The Everlasting

by Alix E. Harrow

history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.”

History no longer simply happened, like an accident; it was told, like a story.

The story of Dominion had many villains over the years, shifting along with the borders of her empire, and many storytellers. But it only ever had one hero, and her name was Una Everlasting. Una the dragon-slayer, Una the queen-maker, Una the tragedy. Una, who died and was resurrected a hundred times, until she fought as no mortal could fight, with the memory of every battle burned into her very bones. (There was awe in your voice, even now—but surely a dog might learn any trick, given a thousand years of practice.) I was not alone, in your story. I was trailed always by a cowardly historian, a man chosen by the queen to lead me to my death, like a farmer driving a balking animal to the butcher. And so—here your voice turned bitter as burnt hair—the historian buried the hero, over and over, and wrote her tale in the queen’s book. Until at last they began to remember themselves, or at least each other. This the queen could not permit. So she told one final story—a story so perfect it gave her an empire and a crown, a thousand years from now—and hid the book away. But the historian stole it and ran back to his hero. And now, finally, we might write our own ending.

I was not a woman but only a painted icon, with lacquer for skin and oil paint for eyes.

The whole of her world was a system of allegiances, long chains of bent knees and bowed necks that ran from sinner to pulpit, from peasant to throne. It disoriented her even to imagine herself outside of it; no link could be removed from the chain unbroken.

‘Who is free, who loves another?’

The scholar looked down at his son and thought: Here, at last, is something worth dying for. The knight looked at the scholar, looking at his son, and thought: Here, at last, is something worth killing for.

Everything that is, was made, and everything that was made, was made for a reason.

Was I a man or merely a palimpsest, scrubbed clean and rewritten so many times that my oldest memories were obscured entirely?

I soon discovered a brand-new set of memories stacked neatly in my skull, like towels in a guest bathroom. They unfolded all at once, a suffocating mass.

I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.

Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

I stood looking down at the city below me, at the shiny beads of automobiles and the zippered teeth of the train tracks.

Dizzily, sickly, in a long string of metaphors, I saw everything we could make of love: chains, debts, cages, circles. And, too, I saw everything it could make of us: tragedies, traitors, madmen, cowards.

On the backs of my eyelids, I saw your face.

Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.

But nothing that lives lasts forever.