Notes: I borrowed part of this scene for my 2013 DARBB fic "i followed fires," which can be found on my AO3 account.
I am eight years old. I am sitting on the edge of the creek by our house, watching the beautiful ripples of light filtering through the running water, the constantly shifting shadows on the pebbles of the creekbed, the occasional blade of grass drifting downstream.
I do not know how long I have been sitting here. Yesterday I sat in this spot and watched a spider weave a web between two twigs in the mud. The spider itself was small and hard to see, a sort of gray color that avoided light. The web was a circle inside a circle inside a circle, constructed around straight lines. This morning there was dew on each of the tiny threads, and the spider was nowhere to be seen. Tomorrow I think I will part the grass near my hand and look for bugs in the dirt. I have not yet spent time observing the dirt.
I do not know why I spend so much time observing the world around me; I do not know of anything else to do when Mother sends me from the hut so that she may do her magic apart from my questions. Sometimes I wonder why her magic is so secret—I know that I will not be able to copy her, that magic is not one of my gifts, and I do not know why she would still feel a need to send me away. I do not mind being alone. I am always either with Mother or by myself, and even when I am by myself there are still so many things around me that I forget there is no one to talk to. Mother and I do not speak often, either.
The sun filters through the leaves of the trees above me. It is summer, and the air is hot, though closer to the stream there is a cool breeze from the water. There are birds tweeting and whistling, rustling leaves and shaking branches as they hop from perch to perch. Sometimes the bushes rustle with the movement of some animal I cannot see, but I am used to such sounds. No animal has ever approached me. I sometimes wish they would come closer, so that I could see and know each hair poking through the skin, feel the softness of a coat of fur and the warmth of a body below it, understand how bodies suddenly become tails. I try to be still, stiller than the sky, but they never come closer. I know all these things, but I want to know them for myself.
I have long since memorized the placement of every pebble in the small part of the creekbed I have decided to watch today. The largest is a whitish brown, its curve rising above the others, which are small and grey and slowly wearing away under the constant flow of water. Even the smallest pebble was once a rock, and rocks were once bigger rocks. I have never seen a rock bigger than my mother, but I know they exist. I know I ought to see them; I would like to watch them long enough to see soft green moss turn tiny chips into giant cracks, until the big rocks became small rocks. I would take the rocks to the ocean and watch until the waves turned the rocks to pebbles and then sand, gritty beneath my bare feet.
I do not know what an ocean is, but I know this happens. I will have to ask Mother. A pebble splashes in the creek.
I look up amidst the sound of birds suddenly started into flight, the flap of their wings sending wind rushing over and between their feathers. For a moment their mingled joy and panic is my own, and then I see the woman standing on the other side of the creek.
Mother has explained to me the difference between boys and women, but she did not tell me that women could look different. This woman has white hair and yellow eyes (like Mother's—like a hawk, though I have never been close enough to a hawk to look) and her skin is like a fallen leaf, rough and veined, wrinkled like my bedclothes after I shove them away in the morning—folded more than lined. Her clothes are plain, the color of raspberry juice, and her skirt hides her feet, so I cannot see if they are bare as mine are. She is not so close that she stands tall over me, but she stands straight and even from the other side of the creek I know that she is powerful. But not a threat.
"Well, well, well," she says, and her voice is very different from Mother's. Deeper, rougher, like coarse sand (I have never seen sand yet I know there are different kinds, that sometimes it is black and sometimes it is brown and sometimes crystal). "I should have thought you'd have made your way to a city by now."
I try to be as still as a rabbit who has heard the footfall of a fox; my heart hammers just as hard.
"You never were one for the wild, but perhaps that has changed. No matter," she says, with a wave of the hand, much like Mother makes when she has become too involved in explaining a spell. "Well met, grandson. How are you on this fine day?"
I do not know what to say. The only person I ever speak to is Mother, and she has never asked how I am. She does not have to ask; she is Mother, and she knows. More than that, I can only say that the sun is shining and the creek water is casting shadows on the pebbles, and I am. I am.
"Are you always this silent?" she says. "Or did Morrigan forget to teach you how to speak?"
"That's Mother's name," I say, surprised.
"Yes," she says, and she smiles, but not like Mother smiles. Mother rarely smiles, and only when she is truly pleased; this woman smiles with her teeth, a hunter's warning. "I am your mother's mother, child. My name is Flemeth."
