Over and over again it had sought reason for the many things others seemed to know uncannily. Of function, of purpose, of things an unnatural, wretched ilk such as it may possibly never come to understand – but oh, the ache to know, among other aches. It had come to each, even those less profitable with knowledge, with simplicity in its throat and starfire in its eyes; tell me, tell me, tell me... Should it have asked for them to show, instead? One particularly disgruntled man shouldering a stand in the Night Markets had scoffed at the request in a way that churned the core of the Erasmus-That-Is like a revolving mechanic of hungry teeth. Go to the library and stop bothering people. the man had retched between gasps, battling a heavy post, and the Erasmus-That-Is could not explain why the manner in which he said so had inspired such a feeling of aversion in him, or the different sort of hunger that rose. But of all the things it didn't know, it had learned that the casual denizens of Novus were not keen to seeing blood, whether it was splattered across the cobblestone streets or washed across his own coat. What difference it made eluded him, but they were especially upsetted by the sight of it dripping from its maw.
The Library, he had said. And the Erasmus-That-Is struggled to know what a library is, and when he asked the man, the man simply laughed but did not answer. It had gone away pondering the thing over and over til the next congregation of passerby, and while they stared at him quizzically, a few of them responded after a moment of contemplation. In the Night Court they have a – Oh no, Delumine probably has every book known to Novus, you might as well go there. And then – oh, how trivial the living are, and the awful things that exist between it and the Nothing, and how he (or it, if we are keeping track) wishes for the latter at each turn. Delumine, Delumine... it lopped over his tongue like a stone he couldn't swallow, and his face had distorted with something akin to anger. And they, seeming concerned but helpful, were quick to point northeast, their gesture cast over the high, jagged peaks of the Arma Mountains. Therein: Delumine, Library. He hadn't felt the same hunger toward their kindness as he had the other's insensitivity, and it was enough to ponder between coordinated thoughts of Delumine, Library, but long after he passed over the ridge of the mountains he felt the emptiness in his stomach and the awful burning that came with it and wondered how bad it might have really been if he had had a taste of at least one of them.
It had gone on similarly between the valley of Denocte and the plane of Delumine, the questions and the answers that varied wildly from helpfulness to concern to downright disapproval. It seemed each could tell something was off about this “Erasmus”, though none of them, from what it could garner, truly knew who he was. (Long after, when it learns how to be Erasmus, it thinks back on this and is thankful his efforts were not thwarted by familiarity.) And when it racked the brains of the Erasmus-That-Was, he struggled to find a semblance of memory that relayed to him some navigation through the forested groves of flowery Delumine, but all he found was ocean, jungles, and sand. There were more questions, countless questions, not enough questions, but each answer pieced together the entity that was a Library and a Delumine. So now he stood in the bowels of both, staring at the tall walls of bookends that stared back at him with the same blankness he was offered from most.
He was thankful to discover that, reaching deep into his skull with frantic tendrils of wonder and near repentance, for how awful the powerless feeling of mortality is, he had found that the Erasmus-That-Was did at times enjoy the occasional book and its tell-tale innards. He didn't have to ask what a book was and didn't even have a word for it until then, but each piece strung together slowly to make of it what it was. How simple things became, when the uncomplicated brain he possessed was so ready to elaborate! Easier than prying the brains of those he had no control over, for most had just stared at him dumbfounded, and many asked him questions instead of providing answers, questions like are you not from here or the worst one he couldn't understand, did you just come out from under a rock, as so far he had not seen any denizens, himself included, who could fit under rocks comfortably.
Still he stood before this grand altar of knowledge and its spiraled cases staring back at him with expectancy, and he thought about how awful it was that he was unsure of where even to start. The mid-day sun coursed through the grand windows and spiraling ivy and cast a gold-green glare across the vast hall and its quiet inhabitants. There was much he did not understand beyond the ancient knowledge of cosmic dream and the celestial workings of being everything that was so tiring and now, worthless. It did not matter that it knew how to make rocks sing for it, or that it knew of glassy plates that looked like ice and burned hotter than fire. These things did not matter here. All he had was a few weak dreams of lilting shadows that dripped from his countenance like cobwebs and their occasional cooperation in forming gestures and fluttering forms. This was what god-dust had been reduced to, but he would make something of it, he resolved. "where do i begin?" he muses softly, and is sparked by delight toward how deliciously absurd it feels, as was an element of the mortals he encountered, to ask questions to thin air. The Erasmus brain answered weakly instead, and he chimed silently to letters A, B, C, D... and when their likeness materialized in his head, he saw their shapes and felt the way they should feel in the bed of his tongue, clicking against the back of his teeth. And there - oh, marvelous! Each spine was marked with the letters that came to him idly, and he saw each was organized in order by the group of letters at the base, marked beneath Author.
