113 - An existence of nothing but my own destruction

Dear Niku:

You won’t believe what I have become... just yesterday. Truly, you’d never believe it.

Dear Niku:

Remember how you always agreed with Skorsas that I look good in red? Well...

Dear Niku:

I asked my mother which of my parents charcoaled the name “Chevenga,” and got it out of her that it was her… no surprise, yes? So then I asked her, “What was the name you thought was more true to what you felt of me in the womb?” She told me...

Dear Niku:

I wonder if you’re writing and erasing letters to me? I doubt it... You wouldn’t waste your time with this. Not like me.

Dear Niku:

I have heard nothing from you, and my heart’s ripping itself into wet pieces for missing you. As if I’m going to send this———————

†

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee, etesora 44, Y. 1556

Tamenat of Haiuroru: As I may intercede, Chevenga, you thought, ‘If I really am a coward, I should fling myself off.’ Why?

Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e: Well… I… if I were a coward, I would never be able to fight.

Ta: So what?

4Che: Such a Haian question!

Lanai Kesila, Servant of Issolai, presiding: We ask that you answer it nonetheless.

4Che: I… the coward… Tamenat, you would not know this, but in battle, each unit must stay a unit to prevail and thus to survive. If it breaks, every warrior in it is likely doomed. And if a unit breaks, the whole line is broken, and likely doomed. The first warrior to break the unit, and the first unit to break the line, will always be the most cowardly. So, a coward on the field is death to everyone else.

Ta: You did not have the choice of not going on the field in the first place?

4Che: I… I was in war-training.

Ta: You could not tell your parents and your war-teacher, ‘I don’t want to do this’?

4Che: Well… I… actually, I did… I said it to Esora-e.

O: After this?

4Che: No… it was just before. He stopped me coming out of the School of the Sword’s ground, and took me into the room with the Sword, to ask me what was wrong.

O: What did you tell him?

4Che: That… that I never wanted to kill anyone. That I wanted just to make friends. We had… well, not exactly an argument, but… he reminded me, there are those who will have no ears for your words of justice and sense. And he told me to imagine, to play it out. I did, but I wasn’t convinced, so he spoke to me… he said first, that I would not be able to make peace with everyone, and not with anyone at all without a sheathed sword at my side. We serve each other best by each doing what he’s suited for, he reminded me, and my best talent was fighting. And then he asked me, would I send others to war and not go myself… he quoted my father saying, it fell to us to command and thus we became warriors. He had me imagine what the Yeoli warriors would say, having lost an even-numbered battle, about me not being there, and how things might have gone differently if I had… he told me how my father and my grandmother and Shae-Arano-el going far back had married warriors, so the talent I had was not by accident, and I should not waste it. He asked me what I thought my blood-father would think if he could see this… (weeping) Pardon me.

O: Take your time, Chevenga, easy on yourself.

Surya Chaelaecha: Deep breath.

4Che: In the end he said… we are all tied to duty… that mine was clear, and that… even though I wasn’t afraid of death, a coward is one ruled by fear of doing what he must do, and while he knew grief could turn anyone’s head for a while, he didn’t think I really was one. But I’d have to prove it… whatever was hindering me, I’d have to conquer, or fail entirely. And he left me with the sword.

Ta: So he left you no—

O: Then you think it was—pardon me, Tamenat, go ahead.

Ta: So he left you no choice.

4Che: Well…

Ta: He left you feeling you had no choice?

4Che: Yes, but I knew I did. Because my blood-father had always taught me that. ‘As always, you choose.’ I could choose otherwise.

Ta: Otherwise? What exactly were your choices, in your mind?

4Che: To take up the Sword… to continue my war-training and become a warrior, I mean… or leap off the cliff.

Ta: Because better you do that, then fail entirely, in his words.

4Che: Yes.

O: Chevenga… what exactly did you feel?

4Che: Well… I wasn’t happy.

O: But—pardon me, Tamenat, please go ahead.

Ta: Chevenga… what strikes me, what astonishes me about this… is how utterly alone you must have felt, to even have these thoughts, at such a young age. What do you remember of that?

4Che: Yes, I felt… (weeping) Forgive me. I…

Su: Deep breath.

4Che: Thanks… I… I thought of my father, who said I always had a choice… I knew he’d say that, if he were here. But… he was gone… and… I was less tied to life than I had been… so it didn’t matter… I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

O: No, no, don’t apologize for your emotion.

Su: Anyone in your place would feel the same. Deep breath.

Ta: What of your mother—two mothers—did you think of them, and the grief they would feel at losing you?

4Che: They… they’d be better off without a son who’d be the ultimate failure.

Ta: You felt the same of everyone?

4Che: Yes.

Ta: You were alone with it to an astonishing degree. Only seven, and you did not feel you could run to your mother with this?

4Che: Which mother?

Ta: … Either.

4Che: No.

Ta: Why not?

4Che: I… I don’t know. I ran to my blood-mother with so much, later… she was the one grown-up I told about my foreknowledge… I don’t know why I didn’t speak to her about this.

Ta: If you try to remember why… remember the decision, whether it was in your heart or in your mind, to keep it to yourself… what is there?

4Che: I… I don’t know… the aloneness… there is a hardness about it… in me… like a law, the laws we keep in our hearts, you know… do you know?

