things i like & things i write

“Well, yes. She seems very level-headed. But the belief they have, that’s what goes beyond the imaginable. It’s just not… very logical, to pin all of your beliefs on one man.” 

Akalnai laughed. “You would frown at the logic—“ 

“—I am not frowning,” Sanokil interrupted. “I’m thinking.”

“With a frown. Because of the logic,” Akalnai soothed, again with that genial tone of agreement while he dropped more fruit peels into a bowl on the table. Sanokil despaired of ever getting a straight answer from him, or of him ever taking a conversation seriously. “I see the human cost. How can one man be expected to bear all of that responsibility? The prophesied hero role is among the worst of the lots out there.” 

Sanokil could have rolled his eyes. “Much rather be a crow, would you?” Only someone born to power could dismiss it so easily. 

Akalnai laughed, deliberately raucous. “I’d much rather be a gifted cartographer, like my mother, but a crow will do.” 

Sanokil did roll his eyes then. “Yes, you’ll just have to make do with a princeship,” he said tartly. “While you weep over that, can you also appreciate how strange this system of belief is?” 

But Akalnai took a big bite out of the finally peeled fruit, and shook his head with exaggerated blankness at Sanokil while he chewed. 

“You are child,” Sanokil sighed. “The Raven Queen has more maturity than you.” 

Akalnai stopped playing with his food. “Do you think our Raven Queen is that much different from what these people here believe? Think about how much we esteem her. She’s just eleven, for pity’s sake, but imagine this going on for centuries more. Each generation we venerate her just a little more… We’ve robbed her of her adolescence already, Sanokil.” Akalnai waved his hand about the room to indicate the entire kingdom they were in. He began pacing, marking out the border of the carpet before turning to do it again the other way. “We could become this too.” 

“There could be similarities, if you think like that,” Sanokil prevaricated. 

“You’re going to call this another of my fanciful delusions, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I don’t believe these people are wrong about their world. I think they’re spot on, in fact.” 

This was one of his fanciful delusions, more combined-world theorizing Sanokil guessed. He couldn’t keep the disbelief from his face. 

Akalnai glanced at him, and kept pacing. And talking. “You already know what I think about the broken mountains and the missing sea. You should also know that I gave Niskaya some of my power. He wasn’t paying attention, but I wanted to see if it would work. It did. I fed him power, and he used it up in a flash.” 

As it did whenever he was passionate, Akalnai’s voice slipped into the deep cadence of storytelling. Sanokil put his head in his hands. 

“Can I have the abbreviated version, please?” he asked. “I’m not sure I have time for an epic tale in full meter.” 

The crow prince froze in his pacing, turned to look at Sanokil with surprise, and then laughed. It had none of the sharp edges of mocking it could so easily take on, and it teased a smile out of Sanokil. 

“All right, all right,” Akalnai capitulated. “The abbreviated version. Let’s see… I think Niskaya uses his power to maintain his kingdom’s existence in our formerly distinct world, my evidence being how the power I gave him was used up instantly. I will collect further proof when Niskaya and I sneak away to find the displaced Greater Sea, the southern one, and see if the rest of our world is still around somewhere. I’m being downright methodical about this, Sanokil. Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.” 

“You are more insane than the people here,” Sanokil summarized. “And you want to steal their god? Over some old stories?” 

“Borrow,” Akalnai stressed. “We are gong to borrow their god, in the name of investigation.” 

“I refuse to be a part of this.”

“But ‘Noki,” Akalnai wheedled, “what if we find the Hall of the Gods?” 

Sanokil scowled. “Don’t trot that out every time you want to convince me to do something stupid. We’re never going to end up before the altar, are we?” 

Akalnai straightened, turned solemn in a flash, eyes steady on Sanokil. “Is that what you really want?” 

Sanokil looked down. They’d talked about what they wanted, before the left. Everyone did. They’d had long conversations about it, so Akalnai knew perfectly well what Sanokil wanted, just like he knew about the thirst for adventure that drove the crow prince.

“I only want to know where we stand now. If you are already sure—sure enough to plan an escape with a god-figure we’ve known for five months… then I need to make my own moves, Akalnai.”