There, A, B, C, each shelf followed accordingly, and he came to see that he stood before the shelves that started for the letter C. But the novels were boundless and their innards a mystery. It thought of all the things it wished to know, and oh, the ache was endless. For a moment a feeling came over it, and it did not know how to process it or what entirely it was, but it came to learn with time that it was a feeling of defeat and had it known then, would have been overcome with the feeling of anger, for the infancy of something intangible being placed in the mortal coil is one turbulent thing after another. But then he paused when the memories of Erasmus-That-Was came to select a familiar binding that alighted to him like an epiphany. And on it read, Flora and Fauna of Solterra by Zarusc Cereti with its beautiful gold lettering, and like the relief of remembering an old friend, he eased it from its place and sat it on a nearby table, pages fluttering decidedly to page 64, The Sacred Datura. But he knew before it knew what was on the page, and he remembered the caricature of the ink-drawn flora and its broad leaves, and his mind's eye slipped across the mark of skull and crossbones and knew exactly what it meant. And oh, its wonder was tickled, that the Erasmus-That-Was took a liking to death so cunningly, as the Aether grins and remembers what both life and death tastes like, and knows which is much, much sweeter.
It howls, that melody of the sea. It howls and roars, pulling at feathered fetlocks and wind tousled hair as the man walks the exposed borders of the beach. For the time being, the water's violent waves are willing to recede and bare to the eyes of every being what rests beneath it.
(For the time being, the wolves are quiet, but they are anxious; they are ready. Inherent predators, they wait and prowl along the margins of his mind, waiting and watching. Something stronger rests inside of him now, however, and the wolves dare not challenge it.
Not when it could possibly be something they want.)
Burnt eyes stared out into the wild expanse, feet running an endless pace that led him back and forth before the thunderous sea. The call of it, that broken melody that he has fallen into the arms of countless times before now, is more alluring than ever. To sink beneath it all, to allow the water to fill weary lungs and weigh down a man that already carries the weight of thousands upon his withers.
It truly is an enticing thought.
The sand beneath him is ruined, unable to be prepared until the tide returns and mends the path he has drilled into the beach. No matter how deep it might become, though, he is not hindered. He is drawn elsewhere, beyond the sight of physical eyes, and it would take more than just the damp grains below him, ones that attempt to slow him down, to bring him back.
Where he is, where is mind might be, no one can truly know, but it isn't here. Not when here has nothing for him. What little he had was gone now, last to the ravenous shadows that seemed to tail him everywhere he went. He wasn't safe from it within the safest of his mind, or out in the physical world. It howled and ripped into muscles before cracking every bone he had in his body. Drilling into his very core, it ran in perfect harmony with the demonic wolves that already claimed such a place for themselves.
In the abyss that was his heart, he ached.
There was no time to grieve, however; no such possibility when what had been tamed by her did its best to regain what ground she had cultivated with her own hands. It wished to ravage the neatly laid rows in which she had planted all of her tender affection that had gently come to completely consume him.
Now, the threat that it might be destroyed was on the horizon.
His jaw clenched, teeth grinding together as an unfamiliar wave of distaste coursed through his veins at that thought. Every single thing that came together to create him was afraid of such a possibility coming to life (everything but the pack that lurked in his mind, alongside their newest inhabitant because they wanted to ruin him; decimate him).
(They wanted to leave him on the ground, breathless and drenched in sweat, gasping for breath and consumed with so much fatigue that his legs would not be able to support him as the tide came back it.
And they could do it—had done it many times before now. Besides, there was no patch of red fur or freckled white to stop them. Oh, they could do it but... the wolves were curious about their newest resident.)
An agitation that hadn't been felt by him for years twirled around his heart, making him irritated and causing a faint sneer to turn down his lips. It made his muscles tense and he turned to pace back the other way, the sea winds continuing to pull at the choppy tresses of both his mane and tail.
The trinkets in his main tinkled from time to time, the bolt in his forelock normally more than enough to draw him away from himself. Sadly, it couldn't this time as it bounced the side of his face.
It would take something more to get him to stop looking out into the sea (where he hoped to find a spot of fiery red, or hear the call of his name fall from beautiful lips) and stop pacing. What that was, however, he didn't know.
