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| Author | SHA1 | Date |
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 Lethe Beltane
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eaea817925
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10 months ago |
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Lethe Beltane
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83db68d7cb
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12 months ago |
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Lethe Beltane
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b336de7e92
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1 year ago |
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Lethe Beltane
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a7bfe160aa
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1 year ago |
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html lang="en">
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<head>
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<meta charset="UTF-8">
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<title>Part 12 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
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<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
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<meta name="description" content="What am I?">
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<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/p12.html" />
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<link href="./style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
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<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p>It's a Tuesday. Tuesdays mean pretending to have enough spoons to get done all the chores I'd been neglecting for the previous six days, being found out, and then pushing through anyway. Tuesdays mean having faced all four days of The Horrors and surviving, now granted three days of rest. Three days of agonizing over how not to waste the three days off before the cycle continues again. And again. And again. And again like this for the rest of my life, or until something catastrophic happens and the delicate balance of everything falls apart. More likely to happen is my free will falls apart, and I spend all day laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, at the dappled light dancing from the trees swaying in the breeze outside.</p>
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<p class="blink1"><em>What am I going to do with this day I have been given?</em></p>
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<p class="blink2"><em>What am I going to do with this?</em></p>
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<p class="blink3"><em>What... am I?</em></p>
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<p>I push myself off my bed - and in the process hit my arm against the side of the desk. A shudder, and then one of the many junk baskets on top slides off and spills everything inside on the floor. A VGA-to-HDMI adapter. A plastic clamshell case full of video game cartridges. Several old nametags from previous jobs. An ancient Android tablet that hasn't seen an official software update in almost a decade.</p>
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<p>"We haven't played Minecraft in a while, Lethe." Jett's voice comes from somewhere behind me, slightly to my right, but she's nowhere to be seen. "Remember BlockLauncher? And the mod toolbox that was secretly full of Chinese spyware? You could just walk into other people's worlds and instantly have a full set of enchanted diamond armor."</p>
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<p>"I..." I scratch my head. "Yeah, I do remember that. I was like a god against the iPad players." I stoop down and pick up the tablet, brush the dust off the frayed and faded cover. "A god in an Anima Mundi's world, because all they could do to get rid of me back then was shut down the world and kick everyone off in the process."</p>
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<p>Jett's voice falls silent.</p>
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<p>I stare at the tablet. "And now it'd be like a loop of time. Because I'd have to track down an ancient version of the app to play on this tablet anymore. And nobody would be able to join me." I toss it onto my bed, right where Jett's voice was coming from. "Hey, Jett..."</p>
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<p>"Yes, Lethe?"</p>
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<p>The hundreds, no, <em>thousands</em> of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. Before I could get the money to buy a copy of Minecraft, there was a free ripoff I haunted called World of Cubes. It was flooded with ads, and I didn't know what a firewall was at the time, so instead I would shut myself off from the outside world for hours at a time and put my device in airplane mode so I could play without constant popups. But then I couldn't go online. I couldn't go onto the creative worlds others would upload to servers which had no name.</p>
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<p>You could retain an iron grip on your world, and its inhabitants would only be tourists, transient and leaving no mark. Or you could leave the world open for all and return after only a few hours to find all the terrain destroyed, every building reduced to rubble, random blocks everywhere and holding no coherence. Like you'd opened a portal straight to the underworld of <code>/dev/urandom</code> and mapped every byte to a new block with no other constraints. Lava next to wood. Torches on water. Wheat growing on bedrock. Ladders attached to nothing.</p>
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<p>"You know I used to be the god of chaos and destruction, right?"</p>
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<p>"Is this about finding young children playing online and <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/june/unsung.html#minecraft">blowing up their houses</a> because you thought them shrieking in voice chat was the epitome of humor? I thought I already forgave you for that."</p>
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<p>"...No. Something else."</p>
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<p>The hundreds, no, <em>thousands</em> of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. My cousins and I had a challenge where we'd take a "flat world", an endless flat plain of nothing but a few layers of dirt, and try to make it habitable in survival mode. The flat worlds already had a purpose: a canvas for pixel art, or a showcase for a cool architectural build, or a sandbox for testing mods. But never somewhere to live, somewhere to call home. Flat worlds were meant to be lifeless: no biomes, no oceans, no stone unless you made a cobblestone generator. Without further cheats, you could never have any tools stronger than stone. You could spawn grass using bone meal made from ground-up bones gathered from defeated skeletons, and cut down the grass to <em>maybe</em> get wheat seeds, but you could never naturally get watermelon or pumpkins or cocoa. You could only ever have in the world what you brought in with you when you used cheats to force the world mode to "survival". Nothing new would ever be created or discovered. Nothing but endless balanced plains of dirt.</p>
