Cast in Chaos

by Michelle Sagara

  I want to be part of your home. I want to be part of what you are, even if it can only ever be a small part. I will do everything I can, give everything I can, listen when I want to talk, and—and help in the kitchen after dinner. I will try to understand what you are, and not what I want you to be.

  It was hard, to wait. Hard to open yourself up for inspection, because inspection implied…judgment. And she’d been judged for things she had no control of all her life.

  Ellariayn.

  The only thing Kaylin could hear for one long moment was her name. It was also the only thing she could feel, as if she were a gong or a perfect, resonant bell. She understood some part of why names were hidden, must be hidden, then. People built invisible, social walls between each other all the time; if they didn’t, all the police in the world couldn’t stop the carnage that would follow. What worked for the Tha’alani worked in part because they had been born into a world without emotional defenses, and the lack was so utterly natural, the polite lies that maintained civilized interaction were unnecessary.

  This was like the nightmare of what the Tha’alaan was to someone who had never experienced it. Kaylin knew because it was what she’d feared so strongly herself. But the Tha’alaan knew it, as well; the Tha’alani knew her fear because she’d touched their racial memories, and they had absorbed the knowledge of who she was. And therefore, so did the Elemental Water, or that part of the water that Kaylin could no longer think of as inhuman and remote.

  Kaylin, she said. Kaylin. Her voice was softer, like wave against shore, rather than the tidal wave that the spoken name had threatened. Our voices are strong, to you. You are too small to contain them for long.

  She didn’t even grimace; it was true. She felt so inconsequential she wanted to curl up and hide, the way she sometimes had as a very small child. Which, she reminded herself with some disgust, she wasn’t anymore.

  This…this name, the water said, it is part of us now. Do you understand what you’ve done?

  No, Kaylin replied, completely honestly. There was no point in lying now; they could see anything at all they chose to look for.

  Do you understand now what you must do?

  And she did. It’s not enough, to open myself up to the Elements of the Garden. I have to reach the Devourer, too.

  Yes. But…Devourer—and he will understand what you mean, even if the word is not one he can speak—is not what he is. Or not what he was when the worlds were the idle dream of passing moments, and we were free.

  Kaylin hesitated. She might as well not have bothered.

  Yes, Kaylin. I understand your fear. It is a fear shared by Ybelline, the loudest of all my living voices. You will return the Devourer to us, and the Garden and its eternal peace will be unmade. We will have our freedom, as we once did, and we will unmake the world—all the worlds—reclaiming what we once might have been.

  I do not know if it will comfort you, the Element added, but I will say what I said to Ybelline. When the child is birthed, it leaves the mother, for good or for ill. Mother and child cannot return to their single state after the fact, even if they cannot be separated with ease.

  We are not children, the water said softly, for she understood Kaylin’s reaction almost before Kaylin did. Nor are we parents, or mothers. But it is…not unlike that. Our separation was the birth of possibility and life, and it was written in ways that you will never perceive while you remain mortal.

  But…he was our night, Kaylin. He was our sleep. He was our borders and our peace. We, conversely, were his dawn, and his waking, and the fractious tension out of which arose his duty. We were his noise and his language. I will not speak of love, for love is small and unique and precise.

  But Kaylin understood it anyway. The Elements were his language. His words. In some way, they were his voice.

  This is what you want me—all of you—to tell him.

  Yes, Kaylin. Yes, daughter. This is what you must tell him. We will guide you if you cannot speak the words.

  Evanton should have—

  The speaking would end Evanton. But you bear the marks and the words, Kaylin. I believe it will not destroy you. Come, she said, and she lifted one watery hand.

  Kaylin took it instinctively, and found, to her surprise, that it was solid. Solid and yet somehow quintessentially water. Can you tell him my name?

  No. We can tell him only the parts of it we understand. He might find you again if he bent will and purpose to the task, no more. It would be something, she added. But not, I think, enough, not in the time that you have.

  She was silent for one moment longer as Kaylin once again gathered her frayed nerves. We were free, the water said, her voice remote. And we will never be free again while you live. But that seems to me the progression of life itself, as it is lived by the mortals and the immortals across the worlds. You build your cages, and you call them homes, and you accept the burdens and responsibilities that come with them. You even learn to love them.

  What you are comes out of what you were. What we are comes out of what we were. But we cannot unlearn what we have learned. We can not be what we were. No more can you return to your infancy. It has passed. It is beyond you.

  She fell silent, although she didn’t leave; Kaylin sensed her presence, and in it, or beside it, the presence of the others. She could not touch the Devourer, not yet, but her senses were heightened, and she perceived him, not as an amorphous beast, but as something else: a page, perhaps, or a book, its words faded. She couldn’t read them, but she could see what they must have been, in part. She could see what was missing.

  Her arms and her legs were glowing as if she had swallowed fire and the marks on her skin were glass through which it could be viewed. She lifted those arms, turning her palms out; light radiated from them in spokes.

