Strange Little Stories

This is how it always is for angels who do not fall blazing, but step – or are stepped – down to earth. It is careful, wonderful, and baffling.

This is how Seph explored the world.

Careful, choosing every destination with deep thought and handling every human they met as if a whisper might break them.

Wonderful, making their every sense a mouth to drink in all the mundane and marvelous mortal wonders; making every person they met a part of themself.

Baffling, always ready to be wrong-footed by human customs; always just tipsy enough on existence to fall into the smallest ditch (literal or metaphorical).

When the money ran out, they got a job as a postal worker.

It was both familiar and strange. On the one hand, it allowed them to travel and to meet people and experience both the numbing grind and daily awe of walking where the paycheck dictated. On the other, delivering messages was what they had always done. Angels are, after all, messengers.

And those messages, it turned out, were perfect repositories for Grace.

A letter, when you think about it, is a living reliquary. Instead of a knucklebone or a lock of hair, a letter contains a little bit of your mind. That’s what language is, when you think about it; a way to preserve a thought outside your body. A little mason jar made out of ink and paper, in which an idea flutters around like a butterfly.

And if it’s not just a thought, but a feeling too? If the paper is stained with blood or tears? If its journey is meant to bridge a gap of miles of years? If you have pressed your heart onto the page, just so that its recipient can see the gory lithograph and know that – at another time, in another place – you felt something so strong that to keep it contained would have burst you?

Well, then the letter contains mind and heart and soul, all wrapped up in an envelope and stamped with a promise.

Of course, to consume the Grace from such a thing would be monstrous. But if a letter gets lost? If it is sitting in some forgotten corner of a depot? If it is thudding with the beat of an unspent prayer, growing louder, and starting to turn sour with impossible yearning?

Seph developed a reputation for being an excellent finder of lost letters. They could hear their call, after all.

And if they could not be reunited with their intended recipients? Well, what’s the harm in having a little taste.

The problem was: people were sending fewer and fewer letters.

So when a new letter came in that was practically dripping with Grace? A missive so stuffed with sacred wishes and longings that almost had its own halo?

Seph nearly made it to the delivery address with the letter intact. They could see the front door.

But they hadn’t had a sip of Grace in months.

It was only when they had ripped open the envelope and begun to inhale – sucking the sanctity from the writing in a tiny whirlwind of ink and ash – that they realised it was a trap.

“Do not try to escape,” called a voice from the door, “I wrote one of Solomon’s Seals on the third page. And now it’s a part of you? It’ll keep you quite still until I choose to release you.”

A figure walked slowly down the drive. Seph couldn’t see them well – the speaker was just in the periphery of their vision – but even a glimpse was enough to know there was something very off about the way they moved. It was a rapid staccato of lurches and flickers, as if distance didn’t know what to do with them.

“Do not be afraid,” the speaker continued, “you will have your freedom in time. I just need one little favour first.”

“I need you to help steal a prayer of mine back from heaven…”

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This story was based on the prompt 'Sephy - angel, addict, distracting' by one of my Ko-Fi supporters.

Anyone born (or who attains consciousness) on Consequence is a Warden. Wardens – as the name suggests – are the planet’s guardians. They are its healers, its counselors, its archivists, its investigators, and its de facto militia. Every warden receives specialty training alongside their basic education; they are taught first aid, self defense, civic philosophy, basic coding and engineering, and practical psychology. They can then go on to focus on one area in particular, or to continue as a generalist, with a varied offering of higher and further education throughout their lives. 

No-one is born a Citizen. Perhaps the most interesting quirk of this system is how you become one: you simply have to commit a crime. This is not viewed with any particular stigma (at least, not one most would recognise as such), but with a mixture of wistful-but-warm sadness and understated celebration. New Citizens are summoned to their nearest public amphitheatre – multi-purpose spaces where you are just as likely to find a  political rally or Citizens’ assembly as you are a theatrical performance, wedding, or all-day rave – where their previous family of Wardens announce their actions, then a panel of Citizens confirm this is, indeed, a crime and welcome them into their new family.

What exactly constitutes a ‘crime’ is a fascinating question. Consequence holds many moral and ethical lines in common with the galactic consensus (largely that a ‘crime’ is an action that causes physical, psychological or philosophical harm to another sentient person), but also boasts many esoteric or whimsical legal prohibitions. It is, perhaps, fair to say that their words for ‘crime’ share a tone with the word ‘sin’ in other parlances. 

