Closed A Dialogue Between the Spirit and the Dust

[Philomena]

Spring 12, 512 AV
The Tailor Shop Beneath Minnie Lefting's Flat, Zeltiva
-------------------------------------------------------------

Death is not a discrete event, but a process. Minnie had gone through all the stages now - but for one. The terror of the early days had gone into a period of frantic hard work - to clean the corners of her life, to try to find a solution. Hope, after the Rak'kelli Tears had soothed the disease into a stagnancy for a time. Anger as she raged against the silent sky with Qalaya, with Dira, guilt as she tried to find a reason for all of this, as she thought of how her Gypa would hurt when he felt the little spark of her die out. When the ring on his finger grew suddenly, irretrievably colder.

This was past now. What did it matter, now? The last mild dementia, gloriously merciful, of the very ill had come, and left her calm and still. She felt the crisis of it coming, and wondered why they even called it a crisis. So many parts of dying felt more like a crisis. This? The knife, she already felt against the flesh of her throat. Dira's mother hand, she felt across her holding her still for the final blow, felt the shadow of a breath of the last mother murmuring in her ear, soothing her.

//Calm... calm child. This comes to all.//

It was only a criss because some people could rally from it. She had done it, twice, herself with Lanie. This was different, her heart knew that. She gently shushed the little voice of hope in her, gently laid it in its crib, and rocked it gently back to sleep. She could do this now, she could, at last, in these final days, be gentle with herself. Even in Winter, when she had thought Mr. Everto would bring death to her a bit early, she had hated herself into a calm. She could not say that she loved herself into it, now. But there was an emotion steadier and somewhat deeper than love, that only mother Dira truly felt, she thought now, but that echoed in the breasts of those who had drawn very, very close to her: something like acceptance. Not judgement, not even to praise or forgive. Simply a gentle allowance of the reality of life. And of death.

She was lost now, of course, from the world's perspective. No one came to her chambers anymore, but for the girl she had paid the infirmary to send a few times a day, to help her clean herself, feed herself, to empty the chamberpot, to soothe her back to sleep, or whatever simulacrum of it she could muster. Calm acceptance did not destroy pain, it only made it a fact instead of a force. Sleep came as hard, now, as everything else, the stillness of slowly driving her swollen joints against each other like deep, throbbing needles. She smelt horrible, that strange mixture of topical spirits and rotten flesh that she remembered from Hannah's leg, before she died. Even the girl, who after all knew her way around a deathbed, looked green in the gills when she came now.

The only other person who came was Lanie - oh yes, Minnie was no fool. She knew it was a hallucination, but had learned to be gentle enough with herself to let the fantasy persist. It was not so much anyway. Lanie only stood with her, smiling gently, sometimes touching Minnie's neck in the tender, intimate way she had learned in the final years before she left - the 'Tallow-Candle Touch' Lanie had jokingly called it. She even heard her voice sometimes, though her mind was not clever or awake enough to synchronize it with the palpitations of her imagined lips. The surreality of this discordance gave the spectacle a sweet regretful pain, that warmed the last vestiges of Minnie's heart.

For the first few days, she'd only listened. Then, she started speaking back. Lanie laughed gently at her, telling her the hoarse shreds of her voice made her sound like a dirty old man at Loveless. Minnie laughed back, and told her she wouldn't know what to do with one of the whores if they unhooked anyway. Lanie smiled at her, told her she was a silly old fool for not enjoying the occasional knockabout in the intervening years. Minnie made lewd jokes that had been anathema since the rough days of her childhood, about the limitations of imagination. Lanie threw a glove at her in mock disgust. Minnie almost... almost felt it on her face.

She stumbled into the rear door of the tailor's shop. She had the stick, but leaned so hard on it, with such a wild shiver in her hands that she was afraid the stick would snap down the heart.

"Goody? Goody!"

Her voice was hoarse and spectral and remote. It amused Minnie, somehow, the way it sounded desperate, despite her immense internal store of calm.

//Why did I come down here anyway? Qalaya's dirrty fingers! I'll have to climb the whole damned staircase again, now!//

She stared stupidly. At her one good hand.

//Papers. Yes! PApers!//

"Papers, ma'am! Papers!"

Minnie found, somehow, the landlady was manhandling her into a chair. It was not a challenge. Minnie knew there wasn't much spare flesh left, and she was so small to boot.

