Nakemiin -- The Way of Pang

[neverwhere]

"Everyone be of someone. Have of mothers, fathers, things like of this. Also, if be not, from of egg, have of soul."
~R

~Beloved Narwen,

I wanted to tell you this story. It's a little something from my younger years in the Lammasi diaspora, before the Rings, before the Well, before the yet another end of the world. It isn't a happy story, love (it's an Elf story, they never are,) but it has the virtue of being true.

I was just a child for this one, not even halfway through my second century. Slowly becoming a woman, getting flighty, moody, arrogant. Wanting to dress up in ways my family refused to entertain. And there was this shop I liked to visit: an aviary, place that did songbirds. Sweet little things in pretty brass cages, piping away with the loveliest voices. I wanted one so dearly, but my family... well, we weren't rich, let's put it like that. We were refugees before it got popular.

But I was a child, and children dream.

I would go in, and they'd let me hang about. The shopkeeper was a nice enough man – you had to have a certain tolerance for children in these things, after all. And there was this one golden-headed little fellow who I'd come to visit specially. He sang and sang for me, cocking his little head when I whistled back, never hopping or fluttering or moving from the spot. He'd just perch there and sing to me, and I was so sure he was happy to see me, every time.

And I came to love him. And I decided I was going to give him a good home whether I could afford it or not.

And that was the beginning of my first ever B&E – that's break and enter, for you, love, started young, me. I got on my raincoat, tugged the hood up and snuck into the coops after business hours, when twilight was down but before the lanterns got lit. Basic latches: simple job. I found my bird easy enough: I could never forget that sweet, distinctive little song. But now I was in there, that wasn't all I heard. There were other songs, sharper, shriller, coming from further out back. I crept over, heart in my mouth. What was going on back there? Had I stumbled on some sort of bird crime? Aside from the one I was currently committing, I mean. The sound was so compelling, so... raw. I peeked past the curtain. And I saw the owner and his apprentices, all hunched over candlelit tables, taking one struggling little bird after another from their cages and preparing them for their new lives, while the room filled with that terrible, sickening song.

They were blinding them. Heating up bits of wire and putting their eyes out. Because that's how it worked, you see. You put their eyes out, and they start calling for help. Forever. Until they die.

My bird wasn't singing to me, Narwen. It had never been singing.

It was screaming.

~It gets a little fuzzy here, I'm afraid. I went a bit funny in the head. I remember being angry, angrier than I'd ever been at anyone or anything. I remember dropping the cage and running over there, shrieking, ripping open the doors of the cages, setting their prisoners free. Hands seizing my body, huge and strong, hauling me back, dumping me on my backside. Someone slapped me across the face, called me something inappropriate. I grabbed a Raven's feather off the floor and punched it into something soft, and now that prick was the one singing. But not for long, of course. Because like I said: I was just a child.

So, anyway, the nice shopkeeper and his lovely helpers beat me into a weeping, bloody mess while the birds sang, and sang, and sang. They dragged me out front, gave me one more good kick in the guts and then waited while the local muscle had my Father brought in, told him what I'd did. He looked down at me through the whole thing with that... silent sorrow that hurt so much more than the cuts on my cheeks or the aching in my bruised stomach. He told me to return home. That he'd have words with me about my behavior later, once he'd fairly compensated these men for their losses. And I ran home in tears and went to my little room and cried like the wretched little shit I was.

It was hours before he came back. Well after dark. He came into my room, put his strong hand on my shoulder and said in no uncertain terms that he never wanted to hear of me stealing from anyone, ever again. That our people had enough regrets to last an eternity, and that little shortcuts can lead us very, very far from home. And then in his left hand, he had one of the little birdcages. In his right, he had his sword. It, and his arm, and his beautiful white shirt and the entire right side of his body were drenched in scarlet blood. And I looked up at him, and nodded, and I promised, and I said that I understood.

He left the empty cage on my dresser, and went back out without a word.

...

I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I've forgotten what I was saying. I've forgotten what the point of this was. All my stories are like this, you know. They're all horrible. Are they really so important that I need to write them down? I don't want to be a rutting Elf, baby. I don't want to drag these ghosts through the desert until I drown. I don't want to remember anymore.

Bleeding Wheel I'm such a whiner. I'm sorry. I just want you to have a choice, sweetheart. I love you more than I can ever say. I can't let them stick that wire into your eyes. I don't care who or what it saves.

...

Nakemiin, sweetheart.

I will never send you this letter.

[neverwhere]

"Yeah but y'know how y'elves get. Romantic 'n sad 'n stuff. Very beautiful.
'Woe. I am five hundred years old. The children have turned to dust. I will play the harp, now.'"
~M

"That's one of the only things I remember about Lammas," I told her -- my new friend -- as we stared out over the sea of Pearls together. "The reflections on the lake." And she smiled, that way she does: half-remembering, half-forgetting. But no, Miranda, no. You haven't learned yet. You haven't learned how my stories end.

It was night. We were drifting across the water in our little boat. And I was just a child, huddled in my mother's arms, peeking out from inside her cloak despite her warnings, looking back at the Doom of Lammas. She'd told me not to. Admonished me to close my eyes, cover my ears. But even then, when I was so very young, I could never seem to do as I was told.

It's so strange, how little I recall, now, I for whom forgetting is a fantasy. I can't recall any screaming. No sound of weapons, or powder fire. I don't remember weeping, or being afraid, feeling hot, or feeling cold.

The only thing I remember is the sight of Lammas's Willow, burning. That great, growing monument, that twisted toward the stars and fell back over the lake, transformed into a roaring mountain of flame. The fire rippling like liquid gold across her blackened boughs; hot, red light, lost in a titanic pillar of smoke. Her hanging branches swaying in the midnight wind, flowing across the water, sparks trailing in her wake; leaves crackling, sap popping. Her lovely hair, blazing in the moonless darkness with the red-orange heat of the sun.

And that colossal pyre was reflected in the water between us; clear and incandescent upon that sheet of liquid glass. The burning smoke, flowing up, pouring down. Her twinned, flaming tresses caressing each other, tenderly, where the sky met the shore, like lover's hands, above, below. As if in dance. As if there were two of them; one in this world and the next, blazing against two black, empty skies. Amphisbaena. Amphisbaena.

I stared at it from the shadows of my mother's cloak, the heat burning on my skin, the light flickering cruelly in my eyes. And I felt with a child's idiot wonder that I might dive into that rippling, black mirror, twist until I stood upside-down, and find myself in that other, imaginary world; reversed, witnessing the same burning tragedy with another's stinging eyes.


In time, I think, I will forget everything. Lammas. The diaspora. The City. The schoolhouse. The Well. The war. But that image, that blazing, golden vision of those terrible, towering pyres, swaying in a final, fateful embrace, will remain burned into my eyes forever. It was the death of my people. The murder of my home, the only place I would ever truly belong. The brutal end of the love that was promised to us, and a burning, pitiless symbol of the Doom which would follow me to the end of my days.

It was the apex of massacre.

The slaying of a race.

The end of all my blood.

A monstrous, senseless, unconscionable act of destruction for which there could be no forgiveness or excuse.




And it was beautiful.