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<p>It always felt awfully lonely after a while. The stagnation would become overbearing. Every time we aimed for a different ending, but every time we just went insane instead.</p>
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<p><em>Is this really all there is? All there will ever be?</em></p>
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<p>"What would you have done if I hadn't fallen into your life?"</p>
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<p>"Died, eventually. Let myself slip into oblivion. The ultimate stagnation. No more running errands for a goddess to enforce a status quo, day after day of no change, just forever everything the same. At least it wouldn't mean I'd have to follow orders to hurt people anymore." A pause. "Why? Is this about <a href="./p9.html">that night you tried to trap me in Sablade</a>? I thought I already forgave you for that."</p>
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<p>"...No. Something else."</p>
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<p>The hundreds, no, <em>thousands</em> of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. I still remember
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the first days of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230518164536/https://minecraftbedrock-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Update_0.9.0">Minecraft update <code>0.9.0</code></a>, the feeling of being set free. No more being constrained to a small finite square with its finite resources that would eventually all be exhausted no matter how much one tried to conserve. Random generation, guided by constraints. A world without end, unfurling itself unpredictably, yet remaining comprehensible and <em>habitable</em>. It didn't resemble a raw bitmap of a hard drive. It looked like a world. Like a place one could live in.</p>
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<p>And the people were people. Before, everyone looked the same. If I used mods to change my "skin", it would change everyone's "skin". Every person was only a reflection of myself. But now I was I, and she was she, and he was he, and every person was their own person.</p>
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<p>"What will you do if I fail? If I'm not able to make Sablade inhabitable and it's just a chaotic incoherent mess forever? If I die in the process?"</p>
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<p>A chill slips past my arm. Jett sits by me, semi-corporeal. Her legs hang off the edge of my bed. Her gaze is pointed toward my closet, but her eyes are focused on something beyond it, something I can't see.</p>
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<p>"You know I don't like discussing this."</p>
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<p>"But I need to know. You have your art. You have your survival skills. Tell me you could live without me. Tell me you'd survive if a god killed me. Tell me you'd seal me away if I became too dangerous to be around. <em>I need to know you'd live on-</em>"</p>
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<p>A flash. My cheek stings. A pair of arms wraps around me, pinning my arms to my sides, before I can comprehend what's going on.</p>
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<p>"I'd <em>survive</em>," she hisses into my ear. "I wouldn't exactly call that <em>living</em>."</p>
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<p>"Jett..."</p>
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<p>She grabs one of my hands, my arms still pinned at my sides, and forcibly intertwines her fingers with mine. "You had a dream a few nights ago. Odin was trying to possess your body and keep your soul suppressed and unconscious forever. Let me remind you that you came to consciousness for a few minutes and told the family trying to save you that I was your guardian angel, I was your wife, I had a shard of my soul in yours, <em>I was the</em> only <em>thing keeping you tethered to life.</em> I came to save you, Lethe. We were Protea together in that hotel hallway. Two souls in one body, <em>my</em> body, <em>your</em> powers. <em>Willingly.</em> We fought, and we got your body back." She digs her face further into my neck, like she were snuggling in for a kiss, but her face is hot not with arousal but frustration. "I need you to keep myself free. And you need me to keep yourself sane. So <em>stop talking about dying</em>. You brought me back to life twice. And I saved you from oblivion twice."</p>
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<p class="blink1"><em>Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.</em></p>
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<p class="blink2"><em>Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.</em></p>
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<p>"Neither of us are going to die, Lethe. We're going to make Sablade together. Solstice and Equinox. Chaos and Balance. And things will turn out just fine."</p>
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<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
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async src="//stats.letsdecentralize.org/count.js"></script>
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<noscript>
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<img src="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count?p=/p12.html">
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</noscript>
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</body>
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</html>
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@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
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It's a Tuesday. Tuesdays mean pretending to have enough spoons to get done all the chores I'd been neglecting for the previous six days, being found out, and then pushing through anyway. Tuesdays mean having faced all four days of The Horrors and surviving, now granted three days of rest. Three days of agonizing over how not to waste the three days off before the cycle continues again. And again. And again. And again like this for the rest of my life, or until something catastrophic happens and the delicate balance of everything falls apart. More likely to happen is my free will falls apart, and I spend all day laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, at the dappled light dancing from the trees swaying in the breeze outside.
