Allie's War Season One (106 page)

She starts with birth. It is the first thing.

We are closer now, closer to one of those spirals of light, and I feel the familiarity of that grinding motion, as if in the code of my DNA. I watch stars form in pinpricks through windmilling arms of molten fire, and I know that I am home, or the vicinity of home at least, in the galaxy where everything and everyone I know has ever lived. We slide deeper inside that place within a place.

Wonder again washes over me, this time at the smallness of all that I know.

That was neat,
I tell her.

She doesn’t answer in words, but I feel her smile.

Here, watching light form inside that expanse of liquid black, I begin to understand, at the very least, what I will never understand.

The cave materializes.

It happens quickly, before I recognize the fading of stars into embers.

It isn’t her cave…the one where my body sits on an elaborately woven rug, where my hair is being patiently combed into straight lines by a woman who deserves better, a woman whose face is creased by wind and sun and whose opaque eyes are far-seeing.

The new cave is exponentially larger, and I see no furnishings apart from a fire pit and a dense, rectangular rug that covers most of the cave floor. I stare at the rug’s detailed designs, lost in fish, whales, anemone, octopi, horseshoe crabs, starfish. Underwater forests live beneath meticulously drawn waves and curling foam.

I don’t look up until the woman tugs my light hand, leading me deeper into the cave. The fire-lit walls open up to a cavern so large it would take my breath if I had any here. It is so high I cannot see the ceiling despite a ring of burning torches and a fire pit that reminds me of beach parties in high school.

Where are we?
I ask.

The Pamir. The caves of our ancestors.

I am impressed. I have never been to the Pamir, not even in the Barrier.

Is this still here?
I say, looking around me at the sheer magnitude of the space.
Now, I mean? In the physical?

She tilts her hand, like a bird banking in flight, a gesture in seer sign language that means “more or less”...more or less. She leads me to a flat expanse of cavern wall, worn smooth by countless hands and tools. There is a shockingly detailed painting on the volcanic stone. I find myself staring at the images there, feeling almost as if I’ve seen them before.

Some, I have.

At the top, a white sword blazes, intersecting the center of a pale blue sun. The sun is something like a cross between Native American and Tibetan images...almost Japanese, I think, before realizing I am trying to categorize something as human that is distinctly seer. I look at the other figures depicted in painstaking detail around a rendition of Earth that could have been painted by Bosch on painkillers.

The old woman points up, to a central image above the planet.

It is an old man. His staff spins up into the heavens, forming a white arc of cabled light that reaches from Earth to a shimmering, deep gold sea surrounded in dark blue clouds. He wears all white and stands in a night sky...holding light between both worlds. His face is serious, a little bit frightening.

One of his feet balances on the earth.

The Bridge,
she says.

Her eyes are stars, so bright I can’t look at them directly.

I gaze up at the old man.

Why male?
I say. It is a bit of a sticking point with me.
Is it always male?

She chuckles, pointing at another image, this one of a female holding a cloud of what looks like lightning inside a patch of black sky. The female figure wears white, as well, and also has one bare foot on the Earth.

Also the Bridge,
Tarsi says.

I study the image, strangely placated, although her eyes are as frightening as the male’s. There are countless other forms woven into the drawings.

Who are they all?
I ask.
They can’t all be the Bridge?

No,
she agrees.
This mural is meant to be a depiction of the intermediary beings. The ones we know of.
She smiles again.
They are your family, Alyson. Your true family. The last of your kind to incarnate here.

I glance over at her, once more startled by the brightness of her light.

What does that mean,
I send.
...My kind? What kind would that be?

You know the myth, do you not? The Myth of Three?

I nod. I am uncomfortable though...I don’t know it, not really. It would be more accurate to say I know
of
it. It is one of those things that separates me from the other seers. They were raised on the Myth and I was not, and no amount of having it summarized to me now would make it a part of my living and breathing reality the way it was for them.

Tarsi smiles as if she understands. Or at least...as if she hears me.

She begins to recite. From her mind, the Myth is poetry.

More than that. The phrases fill with light, resonating with fine structures in her aleimi. Music unfolds from inside collapsed pockets of meaning, expanding like opening flowers, drawing intimate pictures.

She sings:

Love’s breath ignites in pools of gold, but it is not the first...

...Nor the last, nor even the beginning. A people swim the surface of Muuld, in a world marked garden for the chosen. We breach simple with flat tails and fingered toes, revel in the brightness of young light...

