Author |
Topic: Seasons [Dlehn backstory] (Read 30 times) |
|
Marbletoast
Loyal Servant
member is offline
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London
Gender: 
Posts: 1011
|
 |
Seasons [Dlehn backstory]
« Thread started on: Oct 21st, 2009, 8:37pm » |
|
Seasons
Sunrise stains this place like blood, and you cannot get it out of the leaves and soil even after the long hours of the day. Something about the red and gold stays inside them, and only night can mask it completely. Even then, when you look at the moon, you remember the sun’s face. That is why I stay here. I did not mind the weight of iron. I did not grudge the labor. But I could not bear the sunless stagnation.
Every time, it is resurrection. I die in the winter of the far side, bear judgment through the timeless course, fall at last back into life, grave dust still in my eyes. That is why I am here, and that is why I do not stay, why I must always go back to the other side—in order to come again, and again, again—endlessly—back into the sunlight.
I cannot guess what I would do here without it.
The Tunnel.
Three days on Pelmei soil was long enough. The next Run would be his, and those who’d come to recognize the wrung and cold rootish film over his eyes knew. He was not so heavy with the intangible layers rubbed from the Tunnel as they. Something else bound his muscles there, until he was nearly limping under only the air of the place.
I’ll either Run, or I’ll never walk again.
Morning never came well. Even when golden sunlight broke like high summer through the canopy, it was only in passing imitation of the mornings of younger worlds—gone almost before it reached the earth.
Still, it was morning. Dlehn always stood waiting for it, always Ran in the mornings, if he could. To leave behind at least something like it, to enter back into it, almost like bookends—but to leave behind you the evening, the end of everything. It is always harder to go back when the last you saw was closing dark.
There was no one to Run. There were only three Runners at the post, and only Rebels making cold breakfast, spears in hoof. Things had gone badly not many nights ago. He hadn’t asked what, but company was sparse and well armed. Morning dissolved into gray day and Dlehn hovered at the mouth of the Tunnel. There was nothing for it—you didn’t Run alone without reason, and the ache sitting just behind his courage was not reason enough. Not yet, anyway.
Jerteh was rarely good company. Less experienced than Dlehn, but louder, he could easily convince himself he was in command of the threadbare camp. Once the Rebels had gone the way of the morning, swift as smoke, Dlehn was left with only Jerteh’s aimless noise and Qinn’s cowed silence.
A little like a real morning, but through deep water. It was there, golden at the heart, but she was murky—too murky to see deeply into. I liked the way her fingers would catch her bracelets and click against them as she spun them around. I could wish for a touch like that, I think—quick, nearly mindless—habitual, but Qinn had a wary eye and a terrible scar, and rumors suggested she would not suffer another embrace. Dlehn never watched her while he was aware of it, shy of his own need, and listened to Jerteh speak of raids and signals and hoped for refugees, or for a swift night.
Hardly swift enough. They slept with their backs together, the two who did not stand and watch, but the warm pressure was so communal, even the knobby curve of Qinn’s spine settling between his own and his shoulder blade proved no distraction from the roaming dark.
There, they say the shadows are alive, and kill. I believe them. But the shadows here are worse. They are dead, and they bury the dead.
Dlehn saw morning come. Qinn had moved deeper into Jerteh’s waist in her sleep, and Dlehn was not watching the sun. Every seventh breath, they would align, and the deep inhale of sleep would press their skin together. Then, for six more breaths, they were syncopated, filling the slivers of space between them alternately. When Qinn awoke, she would startle away from Jerteh as if she had forgotten he was there, and begin grooming and she will never once look at either him, or at me, until business calls for it.
Business called hardly before breakfast was over.
“How many?”
There were nine of them, a large group, and many of them young. Dlehn folded into little more than a smile while Jerteh barked with the Rebels. An alabaster fawn smiled back.
We’re going away.
I know it.
Have you been?
Yes—many times.
Does it hurt?
Not enough to keep me here.
“They cannot Run today.”
“But we’ve not yet cleared the forest, and we cannot keep large numbers here—and the food—”
“Look at them. Consider the Tunnel—”
Is this your mother?
My sister.
She takes care of you?
She has a stone in her brain. She cannot even eat by herself.
You take care of her?
Nana does, sometimes. Once she almost died when he forgot to feed her.
“Only two days, then. At the most. I will get more Runners, and we will take them through as soon as possible. But they look so thin—that one. Is she ill?”
Morning did not even linger in the hollow of his lungs. When he shook it, scattered like dust and was over. The fawn had caught a lizard and was mashing it slowly with a stone. Dlehn could see blood on the white face when she touched her cheek. The Tunnel yawned behind him, long awake but playing them for fools.
