Memory 3α
…The Spring We Cultivated Schemes.
When my life as I knew it ended, I was sleeping, dreaming possibilities that would never come…could never come; children, a house that oversaw the world, and old age with the woman I'd love forever. We'd be free of these hero-plagued hills, and the plenitude of theomaniacs seeking—always seeking—The Way Home to the Queen-Mothers who tend the world. If only they knew, The Way could be divined in sleep rather than blood, we might have had a better world then.
My vision, the first step on a treacherous Way, was clear that there would be no better world; Armageddon rode from the north, as she always does, alongside the lullaby-bray of Sleep-heavy winds ready to put an age to its last bed. I knew because I saw, past Time's heavy veil, Divided by my rapid and brief taste of divinity which lent me…perspective, but it didn't take a deity to hear the sky wrack itself with guilt, dousing us in Melancholic tears for reasons we wouldn't know until the time for unbloodied tears had passed. Instead, many read positive Omens in the water, saying, "We needed the rain," and Hoped it was a sign of blessed times to come. From where the Queen-Mothers and myself stood, it was, but blessings and purpose are awful things to crave. A plea for rain makes drought elsewhere, and a mission of cosmic import makes requisite equal opposition! And where Dualistic forces clash in violent Alchemy so does one find Armageddon, banner hair stretching 'cross the sky as she gathers lives like a child gathers paint, casts them at a canvas wide as the universe, delighting in the Chaotic splatter-patterns of its demise.
I relayed this to my love, Tashina, a cooper whose name had spread to four hills in four directions—my genius. She handled the news and my appearance—eyes horizon sharp, hair climbing into the air unnatural, and my head encircled by a crown of fragile starlight—with admirable aplomb. I'd pronounced to her that the world was ending, and she asked me, "What do you need me to do?"
Tashina loved challenges the way I enjoyed wine. It was how we found the other; I dreamed of vinting beyond the halter of the Sublime Dowager's dull orthodoxy, to make amber-Alchemy that the Queen-Mothers would gladly sip. While Tashina, when her name had only spread across three hills in two directions, had made her foray into the very blasphemy I dreamed of achieving due to the illicit request of an alchemist. He'd come to her desiring a cask to ferment queens-grace, something no one had built before; she succeeded on her first try. The reward for her Brilliance? She was added to a list of blasphemous heretics penned in the blood of that same alchemist. The fool had been caught by the Sublime Dowager's witch-knives, and tortured into admission of his co-conspirators—in his agony he added anyone and everyone to make it end. It'd forced Tashina from her home and, fortuitously, into the arms of someone who sought her companionship and ambition.
"Do you want to change the world with me?" were the first words I'd given her. They were the nine words she'd use to wake me for over three-thousand Mornings—half of which were after I'd braided a lock of her fur with mine and vice versa; mates to the end of Time.
The last part of my vision, I kept from her. She loved challenges—I had to give her one, so from the furnace of my soul where Hope sits molten, I dredged one up. Blew an impossible shape for it—Stop me from walking The Way Home—but said, "Build us a house."
She lapped at her fangs, leaping from bed to the drafting table, salivating with a hundred drooling questions. This was our first scheme, and over the Spring we Cultivated many more; necessary considering what she'd be building was meant to withstand the heavy blows of Armageddon, the gusts of Sleep, and—known only to me—constrain my sickle touch and guillotine gaze lest I Divide the world.
In seeking out the queens-graces needed to build it, my Tashina became the last legend of a dying age, and lead to…
…The Summer of Our Glory.
And what a Glorious one it was, safe from the world and its dramas, a baby bird nestled in the Paradisical palm of a petrified giant's corpse, looking down on all of creation. We'd outpaced Armaggedon, but news of her work found its way to us even in those azure-gold lands at the edge of everything. Her arrival was a gift to every Bloodlust-addled brain, and made the world a battlefield for those nascent Tyrants and ambitious Kings who'd fallen to the seductions of Conquest; though many wore the painted Mask of Justice, some better than others. Their battles made crimson lakes of Tranquil valleys, cut clouds into citrine entrails replete with Rotted rain that sprinkled corpse-pox over the Luckiest of Survivors.
When I'd inadvertently stepped onto The Way Home and woke Armageddon, I saw that this would happen, and how it'd only be me who could end it…at the measly cost of ending everything. Alas, I—no matter the soil I've been planted—am defined by a selfish aroma. Tashina built the house of my dreams, unknowingly attempting to drag me from The Way Home, and I Loved her for it. In lieu of Burying the world, I swaddled myself in easy fantasy and closed my ears to the bellow of distant suffering.