Numbers swell, our limbs extend...exiting gentle waves. We conquer worlds alarmingly fast...cover creation with our works, both ugly and wondrous. As time brings new, as every cycle of birth and chaos has beginning...

It cannot last. The first race consumes itself inside itself. It calls to Death, and Death listens. But Death could not be left in his loneliness, nor the first in our pain. Compassion brings tears, a wondrous Bridge to touch the sky. They watch, afraid...

...For with her, Death leaves bones to feed the new. Love softens death, brings hope between them. The others come, to weave the next, and...

...Those of us who stay must grow, or perish. We make magics beyond what any sees after...but the gods closed doors to those other worlds, and they are left with only one, and it is alone. And in that world, there is Second race born, from trees and under rocks. They grow to our likeness, yet believing they are alone. Their works cover that lone world, until they meet us and fear.

Fires burn black a second time, a second life. Death listens as the Bridge spins down, illumines a path to the sky. Love song beckons, leaves them alone...and the gold ocean covers all wounds.

Second race follows the path of the first, and those left behind, fated to watch the fires burn yet again. For time speeds up, and all histories fold inside themselves.

As for the first, the youngest and most foolish, most magicked and most childlike, the gods call us from the stone. And a great wail rose when the gods spoke, for the door to that other place must need be lost, and those on the other side forgotten...

For when Third Race comes, they bring with them the stars. We leave them, our Guardians of the Middle. And the Bridge spins her light...

...Until we come to live here no more.

12

ELAERIAN

SILENCE FALLS INSIDE the Barrier as her words end.

In that construct cave, I realize I have never heard the Myth before, not like this, and I can only stand there for a few seconds as lines continue to reverberate through my aleimi like shivers of live current. The words themselves hold a kind of light that doesn’t look like light to me; I feel it as presence laced with emotion and images. I let them wash over me, waiting for some kind of...I don’t know.

Understanding, maybe.

Something that makes me feel like I know something I hadn’t before.

It’s not there...not in a way that makes sense to my mind.

Tarsi breaks the solemnity and chuckles.

You see?
she says.
Female. In the old myths, the Bridge is always ‘she,’ never ‘he.’

But I’m going over specific words now, in my head.

The myth,
I say.
It kind of implies that I’m not, I mean, that I’m not actually—

You are not Sark,
she agrees.

Her words are matter of fact, as if she were relaying a fact of little consequence.

...Not second race. You are first race. All intermediary beings are first race. We call them Elaerian. Second race is Sarhacienne, “Second”...Sark. The third calls itself human. The old names for them are immaterial now...

I hear only part of this. I repeat her words back to her, like a myna bird...as if hearing them again might change her mind about what she’d said.

I’m first race,
I send.
Like actually a different species? Biologically?

At Tarsi’s raised light eyebrow, I see red and orange sparks course through the veins in my aleimi.

I ask her again,
Not only am I not human...I’m not even Sark?

She smiles.
You were aware you had differences from us. The light in your eyes...it is visible to humans. Your blood is not like ours. There are other things. You are telekinetic...that is not a Sark trait. You came to physical maturity much too fast to be Sark. You were able to adapt your early growth cycle to that of humans, to pass...Sarhaciennes cannot change their biology to accommodate their environment. Raised among humans, they continue to resemble very young human children until well past their twentieth year.

She gauges my eyes.

It strikes me that she has converted our appearances to match those of our physical bodies. It happened so seamlessly that I barely noticed.

She adds,
You likely have other differences we are not aware of. Much of our knowledge of your race has been lost...

But I am stuck in a mental loop that I can’t seem to escape.

Something Revik said to me once repeats in my head.

...It is illogical to have an opinion about what species one is.

Of course, when he said it, I thought he was talking about his own species.

But who gave birth to me?
I ask.

She shrugs with one hand, seer-fashion.

Isn’t that kind of an important detail?
I say.

It is said that Elaerian reproduce differently than Sarks and humans...that they are able to manifest their offspring inside the physical embryos of other beings...from the Barrier. It is also said that some always live among us, but keep their presence unknown. Some say they are able to appear here just long enough to breed and then expire. It is possible your parents did any one of these things. It is equally possible you birthed yourself from the Barrier...or were born of a Sark, and the difference is in your aleimi.

That makes absolutely no sense,
I send, fighting anger.

She shrugs again.
I cannot tell you what I do not know.

Wait,
I say, holding up a hand.
Revik said my blood is a ‘type’ among Sarhaciennes. He said it’s rare, but that it does occur...