Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

“But I can pray with you.”

were here to turn whatever simulacrum of soul the fae possess to the service of the Lord Above.

“Changelings. Their fingers bend out and not in.”

“Changelings just need to be not like their people. They need to be a little odd, not quite fit in. Is just their way of being made wrong. It’s in her nature.”

It was not simply a battle of words, however, as for many the cultivation of the hearth mirrored the cultivation of the heathen.

the sea-like fire engulfing the banks of heather.

It is how things are done. The moors need to stay the moors. It’s just like cutting your fingernails.

If someone was choosing it to be empty.

He took a great interest in the importance of sacrifice and the significance of price – he explained that fae liked numbers and costs.

“It is as a debt paid in full by Christ with his death, his sacrifice. A debt to redeem the first sin,” I said. “The transgression in the garden, the forbidden food.” “But it is human sin? Or is it the sin of all? Did we all fall or is it just Mankind?”

“It is dangerous eating forbidden foods.”

“This is in the Psalms, is it not? Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me?”

“It is about fae. I think. Maybe. But we are made that way. So it is about us, yes?” “I don’t know.” I was dreading his answers. “How… how are you made?” “Like it says. They are true words.”

ransom theology and original sin,

antediluvian m...

the apocrypha and how an archbishop once decreed any who published the Bible must do so with the apocrypha intact,...

“Wild stories,” I said, only half remembering. “Some of the youth of Jesus and how he gave life to clay birds. Judith and Holofernes is apocryphal, of course. And there’s all the fallen angels and nephilim in the books of the watchers.”

my favorites have always been apocryphal

“It’s the wild word weeds,” said Mr Benjamin. “They spring up even if you pull them out. No place for them in gardens.”

I waited until the few hours of true night, when the fish moon swam from the dark clouds and its light reminded me of standing at the top of the coal cellar stairs in the dead of winter, gleaming black blocks of brittle coal beneath me.

Medieval gnostics perhaps? Or part of Nostradamus’ speculations?

The house they keep me in is wrong, everything is wrong.

that, I can tell that they are keeping secrets. Yet truth is their weapon.

There were a series of half-moon scorch marks down the middle of the back cover, arranged in a slight curve. Wondering, I placed the tips of my fingers against each of the marks. Under my thumb was the fifth half-moon mark, soot-black against the pale leather. Squinting, I could see the suggestion of whirled patterns in one of the half moons and indents at the arch of each.

did the salamander dig their fingers into the binding?

filling page after page with our intertwined names.

I could not help but imagine myself now standing at one such border of our knowledge, staring into the shadowy abyss of mankind’s ignorance.

Experience has taught me the importance of being systematic about such things.

It was just a door. There was no need to be afraid.

doors are dangerous things

Meric Casaubon’s A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits.

stirred when they hear the words with which they were brought forth into the world.

For nothing moves, that is not persuaded; neither can anything be persuaded that is unknown.

The Creatures of God understand you not; you are not of their Cities. You are become enemies, because you are separated from him ...

Mysteries had a way of keeping me awake, gnawing at the edges of my mind until they crept into my dreams as a jumble of nonsense.

Reflexively, my eyes darted to the door to empty air.

what I had learnt of Enochian, the divine tongue, named for Enoch, the last man to know it. The pages made grand claims, that this language of frail and angular marks was used by the Almighty to create the world and then given to Adam so that he might name all creatures and all things within the gardens. The pages promised that within this language of angels lay all sorts of secrets, that there was a power in the knowing of the first and truest names of all things.

is arcadia eden?

Perhaps they had thought it an act of restoration, that the Word of God needed to be in the language of God.

At the edge of my mind, I wondered if this was an evangelical tool and if so, was it the true language of the fae? Was there truth in the old theory that the fae had been angels? Or was it simply that they remember it from the time of Adam?

A foothold upon the cliff of unknowing.

to press my forehead against his and whisper to him what I knew like old secrets shared in the dark under blankets and sheepskins.

He promised then that we were the same and he would treat me as such even if others refused to see that.

Secrets have a way of making me feel lonely.

But this felt too big for susurrus words and cupped hands; I felt too big.

And then, being without a position, I returned to him and found him– It didn’t matter. He was still my brother. Nothing could change that.

was he suddenly pretty?

“Had they assumed there would be surfeit of pagan children eager to learn?” she said, a wide grin stretching tightly over her teeth. “Grubby-kneed brownies and adorable little pixies all gathering around Miss Helstone asking to be taught the most noble English language?”

“Oh, but surely you had wished to teach them whilst you all sat on mushrooms together and sipped nettle tea from buttercups.”

“We would curtsy to you in our precious little daisy petal dresses and tip at you our caps made of rue. We would be ever so grateful for your bequeathing language to us…”

“Human hands and human lands,” she said, referring to the folk rhyme. “Meat loves salt and salt loves meat, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” She added a sarcastic edge to the pronunciation of soul.

“I know you can’t tell me how he… how he earned his crown of martyrdom. But surely you can tell me how he did his work here. How he spoke the word.”

It’s easy to give hope to those who have lost. Who are lost. They were searching. He found.”

Balaenoptera wickeris, often termed a “sea whale” due to idiosyncratic fae humour, is believed to be more vast than any other beast, being twice again the size of the largest sea-dwelling whale. They are said to swim through soil and not water. They are distinct from the beasts known as the “see whale”, an invisible piscine that lurks in the seas around Arcadian ports, and “C whale”, the uncommon name for the Balaena sinistris.

They say entire ecosystems of fishes can live within the whale once it has consumed sufficient “sea.” Whale “bones” of wood can often be found on sale at the Goblin Market.