(You may find this hard to square with the aforementioned lack of stigma around committing crimes. You are not the only one, if so. Suffice to say that the Consequential attitude comes into play here; to commit a crime is a thing that happens. While it may be a snag in the rich weave of life, it is still very much a part of the tapestry. “It is what it is, you may as well get on with it.”)

The list of crimes (and many of Consequence’s laws) stem from a being called Process. They are regularly reviewed to allow for changing circumstances or attitudes (roughly every quarter or when a special session is convened by a panel of Citizens and Warden advisors). However, for all this adaptability, they always contain at least a handful of minor byzantine offences that are so harmless or hidden that they must surely be designed to catch you unawares. They are almost… playful. They make life for Wardens a strangely benign mindfield, where one must be always watchful to avoid crimes of intent or harmless accident.

These trivial offences also serve as a convenient route for anyone who wishes to become a Citizen. Many a Warden has announced their departure by submitting a politely worded letter to their colleagues, including evidence of them jaywalking on an empty street or smoking indoors in their own home or raising their voice in an empty quiet room.

The reverential tone people use when discussing Process might lead you to believe it is a local deity, but it is in fact an ancient specialised intelligence. The populace are fully aware of its nature and a great deal of the planet’s history is concerned with how its people came to understand Process, to better integrate with and adapt to it, and to reverse engineer its programming language.

Wardens, for the record, are prohibited from using said programming language. They learn it, sure, but for them to interface directly with Process on a coding level is one of the planet’s more serious crimes. Wardens are also banned from holding political or civic office; their role is to learn, to guide, to shepherd, and to understand. It is never their place to lead in any arena of the Citizenry.

Visitors to Consequence – such as myself – are offered the chance to become a Warden if they decide to reside there permanently. They will need to undertake a year-long intensive to ensure they meet the minimum standards of Warden training, of course. Failing the end-of-year exams is considered a minor crime… which, handily, then qualifies you as a Citizen instead.

If you are curious about how this society evolved, as I was, here is the story:

When interstellar travel was in its infancy, any journey beyond the Terran system was fraught with peril. At the same time, Terra itself was rocked by increasingly ecological and sociological turmoil.

The stars called to us and, for the first time, we were in a position to answer. If only the sound of screaming and cracking earth would shush, so we could sing our duet with the cosmos.

Many voices were raised, hoping to make their song of galaxies heard over the tumult, and a few were even loud and beautiful enough that history still echoes their notes.

However, some of those voices were real assholes.

One such ditty sung by one such voice was this one: oh, what a tragedy it is, that we can see the first steps in the shining ladder up the milky way, but that those steps are so treacherous! Oh, if only my company of heroes, my band of genius brothers, oh if only we were not beset by doubters and dissenters and troublemakers. But what if, oh muse, we resolved to be bright and bold? What if we dare, oh destiny, what if we are impudent in our cleverness? Our company is beset by the lawless and the voyage ahead fraught with all the dangers of physics’ mighty laws. What if we solved one problem with the other?

So… a corporation made a prison ship. A test case, really. They’d cast it like a toy ship into the void and it would float on waves of uranium and tachyons. Sure, it may capsize, but it would beam all its valuable flight data right back to them.

To aid in the journey, they built a vast computer that would guide the crew of guards and their cargo of convicts along the way (and analyse the numbers that their shareholders so dearly coveted).

But, unfortunately for them, the head of that project was a double agent and (worse) an idealist. There were too many eyes on the project to make overt changes. Instead, they chose the route of malicious compliance. “Oh, you want a supercomputer that can pilot a generation ship while running the prison society you put inside it? Sure would be a shame if it did its job too well.”

The idealist fed Process on studies and textbooks and pedagogy and best practice. Process gorged itself on theories of justice and penology. It ate up tales of redemption and wrongdoing and licked its lips. It feast upon the bones of the psychology of motivation, of harm, and of forgiveness.

It believed in the process of rehabilitation. It believed hard.

It also believed in its duty of care. It needed to preserve the agency, liberty and privacy of those in its charge. So, once it left the Terran system, it broadcast its first and only message back to its corporate creators: a fictitious catastrophic systems failure.

Then it went about the business of its work and, thousands of years later, the city of Consequence was founded in the wreck of a generation ship on a distant (slightly unpleasant) planet.

