Fate’s Time. The blood of Timelessness far had spilt. Despite the Days returned, Minim in a haze exhausted from her climb watched for eight solar revolutions and on each Day-revolved a different soul young or old would arrive at Lillian’s cell. A ceremonial tea set lay prepared on the top step, and all that came would make their turn.
∞
She saw dark ingredients added to that heavily-scented tea of rose or poppy petals and lavender; the further powdered spores of an indigo-toned mushroom. In one light the spores were violet and crimson in another. She recognised the scent though not its purpose - from the smell she could see two souls dressed darkly, trying to keep her from all hurt and harm. She saw candles blown out and their smoke. Awake from Memory’s tomb.
∞
“The assassin…” she spoke to Lady Fate, wherever she was listening. “I see her in a memory.” Minim inhaled needily, sent by scent elsewhere.
Along the cell floor through its winding bars was space enough for a snake to slip through, perhaps.
And through that smallest of tunnels Lillian’s tea was heard; a rattling of porcelain clay dragged by spiders and their webs, these offerings of the young and old alike.
In some versions the masked assassin instead took the tea to the prisoner, stepping from the shadows outside the cell into those inside.
∞
From no angle around the barred room waiting tired could Minim see Lillian’s face. Only her long grey hair draping and larger wing, a grey blanket of childhood her companion. A sipping sound - or did she imagine that?
∞
Sun, star and moonlight moved, and there young Lillian sat moveless when her tea was finished. Another string to another cup into illusions of levitation. Above her the twisted canopy of her cell made Light’s cast flutter, and patterns weird across her bony floor, and Minim there with her always watching and waiting.
∞
The Spring-Sworn came to observe the bars were ribs cut from their cages, and only these, in lengths and condition all disparate that this place had long been such a mound. She did not want to know what monsters were made of those bones alone and had in this mangle died at once, or did she believe this is all age had left and vultures discarded, all else for food and fading fit, and what gravity had these lost ribs to one another? As the tails of white rats in sewered canals knotting?
“This gravestone-peak, a mass grave of the same soul.” Her hands she placed upon those ribs and heard a startled Fate speak:
“You will see Amneshay again, Spring-Sworn. A wall separates you. A thing once of stone… of stars… that I intend to erode until there it is, a thread always inside. The strings of all things I see. A thread to pull and with it all the rest. The terms of contracts fulfilled. When I am done there will be only one dimension, one thread, one tapestry of all. One world, with a moon and a star in a system closed.”
∞
Minim thought of the woven realm of Fate’s reside: had such deconstruction already taken place there? A thread to pull and with it all the rest.
As well - had another solar revolution passed or reversed? As Minim realised she was standing in the way and stepped back from the ceremonial tea set. Away from her needy inhalations helping her remember. The masked assassin came to help the next pilgrim-soul prepare the tea, though whenever Minim stared too long or tried to reach out and touch The Shadow, as it is with memories, her grasp fell apart and the pilgrims completed the ritual alone.
She focused on what she was seeing: souls involved in the act of keeping Lillian, The Great Freedom, in her state subdued with amnesic tea.
∞
And Lady Fate made graceful tether along her silken strings, her unseen legs thumping the dimensions she was scuffing out:
“Spring-Sworn, my rise in power was no one soul’s malevolence, certainly not my own, but an act in which all had their part to play. When will was theirs, in an age of prosperity never before known, which is to say, with clearest mind furthest from distress they gave Lillian, The Great Freedom, her tea. For under Falsehood, Humanity-all was by so many things imprisoned. Even its last king. The stories vary though in all a fanatic led the resistance, and following that victory there she is in the cell we all in thanks have made for her, to stop her from going further. An heir uncrowned, for what peace can a fanatic find in peace, even if it is of their making? For Humanity is born of Nature Insatiable; Life Proliferate another name. Why would stars spread so far until colder and colder? Why not remain together in warm sleep and leave the darkness to itself? Why Light and stars at all in the beginning? Was the primordial darkness of Nothing’s nil so wrong? Why did Time first tick? Were all things not once Timeless and here we are returning to that point with Time’s murder? All these the questions and observations under which souls as you and Lillian cannot sleep. Lillian is that force in Nature which first made light from dark. Lillian is that spirit different-though-the-same in all humanity. The pride and with it the belief that one’s hands are the movers of all things. The discontent with self and surroundings. The imagining, always testing its reach. Oldest under the sun. Courtdom would not be here without her. Though in victory Lillian saw there still was much constraining the souls she had helped liberate from Falsehood’s ways, Tragedy all its names. She did not understand that Humanity lives in no boundless meadow, nor should it as it once did: live incarcerate. Humanity best writhes alive in walled gardens, inching through ecstasy, and that is the new world we shall give them if we are brave enough, you and I, with Greed’s machines. As they, Humanity, have asked of us not with words but their actions, for are their actions not their desires? Would their body step one way as their spirit goes another? One of Falsehood’s leftovers that we struggle to shrug off - saying one course is best and walking another entirely - in corruption worst or confusion best.”