//What was it the poet said? She was so small, but wrote so brave a hand! Well, I didn't write a brave hand, but I tried, at least, Qalaya, I tried. You won't take me up to you, I know. You would not want gutter-slut stomping about your libraries, Mother Qalaya. I know that. But perhaps... perhaps in spite of all I've done enough, maybe you were grateful. A brave hand...//

She stared at the black hand. IT was bound, but it was crumpled now, the flesh so soft with rot it hardly held its shape. She should be dead for that, she knew it - it was the drops the had kept her so long. The Mistress at teh infirmary, she'd wanted to cut the hand off - it was dead. It was not injured anymore, it was simply dead, simply a mass of food for the maggots they had picked from her wrists during her last visit. The maggots... how strange they'd looked. She realized with a sort of honor, that she was one of a very select few who could watch their body rot into the earth while still alive.

//PErhaps... maybe that's what Qalaya wanted? Maybe ... gods! Why didn't I write it down? Minnie Lefting, you silly old coward...//

"There's still time, you know, Mins. We can write it together," Lanie's hand was so soft on her neck. So soft. And her voice was so gentle in her ear.

"But Lanie, I haven't any paper. This is a tailor's."

"Oh you silly, girl. WE'll go back upstairs..."

"Doctor Lefting! Stop! Stop, listen to me!"

That last was not Lanie's voice at all, but the Landlady.

"What? What? I need some paper... I... no... papers, I already have them... they're gone..."

"You gave them to me, Dr. Lefting. Listen to me. Look at me."

Minnie laughed, and she heard her laugh squeak wildly through the remnants of her throat, "Look? Oh, no, Goody.. canny look n'more. You just look like a paint-smear, now... och, my eyes.. my papers, you will take care of them? Someone must care for my notes, and the notebooks when I'm gone. Mussy, its very important, please..."

"Hush, now, hush, Dr. Lefting. We need to get you back to your bed."

Minnie nodded, "You promise, then, mussy?"

"Promise, yes, your will, I'll have it filed."

She tried to stand then, but she found she had, in the chair, somehow lost track of her legs. The pain of them was still there, she could feel the outlines like warmth from a hot stove, but the flesh was missing, somehow. She wondered what was beneath her skirts, if she would have wooden stalks there, like a puppet. Or maybe it was all turning black, like her hand.

"No, no, Minnie-Wren... no. Only yhe hand and the arm. The rest we will lay out, and maybe they will..."

"...yes... Oh Alanza-mae... do you know, I wrote it in my will? I wrote it in my will, just like we promised, I said to keep me in a box, but to take it up if you come, so you can take us out into the wilds, us two. It is... I know it is not what we wanted. Oh, Alanza-mae, oh, Alanza-mae, do you understand? I did everything I could!"

"Hush now, Philomena Lefting, hush. You must hold still, they're carrying you upstairs."

Another new voice, but she knew it, she knew it though she'd never heard it, she was sure of it.

"Bethany? Oh... no, no, no, I mean Dr. Edgetower..."

The voice smiled, and the face that spoke it was immensely clear. It was a beautiful, solemn, fair-listener's face, and of a sudden, Minnie knew just what Kena Wright must have felt meeting her the first time, "Philomena Lefting, we two have been speaking now for almost 40 years. You may call me Bethany. Only rest, now. You must rest. Alright?"

The face wavered, Lanie's face wavered as well, and Minnie found herself in her bed. A man was there, young. Minnie recognized his voice, one of the Landlord's boys. He was a University STudent, Minnie had even found him a good advisor for this thesis.

"Mother, the old doctor's not going to get better."

The landlord's voice was a bit frantic, but still controlled, "I don't care. No Doctor of the University is dying in my damned house without a healer coming."

"Alright... alright, I'll go up to the infirmary. Poor old girl lived alone. Its not as if she can't afford it. But, mum, really! There's nothing you can do! Leave her be, go... file the will. Yes. That needs to be done."

The woman sighed, and the chatter moved outside of Minnie's door, and the door shut.

Minnie lay back - it was not an action, so much as the result of an inability to act.

"Lanie? Bethany? Come back, please. They're gone, now. They're gone, now..."

Minnie, alone now in the room, felt the pricking of the ring, pulling at her finger, and she thought of Gypa. She grew suddenly, unavoidably lucid, for the moment.

"Oh Gypa... oh my Gypa..."

She felt too cold, too empty now, to cry. Her breath came heavy and slow in her throat.

[Liminal]

...and then everything was gone.

The tailor's shop, the landlady's voice, her bed, all of it vanished.

But it did not simply fade to blackness. Instead, it was suddenly replaced.

