[flashback] talking thunder.

[Caelum]

14th Day of Winter, 506 AV

sick of raising up my hands,
drive another nail in.
- t. amos.

The young scholar Caelum had conscripted as his scribe had yet to arrive. Books large and small, thick and fresh or thin and crumbling sprawled across the work table of the shop, scattered over with sheets of vellum, endless reams of notes and maps, always maps, layered over and over one another until they formed a landscape only he could comprehend.

A quill rested in his hand, still in the striking slabs of sunlight left by the noon hour across the floor. He gazed not at the noon light nor through it, not at what physical objects they illuminated but at those hidden things, those metaphysical secrets hidden amidst billions of particles; and doing so, he recollected an hour that had lived and died six years ago. It had been winter, an entire cycle of seasons since he had stumbled out of the sky and into the sea.


It storms here. The death-rattle of rain shivers down my spine and there will be puddles in the morning.

I hate rain puddles.

I always feel as though I'm going to fall into them, and not hit the ground. I will just keeping falling and falling and falling until my skeleton has hollowed out and I have been stripped bare of everything. Every memory. Every emotion. Every dream, and I dream too deep. Then I'll be a skinwalker landing like a comet against the earth, shattered and alone; but that's happened before. That's happened already.

That could happen again.

The wind tells me tales of yesterdays, trying so hard to speak to me of cities and mountain ranges, all of the walks my path of centuries has stumbled me upon. Yet the whole of me wastes and wanes with the cycle of the universe as though this body whose skin feels like an ill fit is a walking, talking astrolabe. My mind cannot hold what it needs to, a cauldron of celestial improbabilities bubbling over.

There is the scent of ashes on the wind as I stand in the doorway of the cottage. Rosemary for rememberance. Thyme. Sage. Foxglove. Calamint to chase the sorrows away. It comes from my herb garden, planted in late spring of last year, my first on this forsaken earth in what I can only surmise has been centuries beyond comprehension. By the time the sun reaches it's zenith and if the storm grumbling on the horizon does not trespass too swiftly, the garden will be little more than fallow ground and sooted roots once more. Burning leaves and woodsmoke skirling upward in winter's chill, I can't help but watch it vanish into the sky.

It's falling.

Yes, I mean the sky. The little chicken in children stories running as fast as he can, yelling as loud as he can: the sky is falling! The sky is falling! Only in the story, like in all bedtime tales and fairy legends, the sky was not really falling at it all. It was a mistake. A big, horrible mistake.

I wish my life were a bedtime story.

I would toss a wish into a fountain, snap it from my fingertips so fast Syna's eyes upon it would spark, and wait with my hands folded like any good wishing well fool for some divine hand to catch my wish and carry it up, up, up until it stuck against heaven's floor to glow like a diamond with seven hundred billion other wishes.

Then I would sleep. There would be no nightmares to rattle against the walls of this corporal cage, desperately flinging themselves against the inside of my flesh in a futile fight for freedom. For memory. For revelation. No words would dance through the hallways of my mind, shadow sparring and sword stepping to surface, aching to no longer be sundered from my speech. The language would swarm, congregating like constellations, mapping the path towards the healing of the terrible fissure I slipped through. No longer would I draw these dreams in dust, seeking an impossible, impractical goal, assigning myself as the cartographer, as the architect and archaeologist of a holy couple's ruined, respective homes.

Only with every sunset, that quest is diminished, my capacity for success in it fading; and then with every sunrise it struggles to be born again, the need, the drive, the gnawing hunger to bring about this cosmic healing shrieking another waking prayer. The psalms I once sung both with and amdist my brethren haunt me like ghosts, like I have become a ghost and that beloved of Syna, that ascended soul swollen with the wisdom of countless lives is dead.

He had eyes the color of an eclipse and healing hands so fast they could outdraw the devil on his own ground. I remember the way he smelled, like fresh turned earth and green things. He was forever chasing after the wind, trying to keep it from erasing his footprints in the grass. He knitted flesh and conquered death and thought love could survive anything

He did not know it was a lie at the time.

I wish, I wish, I wish it was not.

I wish, I wish, I wish it could never be.

The garden fire crackled, embers flurrying upwards like a swarm of lightning bugs taking to sudden flight. I'm not just burning the leaves this time. There's papers in that fire, papers soaked in the blood of hope, worthless words tracking a year's worth of pointless research. The ink was leeched from my veins and endless orisons to the Bright Lady, to the Sun Born, to beloved Syna. I wonder if she remembers the man with the healing hands, if she recalls his best hours rather than the horrible ones alone as I do.