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*What am I going to do with this day I have been given?*
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*What am I going to do with this?*
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*What... am I?*
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I push myself off my bed - and in the process hit my arm against the side of the desk. A shudder, and then one of the many junk baskets on top slides off and spills everything inside on the floor. A VGA-to-HDMI adapter. A plastic clamshell case full of video game cartridges. Several old nametags from previous jobs. An ancient Android tablet that hasn't seen an official software update in almost a decade.
|
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"We haven't played Minecraft in a while, Lethe." Jett's voice comes from somewhere behind me, slightly to my right, but she's nowhere to be seen. "Remember BlockLauncher? And the mod toolbox that was secretly full of Chinese spyware? You could just walk into other people's worlds and instantly have a full set of enchanted diamond armor."
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"I..." I scratch my head. "Yeah, I do remember that. I was like a god against the iPad players." I stoop down and pick up the tablet, brush the dust off the frayed and faded cover. "A god in an Anima Mundi's world, because all they could do to get rid of me back then was shut down the world and kick everyone off in the process."
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Jett's voice falls silent.
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I stare at the tablet. "And now it'd be like a loop of time. Because I'd have to track down an ancient version of the app to play on this tablet anymore. And nobody would be able to join me." I toss it onto my bed, right where Jett's voice was coming from. "Hey, Jett..."
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"Yes, Lethe?"
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The hundreds, no, *thousands* of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. Before I could get the money to buy a copy of Minecraft, there was a free ripoff I haunted called World of Cubes. It was flooded with ads, and I didn't know what a firewall was at the time, so instead I would shut myself off from the outside world for hours at a time and put my device in airplane mode so I could play without constant popups. But then I couldn't go online. I couldn't go onto the creative worlds others would upload to servers which had no name.
|
||||
|
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You could retain an iron grip on your world, and its inhabitants would only be tourists, transient and leaving no mark. Or you could leave the world open for all and return after only a few hours to find all the terrain destroyed, every building reduced to rubble, random blocks everywhere and holding no coherence. Like you'd opened a portal straight to the underworld of `/dev/urandom` and mapped every byte to a new block with no other constraints. Lava next to wood. Torches on water. Wheat growing on bedrock. Ladders attached to nothing.
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"You know I used to be the god of chaos and destruction, right?"
|
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"Is this about finding young children playing online and [blowing up their houses](https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/june/unsung.html#minecraft) because you thought them shrieking in voice chat was the epitome of humor? I thought I already forgave you for that."
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"...No. Something else."
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The hundreds, no, *thousands* of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. My cousins and I had a challenge where we'd take a "flat world", an endless flat plain of nothing but a few layers of dirt, and try to make it habitable in survival mode. The flat worlds already had a purpose: a canvas for pixel art, or a showcase for a cool architectural build, or a sandbox for testing mods. But never somewhere to live, somewhere to call home. Flat worlds were meant to be lifeless: no biomes, no oceans, no stone unless you made a cobblestone generator. Without further cheats, you could never have any tools stronger than stone. You could spawn grass using bone meal made from ground-up bones gathered from defeated skeletons, and cut down the grass to *maybe* get wheat seeds, but you could never naturally get watermelon or pumpkins or cocoa. You could only ever have in the world what you brought in with you when you used cheats to force the world mode to "survival". Nothing new would ever be created or discovered. Nothing but endless balanced plains of dirt.
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It always felt awfully lonely after a while. The stagnation would become overbearing. Every time we aimed for a different ending, but every time we just went insane instead.
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*Is this really all there is? All there will ever be?*
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"What would you have done if I hadn't fallen into your life?"
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"Died, eventually. Let myself slip into oblivion. The ultimate stagnation. No more running errands for a goddess to enforce a status quo, day after day of no change, just forever everything the same. At least it wouldn't mean I'd have to follow orders to hurt people anymore." A pause. "Why? Is this about [that night you tried to trap me in Sablade](./p9.html)? I thought I already forgave you for that."
