Princess Elle was the quintessence of Northeastern royalty. Her family was one of incredible fortune, consistently victorious in some of the world's most renown and tragic battles, and proficient in the development of scientific advantages. Elle's Great Uncle Claspius was inventor of the scythe, the famed instrument which Death used to lay to rest the first tired, worn out immortals. Thanks to the legendary persistence of Elle's Aunt Testhium, inventor of thread, even the smallest youth of the far North had cloth to warm their thin, nearly frozen bodies. And if not for the great forethought of Elle's father Cornellipun, all citizens as far as language could reach would not have set aside a part of every day for sleep in order to be well-rested for times of unexpected war.
Elle was not simply the newest offspring of a family whose impact on the world stretched back before the first time heaven's warm embrace spread across her land; she was the promise and expectation of great things to come.
When theaters needed a dancer, Elle was not only the best candidate, but the most excited to perform. When thick clouds hid the heavens on stormy evenings, Elle volunteered to climb the highest tree in the land to break them apart so all those sleeping in the wild could still wish upon the stars before they slept. If I woke struggling to unlatch myself from an especially horrific nightmare pregnant with mouthless spiders and familial betrayal, Elle's was the first face I would wake to, reflecting the cool blue rays of twilight. She would appear without warning and disappear without permission, the shadow of empathy itself.
Between acts of kindness, Elle had not the time to see that her's was a life more important than any other - she treated every citizen in the palace with as much delicacy and passion as she would any shit coated farmer on the outskirts of the lonely mudlands. Her only thoughts were to provide comfort to weary soldiers, alleviate some of the burden of child rearing from mothers not granted the alleviating presence of a spouse, and set seeds of comfort in the soft spots of pain of all who felt hurt.
Princess Elle was as beautiful as she was giving. When her eyes fell upon the ice caps of Nelderon, the land of permanent frost where fire was dismissed as quickly as a churlish child from the king's table at a royal feast, her irises reflected the sun with such pure strings of luminescence that a mile of ice turned immediately soft, saturating the land with pure, clean water. With nothing but a glance, she had given pause to the northern communities' thirty year drought.
No one in the world could convince me that Elle was imperfect or capable of generating a spark of negativity. She shared all things with all people. Her kindness was my kindness, her yearning my yearning, her abilities my abilities. She was capable of accomplishing anything, willing to do all things that Time, with his set of immobile, restrictive guidelines, would allow, possessive of everything in the world capable of doing good. Her existence was incredible.
All things are subject to change. Time's guidelines are deceptively clean and well organized. Elle was not one of the creatures humans ever expected would change. But change she did.
Or so it seems. But perhaps it was my sight that shifted and allowed me to see a humble, nearly indistinct piece of her in a brand new way.
Elle's flaw did not damage the kingdom, its citizens, or the world. It only served to raise the memory of her soul higher than the reality of her amazing contributions to the world. She is remembered as a goddess among mortals. She was capable of conveying our deepest tragedies to a deaf man with nothing but a clever smile; she could to satiate the appetite of a starving child more successfully with laughter than with nutrients. Whether her flaw was a virtue or a weakness is a distinction I have not yet found the ability to make, because as much good as Elle did for others, she caused herself the greatest harm.
It could be that Elle was like the impenetrable hull of one of the Klesh warships, imposing at sea, the harbinger of either doom or success in every battle (depending on who has the misfortune of having to do battle with its crew), and impossible to sink by all but the gods, yet sometimes built with an obscure, miniscule flaw unseen by hundreds of master shipbuilders and judged a mark of beauty on the perfect machine because of its apparent insignificance.
Elle's flaw was impossible to see because it was insignificance. Not that she lacked significance, but that she could not internalize the positive weight her actions had on others. She could not see how significant she was.