Not like how he knew that, for the first time in quite a while, he was truly and terribly alone.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war, the saying goes.
But Elena knows those dogs do not just destroy the enemy, they will vanquish everything in their path.
It had been time to grow up, little girl.
Elena had no longer been allowed to parade through life with those rose colored blinders on, unaware of anything but her own destruction. Elena had seen war, she had seen death, injury, families torn apart. She had seen her own mother whither away to disease. It had been time to grow up. And the little girl, who had hardly been alive long enough to understand what it meant to be a child, never realized what she would all leave behind.
She knows the metallic tang of blood the instant it hits the air, recoils from it with a faint clench of muscle along the delicate lines of her jaw. It is the kind of scent that snakes into her mouth, settles like copper on the back of her tongue until she is gagging on it, inching back with wary blue eyes. What was she still doing here? She looks like a bird, a golden chickadee, perched as if ready to fly. There is something about her that is wound too tightly, the world too loud and bright and fast.
Elena knows what she is doing here, it is duty, it is her duty. They fight, they tear each other apart, draw blood, paint bruises, sculpt sprains and breaks. And Elena, patches, she fixes, she soothes, she heals.
These are not the first she had found broken, bloodied, pained. His eyes had stared into hers. “Do I look that hurt to you?” His laughter had been haunting. “You don't let people in, and it will be your downfall, if it hasn't been already.” She had told him. Not realizing, how letting too many in would be her own.
Perhaps the reason that she is drawn to broken things is because she herself often feels so broken. It doesn’t make sense, because at first glance she is healthy, happy, altogether average. Those blue eyes are bright and beautiful, but look closer and they cloud with bruises, riddled with ghosts.
But she smiles anyway as her empathy wracks her body with emotions. (She wants to cry with defeat and scream with anger and laugh with victory all at the same time.) “Where does it hurt?” She asks again and again, so when she spots the next, as he moves up in line, she turns to gather supplies, speaking without thinking. “Where does it hurt?”
Where does it hurt?
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
Every morning, Torix wakes up feeling inside out. There is a vulnerability, he thinks, to walking through the world with his insides on the outside. A heart on his shoulder, perhaps, or kidneys on the hips. There is a feeling, when he is Novus, that his skin is transparent and everything beneath it has grown black with rot.
His mind always, always returns to his mother. If you leave, she had said, you will only be running.
The memory is hot with rage; scalding, it burns him, again and again. He wasn’t running. How could she accuse him of that? Did she not understand he was here hunting, searching? There was something in Novus that belonged to him and, try as he may to forget it—and oh, that list is long, that list full of bodies he tried to lose himself in, fights he couldn’t win, lovers he couldn’t love—it persisted, demanded.
You would have been the youngest commanding officer in the history of Oresziah. They had told him, that. They had held his promotion ranks in a bed of red silk. Take them. Their yours. Everything in his life, it seemed, had been lined up so perfectly for the occasion. The war had been won, and—well, he would travel the seas and take it to new shores.
Vercingtorix walks along the shore in pre-dawn, when the sky is a type of blue edging on indigo. It fights the first light with a speckle of stars and a bruising horizon. That, too, feels like he feels. An uphill battle. A losing climb. The sun will rise.
But not yet. The Solterran sea brings with it a cool gust of coastal wind. He might relish it, but the scent of brine and fish will forever remind him of the unpleasantries of the world he left. They remain, however, a vivid and pungent reminder of—well, of the life he is here to finish.
Vercingtorix, as he walks, picks up small stones and seashells Rather than collect them, or even cast them into the sea, he systematically crushes what he can in his telekinesis. Otherwise, he tosses it end-over-end into the ocean. His mother had worn seashells around her neck, he remembers, like a talisman. She said it would ward off evil spirits and create fertility. Torix supposes some of it might have worked, and some didn’t. He was her only son and, besides himself, she had three daughters.
Sisters. He should think of them as sisters. He doesn’t.
Everything in his household had always been a competition. Last he had heard, they had married his classmates. The sons of other esteemed generals and commanders.
But to them, he is dead, and he knows it.
Torix pauses at last. He is looking out to the sea; it is tumultuous as always. What he is looking for he doesn’t find, and so he turns away.
He is startled to see the stallion standing there, vibrant and red, like the way the bruised sun has turned the horizon to a cut throat slaughter.
“Can I invite you to a romantic walk on the beach, then?” The tone Torix utilises is deprecating; nearly an insult, but not quite. Almost a joke, but more crudely presented. He does not like being surprised.