*****

A flutter of her eyelids, and Minnie would be able to take in the new landscape. She was in the foothills of the Zatoskas, standing in the short grass. Charm Wright's manor was visible in the distance, and beyond that, the rest of Zeltiva. It looked strangely quiet; no boats were moving in and out of the harbor, and the usual bustle of carts and people was absent. The warmth of the sun was unseasonable, and the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue.

Minnie's dead hand still hung by her side, but other than that, she would immediately notice that the pain and delerium was gone. Even her eyesight seemed at the moment to be perfect.

"Hello."

Immediately to Minnie's left was another woman. She looked young, but the kind of young that made her age extremely difficult to guess. She could have been fifteen, or she could have been thirty-five, and there wasn't really any way to tell.

The woman wore a sleeveless yellow dress, the hem of which just reached her knees. Her hair was dark and curly, barely grazing her shoulders. But the most striking feature about her was her eyes.

Those eyes! They were the blue of tears and loneliness, of the sky blazing in utter emptiness, of the waves that refuse to bring a loved one back home. The sadness in them was almost overwhelming. She fixed Minnie in her gaze, and did not turn away.

[Philomena]

Minnie looked over. There was something strange about moving, now, not unpleasant, but strange, a feeling of... familiarity with herself. A feeling as if she knew just where the edges of her were. It made her realize, with a gentle wash, what it would be to be graceful.

But the eyes.

Minnie was old now, and it had been a very, very long time since she'd looked into the face of someone she felt she could look straight in the eyes, with her own eyes unguarded. Even with Wren, there was that pause, that slight holding back that a mother gives to a child, the face that says "There is a piece of me that you cannot and should not know, because I am your mother."

It had been many years - since Lanie.

And even with Lanie, there is, even in our purest and sweetest of Earthly relationships, a moment, a glimmer that says 'I am not you, and you are not me - all that we can be is an infinitesimally close approximation to each other.' Oh how close that approximation had been - a lover could not have been closer, would not have been closer.

But, this this was something else. And Minnie felt a well of love in her heart. It was something she'd felt before, looking at a book, listening to a story, struggling over a line in her opera, fingering her Wright-Miza. Saying goodbye to Lanie. Saying goodbye to Wren.

It was her own eyes, but deeper, truer, without the guesses and simplifications and corruptions of mortal knowing, without the blind alleys and forgotten ways and the cruft of frustration. Or... no. With all those things, but with all those whirling serenely in the cusps of a thousand other sensations Minnie had never been so large to feel.

Her voice came, and it was a far away voice, the voice before it broke its back over Lanie, before it hasped its burr over Gypa, before three separate fevers ground their cruel spurs into it. The mellow, resonant alto of a content Minnie. A Minnie who had never lived her life. The sound did not surprise, but the warm way it filled her throat, her mouth did. Like breathing honey and flowers. A poem came from her.

"The gods know sorrow deeper
Than the cry of a broken bird.
The gods know sorrow closer
Than the kiss of a shivering lover."

Her good hand quivered, but it was not with fear, not now, not with the grasse tickling at her stockingless feet, not with the wind blowing her braid across her neck like the breath of a sleeping child.

"Mother?"

[Liminal]

"Some have called me that." Half a smile flitted briefly across the woman's face. She started walking along the side of the hill; Minnie was clearly meant to walk with her.

"Including you." The woman's curls blew behind her in the honey-flavored breeze. "Yes, I know. I don't say much, not anymore, but I hear, and I remember."

She looked at Minnie again, and her irises seemed to swirl with loss.

"I remember everything. That's what I do. I remember everything."

Their feet made padding noises on the grass. Other than the low whistle of the breeze, everything else was silence. There were no birds, no voices, nothing else at all.

"Philomena Lefting, you need to stay. You need to finish the work you have to do, and you're not anywhere close to done. You have a task -- a calling." The woman's voice was low, but there was something akin to desperation in it. It was hard to tell how much of that had to do with what she was saying, and how much of it was simply always there. She had an almost feverish intensity, but aside from her eyes and her voice, that intensity seemed to have no outlet.

"But I won't make you. I am not Rhysol, or Yshul, or Krysus. Memory is power, but it isn't force."

Now she stopped walking, and those eyes rested again on Minnie.

"You can't do it without me. You're about to die, within two, maybe three hours. You can go to Dira's arms. You can roam the world as a shade, or you can return to Lhex. Or, you can let me save you."

It would feel as if Minnie's face was burning.

"But it doesn't come without cost. I can't save you without cost. It's not possible."

The question hadn't precisely been asked, but the woman clearly expected an answer at this point.

