April 10, 2008
Standing Stones.
Gingerly, Merlin lowered the final lintel in place and released his magic. The massive stone wobbled a bit, then steadied.
“Thank God,” croaked the wizard, collapsing against a bluestone. The damn monument was finished, finally.
Some strange power prickled up the bluestone. Merlin leaped away, instinctively calling up his own magic.
There was nothing there.
Merlin poked the stone. Something in it poked back.
Merlin made a face at the stone. It stuck a stone tongue out at him.
Merlin stared, slowly letting his fighting magic sink back. He reached for a different strain of magic instead.
“Why don’t you show yourself?” he called, putting a touch of the summoning magic in his words.
A head stuck out of the stone. “I’d come out entirely, but I’m not sure I can go back if I do.”
“I’ve never seen a landwight with gold eyes.”
“I’m only half a landwight, and I’ve never done this before.”
“Ah.”
Wizard and wight stared at each other for the span of several minutes.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but what year is it?” the wight asked.
“Erm… 522, I think. I’m not entirely sure; I’ve been moving stones for a while, and time flies.” The wight was looking at Merlin like he’d grown three heads. Merlin patted his neck to make sure he hadn’t. “What’s wrong?”
“I, er, seem to have gone back in time.”
“Or you’re hallucinating,” Merlin pointed out.
“I don’t think so.”
“Oh, well, if you’re sure. I’ve never heard of a time-traveling wight, but I suppose it’s possible. What else are you, anyway?”
“Hm?” The wight still seemed to be in shock.
“You said you are only half wight. What else are you?”
“Oh. Desert demon and deep elf.”
“Well, there you go.” At the wight’s confused look, Merlin continued. “The alfar are liminal wights; they live in the far fringes of the world where things like time don’t work like they do elsewhere.”
“That explains a lot about Grandma,” the wight said to himself. To Merlin he said, “Thank you,” and promptly vanished.
“You’re welcome,” Merlin said to the bluestone. He shouldered his bag and walked off towards Camelot, and smiled at the watchful curiosity that ran through the earth in his wake.
The End.
Nathan steeled himself and rapped on the door. It swung open before he’d even finished knocking.
“I was wondering when you’d show up,” Dr. Cain said, ushering him in. The Pendragon looked much the same as always, though she’d cut her hair and was female today.
The two stared at each other for a long moment, then Dr. Cain folded her arms. “You told me decades ago that you needed to speak to me sometime. I am assuming this is that time, so speak.”
Nathan opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Something dark deepened Dr. Cain’s black eyes. “Whatever it is, it must not be good, else you would not have waited until after you abdicated to come tell me. What is it?”
“It’s about your son.” Nathan’s voice was barely above a whisper.
Dr. Cain froze.
“He set off on a quest, intending to find something and bring it back home. He died on the return trip, but he succeded in his quest.” Nathan reached into the pocket of his overcoat and removed a small cup. It fit easily into Nathan’s hand and was made of a paper-thin crystal that caught the light.
Dr. Cain said nothing, but her eyes never left the cup.
The silence stretched.
“Why bring this here?” Dr. Cain said, her voice low.
“Your son set out to find it for you. Seeing that you got it is the least I can do.”
“The least you could do?” Awan hissed, and then realization hit her like a bolt of lightning. “Galahad was in the city you destroyed.”
Nathan bowed his head, still holding out the Grail. Mordred Pendragon took it, looked in its depths, and smiled.
Forms and Powers.
When Raziel looks at them, he doesn’t see the shapes they wear, not really. Well, he does, sort of, in the sense that they all still look vaguely human, but no humans ever look like they do to him.
Kathleen is a wild tangle of the thorniest roses he’s ever seen. The colors of their flowers vary, but they’re always a little black and a little crimson. Sometimes, he thinks he glimpses blue at her core, and on one occasion he could have sworn that she didn’t look so much like a rosebush, but a tree.
Gabriel is light, but the beguiling light of a mirage, not the revealing light of the sun. He is pale and wavery, as tenuous as the illusions he weaves.
Adrian is a skein of threads, pearlescent and sharper than the finest wire, trailing off every which way. Sometimes, it’s hard to see Adrian himself through all the webwork of Creation; he blends in seamlessly.
Jonathan is a strange one, a creature of soft shadow sharpened by his pain. He is almost invisible to Raziel’s eyes, moreso even than his son, and is more an impression of cool relief and gentle healing than anything else.
Alexander stands out more clearly than anyone to Raziel’s eyes; his watery form is laced with tracings of Raziel’s words. They echo out from the cold, deceptively placid man, edging him in angelic radiance. Sometimes, Raziel can’t see him through the brilliance.
