Midnight’s Fables

Mer’s First Moult

You take a sharp, sudden breath as your mind returns to the so-called-reality of Midnight’s terrible dominion. You fall back, landing on your backside on the cold hard floor, the sounds of your breath echoing back at you from every direction, as though the endless halls themselves are mocking you, panting back with insidious lungs.

“You… did not like it?” Midnight says with a cocked head. It seems almost happy to be breaking you. Almost glad to see you struggle after hearing one of its stories.

“They’re… getting too real,” you say breathlessly. When Midnight speaks, when it tells you a story, it’s like you’re living it, like you’re dreaming and watching it all unfold and… your every sense is telling you that you are still in the dark basement of that abandoned cult building, that you are being chased by the slimy newborn twin of a person you never knew until now…

“Give me something… calmer. No monsters. No dread, no slime, no gore. It can be sad, I don’t care, as long as it’s… clean,” you beg.

You still feel like there’s something grotesque and wet and visceral crawling in the dark towards you. Even though the grand halls are well-lit, you still feel in the hairs on the back of your neck that something is slithering towards you in the dark. Something wet and sticky and...

You shake your head and struggle to your feet, shivers still running down your spine, your neck stiff, desperately wanting to turn and look over your shoulder, but terrified of what you may see if you do.

Midnight muses on that for a moment, humming gently, shifting patterns – black on black, shadows on shadows – writhing blindly in its empty form, before it finally nods. “Yes, I think I know. Come.”

Once more – for the umpteenth time now – you follow as your sinister host leads you through the depths of its eldritch home.

The next display contains a glass mannequin, wearing brightly coloured robes covered in powder paint and confetti. Its colours are garish and bright, clearly something worn for a bright and brash party.

“These are the ceremonial robes of Allo-Mer’fer’akhu, worn in preparation of their Ba-Amo’t’zah,” Midnight tells you. “What ought to have been a bright and joyous party, that became the most humiliating moment of their young, little life…”

***

The first moult of a Lang’lotlmer is the mark of a child’s first step into adulthood, and the day they will discover which of the ten sexes they will be assigned. It isn’t until the second moult, when the journey to adulthood is complete, that a Lang’lotlmer becomes fertile, but that first moult is when they finally learn, after thirty years of childhood, what their future is to hold.

The ten different sexes – three of which are required for successful reproduction – is a fascinating and intricate topic of study all its own, with a richly complicated system of genetics and anatomies, but these things are of little importance in the day-to-day life of a Lang’loltmer. To them, the significance of these things is less scientific and more personal, cultural, and ritualistic.

The ceremony for a child’s first moult, known as a Ba-Amo’t’zah is an intricate and widely-celebrated affair, with a week-long party beginning as the first signs of development begin, and concluding with a ritual celebration as they announce their place in society to the world.

For many young Long’loltmer it is an exciting but anxious time. For Allo-Mer’fer’akhu it was nothing short of terrifying.

Mer’ was the child of a Jeshin, a Shashav, and a Kalan, who had taught them moderation, creativity, and the practicalities of building things. This was the day they would finally discover what caste, what trade, they had been born to do. Already, their four older siblings had had their Ba-Amo’t’zahir, and two of them had reached the subsequent Ba’Ahro’ma’zahir of the second moult into full adulthood. Mer’ was the only one left in childhood.

Looking ahead, though, they felt nothing but terror. No role of any of the ten castes appealed to them. They’d been told so many times that such was the way of childhood, that nobody knew what they wanted to become until they found out, and then they would realise that they could never have wanted to be anything else. But for Mer’, it wasn’t like that at all. They didn’t just not know what they wanted to become, they explicitly did not wish to become... anything.

Mer’ didn’t want to change. To them, it was an existential terror, the thought of their body becoming something other than what they had known and lived as for thirty years, the changes of puberty, the hormones, the struggle, the growth, the change, and the jobs they would be assigned...