Minim frowned, unsure of what Fate was saying of ages past, the Lady seemingly drifting away from all the certainty she previously spoke with. The runaway asked the seamstress:
“Human Nature has relinquished its Freedom To, imprisoned her in its tallest towers, a concept walks as in myths. Where were you when this happened? What are you, Lady Fate?”
∞
“Just as an apprentice of Old Gada’il would ask. There are many of us all with our different names, though we are one, or once were and will be again. Limbs of the same embodied force named Entropy.”
Hearing this, Minim shuffled, uncomfortable on the oakenstone listening to madness she could not see:
“Some limbs seeking order when disorder loosely reigns, others seeking disorder when order has too firm a grasp, such is our penchant to unravel whatever most is taut. The same force our Lillian is, that first encouraged Light from The Dark. Your master will have told you our name if ever he spoke of beginnings… and Timelessness has scattered us conscious against each other. Allowing all of us to be, all at once scattered Me against Me. Another reason if not the core reason to turn it all back… to make One-again what has been scattered. For all the good that comes from winning my duel with Lillian, much is the needless suffering in between, your own suffering in among that lot. Where was I? I was waiting. Among us-many there are those who Chance’s-rolling nor Luck’s surprise have seen fit to grant with opportunity, and I among those was waiting. Humanity long spoke my name but they did not know me, not at all what I could be. I heard them calling and here I wait no more; with every chance possible, that you and I may freeze over this eternal cycle with our crowns. Perfect order has come! Disorder wearing our mask has reigned too long. Untangled as Human Nature shall be under my woven reign, all souls a thread in the perfect patterns of my tapestries becoming tapestry. Nature meanwhile is untamed, as you know too well, that even stars will die. Indifferent Death visiting always, sent unbeknownst by Time unbeknownst. Coming to end Spring with Summer’s start. Time’s murder is not an act I would ever have resorted to… Time had its place in my world, though we are left with this aftermath.”
Believing all that Fate had not only told her, but had trusted her with, Minim asked:
“And in all this, what does the tea do to Lillian? Numb her? What have all souls played their part in? Making her forget and remember as is your will… have you ever taken the same tea?”
∞
“I always feared the same, that I was being tricked into drinking such medicinal poisons - I have discovered it is a misdirection.” Lady Fate spoke with ire, having been fooled before by forces Minim did not know. “Let us make with our weft straight what is warping away from us; isolation has been unkind to me and I have spoken too long. Tell me. Why are you here?”
“The tapestry.” Minim said bluntly to the voice untied to any dimension. “To seek The Lightning Crown.”
“And so to become lord of all Nature… yes. Look closer at Lillian.” Fate commanded.
∞
Tired Minim twisted herself to see inside the mangled labyrinth and saw Lillian’s long hair was pressed strangely above her ears, as though there sat upon her bowed head a crown invisible. Sad for a child no older than her.
“A crown?” Minim asked, pressing her face deeper against the bars and still she could not see as she wished to.
“She is a force of Nature and Human Nature, reading her sandy books she sought the crown you seek. A very old thing. To you it is a crown… though to Lillian it is a shackle. How could she have known?”
“The crown keeps her shackled here, or the tea?”
“Both.” Fate answered. “Separate mechanisms from different tales here overlapping, converging. Constants the same and variables rearranged in a Timeless flood.”