"Flemeth," I say, the word flowing off my tongue, strange but soft. It is a mystery.
"And your name?"
Mother has never had to ask; I named myself. "Morrin," I say, though I am uncertain even as I say it. It is not a flowing name, like Flemeth; it rather rumbles, slithering like a snake in the grass. Morrigan rumbles over a cliff and comes to a sudden stop, while Mother is a blanket wrapped around me, safely. I wonder how it is that Mother and Morrigan came to mean the same thing.
"Derivative," she snorts. I do not understand. "Well then, Morrin. Fare-thee-well?"
"The sun is shining," I say, because I have no other answer.
She shakes her head, her long white hair drifting over her shoulders, froth from a waterfall meeting the river below. "To see such refined sensibilities satisfied in such an ordinary fashion...ah, well, I suppose you're still young. We shall have to see how you are when you are older. Perhaps by then your mother will have taught you something useful. Tell me, child," and the full focus of her yellow gaze sharpens on me, the mouse in the grass, "what has she taught you?"
I try to think of an answer. Mother rarely tells me she wants to teach me something; usually she says so only after I have made a mistake, such as trying to grasp the cookpot without a mitt. "Flowers," I say finally, "and their names. How to mend shirts. How to—"
"And magic?" she says, seeming to loom taller without ever taking a step. "Surely you can tell me the names of the demons, or call the wisps—"
"I can't do magic," I say, returning her interruption with a laugh. I have never done magic. The thought feels silly. Magic is smoke and lyrium and Mother sending me from the hut with sharp words and then sulking silent when I return, or else smiling and passing a hand over my hair.
The pressure of her gaze softens; she is thinking, and watching me while she thinks. I still sit on the ground with my hands in my lap. "No," she says at last; "no, I don't believe you can. And...of your own volition, it seems." She tilts her head, the avian cockeye look of contemplation. "An interesting choice, and one I think you will yet regret."
"I've never done magic," I say, feeling a need to tell her she is confused, or wrong. "I don't need to do magic. Mother does magic."
"You don't need—?" She laughs, then, a sound that comes from deep in her throat, her head tilted back to let the sound bubble into the air, her shoulders shaking. When Mother laughs I want to smile, but this laughter turns my innards cold, and I shiver. "Oh, but don't you? Tell me, boy," and now she is leaning, almost as if she is leaning across the creek and peering into my face, "do you fear death?"
"Death?" I have not thought about it. Animals die. Mother calls them and they come to her, and with a word or two they stop moving and she skins them and puts them in the cookpot. I clean the furs. I know animals eat each other, but it has not occurred to me that the same fate could await me.
"Oh, nothing so gruesome as that," she says, as if she knows my thoughts. "I'm not talking of death in battle or any such glorious nonsense. Decay, child. Slowly wasting away as time and age rob your mind of clarity and your body of strength. Closing your eyes for sleep, and simply never waking. The end of all things, as all things must end."
"All things?" I ask. My heart still beats at a rabbit's pace in my chest, a-live, a-live, a-live, but a rabbit's heart speeds up before it dies (it is the rhythm of death as its breath is the music; a symphony ending in abrupt silence) and Flemeth is watching my face and I wonder in a panic if she means to eat me, or kill me, if she can make me decay with the strength of her gaze.
"Oh, yes," she says. "Surely you've seen trees rotting away from the inside, or what becomes of the squirrel after it makes its final leap?" As she speaks, I see her words, as if she has cast a spell and suddenly I am the squirrel hurtling headlong into the ground; I am tree and I am consumed, an agony that grows slower than my roots, and I want to scream but the tree has no tongue and I stay silent. "The same will happen to your mother," she speaks of her child as though she does not care about her death, her voice close, "but not I, and not, perhaps, to you."
I blink and the vision clears; I am standing, and Flemeth stands behind me, her hands on my shoulders. Her hair tickles my neck as she speaks into my ear. "You have power, Morrin, power within you, power to reject this fate. It is your birthright to claim when you see fit."
I breathe quickly, small gasps, my limbs shaking, full of jumbled images that I have never seen and feelings I have never felt (sand and symphonies, oceans and sky)—I have never been frightened, but the word comes to me unbidden and I take it, naming my fear—though if it is more of Flemeth or death, I cannot say. But the fear is mine, and no one else's, and that helps, a little.
