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by
Laini Taylor
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July 24 - August 11, 2024
Only Morgan could provoke her like this. It was like his voice—belligerent spiked with obnoxious—triggered an autonomic impulse to argue. All he had to do was take a position and she’d feel an immediate need to oppose it. If he declared affection for light, Eliza would have to defend the dark.
She knew there was no point arguing with him, but it was maddening. He was pretending not to grasp the intense sensitivity of this situation out of some notion that it marked him as superior—like he was so far above the masses that their concerns were quaint to him. How primitive your customs are! What is this thing you call “religion”?
“There aren’t many things that people will gladly kill and die for, but this is the big one,” she said. “Do you understand? It doesn’t matter what you believe, or what you think is stupid.
“There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it’s hurtling forward—toward what?
Like remorse, the words hope and dread were wholly inadequate to describe the intensity of the feelings in the dream. Ordinary hope and dread were like avatars to these—mere digestible representations of emotions so pure and terrible they would annihilate us in real life, rip open our minds and drive us mad.
Liraz had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original—one emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn’t love—not that she had any experience of that one—and it wasn’t hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling. It was shame. Shame never faded, and Liraz realized only now that this was the baseline of her emotions—her bitter,
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“The dead,” she said. “And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you’d think they were corpses hanging on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements.” She looked up at the chimney overhead, as though she were imagining the souls it had conducted in its time. “They’re gone, they can’t be hurt anymore, but we drag their memory around with us, doing our worst in their name, like it’s what they’d want, for us to avenge them? I can’t speak for all the dead, but I know it’s not what I wanted for you, when I died. And I know it’s not what Brimstone
It was noble, and it was bleak, and it wasn’t the conduit her own unspoken words needed. They were heavy in her, and clinging. How do you just thrust “I love you” out into the air? It needs waiting arms to catch it.
There is another universe. That was the thing that she knew. In school Eliza had shirked physics egregiously in favor of biology, and so she had only the most simplistic understanding of string theory, but she knew that there was a case to be made for parallel universes, scientifically speaking. She didn’t know what that case was, and it didn’t matter anyway. There was another universe. She didn’t have to prove it.
“My wife likes to say that the mind is a palace with room for many guests. Perhaps the butler takes care to install the delegates of Science in a different wing from the emissaries of Faith, lest they take up arguing in the passages.”
“Is another universe bigger or smaller than the idea of God? Does it matter? If there is a sphere where ‘angels’ dwell, is it a matter of semantics, whether we choose to call it Heaven?”
up at the stars—not gazing, but staring—she felt the scope of the universe around her, so vast and full of secrets, and she sensed the presence of more and greater beyond that . . . and beyond beyond, and then beyond even that, and somehow the unknowable depths within herself corresponded to the unknowable scope without, and . . . there wasn’t another universe. There were many. Many beyond many, unknowably.
“But perhaps it’s time now to seek help. You’ve been through so much.” And that’s when things started to go sideways. He still had his hands upraised in that let’s-not-do-anything-rash manner, and Eliza just stared at him. What was that all about? He was acting like she was hysterical, and for a second, it made her doubt herself. Had she raised her voice? Was she wide-eyed and nostril-flared, like some kind of lunatic? No. She was just standing there, arms at her sides, and she would have sworn by anything worth swearing on—if there was anything worth swearing on—that she didn’t look crazy.
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She’d spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened—apart from everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn’t a mystical place to be reached or won—some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it—but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness.
Nothing more came. No words. She was failing at this. It was beyond her skill. What had she thought, that she would be able to summon some warmth from within herself, when she’d spent her entire life stifling it?
“There is the past, and there is the future,” he had said to his brothers and sisters not long ago. “The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other.” He’d been wrong. There was only the present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn’t drive us mad.
“Well?” she asked. And it was an easy choice. Life, first. You have to be alive, after all, in order to figure out everything else. “All right,” Akiva said. “I’ll come with you.”
“Or maybe it’s like skohl,” she said. That was the high-mountain plant whose stinking resin they burned on their torches at the caves. “And only grows in the worst conditions.” You’d never find skohl in some sun-dappled meadow, but only on a cliff face, crusted with hoarfrost. Maybe heart-crushing love was the same, and could only grow in hostile environments.