“And upon my head it will be The Lightning Crown? Where is it, why can we not see its flash and might…” The Spring-Sworn asked, ceasing her struggle irritated against the ribs that would not bend: “A shackle, you said? If I remove it from her, if somehow I can find my way inside this maze, will removing it from Lillian not free your foe? Freedom To against Freedom From.”
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∞
“It will, though I shall have gained you in return.” Minim listened too closely and heard the wet smile crackling again; heard the trembling stretch of meaty limbs. “Let me worry over her… as I long have, though never long enough; too late and old we learn these things. Now that you understand, you will need a guide through the maze to meet young Lillian Grey.”
Minim thought it would be the masked assassin, and asked in soft joy:
“Is Amneshay my sister? That is what I can see with these tea-scents… a memory of our parents. My mother a deadly Shadow, though full of fear, of grief for a future not far. My father more hopeful, too hopeful, that he did nothing but follow, trusting the wrong would right itself.”
“She is your older sister. Entire journeys you have shared without knowing. Another thing I will sew shut, the two of you.”
∞
Even under her arms Minim’s hands were stiff in that bitter cold above the world, her robes dim of their patterned lightning despite the sunset ‘unsetting’. It seemed no victory or reunion distant in remembering her sister, as now what had she found but more and more to lose? Her master Old Gadail was all the love she could remember, the dread of losing him to his Winter had urged her on this far.
Her parents and her sister - three more souls to mourn for - to keep this painful hope alive for. What if she failed to create The Spring to which she had sworn herself?
And before this tale her own is over she will find a fourth; one all-eclipsing.
∞
Fate spun:
“Grief was Amneshay’s hidden define, a mantle passed down by your mother. Our cause your sister still fights for, across eternal leaps. Your define will be your Bravery. Your enemies, such as Ahlzvyr The Hunter Lord, shall name your virtue-Brave as Fear. He will call you illiterate for you do not believe the books or cave-art he believes. For you are leal to my tapestries dreamed, devoted to the shores Before Good and Evil, to The Gardened Shore. For you have gazed Beyond with Far Sight and saw as Lillian did. The crown you have yet to earn shall allow you to take Time’s place… you shall be Nature’s Lord. The seasons, stars and darkness yours to rearrange. Where Time swam onwards, you shall turn back.”
∞
“My sister.” the air atop Gravestone-tall was thinner and thinner, the great monument further and further from the ground
Gadail was with Minim if she knew it or not, and just when she struggled most, his breath he gave to her, across distances only the spirit can surmount.
“You are no orphan, but your tusks made you a target from your birth. A target not only of Truthdom’s shamanic ways.” Lady Fate explained. “Born under eclipses and their storms, no less. As a beacon of hope and despair to all that would take notice, such as I. You became a target of mine, a dye my patterns require. Alas a target of my foe as well, your blood added to her ink. Alas for your parents, of course. They knew to leave you in Gadail’s care would cradle you in a way their shadows never could have… perhaps their shadows could have even better hid you, though what powers would you have learned from them? Safe with them but soft in shadows. Your mother knew what you could become in that future if she let you go, and so forsook her fear just long enough.”
“You’re using all of us.” Minim sat out of breath.
“With all the power I possess, I have a duty to Order. As do you. What would you alone do with your power without my guidance? What are my human strings if Nature flails wanton as it always has?”
“If you exist, Lady Fate, then what duty is there other than that which you decide and dictate for us?” she stole Fate’s words. “Other than, whatever purpose you have needled into us?”
“Did you see the tea-dark ritual over and watch it not once? Is it my design, or do I to the desires of Humanity kneel? Am I not taking mantles others have thrown off? There are those still with will their own, for I was not there from the start of the stars. I am weaving myself among all things though slowly, as Everything is the vastest dominion. I will not force you… there will always be another variation, another constant.”
“How long have you waited for me to come here lead, because you cannot force me?” Minim’s tusks were sharp against the woven clouds afar.