A barren road. Dust settling. Someone screaming, screaming, screaming.

He's dead and gone, Bright Lady. Dead and gone.

I can feel this body dying around me.

Over this past year I have become accustomed to it; but there lies a difference between the mortality of a young, drykas healer singing himself unto his goddess and a centuries old ethaefal being sung down. This body speaks. It talks in the aches of bone and the plagues of a limp and gods-haunted hands. The windmarks whisper tales, so many, too many. If my blood could talk, it would hum a dirge to the darkness. The darkness dreams tell me it has been spilled countless times to prevent.

They will have to bury me standing.

It is the faith of fallen I have within me now. The faith which beats wings between my shadow and my soul, uselessly trying to escape to the sky beyond. My feet are bound to the earth. I cannot fly, Bright Lady. It is too late and that is entirely your fault.

I may never go home. This path may never end, and if it does it may well be in a red haze of fire and condemnation; but Syna, dear, traitorous Syna, I am going to keep standing back up. I am going to keep crawling when you make walking impossible, and I am going to keep swimming through these puddles, struggling against the ceaseless waves while trying to heal the sky, your sky, not for you, but for those of us who still need something in which to believe.

It is time to leave this place. Foolish fallacy to have remained so long. The ingredients required to heal the fissure are doubtless scattered. As woodsmoke blurs against the horizon, I can see it is striped with blood like so many others have been. I wipe a smudge of soot from my cheek and watch the fire die into embers, glowing, glowing, as night falls over the world. The sun fades from my form, a log pops and a spark flies, wheeling madly upwards, reaching, reaching.. I close my eyes.

I wish, I wish, I wish.


A door slammed below, bells twinkling, calling Caelum back. He blinked and breathed out, sun swallowed eyes tumbling back down to his notes, to his research, to his collection of impractical, impossible hopes.

[Hadrian]

The young scholar Caelum had conscripted the day before arrived as soon as humanly possible, though in the back of his head and the pit of his stomach he was wishing it could have somehow been earlier. Would a celestial avatar be content with human limitations? It seemed not, at least with his own, semi-mortal shell.

At the door, Hadrian looked up at the sun, wondering: Was the presence of this ethaeful a sort of insubstantial gnosis? Was her errant servant a silent, coded message of 'I see you'?

In his haste, the door slammed behind him.

He had read into the night, squeezing his brain into a headache that plagued his sleep. Awaking after dawn, he thought to go immediately to Phaleron's shop; after all, Caelum's change back would theoretically already have happened. But he was home from university, and his family prevailed upon him until nearly noon. Escaping before lunch, he bolted food from the kitchens on his way, and here he was, stomach clenched from the hurried, nervous sustenance. But here was that ephemeral utopia, and he knew it would all soon be quiet and they would be transformed again into their quest for knowledge.

When he found Caelum, he slipped into his seat with a murmured apology, breaking out his quills and ink, reams of blank paper, transforming into a research assistant.

His mind could only hold this being in two hands: one diminishing him down to mortal scale that he might be studied too, the other stretched to capacity to hold the mere, transcendental idea of him. He decided it was probably for the best that ethaefal were not known to gather in groups for any amount of time. How could mortals not grow envious, worshipful, or follow some other, dangerous route.

He turned chlorine eyes to the book laid out in front of his seat, but glanced quickly at the heavenly scrawl before Caelum too in order that he might more quickly assess what he wanted from him with this particular book.

Hadrian began to read.

[Caelum]

Thousand-league eyes slanted sidelong at Hadrian as the young man arrived, offering a brief nod in response to the apology. Memory coated his mind in a thin film, stuffing his senses full of green scented smoke and the bitter, beginning footsteps of a journey still incomplete. The papers strewn before him were full of that quest's signposts and thorny twists. He shuffled them hastily and resumed his research.

Hours yawned, the light from the window marking them as they passed. Throughout, Caelum only exchanged brief clips of conversation with the young scholar, all of it pertaining directly to what they were reading, what they were specifically notating, or perhaps just the need to be handed a fresh ink well.

So it was at great length that Caelum slammed the heavy tome before him shut with an air of disgust. His chair creaked as he shoved backwards and down into an indolent slouch and proceeded to press the heels of his palms into his eyes as if to relieve them of their ache. His head swirled with herb lore, religious history and archaic mage craft, all the subjects of today's study.