Darkness like absence—so utterly without, it is asphyxiating. It crowns her in a terminal judgment—thorns and all—and each slow, drag-toed step she takes proves she has been sentenced to go on. Proffered life when she is not sure she wants it. Is not sure she has space for in it in the weeds of her darkened garden—a flower in a place of sunless bramble and the haunting slip of empty, unfamiliar visitors, passing by and picking each petal down to the white bone.
Darkness like, did anything ever exist there before?
Darkness like, can anything ever exist there again?
The wind passes by her in long, lethe exhales. It purls as it does, rustling the scant leaves and needles of healthy trees; plucking the limber, naked limbs of the dead. It carries the scent of autumn—earthy rot, things breaking down and settling; and the swill of swampy redolence, mud and a sticky, sucking kind of musk. With each enervated press of her hoof, the green-brown mud envelops her to the knees, seizing her with damp, tight hands. Pulling.
Pulling downwards.
She finds the insistence alluring. That she can imagine, just as well, her body taken by the morass—given freely to a swam-god, many-headed and lichen-pelted, and if it were kinder than her own gods, perhaps it would take her gently into its muddied elysium. Perhaps it would pull her down and cover her over and the rest would be an insensate process of breaking down.
Settling.
So what compels her to lift, to labour until the viscous moorings tauten and snap and set her free with a sickening kind of reluctance? What urges her, unseeing and unfeeling and unknowing, on a path that promises other-than—other than death, other than settling and breaking down and loosing the mortal coil? The thing that blooms, soft and wan but ever-so on the horizon of her darkness, her absence, her nothing and her without—that thing, like hope but bigger. Like knowing there is light, even if it can’t be seen; that there is sun, even if the clouds have gathered like wet, woollen blankets over the sky, and none of its radiance can reach her. Like know there and wolves in the woods, but finding the courage to fight them.
Like remembering that something existed there before.
That it was a meadow of wildflowers, sun-kissed and honeyed.
That is was perfect, even if only for a few fleeting days as it teetered on the edge of oblivion.
A bird calls overhead. Shrill and shrieking. One small, fluted ear tilts, languidly, in its direction. Measures it. Finds it wanting. Finds it unfamiliar. But rather than gut her all over again, she simply moves on, thrusting with soft, onerous grunts as she feels her way from one mound of semi-firm ground to the next. Coming to rest where the mossy earth gives only slightly, with a flush of dirty water pooling around her toes, as she leans against the rough, grey bark of a tree.
She has always been comfortable in her darkness. Knew it as she knew the lines of her own sturdy, northern body. Was made in it—made to its specifications, because it was her toll; payment exacted for the honour of walking through history, not as through mud, but as through thin air.
But this isn’t her darkness.
This is like knowing there is light. And a sun. And a fight.
Sometimes, he thinks the crescent-moon lake is less of a lake and more of a mirror, holding all the selves he’s been before. Tonight, for instance, when he steps softly up to the edge of the water, the glow from the lanterns could be from fireflies. Instead of a crowd, it might just be him - not old (or immortal) and heartsick and weary, but naive and new-arrived with hope urging him onward. And there might be a girl in the water, with hair like starlight and a constellation across the curve of her neck, and they might reassure one another that they aren’t dreaming.
That night from years ago feels like a dream now. So, too, does the time he stood on this shore with Isra, and together they fashioned the lake into another dreamscape, a walkway of cedar and gemstones and water that hung suspended like glass, the picture of a world underwater.
The sound of laughter draws him from his reverie, and Asterion glances up to watch two yearlings racing their lanterns across the water, blowing great puffs of air until the bits of paper are beyond their reach. With a thought, he sends a wave rippling beneath them, and the youths cry out, delighted, as their lanterns are carried beyond the others. The bay stallion smiles faintly, the expression lost in the semidarkness, and steps away from the shoreline toward the silent pines beyond.
Someone had told him once that the dunes liked to sing.
But they have never sung for him.
Today they look like restless giants behind him, whispering about the flower-clad child they once nearly devoured. He wonders if they still want to consume him now, all these years later; he thinks they must. He can feel it in the way they shift around him like hungry wolves, the pack circling the rabbit. Always moving, always changing, always ready to drag him down to the depths of them and take back the life that was stolen from them that night.
Already he can taste the sand, and each breath of it makes his lungs ache like they have only ever been an hourglass slowly filling up. It makes something in him start to tremble — from dread, or from anticipation, or from the blood-deep instinct to rise, rise, rise and bare his teeth. He can’t tell the difference between his courage and his fear anymore; he supposes that is what it took to learn how to be brave in the middle of a war.