Far from the center of the world and the people who tainted it, you could hear the song of the Queen-Mothers, their Infinite sublime arrangements whose harmony and discord Cultivated a private heresy within me; that those divinities—my distant kin—were a bickering clan, but unlike the orthodox position, their inability toward Unity was where every illustrious Mystery that made life and this world worth Existing had derived. This was the song that became a bulwark for my heart, and the score to my summer.
In the many Quests undertaken to build the house, Tashina had inadvertently completed another dream of mine—she gave me children, a family. Though she'd grumble at that designation. "Disciples, woman. Disciples! A bond thicker than anything nature-made," she'd say, chastising me for my over-simplicity, but I think you can forgive me this misappellation. When she'd returned with that little flock of six, faces starving for Instruction and Love, I saw the children that'd traipsed through my dreams all these years. There was no force nor Queen-Mother that could've prevented me from spoiling them.
But Tashina, ever the responsible one, allowed me this provided I—despite the children's pleas every Morning for a few minutes more—made sure to get them ready for the day's lessons. In the months she'd been away, Tashina's skill as a cooper and alchemist had married themselves in her finest creation: the votive cask, an improvement on the earlier model that'd forced her to flee; not only capable of fermenting the queens-grace from whatever was placed within it, but could be tapped, releasing the ambrosia used to create the mystic wonders the Sublime Dowager built an empire on. It was a Revelation Tashina could've leveraged to become a King in her own right, but instead, every morning on the terrace that oversaw Oblivion, she let wisdom flow from her palms, baptizing our children with Primordial insight. It was one of those mornings where I sat in on a lesson, kneading dough for the Night's meal.
"Can any Queen be casked?" asked First-Sun.
Tashina thought a moment, ruffling Sixth-Star's fur to their half-hearted exasperation—a tax for begging to sit in her lap rather than on the 'dirty' floor with her sibling-disciples. When the answer came, and the children were on the edge of narrow pubescenct patience, Tashina set Sixth-Star on the floor and meandered to a flower, asking me with her eyes, "May I pick this one?" My tail flicked the air with a dismissive, yes you may, and so she did, raising the plucked beauty.
"Clarity, as I've often said, is the most important thing about what we do," Tashina explained. "Each votive cask, for greatest efficacy, should be tailored to the grace you're trying to cask. Not just for the Queen-Mother whose grace it is, but how grand that grace is. A cask meant for a flower wouldn't be suited to cask the bones of a noble beast, and that which could work on a beast would lack a number of materials worth legends in their right if your desire was to cask a Queen. Now, First-Sun, are you asking if it'd be possible to cask a Queen-Mother or are you asking about the possibility of casking a specific queens-grace?"
The children snickered at the explanation given at First-Sun's expense, but having been reproached for an inaccurate statement, First-Sun decided to pursue his line of inquiry. "Queen-Mother," he stated, Rebellion sparking in his eye as he strode across a line that no ancestor of his who walks beyond Afterlife's Gate would think to try. A matter that the more religious of Tashina's disciples, namely Third-Moon, bristled at; fur on end and a tinny child's growl rumbling through her.
"Did your brain leak onto the bed overnight," she hurled at First-Sun. "It's impossible to do that!"
But First-Sun, hunkering behind his pride, cast to her the question, "How do you know?"
"No one's done it!"
"No one's done what Master Tashina has until she did it," he argued, "so who says you can't?"
This was an argument with no end, and I chuckled at Tashina's growing weariness, stepping in to pluck Third-Moon into my arms and wrap my tail around First-Sun.
"Maybe, instead of proclaiming what can't be," I said to Third-Moon, "we remember that eras come-and-go, and with them the rules of what is and isn't. Let the Queen-Mother of Swords strike that line, and maybe you and First-Sun can find it together, hmm?"
Third-Moon crossed her arms, unhappy that it seemed like I was taking First-Sun's side, but Tashina, recognizing my lead, admonished First-Sun, "And it'd behoove you to remember, there's no difference between us and the leaves in the eyes of the Queen-Mothers. We both grow, we both die, and to think ourselves above nature's context is the first hubris that leads to harm. Don't seek glory, disciple-mine, only answers."
First-Sun hung his head, casting his features into the shadow of introspection, and Third-Moon uncrossed her arms, bidding I place her down—which I did. Trepidatious, as they'd been fighting moments earlier, she pulled herself to First-Sun's side and she hugged peace into him, promising that she'd make sure nothing harmed him. It was a moment I painted in the halls of my memory. The rest of the day was a blur, possessing no distictive clarity from other Summer days until the evening fell and the children were silent in their beds. While I, pestered by First-Sun's question, rolled over to prod Tashina until her eyes opened far enough that my question could slip through.