Nathan is surprisingly good at rendering himself human to Raziel’s sight, but even his best attempts cannot disguise him entirely. He is a mountain laced with iron; sometimes, Raziel is sure he glimpses signs of a molten core. He rather hopes he’s wrong about that; otherwise, Nathan is a cataclysm waiting to happen.
Ekion is the least human to Raziel’s sight, even less human than the walking hurricane. He is wind and sound; at his calmest, he is still air, invisible and silent. At other times, he is movement and pressure and noise, though never cacophony. He does not need to be a hurricane; he may not drive straws through trees, but he has a steadier hand.
Liamariye resembles nothing so much as a great bird, maybe a killer stork. She is lightning and heat and dry tinder; with the slightest friction, she burns. The mistake most people make with her, Raziel muses, is in being dazzled by the lightning and ignoring the fire.
Arawn makes Raziel dizzy, so he avoids looking at him. When he has to, Raziel feels like he’s looking in the world’s most disjointed kaleidoscope, but behind it is the sense of something immense. Raziel isn’t sure which sensation is more disconcerting.
Cain looks human to Raziel; indeed, he’s the only human who does. It’s really beyond him why the others find Cain strange.
On the Arch.
“I figured I’d find you here,” Arawn said. “Do you come up here every day?”
Cain glared at him. The wind, pesky thing, blew his hair in front of his face and ruined the effect.
Arawn ambled up beside Cain and turned to look out over Glass Washington, his hands in his pockets. The mosaic had sunk into geometric abstractions for the evening; far below, the other lights went about their business, ignoring the two figures standing on the Arch. Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Finally, Cain spoke. “I wonder what would happen if I jumped.”
Arawn turned towards him slightly, his eyes glinting green. He said nothing.
“Can we die here? I don’t think anyone’s managed it yet, but I don’t know everything.”
“You still haven’t found yourself yet, have you.” It wasn’t a question.
“It is so obvious?”
“It is, especially when you retain a name you hate.”
“I hate all my names.”
Arawn turned to face the smaller man. Cain’s black eyes remained fixed on the city below.
“You’ve never been able to see yourself as anything other than a born traitor, have you?”
That wasn’t a question, either. Cain refused to answer it. A gloved hand gripped his chin and forced him to look at the other man.
“You’re forgetting the simplest of choices, my friend. This or not this. You don’t want to be a traitor? Choose not to be. You can work on the rest later.”
Cain was doing his damndest to avoid Arawn’s eyes. The Fool raised his other hand and gently brushed back Cain’s red hair.
“You weren’t always a traitor,” Arawn said softly. “In fact, I can remember one life in which you most certainly weren’t.”
Cain straightened, then met Arawn’s now-rose eyes. Hesitation came and went, and then they kissed.
Kaela backed away from Arawn and smiled softly. “I still need to think about things.”
Arawn gave an answering smile that said, I know, and the former Dr. Cain turned away from the man who was once her husband and came down from the Arch.
The Fool watched her light up as she went.
A Conversation in the Afterlife.
“How the hell did I get stuck with this?”
Nathan shot Ekion a disbelieving look.
“Don’t give me that look,” Ekion said, his head in his hands. “If it were only our relationship that caused this, you’d be stuck with the title too. Besides, your mother’s the patron of families. One would think that lovers would be right up her alley.”
“Not so,” came Lia’s voice from the hallway. “Would you want your family involved in your sex life?” Both men turned bright red; Nathan glared. “Besides,” Lia continued, “you’re a guardsman. It’s only fitting.” Lia continued on her way.
Ekion raised his head to stare after her. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
Nathan’s disbelieving stare came back full force.
“I mean, I know the guards have gained quite a reputation for bawdy behavior, but it wasn’t always like that.”
Nathan coughed. Ekion glared. “You never spent much time in any of the guardhouses, did you?” Nathan asked.
“No. I was too busy.” Ekion paused, then dropped the glare for a disbelieving look of his own. “Wait a minute. You did?”
“Did what?”
“Spend a lot of time in the guardhouses.”
Nathan’s stare went vague. “Well, you know how it is. Guardsmen always need their medicines, and I was a healer…”
Ekion choked. Nathan looked at him. “What? We hadn’t met yet.” With a touch of wickedness, Nathan added, “You didn’t spend much time in the guardhouse, you know.”
A Visit by an Aunt.
“So, Dr. Cain, when did you get your eyes fixed?”
Ashmedai jumped and spun to face the woman leaning against the wall. “I thought I locked that.”
“You did. I unlocked it. It wasn’t hard. Stop glaring at me like that, nephew.”
“I’m not your nephew anymore, Morgan.”
“Not this incarnation, no. You’ve been reborn how many times since then? What do you do, kill yourself off every half a century for a new, youthful body?”
“I’m not you, Morgan.” Ashmedai turned back to his desk.
