Fire Walk With Me
Twin Peaks-inspired musings on woeful errands, dark magic and all that jazz. Not explicitly spoilery for Twin Peaks, but if you aren't familiar with the series and plan on watching it I warmly advise to steer clear. By the way – to better understand the references and the story, it is important to know what Mingi Taw is. You can look up Mount Elbrus on Wikipedia.
The Scythian knows this is the place before she even arrives.
It shows in the branches of trees first, when she turns up her head and thinks wow, they sure have weird angles. But it is a footnote, a side in a greater shape she cannot see yet. With every step she travels ahead, she watches the rest of the world join in – the earth and the leaves and all life are part of a whole, the underlying theme in the tune of her fate.
If everything bends to a greater will, which incidentally bends in her direction, then it must happen here.
And the predictions were never wrong, the Scythian grumpily tells the wind. Her people know their stuff. If their obscure weavings let her guess it's west, she travels west. If they whisper it's going to be in a volcano, she is confident she will meet slopes, open mouths of rock, and bony crumbs of stone at their sides.
She does. All of it. Something inside her has always known anyway.
The Scythian opens her mind to the magic around her. Silently led, her limbs choose to kneel on the riverside. She is glad to notice the woods are spreading their arms – they beckon from the small field, towards a solitary roof, with food and rest.
She often makes mistakes when she is tired, but not this time. She is sure it comes from the hut – it is a call, and it flares with magic. She is not surprised to find patches of hillside growing beside the walls. It is here alright.
Human figures are rushing to see her. She is not in a hurry, though. She lets them come, and takes her time to look into the river.
The pure waters paint her a perfect portrait. Even among the ripples of the flow, the dark hair trembles to match that falling from her shoulders, and her image has a bronze shell of flesh and leather she has always known as her own.
The river is so clear, it is almost deceitful. Maybe it really is. But when it comes to light and its reflections, her people do not like speaking the truth. It is too dangerous.
The friendly man accompanies her along a generous segment of path. When they get to the edge of the grotto, he points at the entrance, and chooses to stay behind. He is smarter than he looks, the friendly man.
Maybe he is just luckier than her, or more sensible. The Scythian is not sure. To be fair, this far into her errand, she suspects the force which drives her deeper to be a little stronger than mere will.
It feels like walking in the bowels of darkness itself. At this point, she has a hard time telling her feelings and the truth apart. This is the edge of a tear in the world, the border where magic and solid perceptions melt into brain-burning mush.
She briefly wonders how she even got here in the first place.
But the source of it all shows, and everything else stops mattering. The heart of the vortex lies between bones and darkness, tight, too tight, in a grasp of centuries. It pleads her to set it free – it is misplaced, it is trapped, it belongs somewhere else.
Her soul lets out a low whistle. It isn't nearly as great as it is terrible.
All the bleak truths she prepared for were right. There is a kind of evil at the heart of Mingi Taw, and she may not tell, but man, does it freak her out. The same way it lures her into knowing more, it repulses her.
The Scythian would run away, if she only could. She would turn her back on it. But she can't.
That was the first time it occurred to her so fully, she silently realizes later, with the first hints of daylight on her skin and the book in her hands. There is definitely something other than her choices playing its part in this tale.
But all stories are finite in the end, and it is before the end that she must know. She can only wait.
Before leaving the bridge, she turns back for a moment. Her eyes climb the rocky flight of stairs, spying every nook and cranny, as if her life depended on it.
That night, the Scythian dreams. She roams the summit of the sleeping volcano in terrified fascination, and her frightened soul magnifies her fancies of the day. Her feet lie on the surface, but she sees what is below – within the twin peaks and their mouths are stone walls and chimneys, then deep, dark wells that descend into the night.
Her dream self flies far below, yearning to explore the places she will never tread on. It isn't long before her soul plummets in a dense, open space. The Scythian meets a sea of red heat, the sleeping chamber of millions of years, and she burns into its core until she wakes up screaming.
She echoes her vision, drenched in cold sweat, and speaks. The eternal mountain has a heart of fire, she says.
They rush beside her rough bedding, to listen in silence, like effigies of mere concern. They know nothing, the Scythian thinks. They could never know.
At the very least, she is not alone.
The Scythian wakes up from a new dream every night, with babbling of trigons in her mouth and fingers colder than ice. The girl is there to watch. She falls asleep easily at any time of day, in any case – to sit awake at night and hold her hands until they are warm is no concern to her.
They talk, and the girl sits precariously on her bedside, leaving her heavy with a sense of loss and fragility. The Scythian fears what is beyond the edge, whatever it is.
It is destroying me, her gaze speaks in the firelight.
Why then, the girl asks.
Because I had no choice.
And the choice could be hers now, the girl tells her during the day, with a pensive brow and watchful eyes on the storm. We can live with a little rain. It's the worst that could happen anyway. Right? Right?
What does a book count for?
The Scythian would like to know, too, and sorts through the pages every time she doubts it. There is nothing in the Megatome, her skeptical wood-cutting friend says. She knows better – there is only nothing if things like thoughts and dreams do not count.
But she can read their language, for some reason. If she spies on the book, she can watch over their secret minds as they unfold, and touch the fabric of their whole existence. It is too bad they cannot read. Or they don't wanna. It makes sense.
She still gets this feeling she cannot chase away. It's like she is the only one who can truly see it all.
She wonders why.
The Scythian had not expected to share her makeshift home with a dream walker. Then again, in retrospect, she should have.
It does not feel like a coincidence, thus it is no coincidence. She has known about the two sides of the world since the beginning. As far as she can remember, there is a picture of her, child then girl then grown woman, seeking a way to link all the moods of the moon.
The way is indeed there, she chants to herself, drifting on the ethereal paths that drag her to the ending.
When she was little, the Scythian watched the moon shift in the heavens, and played a game of imagination. She gave the silver disc another side, colder and darker than the depths of the night. She pictured a black edge, just around the corner of her vision, and she dreamt of its fight – the struggle to win over just a sliver of that whiteness, to tug at the face of the world, and manifest among the mortals like her.
She used to shiver in fear, all alone. She took comfort in the fact it was a game. She basks in the memory every time, and every time her dream self teaches her – the greatest challenge of life is coming to accept that it never was.
In one of the last dreams, she is squeezed into a room full of people. The happy dwellers of her life sway to the music, tenderly, with a somber girl's voice whispering in her ear. It is a nice dream, a welcoming dream, where the flow of friendliness and sweet tunes never stops.
But the voice speaks the truth, and the truth has to break it down.
When she opens her eyes again, she is going to meet her fate.
She climbs Mingi Taw in full acceptance. For the occasion, the telltale song of owls accompanies her in broad daylight.
Her fate behind her back, the ghost of her closure just ahead. With the wreck of a body she has left, it can only be like this – nothing but outer forces are dragging her to the top of the mountain.
So it was true, she thinks in the haze of blood and vomit. The summit is where it is all going to end.
The dreams did not lie either, in the dance of their colourful language. The fire, the soul of Mingi Taw, walks by her side. She spirals into unconsciousness with every new height she conquers, all heat, horror, helplessness.
However, the Scythian won't fall now. With all the weakness that gently lulls her to death, she still has a purpose – though she was a pawn, her life wasn't cornered and drained for no reason.
She lifts her arms, so the horizon can meet a fragment of uncorrupted truth. Just behind, just there, inside and outside her, she is burnt to her skeleton by an evil she could never really escape.
As the world balances itself, she joins hands with that evil. They blur in and out of the sky, melting into a puddle of eternity.
And in that moment, if you were there to watch, you could never tell which is which.