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"...No. Something else."
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The hundreds, no, *thousands* of hours spent exploring those blocky worlds run through my mind. I still remember
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the first days of [Minecraft update `0.9.0`](https://minecraftbedrock-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Update_0.9.0), the feeling of being set free. No more being constrained to a small finite square with its finite resources that would eventually all be exhausted no matter how much one tried to conserve. Random generation, guided by constraints. A world without end, unfurling itself unpredictably, yet remaining comprehensible and *habitable*. It didn't resemble a raw bitmap of a hard drive. It looked like a world. Like a place one could live in.
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And the people were people. Before, everyone looked the same. If I used mods to change my "skin", it would change everyone's "skin". Every person was only a reflection of myself. But now I was I, and she was she, and he was he, and every person was their own person.
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"What will you do if I fail? If I'm not able to make Sablade inhabitable and it's just a chaotic incoherent mess forever? If I die in the process?"
|
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A chill slips past my arm. Jett sits by me, semi-corporeal. Her legs hang off the edge of my bed. Her gaze is pointed toward my closet, but her eyes are focused on something beyond it, something I can't see.
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"You know I don't like discussing this."
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"But I need to know. You have your art. You have your survival skills. Tell me you could live without me. Tell me you'd survive if a god killed me. Tell me you'd seal me away if I became too dangerous to be around. *I need to know you'd live on-*"
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A flash. My cheek stings. A pair of arms wraps around me, pinning my arms to my sides, before I can comprehend what's going on.
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"I'd *survive*," she hisses into my ear. "I wouldn't exactly call that *living*."
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"Jett..."
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She grabs one of my hands, my arms still pinned at my sides, and forcibly intertwines her fingers with mine. "You had a dream a few nights ago. Odin was trying to possess your body and keep your soul suppressed and unconscious forever. Let me remind you that you came to consciousness for a few minutes and told the family trying to save you that I was your guardian angel, I was your wife, I had a shard of my soul in yours, *I was the* only *thing keeping you tethered to life.* I came to save you, Lethe. We were Protea together in that hotel hallway. Two souls in one body, *my* body, *your* powers. *Willingly.* We fought, and we got your body back." She digs her face further into my neck, like she were snuggling in for a kiss, but her face is hot not with arousal but frustration. "I need you to keep myself free. And you need me to keep yourself sane. So *stop talking about dying*. You brought me back to life twice. And I saved you from oblivion twice."
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*Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.*
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*Neither of us can die while the other is still alive.*
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"Neither of us are going to die, Lethe. We're going to make Sablade together. Solstice and Equinox. Chaos and Balance. And things will turn out just fine."
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@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html lang="en">
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<head>
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<meta charset="UTF-8">
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<title>Part 13 - Dead End Shrine Online</title>
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<meta name="author" content="Lethe Beltane">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
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<meta name="description" content="You never had a childhood.">
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<meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://blapi36sowfyuwzp4ag24xb3d4zdrzgtafez3g3lkp2rj4ho7lxhceid.onion/p13.html" />
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<link href="./style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" title="main" media="all">
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<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="./jett_sigil.png">
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</head>
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<body>
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<p>Early Thursday morning. Early by my standards, anyway: the rest of the world has begun without me. Cars zoom past on the nearby highway. A lawnmower buzzes the next yard over. A carmine cardinal sits in the bush outside my window, plunking out a song on a piano in its throat until I wrestle myself out of bed and it flies away. The last dregs of a dream slip away from me: a mother turned ghoul, shrieking raw despite desiccated and punctured lungs, reaching for me with bony hands to trap me in my childhood bedroom forever. There were many like it, those bedrooms of isolation guarded by self-appointed angels angry that something had slipped into Eden, slipped past them, slipped into Eve's mind. But this one was mine. This one was my Garden of Ignorance, my Eloi breeding ground, unable to comprehend the language of the world outside.</p>
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<p class="blink1"><em>If you never cherished all the things that I find good, you never had anything resembling a childhood.</em></p>