Glancing over his shoulder, Dlehn got caught in the stare of it, and down that maw is a belly of madness. Not enough to keep me here, that is true enough—but were that morning not on the other side, I might have been caught in the middle long ago.
“I’m hungry.”
“You see? There is nothing for them.”
The white fawn ate the lizard. Dlehn saw the brown tail vanish without preliminaries, and without hesitation. It was a swallow that had vanquished many cold lizards, and a gut that had put to use less nourishing things than reptile bones.
“How long have they been traveling?”
“We’re not sure—we found them together, in the forest. They’d certainly lost some before we found them.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Urhein—that’s all we know. You can ask them, if you like.”
The fawn was digging for grubs. His sister lay to one side and bubbled. When she sat up and stared, as she had when Dlehn first saw her, she was supple, and her eyes were bright. Dlehn had seen more than one Rebel stag eyeing her, and had followed their eyes along the curve of her leg and the sweep of her back. Dlehn liked her best when she crumbled into pleasant delirium and burbled for the mica in the stones she could not quite grasp hold of, damaged and beautiful and leaving shapes in the dust where she thrashed.
How will we take her through?
Qinn came into his mind like winter comes into autumn.
Someone can manage it. You have been Running since the beginning—you could do it.
Qinn’s ears went back when the gurgling became a shriek—either from joy, or despair, or some loss of control, Dlehn could not guess.
I could.
Dlehn was left empty when she closed and moved away—left pristine and clear as first snow, and as cold. Qinn was tracked, muddy and cleaved with prints, so miry they lost all distinction. Dlehn watched her move back to the Tunnel mouth, and I am always too unscathed, and she riddled, and I cannot smooth the turmoil, and she will not leave tracks in the snow.
The fawn’s sister was watching. Dlehn did not know how, but her wild eyes were on him, and like a child looks through a broken window and sees—at last—reality, she knew him. Dlehn saw the child there tremble and duck away again, comfortable in the senseless fortress, and he knew he envied the girl. When Qinn held the limp and quivering frame against hers, they would be shadows on the same side of the light.
|
| « Last Edit: Oct 22nd, 2009, 02:00am by Marbletoast » |
 Logged
|
"Worlds without end couldn't hold her." - Windmills, Toad the Wet Sprocket
|
|
|
Marbletoast
Loyal Servant
member is offline
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London
Gender:
Posts: 1011
|
|
Re: Seasons [Dlehn backstory]
« Reply #1 on: Oct 21st, 2009, 8:38pm » |
|
“We cannot feed them only roots and mushrooms. You must take them today—some of them, at least. The children, and that one.”
“There are only three of us! And we never force them through. Are they ready?”
“The children cannot know if they are ready, and that one can never be ready.”
Dlehn listened without looking. He was too close to the Tunnel to turn his eyes away. When the refugees had arrived the morning before, the Tunnel had been lackadaisical, lazy with the ambience of neglect. Now it had scented them. Dlehn felt it breathing against him.
“Alright, we’ll take her, and the two youngest. I’ll send the others through. But we’ll be leaving no Runners—you must stay here, with them.”
“Of course.”
It was nearly nightfall. Dlehn was shadow sick, reeling with the idea of moving from one kind of dark into another. Away from the Tunnel, the air was only a little lighter, and Dlehn tried to take comfort in watching the fawn’s sister. She was chewing on stones, and no one thought to stop her. The inside of her one her legs was bleeding, and now and the she would smack at it, but the lolling roll of her eyes was eager and hungry. There was no pain in eyes like that. To be beaten beyond knowing you are broken. To wake from moment to moment in the same rebirth of coming from the Tunnel—
A bit of forest came closer and became a mossy gray stag, stepping toward the fawn’s sister as if he were afraid she might strike. When she looked up and squealed, he stopped, and his attention was immediately amidst the cluster of refugees. None would look her way, knowing they would then shoulder the responsibility of correcting whatever was going wrong.
She is living in her own Tunnel. How can we think she will not survive this one? She is Running like the rest of us.
He moved closer, his rusty eyes dropping back to her, slipping along her shape as swift and close as a viper on a limb. Dlehn saw his steps become softer, slower, predatory just before he crouched and closed the final space between himself and the wriggling doe nearly on all four.
Always, there is a gold Ending there for her, but always there is a dark Fight behind her, and she is caught in the middle.
For a long moment, he only hovered over her. Dlehn saw nothing but the two bodies, a jagged shape against numbed time as the gray buck reached over and around her, linking his outline to hers. Dlehn had grown roots. The Tunnel is closing. It is so dark. The Morning is going. I cannot find the end.
Help!