But Ipomoea is not the helpless prey. Not anymore.
And the flowers on his brow will not wilt so easily.
Inside the blood-stone walls, he can (almost) forget the way the sun feels like the great eye of Solis bearing down upon him. Inside the Colosseum there is only the glory and the gore of the fighters, and the blood-drunk frenzy of the crowd. Their cheers drown out his thoughts, their cries suffocate the wind of the desert whistling like songs through the canyon walls, and when the gates swing open with a crash, it sounds to him like death knocking a little too keenly at the door.
From the darkness on either end of the arena steps a soldier, one clad only in leather greaves, the other bearing a strip of metal down his face in the crude semblance of a helmet. They circle each other like hungry dogs, like they have forgotten how to be anything but monsters hiding in slack-ribbed bodies. Ipomoea can feel the crowd leaning in around them, pressing him forward, daring him to watch and oh, how like carrion crows and vultures they seem to him now, with their sharp eyes and their sharper teeth, and Ipomoea does not know which of the dogs is hungrier, the crowd or the fighters.
He wonders which of them will die today. He wonders if it will be worth it.
He wonders if he will ever be able to look on a gladiator fight and feel anything but contempt for the so-called sport rising like bile in the back of his throat. Or if he will ever hear the calls for blood and not feel the broken bits of him forming into that beast just below his skin in response, so close to the surface that he can hear it beginning to pant. The crowd presses in and oh, Ipomoea can feel himself pressing in beside them, and in the war-drum beat of his blood he finds all the truth he will ever need.
Ipomoea knows there is no glory here, there no glory to be found in their deaths. He has seen death, has known death, and death — death is no better or worse than the primordial dance the two warriors begin.
He tightens his grip on his wooden dagger, feeling it grow thorns and vines and blood-red petals, and again he wonders which of them will die today.
But the hard prey is the one that won’t come bidden.
Vercingtorix was born a hunter.
It is all he has ever known. He comes to the fires to sell his soul to the practices of Novus; to pay homage to pagan gods he will never worship. His worries are written on a piece of parchment, already prepared to be enflamed. The list seems grossly inadequate, but his mother had always accused him of being a narcissistic like his father. What do you know of worry? she used to tell him, when he grew short with her concern for his wellbeing. Nothing, she would say. You will never be the mother to such an unruly son.
And so the list:
Boudika.
Boudika.
Boudika.
If she is alive, still, in Novus. If she is here at all, of it the sea took her even further. And, anyways, it is simple enough, the fixation of his purpose within the nation. Why not burn it? Why not watch the fire flare up and spark with embers, to watch his concerns burn? Torix had listened to the depth of the ceremony; and he would be a liar if there was not a small part of him hoping for the image of the woman who haunts him to appear within the billowing smoke. She doesn’t.
But someone else does.
Through the fire Vercingtorix drops the name into, he sees a series of images glint metallically upon a small horse’s flank.
At first, he does not move, but dismisses it as one of the strange native’s foreign (to him, at least) intricacies. But then: Torix realises they are familiar and hardly foreign at all.
No.
He remembers the way the flesh seared beneath the metallic paint, and the way the Old Priest muttered the arcane words of the Old Gods.
Binding a Soul always smelled of burnt flesh, piss, the early morning tide, full of death. Salt, and fish, and sand. His lip twitches; it almost becomes a sneer. And then Torix is weaving through the crowd in quiet, measured pursuit.
He has always been a hunter. It is the truth of Vercingtorix that defines him; it is the thing that drives him now to near-madness, as he exists in a world where the creatures he is meant to hunt no longer exist. Yet—here is one, familiar, known and he follows her stride past natives, past bonfires, until she stands on the dark stretch at the end of the gathering, staring out at the sea upon the cliffside.
Torix has watched her now for a portion of the night; and it is now and only now that he approaches. He is no less imposing, despite the limp that jars each step. By the time he reaches her, the sound of the bonfires seems distant; it is a crackling of fire and wood in the background to their meeting, and the crash of the sea.
heaven help us, says your unholy mouth, your hands on my hands
I don't know where the darkness ends and you begin.
The autumn sea is unlike any other. It is, perhaps, the only sea that Vercingtorix relates to. He watches the waves with steely eyes; there is a storm-front moving in, as is wont to do when the seasons shift. It is this sea that has brought him back to Novus, from a venture outward, a venture into other, foreign seas. Torix had bartered from ship to ship, trading work and knowledge in exchange for passage, until he had visited so many islands and countries he had lost count. None stood out to him, even now, even staring out at the shore of Novus. Everywhere, he thinks, the sea is the same. Even in the tropics, away from cliffsides and the cold of currents, the sea glares and winks and breathes.