"Power?" I say, the word puffed through my lips.
"Yes," she says, her voice a hiss that stirs the same unbidden place within me—a place without explanation, a trickle from a river long run dry. It is the home of all the things that I know and yet have never known; but knowledge is not understanding, and that I cannot find. "I could teach you, child, to embrace your potential, if you'd like."
Flemeth's voice and hands are warm and prying, gripping my shoulders as if to tear me apart. She does not wish to teach me; she wants to reach her claws into the strange silent place inside me and take my knowledge at the source; she cares not for understanding. She merely wants to possess. The words are still not my own, but they fall into place, locking in with my frightened instincts as if to warn me that my instincts are true.
"And Mother?" I say, because I know this is not what she wants me to ask.
"What about her?" she asks, her voice amused.
I take a deep breath. "I can save her, too?"
"Morrigan has served her purpose," Flemeth says, squeezing my shoulders. "She is a mortal girl, meant for mortal chores. Let her live her life to its end. It is you who concerns me."
I don't dare pull away. My eyes fix themselves on a seed, floating through the air on a ray of sunlight, heedless of its fate; I wish that I were so careless, but I do not know what this means. All I know is that Flemeth has me, and I wish to be free.
"I won't let her die," I say, the strength of my voice surprising even me. "If you want to teach me, you have to save Mother, too."
I can feel her nails pressing through the thin linen of my shirt, as if she would like nothing more than to rip me to shreds; but that would kill me, and apparently she wants me alive. So instead she releases me and in a swirl of fabric she stands before me, her skirt wrapping around her legs. Her expression is carefully unhappy, as Mother's is when she does not want me to know the fullness of her anger. She is Mother's mother, after all.
"Very well," she says, "persist in your loyalty to the girl, if you must. She has her work cut out for her, if she thinks to harness you herself." Her smile is thin and tight-lipped. "Should you change your mind, you will know how to find me. I wouldn't take to the skies." I still do not understand, and my reservoir is silent.
She looks at me a moment longer, but I do not meet her gaze; the seed drifts between us, unknowingly seeking the haven the ground will provide. At last she says, in the same light tone she greeted me, "I suppose I must be off, then."
She is changing, somehow, smoke and lyrium and power I cannot see. "Do not tell your mother we met, grandson. Or perhaps rather..." a sudden gust of wind blows the seed off course, beyond my sight, and a voice deeper than sound and harsher than Mother's worst scolding echoes around me, driving me to my knees with my hands pressed over my ears, "...brother."
Dirt swirls around me and I squeeze my eyes shut, curled in a ball on the ground until the horrible roaring sound ceases. There are no living sounds to replace it, only the quiet gurgle of the creek. I do not move and this is where Mother finds me; I open my eyes as she shakes me and see the red light of sunset filling the forest.
"Morrin," she says, without a trace of relief, "would you like your supper?"
I shake my head and start to cry. Mother does not know what to do; when I was small she told me that if I ever felt the need to cry I ought to do it somewhere she could not see, for she could not abide the sight of tears. I know now it is not disgust but confusion that fueled this order, but I do not know why I know, and I cry all the harder. Mother does not scold me, or tell me to stop; instead she puts her arms around me and picks me up and carries me home and holds me until my tears run dry and I can only shudder myself to sleep.
I do not tell her I have seen Flemeth. She does not ask, but I think she must know, even if she does not understand. The next morning I leave the house without her asking and make my way into the darkest part of the forest, following my nose, deliberating seeking scents that repulse me. I do not mark how much time passes before I complete my quest; the morning air is still cool beneath the denser trees above me when I find the body of a songbird, wings folded, eyes closed, half-hidden among the bent blades of grass around its final resting place. I sit upon a fallen log and watch as the body lies still, as ants and flies begin to crawl over it, as the grass slowly straightens, recovering from the sudden violent interruption of death.
And the living songbirds yet tweet among the rustling tree branches, and the flies buzz, and a beetle makes quiet ticking sounds as it walks. The air is still hot; the world still hums; sunlight still reaches for the ground, and the ground sends plants reaching back. The bird rots as the days pass, each morning revealing a new fascinating part of its construction: the skin beneath the feathers, the muscles below the skin, the bones below that—and I learn that death, too, is beautiful.
