by G. Deyke
~*~
The great turtle bears us down the river, winding Northeast through the land. It is a long way, and we must be a heavy burden, but she swims fast and easily and without complaint, and the current helps us along. Water washes over her shell and against my feet and legs, so I that I am soon shivering with cold.
The living colors and the freshness in the air fade as we move away from the lake. Now it is the same bleak world it was before, cold and gray and dead. It is calming to have this deadness around me instead of the sharp strangeness of the living places. It is better when it knows it is dead.
I don't like being so close to this turtle. I don't like her. I don't trust her. I sit on her shell clasping my knees to my chest, and wait in shivering silence till we arrive, hardly daring to move. My arms – still sore from rowing – hurt from holding my knees up so long, but I don't want to relax them here. I don't want to take more space than I must. I don't want to be nearer to her.
Therrin speaks to her as she swims. I don't like to listen – my dislike for the shared tongue is only growing – but I cannot help but hear, and I know it must be better to know everything I can about Therrin's task, so that I can be of aid to her. But most everything the turtle says we have heard elsewhere before. And I do not trust her.
The curse swims beside us, drifting through the water blackly. I think it must move the way my memories move. I never saw her swimming, so the curse does not move its arms. It floats along with its face underwater (would that it could drown!) bobbing up and down with the movement of the waves. It looks like thin black paper. But it is still she, it still looks like her and I cannot look away.
At last we are near the hillock, and the turtle stops and lets us climb off onto the riverbank. I am relieved to be standing on the ground again, but I am intensely aware that this is not the ground I want to be on, not my Thiluan ground that I have loved all my life, but a strange gray dying ground not even in my own world.
The turtle bids us good luck and farewell, and swims back toward the lake with Therrin's thanks. I am glad to see her go, to be alone again among the dusty gray grasses. Ty and Therrin are all right. I don't mind their nearness.
Now we follow the curse to the hillock. It knows the way. It always knows the way. It looked once at Therrin's map and now it knows where on the map it is and which way to go to find anything else. It has no mind to be confused by directions, Ty said. So we follow it. We trust it not to lead us astray. We trust it to know things it ought not to be able to know.
“Shall we sleep there after all?” asks Ty. “I might like to see this ghost – but I won't go against their advice unless you agree.”
I have some idea of what a ghost is, but I think this is only because of the shared tongue. I think this but I do not know it. Perhaps I heard of such a thing before. Perhaps not. Either way I don't want to see it. I don't want to see anything. It doesn't matter. I will do what they choose.
“I don't know,” says Therrin. “There must be a reason they advised us not to. But – I am curious too, and perhaps there is a reason the witch chose it as a landmark. It may be that she meant for us to see it. Curse can keep watch, and be sure we are safe.”
I don't want to put my life in the curse's hands, but I say nothing.
It is already dark when we arrive at the hillock with its crown of tall stones. We build a fire between them, and eat from our stores, and lie down to sleep with the stones at our backs. I am afraid, but also very tired, perhaps too tired to know what it is I fear. What sleep I have had in this world has done little to rest me.
So my eye has closed, and I have almost begun to fall asleep, when suddenly I wake again. I hear or feel something – what it is, I don't know – and I sit up and tear off my eyepatch, and I whistle to Snake, and I look around to see what woke me, what brought this fear rushing through my veins.
I see nothing.
Therrin and Ty are awake too, and they are both looking at a spot a little to the right of the smoldering remains of our fire. But there is nothing there, nothing at all but gray earth and gray grasses.
“I am Therrin Shiaran of House Lithuk,” says Therrin.
“To whom are you speaking?” I ask, looking all around the circle of stones in fear. “What is there?”
“You don't see him?”
“Perhaps because the demon sees only what is there,” Ty offers. “Perhaps he isn't, after all, real.”
They keep talking but their words mean nothing to me because I can't hear the answers to their questions nor the questions they are answering. I am afraid of this blindness, this deafness, as I am afraid of this world.
It all means nothing to me. I cannot understand.
Have I truly gone mad, then? Is that why I cannot see this person to whom they speak? I have seen many strange things since we came here. I have seen living bones and I have seen people who looked like fish beneath their waists. And I have heard things I cannot know. I have understood things though the words were meaningless sounds.
I must be mad, then. That is the only explanation. These things cannot be real. They cannot be.
They must be speaking Thiluan Common as they always have. They must be, else I could not understand it. It must be my own madness which twists their Common into strings of sound I have never heard before.
It must be my own madness which makes me see fish-tails instead of legs, and bones instead of flesh and fur. It must be.
I laugh to myself, quietly, under the sound of their talking to the air. I am glad that I know what it is, at last, that I understand. The smile stretches my lips and my cheeks and it hurts. The laughter feels strange in my chest. I am unused to laughing. It bursts out of my chest like a quiet broken cough. I feel like I'm choking, dying. I can't breathe.
I stop suddenly, with unsure breath, and find that I am moaning almost silently in the very back of my throat. I don't know why I'm not weeping. I want to claw out my eye. I pull at and twist the skin on my hands and I scratch at it so that it hurts and itches and I don't want to stop, I want to scrape away the hurt. I must stop before I lose all my skin. I can see it in my mind, my hands worn raw, bleeding red stumps without skin, rotting and falling apart. I mustn't do that. I mustn't.
Instead I run my fingers through my hair – unbound for sleep – again and again, tearing through the knots and twisting in new ones. Hair winds around my fingers like a net, holding me, trapping me. I want to scream. I want to weep. My breath is shaking.
I don't like it here.
I want to go home.
Surely, no matter what the demon can or cannot see, I ought to be hearing what they hear. Surely if my mind was whole I'd hear the questions they answer.
