#aeife

little birthday doodle of @elfzelda! (i think this is what you look like??)

Wake up. From one day’s radiance into another. It had still been light out on the other side, and it was already on this one. The room was sweltering in the radiator heat she’d allowed inside. Ostensibly to make it feel more like home, but mostly to keep any mouthy snowmen from intruding upon her domain. 

Check the clock. She had about an hour before the mouthiest of them all would come back as well. The only sixty minutes of the day that didn’t have to matter all at once. This was what she did for a living. Anyone’s living aside from hers.

Listen. Amidst the palace’s terrible acoustics, Kerli could hear the luckier servants at work. Drawing baths, kneading breads and directing overly eager guests to the waiting room, where they’d get to sit and ponder the straightness of their priorities for implicitly professing their paltry liegeman’s problems to be more pressing than their lord’s early morning doze. 

Consider. Theirs was a grit she could respect. No, not the liegemen’s. The servants’. A diligence she could only simulate by sacrificing sleep for a few dozen minutes of rest. As actually joining them in their being all but taken for granted would somehow rub both the taken and the takers the wrong way. Not that she cared. Yet not doing whatever she damn well pleased, like a good little noble, was a bigger act of rebellion than any solidarity could ever be. 

Reflect. It’s pragmatism, she thought, don’t judge me.

“I’m not judging you,” Aeife would say.

“Maybe I want to be judged.”

Compare and contrast. Most other vinkona got out of bed along with their sisters. Yet Aeife’s mere presence was such a smother on her daily existence that she had to allow herself at least an hour to catch her breath in advance. Everything after that was dressing, preening, driving, meeting, smiling, shrinking, kissing asses, making nice and at the end of the evening cursing herself for wasting yet another day choking on the undignifying drone of debonair dignity. Effacing herself for a loyalty to no one in particular. For a fealty more foul and fatuous than the gilded bitterness boiling up inside her. 

Don’t lie. She wanted to be judged. But Aeife couldn’t. And Faye wouldn’t.

The bell rang. When Emily opened the door, she was met by her own reflection in a pair of mirrored aviators. It was Aeife. Somehow.

“How the hell did you get here?” Emily asked.

“Well, I sorta followed you here. I hope you weren’t about to slip into something more comfortable?”

“I’m more than comfortable enough, thank you.”

“Really now.” Aeife raised an eyebrow and cast a skeptical look at Emily’s frumpy getup. “Mind if I come in?”

"Actually, yes.” Emily leaned against the doorway. “How the hell did you get here?”

Aeife scoffed. “You think you’re the only slider around these parts?”

“A what?”

“You know, that whole thing where you fall asleep and wake up in another world? We’ve been doing that for my entire life. And so have you, by the way. You just can’t remember.” Emily couldn’t shake the feeling that Aeife was disappointed in her. “How do you think we knew how to get you out of there?”

“So you were the one who attacked me,” Emily muttered.

“The only way to wake you up over there was to knock you out over here, yes. You starting to see how this thing works?”

Would it hurt this girl to apologize once in a while? Or was she the one who had to apologize? Emily ran a hand through her disheveled hair and lowered her gaze to the perfect feet gracing her doorstep. They were wearing designer heels. Of course they were.

“Aeife, I, eh...” she said, “I don’t know if I wanna be involved with all this stuff.”

“Call me Evanna.”

Emily looked up.

“My parents aren’t sliders, you see. Sure, they exist in both worlds, but as two separate entities. They don’t share their memories or personalities like we do. Most people live an entirely different life in the other world without ever knowing they’re not the only ones of them around,” Aeife -- or rather, Evanna -- said, pursing her lips. “So yeah, I ended up with two names. One for each world. One for each life. Unlike you.”

“Wait, so in that other world... my name is the same?”

“Yup. That can only mean your parents knew you’d be a slider and wanted to give you a single identity. And they’d only knew you were a slider if they were sliders themselves. Or at least one of them.”

“I’m pretty sure my mom would have told me she’s a witch,” mumbled Emily.

“You have another parent, don’t you?”

Emily started to bite her nails. It felt wrong, as things should be.

Emily stared down at the table, where the apple lay innocently on its side, still wobbly from its drop. Her way out was within arm’s reach, and she couldn’t even touch it. Literally. She had dreamt more than anyone who actually could dream. She had waited for an opportunity to fall into her lap, and now that her wish had been granted, through some cynical twist of fate, a giant middle finger to the spirit of initiative that’d almost made her feel guilty, she was too scared to make even the minimum of effort it still required of her.

She’d no reason to trust Aeife. She knew. But she’d never been the most rational person. She wanted to trust Aeife. She did. But she’d never been the most courageous person either. So here she was. Banging on a locked door. Her grand adventure, aborted before it’d even started. She chose. The same thing she always chose.

“I can’t,” she said.

Coward.

“Why not?” Aeife asked.

That question. Always that question.

“Because it won’t matter. It’s not gonna change anything. I don’t know you. I don’t know this place. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I’ll never be a part of it. Never, really be a part of it.”

Aeife reclined in her chair. Outside, the sun was going down.

“You’re already a part of it. You’re a part of everything. This world, all of the worlds, they’re just grand spiderwebs of similarities and differences. Relationships. All you need to do to see that, is to acknowledge that you’re a part of it. To use magic is to reach into something you see, isolate every single one of its treats and find that which connects you. I reach into you and I see not a single aspect I won’t find anywhere else. On the contrary. You and I have so much in common you’ll never see the end of me. You already belong, Emily. That’s not your choice to make. But you can choose to accept it.”