Akalnai was very still. Then he sighed, and nodded. “I’m sorry. That’s your right. I shouldn’t… I like you, ‘Noki, and I think we could be a model couple. You know I would keep my oaths.“

Sanokil waved his hand, as if he could erase those words with a gesture. They were… embarrassing. He’d wanted to win Akalnai over on their quest, captivate him like he’d been captivated by Akalnai. But if that wasn’t possible, he didn’t want Akalnai’s honor. He wanted a partner to share his love and ambition with, not a prince’s pity. 

“I’d probably strangle you within five years,” he admitted. He had watched Akalnai tease Niskaya with the same wild, unreserve that had annoyed Sanokil throughout their travels. Trying to sound as light as Akalnai could, he added, “Besides, leaving with you on a quest and returning without you will make me enough of a name to start with.” 

Akalnai grinned. “You never needed my help to make yourself known. But I’ve been happy to be of service.” 

“You’re happier in love,” Sanokil said, compelled to get the last word in.  

Akalnai frowned at him. “I wouldn’t leave on a quest with just anyone, Sanokil. I love you too. It’s a different kind of love, but I would have you in my life always.” 

She knows by then she will be the very last thing alive in whatever's left behind. When the Waves of Starless Night drown the world bit by bit, only Fran survives. Only Fran surfaces from the darkness, no trace of even a wreckage behind her. Fran, bright, burning with the lives of everyone she's failed to save. She's terrified of how long she can live. She finds solace only in the black unknowing of deepest sleep.

She wonders, in the last days, when she's closer to forty than thirty and has tasted love and its shattering loss, the way its reverberations shudder through her, thick and smothering at first, then equally thick and smothering, but spread out, beneath the loss of everything else--she wonders, not for the first time but finally with real purpose, if she can end it early. Could it be called a mercy?

When the last of the world's cities waits, watching her, almost hypnotized by her useless light, she wonders--could it be called a mercy now, if she gave in? There are those who throw themselves into the waves, choosing their moment of drowning instead of waiting for it to come.

The ones around Fran always wait. They watch her, and they never see the darkness crash down upon them. Could that be called a mercy?

She waits alone, now. The end has stretched its hand over everything, and even Fran's light begins to fade. She could have been afraid, or even relieved, and always lonely.

She is numb when the Waves take her at last, nothingness upon nothing left.

Is that a mercy?

"I never liked mercy. It was one of those things everyone always asks for, but rarely has to give.”

The voice was cool, critical, and so breathtakingly human that Fran opened her eyes.

She hadn't known she had closed them. She exhaled what she thought would be her last breath.

"And as a friend of mine once observed," a dark-haired man continued in the same voice, "The most merciful people are merciless to themselves. Big ideals are never fair."

The man sat on a large tree root and regarded Fran with pale, intent eyes. They were eyes that didn't miss much, she bet. Eyes that could look at something burning and not look away.

Fran looked down at her feet. She stood barefoot on a moss patch, in the space between two gnarled roots as thick as her ankles.

"Am I dead?"

The man smiled. It changed his face, smoothed a hint of sharpness into a spark. It was a smile that radiated energy.

"Nothing in this place is really dead.” He was earnest and matter-of-fact at the same time, and Fran registered the words and let them slide through the emptiness inside her. “Though some things sleep so deeply, you could think of them as dead.”

The man’s smile faded, but the ghost of it was still there in the pleasant tilt to his face. He stood from his tree root--a root grown into and merged with others, creating a gnarled and knotted carpet, Fran saw on second look--and picked his way through more roots to stand before her.

He was barefoot as well, Fran noticed, balanced with the ease of long practice on uneven root-ground. She looked up again when he stretched a hand out to her.

"I'm the gardener," he introduced himself. “Call for me if you need anything.”

Fran shook the gardener’s hand mutely. The title meant nothing to her, but he offered her a firm grasp, his palm somewhat cool to the touch—like everything about him. A gentle breeze. How long had it been since she’d felt something so real?

The gardener let go of her hand and nodded, taking Fran’s silence in stride. Then he turned and walked across the grey-brown roots to the massive trunk of a many-branched tree.

