about
"Mimic"
As the sun sank to its bed, Supprim put behind her the miles dividing her home from the rest of her village. A gloaming sky as of agates black and blue cooled the steppe, and the vale, and the forests amongst it, rendering her thatched stone dwelling unto some mauve growth of coral on an ocean floor.
Upon quitting the village, she'd worn thonged sandals and her sackcloth shawl, threaded through with treble lines dyed purple with crocus; the mantle of a sorcerer. So had she been dressed since becoming her peoples' magician; the one fated to walk the hills and rivers, forests and heaths, scouring from hidden places their splendor, their native mana. With such had she returned a thousand times, bearing cold from the mountains of Aurn to dispel fevers among her elders, and from those same heights the scorching voltage of storms, for forging new metals with which to till and kill. So many lives had she lived, in each one a creature anew, yet, being aged but twenty-nine, so many lives laid ahead.
Or such was Supprim's hope, for she now faced the constricting of some fatal twist about the shape of her life.
She reached her home, naked but for her mantle, striding inside out of the moonlit span where her squat dwelling stood. Night had fallen on the steppe, and all across it hovered bugsong and fireflies. In her abode Supprim knelt and swallowed deep the night's squall, for she'd need use of its mystique just as the serum-makers in the South bask in starlight before setting to work.
After a breath, the world no longer was dark. Though her eyes were closed, her Sight remained awake to the world of myth and process, of empyrean fire and making. At the center of Supprim's home, amidst knotted cords of talismanic stone, heaps of garments and masks, was a shallow glass basin blown for her by a village artisan. As a new parent's world orbits their child's cradle, so she focused her energies on the glossy dish until it appeared just as a plane of water. This cast back her memory to the place where first she saw the miracle done she now sought to replicate; in a grotto by the Strident Sea she'd gone searching for the purest darkness, to lend to neighboring chieftains beset by sleeplessness. There, she'd found pools of scaled serpents no bigger than a handbreadth, each of them able to birth, on its lonesome, an exact replica of itself.
Supprim placed a piece of clay she'd steeped in springwater into the basin, caressing it until every contour was smooth, and her fingerprints showed all across its surface. Then, she spoke. From inside her dwelling rolled a wind that rifled up the valley astride her home, silencing the night. When the stars' shining and the night's songs returned, an infant's crying had joined them.
The magician glared at it, this awesome and obscure feat she'd done, as it waggled its limbs about its bowl like an overturned turtle. Supprim ground her teeth, wished to lean forth and hold the baby as one should, but withheld herself, feeding it only droplets of springwater from the steeping dish, and salts jinxed to hasten aging. Before long it ceased crying, and the night swam on.
At first light Supprim rose and swaddled the child, who'd already grown so much one might've thought it a changeling.
In morning's pallid light she sat leering at the sleeping toddler, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she then searched for a pair of sleeves with which to cradle the child without it learning to expect her touch, her warmth. Just so, she scooped the babe from its dish and brought it outside.
With the rising sun ensconced in cloud-columns red and gold, Supprim breathed into the child's ears all the knowledge destiny had entrusted to her; memories of spirits and miscreations banished; the names of godlings, and creatures from other-world for whom she'd done service. By the time dawn's dew had settled and the steppe was gem-speckled, so had the infant's mind been sown with so many carats of arcane thought.
Yet swaddled and asleep, Supprim then fed it more salts and springwater before tucking it into a cage at one corner of her home, then set out for West Ahruen.
Would the child die in her absence? Supprim wondered, knowing the more dubious a thing's origins, the more precarious its being. She tried desperately to rid herself of any telling signs; her tired stride, her wandering gaze. Regardless, she reached her people's village wishing only to turn and abandon it, to flee home and meditate in reverence of that thing what was no doubt the grandest feat of making she'd ever issued.
Supprim's people, as plain as any in all of Vine, were unique only in the extreme age of their elders, whose health in their advanced years was owed largely to her, their loyal magi. In the lee of the eastward plateau was the city built, out of the same ancient shelf against which Supprim's own hovel leaned several miles away, and from which rivers flowed that moved the great mill at the city's heart.
With intent to confer with their chieftess, Supprim visited with families among the village forum, whose mild greetings and pittances of food did naught but distress her, as she knew each was proffered as a parting gift.
The magi ducked down an alley between homes where the reek of damp hay couldn't reach her, and a gust rich with lilac-scent helped still her heart. As she readied to face the world again, Supprim was nigh blindsided by a young tiller trundling a handcart canopied with blankets. Scraping by, the cart suddenly jolted, and from it slid queen minister Balma, village chieftess and eldest lady of the village. With a wave, the little yak of a woman waved off her chauffeur, then summoned Supprim forth with a like sign.
"A sting in the wind tells me someone's heart harbors questions, young magi."
"It is I," Supprim grimaced, "I'd like your counsel, Balma, on the matter of my departure. Before it comes, of course."
The woman eyed her suspiciously—before the fire in Supprim's eyes remembered her how formidable, how loyal a magician she'd been to their people.
