She wasn't nearly what you thought she'd be.
She wasn't nearly anything, anymore.
She had been, once, running through wood and stone and metal, and before that life, human body, human senses, a pale albino figure sitting beside her brother Ranna on the edge of a waterfall. Sorrow written in her blood, sorrow for the dead and those of it. And even after blood was gone, really, sorrow written in the ancient marks they had created, been the driving force. The grief and the fear, the life and the stars at the ninth gate, white and pure with the perfection of perfect sorrow and Death.
She'd held them in, giving herself up to be the boundary, the borderline, the point where everything submerged and swirled and Life joined Death on that precarious perch that few cared to walk through and she had made it the one way trip. It was only her brothers and sisters who bent the rules, swirling reality where it was already swirled, counterclockwise with death running through her veins, twisting the sorrow with Sleep, Waking, Walking, Sound, Thinking, Binding, twisting her Sorrow and making it death so that few could pass through. Dead tread that way, and they bent it to allow one through, only one, the Ancient Guardian, bound in the laws soon after creation. To lay the dead to rest.
But there was a price, always a price for the sorrowful lady in white because you could not enter Death. She had made the laws and there was a toll to be paid because even she could not break them. Chilling, cold coldcold rivers in the singsong-rushing waters, trickle, life's blood trickling into the river, suck at the spirits trickling over the gate, sucking at life at death at the spirit and the will with a music of it's own, a music that Dyrim granted her years ago, curly-haired sister with dark hair and a proud spirit, granting a gift to the Weeper among them, the weeping woman in white who created the gates of Death.
Sing-song, trickle lovely, water rushing past her, the gates that defined her. The only music she has now is the rushing of the waters of Death as they hurtle past every gate, every gate but her home, the Ninth and final where she is the stars and rushes them home. Home, home under her weeping tree where the rosemary blooms, rosemary and amaranth and the flowers that never fade under her stars.
Flowers never fade for her, held in Death beside Time. What is death but the control of time, the flow of the river counting out a hundred hundred heartbeats, wood crumbling and time coalescing as those bound by it still enter. What an odd concept, she would think if she could think at all, but she is in everything and individualism is all lost into the stars that carry them home.
They were here with her, and they were not. All of them lived on without living on, moving forward and backward and only Kibeth truly stayed, straying so close to her that the laws envoked in herself. And with sorrow she watched them but, sister or not, the river had to be fed, fed the life blood of the spirit, and Kibeth and Yrael had both evaded the river too long. You know the rules, sister, lost in the dark and you know which way you're going as the water flows back and forth with waves curling in her underground gardens, black liquid of the air and of the river of death.
She blocks, she blocks all of life, Charter present in death because she is there in essence, her unconsciousness is part of it, but she is not able to be in it, her unconscious thoughts protecting everything. She knew Kibeth would be here, her sister the Walker, but the nature cannot be denied, nor the roles reversed. Look Yrael, see the weeping woman in white and who's laughing now, brother
Ring the bells, blow the pipes, run the water through the currents of life, twist through the laws of the forces that goven this place. Walk, Kibeth, sister, you are free because you take the Abhorsen with you, the Ancient Protector, who keeps the dead down. She reaches and grasps, but her arms do not close, held apart by the force that draws them together like Orannis in his prision under the wards and her eyes grow wider, greener like Yrael's, silver wire and emeralds with a wide mouth, stretching and reaching. Fate holds them apart and together.
It's curious, she thinks, if she could think, that the fate of this girl is to defy fate, giving a hand where a life is required, her lover captured on the edge of the river of death and Kibeth walking him back as she walks the river between Life and Death, just as they all fufill their natures. Ranna sleeps for two hundred years, Mosrael balances with the prophecy in her voice, Kibeth walks the edge of her boundary, Dyrim speaks in the voice of the Rule, Belgaer thinks with the nature of the Craftsmen, Saraneth rings with the truth of the bell and Astarael, Astarael the weeping woman in white who always remembers, never forgets.
But she remembers, and she remembers, and what she has forgotten isn't so forgotten in what the past has come back to her. Defy fate, she would think, when she is fate. And the girl is herself, after all. Not so pale, anymore, black as pitch, but sorrowful, golden-handed. The irony doesn't escape her in her tomb.
Hello, sister, you've left her again
And Kibeth walks, walks, the sister she was closest too in the world sends her a poor replacement for a friend and walks, even when her own path is at an end. Come with me, sister the stars whisper, but Kibeth looks up at them and no matter how much Astarael loved her sister she could not take the Walker from her path.
...so that the dead shall not walk in life. For this is not their path.
Look at the woman in white, the sorrowful woman with Death in her arms...
None of the characters belong to me. Stream-of-consciousness in third person. Oddness.
Finally got Abhorsen from a friend at school, and shot through it in about two and a half hours. I liked it more than Lirael and nearly as well as Sabriel, if not better. I'm a sucker for ancient history embedded in magic. I wanted to see the original seven, their personalities and such, but I still wrote this piece, so enjoy. The writing is highly odd--it's got a sing-song quality to it, probably from listening to too much Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind while reading.