Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

Too long have I spent alone with my own thoughts aboard The Quiet.

trying to detect her fae origins.

and, here's the thing: to be a fae & not having been raised a fae are you still a fae? or, are you missing some fundamental fae-ness bc you haven't had the culture & interiority & idiosyncrasies made a part of you?

Still, she had that awkwardness I heard rumoured of changelings, a certain deficiency in their simulation of humanity.

and, here is one of those old, old, old beliefs that situate the neuro-nonconforming/neurodivergent as something Other, something not-human

Above us, a cloud-bruised sky was heavy with rain.

in a voice quite quiet and quite different

noticed there was something odd about her, though if this was to do with something unsettled rather than unsettling about her aspect, I could not say.

Before I could marvel at the sheer strangeness of hot rain, a gasp of wind chilled the splashed raindrop.

I had expected to see its needle spinning indecisively but it pointed more or less ahead. So there was a North.

or, your true north is laon

beyond the ghoulishly yellow lamplight.

Hulking shapes darted behind one another and I tried not to give them faces but, unbidden, my imagination began filling in the grey landscape before me. Half-remembered etchings from The Voyages of Captain James Cook and exotic phantasms from Sketches of a New World populated the space.

At her voice, the fog parted like a curtain.

It was more castle than manor, a knot of spires and flying buttresses atop a jagged hill. Stone leaned against stone in a bizarre edifice, with nothing but scorn to the very concept of aesthetic consistency and structural purpose. Though silent and lonely, it was far too skeletal to be termed picturesque.

Of all the places to grant him, why had the fae chosen this one?

There may indeed be countless worlds revolving around countless suns, as Lady Cavendish described in her poems. These wandering worlds may indeed be hidden from us due to the brightness of their stars. But Arcadia is not one of those worlds.

THE BLAZING WORLD CHECK

The Faelands do not possess a sun in the way we would understand a sun to be. The cycle of a sun rising from the east and setting in the west is a sight wholly alien to this place for it does not orbit a burning star.

Then imagine that it swings as a pendulum over a surface, bringing each part in turn into its light.

That surface is Arcadia and that lantern is their sun. Thus at the edges of the Faelands, the sun reaches the pinnacle of its upswing before falling back the way it came. The equilibrium position of the pendulum sun is near the centre of the Faelands, directly above the city of Pivot. There, it is almost never night, as the sun is always close enough to impart at least a hazy twilight of illumination.

Thus, periods of light and dark – I hesitate at using the word “day” – are very different along the length of the Faelands, depending on where un...

This makes the reckoning of days in Arcadia rather complex,

The Faelands do possess something approximating seasons.

the arc of the pendulum sun grows smaller, but the duration of the oscillation, as with any pendulum, is independent of the arc and thus remains constant.

The sun is also, I am reliably told, literally a lantern.

On the Horological Nature of the Faelands Skies,

A red door opened into darkness.

Though long-faced and vacant-eyed, they seemed so very human.

This was a storied dwelling, its vast history written in a language I only half understood,

Does and the doings.

Mr Benjamin

gnome,

Paracelsus to mean an elemental o...

He had been the first and only convert of the prior missionary in residence...

As we wound through the keep, I felt as though we were coiling back in time, through the layers of the castle’s history.

“Almost almost forgot. Remember, no walking down the silver corridor when it’s dark. No looking behind the emerald curtain. No staring portraits in the eye. No eating things without salt. And no trusting the Salamander.”

It reminded me of a hagoday, the enormous knockers affixed on cathedral doors that used to grant sanctuary to any who touched them.

The wardrobe

we're gonna find narnia yet

In youth, I had shared Laon’s restlessness. University had only nourished and nurtured his ambitions, but education had stifled mine. I had been taught to tame my wild impulses and desires that had agitated me to pain. I had folded it with my soul and learnt to drink contentment like you would a poison. Drop by drop, day by day. Until it became tolerable.

Scorn the food and shun the drink, For faerie food and faerie tricks, Will snare the tongue and trap the sick. Sprinkle salt from human lands Sprinkle salt with human hands. Meat loves salt and salt loves meat, I pray the lord my soul to keep. So sprinkle salt, else restless sleep, So sprinkle salt, else endless weep.

And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt.

Squinting, I saw that the words had been scorched into the parchment rather than written with ink.

There was a salt shaker on the tray, but I found the grinder at the bottom of my carpet bag and ground salt onto a side plate. I threw the salt onto the stew, then upon the mushrooms, the asparagus and lastly, the bread. Hands pressed together, I murmured an Amen.

yep, christians don't perform magick at all

Some would dismiss this as superstition, but salt protected humans from the food of the Faelands. Captain Cook and his crew, the first British explorers to reach Arcadia, were said to have perished because of their misdealings with salt.

I wondered if this would be the greatest affront to my sense of civilisation.

And sunsets last so long in Arcadia. No horizon, after all.”

“What is Arcadia?” I muttered, half to myself. “How could this place truly be?”

“Nothing,”

is that what arcadia is? nothing? is arcadia a fishbowl?

There have been some whose faith was challenged by the very discovery of Arcadia, a realm which the scriptures spoke barely of.

How could I limit an infinite God with finite words?

“And now the moon,”

The moon was, at first, but a luminous shadow behind a mist, flashing for a moment before disappearing again behind the burnt-scone clouds. Then suddenly, a bright silver shape swam out. Clouds clung to the arc of its gleaming fins, trailing thin wisps of seeming light.

The moon was a fish.