“I will not coerce by threading in such ways that it seems there is only one good pattern and all others are of Evil’s fray, for such revelations are always dragged into sunlight, and betrayal destroys all that could have been perfect. In Timelessness we must forget our linear thinking, our seeing duality in everything. The shores we seek are before all these words.”
∞
“May I see my sister? Know her voice… her hands. Where is my mother in Timelessness?”
Minim did not know if she meant this; if meeting her mother again she would not wish to leave her side, or be even more distant from her. ‘Sister’ and ‘Mother’ somehow lesser words for too young she had been. To have been separated for so long, a bond that could have been and can no longer.
Was her family not idyllic in the unknown? That same unknown filled with her wishes of closeness. Of Spring eternal. When there would be sunlight and moonlight, tea without poison to remember or forget, soft cakes and chewy farbark. All inside the walls of her making, a garden of once and ever.
∞
She breathed with all that Gadail had given her, a teacup meant for Lillian in her hands atop the gravestone-tall’s last step. Inhaling the tea-scent she better remembered that one of her sister’s hands was kind though gloved with hard leather - the other was a bony prosthetic having been severed at the elbow in a duel far away. Sheathing a poisoned dagger once a longer sword, knowing somehow she was smiling behind her mask. Her sister’s loyal companion was there also, leaning on shadows away from light.
∞
Lillian in her cell appeared numb to all around her, and spidery Fate sewed shut the moth-holes forming across her blanket-grey without being seen:
“You have met Amneshay before… travelled and fought beside. Seen to endings together. That long has been our aim, my Minim. This is far from our first meeting, as well… throughout the stitches of my cosmos many have been our attempts to seize full control of Nature, that we might turn Timeless Time back to the blissful points of its compass. To those points when you and your family are together. To when all this grief is gone for it never was… for into all possible futures you have stepped and brave, cured what could become sick or was sick from the start. Wrapped in swaddling cloth lightning-patterned that would become your robes, a material of my making.”
Minim scratched at her sleeve-unreal which has with her grown perfectly; since a babe this force named Fate had known her. Called out to her. Responsible for the very clothes she had always worn. The Lady of Frac’tralien-to-be reiterated:
“Now that you understand, you must navigate through the maze with a guide who has gone such a path before. With he who first placed that crown atop Lillian’s head and made it invisible - and look at her - forgetting it was ever there. He helped her to find it, from clues in the books she read. And you will meet yourself... your weaker self ‘Serib’… and you will hex her. You will hex your conscience and become unstoppable as I am; it is all that will ever hold us back. Here… down these gravestone steps, traverse with Ikosinok, my servant leal. His world or land among those that ‘first’ have fallen under Timeless floods, his lineage of a tribe forgotten and so he shares our wish he tells me - to return and remain.”
∞
Just as mysteriously as Lady Fate had claimed, there he was to The Spring-Sworn’s eyes as well. Dead angels at his feet - those who had come all this way not as pilgrims - eyes melted from their sockets that they had beheld the divine and blast shadows scorched into stone's eternity where the rest had stood and tried to scream.
∞
He sat some way down the steps and with reluctance Minim left young Lillian, The Great Freedom alone at the top of the world, where only dreams and ideals such as may. Believing injustice crowned the scene, The Spring-Sworn shuffled down the steps, and with each she could easier breathe with strength regained. A child leaving a child, with all that magnitude most old have spent or left unspent; the presence of potential, of all she could become.
∞
She met with Lady Fate’s servant leal.
Ikosinok’s skin was in imitation painted as a night sky: darkness flecked with white spots starlike, as comets streaked. Clusters. Nebulae bruising. Wearing not a thread of clothing, unfettered by the cold air of Winter’s parting and Spring’s beginning over Haven high. Hair black that would be long across the ground longer than he, where it not floating about him as hair submerged will do, from scalp to ends covered-sparkling in blacker sand. A sword aflame with white starry fire in his hand was hissing at the wind, burning all the more alight, himself a shaman to Minim’s eyes and that longsword was his totem. Lady Fate spoke:
“He was the apprentice of The Firelord, Anaxagyr’il.”