As he stands observing, the cold wind buffets him and carries with it the brisk tendrils of winter. The hair of his mane whips wildly into his face, but Torix allows it; the sting is a welcome reminder of where he is. The tide is falling low and in it his eyes scour the beach, searching—rumours have it the Scéal live here, the water horses of Terrastella.
Gealach and, among them the Comhar, the Dathuil, the Diasca. In fact, from what Torix has garnered of myth, all of Terrastella is haunted by the beasts; inland live the Séasúr, ghouls half-starved and haunting the swamps of the nation. He is still unaccustomed to the word “kelpie.” It flits off his tongue inelegantly, foreignly. He hates it and yet it is the word the most cultures seem to recognise. Vercingtorix does not believe he will find them here, not now, not with the storm rutting up along the coastline.
Eventually, the clouds cross over the blue that is left in the sky. He feels the first stinging pinpricks of rain.
He wonders if she is out there. He wonders, more fully, if she has any idea he is back in Novus. The only reason he returned is because, no matter how many water horses he found and defeated, their deaths seemed empty. The thing that bound him to the slaughter lived in Novus. Vercingtorix memories of Bondike—no, no, she had stopped being Bondike years ago—Boudika were so vivid he can see her running where the surf meets the sand, a flash of red and black, so bright, so brazen. They had once raced up the coastline in a dare, fearless of the dangers beyond.
Yet, that had only been because they had had one another. Now when Torix stares at the sea it is with the knowledge his flank is exposed.
And it is your fault, he thinks to himself. Strangely, the internal voice is not so different from his father’s. The drizzle of rain intensifies—and then, out several yards, Torix watches the kelpies breach.
The herd of them is breathtaking and luminous. They hit the surface in a plethora of equine colours, reds and bays, blacks and dapples, some with horns and many without. Their skins look slick and seal-like, or catch the thin, waning light to reflect from scales and iridescent skin. Then, like that, they are gone.
Torix was so captivated by their appearance—and the affirmation that they are, in fact, real—that he did not hear the telltale sound of approach.
He jerks his head in the direction now, however. His smile is quicksilver. His smile is mercury, and arsenic, and radiant. All things that will kill you. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a man like that. It is a good way to end up with a spear through your belly.” In saying it, Torix acknowledges his spear is lost. In saying it, Torix acknowledges day by day he sounds less like himself and more like the father he detests.
He appraises the golden mare with a hard eye. “You shouldn’t be out here alone.” It is what he has always said to women by the sea. It might begin to sing to them—and if it did, they would be lost. They were all born with one foot in the sea, and one on land. And this is something Vercingtorix will never forgive them for.
I was so used to being one of the youngest members of Denocte. The baby. As much as I thought of that word with derision, there was definitely a comfort to it, a freedom in knowing that if you did anything wrong-- anything at all-- ah, well. You could not really hold a baby accountable, could you?
But time marches on. I grew tall and narrow like a reed. More babies were born, and the brief specialness I experienced was eventually passed on to someone else. I should not have felt resentful for someone younger than me, I didn’t want to, but controlling my emotions was beyond me. When I saw the younger girl at the lake, I’m ashamed to say my first reaction was jealousy.
Maeve was pretty, and so very small, and she had the joyful spark of youth which I recognized in myself as fading fast. (I wanted to cling to my spark, but the harder I tried the faster it slipped through my grasp. I don’t understand why life is so heavy, even when it is so wonderful; I had everything I could ever ask for, but still that spark slowly bled from me.) I wanted to ignore her, because ignoring her was the easiest way to ignore my own discomfort. But I could not ignore the way she struggled to light the candle in her lantern.
I glanced around and saw no one to help her, no parental guidance, and I sighed. At this rate she was going to burn herself, or-- knowing what I do now of her lineage-- set the hillside on fire. “Hey there! Here, let me help you.” I plucked my pale blue lantern from the lake’s surface and trotted over to the girl. I leaned in and picked up my candle to light hers. “I like your lantern,” I murmured as I worked, and I hated the vague tone of motherly approval in my voice. Why must I always be so nice?! The girl didn't even need to be placated. “Ready? Make your wish-- now!” I lowered the flame to the unlit wick and-- I couldn’t help myself-- I smiled warmly.