  What she had done for the elements, she now did for the nameless creature who had hunted—and destroyed—worlds. But if the intent was the same, the offering was different. She didn’t stand in the frame of the door like an uncertain, homeless orphan waiting approval; she didn’t open herself up to his inspection—and rejection—in the same held-breath way.

  They had invited her in, in the end; they had accepted what she offered. And Severn had said that she made any place she entered another home, because she needed and understood home in a way that he didn’t. Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. She couldn’t and didn’t argue with his words because she was weak enough to want to believe them.

  She trusted him enough that, for this very necessary minute, she did. She opened the door that she had only barely entered herself, turning back to look into the streets as if trying to catch a glimpse of someone who might be huddling outside, looking in as she’d looked in.

  What she saw was the whole of the night sky writ large. She saw the starscape as the night unfolded; she saw the misty wreaths of borealis; she saw the Twin moons. She saw the immensity of the heavens—not the literal heavens, but the ones which even Dragons couldn’t touch in flight—and she felt her size and her insignificance keenly.

  In the distance, she saw the mountains rise. They weren’t the familiar Southern Stretch, which housed her beloved Aerians—and, to be fair, the ones she could have happily done without, as well—but some echo of that stretch existed in this one. And the mountains came closer to the sky than Kaylin ever would without winged help.

  The wind’s touch was cool; a welcome night breeze. It carried the scent of the rain, of mist, of the rowans which sometimes made her sneeze; it carried, as well, the fragrance of the white lilacs that grew down the banks of the lanes a few blocks from Elani. Her favorite scents were bread, fresh bread, but that was absent; there was nothing in the wind that suggested that people owned any part of it.

  Water came as grass rose around Kaylin’s feet, springing from nothing to her knees. By some strange alchemy of earth and wind and water, trees ringed the foothills of those distant mountain ranges, and from the height of those mountains, water began to rush, hea
d over heels, toward the lower terrain. The earth cracked and widened to receive it, to build the channel through which it might pass.

  Where is fire? Kaylin asked.

  Fire roared, and for an instant, Kaylin froze. But turning, she saw that it roared in a stone pit at her back, flames leaping over the edge to lap above grass that wilted but didn’t burn. It was close, though. She understood, then, that the fire was contained, but so, too, the water, the earth, and the air. She knew what the landscape would look like if they went to war—and she also knew that she wouldn’t survive it.

  It didn’t matter; they were united, for a moment, in this purpose.

  Kaylin realized as the elements spoke to—and through—her that it was an effort on their part, sustained by the fading presence of the Keeper, whose role was to guide, guard, and leash their fury. Evanton was silent.

  Kaylin was not. She spoke, and words formed as she did, runes that were ancient and wild and true. They formed quickly, and they formed completely, capturing what she hoped to say. Sanabalis had told her—she thought it was Sanabalis—that these words had a meaning that did not rely on context or limited understanding, by which of course he meant hers.

  But she recognized one rune clearly: it was her name. It nestled among the others, the names, she realized belatedly, of fire, earth, air, and her beloved water. There was another rune, however. It was a simple rune, which is why she’d missed it the first time, one stroke that stood on end. One bold stroke, she thought, as she examined it. A similar single stroke bisected the line of each of the other runes, some part of their much more complex patterns; they were built on it, although ultimately, they were unique.

  She left the blazing fire at her back; heard it crackle and hiss as if it were chiding her for her desertion. A few yards away, across the unkempt grass, the words rotated in the air, immune to gravity. They were evenly spaced, but as she walked around them, she saw that they circled the central, simple glyph. Even her name.

  Reaching out, she touched the single rune with the flat of one palm. It was smooth and dense and cool.

  And oh, the marks on her skin began to dance. To rise, pulling her with them, until her feet no longer touched earth. Her palms tingled and warmed where the rune touched skin, until she was almost numb with the sensation. The moons in the sky’s height turned, as she had known they would, and she saw again the vast distance of desert eyes, against which her reflection would have been so tiny she wouldn’t have seen it at all.

  The fact that these eyes were on the inside of what might have been a body didn’t trouble her at all. She stood, hand on rune, waiting—because he could see her now. He could see as much of her as he could understand, and it resided in the externalization of her true name. It wasn’t what Severn understood; it wasn’t what she herself understood. But her name had been offered, and it was the only bridge they now had, this endless and eternal force and the very finite Private.

  He roared, and this time she understood every word he spoke—and he did speak, and it was a chaos of syllables that clashed and thundered toward her. She couldn’t see them the way she could see the names, but she could feel them as if they were elemental: ice and fire, thunder and earthquake. He was calling them, she thought; he was shouting their very names into the night sky as if they were, in the end, the only words he owned.

  Speaking, she thought, without being heard.

  But he knew where they were, now; they knew where he was.

  There is danger, Kaylin, a familiar voice said. It was Evanton; he’d been watching. If the elements are correct—and it appears they are—he has been searching for them for a very long, and very destructive, time. He can see them now. He will be in a frenzy to reach them.