"Let us go then to find your answers, and may nothing seize our talk before we find them."
They strolled to the outskirts of town, to meditate before the blasted span where Supprim's family were slain in a disaster of the distant past. Through use of her then-untapped talents she alone survived, becoming afterwards an ordained pupil of other-world.
"Now, tell us of your wondering."
"I want to know of the Foremothers' timekeeping. The accuracy of their dating of events."
Balma stared, her suspicions seemingly realized. "You wish to postpone your Ascent."
"No, no," Supprim struggled, her honest tongue betraying her. "Timing governs my craft like no other force but passion, dear Balma. We ought to know if our dating is correct."
"For two-thousand years have the rains, controlling the richness of our crop, and thus the health of our elders, the wisdom of our warriors, and the peace for our children, depended upon the sacrifice of magi. This is not some dreary compromise, young cub. You go to be wed to a god, whose home is that place you look into at the summit of your art. If you were wise, you'd not doubt the Foremothers' chronicle."
Their talk was not so unlike a rite of vision-giving, Supprim thought. Speak the words, watch the wicker burn. In Balma as in all others was Fate manifest; benign pressures deployed unto all being like bright ores stamped into some godsent mold. It was Fate which said that the flame required to mediate this mold, to temper those ores, was that of Supprim's immolation.
"Supprim?" Balma said, snapping her fingers. "Give here heed, girl. If you are this distracted on the day-of, you might cost us all our livelihood."
"How many days, Balma."
"Six. Including today, seven. Perhaps you ought to visit the villages over yonder. Your help will be of great use to them in these, your final days."
Supprim obliged the notion with a nod, all feeling absent. She was off and away then, thinking of the child. Balma formed a sign of farewell, one most honorific among their people. With all the venom she could muster Supprim ignored it, wandering off with a look of pretend rapture. The queen minister then aimed a sign of the opposite sentiment at the back of the young magi's head.
With her Sight, Supprim had glimpsed more souls, naked and undying, than might ever the sibyls and priests in the sacred North. Yet whether her own creation possessed a spirit, she could not guess. For years had she pledged her spirit to her people however, and so she swore to her own ghost she'd not be troubled to send the child to its own guiltless end. This she resigned herself to on the trek home, where from afar she saw a great bird roosting on the thatched rooftop. Upon reaching it she realized it was the child, whose aural form she'd thrice mistaken for reasons she wished not to guess.
The child was now roughly the like of a four-year-old, the same taupe skin and mane of kelp-like black hair as her maker had yet. Her eyes watched the air like a preying frog, fixedly vacant yet radiant with intent. Her small body was balled, knees to chest with hands clutching her ankles, as marvelous a thing as Supprim had ever seen.
She stopped on the lawn before her home, clearing her throat. Immediately the child's attention darted to her, and Supprim turned to face the sun to avoid the child's gaze.
"Down," she said while pointing to her feet. It did so, though only after squinting, studying Supprim as if to discern whether she were real or figmentary. Out of instinct, the girl toddled up to her creator, holding out her arms. Supprim led toward the house, when the girl again reached for her hand, and had it slapped away. Once inside, Supprim struck a torch alight with power she summoned from within, examining the room—the smashed cage. It lay in as many shards as the food scraps heaped upon the floor.
The girl followed her in, Supprim turning to face her. She seized the child's arm, her flesh as soft as of ripe fruit, pointing to the mess. "Clean that up."
Blinking idly, the child then stooped and began eating the soiled morsels off the floor. Seizing the child's arm again, Supprim pulled her up and slapped the food from her hands, glaring fiercely into eyes possessed by fright and innocence.
If the child was to pass as her on the day of her Ascent, she'd need teach her language. Supprim praised the gods that such was as easily said as done, given her sorcery. She'd learnt entire tongues, lost for ages to the cull of time, by consulting with eidolons willing to convey each word into her, like a codex in which a sage lays down doctrine. Supprim ground her teeth and stared the child in the eyes, then placed a hand over the girl's brow, her little finger on one temple and thumb upon the other, then, as dispassionately as possible, sent their peoples' words into her mind.
What little expression the child wore vanished, followed by a pucker of curiosity, which she directed up at Supprim. "Are you my mother?"
Supprim stared long, then reached for the torch she'd lit. "What is this called?"
As though the motion would help sieve out its name, the girl tilted her head. "A… torch."
"What is its purpose?"
"It burns… so people can see," she muttered, looking around.
"That is my bond to you. I have made you a thing, to do only as I wish."
"What am I called?"
"Heron," Supprim answered, remembering what she'd first mistaken the child for.
Shifting foot to foot, the child, a gleam so keen in her eyes, asked: "And what's my purpose?"
"You will stay here and await me each day. Do nothing you are not told to." Supprim fetched the jinxed salts and set them before Heron, then pointed to the springwater. "Whenever your belly grumbles, put a pinch of this in your mouth and wash it down with that. If the grumbling doesn't stop, there is a stowing pit behind the house where food is kept cool."
