The leg felt uncomfortable at first but, after testing it for a while, he was managing to retain a semblance of stability as he moved his sore body across the cave. Each step sent bouts of pain bolting up his stump, hobbling next to the slope that would lead him to the far mouth of the cave. The rubble was loose, treacherous to climb even for a Felsian whole. He stared at the alien limb, at his workmanship and its ample base shaped roughly like a foot. He hated it. It didn’t show, of course, because one should be grateful with those who provided aid, and with one’s functional crafts. And functional, the leg was, but it wasn’t more his than the sword. It was a leg he made, and leg that hurt. He couldn’t help but resent it for this flaw, for not standing up to the real thing. If some parents felt that way about the children they sired, the monstrous attitude of Father was nothing else but the death of politeness.
How hard he tried not to hobble, and how miserably he failed! But in this same cave he saw death, sitting on a corner, mischievous shadows playing tricks to his mind, awaiting the one who refused to climb.
And at the top of the slope, beyond the treacherous field of loose clasts, the Masterwork awaited. On an apple tree of her own making she sat, feeding plump, turgid, spherical ravens to deformed, sharp-teethed fruits. Apples green or red; ravens black or white. “Will you climb, Ald?” She teased, knowing he intended to do so, as soon as he gathered the courage.
“Before my leg grows back if I am lucky. Couldn’t you shape some stairs out of the rock?” Unkindness didn’t need to answer for Ald to continue and correct himself. “Of course you could. Will you? that’s the question I should ask.”
“No.”
“Unpleasant, but not unbecoming of you.”
She turned a raven in her hand, admiring its sphericity. “Do you think they would fare better if I remove air friction from them?”
Ald decided he had paid enough attention to her for the moment. How to climb? Where to start? How long to wait? Pain would be there in an hour, it would be there in two. It could be there in a week, too. His arms felt heavy, partly from the effort of using them far more than normal to move around the place and the manual labor he had been tirelessly realizing to make the leg, and partly due to the hard surface upon which he had been sleeping. If his body was a bag of potatoes, he felt he was already puree under the peels. “Unkindness, be honest with me: is there a tomorrow for me?”
“If you climb, there will be more tomorrows than you can count awaiting for you. If you don’t, well… the apples are always hungry.”
Ald looked down, eyes wide open. Unkindness scared him sometimes, reminded him of the insurmountable gap in their powers, in their very perception of reality. Unkindness had never been properly born, and she would never die. She had no body to call her own: Ald was his soul, but he was also his eyes, his hands, the leg he had lost. Unkindness mutilated herself a readily as he breathed: she cared not about her wellbeing, for she could have none. All of her fears could only be second hand, all of her understanding of how anything living felt was loaned, or even stolen. Did she suffer this reality? Could she even suffer, in the full extent of the word? Was Mother involved in a similar existence?
“Unkindness, why do you care?”
“Fascination, I’d say. Why do you care, Ald?”
“Unlike you, Lady in white, I am prone to certain… loses,” the Felsian said, putting his peg leg forward, grimacing from the pain the step engendered. 2Climbing this will be a nightmare.”
“Worse than another night sleeping on the cave floor?”
Ald groaned, scrunching his nose, and leaned over the slope, examining the rough surface with his calloused hands. A piece of the stone disaggregated under his grasp, reduced to a fine rubble. He stared at his fingertips for a second, and then at his backpack.
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“Ald, don’t commit acts of insanity in my presence, please. Shoo me away first.”
“But a pile of debris with a lower slope would allow me to crawl upwards, at least part of the way Furthermore, I’d be better off removing the lose stones before attempting a climb.”
“Do you wish to bury yourself alive?” She threw a bouncing raven in Ald’s direction, the spherical bird flapping its useless wings before disintegrating into dark smoke before his eyes. “The cave could collapse.”
“I trust you wouldn’t let it do so. You need me alive.”
She cast another raven carelessly. “I don’t need you whole. How would you feel about having to do all of this one-handed, Ald?”
Ald instinctively pulled his hands away from the wall, and tried to dissimulate by crossing his arms. “Is there a point in lying to you?”
“It makes some feel better.” And she didn’t need to add anything else, as Ald was well aware that the statement would never apply to him.
The claws of his foot found the wall, and he made an effort, against wave after wave of pain, to make them dig, at least a little bit, into the slanted wall. His nails struggled for purchase, taking their time to find the jutting-out rocks that could support his weight.
He tried to convince himself. Extend the hand upwards, to the light, and forget the pain that washes over your whole being. Forget that the wood is slipping off against the humid stone, threatening to send you plummeting to the cave floor. If he didn’t look down, And only for brief instants, he could feel he still had two legs, instead of one, and would try to move claws that weren’t there.
The illusion broke each time his real leg had to be pulled up, and then his hands bore most of his weight, and at times he prayed to Mother, Father, and even Unkindness for the rocks he was grabbing onto to not fragment under his fingers.
And they resisted. Way more than the splintering wood seemed to, way more than his skin as the straps and ropes that secured his new appendage in place chafed it. But the light clamored for him, as did Unkindness’ shadow.
He thrusted his whole body upwards once more, grabbing onto another ledge, clawing another jutting out rock. The pain surrounded him like a blanket of needles, jabs going in and out of his skin in tides.
Yet he persevered. Because he needed to, and because letting go would not ease the pain. No slippery rock, no fragile lump would deter him from reaching the exit. Meter by meter he crawled up the wall, an arthritic gecko on its last race for sunlight.
His bag hung heavily from his shoulders, and more than once he thought about dropping it, abandoning his things on the cave. The few tools he had decided to keep, the mortar and pestle, the pigments he had made. The painted stones. No, leaving it behind now could put him in a precarious situation down the road. The only advantages he had over the misshapen —not the masterworks, the merely deformed creatures— were his cunning and Mother’s magic. And if they could turn his senses into agents of betrayal, only magic remained his ally. They could have claws sharper than his blades, arms longer than his body, flesh harder than the rock under his hands. The mutations could turn them into untiring automatons, into runners that could chase a scream. Into creatures that Unkindness would refuse to hurt. He couldn’t leave the bag.
Another little hop forward secured a higher ledge. He let the wall support his forehead as he drew tired breaths.
“Are we close?” He asked, scared of the ghost of failure that stalked his mind, that told his limbs, real and imaginary, to give up, to abandon this so-far-fruitless endeavor.
“A few meters away from each other, if you refer to my physical manifestation,” as she was wont to do, Unkindness provided a non-answer.
“To Father!”
“We are more than halfway there, but you won’t reach him by walking. Or by swimming. Or by crawling.”
“By climbing?” Ald ventured, trying to reach another irregularity to get a grasp, and failing, feeling his fingers slip slightly, making his heart turn over for a second.
“No. You shall see, if you reach for me.” She stood and begun walking into the sun, out into the dandruff-white flats, her cape of raven feathers stiff due to the unwillingness of the winds to disrupt Him, the source of the blanket of vibracula-rimmed flakes. Ald would emerge in a wee while, and she wouldn’t give him a hand. His ascent was as certain as that of the sun at daybreak. And he would marvel at the sight of the plains of white, marvel and loathe the wriggling tears of her broken brother.
And he? He would wait for them to be stepped upon by a son of Felsia, to get a chance and admire one of them once again, like he had for the last time so many years ago. Every photon was meant to find its retina. Every image its archive.