Silence. Emily looked at Aeife, then at the apple, then at the seemingly infinite space between them. Breathe in. Reach out.

“There’s just one thing i want to know before I do this,” she said. 

Aeife cocked her head. She swallowed.

“Is it scary, to fall asleep?”

“You don’t even notice it.” Aeife smiled.

Breathe out. The fire scorched her hands. It didn’t hurt. She tightened her grip around the apple’s round contours. Not hers. She imagined the taste of tart, luscious sweetness in her mouth. Not hers. She envisioned the old farmer’s hand, plucking the ripe fruit from its branch to usher in the end of summer. Definitely not hers. 

Hers was the red. The pervasive, abundant red longing to flow through her veins. She called out to it; it pulled itself loose from the apple’s skin and seeped into hers. It poured into her like a tidal wave, washing away her fears and doubts. Within a matter of seconds, she’d dug her teeth into the feeble fruit’s fragile flesh and rent it to shreds in her mouth. And then it was over, and she was Emily again. And she wondered how she ever came to be brave enough to have done the things she’d just done. The apple, pale and colourless, fell to the table. And she was still alive.

“Wait, so you don’t actually call it magic?” Emily blurted out. It had been a while since she’d last interrupted anyone.

“We don’t really call it one thing.” Faye emerged from the living room and dropped onto the seat next to Emily’s. “It just comes naturally to us. ‘Magic’ is what the people over on the other side call it, so we sorta picked up on that, but we’ve never really felt for it to need a name. It’s just the way of the world’s work.” 

“Don’t you have good feelings to make with my vinkona?” groaned Aeife. She slammed the fridge door shut and strode back to the table, where she put what looked like a large apple down in front of Emily. It gleamed an alluring deep red in the late afternoon sun.

“She can wait. I wouldn’t wanna be missing this for all the moolah in the world.”

Aeife scoffed. Even her scoffs sounded like they came from another world. “Suit yourself,” she said, “but don’t come crying when things get a little heated.”

“Are you gonna make me set this thing on fire or something?” Emily said. Usually the fire came after months of reading and breathing exercises and philosophical pontificating. At least in books it did.

“Nah. That’d be too easy. You’re gonna eat it.”

Another answer that raised five more questions. Emily sighed from a sit into a slouch, swept the apple up from the table and held it in front of her face. It smelled like grenadine, and looked like carved ruby far more than anything edible, but the longer she held it, it mostly just felt. It hurt. It hurt like nettle, scorching every pore in her shivering skin. It pulsated, convulsed, lived in the palm of her hand, drawing out pain from places she didn’t even know could hurt. It stuck to her like boiling sugar. But the only thing harder than letting it go would be to keep holding on. The strange fruit dropped onto the table to the beat of Faye’s fist.

“Have you completely lost it?!” Emily heard, and “You’re making her eat a Scarlet Kiss?” Someone was screaming. She wasn’t the one screaming. Somehow. She blew into her hand, hoping it would ease the pain. She clenched, hoping it would quell the fire. She bit off her fingers, but they were still there.

“It’s the easiest way to see if she can tap into the Cavalier’s power,” someone sang. I was Aeife. Aeife sang. The unpain slowly trickled back into her body. The oxygen forced open her throat. Her hand was lying right in front of her on the table, floundering in a puddle of its own blood. Her ears listened. “This is a mutated type of apple known as a Scarlet Kiss,” Aeife said, “I've read that before the Age of Colonization, these were presented to condemned criminals on the night before their execution -- usually by their wives, or their sisters, hence the name. The idea was that if they chose to atone for their crime by dying by their own hand, they’d deserve a more gentle death than whatever the executioner had in mind for them.”

The words burrowed their way up through her gullet, like vomit. A million bottled-up accusations, fighting for the right to strangle her. She swallowed then all. She took everything back. But Aeife wouldn’t stop looking.

“It’s gonna be okay, Emily. Trust me.”

Emily hadn’t had any problems trusting Aeife up until now. But that had been another Aeife, a gentler, goofier, far more enthralling Aeife. This Aeife, royal and uncaring, she didn’t want to trust.

“You just tried to poison me,” she said.

“It’s gonna be okay. Eat the apple.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I can’t, okay?” Her voice capsized. It was humiliating. She clenched her fists, gazing into Aeife’s ice. “I know what this is,” she stammered, “you want to brute force me into doing something magical by endangering my life. I know that. But if that’s how it works, then I don’t want to learn mag--”

“I’m sorry, Emily.” Aeife hung her head. Faye put a concerned hand on Emily’s shoulder. “But this isn’t about what you want anymore. This is about what you have to do. And all you have to do is trust me.”

At least her senses were returning, judging by the pain breaking through the haze in her legs. Awkwardly wobbling back to her feet, she looked over the railing that had broken her fall. The tiled floor below was as gorgeous as the one she was standing on. Four, five floors before she’d reach ground level, maybe? The screams and gunshots emanating from downstairs didn’t sound very welcoming, but going back was even less of an option.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

It was the most oddly endearing voice Emily had ever heard, a melodic, high-pitched song of an accent lisping its way through a question she honestly didn’t know the answer to.

“That’s where they’re coming from. Come on!”

She’d heard this voice before. It was the voice that had woken her up. And it belonged to a girl no self-respecting person would ever dare to fall in love with.

Clearly tired of Emily’s waffling, the girl with the dainty voiced grabbed her arm and nearly pulled her upper body off her legs, still struggling to wake up. Emily didn’t like being touched, especially not by someone as infuriatingly perfect as this girl. Her magnetism troubled Emily on a level far beyond mere attraction, oozing a sense of comforting unattainability she thought existed only in print.