"What is "await"?"
"You will stay and do nothing until I return from my summons."
Supprim fetched a dress sewn together from the aprons of a blacksmith and of a seamstress. Since the season her family was taken she'd worn it in the summer. Supprim reviled it now, the ghosts it held. Thus she folded it thrice and thrust it on Heron.
The programming of the child grew easier the more Supprim thought of it as she did charm-making, wherein the mind maneuvers about a nucleus of energy until such maneuvers are grafted in, the charm repeating them perpetually. Heron was only that, an artifice made to mimic her. That the girl bore her likeness was merely like the reflection of the self encountered by the artisan whose fingerprints are worn into their tools after so many years' use.
That night, Supprim ordered Heron to sleep on a roll beneath her workbench, while she lay restless in her loft at the hind of the house. Twice she awoke with a fury, ready to cast away any ancestor or astral guide come to judge her for her plans.
Upon waking, she turned and saw the front door partially ajar, just enough for a little head to peer out at the night—the fireflies, the stars.
Finally she leapt from her loft and seized Heron unawares, saying, "Does a torch burn when it is not lit?"
Heron crawled back to her nook once ordered, after which Supprim was nearly asleep when she sensed some numinous surging alike that she herself emitted when using her Sight. Turning wearily over, she squinted to see the child, eyes wide and basking as if in some unseen sunshine. Again she came down and squatted, meeting the child's eyes for perhaps only the second time.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking around, that's all," she testified fearfully, her precious face older still than it had been that evening; her legs and arms longer.
"Where did you learn to do that?"
Heron looked toward the door. giving no answer.
"Spit it out!"
"The creatures outside live in darkness, so I asked them how they see. They taught me."
Supprim began summoning a pall of dreamless slumber, the same darkness she'd lent as medicine to those ailed by sleeplessness. Like a switch she drew it out, striking Heron with it, casting her into a sleep mercifully devoid of dreams, so she'd not wake again with fantasies in her heart, or some magic gotten from therein which Supprim would have no clue how to counter.
In the morning, Supprim rose and headed south without a word to her creation.
Heron later woke and ate of the aging salts as commanded, cleansing her mouth with the rich springwater. Upon tasting it, she saw every place the water had been; the rocks it had cut at the dawn of time, the clouds in which it drifted during Vine's fiery infancy.
"Think of our homeland, girl. Ah-ru-en. Do you know what that stands for?"
"Yes, minister Muniver."
"Oh, I doubt that. The ghosts you magi speak to are not ancients; those yammering sprites and ghouls couldn't have taught you the origins of our land's name."
"I learnt it from my mother," asserted Supprim. "Ah: the first intake of one's breath. Ru: the sound of force, willpower. En: the deathrattle, exhalation. It is the song of the life-cycle."
"So you should not dread your death, as I sense you do. You'll be the consort of a god, anyhow, and that's hardly the long sleep most of us hope for at life's end."
Before Muniver, king minister of East Ahruen, Supprim knelt, he and his gumtree throne gilt in sunlight. She tried to appear supplicant and receptive of his advice; his ordainment of her upcoming Ascent as heroic, the most crucial in ages. Yet her mind dwelt only on that she'd not seen the East's great gumtrees since her youth, where she saw her first demon lurking among their roots.
"This life makes traitors and waifs of us all, child," Muniver mused. "Do not loathe that you've been asked to leave it behind."
But how many demons had she yet to conquer? Forgetting beauty or pleasantness, how many exquisite dangers had she yet to taste of, how many journeys? Of what use could she be to the gods without power like theirs, as might only be gotten over a lifetime of taming hellions and beasts with her magic, which her service had hence rendered her too preoccupied for?
"Come, my bidding needs done," said Muniver, rising and waving Supprim into a chamber beyond the throne room.
At that same moment, Heron had found the cold pit quarried into the heel of the plateau. She discovered several fruits, her favorite of which was a tan fruit the size of a fist, with a fragrant peel and sweeter flesh than any other plant; what her inherited memories reminded her was named serapine, or 'steppe's mercy' in an older tongue. She recalled hearing from someone who must have been her mother's mother, that serapine are sweet enough that when dried and ground, one alone is rich enough to sweeten a whole banquet's worth of mead.
As one disappeared into her stomach, Heron tossed the peel into a pile already made beside the cold pit. As she studied the pile more carefully, she realized it was fresh, and that one end of it trailed off into the near forest. Fearful she might be blamed, Heron followed the leavings of peels as far as the forests grown astride the saddle which the plateau descended to, some distance east of the house. What she found there, feasting on several great fistfuls of steppe's mercies, her memories called many things: "moss-chief", "man-tree", "living hill", "Troll-kin".
As she drew close enough that it could scent her, Heron thought the creature set on destroying her the instant it leapt and turned to face her, yet the giant began trembling. "Spare plea, magi. I will fetch you anything, spare!"
"You ate our fruit."
"Yes magi, I thought myself alone. I saw you leave this morning!"
"That was my maker, not me."