When she really looked at the tree, Fran had the sensation of looking at something from afar and through a magnifying lens at the same time. The tree was inarguably large, with a trunk that, in one way, might take twenty, or a hundred people to circle; and yet, in another way, it seemed the perfect size to prop oneself up against on one of those long-ago, lazy afternoons of her childhood.

But when the gardener reached for a thin branch and began to climb his way up—the tree was as infinite as the Waves of Starless Night, and not even a world full of people linking arms could circle its circumference.

Fran stared at the tree until the tight protest of her lungs reminded her to breathe. Then she gulped in air and sat down hard on the myriad roots woven beneath her feet. She took a few more breaths, and finally turned her head up away from the infinite tree. To the starry sky above.

She focused on the black space between the stars. It was almost comforting. It didn’t have the flat emptiness of the Waves, the black that was going to steal the earth from under you and everything else from around you. This black was empty but not devouring; a darkness between the stars that waited, shifted, patient. Space enough for dust to gather and gather and gather until, in some distant future, it blazed into life of its own.

Would the dust of Fran’s lost world feed back into the macrocosm? Would her people’s bones become scattered molecules, drifting along the universe to help give birth to stars? Or had the Waves of Starless Night stolen that from their world? Were there any bones anywhere?

Fran turned that question over and over in her head, feeling its weight and pressure, and how the failure could overwhelm her if she let herself think about it for too much. She kept her face turned towards the sky, the stars, staring for so long that she slowly began to see that it wasn't the sky at all.

The darkness was made of uncountable branches whose leaves blanketed whatever sky might exist; and the stars were the infinite tree’s glowing flowers. The tree was everywhere here. Yet the dark, leafy space between the glowing flowers was still patient and expectant. Whatever the Tree was, Fran was sure it had blazing births of its own.

She began to note more of the tree’s shifting properties, the way it played with her sight and perception. Now Fran could make out more clearly the criss-crossing branches that stretched along her imagined sky. It was as though her eyes were finally adjusting to the dark, and she was filled with some weird, jittering energy that made her uneasy.

Rolling over onto her stomach—when had she lain down?—Fran breathed in the deep, woody roots, and slowly pushed herself up to her feet.

There was something sweet in the air. Fran wasn’t hungry, or thirsty, and yet she was pretty well convinced that that had nothing to do with how long she had stared at the tree-sky. She hesitated before following her nose to the trunk of the tree.

It wasn’t curiosity that picked up her feet. She thought maybe it was just the easiest thing to do. No—maybe the easiest thing to do would be to call for the gardener. Or lie back down and stare up at the tree-sky again.

I’ve had my fill of that, Fran thought, decisiveness wrapping her up all of the sudden. She took another step, and found herself already at the base of the tree. The trunk before her was both comfortably sized for climbing up, with useful, low-hanging branches, and unimaginably large. Fran fixed her gaze on the branches above her, which began jutting out from the trunk just within her arm’s reach. She wrapped her hand around the closest one, braced a foot against the trunk, and began hauling herself up into the branches.

It didn’t take her long to reach a place where she could stand comfortably. She reached for one branch above her, braced her foot on another, and pulled herself up. She went for another branch just a little higher, and then another, and suddenly, she had climbed up to a branch so large it might have been its own trunk, growing out sideways from the infinite tree. It couldn’t possibly have been there before—she would have seen something so big from below.

At the same time, Fran was not surprised to see the branch. It rose at a steady but comfortable incline, broad enough for one person to walk along. All around her, similarly large tree limbs rose or descended, crossing each other at enough points that Fran could see how one could make their way from this crossing or that to explore.

She chanced a glance below her and was not surprised to see more branch-avenues, instead of the rooted ground she had climbed up from.

It didn’t worry Fran. The knowledge of how to get back down was with her now, with a foreign certainty. All she had to do was climb down.

She started walking up the gentle incline of the branch, following the sight curves in its path. When it intersected with another path leading up, Fran caught the whiff of that sweet scent, with an almost sickly layer to it now, and stepped onto the new path to follow it. She wandered like that for who knew how long, staring at the glowing lights that graced a branch here and there and whose combined glow lit the tree’s avenue. Whenever the scent grew stronger, she changed paths.