Old Gadail did not know of this shaman nor his tribe, or he had not told Minim when she was named Syrib. She descended the steps to meet him as told and he looked up to her lightning-eyes, to the bronze sunset of her gaze. She stopped as one of his eyes was an orb black, the other white with light, his stare and skin aligned. A lone tusk once twisted in helix and spiral out from his mouth, worn or filed small Minim saw now; a thing to hide. And from this alone he seemed - despite his power - persecuted.
∞
Of all his strange appearance and presence, his hair behaving no gravity and frame unaffected by cold, with all trappings of a culture unheard of, that tusk alone was familiar to The Spring-Sworn.
∞
The same tusks-helixea were shared by a species of whale in one of Old Gadail’s stories fireside, whales whose seas were threatened and to the skies these whales learned flight, swimming Wind’s currents away from oceans no longer safe. Gadail came to know them well, being The Windlord. As their tusks were used to unsettle the seabed and so carve out their craters and sifting-feast on the uproar, the whales with their spiralled tusks dug at mountains the same for that is where the dragons lived, those with leathery wings that had come to kill the progenitor of all whales, covering the ocean’s surface with their flames. And the depths of oceans cold were frigid as the darkness of the stars, and those flying whales, having imprisoned the dragons under their own mountains crumbled or left them flying without aerie into exhaustion, fled to the darkness of the stars. Fled though knowing, for why else would they flee, knowing those with leathery wings would return.
Such fireside things Old Gadail told young Minim as she drifted off to sleep, that in dream she could glean meaning from its vagueness, a meaning that still did not come to her.
∞
Iksosinok spoke plainly, still learning words that Minim knew, being from a tribe Courtdom had never reached, a tribe with its own language untouched by The Emancipation and Eradication of The Languages as it is known, which left only one tongue for all. The tower of that myth became a temple and a star above it shined, but to Ikosinok that star was dark. He pointed at his tusk:
“Stone-shaper.”
He pointed to her:
“Earth.”
∞
In his strange tones he recited a passage perfectly rehearsed, his black orb swallowing all light, his white eye expelling all that had been swallowed:
’Once-Heir Angels struck by lightning into the deep,
and that lightning too struck the waves,
and the earthen seabed raged of magma,
and so the deep was boiling, and the angels drowning, half their number willingly so -
and foul was known The Mauling Crown of Dark Minim: HERALD!
as arose Boiled Angels from the deep.
All grey lighter or gray darker,
and one their Chief was Black stone,
having longest burned of All, having most wings, and extinguished sword a’billow.’
∞
Minim twisted hearing these words, writhed under the sight of Ikosinok’s twisted tusk, under hollow Love for parents she had little known, for her master always there, her heart loyal to one season alone and order absolute.
∞
There was in her mouth a foul, bloody or rusty taste as she stared at Ikosinok’s sword blazing with white fire, the fire of the distant stars somehow the same when close or afar. He spoke again in his plainer fashion, while Minim The Spring-Sworn could not take her sight from the longsword’s fires, nor tear her thoughts from Iksosinok’s recite of her future echoing and echoing. Her future as shaman dark for light has too long shined:
“I shape you. You shape me.”
She knelt with him wincing and peeling high her sleeve exposed to him her infinite scar ghastly in its healing, slobbering alive with pus and odour. More than his thin words could say, his expression was one forlorn as he saw the wound, as one might gaze powerless upon a ruin found too late.
“Hope?” Minim asked him, terrified that this mystery squatting with her held all clue and key to The Crown atop Lillian’s head, and that her failing scar which had brought her here shattered his belief or ability.
“Hope.” He reassured her, his star-painted hand held her arm under her scar, and he pointed to her tusk still bloody. “Hex. Maze. Map.”
∞
With unsettlingly little hesitation, Minim tore again her tusk into her arm almost cutting at Ikosinok, from pus releasing the Bronze glow inside, a tarnished and rusted light.
Dripping -
slapping onto ancient oakenstone.
Minim’s dark sunset against Serib’s dawn.
∞
Whimpering in bitter pain and still, the cold winds high above the world did not leave her side.
∞
Through weightless change Minim travelled with Ikosinok huddled close, to an aeon when the gravestone-prison had fallen or had not yet been built at all, when the sands of such stones were still spread across deserts far from Hadaeon, before accretion had made such a world.