The beast thought that a sad thing for a child to call their mother. "Yes, I was going to replace your mother's fruit before her return."
"She is my maker. Not my mother."
"Gone to fulfill her last summons before her Ascent?"
The girl only vaguely comprehended this; "Something like that, I think."
"Then let me replace the fruit, magi, for your maker's sake."
"What's a magi?"
"Oh, are you not the pupil of your maker? I thought you a sorcerer—your vessel is powerful!" said the Troll-kin.
Memories merged and fractured, a harlequin fresco in the child's heart. Yet she was resolute that Supprim should have her pantry renewed. "I'm supposed to do as my maker bids, and eating all the food from the pit was not something she said to do. So, I need to help you find more."
"Yes magi, together it will be swift! Right this way," he obliged, parting a swell of trees as though it were a cloth door. Heron hurried up and away from the steppe, following the arbor beast into the woods.
Together they combed the forest, formed majorly of great alder trees turned ruddy by the iron-rich hills. And although Heron could faintly sense the moss-man recalling some great terror what'd transpired there, he lumbered on beside her, gathering fine berries, crystals of sap, and feathers shed by thunderbirds. Heron merely followed, Sighting their way through the forest's darker fathoms. At last, fortune allowed that they find a lush bushelful of serapine.
"Tree man," she stopped and said, "In case we become separated, I need to know your name before I start gathering."
"Magi, would that be right? Names are mighty things to be trading."
"But for my maker, I've never met anybody. Who could I tell your name to that could bring you any evil? And I am not afraid of you knowing my name."
"No, sorceress, I do hope not! It's only that your "maker" and her kin have burned my kind, and kept me penned in these woods since ages agone. I don't know if it's our place to go negotiating that bond."
There was a form of menacing she'd gleaned by watching Supprim, a baleful stare that glows like burning sugar. "Tell me your name," Heron said as she employed the stare against the man-tree.
"Halygonder. And your name, sorceress?"
"Heron."
"It becomes you. Please, go ahead and harvest. All of it, I'll bear back."
Heron stuffed the pockets of her makeshift dress with steppe's mercies, telling Halygonder he ought carry some too, among his armfuls of other spoils. They crept then back to the plateau's limit, where Supprim had threatened hellfire if ever Halygonder or his Troll-kin came beyond that margin of the cliffs. Through the waning light; cool winds borne of a wounded-red sky, Heron filled the cold store over many trips, their plunder parceled out by Halygonder. The girl was mortified she might be punished for being out, yet she could not sense her maker—something she'd realized she could do that morning.
Pushing aside such fear, she went and spoke with the tree-man, his amber eyes primevally bright beneath his rugged frame, spawned of the sturdiest clay the gods ever fired. When the sun sank past them and the treeline was of a bruised purple, Halygonder was invisible even to Heron's Sight.
"How do you do that?" she asked.
"It's my kin's secret to survival that we hide, magi. I'm afraid I can't teach you its essence."
"Not that, moss man. When you carry so many things—so many your limbs should break. How do you do that?"
"Oh, that is the oldest magic of them all. You know it merely by being alive. My people's name for it—spoken in your people's tongue—is "Vine's Promise"."
"Our world is named that, isn't it? What's her "Promise"?"
"Something all creatures know innately, including your maker's people. Once, they used it well but do no longer, hence why they build such higher walls every season, and war twice as often. Her promise is that anything and everything will pass; will go the way of flesh. So it is to bolster the body by ignoring any wound or hurt that is not fatal. It is to say, "my vessel for this world, no matter the toll"."
"Can it be learned?"
"As I said, you know it already. My kin have grown so by living in adherence with Vine's Promise for eons; you could never grow to be as we are."
"But might my grasp of get any stronger? The maker thinks low of me 'cause I'm too weak to serve her, I think."
"I can't advise one so mild as yourself to be put through the strain of growing mightier in the Promise, magi! Mind you, it can be honed elsewise. To always speak the truth whets the edges of the Promise, raises one above the fear of bodily pain through surety that it is only that. Only the spirit within is invincible."
Heron bowed to the man-tree, his eyes earnest and moonlike, receiving in that moment as much as surge of knowledge as she'd had in gazing out at Vine's true moon the night prior, the nativity pregnant within Halygonder's gaze conveying to her light as from an ancient sun, one that'd burnt out at the dawn of Vine.
"Vine's Promise," she whispered as she started back. "If this is her Promise, what is Vine's Secret?"
Halygonder stifled a laugh. "You said you were not a sorceress; how should you know to ask such a question?" Heron stammered, sensing Supprim returning from her summons. "Yes, run along, magi!" laughed the Troll-kin as the girl broke into a dead sprint through the shadows of the plateau cast in rising starlight, around the cold pit, and into the house.
Supprim numbly strode home, the mountaineer's blessing she'd practiced allowing her to pass from Muniver's reach to her humble dwelling in little time. She entered to find Heron, filthy with travel, insisting she'd been nowhere. (The child was secretly glad she'd forgotten Vine's Promise for the moment.)