She was nearly under him, nearly under the trees, a wide scar through the dust behind. She was disappearing. The trees were closing around her. She was hidden in him.
Help!
Dlehn moved at last, bursting forward as if the Tunnel had vomited him, lurching through the bracken into the gray stag. Crouched and preoccupied, the stag fell easily, but was scrambling to his feet hardly before he lost them. She was silent. Dlehn was heaving, and towered over her. The gray buck had a knife.
What is it like to come out of the Tunnel with the hope of Morning to find only the lather and slaver of hungry Night?
Help!
The knife hit him, and he was fighting one-armed, and doing badly. The fight was plenty loud enough to last no longer than a bloody moment, anyway, and Jerteh was throwing them both aside and scooping her up.
“Dlehn!”
“Gerren!”
The Rebel leader was at the forefront of the crowd that vultured around them, and his eyes were leaping irregularly from the gray stag, to Dlehn, to the doe in Jerteh’s arms. She was reaching outward and wailing.
Dlehn!
Winter made him shiver, and he realized Qinn’s hooves were covered in his blood. There was a white face just behind her, all eyes.
“What happened?”
What happened?
What happened?
“You went after her?”
“He attacked her!”
You saved her.
Something parted, and Dlehn saw through Qinn’s eyes to a place just as wide and empty as the waiting gully in his own heart.
“Dlehn!”
“He took her, dragged her away. He was after her.”
“Not you?”
Qinn turned on the Rebel leader before his words were fully parted, and left blood that wasn’t Dlehn’s across his face. She was left to her work because she was a doe, and no one—the Rebel leader most especially—had caught up with the present, so ferociously did it come upon them. He was back against a tree, bleeding from his nostrils, and Qinn was giving him a private dose of venom that many wished they could hear, but which they got the general movement of through the snarls and growls.
Finished, and with Dlehn acquitted, Qinn left them.
Let the old mother look at that, she left with Dlehn.
No one moved immediately, but the gray stag was the first, and his was a hopeless lunge for escape. The Rebel leader, needing to tear into something to ease some chagrin, did exactly that, and the other Rebels put into practice the rugged laws of wartime—traitors are enemies, and take no prisoners.
Dlehn and Jerteh hurried back to the Tunnel camp with miles of wordless space lurking between them. Dlehn was bandaged, Jerteh commended him as if he was in the place to do so, and Dlehn was told to Run alone, but to wait until morning.
There wasn’t much of a party to see him off. The fawn’s sister was now knit into the cluster of refugees—protected, for a little while, as she had never been before. Dlehn got no more than a taste of her coat, but curling into a corner of his memory were the three lucid cries which had fixed her as a part of him. So intimate and desperate, they had lodged far more deeply than many friendships could run, and he knew he would recognize her connection just as certainly as he knew I will never feel it again.
She was lost in the Tunnel. Qinn was her Runner, and the other Runners offered their condolences and understanding that such a Run was nearly impossible. It might even have been for the best, some dared. After all, what could she have had here?
Morning.
Qinn found him in the healer’s tent. Though the canvas was thick, it could not hinder the rush of gold dawn. He sat up, but was nearly asleep. The film had left his eyes. He looked younger. She stood before him, incandescent with the hum of light around them, and Dlehn felt the frost melting.
“I didn’t lose her.”
Mud stirred in black water, disrupted from where it had settled for years, cloudy and brackish—and then clear. Winter was over. The current was moving.
“I let her go.”
|
| « Last Edit: Oct 28th, 2009, 08:25am by Marbletoast » |
Logged
|
"Worlds without end couldn't hold her." - Windmills, Toad the Wet Sprocket
|
|
|
Marbletoast
Loyal Servant
member is offline
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London
Gender:
Posts: 1011
|
|
Re: Seasons [Dlehn backstory]
« Reply #2 on: Oct 21st, 2009, 8:52pm » |
|
And now, a bit of follow up...
1) When Dlehn told me he had some backstory to tell, I originally planned on capturing his take on Oriis entry into Haurah, since during that first approach, Dlehn wasn't a character yet. I even persisted for some time into this story to warp it in that direction. But you know how they can be...
2) Apparently, Dlehn had older secrets. Like a fascination with a girl Runner I've never heard of before...
3) And this all happens before he has any bondmates, so well before the story I originally set out to write.
4) I liked it the first time I read over it. And then I read it a few more times and realized it's basically an Imagery Train Wreck. Oh well. It gets the point across. And I still sort of like it, in its train wreckiness.
|
| « Last Edit: Oct 21st, 2009, 11:31pm by Marbletoast » |
Logged
|
"Worlds without end couldn't hold her." - Windmills, Toad the Wet Sprocket
|
|
|
|