  Never mind reaching them, she said. Are you ready for what happens when he does?

  The Keeper laughed. It was a slightly bewildered sound. I? No, of course not. The water is reasonably certain I’ll survive. But the portal is opening, Kaylin. Grethan can see it. He can see your refugees, although they are not yet entirely clear. I think you will have minutes, if that, before the Devourer is loose in the world.

  She understood, then. He can’t reach the elements, she told Evanton, if he isn’t loose in the world, as you put it. Unless—

  Unless?

  We came here through the store—

  I’m sorry, he said quietly, but no.

  Then I have no other way to reach you. She was still suspended in air; she couldn’t lower her arms. She spoke in a rush without volition as the elements opened the figurative window and began to shout instructions and encouragement.

  She’d thought to be afraid, and in part she was—because she could feel herself swept up in the gale of elemental emotion, and she had to work to remember why she’d come here in the first place. Why had she? To find the Devourer. And to save the people who it stalked in its ignorance: the refugees and the in habitants of her world.

  The refugees now had to take care of themselves, although they had Severn, if he could make himself understood. The Hawks knew what to expect, and they knew where to expect it. She let it go, and turned the whole of her attention to the Devourer. She had made a metaphor, and she now attempted to continue it; if the elements were standing at a barely open window shouting either directions or welcome or both, the Devourer was still outside, and he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—move, because movement would take them out of his sight.

  But he needed to find the door, and the door needed to be opened. Someone needed to invite him in. Help me, she told the elements.

  The water said, Why?

  Because the portal is opening, and he’s going to go through it. I don’t think he has a way of leaving nonworld. He destroys what he finds, and sometimes, somehow, he finds worlds. But I don’t think he ever sees them as anything but names or words.

  I need to be on the outside of whatever it is he becomes when he leaves this place.

  Silence. Heavy, clouded silence. The words were worse. I don’t think he understands your concept of inside and outside.

  Kaylin, frustrated, said, What was he when he was part of you?

  They answered as one voice, and Kaylin didn’t understand a single word they said. She recognized what she heard as words; the syllables were sharp and defined, and if she listened hard enough, she could repeat them, for all the good they’d do her.

  But the Devourer heard, and the Devourer turned; she could feel the movement of his internal eyes. His eyes.

  She rose without any volition at all, approaching those eyes, which grew larger and larger. She had thought them deserts, both ice and sand—at a distance. Some sense of that emptiness remained, but none of the sense of geography; she would have lifted her hands to shield her eyes, but she couldn’t move her arms at all. She could barely close her eyes.

  When she opened her eyes, she almost closed them again. She could see light and darkness and the uneasy blend of both; it was like a very spectacular hangover, but without the pain. Pain came from confusion. But the confusion, in this case, wasn’t hers—it rode her. Or she rode it. She couldn’t sense her body at all. The only thing she could sense—and it was the wrong word for what she now felt—was the immensity of emptiness. She was, she realized, the Devourer. She was part of him; she saw and felt what he saw and felt—but she could only dimly understand any of it.

  Whatever parts of her that were Kaylin were so insignificant she couldn’t feel them at all. This was admittedly worrying; she took a very figurative deep breath. He didn’t. What he could see, she could now see—but interpreting it, making sense of it? It was as if what he could see was filtered through her very human, very normal vision. Which meant she was still herself. Somewhere.

  He turned and she turned with him, as if they were indivisible. There was one solid thing in this blurred and shifting landscape, but she wasn’t certain what it was.

  As she circled it in a frenzy, she realized what it must be, but the Devourer’s vision didn’t see words—even ancient
, living words—the way hers did. These words didn’t look like runes; they didn’t look like fire, earth, air, or water to Kaylin, either. But their light was in motion, and as she watched—and she did, because she didn’t have much choice—they traced a complicated pattern, a type of dance, across the ether, and the trail of their luminescent shadows lingered where they’d passed. She did recognize those.

  It was as if the words the Devourer saw and understood cast shadows, and those shadows were a type of ink, something that Kaylin could see and comprehend. She realized, then, that that’s all she’d really ever see of the words: the light they cast, the thing they left behind.

  And what are we? What are the rest of us? Nothing else cast those shadows, nothing else scrawled across the ether in the Devourer’s vision.

  Kaylin. She could hear Severn; he was her anchor.

  Listen to me, she said, to the Devourer. Listen to what I tell you.

  He paused in his frenzied circular motion.

  She spoke of her world. She spoke of the things that she knew of it and imagined, as she did, that she was laying down the complex, complicated, lines of a world in a brief pencil sketch. But he understood something about what she tried so hard to tell him because he had made her part of him. He had taken her name.

  The elements aided her, picking up threads of her story, leaving the shapes of other words in their wake; words that were in some part derived from their baselines, but also unique. But they moved so damn fast, Kaylin couldn’t follow it all, and she gave up trying. She let them speak; it wasn’t a conversation, exactly, but it wasn’t the noisy, shouting chaos of a mob, either; she could speak and she was certain she had his attention.