"Could you do it?" I asked. "Cask a Queen-Mother?"
"Woman, if I need to cask a Queen-Mother then we'd have bigger problems," she said, before pulling the blanket over her head with a muffled huff. I accepted this answer, unaware how accurate my genius Tashina was; no matter the heights of Summer Glory there would always come…
…The Autumn When Melancholy Knocks.
Summer's fire varnished the leaves and giant's bones upholding our home, and the sight of it—a fading world's winking beauty as it drowns in its blood—stole my children's hearts; strange how, in a time for dying, the youth continue to grow. Possessed by the irrepressible desire to live, unaware that their world is a grave, Tomorrow a cadaver, and when I told them this, speaking from divine experience and motherly concern…they called me, "Paranoid."
Never to my face; they loved me too much for that, but not enough to never say it. And say it they did, to the drifting breeze that carried the aroma of Oblivion's quintessence, to the ancient bones of our gargantuan benefactor, to each other in the small hours of Night when they traced their dreams in stars, and to the dough as they needed it to bread. All the world became their confidante, and with every surface soaking in this perception…it was only a matter of time before Tashina approached me, our children's estimation furrowing her brow beneath its weight.
"It's the end of the world out there," I yelled. "Do you want them to die?"
She countered, "The world has been ending for five summers, maybe…"
Maybe I was wrong? Maybe the Queen-Mothers aren't in a hurry to see the sundering of creation? Maybe—"I really am paranoid?" I whispered, reading in my mate the doubts that'd engraved themselves into her face. She was my genius, and if she also believed this—that I'd projected the fear for myself onto the world—perhaps she saw, with mortal clarity, the mundane passion that'd Masked my reason.
"How about this," she proposed, pulling my head to her breast, "see if you can see again. Divine their futures, and if ruin awaits them we keep them here."
It was a measured plan from a measured woman; Tashina shied from known risks. We forgot, every risk isn't known, and to find the line struck by the Queen-Mother of Swords is, in truth, a pursuit of her sublime edge. My children, kneeling on pillows before me with Hope-painted faces and eyes bright with ignorance, had laid their necks to it.
From my own position, kneeling to face them in equal commitment, I took myself in hand and turned; divinity's sharp-edge trading position with the mortal back I'd held before the world thinking this would save it. Another fantasy I'd swaddled myself in—I realize that now; neither front edge nor back mattered when I, divine and mortal, were the equivalent dreams of a ruinous blade.
My chin, heavensward when we began, fell to my chest in an initiatory stroke, vorpal sight Dividing Time's corridor-veil. Umbral flowers bloomed, shadowy aeonic petals obscuring their faces as a caul; my last warning.
"Mother, what do you see for me?" First-Sun inquired, forcing me to turn my head to face him; a dolorous motion. What did I see?
A viridian man atop battlements that oversaw innumerable dead. A woman whose broken heart led her to the end of her mother's blade and saw the shards of that shattered feeling take her throat in turn—an end of an epoch. My First-Sun sought the lines of every world, sought shadows to chase, sought the moon's shape to make his own. A born seeker cursed to delve dead hollows, tumbling down rivers of Melancholy that would drown him everytime. The question, how many does he take with him?
Petals take flight in a fluttering explosion, a flock scattered. The flower is smote. I'd seen all that he'd been, most of what he'd be, but I'd forgotten that a saber's kiss lacerates.
My children screamed, rising from their seats to escape me—not that I perceived them; in peering beyond Time, beyond the bowl of creation, I was aware of nothing. They were one tile in an omniversal mosaic that I'd promised to examine before granting them my blessing and their Freedom. This knowledge was my Grace; I loved to spoil them.
In a sweep of my head, I destroyed them.
At Tashina's unwitting request, I Divided our family. Parents became Remnants; children, Ghosts.
How that night sticks to me, the sap of Melancholy adhering it to my Way, my Path; canon as cosmic landmark. I should've seen it, but I didn't. Now I do. My arms are scissor-blades cleaving what I hold. My heart, a scintillating rapier which attracts…and pierces those I Love, leaving them to bleed in a graying world. I sever the heavens, literal and metaphorical. Goodbye my Suns, my Moons, my Stars. Mother will always Love you, and for that I'm sorry.
For that, I took to my bed, alone. Tashina, to her studio. Alone I watched the snow fall, Night-obsidian and strewn about with the powder of stars. It took time, but it'd come—I'd seen it on the horizon…
…The Winter I Lose to Sleep.