“Your hour is nearing, child,” Allo-Lhak’tam’ghath, their Jeshin parent, said with a voice full of comfort and wisdom. Lhak was tall for a moderator, with a typically spindly form and flat, undersized vestigial wings with swirling red and blue patterns in jer feathers. Jer beak was round and short, jer lips protruding just beneath it, and je had the same dazzling white eyes as jer youngest child. Mer’ hugged their parent and nodded, taking a deep breath. They had no wings of their own yet – vestigial or otherwise – and no feathers. Their beak had not yet calcified into bone, remaining soft, sensitive, and squishy, and though their eyes came from their Jeshin parent, their skin was dark blue like their Shashav, and they had the dark purple carapace of their Kalan parent.

“I know, Jeshin,” Mer’ said quietly, their skin wrinkling and folding as it loosened, their carapace barely still attached as their body prepared to, for the first time in its life, moult. The next stage of their life was already there, their next body already developed under the skin. Soon that outermost layer would fully shed and Mer’ would learn the truth about their destiny. Would learn their sex, their caste, and their purpose in life...

“But I’m scared,” they added with a tentative breath that caught in their little throat. “I’m not ready.”

Lhak’ smiled softly, nodding as je crouched down before jer child, meeting their eye, “I felt the same, so very long ago, when I was your age. I remember standing in a tent like this one at my Ba-Amo’t’zah with my parents and telling them... I wasn’t ready. I was scared. I didn’t know what I wanted to be and nothing that I might become was right for me. That I just... wasn’t any of those things. Not yet. It’s normal to feel that way, though nothing they could have said would have made me believe it. Whatever happens, you’re not alone. You’ve got us, you’ve got your siblings, you’ve got the whole community here for you, to love you and support you no matter what. You’re not doing this alone. And remember... everyone out there who loves you... every single one of them either has already been through this, or one day will.”

Mer’ nodded slowly.

They didn’t believe it. Not one word. Of course they didn’t! But they trusted their Jeshin. And even if what je said made no sense to Mer’... they trusted jer. Completely.

They could feel it, the skin moving off their body, fibrous membranes detaching, falling away. Their entire body remade beneath the surface, new organs, a new body... ready to grow, to carry them forwards into the future.

“You ready?” Lhak’ asked softly.

Mer’ shook their head. “Nope.”

Je laughed at that and smiled again, “no, of course you’re not ready. Shall we go out there anyway?”

They took a long, deep breath, the air whistling between their beak and teeth, and nodded.

Lhak’ had to help jer child out of the tent, and their peeling skin began to make it difficult for them to walk without tripping, but with a little teamwork they made it out into the crowded gathering area.

It was a beautiful valley that the clan lived in, with rolling purple meadows and orange orchards under the shimmering kaleidoscopic sky. Everyone had gathered, almost two hundred people, to share in the celebrations. Their headdresses and painted faces and multicoloured robes were myriad and beautiful, creating a mesmerizing sea of colour that danced and sang and cheered, reaching a crescendo as Mer’ stepped out onto the stage before them all, before falling silent as the child’s moment finally came.

Their robes carefully worn so as not to catch as their skin was shed, Mer’ stood, nervous but supported, parents and older siblings gathered excitedly on the edge of the stage as the final moments of shedding completed, their skin peeling away, revealing the new flesh underneath, and the body Mer’ would wear throughout their adolescence...

And...

They were the same. They boasted no wings still, no feathers. Their beak had not calcified under the keratin sheath it had just shed, their carapace remained soft and unadorned; no spikes, no patterns, no flairs or curls. They had no horn stubs, no new talons, no tail.

Not only were there no markers of a single caste, there were no markers even of adolescence.

They had shed into... a child.

The crowd remained silent, uncertain what to do or say.

Mer’ looked down at their new body and in the same moment was relieved that their body was still their own, and was horrified by the ramifications of having moulted into... an infant.

Their gaze turned at once to their parents, panic and confusion in their eyes as they waited for answers. But their parents had none to give.

This should have been Mer’s great celebration. Their first step from childhood to adolescence, their moment of triumph as they learned their caste and their place in the world.