The elder magi had scant energy left, and little choice but to ignore signs of mischief. Without a word, she went outside to bathe with water collected from the cold pit, finding in addition to a refreshed wash-basin, seven bundles of steppe's mercy, leaf-wrapped medleys of herbs, stalks of cane, crystals of amber sap, and a whole fan of wyrm feathers.
Supprim sank to her knees and wept. How many secrets must she have learned while I was out? she pondered. What names and powers, what dreams will I be sending to their demise?
She took one serapine and one jar of water inside, dropping a halved slice of it by Heron's bedroll, and a wet rag to bathe with. In silent darkness they chewed and they savored, and when darkness fell, all either could do was watch where the other lay. They didn't speak, yet neither knew or felt anything without the other, save for that which Supprim wondered about Heron's eyes.
Where had they gotten that shine? "Names and powers," she whispered.
Once done with it, the girl hung the cloth on a roofbeam, and went to sleep. That night, they both dreamt of gumtrees.
Supprim's miracle for Muniver had been a slight to her. Hoping to know his people's fate, the King Minister bade her channel an ancestor of his; one with a view of the other-world, to foretell the destiny of the East. He'd thought they'd need travel to the mountains to reach so "eminent" an ancestor spirit, though Supprim had conjured it, exposed it as though by wiping a foggy looking-glass, right there in the throne room. Jessiver, East Ahruen's eldest ghost, foresaw the fall of the Western village.
Out of courtesy Muniver apologized for the news, though Supprim knew a spector's word was as true as sight itself; she'd no use to doubt it. No matter how soon Jessiver placed the West's destruction; the deaths of its lumpen millers, smith's wives, and itinerant fighters, of stale prayers and penance; no matter how soon Jessiver alluded to, it was not sooner than the date those same folk had damned Supprim to. Sooner than the West should die, she'd be forced to send her feat of making—miraculous, tricksome soul and all—to burn for its placation.
Heron looked at herself in a water bowl by the cold pit, observing that her face was longer, harder—her limbs as well were longer, and since she'd dreamt all that night of climbing gumtrees using Vine's Promise, she awoke with real thew in her arms. So she trained, something she'd no real word for, using the Promise to ignore the scald in her limbs as she scaled the rock face looming over the house from dawn till noon. It pleased her to work Vine's Promise just as she 'remembered' vicariously her creator's twirling of other charms, as she knew it was one sorcery Supprim hadn't mastered. Under this tense of strengthening herself to help her maker, Heron climbed and crept forest-wide, learning all the while the ecstasy of self; the scope of its mysteries, its sweetness. She'd sensed outgone maker Supprim's sworn assurance that all she was was an instrument, yet here was her own fire; in splendid self-evidence.
Supprim had dreamt of that same thrill, that to know oneself real was to glimpse a flower in the garden of being none might ever see again.
Before her fifth morning, Heron had consumed enough aging salts to already have become roughly nine years old, looking just as Supprim had at that age. While she sat and sipped some water, her maker slept the morning away.
After dawn Supprim left for the next of her errands, what she solemnly reckoned would be the last ever done under her name.
Heron rose as soon as her creator was gone, taking to the near outdoors to train Vine's Promise. In the rising light she herself rose, as proud as the sun fledging its bed for that she'd soon grow mightier than any servant Supprim could have hoped for.
By midday, she'd tired of climbing and of tearing up stones along the heel of the plateau and casting them as far as she could, when Halygonder came slowly loping from the forest after hearing Heron's clamor. She waved to him, and he reluctantly waved back, after which the girl went and they spoke.
"What's brought you so far from the woods, moss man?"
"I thought that sound you're making was that of sword and shield."
"Not unless you're hearing echoes of some other age. I'm practicing the Promise."
"Have your people so grown, magi, that they've learned to cherish truth once more?"
"I've not met Supprim's people. But I know she cherishes it. I can sense it."
"Yes, and it is almost the day of her Ascent," Halyongder sighed.
Recalling the first time the term piqued her ears, Heron asked: "Her what?"
"That rite her people use to garner favor from demons and godlings"
"You mean she summons them?"
"In a way," the man-tree laughed, frowning once realizing the girl was sincerely oblivious. "The people your master belongs to sacrifice their magis' lives every few hundred moons; their souls go to be one with forces that then endow the land with blessings."
Heron peered westward, to where a sun under auburn clouds looked just as the torch to which Supprim had likened her. She blinked. "They burn them, don't they?"
"Yes," Halygonder whispered, "I thought… surely you knew this, magi."
"I am not a magi!" insisted Heron.
The Troll-kin hung his head, a great animate earthwork. "Then I can only pray, and wonder what use your master hopes to make of you, if not as a pupil."
When her ashes are scattered and Ahruen is appeased, my name will be no more, Supprim thought as she lay in her loft that night. I will divide myself from this land by my craft, to go afar and conquer evil someplace else.
I will be nameless. But I will be.