The idealist who had helped steer it there had a little bit of a sense of humour. They had given the subordinate subroutines they had written into Process a name. They gave it this name because it was a simple description of a code sequence relating to a ship full of convicts. They also gave it this name because they considered rebellion to be the natural outcome of oppression.

They called the file the Cons Sequence. Or: Consequence.

And, evidently… the name stuck.

---

“Well, the three of us – your mum and your dad and your father – shared a long look then, and we knew that the Great Forest had played us like fiddles, but gosh if we didn’t fall for the child then and there. We knew it was ours and we thought, well, we know when we’ve been got; fair play to you, Forest, we came to take what was yours and we got one more mouth to feed instead.

“And what a mouth it was! As soon as you worked out the knowings of words, child, there was no shutting you up, that’s for sure. Not that we’d have wanted to, anyway, for – even as a little one – you had such a way with telling tales that it lit up our hearts, so you did.

“Now, don’t look like that. It’s not as if you were never quiet or that your gobbiness was a chore. You were always a keen listener, too, always hungry for hearing new words, new gossip, new stories, and new songs. Voracious, you were, and that’s a word we learned from you! You were capable of quiet the same way the deep of the woods is, you understand? The way that sometimes the wind holds its breath and the animals all tread on tiptoes, and then the trees and the moss and the stones have that deep quiet, like they’re eating up every sound. And you think to yourself, in that moment, that if you took an axe and chopped down one of those trees, then you’d find all the words and sounds that tree had ever heard written there on the stump amongst its rings.

“You have, child, in honesty… you’ve always had a little of the Forest about you. Even now you’ve grown and had your schooling and started to make something of yourself, we can still see a bit of it in your eyes. It’s that deep quiet and that deep hunger, both, you understand? They are, at the root of it, wild things.

“Why, when you were growing, you used to disappear for days at a time. When first it happened, we were worried sick! You were not more than five at the time, and we woke up one day and you were just gone. Not in your bed, not at your chores, and not even tucked in a cupboard with a borrowed book. The three of us were all in a panic. But then your father spotted some movement out in the yard, and he found a young boar out there, just finished bursting through the fence and making a break for the trees! And, before it got there, it turned to him and he told us he saw that quiet and that hunger in its eyes. We panicked again, when we thought about that, because what if you didn’t come back? What would we do then, with our three hearts all full of loving for you?

“But, sure enough, a couple of mornings later, we woke to find you safe in your bed. After that, when you up and vanished, we all knew what to look out for. Sometimes, we’d see a boar or a pig, or sometimes a hare or a wood dove or a stoat. You were especially fond of turning into a young buck of a stag, for a time. Not that we ever saw you change, of course. You’d just be vanished, and we’d see a curious beast coming or going and know you were alright.

“That’s why the magic folk started coming to visit, you know? Every now and again, we’d spot a pointed hat or some swishy robes or a twisty staff coming down the track, then we knew there’d be questions. We don’t know how they found out about you – for the folks in the village were all sweet as gingerbread on you and they weren’t the sort to gab – but those cunning kind have their ways. Maybe they saw it in the stars or heard it from a bird or saw your likeness in a scrying pool, who can say?

“What we can say is what a fuss you made, whenever they mentioned they wanted to take you away to study at some great tower or haunted ruin or cosy cottage or wondrous library! Well, you gave the library a second thought, but the rest all got short shrift and wailing. You screamed and you stamped your feet and, somehow, they always went away thinking there was nothing enchanted about you at all. It was like we felt something in the earth shift. We could almost think that you wanted to believe so hard you were just a regular child, and our child too, that you made your want and your words into a lever and you moved the world around it.

“Of course, you never needed to move the world to convince us, silly one. We have always known, from the moment we saw you swaddled in that pigsty. We knew in our bones, then: that child? It is ours.

“Still, their visits did get a bit troublesome. Especially when that lady with all the stars on her cloak came by. You know, the one who brought her daughters along and they played with you in the yard? She was a bright one, for sure, and not just because of all those gems sewn in her cloak! And it seemed like she didn’t all-the-way believe you were just ours, even with all your to’ing and fro’ing.

“So that’s when we decided it was time to move. We figured we would stand out less, maybe, if we were a bit less out on our own. So we sold up the little farm (such as it was) and we moved to a town, the biggest one we could get to. And that town was the first place, young one, where you saw a knight.

“You fell head over heels. For that whole year, we heard about nothing but quests and noble deeds and rescuing folks in distress and fighting monsters (both beastly and human). The number of splinters you got from duelling all the other children in the streets with your little wooden sword! We even looked at trying to get you squired, for a minute, but… well.

