Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

saw it then, the floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire, seething stench and smoke.

There had been nothing but mists and constructs of mists there when I had wandered through.

The pendulum sun never gave it such shades.

Diogenes

a slinking, black shadow of a hound at his feet.

The argument from the night before lay between us, but for now, we were able to ignore its carcass.

“Moors?” “The emptiness out there.”

“The fae like to keep the land out there…. Uncultivated. Formless.”

“It’s overgrown, so they’re burning everything back, returning it to mist.”

“But what is out there when- when it’s not mist?” “Dreams. Thoughts. Things our minds give shape to,” he said with a soft, long-fingered gesture. “The mists are very malleable and it is for that reason they desire to keep it that way. I suppose it’s a resource of sorts, harvested periodically. They probably sell it at the Goblin Market or something. But our minds are here so it me...

“Like the real moors? They choose for it to be empty.”

The once mist-covered moors seemed a great furnace, yet from those flames there was no light, only a dense, swallowing darkness.

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

Until then, I had always believed the moors this wild, inhuman landscape, where endless sky wrapped its heathen arms around an untamed, primal earth. And yet there it was before me, nature being brought to heel. Like any wide-eyed fool, I had mistaken a broken animal of the circus for a wild

“I’ve read about them and they’re called that not because… they live in the sea but because they… eat it?” “Close.” “What do you mean, close?” “They’re full of saltwater and sand,” he said. “I’m told fish live inside them.”

“I know this is Arcadia, but how?” He gave a half-hearted shrug. “I assume they heard about conch shells and got carried away.” “That you can hear the sound of the sea in them?” “That they have in them, captive, an oceanic fragment.”

“It’s just the whales,” he said. “The fire calls them. They rise to the surface like earthworms in rain.”

“It can’t be. It doesn’t tend to do individual entries for animals.” “But it’s not an animal, it’s a place. Like a desert or–”

the sea whales are not creatures but moving places

Mab was to arrive when the clocks struck noon.

They bowed low to me as they spoke, dripping grit upon the ground with every motion. It trickled off their skin like the sand in an hourglass, steadily and smoothly.

Then suddenly, the Queen’s retinue were pouring through the far gates. They moved in absolute silence, neither their clothes nor their shoes making a single sound. I was reminded again of the limits of my own petty imagination as the Pale Queen’s retinue bore little resemblance to the processions I had conjured up in the mists but for the fact that both were utterly silent.

Black-cloaked beings shambled in and squatted by the path. Little protruded from the darkness of their cloaks except for long, gnarled fingers made for strangling. Ladies in feather gowns flounced about in fluidly boneless movements, each carrying a pair of long, bloody shears and a threaded needle. They wore necklaces of still tongues that lolled black blood onto their white gowns. Others seemed almost human, but the shadows that stretched out from their feet were not those of their own human-seeming shape but those of restless, leaping horses. A carriage of horn and ivory rolled into the courtyard. It was pulled by creatures of leftover parts. Each was a chimera in the classical sense, obviously composed of different animals: a tiger’s striped leg ended in the hooves of an ox; an elephant’s trunk reached out from the face of a lion; a knot of snakes reared out from the haunches of a goat.

She unfurled from it like the sticky fronds of the sundew, like an octopus blossoming from a dark corner of a rock pool, like the slices on a peeled orange. It was her. The woman from my dream.

is there some want there for yourself, catherine?

Each shadow that brushed against her reminded me of the dappling from the willow trees.

Her brown hair had the same white-gold streak in it that stretched from the peak in the middle of her forehead.

Her flat, wide nose and heart-shaped face put me in mind of an owl.

at once a whisper and long, piercing avian screech.

Winglike sleeves draped from the shoulder of her dress and dragged along the floor. Her skirts flowed from her waist in feathery layers of white and brown.

A drop of fire streaked across the courtyard, trailing black soot and smoke. It flared like a splash of whisky over a fire and coalesced into a humanoid shape that ended in a single, serpentine tail. She seemed at first a black wick within the flames, but as the fire dimmed her skin turned ash-white.

“It has been as long as it takes to tell a tale, neither long nor short.”

“Time is as I count it,”

“You speak of her, and as such, I must have expectations.” “Rarely.” “You should know by now I hear more than just your spoken words.”

Her courtiers were speaking silently among themselves. Even though I could not hear their voices, I could see their lips, crooked like the beaks of owls, snapping and spitting. They turned their heads in sharp movements, looking and leering.

I am glad you are lost so that we mig...

“But I wonde...

“I trust you will prove a Balm of Gilead to your brother’s wounds.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil! — Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted — On this home by Horror haunted – tell me truly, I implore — “Is there – is there balm in Gilead? – tell me – tell me, I implore!” Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

does mab have an avian bent bc of gilead & poe?

Gethsemane

now jesus went into the garden the garden of gethsemane he went there sad and very weary to be alone to pray dear god i am so sorrowful but know your way is best let love come over me help me to be bold and free to do your will to do you will to do your will and rest ubi caritas et amor ubi caritas deus ibi est (where charity and love are, there god is)

They cared little for the concept of up or down, so they seemed as keen to walk upon the walls and ceiling as they were the floor. They gathered around the portraits, pushing their faces against the canvas and whispering into the painted ears of the depicted.

They spoke silently to one another, their beaks and lips and muzzles moving animatedly without trace of voice.

The first of the Pale Queen’s entertainments was to be a moment of fashionable domesticity in the English style. Before she withdrew into her rooms, she had announced to us that she desired to sew and take tea in the solar, as was the London way.

a great surfeit of inhuman servants, all shadowy hands and sandy footprints.

Still, for all their esoteric appearances, they busied in familiar ways.

This house has a keeper.”

dusted more dirt onto the lapel.

Geas of blood cannot keep you safe in all ways.”

A wide black belt clasped inhumanly tight around her tiny waist. Myriad pairs of insectoid wings, impossibly thin and veined in black, stretched from her waist and overlapped to form what could be termed a skirt.

“I read that a wasp waist is the very height of fashion,”

QUEEN'S GOT UNINTENTIONAL JOKES

The bodice she wore was banded in black and gold, like the colouring of a wasp.

This close, I could see the rustle of each of the pairs of wings, like the twitching of a swatted wasp during that moment when one is unsure if it will fly again.