Heron lay perfectly still upon her bedroll, praying her maker might soon comprehend how strong and like an unfeeling instrument as those on Supprim's workbench she'd become. The girl sensed no such admiration; only her maker's spirit trembling each time she glanced her way; each time she saw how obedient the child was in their demise.
"Are you prepared?" Balma asked, donning her prized magician with amulets and banded bottles of exotic ores.
Supprim met her eyes, saw through them to the sycophant beneath, whose own vying and meddling she'd known since adolescence had provoked the Troll-kin's rampage what slaughtered her family. For years she'd known it, though only once she reckoned her own village as a foreign entity—one poised to destroy her—did she grasp it for true.
Around them thronged witnesses to her ceremonies done on the eve of her Ascent. People she'd once loved, had played and hunted with, had eaten with since she'd thought the world one steppe, one realm spread against Vine like a rug in the bed of a chariot, bound for lands unknown. Supprim now knew life to be nothing a word can say; a maze, ghost-choked, and peopled with as many cold and deceitful folk as it was fell creatures. All eyed her possessively; she felt their hopes fall upon her, their groping eyes and apprehensions.
"Go and make right your soul with your forebears. They await you in the burial yards."
Supprim bowed to Balma, then turned and exchanged salutations from her pyres: custodians who'd tomorrow be tasked with carrying out her Ascent. Numb as a stone, she strode from the village forum heading southwest, toward the sand tombs and sepulchers quarried there.
Heron stood where she'd first learned to, when she'd crawled from inside the house and up the wall, then lifted her tiny self upon the roof. She'd spent the last few days apart from the world; apart from moon-eyed Halygonder and his fruit groves, apart from the sun and the air. She divided herself from all things, so to grasp what she was without them.
Maker Supprim hadn't watched her grow, leaving each day before first light, always without a word to the child. Heron was now as tall as she, as wholly-assumed of their shared form as was Supprim herself of her baleful, mana-rich mold.
The sun emerged from a veil of cloud, the steppe's western sky sanguine and bright. Her feet yet in the thatchings, Heron wondered: was she truly mere clay; an instrument, her corpus hewn of matter no more luminous than dust? She felt herself but a dream of someone, inhabiting a shell like a spark within an effigy. And yet she felt herself alone, and felt herself wondering. Reflecting on her loneliness.
Could one without a soul do so?
In the heights of such thoughts, she awoke and was only herself. Though she owed her wits to her maker, she could not doubt herself. Could it be, she thought without need of words, that her maker's magics were indeed so resplendent as to have woven these convolutions, these anxieties, into that which was, by her own declaration, only a puppet?
A child is no more than that, Heron thought, and the agony of it impaled her. I am my maker's child, and may now and as long as I live remember a girlhood which was not mine.
In Heron, a vision emerged of Supprim's mother stooped over her, pride and happiness like gold plated upon her cheeks. "Who is that little warrior from my womb," the woman swooned, her voice the very same as Supprim's; "who is the most fabulous daughter Vine ever hatched?"
"I am," Heron said.
A short while later, a pall fell over the air before Heron, the sun curdled to a magnesic green. Suddenly she saw into the eyes of a man whom she recognized for Supprim's father, his ghost hovering aloft. An otherworldly awareness played upon his face, the silver fathoms of his eyes where light and shade were somehow one. They focused on Heron.
"Supprim… It is I, beloved," came its voice as if after crossing a gulf. "Your heart harbors much darkness."
"I am not Supprim."
The shade's focus redoubled. "Who are you who wears my daughter's face?" it crooned.
"Her creation."
"But a magi mustn't sire children…!"
"She has found her own way."
Upon reaching the boneyard, Supprim thumbed the thread by which she was woven into being, gazing over the tombs of her family; their near and distant kin, all casked and commemorated in common rock. She'd emplored the departed so rarely she could scant remember how; the subtle psychic dance required to tread the walls 'twixt life and death's mingling layers. She cherished the feeling of the sand beneath her feet, the smell of lilacs blooming in great swells among the burial plots in their rows. She would not revisit this place in her lifetime.
Before she could begin, the shade of her father appeared, looking pensive and radiant as a seer before a war. Supprim dropped herself prostrate, then rose and regarded her own creator's eyes.
"Supprim, dear toadstool. I've visited your dwelling—who is this creature that bears your like?!"
"A mimic, pa. My magician's aide, that is all." A wind came to pass of Supprim's own invoking, perishing the guilty sweat upon her brow.
"It will be her that burns, won't it?"
To whom would she pray, Supprim suddenly wondered, in begging Fate not to turn her own departed father against her? If stripped of that what hope was there, if even her own fate-forsaken kin could not forgive her cowardice?
"Yes, father."
"Maybe you knew, but I have shared many a dream with you. I grasped that you'd not let yourself burn for Balma and her adherents' sake. Only I did not know how you planned to side-step your Ascent."
"I could not just leave. I have no love for their sloth and their death-worship, but without one to sacrifice at an Ascent, Ahruen may be conquered, destroyed. Our blood is there—is here."