[Philomena]

The grass brushed against Minnie's feet, whispering to her, the air stirred her hair, swished softly against her fence in a low murmur. She looked away a moment, over the city, over the sea. She could see the library, and from here, it was luminous and beautiful. The stone was clean and fresh, none of the crumbling of time, or the water marks of the Djed Storm. She looked into the sea, and it was empty, still, but she could see, almost, the brush of four seperate ships, the place their keels cut the surface of the sea: one large and proud, and pushing into the wind to circumnavigate the world, one quiet and small, and slipping from the harbor to, perhaps, turn south instead of north, one a humble fishing scow, carrying Charm to her Darvan grave, and one more, luminous silver ship, sailing out, out, out into the sea, out, out into the sea, so far that one day, one day, one day when she could find a storyteller, it would sail from off the edge of the sea, and off into the sky.

She sighed, gently, and looked into the goddess's eyes, and for the first time, perhaps, she ceased to be a child. Of course, she had been a grown woman, an adult, even an elder by some counts, for some time now. But always... always there was the heart of her something that had never grown up, something that perhaps had been too frightened, or perhaps had not known how. She looked into the sorrow-plumped eyes of the only Mother she had ever really had, and felt the weight of what she bore, in just her own, small, human way: every memory, every single one. Every one. And with an eidetic fullness, she felt, each moment, every memory, felt all that was in those memories.

"And I..." she thought, with quiet, sacred shame, a thought, and yet a word aloud, somehow, "And I... I would have left a work undone, for nothing. For feeling tired. For wanting the story to end. When so many stories need their endings more than mine!"

She thought off all the things the lady could take as price, of every one. And in that moment, unmoving and still, her eyes trained, for an instant, a barest sliver of time, on something deeper than she could truly know, she felt the heart and morals of a God.

"Whatever I have, Mother Qalaya. It is yours for the asking. Whatever would comfort you, I would do it if you asked."

[Liminal]

"Then walk with me."

Qalaya -- it was her, of course it was -- turned and walked further up the slope. Here and there, tiny blue flowers peeked out from behind the exposed rocks. It was all somehow more real than real, despite the fact that they were clearly in an Other place.

Behind another outcropping, there was a boulder, perhaps three and a half feet high. It was perfectly flat on top, and it was here that Qalaya stopped.

She moved her left hand, and without warning, it suddenly held a blade. It was something similar to a machete, with a gold filigree handle. The cutting surface was made of a metal so blue that it matched the goddess's eyes. She looked at it for a moment, then looked up at Minnie.

"Your hand, Philomena, the dead one. Place it there on the stone."

Her voice was soft, almost inaudible over the breeze -- but it was also deadly serious. Whatever was going to happen next, it wasn't a joke.

[Philomena]

Minnie's heart beat like a temple drum in her chest.

//Doom, doom//

It pounded against her ears, her ears the felt the sound so clearly. Though the goddess turned away to lead her up the hill, still those eyes were visible to her, still they poured into her own, in her mind, those infinitely sad eyes.

//Doom, doom//

The eyes ran across her heart like a bow shivering across a sweet-sad fiddle, and she felt in her heart the welling force of all the stories that her steps could tell. Her breath, breathed silent out the tale of her eyes fading, fading into darkness, and never brightening again. Her breath, breathed silent out the tale of finding Lanie on the hill before, of pressing on her eyes, and having her forget, and never come again. Her breath, breathed silent out the tale of the Lady giving her a dagger, and pointing to her Gypa, squalling in his cradle once again, so many years ago, and ever se delicately, with quivering hand, drawin the blade across his tiny throat.

//Doom, doom//

Each one plucked up from her heart some shade of sick horror. And each horror marched before her mind, and she looked at it with with eyes, with deep, deep borrowed eyes, filled with sadness of the world, and for that moment as each came, she knew that, if she found that tale here on the hilltop, she would tell it, to those deep blue eyes, would lean forward close and whisper it in the ears hidden under the curling hairs.

//Doom, doom//

And, then with each one passing, her heart grew still, until she felt as clean and empty as a broken eggshell. And th drum of her heart stopped, and the stone stood before her. And as the goddess, said the word hand, her mind was clear and sweet and sure, and she began to raise the white hand, sighing soft that she would never hold a pen again. And when the Goddess murmured her words, they felt less like a reprieve then, almost, a quiet rebuke.

She grew pale, but nodded, now, and lay the mass of black there on the altar. She knew the flesh was dead, but still she felt the cold stone against the blackened skin, felt the shadow-ghosts of hair long fallen from the loose sockets of dead follicles tighten into the spectre of goose pimples.

