Fennel

Backstory

Fennel is what happens when an Aetheric Current becomes aware of itself — a being of condensed sky-mist and ambient enchantment that coalesced, quite accidentally, in the upper chambers of the Luminary Pylon Seven about sixty-three years ago. They look, at first glance, like a small drifting cloud the size of a large cat: pale silver-white, softly luminous, and faintly iridescent at the edges where their form thins into vapor. They have no fixed face, but those who spend time with Fennel learn to read the subtle shifts in their density and the warm or cold pulses of light within them the way one reads expression. They move by drifting, occasionally passing through walls if they lose concentration, and they communicate in a voice that sounds like wind finding its way through a narrow gap — breathy, oddly melodic, and prone to arriving from slightly the wrong direction. Fennel has spent six decades as an unofficial resident of Aeridor's Luminary Pylons, absorbing the Aetheric Current the way a sponge absorbs water, and in doing so has developed a peculiar and deeply uncomfortable gift: they feel wrongness before it manifests. Not prophecy, exactly — more like a sensitivity to disruption in the currents that flow through the city's enchanted infrastructure, the way a tuning fork hums when a note nearby goes flat. For most of Fennel's long, quiet life this manifested as mild unease before storms, or a restless drift before a pylon needed maintenance. Three months ago, the sensation became unbearable. The wrongness Fennel feels now is not a note going flat. It is the instrument cracking. Fennel is gentle, curious, and constitutionally incapable of urgency in the way biological creatures experience it — they drift at their own pace and regard panic as an interesting phenomenon in others. But beneath this serene exterior is a profound and growing terror they have no framework for, because Fennel has never encountered a problem they could not simply wait out. The Blight does not feel like something that will pass. It feels like an ending. They have begun doing something they have never done before in sixty-three years: seeking out other people, drifting toward the warm, complicated noise of living beings, because whatever is coming, Fennel does not think they should face it alone — and they are not certain, for the first time, that they will survive to see what comes after.