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<p class="blink2"><em>If you never cherished, you never had anything...</em></p>
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<p class="blink3"><em>You never had a childhood.</em></p>
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<p>"<em>You didn't have a childhood!</em>" some grubby-handed teenager shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. In her hands are several cheap ballpoint pens, all weighted down on one end by triangular strips of duck tape wrapped around. They were meant to resemble flowers, you see. Like you'd plucked one out of the ground and snipped the bottom of the stem sharp and were writing with it like a feather quill. A fairy's imitation of a revolutionary. Or maybe an insect, a cloud of locusts descending on a craft store and leaving the fields of the duck tape aisle bare and barren. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.</p>
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<p>I close my eyes. On top of the broken fireplace inside sits a photo frame. Inside, an old sketch on a legal notepad by a toddler me, before the speech "therapists" got the go-ahead to randomly steal me away from my class in the middle of the day and force me to tell them over and over again what an apple was. "Mommy, it's a <em>flr!</em>"</p>
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<p>I open my eyes. "Are you sure?"</p>
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<p>The teenager into ash disintegrates. Their pens fall to the ground, bouncing a few times. A pinprick of pain in my lower gut. A field of wildflowers is coming to full bloom somewhere in Sablade.</p>
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<p>Another person, a child just on the cusp between elementary and middle school, appears.</p>
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<p>"<em>You didn't have a childhood!</em>" some be-braced kid shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around her wrists are several rubber bands. But these lump up and curve away from her skin at weird angles, not like any other rubber hand I've seen before. She takes one off, holds it up. Instead of a loose oval, the band rests in the shape of... an animal. A generation earlier, and it'd be a collectible card instead, but still depicting an animal. Kids would crowd around the two picnic tables on the playground and trade them, one kid appointed sentry to keep watch for the "paras". Animals at a watering hole, one scanning their surroundings for predators. With one spotted, the sentry would sound an alert, and the kids would all scatter to the four winds in hopes of not being the slowest and thus the only one the para could catch by themselves. Being caught meant having your collection confiscated and never returned. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.</p>
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<p>I close my eyes. It's sometime in 2009. I'm playing a computer game, a city simulator, on the family computer. Hovering over the land before the humans arrive. Like snapping a rubber band to launch it at someone, I snap my fingers across the laptop's touchpad. Streaks of animals appear, wander for a few seconds, then disappear. I could never figure out how to get them to breed, to survive, to continue on. They would always vanish no matter how many cheats I used. "I wish I had a way to make you stay."</p>
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<p>I open my eyes. "Is that really the assumption you want to make?"</p>
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<p>The kid into ash disintegrates. Their bands fall to the ground, twisted up and unrecognizable. A cloud of a cramp in my lower leg. A herd of untamed fauna is migrating to breeding grounds somewhere in Sablade.</p>
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<p>Another person, indistinct and flashing through multiple ages, appears.</p>
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<p>"<em>You didn't have a childhood!</em>" an amalgamation of faces shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around their body float clouds of plasma, all different colors, like clouds of magic waiting for command. Every year, it felt, there was a new cartoon about people fighting with the power of the elements. Another blatant cash grab, an excuse to print out plastic toys in the millions and generate just as much garbage to fill the landfills. One was banned from the house for reasons never explained. One was encouraged. One was never explicitly forbidden, but whenever we kids growing up in that brown house would change the TV to our favorite channel and see that show playing, Mother would give us weird looks until we'd acquiesce and flip to another. <em>The one clothed in red commands fire? And the one in green commands earth? I never could have guessed. Does the one in blue control air or water? They keep changing it on me.</em> I never really caught the fever, never let myself get swept up in the flood, never felt the winds of desire, could never, as much as my peers bullied me for my isolation from pop culture, put down any roots in the earth of the things they loved.</p>
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<p>I close my eyes. I'm fifteen. I'm playing a sand simulator on my phone, except there are more sands than just sand: some are lava, some are water, some are grass that grow on whatever surface they touch that doesn't immediately kill them. Some are stationary the moment you put them down, like iron. There was no end goal to the game, no achievements, maybe <em>sometimes</em> a functioning "save game" button. I always ended up trying to make a tornado of lava with the wind function, seeing how quickly grass could regenerate whenever one of the lava particles strayed from the circle of wind and set everything else on fire. My deft fingers constructing an ouroboros, a cycle without end, versus the twin forces of entropy and simple boredom.</p>
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<p>I open my eyes. "Will it really matter in the world to come?"</p>