She raised the white hand to her breast then and said softly, "My Mother asks of me only the worst I have. Then take the black hand for my life. And the white I will keep, and serve with it only thee."

She felt then the thrill of fear at the keen blue blade, and had the urge to shut her eyes, to quell fear. But she did not, she forced her quiet eyes, keen and clear as they had not been since first she felt Vayt's sting so many years before, to open wide, as wide and unblinking at they would. And looked at the hand, and let the story tell, opened her heart up to fear, pain, acceptance, love, all bound into the messy, sticky mass that human emotion always amalgamates into, in the truest of true tales. And she exhaled, softly, waiting.

[Liminal]

Qalaya said nothing now, though she had obviously heard. She raised the blade high in the air, its blue catching the rays of the sun and splintering them in all directions...

...and then she lowered it.

Everything happened too fast for Philomena to even think of moving. The whistle of the blade through the air was caught and swallowed by the thick crunch of flesh and bone being cleaved asunder.

The odd thing was that, though there was a disturbing sensation of pressure, it didn't actually hurt. The blade went through the joint of the wrist, raising sparks from the stone, and the dead hand fell away from Philomena's arm. But there was no pain -- and, somehow, no blood. It seemed surreal, dreamlike.

Qalaya raised her hand again, and the blade vanished into whatever aether it had come from. At the same time, Philomena's dead and amputated hand disappeared. The goddess opened and closed her fingers, and now she grasped something else, something that similarly had seemed simply to flash into being...

a hand.

It was an odd color -- a sort of rich bronze, almost as if it were made of some kind of metal. Qalaya held it up to the light, which reflected off it brilliantly, and then brought it down, almost as suddenly as she had wielded the blade.

She pressed the wrist of the hand to Philomena's wrist. There was a sudden jolt, as if Philomena had touched a doorknob after walking on a thick woolen rug. And when the goddess moved her own hands away, the hand stayed attached to Philomena, as snugly as if it had been designed specifically for her. If she attempted to flex the fingers, she would find that she was able to do so. It didn't feel like her skin, not exactly -- it was as cool to the touch as marble -- but she could feel the sensations that its fingers sent to her brain.

Then, Qalaya once more reached down. This time, she simply touched the back of Philomena's new hand. A burst of warmth, almost to the point of pain, and when the goddess moved, there as a mark left behind. It took the form of a capital Q, without serifs or other adornments, and it shimmered with the same blue as Qalaya's eyes.

"I caution you not to speak of this to those you cannot fully trust," the deity said.

[Philomena]

She does just that, turns the hand on her wrist. It feels cold, on the inside, not like the hollow empty cold of something missing, but rather a real, and affirmative cold. The cold spread just into her native flesh, just a few millimeters, and gave her a slight goosepimpling as her arm absorbed the feeling of a new thing. She reached the white hand over, traced the Q, slowly, with a tentative hand. She looked into it, looked hard into it, into the round of it, the round like an eye, the tail like a nearly fallen tear.

She breathed, slow, closed and reopened her eyes, and reached to where her satchel would be - it was not there, and for the first moment in the place, she felt how naked and exposed she was before the Goddess, how truly small she was. And yet... and yet large enough for Qalaya. Large enough for Qalaya.

She looked up to the God, and murmured soft, the prayer she had offered so many times, "Qalaya, I will write this down. And whatever else you would have me write. And I will keep it my secret thing, for there is noone left here that I trust."

Her hand, almost without her noticing then, reaches up toward the goddess's face, to try to brush past the curling hair, the downy cheek, and touch her neck. Her face remains solemn and still, and she does not speak.

[Liminal]

The goddess nodded, but did not speak. However, she stood still and allowed Philomena to touch her neck. She had much the same attitude that Charm Wright had had -- physical contact was something to which she was unused, but she seemed to understand what it meant coming from Philomena.

Then she stepped back two paces and looked at the woman with those sad eyes.

"Remember."

She spoke the one word, and then everything seemed to go black...

*******

Minnie was lying on her back, sprawled out on her bed. She was quite alone -- the healer hadn't come, and there was no one else attending to her.

However, she would find that she felt much better. The professor was soaked in sweat and utterly exhausted, but the hallucinations, the pain, and the sense of impending doom were all gone. And on one hand, the hand that had formerly been infected and destroyed by the plague, there was a red velvet glove.

If Philomena pulled the glove off, she would see that the dream, or trance, or whatever it had been, had left tangible evidence. The new hand that Qalaya had given her was there, with the Q inscribed on the back.