Written for invisible_cities for Yuletide 2013
1.
The great heart of the world beats achingly slow, and Hesseth Sa'Restrath stumbles and trips and runs, trying to follow along.
2.
"All right, then. Explain it to me. Your Church. Your faith," she asks Damien during their voyage. Despite everything, even now, she's khrast, and understanding is her purpose.
She wants to know, and doesn't, in a way that's hesitant enough to be almost human, but in the end the desire for knowledge wins.
Damien's faith intrigues and terrifies her; try as she might, humanity's everyday struggle with fae is alien and incomprehensible to her. Humans: so lost, so destructive, torn between their desires and fears and unconscious decisions, breeding monsters and reaping terror.
To Hesseth, earth fae are invisible and yet just as familiar and known as breathing, as water flowing downhill. She needs, and the earth responds; she wants, and nature reshapes itself to meet her need. She knows she'll never need wrong, want too much; she knows that what needs to change will be changed as if it was always so. How scared, how desperate must humans be, by this gift turning on them in a myriad of dangerous, terrifying ways?
But the vision of the future Damien's church strives towards is full of vast terror to her as well. To live forever denied the embrace of Erna, in the unchanging, empty world where the earth fae are forever tied down… What a cold, ruthless mind was needed to create this vision, Hesseth thinks. What little surprise there is in their Prophet turning into a feared Hunter, a blight upon the face of the world.
And yet she cannot deny that Tarrant, in his own twisted way, is still trying to help his Church survive. And Damien, the most steadfast man she's ever met, listens to him, however much it pains him. And Hesseth follows. Who could have ever told her how far this path would go?
3.
There are things that khrast don't tell their people, and one of them is this: if you study it long enough, English makes perfect sense - because the language of the rakh is quietly and obviously born from it. The khrast know, and don't disclose. It's quietly accepted that there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Hesseth has traveled far and wide, listened and studied and looked, and struggled with what she found. She has read the history books and looked at the illustrations, masked herself with the unreliable lights of the tidal fae and talked to historians and scientists, pooled knowledge with other khrast. However repugnant, however alien to her the fruits of her studies were, she had to accept them. Rakh, children of Erna, were just as much human-born: ages of evolution compressed into one brilliant explosion of creation, intelligence blossoming, body and mind changing rapidly to follow along.
It's amazing and terrifying. Humans: the outsiders, the aliens, so violently rejected and embraced by Erna in turns, wreaking havoc and destruction upon the world. And yet, without them, there would be no rakh; there would be no Hesseth herself. She hates humans and she doesn't. She learns, and learns, and learns.
She's listened to hundreds of hypotheses on the nature of the Canopy during her travels, and none of them made any sense to her. What she thinks - what she knows - is that the canopy is just Erna's response to the needs of the rakh: protection. The barrier shielding them from the volatile mind of humanity, the chance to evolve and grow without being guided along.
But evil still crept into these protected lands, and nobody but Damien and his people came to help.
And now, wandering in the senseless carnage of the destroyed village, carnage created by rakh, on the forsaken continent ruled by a conspiracy of rakhene Matriarchs and a being that's neither - or both - rakhene or human, Hesseth mourns her certainty that evil only ever came from the outside. The world used to be so simple, once, so easily divided into parts. And now she mourns, lost, and her only hope in this twisted world is a human priest and a being so dark his own creation expunged him, and she relies on both of them more than she ever did on anybody else.
4.
She tries to explain tidal fae to Damien, tongue stumbling over unaccustomed phrases, trying to put into words something as close as her own skin. But how does a fish explain water, how does a single blade of grass explain the nature of the plains? The world moves in a slow majestic dance, and Hesseth dances along with it.
They move through the forsaken lands of the Undying Prince, bewildered and determined, and Hesseth does what she can, when the world allows it to be so.
She remembers the chants of her childhood, abandoned during her sojourns in human lands, and speaks to each great moon of Erna in turn, lips moving through the well-worn words. O You-who-hunts-on-soft-feet, o You-who-weaves-the-stars, o You-who-sings-in-the-darkness. Do not leave me in my hour of need; do not abandon me in my quest for life; do not let my road end before the time comes. Pour your light ahead of me, guide my hand, confuse my enemies, bring your song into my bones. O do not leave me, do not leave me, do not leave me be.
They stumble and run, inexorable Damien and little Jenseny, frail Jenseny, the child of her soul, Hesseth's last gift.
Soft Jenseny, who hears the songs of Hesseth's unborn children in her fur.
The danger hisses and swirls around them, and Hesseth is not afraid. Hesseth keeps the secrets of her people. Hesseth weaves and sings, starlight and moonlight and voice, all twined together in a net of power and loss. She learned long ago not to look at the secret heart of the world, but this time she strains with all of her being to be one with it, to be a graceful leaf floating on the wind.
Because what she started, Damien and Jenseny will have to finish. Because her people, twisted and bent by the evil soaking this land, have to be saved. Because what's wrong will have to be put right.
Damien begs her to teach Jenseny, and she tries. But what she teaches is neither sorcery nor tricks. She has to teach Jenseny what is it to be rakh, what it is to be united in your body and mind and soul, fragile and resilient and whole.
She gives Jenseny the proper names of the moons and herbs and animals and rocks, tells her of hunts and gatherings and dances performed in the darkness of true night. She touches and weaves and sings, and Jenseny soaks it all up, and there's so little time left.
That's something Tarrant, in all his smug superiority, doesn't know about rakh. Yes, rakhene women are the ones who hunt, and rakhene women are the ones who rule; they hide and they find and they confuse. What he doesn't know is this: they also foresee.
They run through the black lands, and in the hurricane's eye of the great song of the world there's a silence that tells Hesseth: She-who-waits-by-the-end-of-all-roads is waiting for her.
5.
When the time comes, long before her body breaks against the rocks, Hesseth sa-Restrath scatters into starlight.