Elle did not care for herself, nor about herself. This was not an easy trait for even her closest family to see. As a baby, Elle cried only when she sensed danger. Half of the kingdom would have been lost to the Pastillades had her cries not kept her father near her side when he was on the brink of heading out to conquer distant lands. Her parents were overjoyed by the child's innate sense of protection and were nothing but impressed by the strength of will it must have taken their infant to reserve her wailing for the time it would save her people. As a toddler, Elle learned to walk earlier than all others her age when she noticed the pain she was placing on the frail back of an impossibly old maid who carried the curious child night and day from one local oddity to another, through villages and over mountains, to see all the beauty in her small world.
I met Elle from a distance as a part of the crew of the warship Kon when it returned to harbor from nearly two decades at sea. I was foreign to Elle's land and had been taken in as a captain's assistant to Karendine Hale, who made it a mission to learn my language and speak to me high above the ground in my treehouse, which was so far from Elle's homeland that the sun that lit her lands had not yet brought its golden rays to the brown, crusted leaves of my tree. I loved Captain Karendine like a mother and waited on her every word. I was not a slave, but a companion. When it was time to return to her lands, she made the incredibly rare offer, among adventurers, to take me back to my home before parting ways. I happily declined.
In the close of every warm season, a master adventurer or her unmanned ship returns to Annillade's harbor and is welcomed by the royal family with love, affection, and weeks of celebration. The week Elle came of age to be a member of the royal party who welcomed the ship home, I was coiling rope in the aft of a ship whose captain had not been seen for many weeks. Captain Karendine had disappeared a week earlier, late in the night after we fought with an especially vicious mammoth whale. The whale was so large that hours after we had defeated the beast, tied it to the back of our boat, and filled the hull with as much of its blubber as we could fit the nerves in its mind had not yet reached its tail to tell the whale it was dead until it had kept charging through the water long enough to push our ship miles closer to our destination without assistance from our sails. The Captain returned to her cabin alone after bidding all good night and was not seen the next morning. We searched high and low, but were unable to find any trace of her except for her hat, which had become inextricably cemented to the floor of the ship. Worried the hat would be destroyed and that it was the only remnant left of our beloved leader, the first mate created a barrier around the hat and ordered it to be treated as sacred.
The ceremony on our return was lively from the outset - even after it was established that the master of our adventure had not made the return, laughter rang through the town, as it was tradition to acknowledge the absence of a dead oen's vibrant existence with the promise to carry it on. It was the opinion of Elle's father that vibrance is not lost unless it is forgotten and only forgotten if it is left unpracticed.
Before the festivities moved away from the harbor, however, Princess Elle took a stronger interest in Captain Karendine's hat than any of her reverential crew's had been. Ignoring the fact that her clothes were embroidered with more fine jewelry than most diamond mines had produced in their short lives, Elle placed herself to the greasy, grimy floorboards and held her ear against the wood of our warship, silently motionless, for three hours. Her persistence silenced the celebration and hundreds of onlookers began to worry that her skin would become damaged by the ship's damp wood. Elle's father nearly admitted anger at his daughter's refusal to stand at his command.
And after four hours, she thought to do what none of our crew would ever consider.
Her father froze at the outburst. Never had Elle uttered a command, nor even a suggestion to her father without having discussed it with several of the most revered intellectuals among the royal council. But she did not lack confidence on the matter.
"Each second that passes invites the possibility of unpoetic tragedy!"
Elle's father turned to Elle's mother for guidance. She turned, in turn, to the ship's first mate. He turned away from her. Then he turned back to her. Then away, and back, and turned and turned. He had jumped onto the unending ferris wheel at the start of the festivities and become trapped on its infinite loop. The Queen took charge.
"You heard the princess! Rip up the floorboards! Demolish the gangplank! Undo the lashings! Reduce this ship to ashes!"
And she began her walk back to the castle. As did, after a nod of consent to the second mate, Elle's father. The first mate shook his head, but only at the necessity of centrifugal force.
The unprecedence of this occassion would have terrified the onlooking citizens had Elle's smile, more effervescent than molten gold heated by the happiest gods' laughter, melted their concern and convinced all to help with the destruction.
"Do not touch the captain's hat!" Elle screamed. And her command was obeyed.