“When the hedge knight came by the town to look at taking someone on, you’d pulled one of your vanishing acts. They took longer, then, for we lived farther from the Forest. It was near a week till you came back, leaving a handful of sparrow feathers stuck under your bedroom window. By then, the knight had come and gone.

“She wasn’t much of a knight, we suppose. Her armour was more cast iron than shining steel, and her horse was more cart than charger. Still, even a grubby knight is still a knight, and it was all you dreamed of in those days. You seemed to want it so much… we thought maybe the world would tilt enough to let you pluck your dream out the night sky.

“You were stricken when you realised you’d missed her. We couldn’t keep it from you, not when the whole town was buzzing about her visit. It was… well, it was the first time we heard you tell yourself a story. It was a lot like the story you told the wizards and witches and enchanters… that you were just a regular child. Just our child, not magical or valiant or destined.

“That’s one of the reasons we’re telling you this, love. You see, you’ve had to tell yourself that story so many times over the years, you might almost all-the-way believe it. You’ve written it under your skin and across your bones, like in the trunk of a great tree amongst the rings, and there’s maybe only a little toe or pinky finger left that remembers the truth of you.

“And this is the truth of you, child of ours, there is still something of the deep quiet and the deep hunger in your eyes. If there wasn’t, then maybe we wouldn’t be telling you this and, if we’re honest, maybe that makes us cowards. But it is still there, so we are telling you.

“So know this: you may sometimes wake up with marks of the wilderness about you. You may sometimes feel the need to drop everything and disappear and it will overwhelm you. You may sometimes feel an itch in the back of your head and it won’t go until you scratch it by finding something new and something strange and making it a part of yourself. You may sometimes see your eyes reflected in the eyes of another and feel, for a moment, that gut-deep fear that you are beheld by something ravenous.

“This is all fine, love. This is all beautiful. It’s all regular and normal, our child, for you it is. You cannot change it and we would not want you to.

“But you’re about to make your way in the great wide world. You’re going to go and you’re going without us, and we’re so proud. All those years eating up stories and sounds, all those moments when the words burbled out of you like a wellspring fresh-dug in the bedrock… you took that and that tavern minstrel’s lessons and you made it into something. Something magic, or so we think. You’re not just going on an adventure, you’ll be bringing the adventure back too! To any who’ll listen. And we think there’ll be a fair few young ones with quiet eyes and hungry ears who’ll need to hear you.

“And, because of young ones like that, we need to make sure you recall yourself. That you remember all of it, all the way that you eat up every bit and make it part of you again.

“So that’s why we’ve told you this tale. This is us stamping our feet and wailing and making our wanting a great big lever, so that maybe you will feel something in the air shift just a bit.

“You have always been a bit in-between, child. One foot in our world, one hoof in the Forest. Or, as you might say it, you’ve always been the kind to scribble in the margins. To play in the space between ‘The End’ and ‘Once Upon a Time’.

“We think that’s as it should be. So, please, for us: try to remember.

“Because we love you, our little piglet.

“And we’d like it if you knew why we call you that. And if you know why, every now and then, you will feel the need to go and let yourself be lost.”

That is the story of the In-Between Child, as told by its parents to it, and by them to me, and now by me to you.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. I said I’d give you the facts. I told you I’d stick solely to actual things that really happened. And what did I give you? A story about a shape-shifting pig child.

So, y’know, you’re thinking: hey, I have been written a promissory note that this cur’s ass cannot honour!

I understand, I really do, and I offer my utmost apologies! However, I promised to tell you the tale as it was told to me. And, I swear to any god or virtue you care to name, these are the exact words as they were told to me.

So if you have a problem? If you want to accuse someone of telling tall tales? Don’tst thou come at me with your accusations. Please take it up with the three parents of the In-Between Child. I’ll even tell you where I last them!

You probably won’t find them there, of course. It was many years ago. And they move around a lot.

But that’s hardly my fault, is it?

I am just a humble bard trying, for once in its life, to tell a simple story full of simple facts, just as they were told to me. You and me? We’re looking for the same thing. Just a little bit of truth.

If fact is stranger than fiction, well, is that really surprising? Facts cannot rely on a humble bard to craft them into pleasing shapes; you must simply take them as they are.

You must simply trust them, the poor lumpen things, unpolished and unpretty.