Their place... was no place. Still a child. Still an infant.

No caste.

No sex.

No identity.

Mer’ was frozen to the spot. Terrified. Confused. A thousand questions racing through their mind, with not a single answer in sight.

This had never happened before. They had never heard of anybody in the tribe having such a failure.

Finally, their feet caught up with them and as the silence became deafening, they turned and fled. Past the tent. Past the edge of the orchards. Out into the valley, their mind failing to process anything, looping on its own panic again and again and again as they ran, unable to stop, unable to think, unable to stop begging the world for answers it could not give.

Who were they? What were they?

Why did they have to be the different one?

They had wished so long not to change, and now it had happened and... they’d have taken any caste over this. Any sex. Any chance to be normal over the humiliation of that display. All the clan would know them as a freak. A failure. A nothing. A child that was incapable of growing up.

Mer’ ran all the way to the river and finally their feet stopped as they fell down in the water and wept bitter tears, crying and heaving alone and afraid and ashamed.

***

Three centuries later, The Nomad looked down wistfully upon the village in the valley below.

A Ba-Amo’t’zah was going on. A week of partying to celebrate the growth of a child into an adolescent. A happy affair, truly.

They knew not the name of the child, but they had been watching the village long enough to know they were the grandchild of The Nomad’s eldest sibling. The child went up on the stage and as their childhood skin sloughed from their body and peeled away under their loose robes, the clan celebrated the beginning of a new Isari, a speaker who one day would surely make a great spiritual leader amongst the people. The party continued, the celebrations were rampant, and there was joy and mirth to be had by all.

And despite their isolation, despite their jealousy, The Nomad could not help but smile.

No other child had shared their fate in the three hundred years since their own Ba-Amo’t’zah had gone so wrong. No other child had moulted into a child, had been so humiliated, so mortified, as The Nomad had been.

Though they had moulted half-a-dozen times now, at last wearing their final elderly form, The Nomad still appeared to have the body of a child, though their skin now sagged with wrinkles, their beak was brittle and chipped, and their bones were weak and sore.

The Nomad was, despite their loneliness, glad to be unique. No child deserved the shame they had felt.

In all this time, they had decided it was not the fact they had moulted into a child, the fact that their anatomy was different, that upset them so. They were quite content with themself and their body as it was.

It was the fact that their clan had no space for them that brought them sadness. The fact that nobody had sought to bring them home. They had heard the conversations that rose up from the campfires at night. They knew how their once-family had remembered them. A cautionary tale. A cursed individual who had been rightfully abandoned to the wilderness. A freak who had hopefully died long ago. Better that fate than to live with their shame.

The Nomad had wept once at those tales. Now they just smiled. How backwards the clan had it. If only they knew.

Mer’ felt no shame at being different. They just wished everyone else wasn’t so ashamed on their behalf.

***

“How was that?” Midnight asks as you blink away the colours of this tale. Those bright and beautiful robes, the kaleidoscopic alien sky… it felt so real, so tangible, yet you know it was nothing but words.

“That was… surprisingly wholesome, as far as one of your tales goes,” you say carefully, feeling a little less overwhelmed than you did before the story began.

“It is not one of my favourites. It is a tragedy, but… in the end, Mer’ did not resent their people, or their life. They were content. I would have preferred to have ended the story before that point, to have stopped when they ran away,” Midnight sneers. “I think however you would not have liked that ending. And it is what you asked for.”

You’re surprised at that. Midnight normally would never consider indulging your desire for a happy – or even contented – ending. Everything else is tragedy and horror and blood and death and fear. “I… thank you…?”

Midnight seems uncertain what to do with your gratitude, so it simply nods. “I did not like ending that story there. I want to tell you a better one now.”

You sigh reluctantly.

You know it’ll be horrible or scary or heartbreaking or all the above.

But there’s no getting out of this place. Each story you hear tells you more about who and what Midnight is. The only way you’ll ever learn of an exit… is by listening.

“Fine,” you sigh. “Lead the way.