Morphine had belonged to the mountains before she was
Morphine.
She was her flower's first and foremost, but nothing with wings can be content
with feeling the breeze when they could soar through it, and the entire forest
was her playground. She had raced the other spirits from treetop to ground and
back again, always winning and always preening when she won. She would sweep
low and skim across the lakes, so close she could feel the skin of the water on
her belly, and then again on her back so she could feel it on her wings. She
would fly straight and true up in the night sky, trying to meet the stars.
This was back before most ancestors could remember, when Morphine had been just
another spirits of the flowers and the woods and the wind. The fastest and the
most beautiful, to be sure, but still only a spirit, lovely and free and
nameless.
Then the man had come. He stayed in the forest for many days, and all the
spirits clustered around him at first, curious why he was there when he did not
belong. When it seemed that he had no intention of leaving and would only walk
among the trees holding a slab of shiny stuff in front of him, build harmless
fires every night and eat what he had brought with him, the others lost
interest and went back to their play. But she was more intrigued than she was
curious, and kept coming back to watch him and his glittering pendant and the
neat and conscientious way he rolled up his bedding every morning.
One day she had come too close and he caught her watching. She darted back to
the cover of a bush, but he smiled and asked if she wanted to know what the
pendant was for.
He had been the first Diethyl. Not the very first, of course, he had had a
father, but the first one she knew and the first one who mattered. He had given
her her name, and Morphine went with him not because that had given him power
over her but because no one else had ever cared before to name her.
She had loved that first Diethyl as she grew to love his son after him and the
son after him again. She loved them all for their seriousness and their
sweetness and the nobility of their convictions. She had watched countless
numbers of Diethyls grow weary and frustrated as they searched for the key
while she laughed primly in her cage, glowing like the sunset in a jewel. She
had seen their elation when they released her and she flew around their heads
to rustle their hair and then alight on their shoulder in her version of a
kiss. She had been introduced to all the sweethearts they brought home, more
anxious for her grudging approval than for that of their parents. She had
practiced with them as they created and perfected the techniques they taught to
their sons.
And with their sons, she had mourned each Diethyl as they passed into a world
she would never know.
She loved each of her Diethyls as separate people and for the smiling eyes that
united them all, and loved them all equally and without exception. But she
thought now, perhaps, that she might love Lyserg the most because of how much
he needed it.
They would have been so proud of him, his fathers and his fathers' fathers,
that he was so strong and brave and focused and had the opportunity to be in
the Shaman Fights, and they would be so sad for him too.
Morphine was so happy when he made his allies. She hoped they would become his
friends, that they would teach him to laugh more. Children should laugh often,
and play - she had learned that. But she could only watch as he stood on the
outskirts of their comradery, mystified and annoyed, too full of his mission to
let anything else in. She did not mind when everything else basically meant
Morphine - long ago she would have pouted and sulked, stamped her delicate foot
in the air at the lack of attention. But the Diethyls had taught her patience,
so she aided Lyserg and waited until he would hopefully look past his own anger
and see the world around him. But now she feared that her love and his allies'
example would not be enough.
Lyserg admired the X-Laws. They told him all the nasty things he suspected
might be true wrapped in a package of self-righteousness he needed to feel.
Morphine did not like them at all, wanted to, in fact, tear them apart with her
pendulum and wire. She feared Lyserg would join them, suspected occasionally
that it was only a matter of time. She recognized the dreaminess in a Diethyl's
eye when one seized upon a new idea.
The X-Laws would destroy Lyserg, she knew that. They would take what made the
Diethyls, made Lyserg in particular, so precious and special and
ihers/i, and twist it in on itself until his justice had the
steel edge of a sword and not the supple strength of a petal or the
thoughtfulness refracted in crystal.
But even if he did join them, iwhen/i he joined them, Morphine
knew she would stay true. Because he was a Diethyl and he was Lyserg. The
Diethyls had shaped her as much as she had shaped them, they the lock and
Morphine the key. She was no longer the spirit of a flower and its mountain;
she was the spirit of a family. She was not going to abandon Lyserg, she was
sure of it, even if he might be the last of her Diethyls.