"Your destiny is yours alone to course, beloved. Yet there is something I'd bid you do, if you'll soon be outside Ahruen's reach."
"Anything for you, pa."
"In the village trove-room is a sword of mine, mistaken for that of another when I was slain, and entombed without it. Its edge was our kin's safeguard ages before I inherited her, and had it renewed. Yet it gathers dust, like so many idols across the steppe," the shade seemed to jest. "Wherever you should go, dear, take first that sword with you. To protect yourself with it would be as close to a boon as my lowly soul could grant you."
"I will do this, father."
At dark, Supprim returned home, her Sight wide-awakened from her touch with the other-world. As she wound through the lilac thickets thrumming with bugsong, she bid farewell to every beast, every blade of grass what crossed her path, and asked of them to pass along her goodbyes to whomever might miss her.
Suddenly obscuring Supprim's sad rapture was the sight of Heron atop the roof; a little-winged bird no more, but a thunderbird, roosting in the falling light. As she turned to see Supprim upon sensing her, the bestial visage faded, leaving only the mirror image of she who neared on foot.
"Down, you," Supprim ordered, her self-begotten twin obeying. They neared and met, eye to shining eye. "In the morning," Supprim managed, "whether I am here or not, I'd like you to go into town—that's the village over yonder."
"My first summons?" asked Heron.
"Yes," and your last, Supprim thought. "You'll meet our people there. You're to be their servant for the day."
"And what am I to do when I arrive home?"
Supprim cleared her throat, nursing her wounded heart. "I'll be waiting for you."
They went inside at Supprim's insistence, eating steppe's mercies and springwater with morsels of baked cattail flour. Without ceremony or sentiment, the creator retired to her loft once the sun had set, leaving Heron to stalk the enchanted fastness of her soul in solitary quiet.
Was she meant to betray her maker? pondered the girl. She'd no doubt what was to be her purpose, but would abandoning her creator make not make her a traitor like Supprim herself? Wit would not avail her, and so Heron embarked the stellar spans of Vine; hearing the counsel and sooth of the world's choirs as one hears the singing of monks upon a mountainside.
Under a sky mottled by star and moonlight Supprim went, leaving her creation without so much as a look.
"Here," she said as she trod the way to town, meeting spirits along the way whose ethereal lips passed words of scorn unto her. "Take this pain from me," she uttered, purging her grief to the ghosts thronged throughout the hills. "If you would not bear such venom, why must I? Why ought I cherish the role of traitor?"
All were asleep, the village having not a light shining among its guildhalls and villas, sorted in quartered spokes around the great hall. As though she were one of the myriad dead met along the way, Supprim embarked the town in silence, unseen. She carried with her a banded wallet in which all that she'd need to depart was held, and a girdle at her waist through which to sling her father's sword.
Shadows lashed her; brambles of darkest black squared the great hall, where preservative enchantments of her own making laid yet in sealing out select forces of age and wasting. Her Sight prevailed, a courtesy of her past self afforded by having needed it to shape the seals themselves; the intangible thresholds she breached now with sandaled foot, and flint in her heart. She stalked the great hall in seeking to remember the place of its trove, a reliquary among the vaulted timber corridors and shrines to Ahruen's native deities.
With little luck and more intuition, she reached the keep, wherein relics of many ages were shelved. She browsed—a crown hewn of bone, crystals shaped as teardrops, ores bright and rare, preserved herbs, and ornaments of a thousand ceremonies—all within the mana-parched bowels of Balma's slothful dominion. Within a roll of vellum she at last found her father's sword, an inornate edge of some pitted black alloy. Upon stealing off with it toward the stone portal what led her hence, Supprim spied a tome so exquisitely bound that she could not help but fetch it for inspection. It was a guide to relics stored elsewhere, other troves of artifacts too powerful or otherwise precious to be kept within the village.
At the far reaches of being, the marshals of the sun were at that moment headed for the reins, and by the sense that dawn would soon arrive was Heron awakened, stirring fearfully on her bedroll. She reached for the aging salts upon her maker's workbench, but forewent them in favor of a rich serapine, which she ate while envisioning the end.
She shut her eyes, but seven mornings aged, and let the dark swallow her while she ate. To be wed to a godling? What could that mean? What is that but to live in utter servitude—the thought paralyzed her. Was that not her lot already?
Settled in her own shadows, Supprim was struck suddenly with a light that nigh blinded her, having so long sat poring over the tome. She hoped it a light from other-world, a god come to annihilate her; to relive her of her circumstance.
"Who is that!?" one of the few shrewd folk in their village, a guildman, cried as he strode into the keep.
As though the darkness in the keep were a black sky from which thunder sounded, the guildman summoned his retainers to him. Shortly thereafter, Balma appeared.
"Why did you come here?" begged Supprim, walled in by a horde of guards, faceless with dawn's light at their backs.
"The pyres' robes are kept here, child," Balma said gravely. "You knew that, I'd have thought."
She'd forgotten.
