Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

“Those who take shelter upon the leaves of the church but are not part of it. We who give you definition, meaning, purpose. We who are your opposite.”

“But what are you without us?” “Human.”

“You know who you are not. That is not the same thing.”

Dangling from rough cord was a stone with a hole in it.

witch stone

I am not good with time,

“Some believe lesser minds are so fascinated with such stones that they become unable to carry out their larcenous designs.

All meaning had been eroded from words, but still sound had significance and my mind tortured me with memories of that keening the woman in black made.

kept as a curio in the Pale Queen’s court.

“What are you?” “On the Pale Queen’s orders.”

The creature wore nothing but its feathers and a green waistcoat.

“A sister for a brother. Reflections can answer for the whole. Fair is fair?”

“So am I a stony place? I feel joy and yet I do not understand. It cannot root within me.”

“And you fear that you are not able to understand?” “No, no, not that. I simply do not understand. And you know I do not. So since I do not, then is it not meant for me? I have read it over and over and over.”

“And he speaks in parables so that only his followers can understand, for they are given the secrets. But not me, not those who do not and cannot understand. And he will take it away from me, what little I have, he say he

“There are eyes that are blessed because they see and ears that are blessed because they hear, but it is not the seeing and hearing that marks them as blessed, or rather it is and it isn’t… What I mean to say is that they truly see and truly hear. So it is not simply the reaper angels that will separate the wicked from the just. It is not the fishermen that pull from the seas a harvest of souls and cast aside the bad. The act of seeing and hearing is itself a test.”

WHICH IS SO INTERESTING W HOW THINGS ARE SEEN AND NOT SEEN SO FAR

I don’t think I’m in the right story.

“No, no, but we do. I’m a part of a story, a small part in a big story. The stony ground and the fish that is cast aside. Someone needs to be that, don’t they? So I am the one who doesn’t understand.”

“You find him. And I will ask him.”

laon really is the lost in all of this

The Devil plagues humanity with changelings.

“She wants a masquerade,”

“They say the whales usually swim in the dark, beyond where the pendulum sun could shine.”

think the ball and hunt has to do with faerie politics. She has a grudge against the Duke of the North Wind or somesuch. So she needs to hunt something or not invite him to the dance. I don’t really understand it, but she wants it to be winter.”

“Petitioning.”

“What’s done is done,” he said, downing his brandy-fortified negus and serving himself another. “And it’s what has to be done.” “No, it can be undone.” “I think I’ve lost track of the doing, Cathy.” “I mean, she has done things. She had made you do things. Their ways

“What reason would we have to convert them if they were already good? What need there be of missionaries in a land without sin?”

The air was ecclesiastically thick with scents of cedar.

A confirmation of my fears would only intensify them and a refutation would exacerbate my keen sense of doubt.

be careful what you whim

Perhaps a mind too hounded by questions would be prone to madness.

You’re spinning castles out of air.”

I wanted to protest that there was no power in the saying of a name, to defend all the conclusions I had come

The Spirits answered, That there were more numerous Worlds than the Stars which appeared in these three mentioned Worlds.

Although there be numerous, nay, infinite Worlds, answered the Spirits, yet none is without Government.

had so strengthened the Immortal parts thereof with mortal out-works,

Why, said the Empress, it is not possible to conquer a World.

Such aggressive purging I understood to be the creation of a blank canvas for Mab to impose her vision upon.

Pale Queen to her multitude of guests. The painting of frost continued on each of the windows, blocking out more of the increasingly infrequent light from the pendulum sun. As time ticked by, the width of the sun’s swing grew slowly shorter.

There were times I would imagine rescuing her, leading Laon to her like a damsel in Le Morte d’Arthur.

guided on a quest by Lynette to save her sister Lyonesse. My brother would insist that Lynette was secretly in love with the knight and that the ending was pointlessly tragic.

there was something almost comforting about the emptiness of the castle’s history.

In a land full of strange and profane creatures, it was apparently this that strained my credulity.

to reveal enormous teeth. Sharp to a point, each seemed larger than even my thumbnail.

There was something reassuringly inhuman about that smile.

“You can’t trade for weather like that. It needs to be made the old-fashioned way, you understand?”

Icy fronds bristled from a curved spine. It was shaped like a tiny feather.

“Though I suppose you might be as blind as the rest.”

“fairy” coffins

“What’s it like?”

being a person

“Sometimes, I would try very hard to remember what came before.” She gave a high, forced laugh. “I sometimes think that if I couldn’t remember then that would be proof. Of something.”

“It’s not that unusual. Memories aren’t perfect.”

“I didn’t feel different when I found out. When they told me. But why would I? I was always different.”