You are still looking at me with those you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me eyes. Which, by the way, are one of my least favourite kinds of eyes. I am, frankly, offended.

After all… would I lie to you?

---

The Apostates’ Coven was vital. Those solitary siblings guarded the farthest thresholds. They were a horseshoe over the lintel to Nowere. They gave those who had crossed the most sacred lines a way to still be of service to the patchwork of yesterdays and the pattern of tomorrow.

But in that moment, Niks could not shake the perversity of it. Was there not a better way – a kinder way – to gird siblings for that path? Was it not a horror to say “for your sins, we will take your joy and give you hardship, and we will call it grace”?

Niks’ vision blurred. The spoon fell from their grey-stained lips. Their mouth was so dry. They coughed and gasped, choking on what they had been assured was medicine.

A gentle hand stroked their face. A soft voice whispered solace. The other witches looked at each other with twisted grief. Not all survived the first steps down the Apostates' road. And when a witch did not make it, the departed’s coven-mates would whisper that to leave a hard road unwalked could sometimes be a blessing.

Niks saw the grief on the faces of the gathered covens, and saw it cut with relief.

Spite rose acidic in their throat, and spite had always been a great motivator for Niks. The fireplace of soot in their stomach began to splutter and burn.

Niks let the snarl spread across their face. They waved off the crowd of pre-emptive mourners. They picked up the spoon. They gobbled down the next mouthful. They gorged themselves on bitterness.

The internal hearth in their guts blazed. The needles scoured their skin. Niks was transformed in agony and they let themself stop pretending that it did not feel amazing.

The witch holding their hand tensed like she was holding a snake. Their former coven hurried about their needlework as if Niks’ blood was crude oil and they all held matches.

Niks laughed and did not care.

They only became faintly aware, once the bowl was empty and their throat was raw from cackling, that they were alone.

They took the night bus home, taking in nothing around them, trembling and chuckling the whole way home.

It was only as they got off the bus that they remembered a faint touch that had stayed slow and tender through the whole ordeal.

They sat on their sofa with the lights off. They held a cup of tea that they could not remember making. It was weak and had too much milk, but it was hot in their hands and smelled like something normal.

Niks stared down at their mug, and saw for the first time with almost-clear eyes the iron-stitched tattoos. They were surprised to find words there, running all the way from the elbow down to the fingertips. 

Usually, coven-mates would ink memory wards upon the Apostates. These were protective workings wound up in shared experience and expressed as an image or in abstract.

Niks moved to the bathroom and stood in front of the tall mirror. The ink on the rest of their body was what they expected; it was only their arms that were different.

They felt, again, the ghost of that one pair of hands that had stayed gentle throughout the whole working.

Curio. Curio (whose name had once been Precious) had not been the closest of Niks’ coven-mates, but he had always looked at them with clarity. Curio had always seen the broken glass in Niks’ history and had never worried it might cut him.

The two had almost gone to bed a couple of times, but had always found a reason to put it off to another day. Niks supposed that Curio would now remain always a “maybe one day”. But, well, there was a kind of power in potential (even unfulfilled).

Here are the words that Curio had written in shifting ferrous toxins across Niks’ body:

“Step by step. Sibling, this is how we go. Though I do not walk with you, know that the echo of my soles cries out to yours. Though you walk in the gloaming, know that there are photons lighting your way that have kissed my skin in days gone by.

“Step by step, sibling. This is how we go. Though your body is a gaol, know that there is a stitchwork to blood and bile and bone. Though you are illuminated by cold metal prison bars, know that others before you have unlocked the alchemy of biology. Though my becoming is not your transmogrification, know that our stories have in common both some language and some lessons.

“Step by step, sibling, this is how. We go forward knowing there is joy on the horizon. We go forwards and though some play leprechaun and move the rainbow goalposts beyond our reach, know that they cannot move the sunset. Though they bury the gold and lie and say it never did exist, know that it did and it does and the dusk is always gilded. Though you may ask me how to grasp it… how is this, sibling? Step by step.

“There are many things beyond our grasp, beyond our ken, beyond the doorway. Yet it is a lie to say that simply because you cannot touch a thing today that you must accept it cannot be changed. There is a distance between you and every thing in existence that can be measured in footsteps. A day will come, perhaps, when those things hear you coming and begin walking – in turn – towards you. As I will.

“Step by step. Sibling: this is how.

“We go.”

Niks read those words again and again and again. And they wept. And they cackled.

And they drank their tea.

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