"When do you go back to Zeltiva?" He asked the air or, perhaps, Hadrian, half mumbling the despite language.

[Hadrian]

"As soon as I can," he said, not looking up, not ceasing his note-taking. Not yet. "A week, two. As soon as I can safely withdraw from the comforting womb of home."

He was not sure what time it was as there were no windows in this room; few, in fact, in the entire shop that weren't at least covered in curtains to diffuse the light so dangerous to the older books. A lesson in that: time tears down all things in this vale of tears; books with their knowledge, men with their wisdom, buildings, mountains. And the ethaefal? Well, perhaps their wear and tear only showed on their insides, but who would dare vivisect a celestial avatar to determine the truth or fallacy of this hypothesis?

Finally, he fit about as much writing as possible on the page before him and set his quill aside that the ink might dry. No need of blotting sand with these materials, thankfully, else scholarship would be more trouble than it was worth.

"Did you want me to stay?" he asked, leaning forward onto a small strip of bare table, turning chlorine eyes on the horned man whose body cycled faster than a woman's.

The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn't got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It's not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium." --Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

[Caelum]

He considered Hadrian for a little while, hands sliding down his face to leave him blinking owlishly through the gradually diminishing light. He heard freedom in his scribe's voice, or rather a longing for it, perhaps in it's entirety, as though this trip to Syliras was more of an obligation than it was a vacation.

He wondered absently if that was Hadrian's fault or his family's. Probably, it was some muddled, gordian tangle of both. The only family Caelum could recall having was his ascended brethren, and the phantoms of that fellowship he was self-aware enough to admit were partially what kept him from forming any even vaguely real bonds of companionship.

"I'm not likely to be here much longer anyway," he said finally, words and slow and lumbering as ever, letting Hadrian off the hook as easily as he had initially hung him there. "I've been here long enough."

[Hadrian]

"The library at the University of Zeltiva is more extensive," he said, nodding and leaning back in his chair. "No offense intended to Master Phaleron, of course. But it is. And I imagine the nuit lords of Sahova have more thorough records of these things. Or the Celestial Seat in Nyka."

When only silence met his suggestions, he looked over at the ethaefal who had pushed him past the limitations of his knowledge into a realm of scholarly intuition.

"What's it like there?" he asked. "With the gods."

[Caelum]

The question had him peering sharply at Hadrian through blades of sunset hair, taken off guard by the abruptly personal inquiry tossed into an otherwise casual conversation. Walking through this world seven years as a stranger, an outsider, had left him ill prepared for the intimacies of continued contact with another sentient and communicative being. It caught him off guard, Hadrian's query acting as a catalyst, firing off a string of sparking words in his head that was like trying to wade through a storm of lightning bugs.

"Inhabited," he finally said. "An awareness of the connectivity of all things rules out any feelings of being sequestered. There is a fellowship among the souls and one that is shared with the goddess." He fell silent for a minute, sun-sunken eyes having gone far away. "Painless. Syna's light has burnt you blessedly hollow of corporeal suffering, passed you through it, beyond it, so that the lessons of fear and grief, rage and agony, are learned to their fullest extent yet leave no stains upon your soul."

[Hadrian]

Chewing on those words, those thoughts, and giving them due reflection, Hadrian finally nodded. He realized that parts of the experience had to be ineffable, or else much of what the man described sounded like descriptions of the Drykas webbing. At least, the part about interconnectedness. And the rest, well, this sustained thrill of academic pursuit was the closest to an ecstatic event as Hadrian had ever experienced. He was young, yes, but not inclined toward mystic experiences.

"Why do you think you're here?" he asked with all the impertinence of youth, but without malice or cruelty. It would only be a mental exercise for him until he had some experience that made it personal, incited emotional response. Until then, while he was not without compassion, he could only cut like a surgical instrument, attempting to lay open each intellectual challenge with the precision that Caelum and professors required of him. "I mean, the gods aren't infallible. We know that although it's considered rude to admit it openly. Maybe Lhex and Tanroa are infallible. Maybe there's a faceless demiurge farther from us than even they are. Maybe this hypothetical demiurge is created too, so there is a source beyond even it. At the beginning, there most be something, Something, beyond the question of mistakes. Like that word doesn't even apply. We throw our morals and ethics at everything, and that... they might not be wrong, but they are prejudices." He recalled Caelum's previous challenge to his word, wrong. "And even if you only admit to the existence of Lhex and Tanroa as supreme deities, then Lhex must have some reason for the ethaefal even if they are Syna's and Leth's children."