"And here you sit with your belongings about you," the queen minister observed as the guildman stood Supprim upright. "Preparing to disappear, as sorcerers are wont to?"
The magician felt abandoned by her wits, as though in purging herself of her heart's follies she'd gutted herself of the cunning and courage once begotten by such fears. "Yes," she whispered, trembling. "I was going to leave you all behind. You, and death-worship."
A tide of shadowed forms as she'd not faced even in her most accursed exploits surged at Supprim, bearing her hapless body out of the keep and toward the promontory at West Ahruen's edge.
The sun lay like a heart disembodied between hills on the steppe's horizon, where Supprim's eyes fell and began relaying omens to her of the future she'd be leaving. They'd bound her hands whilst dragging her through the village, throwing jeers and curses that'd cling to her spirit beyond death. Even in her shock, she thought, I will don those curses like warts and lesions, and tell whatever godling is displeased at the sight of them, who is to blame.
She now stood bound and muzzled atop a circular pyre, rounded with stones gathered at the edge of a cliff overlooking the greater steppe. Among those that thronged the bridge between the pyre and the incline whence they'd brought her was Balma, who with shadows dimming her eyes set toward Supprim with a censer and a torch in her hands. The chieftess bayed Ahruen's magician thoroughly with a perfume of lilac and crushed cacti, then removed the muzzle from her face. Still was the dawn, a cloudless sky lending silence to the steppe.
"So has this been done before, Supprim. Do not think the chronicle incomplete. When a sorcerer ascends unwillingly, what endowments we receive are lackluster."
"Burn her already!" concurred most of the crowd.
"There is still time to lend this ritual your blessing, magi."
Of my immortal breath, I will give you not another word. I am nothing now. Of that, I will not say I am glad.
Balma frowned at Supprim's refusal to speak, then slapped her and replaced the muzzle. As she signaled the pyres forth and they moved past Balma, both she and Supprim at once spotted a figure approaching from outside the crowd. Clouded with age as her eyes were, the queen minister was seasoned enough in watching over Supprim to recognize her shape from afar. Likewise, all looked and were aghast at the sight of their magi coming through the village, her eyes alight like twin moons.
"Devilry!" cried someone. "She summons a shadow of herself!"
A sally of warriors went forward to confront the illusion, or demon, and were met with a gaze so like that of the wild man-tree that they dared not stand in the thing's way. Supprim saw but could barely comprehend the sight of entire village closing on Heron like tides upon an isthmus, only to see her pulling through them, whole families tugging fruitlessly at her proud shoulders.
The mimic said nothing, moved only with the relentless grace which Supprim had seen borne out of her creation's vital innocence. Though all the steppe lay before her, Supprim could not conceive of a more fiercely beautiful vision than that of Heron, eyes glittering with fear and fearlessness at once as she broke through the crowd, arriving at the altar by the cliff's edge. By some feat of strength Supprim failed to grasp, the girl snapped her maker's bindings and tore the cloth from her mouth. She then turned and gazed at the people of the village, who cautiously fled and parted into droves.
Heron then faced her maker, the sun swathing them both, and raised her fists. "Vine's Promise. All things will perish, maker of mine."
Supprim was weeping. She pressed tears from her eyes with fists balled like her child's.
"Don't hide yourself from deaths you cannot weather. You'd have spent my life to save yours. For that—for you—there will always be hate in my heart. But you've given me yourself; this form, mighty as it is. For that I will always love you."
"Come with me," Supprim began to bargain, "there is so much we could discover. For it to be this way was never my hope. I—"
Heron shook her head. "I know all that you know. Through that bond, nothing within me is hidden from you but this magic I've learnt."
Her words were truth. Regarding the soul of her creation, Supprim's doubt was quashed by the child's prodigious spirituality; her triumph in this sorcery Supprim knew of but could not grasp.
"Let's not be bound together, like you were to these people. For that—for you—I will go every place you've been kept from, so you might see the world through my eyes."
"Each of us was robbed of so many years…"
"Together, we can make up for them."
Heron then turned and braced herself against the altar's tinder boles, heaving till all fell sidelong, and gravity sundered them with a terrible rasp. In the distance were dismayed Ahruenites from East and West clutching themselves as if in seeing an idol be upturned, watching the pyre be destroyed.
"Wait, please," were but two of ten-million words Supprim wished desperately to air as Heron turned away. "Where did you learn this power?"
"The man like a living hill--who helped me renew your pantry."
Scourer of secrets that Heron was, it thrilled and appalled Supprim to know she'd found a peer in something she'd feared always, hated forever.
"I go south—to where stars shine which none born in Ahruen have seen. One day, we'll meet again," the girl, now a woman unto herself, said as she embarked south. "Goodbye, mother."
Unshod and dressed yet in her heirloom shift, the wind folded about her such as to make billows of her hair and clothes, that moved as she quit the cliffside like the wings of a gliding bird.
At the foot of the promontory the guardsmen had abandoned Supprim's belongings, Supprim fetched them. So long had she failed to truly weather the deaths of her family; it was time to make peace with the Troll-kin.