Maybe the demon cannot live here, in this bleak world. Maybe it will die soon, and I shall be left blind again. And Ty won't be able to make me a new one. He almost died the last time. And his talent doesn't work here. It can't. None of ours can. Mine has been fading, more and more, the longer we stay here. It is dead, except when we were at the gate, and there it was overwhelmed, so that my nature sense was nearly singing, and I couldn't feel anything anymore because I could feel so much.
Maybe that was only because it had had no time to fade yet.
When we were in the necromancer's palace, and Ty made the torches flare up – it was enough to scare me, and it was enough to scare his daughter, and enough to make the necromancer himself see reason, but still: I think he could have done better, elsewhere. I doubt he did something so little when he could have made an elemental to truly frighten the necromancer. He has never tried to hide how strong his talent is.
What did the necromancer say – that he oughtn't to have given us the apples? Maybe the rare true food of this world strengthens talents. Maybe the death of talents is a part of the bane on this world.
Maybe this world has had too much wine.
And when we fell from the dying great bone-hawk, Therrin cried out and then there was a wind that slowed us. Therrin is a great win
d-caller, but still we landed painfully hard.
And then the villagers wanted to burn us with their flickering orange torches...
I try not to think of that.
But my own talent is dead here, truly dead. I cannot even feel Therrin or Ty anymore. Maybe they're not here. Maybe I am dreaming all this. I don't know. I can't feel them. I can't know that they are real.
Maybe all the colorless grays I have seen here are only because the demon in my eye is dying, because it cannot see the colors. Maybe I shall be blind again, soon. And this time I shall be blind forever, without even my nature sense to guide me.
And there has been so little to smell here in this world, and it is so silent, and everything is like dust beneath my fingers. I am losing myself. I am losing myself and I am losing my hold on the world. How long will it be, then, before I am one of those lost to this bane? Maybe I shall turn to stone, cold and silent, and then I shall sink into the gray dirt and this will turn into another stone plain and I shall be lost forever beneath it.
I think how it might be to be lost, to never feel anything at all. To never again be afraid of the future or afraid of the past. To never again be sickened by the sight of the curse. To never again feel the pain when I lose whatever is close to me. To be cold silent stone, to never know it even when I crumble.
My gaze falls on the curse, which sits watching me. I don't like it. I don't like it watching me. I want to look away whenever I see it because the very sight hurts me, in my belly, in my mind. I don't want it here. I don't want it anywhere. I want it gone and dead and away from me.
I can't look away from it. I can't think of anything except its end. Almost without knowing what I am doing, I draw the knife from my belt – it has been weighing heavily on my mind ever since I received it – and stab at the flat black imitation of her before me.
I can't feel anything. I can feel only rage. It burns like a fire in my mind, sealing off thought. Is this what hatred feels like? Is this what it means?
I wish it were her my knife slices through and not only this copy. I wish she were dying before me. I wish my knife were pulling through her skin and her blood were flying and she were screaming (and her pain is the fox's pain, she looks like it when she dies) and I wish she were sorry for what she did to me. I can picture it so well. I can see her flesh laid bare in my mind. I can see her face full of fear and pain and remorse. I can see her tears. But I don't want to. I don't want to know. I don't want to see her ever again. I don't want to see her even in my mind, even in pain, even afraid and hurting and paying for her crimes. I want her gone.
The curse's shadow-flesh reforms around my blade, unscathed. I can't hurt it. Of course I can't hurt it. It isn't alive. It isn't anything. It's not there. I don't want to think about it. I drop my knife and I fall to my knees and I put my head in my hands and I weep. My shoulders heave with every sob and I am shaking and hot itchy tears are spilling down my face and I feel naked and alone.
I don't have a charm anymore. I have nothing. There is nothing with me. There is nothing I can cling to, nothing and no one. My family are far away and they have cast me out and Mother must be dead by now. And I could do nothing. I wasn't even there. And when I was there she wouldn't listen, she wouldn't even see that I was there, that I was real. And she cast me out. She didn't want me and she didn't love me and she left me and now she is gone, she is dead, she must be, and I could do nothing. I miss her. I miss them all. I want her back. I want her arms around me warm and comforting. I want her voice, when I was little and she still tried to soothe my fears. I want even her scolding that so frightened me, so long as she'd be here.
I try to hold in my tears but I can't stop them.
I remember (no I must not remember I must not) when I stumbled into Therwil from the Desert and I found myself an empty room and I sat there and I would not think and I was as cold and as unfeeling as stone. I would not think of how my mother made me leave. But I was too afraid and too lonely and sad to move, so I sat and I did nothing and I thought of nothing. I didn't even try to find food until I could wait no longer for hunger.
And then she came and she saved me from that stupor and I don't want to think about her, I don't want to, she did not save me but hurt me, she came and hurt me and I trusted her because I needed someone to trust. And she betrayed me, she hurt me, she used me and then cast me aside like a dirty rag (but only a noble would cast aside a dirty rag; as long as it is still soft it would be a good addition to my bed).
I don't want to think about her. I try to block off the thought, the memory. I want to whistle to Snake, but I can't control myself, my face, my lips, my breath. I can't. Maybe he can hear the whistle in my thoughts, in my mind.
Maybe he can't.
Even in Anaria, the gods are strange gods who live among the stars instead of under the earth. If Snake's sacred coils do not reach across the sea, how could they reach through the gate into these Unnamed Lands? This is not Thiluan soil beneath me. It is meaningless gray dust. Snake cannot lie beneath it. He is gone. They are all gone, all the gods.
I am all alone.