Tashina comes and goes; I don't know where, but I measure the days in the whine of our front door. It was Sixth-Star's chore to oil the hinges, they were so meticulous. But they were gone, and what prowled this house was a genius haunted and a Monstrous mother who needed to hear the whine of the door so the Silence of this childless home wouldn't kill her.
I'd turned myself back over, but I'd made another step on The Way Home. Mine had become a world of shadows past and future. Those few moments that Tashina would visit me—I think checking if I'd died—her face was a bouquet. In the years that past, I wondered over her hammering and scratching. What challenge could overtake such Grief. I was happy she'd found something. Let me bear sorrow's burden. Let this be Justice.
Over the years I forgot her face. There were too many petals. How old my beloved's soul.
When I dreamed, I was someone else, speaking words that weren't mine but fit well enough. In the bronze mirror, burnished beneath Time's detritus, I saw faces that weren't mine but felt appropriate. When I couldn't sleep, tortured Remembrance a ballast into the present, I read my History and it all made sense. There were cues, scattered but present, and moments that forked had I been capable of choosing something else. In those moments, I held Dual feelings—The Way Home was so familiar, but I walked it like every step was a surprise; could something be both old and new? Queen-Mothers alone could answer.
One morning, beyond the window of my room, there was an army. That was new, and likely bad seeing that Tashina entered my room—in her visits she'd only poked a floral head in, petals swishing in quick examination before she retracted into the hallway.
"Do you want to change the world with me?" she asked.
"I don't think I can," I said, losing myself in a jungle of aeons the moment I considered her question.
"I never said 'can,' woman." I closed my eyes, appreciating the velvet sensation of her chastisement. "Do you want to change the world with me?"
"Across every gloaming world," I said, "I'll want to change it with you."
She crossed the room, and for the first time in too long she handed me tea. Our fingers slid against eachother's. "Then drink, and know that I love you." I did, and on finishing my cup it felt as if I'd never drank anything in my life. I was panting, cold and warm, in need of my Tashina to make me whole. When she mounted me, I realized that I could see her face again. Such a beautiful face. I grasped it in my hands, giving thanks to the saint who'd brought me back to the present.
"My genius," I said, pressing our mouths together to make a bridge of tongues.
Tashina stayed beyond that first kiss. A farmer, she planted more across my body—between my legs and beneath my tail. In her company I regained my voice, having not spoken for so long it proved weak when forced to trumpet sensual agony. My mate came back to me, in fullest meaning—not that twin Moons could make children, but Tashina treated that fact like a challenge. She'd always Loved that challenge.
When it was done, I fell into the shallows of Indulgent Delirium exhausted beyond measure. Though not so far gone I couldn't feel Tashina leave the bed. My eyes fluttered open and I raised a trembling hand, clutching at the memory of where she'd lain but found no purchase. She was in a chair across the room—the one she'd always slump in after mating. "I have to appreciate my hardwork," she'd say when I asked her to return to bed.
Not wanting to lose her again, I marshalled memories of seduction and asked, "Appreciating your hardwork?"
She looked at me in terror, like I'd discovered something I shouldn't have. What?
"What's wrong?" I asked, trying to push myself up to leave the bed so I could comfort her. Instead, I fell deeper into the bed. What few muscles had been engaged slipped from my power. I would've screamed, but it takes muscles to speak. So I implored her with my eyes, answer me, please.
She rose from the bed, wobbling to the door, stopping at its threshold. This-way-and-that she looked, not to avoid me but…to appreciate her hardwork. When her attention joined me, she asked, "Do you remember, First-Sun's question?"
He asked so many questions, my little seeker, but there was only one that was truly memorable, one that was the answer—can you cask a Queen-Mother?
"It's a good thing you aren't one yet," Tashina said.
Tears wet my blankets. She was going to put me in a votive cask, imprison me in a barrel. Was she this mad?
"No, no, no," she said, petting the word into my fur from across the room. "Votive casks have to scale. You're too much for one of those."
I couldn't move my eyes. I couldn't blink. The image of Tashina drowned in my tears, and I held a question affixed in my heart—Tashina could always read my heart—where's the cask?
"We're in it," she said. "I make casks—even when they're houses. And tonight, I've closed the lid."
There was no wailing from me, nor cheering, but only the cold realization that my genius had found the answer to the impossible shape. The way to keep me from walking was to make it so I couldn't walk. A familiar darkness absconded with my senses, and to Sleep I fell; furious at Tashina's betrayal and Content that she'd suffer with me—until I was Free, there'd be no end.
Mates to the end of Time, Remember.