SONG of EMBER

63

FAREWELL

PART II

🙜

Once she reached his side, Ky let her skirts fall open, spreading the array of fuzzy leaves before her and stuffing three or four of them into her mouth. She chewed thoughtfully as she observed him there, the slightly bitter taste infusing her with a renewed sense of life and purpose.

His clothing was tattered and soaked through with blood and the grime of the lake; they would need to be rinsed and dried if he were to rest comfortably, and she needed to wrap his wounds. There was a bite mark on the side of his neck—her sister’s doing—and his hand was bloodied as well.

These, she could attend to with a poultice; that much, at least, seemed common practice between their peoples.

It was rather less easy than she had anticipated to strip his sweat-soaked body of the damp tunic and trousers, and Ky felt the blood rush to her face. She had seen many unclothed bodies before… but she had never seen Ember unclothed.

That was different, somehow.

Glancing away quickly, she battled the hem of her skirt, tearing it into several long strips—long enough to wrap around Ember's waist several times over, when knotted together.

She rinsed his body as best she could, and then spat the knitbone into her palm and gently pressed the pulpy greens over the broken places. While she chewed a few more leaves, she tore off a smaller strip to wrap his hand.

By the end of it, her dress hung in tatters.

She pulled that over her head as well, gathering up the bundle of soiled clothing to rinse in the stream; it was easier work, and pleasanter, for she knelt in the midst of it and let the cool, fresh water flow around her as she cleaned their garments. She scrubbed the mud and bloodstains against a rough stone until they had nearly disappeared, and then hung them all to dry on a nearby branch, startling a tiny songbird which flitted away into deeper woods.

A clean bit of cloth served to drip fresh water into Ember’s mouth, humming a refrain of refreshment as best she could manage. When she had finished, she wiped his brow and body with it, and hung that to dry as well.

Satisfied, Ky returned to the stream and lay down on the pebbly bed, letting the sunlight dance across her lashes as the water tumbled over her face, breathing it in. Her aches slowly ebbed as she curled her claws into the stones. This was good. She only needed to rest for a little while…

❧

Darkness greeted her waking eyes.

She sat upright quickly, rivulets of water streaming over her lashes and nose and pouring from her gaping mouth. Had she slept through the gloaming?

Ember!

She scrambled out of the stream, pattering across the half-buried path with damp feet.

He lay where she had left him…

Ky held her fingers before his mouth and nose, listening intently. Yes, he was still breathing, and better than before. She exhaled the rest of the water in her lungs and grasped his fingers in hers, holding them tightly.

She glanced up at the sky, where a few faint stars glimmered above, and heard the soft throaty trill of a blackbird in the bushes, signaling the approach of daybreak.

I have slept through the day and all the night.

Ky held his hand for a few moments more, feeling the rhythm of his steady heartbeat, and then rose and drifted across the clearing to retrieve the woolen dress—or what remained of it. It seemed a strange thing to leave him there again, but her fears were somewhat abated, and she wished to return to those dark waters once more…

Sighing, she covered him with the dress, which had dried in the night, and pulled his still-damp tunic over her head before setting off down the trail to the lake. Perhaps if she saw it again in the light of day, she could finally make sense of all which had transpired.

❧

Ky wandered the misty reeds and wove through tangled roots and brambles, dipping her toes into the shallows and listening as the chorus of birds changed with the brightening of the horizon, and the dusty gold of a morning sky appeared behind the trees.

The tree which had claimed so much of her siren beauty rested gently on the bank, its snarled claws hidden from sight.

She observed it, mouth tightening at the memory.

Something red and wispy trailed over her bare toes, passing beneath the glimmering reflection of the sky. She clambered onto the fallen tree and padded out over the shallows for a better look. The body appeared from the mist like a half-forgotten dream, floating amidst a scattering of the first dry leaves which marked the turn of the summer.

For a long while, Ky stood above her sister, looking down with a quietness.

Her face was twisted in shock, as if she could not accept her own defeat, even in death. She was still beautiful—and terrible to behold. Beautiful, in spite of everything, and terrible because of everything.

A lump formed at the base of her throat as drumbeats from the past shivered her senses, and the tones and overtones of the Elder’s magnificent voice wavered in her mind, pulled from a memory so old that Ky could scarcely recall it.

A song of darkness, of great feats of magic, and a hollow triumph.

Ky murmured the words, letting them drop from her lips and fall upon Sil’s lifeless body.

And so the sirena, brave of heart

Sang herself into the earth

Bone became stone

And thought became dust

And all that was pleasure

And all that was pain

Faded into the welcome dark

For at long last her heart was free…

All her life, Ky had run from the ‘welcome dark,’ chasing after things of light.