Ta: Yes, I know. Go on.

4Che: I felt a law in my heart, that I should not tell any of my parents about this.

Ta: Because of what aspect of it?

4Che: … I don’t know.

Su: Deep breath, Chevenga. Make the white line if you have to.

4Che: I should… this was… this was the sort of thing that they were not with me about. Even my blood-mother… I… All-Spirit, I’m on the edge of a chasm here, I… All-Spirit… All-Spirit.

Su: Make the white line.

4Che: This is… the kind of thing… I… endured… while they… stood above me watching… All-Spirit, All-Spirit, rest-break, for the love of All-Spirit, may we take a rest-break?

†

I lie in warmth and comfort as vast as the world. My body is not mine to command, somehow; I can’t even lift my head; but this is somehow natural and not frightening at all. All I need and wish comes to me anyway, freely given, by huge presences that make soft, sweet and gentle sounds. For a long time I was one with the greatest of them, and still barely know that I no longer am; I still feel her touch all the time. And yet I see, with my own eyes, so many things. Lines that run and zig-zag and wrap around each other on surfaces high above me, bright yellownesses that dance sideways against glowing orange in the darkness and cast heat on my cheek; moving happy pink things, each with two shining orbs full of life. All so new and amazing; even if my hands can’t, my mind reaches to grasp it all.

The swing up, warm skin under mine; then I’m seeing things I never have. Blue, bright, unending, above; piercing it from below a rugged brownness, fringed with green, so vastly high that it blurs. Against my face, a momentary caress, the softest imaginable, yet cool, of something I can’t see.

Harmonious sounds, solemn in tone; I am feeling the caresses all over my body, now, the soft stuff that was wrapping me all around taken away.

Then all my world is shattered. I am suddenly immersed in such cold that it burns like fire, trapped in rushing all around me that pins me frozen. Cold claws into my skin, seeps inward, sizzling, as if to dissolve my bones.

I cannot move, I cannot fight. I cannot breathe, my ribs and lungs turned to ice; I make no sound; cold is crushing me. Inwardly I howl to be saved; my mouth is open with silent wailing. The presences are above, but they do not take me up and enwrap me as they should when I cry. They do not save me. I scream inside for them but they stand still and uncaring.

I am alone in an existence of nothing but my own destruction. It is all I know, all I have ever known, all I ever will know. I am fighting inside, my heart fighting to keep beating, my lungs to keep pumping; alone in the universe I go berserk in my body; I am and was and will always be nothing but a death-fight against the cold. But I can’t move, can’t escape; the life in me feels itself begin to weaken and fail; the darkness of futility and death grows in me, opening like a black flower within, with tendrils reaching outward.

Then I am swung up again, the cold is gone and I am wrapped in warmth all around, skin on skin. I don’t feel it at first, still ringing all over with the icy echo of cold, and I go on mindlessly, eternally screaming.

Time passes, and I am warm and calm again, in the place with the lines above. But inside me a sliver of the coldness is left, the ice-edged blade of my own death, shimmering with terror and rage and shame, in my core. I will never again entirely trust this world. I will never again entirely feel I am not alone, even with love all around. I will never feel entirely innocent and unstained. I know darkness now, and will never forget. I have learned. I see the pink thing that holds the voice of the greatest presence, her shining orbs locked on me; she makes a series of sounds.

†

I woke up gasping. My blood-mother’s lips in firelight—that’s what I had seen. Forming words.

Ivaen Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Anaraseye d’Yeola-e.

My mind put names to everything in the dream, from knowledge I’d had since childhood. The running patterns on the ceiling. The fire. The sky. Hetharin. Is this something I’ve forgotten? Did I have some terrible illness as a child that they never told me about? Why couldn’t I speak, or understand? The blade of ice was still in me. It had always been there, as far back as I could remember; I’d just never noticed I was feeling it, and in fact it had always been central in everything I’d felt; that had gone without saying and seemed entirely natural now. I remembered going berserk against the Mahid escort near Roskat once they’d backstabbed my own escort; how I’d felt that my entire existence was in each moment of that fight. It was the same as fighting the cold in the dream. Why does it seem familiar, as if it has always been part of me? I was shaky all over, my limbs feeling empty as if there were nothing inside my skin.

I must understand this. It had a very certain feeling of having happened. By some miracle I had not awakened Skorsas. I crept out of bed past him, threw on my robe and knocked on Surya’s door, even though it was past midnight. I didn’t care. Why does it seem strange that I can walk, that I have strength? Why didn’t it seem wrong that I was so paralyzed I couldn’t lift my head? My stomach was in my throat.

“You don’t see what it is?” Surya asked, sleepily incredulous, when I had described it to him. I had lost not even an instant of it; it was another one of those dreams that I knew I’d always retain, in every detail. The robe suddenly wasn’t enough; I was shivering. He pulled the quilt off his bed, still warm from his body, and wrapped it around me, without my asking, as usual. “Just let out what you feel,” he said. “Have you ever expressed what is in that blade of ice?”

I signed charcoal. “Surya, just tell me what the fik it is.” I had waves of hot and cold going through me now, and the hot was anger.

“Your stream-test,” he said. “You’ve remembered it. Your mother saying your name was the first time she did.”

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