He was quiet for a moment. He had asked the question, and then set the rules for the inquiry. But the response was silence, so he repeated the question.

"So why do you think you're here? To mend a wound and return to Syna's Presence?"

[Caelum]

Don't ever try to teach me about good and evil. I've been there. You've seen nothing but the map.
- Orson Scott Card.

Caelum studied the young scholar's face as he spoke, watching the passion flicker and flare, the urgency and the hunger marking time upon his sharp featured face. If this was better than being assumed a monster, then he was not yet decided. Regardless, he shifted slowly out of his slouch and shoved wrinkled, ink stained sleeves up to his elbows. It was a nervous gesture, scarred hands and steel-wire muscles not what they should have been. It was said that the ethaefal were beautiful, but if he yet was it the distilled nature of that glory, when all of him, every part and piece, had been scraped and carved down to little more than the necessaries.

With the cosmic pieces of his impossible, impractical hope spread between them on the table, he weighed his elbows upon the pages and pushed his hands together over his jaw. When he spoke, his words were more fluid than ever with this alien-to-him language.

"First, the gods are not infallible. If you are looking for a fairytale, Hadrian Aelius, a lesson crafted from snow, glass, and apples with definitive lines between the heroes and the villains, a tale of good versus evil and where the monsters are known by their faces and the shining knights by the white chargers they ride, a story where the light overcomes the darkness and in the darkness are only bad things and within the light only the best, a story where all choices are easily categorized into right and wrong and at the very last possible moment a good turn or the providence of great love or maybe a steadfast faith prevails to save the day, the maiden, the kingdom and even the world, then this is not the story for you."

He paused while the light from the window waned, the world turning slowly their piece towards sunset. It was always torturous and doubtless some of that spun through his words. "Here, here there are no obvious heroes or absolute villains, the light burns and evil sometimes wins. Faith often flounders and love dies as often as it saves. The heroes are not always brave, villains tell the truth sometimes and good deeds are not always acknowledged. Further? This story ends badly and if it has a saving grace, it is the fact that a heap of ashes means whatever was there did not go quietly, did not fall without a fight. No, a heap of ashes means that whatever was there went out burning and no matter what Lhex or Tanroa, Syna or Leth or any goddess or god existent may wish, no matter what their followers or even their detractors may believe, they can make mistakes. They have made them. If there is a demiurge existent, perhaps it is infallible, perhaps in it's omnipotence there are no mistakes, there are no errors; but that is not the practicable divinity with which I am so well acquainted."

It was more than Caelum had uttered in a piece since landing, broken and embittered. It was as if the very vocabulary which they employed was caught by a centrifugal force, spinning and spinning and spinning so as not to fly apart. Yet if it spun too fast it would, of course, only collapse in on itself and the bowl of the heavens would be bereft of another star. This story, he had said, knowing that where it ended another had begun.

"Why am I here? What is it Lhex, shouldering up to the Bright Lady, to my Syna, has designed? Maybe we should return to your original question, Hadrian, when you asked what it was like there with the gods, as though they exist in some other place, some different land. The Ukalas surround us. The heavens are at your fingertips, inside your lungs, whirling about the candle flame. The realm of Syna, the realm of any god, is merely crafted from the fabric of all that is around you, a sort of pocket created amidst billions of tangled threads. I was here while I was there. How can it but be a mistake when I am now only here? Do you understand?"

[Hadrian]

"All right, all right. The gods are not infallible. That's what I meant to say anyway. But it's sort of a moot point anyway. How can I judge whether a god is infallible if I don't know the mind of a god? They can manifest before a crowd and say something and then later that might prove untrue. Well, gods can lie, then. So the question of fallibility is moot anyway.

"Our world and the Ukalas co-exist, juxtaposed. That's not a new idea either. And apparently Valterrian ripped some kind of hole between whichever part of the Ukalas where the ethaefal existed and here. Or, not a hole, but distressed the fabric that separates them to the point where some of you accidentally fell through it like cheesecloth.

"But you're saying it's a mistake. Whose mistake?"

He wanted to ask more, like how he expected to mend a tear that the gods could not. Or could they do it, but would not? That might be worse, to know that his patron goddess could not be bothered to pull him to her side, and after all this time.

Leaning back, he gave up, on some level trying to protect Caelum from truths he might not enjoy.

"Never mind. Areesa Tallshade made a sword to cut gods. I'll make you an amulet to bridge the gap to the Ukalas. Someday."