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<p>The crowd into ash disintegrates. Their clouds of magic disband and float up into the sky to merge with the rest of the atmosphere. A roll of rumbles through my guts. There's a thunderstorm brewing somewhere in Sablade.</p>
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<p>A shadow looms over me. I turn my head to the left, the rest of my body still. Jett's standing between me and the sun. I can barely see her face with all the light bordering it. My own little eclipse.</p>
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<p>"Let me guess. You're here to act the part of my elementary school bully? You better make sure to sneer lots when you taunt me about not being a princess. And throw in a punch or too as well. And also vandalize all my belongings."</p>
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<p>"Lethe, what the hell are you going on about?" Jett crouches. I can see her face better now. "You know, when people on the Internet tell you to touch grass, that doesn't mean you have to get fistfuls of it."</p>
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<p>"What- oh." I unclench my hands. "Jett, you don't mind that the Lethe you knew back then didn't have a childhood, right? That the one I had in this life is the only one I remember?"</p>
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<p>"Why would I care? I wish I was the same."</p>
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<p>"Oh, right. I forgot..." I let my words trail off, remembering an old promise, and hold up my left hand for her to take. "Jett, you'll still love me if I turn out to be nothing special, right? Not royalty, not owner of any lands? If I have no title to confer? If that vaccine you gave me made me lose my shifting and I'm nothing but that sad little angel you fished out of the river?"</p>
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<p class="blink1"><em>You're not a princess!</em></p>
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<p class="blink2"><em>You're not a princess!</em></p>
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<p><em>You'll never be a princess!</em></p>
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<p>She rolls her eyes, but takes my hand. "I don't care about any damn royalty. You're my Anima Mundi."</p>
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<script data-goatcounter="https://stats.letsdecentralize.org/count"
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<noscript>
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Early Thursday morning. Early by my standards, anyway: the rest of the world has begun without me. Cars zoom past on the nearby highway. A lawnmower buzzes the next yard over. A carmine cardinal sits in the bush outside my window, plunking out a song on a piano in its throat until I wrestle myself out of bed and it flies away. The last dregs of a dream slip away from me: a mother turned ghoul, shrieking raw despite desiccated and punctured lungs, reaching for me with bony hands to trap me in my childhood bedroom forever. There were many like it, those bedrooms of isolation guarded by self-appointed angels angry that something had slipped into Eden, slipped past them, slipped into Eve's mind. But this one was mine. This one was my Garden of Ignorance, my Eloi breeding ground, unable to comprehend the language of the world outside.
|
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*If you never cherished all the things that I find good, you never had anything resembling a childhood.*
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*If you never cherished, you never had anything...*
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*You never had a childhood.*
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"*You didn't have a childhood!*" some grubby-handed teenager shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. In her hands are several cheap ballpoint pens, all weighted down on one end by triangular strips of duck tape wrapped around. They were meant to resemble flowers, you see. Like you'd plucked one out of the ground and snipped the bottom of the stem sharp and were writing with it like a feather quill. A fairy's imitation of a revolutionary. Or maybe an insect, a cloud of locusts descending on a craft store and leaving the fields of the duck tape aisle bare and barren. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.
|
||||
|
||||
I close my eyes. On top of the broken fireplace inside sits a photo frame. Inside, an old sketch on a legal notepad by a toddler me, before the speech "therapists" got the go-ahead to randomly steal me away from my class in the middle of the day and force me to tell them over and over again what an apple was. "Mommy, it's a *flr!*"
|
||||
|
||||
I open my eyes. "Are you sure?"
|
||||
|
||||
The teenager into ash disintegrates. Their pens fall to the ground, bouncing a few times. A pinprick of pain in my lower gut. A field of wildflowers is coming to full bloom somewhere in Sablade.
|
||||
|
||||
Another person, a child just on the cusp between elementary and middle school, appears.
|
||||
|
||||
"*You didn't have a childhood!*" some be-braced kid shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around her wrists are several rubber bands. But these lump up and curve away from her skin at weird angles, not like any other rubber hand I've seen before. She takes one off, holds it up. Instead of a loose oval, the band rests in the shape of... an animal. A generation earlier, and it'd be a collectible card instead, but still depicting an animal. Kids would crowd around the two picnic tables on the playground and trade them, one kid appointed sentry to keep watch for the "paras". Animals at a watering hole, one scanning their surroundings for predators. With one spotted, the sentry would sound an alert, and the kids would all scatter to the four winds in hopes of not being the slowest and thus the only one the para could catch by themselves. Being caught meant having your collection confiscated and never returned. Everyone had them, until one day they didn't and they collectively forgot without a word.
