Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

Under the Pendulum Sun

if humans are objects w soul breathed into them, & fae are the opposite (soul bent into a shape), doesn't that mean that changelings are both & neither? are changelings, in fact, like jesus and are wholly human & wholly fae

Great and ancient empires, Mahomedan and Heathen,

nerved and strengthened by GOD,

and so a way has been opened for His blessed Gospel to pass from here to the rem...

forced open by war, calls out to the faithful.

But it is the Faelands that arrest our attention. Arcadia’s vast unknown, which has been for many ages closed against us and the Divine Word, is at last made clear and knowable.

of breaking down that barrier,

My brother and I grew up dreaming of new worlds.

sustenance for our hungry imaginations. Bored of waiting, we told each other stories of what could be.

a city in france but call also mean "stale", "not fresh", & "fish" in tagalog

We invented whole new worlds for our soldiers to explore: Gaaldine, Exina, Alcona, Zamorna.

we learnt of pilgrims and missionaries and explorers, and so we wrote of grand journeys, long and winding.

As we read of the discovery of the Americas, of the distant Orient, and of strange Arcadia we added similar places...

In the tiniest, tiniest writing, we detailed their exploits, the politics of their parliaments, and the...

For the talk of tropics and deserts, our childish fictions filled them with the same oaks and aspens that grew in our garden. We built on their landscape, exotic buildings that were just our little whitewashed church in Birdforth in disguise. We rained down on strange soil the same Yorkshire rain as that which drenched our skins and drove us inside, peeling off our clothes, housebound by the weather and desperate for diversion.

strangely shakespearean: a midsummer night's dream is a the greek athens & the british forests

As such, I could never have imagined Arcadia.

can we really ever imagine a place we've never been?

until I laid eyes upon the Faelands, I was blind, and now I see. I have never seen colour, nor grandeur, nor wonder, until I saw the shores of Arcadia.

There were few maps and fewer landscapes available, and almost all of them had been denounced by one explorer or another as fraudulent.

arcadia is a shifting, liminal, uncanny landscape--a place known & unknowable

For all the many contradictory theories I had read on the relationship between our world and that of the fae, I was no more enlightened. It was said to be underground, but not. It overlaid our own, but not. It was another place, but not.

Our ship, The...

I clutched my compass. My brother had given it to me before he left for Arcadia to become a missionary.

oooooo, the potential failure of technology & surety, i love it

That was when I caught my first glimpse of the Faelands.

Yet those cliffs were too white, too stark. They could not be Dover.

familiar but not the familiar--uncanny in it's recognizability although not where one expected to be

It seemed cobbled together, each part eerily familiar but set against something other.

For a moment I thought the town to be an endless dragon coiled around the edge of the harbour, huffing smoke from its distended nostrils. It shimmered, the shingled roofs seeming scale-like, and then it shifted.

but, it was a dragon for just a moment be careful what you believe here--what your fancy creates--because it might find life

they muttered invocations under their breath. I wanted to chide them for their superstition but we were sailing to Arcadia and none of it made any sense.

blasphemously crossed themselves in the name of salt, sea and soil.

my dude, you give reverence to the sea and, you give reverence to the fae

The cabin boy flung his arms around the prow and cooed at it. It was a long while before the ship was tamed and brought to shore.

in arcadia, the ship--the quiet--is a living thing that needs to be soothed & cajoled

Twisting streets full of seeming people reminded me of crowded London.

i wonder if this is like hell in paradise lost (or, was it dogma?): something vastly different before humans brought their own sins to bare thus changing its landscape, its reality, its integrity

"pure"

dressed in sombre, mortal colours,

“I’m not the real Ariel Davenport, you see.” There was an unpleasant edge to her laugh; it was a touch too brittle. “I’m her changeling.”

Many of the intermediaries between the fae and humans were said to be changelings.

Despite such accounts, changelings never seemed quite real to me. But then, given how sheltered I had been, the French were never quite real.

“She was a human child, I was a fairy-made simulacrum of a human child. We traded places. I grew up there and she grew up here.”

a pair of steel scissors by our beds to ward off faerie abductors.

I once said to Laon that we should close the scissors, so that they no longer formed the sign of the cross, and invite in the fae. He was horrified. And so I never suggested it again.

someone wants to be taken by the faeries

“How far to Gethsemane?”

isn't that always the question

“Two revelations and an epiphany? No, there has to be a shortcut… Two painful memories and a daydr–”

i love this notion of distance

I had read so much of the pendulum sun of the Faelands. Foolishly, I half-expected to see it waver in the sky before rushing east again, like my own pendant did in my experimenting hands when I was trying to comprehend the very idea.

“It doesn’t move that fast,” said Miss Davenport. “You won’t see much by just looking up. Even at midday.”

changeling!ariel seems determined to demagick the magick, to mundanify it w human imposition & colonizing it w human thought it's very interesting

Arcadian days were as long as earthly ones.

I even knew that I was at the very edges of the Faelands and that many of the oddities of the sun’s pendulum-like trajectory would not be discernible here.

of how hollow the promise of other worlds seemed then.

in the reality of death bc aren't the fairylands a place of the undying

“But it’s outside of Sesame, you know, the port town.

the fae's got jokes

Things are rather more earthly there, you know.

I did so incorrectly, or rather in ways that weren’t correctly understood.

be careful how you describe things too

He’s conducting services no one comes to, begging to gain access to the rest of the Faelands and asking them questions about their–” She cleared her throat and continued in a deep, ponderous tone, “cosmological and metaphysical importance.”

the properties of the pendulum sun and the fish moon.