Phoebe was the first to move her massive frame, albeit slowly at first. She lifted one arm up gradually to shoulder height, straightened her back, and pushed out her chest. Almost like an opera singer. Almost like this really was their equivalent of music. The sound grew louder and louder, as if to hold the entire Pacific and all of California in its span. As both behemoths raised their voices, their respective sound waves intermingled, weaving into one another to form new and bolder sounds. They sang at once in harmony, then in discord, then in harmony once more.
Even from this distance, I could tell what was happening here. This was their way of exchanging information, of sharing the enormous amount of mental data stored within each of their brains, a two-way form of highly advanced communication capable of transmitting more information in a single note than I could ever know. It was baffling to me that it sounded so beautiful to my ears, yet it was a sound I could never produce nor have the capability to comprehend. This was a language only apprehendable by higher beings such as them.
And it was then, as their voices reached toward the heavens, that Phoebe began to move once more. Without interrupting her song, she raised her right arm up and laid the massive kilometer-long oar flat across her chest. As she gripped the fan-like paddle end in her upturned left palm, out came another visible surge of pixies. She then slid her hand back and forth horizontally along the paddle as if to make a crease in a folded sheet of paper, and I watched through the swarm of pixie light as the paddle end was reshaped into something else entirely. Something far narrower, thinner, and longer than an oar. Almost like the bladed end of a polearm—a spear, or a naginata. And upon further inspection, I noticed this new part of the oar was a different color as well, a far darker shade of gray than that of standard photopolymer, and much more lustrous too. I assumed this meant it was both structured differently and made from a different type of resin, then—but before I had a chance to think on it any further, Phoebe held her new creation aloft and then swung it down with reckless abandon.
For a moment, I didn’t even register what had happened. The swinging motion had happened so fast, I was in a bit of a daze. Needless to say, it was a far cry from the slow and methodical pace at which she’d come out from her shell and paddled across the bay. This was the kind of speed that I genuinely could not believe one of her size was capable of, hence my being slow to process what exactly had just transpired.
I brought my gaze down toward the ocean where a massive object had just fallen into the sea with the force and speed expected of something of its weight. A massive splash of water shot up, and the waters shook our boat violently as they were displaced to make room for this gargantuan mass: Coeus’s severed right arm.
“Wait, what? No…” I breathed in utter disbelief. My mind still refused to acknowledge what it was seeing, but there could be no doubt as to what my eyes now saw. Coeus’s entire forearm had indeed been cut off from the elbow on down, and colored fluids gushed like waterfalls from the gaping wound.
Coeus let out a howl that shook the earth. His song was now extinguished, but Phoebe sang on and lifted her newly crafted tool back into the ready position. And then my awestruck brain finally understood the obvious: it was not just shaped like a polearm—it was a polearm.
“But… But why?” I murmured under my breath as Coeus continued screaming in pain. Blood continued to spill out in a torrent from where his arm had been amputated. Why had this happened? How could Phoebe do such a thing? But once again, my thought processes were thrown for a loop before I even had a chance to blink. Coeus reached over and grabbed the stump of his severed arm, squeezing it tight with his left hand, from which light then began to pour out. An unfathomable number of pixies shrouded his open wound in a frenetic swarm, slowly taking shape as his hand dispensed the raw material they needed. All throughout, Coeus continued growling in pain—yet in all of about ten seconds, it was complete. Coeus’s arm had been fully regenerated.
“Guessing that’s the new stuff?” Narain muttered. I thought back on our journey. The new, more advanced photopolymer that Phoebe had sent us via tanker. The mixed hodgepodge of gray paint from which any color could be drawn. Had Coeus truly done what it seemed he’d done?
“Did he just…create an entirely new limb?” I said, unable to believe the words that were passing through my lips. Perhaps in theory this was possible, with access to all of the correct raw materials and an atomic-level of precision from the pixies. But was it actually feasible? I had no earthly idea, but Coeus’s new arm insisted it was, as he clenched its fully functional hand into a fist. Once again, I could see light leaking through the gaps in his fingers, giving birth to yet another new creation. As it stretched outward and hardened into a lithe crescent shape, it began to look almost like a cross between a sickle and a sword. But one thing was for certain: this was a weapon, and his answer to Phoebe’s polearm. A tool with which to do harm to his opponent.
“Coeus!” I cried. But my voice was too small, and could never reach him.
Coeus let out a roar and with a lunge swung his curved blade at Phoebe, who quickly raised her own weapon in response. Yet she neither swung it nor attempted to block the attack, and simply let Coeus’s blade hit its mark. The bride’s gloved hand was no more; severed at the wrist, it drew an arc across the sky as it fell like a meteor into the ocean.
Phoebe wailed in ear-piercing agony as the blood came spurting forth. The enormous amount of blood being poured down into the ocean cast a great red arc into the water. Yet once again, her amputated wrist was quickly enveloped in a haze of light, and her hand was meticulously regenerated as though nothing had even occurred. Then, facing each other with their respective weapons in hand, Coeus and Phoebe began singing once more. And again, their song was remarkably beautiful, especially for something so clearly alien to this world.
“I don’t understand…” I said, feeling as though I must be having some sort of fever dream. “What are they doing? What are they trying to do? I just don’t get it…”
“Guessing it’s all a part of their dialogue,” Narain posited.
I knitted my brows. Dialogue? It sounded ludicrous to me.
“I mean, think about it,” he went on. “Exchanging information is all about sending and receiving stimuli. You see a bright light with your eyes, or hear a sentence with your ears, and those stimuli get sent to your brain through your nervous system for interpretation, right? Hell, we can even perceive the chemical makeup of something through our sense of smell, and intuitively know whether it’s toxic or not.”
Finally, I caught a glimpse of what he was getting at.
“You don’t think…they’re communicating via pain receptors, are they?”
“If you want to convey an emotion that feels like you’re being stabbed through the heart, what faster way to do so than by stabbing the other person through the heart?” Narain said, as though this wasn’t an utterly ridiculous equivalence. “You feel suffocated by something and want someone else to understand what it’s like, you might as well choke them out, right? Even humans resort to violence and abuse when they don’t feel like they can get the message across any other way.”