She was meandering her way up towards a dark spot among the lights—her stars, Fran realized—in a circuitous way. The longer she wandered, the clearer the scent grew, and Fran finally understood it to be the mossy, sweet decay of leaves in autumn.

Fran continued climbing to the dead star. She saw the gardener long before she came within hearing distance.

“You’ve found your way well,” he said when she approached. His smile was faint, flashing more in his pale eyes than on his lips.

The path they stood on was more like an avenue, twice as broad as any she’d walked on before. Farther down, the branch split into three smaller paths that stretched in different directions. Fran could see faint, wispy glows along each of those paths.

“I just started walking,” Fran said. It was all the explanation she could give.

“It’s right that you came here first.”

The gardener stood next to a dead flower. Its fruit was round and small, darkened and shriveled at the center. Fran knew when she saw it that the mottled, grey-orange petals hanging limply would have wreathed the fruit in a brilliant white in its bloom. Bright enough to reflect the fruit’s glow, until it was one of the brightest stars of the tree.

She knew what that light felt like. She had lived with that light.

“Yes,” the gardener said. He watched her, and seemed to gather what she was thinking from her face. “This was your world.”

Fran stared at its remains. The image of swirling stardust slowly coalescing into a new birth came back to her again. Death and life. Her world had been old, and there were new worlds growing along this avenue’s children branches.

“So I should have been comforting my people, not pretending I could save them,” Fran wondered aloud. “It was all going to end, either way.”

“How could you have known?” The gardener asked. “You did what you thought was best. How could you assume defeat was in your destiny?”

Fran smiled bleakly. “Maybe someone else could have figured it out, and done a better job.”

“Yes, there are certainly those who think their endings are destined to be bad, but they tend to be very woe-is-me about it,” the gardener said, with a strange amusement Fran didn’t understand. “It’s not very soothing for anyone. When we write the story of our hero, we want her to be a warrior-savior, not tragic doomsayer.”

Fran considered that. In many ways, it was easier to push her life away from her and look at it in this distant way. She didn’t have to think of individual faces, and that always blunted the pain.

“If that’s the story we want,” she asked, “do you think I did help them, a little? Is it better if we thought I had a chance?”

The gardener waved his hand dismissively. “People want a hero, but whether or you were a good one or not doesn’t matter. You did the best as you understood it.”

Some part of Fran—maybe the part of her that first recognized the leaves she’d smelled—was surprised by the gardener’s cool disregard. The rest of her was more familiar, a numb equilibrium that waited for the next hit.

The gardener frowned at her. “I do care about everyone’s suffering,” he clarified, “on the small scale, because it’s never easy living through the end of a world. It’s just difficult to maintain that perspective when you live here. I’m surrounded by infinite worlds—infinite life and death.”

Fran frowned. “How do you keep your perspective?” He didn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it.

The gardener’s smile was sharply amused. “I have some friends,” he said. “The kind that keep you humble. And I’ve assigned myself a personal mission.”

When he didn’t elaborate, Fran felt impatience rise in her. It felt strange, like an old friend she hadn’t seen in so long they had slipped from her mind, and she found herself wanting to indulge it. She wanted to cross her arms and stare at the gardener, so that he knew that she found his explanations lacking.

“And what’s that mission?” Fran asked. Calmly. But trying to keep the impatience from her voice was a struggle that again felt familiar but long-forgotten.

The gardener hesitated, then said, “I pull out the souls of heroes before their worlds end and bring them here."

“I'm here to help you with your perspective?”

“No! Not like that,” the gardener backtracked with some force. “Bringing you here helps me and all, yes, but I mean that as more of a minor tangent. My purpose is to… well, it can sound kind of inane. But I wanted to give you a vacation. A chance to gain a larger perspective on your life, see a bit more of everything." He gestured vaguely around him, at the stars in the tree and the vastness surrounding them. "The prophesied savior role really is one of the worst lots around here. It tends to narrow your vision.”

Fran shook her head slowly. “I think I have a headache,” she said.

The gardener smiled apologetically. “Most stays in the Worlds Tree start this way. I’ve been told my orientation needs some work.”

-----