like a third parent to her growing up.

It was not fair to ask an audience to face and then forgive what it had taken Quarti decades to reconcile in the span of a few moments.

“So did the great spirit beast, of the kin of Obbie, a merchant all the same kind and yet vast and huge and old beyond all reckoning. A great tree to the spring flower of Obbie speak unto us of what secrets and knowledge and spirit flesh it had available and what the price would be”

She had mused on this moment when she started the story, but given the condensed nature of her narrative she had chosen this path. It had been a much longer and more harrowing back and forth, every skill and even the hints of the skill had bled them of more and more of Obbie’s fat stores of prayer and meaning.

But that particular battle of wits was less important to what she needed to come to next. To the revelations that she was bringing her charges too. And with it the absolutely vital lessons they needed to survive the trials of the Reef far away from the gentle garden of Terra’s shelter.

“In the end the price was harrowing and left us thinner and less then we were, bereft and near starving. But we that survived that far were obtained something incredible. Even Obbie was wracked with the wonder of this”

She shivered both in memory of the moment and for theatrical effect. Revling with her eyes closed and her hair back.

“I have described before that Obbie procured for me the eyes of a spirit so that I might look. But the great trade beast nestled in the depths of Terra gave us that and more, for it showed us how to see”

Quarti took a heavy breath and held it, giving the moment time to settle before she continued into her flowery, enthralling and beautiful fiction. A lie to tell reality when the facts would fail.