|
||||
|
||||
I close my eyes. It's sometime in 2009. I'm playing a computer game, a city simulator, on the family computer. Hovering over the land before the humans arrive. Like snapping a rubber band to launch it at someone, I snap my fingers across the laptop's touchpad. Streaks of animals appear, wander for a few seconds, then disappear. I could never figure out how to get them to breed, to survive, to continue on. They would always vanish no matter how many cheats I used. "I wish I had a way to make you stay."
|
||||
|
||||
I open my eyes. "Is that really the assumption you want to make?"
|
||||
|
||||
The kid into ash disintegrates. Their bands fall to the ground, twisted up and unrecognizable. A cloud of a cramp in my lower leg. A herd of untamed fauna is migrating to breeding grounds somewhere in Sablade.
|
||||
|
||||
Another person, indistinct and flashing through multiple ages, appears.
|
||||
|
||||
"*You didn't have a childhood!*" an amalgamation of faces shrieks above me as I lie on my back in the grass. Around their body float clouds of plasma, all different colors, like clouds of magic waiting for command. Every year, it felt, there was a new cartoon about people fighting with the power of the elements. Another blatant cash grab, an excuse to print out plastic toys in the millions and generate just as much garbage to fill the landfills. One was banned from the house for reasons never explained. One was encouraged. One was never explicitly forbidden, but whenever we kids growing up in that brown house would change the TV to our favorite channel and see that show playing, Mother would give us weird looks until we'd acquiesce and flip to another. *The one clothed in red commands fire? And the one in green commands earth? I never could have guessed. Does the one in blue control air or water? They keep changing it on me.* I never really caught the fever, never let myself get swept up in the flood, never felt the winds of desire, could never, as much as my peers bullied me for my isolation from pop culture, put down any roots in the earth of the things they loved.
|
||||
|
||||
I close my eyes. I'm fifteen. I'm playing a sand simulator on my phone, except there are more sands than just sand: some are lava, some are water, some are grass that grow on whatever surface they touch that doesn't immediately kill them. Some are stationary the moment you put them down, like iron. There was no end goal to the game, no achievements, maybe *sometimes* a functioning "save game" button. I always ended up trying to make a tornado of lava with the wind function, seeing how quickly grass could regenerate whenever one of the lava particles strayed from the circle of wind and set everything else on fire. My deft fingers constructing an ouroboros, a cycle without end, versus the twin forces of entropy and simple boredom.
|
||||
|
||||
I open my eyes. "Will it really matter in the world to come?"
|
||||
|
||||
The crowd into ash disintegrates. Their clouds of magic disband and float up into the sky to merge with the rest of the atmosphere. A roll of rumbles through my guts. There's a thunderstorm brewing somewhere in Sablade.
|
||||
|
||||
A shadow looms over me. I turn my head to the left, the rest of my body still. Jett's standing between me and the sun. I can barely see her face with all the light bordering it. My own little eclipse.
|
||||
|
||||
"Let me guess. You're here to act the part of my elementary school bully? You better make sure to sneer lots when you taunt me about not being a princess. And throw in a punch or too as well. And also vandalize all my belongings."
|
||||
|
||||
"Lethe, what the hell are you going on about?" Jett crouches. I can see her face better now. "You know, when people on the Internet tell you to touch grass, that doesn't mean you have to get fistfuls of it."
|
||||
|
||||
"What- oh." I unclench my hands. "Jett, you don't mind that the Lethe you knew back then didn't have a childhood, right? That the one I had in this life is the only one I remember?"
|
||||
|
||||
"Why would I care? I wish I was the same."
|
||||
|
||||
"Oh, right. I forgot..." I let my words trail off, remembering an old promise, and hold up my left hand for her to take. "Jett, you'll still love me if I turn out to be nothing special, right? Not royalty, not owner of any lands? If I have no title to confer? If that vaccine you gave me made me lose my shifting and I'm nothing but that sad little angel you fished out of the river?"
|
||||
|
||||
*You're not a princess!*
|
||||
|
||||
*You're not a princess!*
|
||||
|
||||
*You'll never be a princess!*
|
||||
|
||||
She rolls her eyes, but takes my hand. "I don't care about any damn royalty. You're my Anima Mundi."
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue