Long ago, Dendron graduated from King Protea’s course of lectures when the whale known as Cachalot crashed into the surface of Ntinyeti. It was a large scale catastrophe that may have been averted if not for the cloaking magic of Dendron that allowed Protea to be distracted as the large whale sailed limply through space from the spot of its embarrassing defeat at the hands of a challenger to his dominance of the bachelor pod he swam space with. Cachalot had been slapped extremely hard by the challenger’s tail after a long and exhausting battle, and he blacked out long enough to go crashing onto Ntinyeti.
It was not coincidence that Cachalot landed to crush many of the Star Flowers of Protea’s court, and many of them were lost when the whale cracked the surface of the glass, that had relented to the impact in the hopes that it would mitigate the slide or roll of the whale across the court, but the whale did have enough momentum to tumble over the court. Dendron and the Flowers rooted in her vicinity were all presumed lost. Protea used his magic to remove the body from the surface as soon as he was recovered from his shock, and his instant suspicions that someone had caused this to happen because he had been taken completely unaware. The whale hovered over the surface of the star as he came to and realized that he was in the hold of something powerful. Several Flowers had survived, but were bent and broken amongst the remains of the lost.
“Where am I?” Cachalot asked in a slow, booming voice.
“At the site of a massacre,” King Protea said in his way and even though Cachalot was only vaguely fluent in the language of the trees, he understood the angry Star Flower. “You have maimed and killed so many. I should make you experience all of the pain that you have wrought. Why have you done this?”
“I didn’t purposefully land here, I lost my head in battle and this is all an accident…” Cachalot stammered in his slow, booming cadence before Protea interrupted angrily.
“But you were invisible to me! Even traveling at speed to exceed light, I should have been able to detect your approach! But I did not! Why is that? Why have you attacked this star?”
“I didn’t attack, I fell from space. I am apologetic that my carelessness resulted in a massacre, but it was not my intention. I didn’t cloak myself, I lost my head, I told you, I couldn’t have cast the spell to cloak.”
Protea knew that he was telling the truth, and seeing that he was useless to the King, he tossed Cachalot away from Ntinyeti in the same direction he had come from, inadvertently sending the whale to collide with his rival and allowing Cachalot to regain his dominance over his bachelor pod. Protea turned his attention to his court, scanning for survivors, particularly the one among them who had used the unwitting whale in their plans. It had to be an extremely savvy observer of the pattern to so completely evade Protea’s detection as it had.
But the one responsible was now far away, stuck securely in a fold of Cachalot’s back and smiling in her way. Dendron was excited to see the Disc in ways that were impossible from the King’s court, and Cachalot traveled all around space as the head of his pod. Dendron was proud of her ability to out class her teacher, things couldn’t have worked out better. And she would only become more powerful as she observed the complexity of the pattern in every new space she encountered on Cachalot’s back.
PRL Serials 