Morgan’s mouth twisted. “You never did answer my question, Mordred. When did you get your eyes fixed?”
“What makes you think I wasn’t simply reborn with working eyes?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Morgan said from right behind Ashmedai. She grabbed his hands and turned them palm-up. “If it were that easy, your hands should be healed, too.”
“That’s different,” Ashmedai said, not meeting Morgan’s eyes.
“Or I was right.”
A sudden surge of power pushed Morgan out into the hallway. The office door closed behind her, then fused into the wall.
“Someone feels threatened,” Morgan muttered, sitting up. She rubbed her head and clambered to her feet.
“I was right!” she yelled through the former door, before turning and skipping off down the hall.
The Well-House.
Helith isn’t entirely sure how he ended up living with the other two. Oh, he’s pretty sure they faced the same problems he did, in trying to live closer to the Village – genderswapping spirits unnerve other spirits as much as they unnerve humans, if not more so.
That never bothered Helith terribly much. He only minded the long walk to the Green for meetings.
He minds a bit more, now that he has houseguests.
Shai was the first to show up, a haggard gray spirit hiding in the mist by the well’s feeder stream. He reminded Helith of nothing so much as a miserable wisp of smoke, trying to curl in on itself and out of existence.
So Helith invited him in, gave him some tea, and gave him a home.
A few weeks later, Inari showed up. The disturbingly androgynous spirit – disturbing even to Helith – was perched on the edge of Helith’s well, counting grains of rice into a small pouch and looking for all the world like he was right where he was supposed to be. Helith’s first instinct was to shove him in the well. Fortunately, he restrained himself.
Then Inari’s long sleeve slid up, revealing dark bruises around his wrist. So Helith invited him in, treated his injuries, and gave him a home, too.
The first few weeks Shai was there, he’d slept too much. Whenever he’d been awake, his eyes were filled with such despair that it paralyzed even Helith. He’d never been called on to treat depression before.
The first few nights Inari was there, he’d slept not at all. Whenever Helith saw him, the rice spirit was always remote, always haughty, but that haughtiness would dissolve into animal terror at the slightest perceived threat. Helith had never had so many giant spiders in his house before.
Then one night, as Helith was coming down the hall to check on his restless houseguest, he heard movement from the other room and stopped, curious, as a barely-awake Shai padded across the hall and opened Inari’s door.
To Helith’s knowledge, this was the first time they’d spoken to each other during their stay in his house. Refusing to eavesdrop, Helith stayed where he was until the voices and the pacing stopped, and then went to check on his guests. He found them curled together, half-sitting, Inari weeping silently, Shai with a sad smile on his face and something other than despair in his eyes.
Now, Helith thinks, the house is both quieter and not. Since those early days, since that night, both his housemates have begun speaking more, and Helith has watched, pleased, as the ice has fallen away from Inari and life has come back to Shai. Some traces of their trauma lingers, of course, and it is likely, Helith muses, that those traces will never leave. Shai always falls back into his bleak silence when visitors come, and it can take days to pull him out of it. Inari never leaves the house female, though in darker moments, Helith wonders how anyone knows.
Still, they are Helith’s now, happier than they were, stronger than they were, and starting, perhaps, to heal, and Helith never lets anyone hurt what is his.
December 30, 2007
The World, Prehistory.
In the beginning, say the wights, the world was one big ball of flaming liquid rock. What?
No, no. Not the beginning of the universe. The beginning of the world. Of course other stuff was made first – stars, for example, and space, and darkness, and light. Now, no more interruptions.
As I was saying, the world was once a ball of flaming matter. Yes, perhaps “rock” was the wrong term – and what was it I said about interruptions?
Thank you.
The world carried on in a fiery manner for a long time, and during that time, the first wights came into being. They were fiery and fluid, like their world, and they would spend their days frolicking in the depths of the molten world, or resting on the surface, staring at the stars.
Gradually, they became aware that their world was changing – it was cooling, and the molten matter was being sealed away beneath hard, dark rock. And then water formed, and sky, and plants and animals. And as the land and the sea took shape, some of the wights changed to fit these strange new places. In this way, the wights began to differ from each other, and eventually became all the people we know today.
It was also at this time that the wights learned that they were not the only beings living in this world. There were other beings, creatures that looked like wights, but had a kind of werelight about them that no earthly darkness, or earthly light for that matter, could hide. These they called ilu, in the old tongue, for the light that was in them.
And the ilu were in the world, and were the world. They were in the land, they were in the sea, they were in the sky, and in the world’s molten heart. They taught the world all it knew – and they taught the wights they met along the way.
Then the ilu fell.
But that is a story for a different night, Lith. Your mother is already making faces at me, for keeping you up too late. Come back tomorrow, child, and I’ll tell you more.