Luminous fishes in the vast reaches, glowing weeds washed upon the rocks, firebugs drifting through misty dunes, lanterns set in the windows of those who lived along the coast. The fishes never lingered, the weeds grew brown and died, firebugs could not endure the winter, and even the lanterns she stole away had never flickered long before they were doused by the cold and damp.

“You were always fond of darkness,” she whispered brokenly. “Moonless nights and stormy seas. I am sorry I was such a troublesome sister, and I hope… you are happy at last. For surely I could never make you so.”

The last rites of her clan were to tear them apart for the fishes, for their bodies crumbled slowly without such measures. Ky could never bear it after what they had done to the Elder. She leaned down and swept her sister’s hair from her face, placing two of the dancing leaves over her sightless eyes. It did not seem real. But she was nobody and nothing now.

“I know… you did not love me.”

Ky softly touched her fingers to her sister’s face.

“I cannot hate you for it.”

And she wrapped one arm around the tree, dipping her other hand into the shallows, and shoved her off with a little splash, the lifeless carapace drifting quietly into the middle of the lake. Glittering crystals dripped from her fingertips and she flung them out after her…

The nearest she would know to mortal tears.

Ky sat back on the fallen tree and watched her sister’s body float away. The oppressive heaviness of dread and the aching knot of confusion in her chest loosened faintly as she placed her hands against the sun-bleached deadwood, her feet dangling in the mist. And the further away the body floated, the easier it was to drink deeply of the air and last scents of summer.

She found, of a sudden, that she could breathe more freely than she ever had before, and stared after it in silent thought until the empty shell of her sister was lost to the ripples and reflections of the lake.

All her life had been shrouded in darkness, beholden to her sister, a burden to the clan, and bound by sorrows too numerous to name, until the day she caught sight of the boy with eyes like the sky and hair like the sun, spearing fish in a swift-flowing stream by a little wooden nest in the woods.

And there she had glimpsed a light afar off, so far from reach that it seemed but a glimmering spark amidst the smoke of a distant campfire. Sometimes near, sometimes far, it followed her Ember wherever he went. She craved it and loathed it, for it had made her aware of the nothingness in which she dwelt, always in the shadows of her sister and her rivenness. Ember was something—and in his foolish effort to share his something, he had lost everything—his warmth, his breath, his beautiful red blood.

There had always been grim days when she had thought to end herself. Yet ever she pressed on, carrying with her the thinnest sliver of hope that she would someday find the light which he had always possessed without knowing its worth. If she abandoned him now, the spark which Ember had brought into her world would vanish forever.

“Farewell,” she sang softly, the human lamentation sweet and strangely bitter on her tongue.

She rose up onto the tips of her toes and balanced her way along the fallen tree, back to the shore. Then she circled quietly around the lake the way she had come, admiring the way the breeze lofted the reeds and listening to the many songs of morning.

❧

The flowers—she had overlooked them, in her haste. She remembered crushing them in her palms outside the mountain’s door, and inhaling the sweet fragrance of the knitbone. A soft memory returned to her, of the stone statues in the mountain, and she picked as many as she could carry on her way back up the hill.

When she rediscovered the clearing she was pulled to his side at once—not even the song of the babbling stream could lure her away—and she found, in the soft light of morning, that he was so very strange and beautiful that she herself was no longer the most resplendent creature she had ever beheld. That most resplendent creature was Ember.

Here at long last he had tempted her into looking away from her own Self, to see him as he truly was… as he had been, all this time. Ky ached to press against him, but could not lift her eyes from his face.

And so she folded her arms upon a carpet of moss, and rested her chin on one hand, and with the other she nestled each flower securely into his ringlets. She took notice of the morning dew upon his lashes. Each line set about his mouth and eyes after twenty-one youthful summers of crinkling in smiles. A golden curl of hair that shifted slightly in the breeze.

The Elder had once murmured in her ear that the blind and homely creatures which haunted dark caverns of the deepest places were in truth the most beautiful of all, for they could not behold their own reflections, and thought neither highly nor lowly of themselves.

“How sad,” she had naively sighed, “That they cannot know of their own beauty.”

“Would it be better for them to chase their own reflections until they grew weary and perished, consumed by vanity? If they did know of it, they would no longer be beautiful in my eyes—leave them to their humility, for it is in ignorance that they find their truest purpose.”

Ky had quietly thought this very foolish, for who would ever wish to un-know of their own beauty? Was it so ignoble to glory in what glory had been bestowed to her? Only now, after all, his passing, and many long dark winters, did she understand his words and the wisdom within them…

But now that she did, she found she disagreed.

She placed the last of the flowers and smiled

If ever Ember awakens, I must find many ways to reflect this beauty back to him—to show him how he appears in my unworthy eyes, that he might at last behold the truth of his own loveliness.