What was strange about Elle's outburst, beyond the fact that it had been so forceful, was the impracticality of what her orders entailed. The ship on which Captain Karendin's had taken up permanent residence was Kresh made. Like all its likenesses, our ship had been built under the advisement of the gods. It was rarely used in battle because it posed an unfair advantage to the opposing side, because a Kresh ship had never been destroyed. Or damaged. Or even scratched. Elle's command, according to history, was literally impossible to follow through with.
But Elle's intelligence pierced through the timber of the ship and into the greasy hull that our crew had made into a whale container. The ship was still full to the brim with the rare, invaluable mammoth whale blubber because the first mate left the ship before its crew had a chance to remove its valuable cargo. We had filled the hull of the ship with this blubber before we began celebrating the beast's death and soon before the disappearance of our captain. It was the crew's prized possession. And no one had given it attention in respect to the Captain's disappearance. Except for Elle.
As citizens began to crowd the ship, crawling in waves across the deck around the hat and the motionless Elle like children around a newborn mammal, the floorboards began to creak and Elle's mouth widened into a smile. The grease in the ship's hull had provided enough slickness that, in combination with the weight of so many people, the floorboards began to sink ever so slightly into the whale fat and send small geysers of blubber bubbling up through what Kresh shipbuilders incorrectly judged were seamless cracks. And that's when Elle's plan became clear.
No tool could put a dent in the ship. No man could break its glass. The citizens hopelessly tried to dismantle the ship's mast, but even the sails were impossible to damage. But while the tried, the floorboards were bending and sinking down. And the hat was moving.
Captain Karendine was emerging from the murk of the ship's greasy hull like goop from the inside of an adolescent's pimple. She was alive. And breathing. And healthy. She had gone to take a bite of the blubber the night after we had celebrated and been sucked, unseen, into the hull by the sheer compression the grease built up inside the ship. Captain Karendine believed it was the whale's sense of vengeance getting back at her - like the tail, the whale's vengeance also had not yet learned the whale was dead - and she felt honored by having been seized back into battle by such a powerful beast even after its death. But by keeping her face directed up toward in the dome of her hat, Karendine was able to breathe leathery, thick air and keep herself alive. She took bites of the blubber when she became hungry. She said the meal was at least as tasty as it was life-threatening.
If she had had been left in there much longer, however, Karendine would have lost to the whale. The Captain's body had been in the grease so long that it became glued to the stuff. Had the hull been opened before Karendine was extracted, the release of pressure on Karendine's body would have ripped her in all directions.
Without Elle, eating the salty fat of a mammoth whale would have been the Captain's last adventure.
And Elle smiled because Karendine was safe. But she did not consider her actions anything more than an obligation to her subjects. They were an extension of her breathing, the common beating of her heart. Elle's role, as far as she had known since she began interacting with strangers, was to bridge the gap between absence and fulfillment. Her propensity to bridge that gap was a blessing she had been given and felt responsible for recreating again and again.
Princess Elle built more bridges between impoverishment and gratification than the dragons did between the planets in all the solar systems of the cosmos. But when she felt she was not building enough, when she felt like she could not keep up with the demand for her warmth, Princess Elle began to cool.
And because Elle perceived the absence of heat as the absence of activity, the negation of friction, and the termination of progression, she thought of herself as an absence. She treated herself as an absence. And she made herself and absence.
There are some spots on every planet where the gods place extra pressure to keep the universe in balance. And when a creature as small as a human stands in one of those spots, even if that human is as incomprehensibly unique and strong as Elle, the weight of the burden can crush them.
Elle did not have a chance to anticipate the weight before she inadvertantly stumbled into one of those spots.
Elle's only weakness was that she believed that she was inconsequential. And I have missed her since the day she took her life with more energy than all the mourning northern lights will try to shed as they gleam for her over the next thousand years. On nights when her life seemed absolutely dark, I wish she had realized that she was not a fire extinguished, but a spark waiting for dry tinder.
I am not much. But I will fight every day to make sure that Elle learns, in whatever body her soul now inhabits, that in even in the moments she felt like she was nothing to herself, Elle was everything to the world.
prguitarman
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
2087
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