Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

I pulled out the handkerchief I had been half-heartedly embroidering for the last four years.

same, omg, same

“It’s red. Is it meant to be special?” “It was just the thread I had to hand.” “They grow in my garden.” “Red roses?” “When I remind them to be.”

such an interesting question--especially since it's for laon & red roses are for passion, true love, romance, & desire

“They are a present, after all, and it is good to thank people for presents. I remember.” “Present?” I said, trying not to sound too surprised. “It was most thoughtfully left in my bed. I was very pleased with them. That is a present, is it not?” “I- I’m afraid not from myself,” I said. “Well, I should thank someone,” reasoned the Pale Queen. “And I would like to thank you. That is only polite.”

who's leaving shears in beds?

The scissors lay open in my hands, forming the crudest of crosses. Her opening of them before giving them to me was a pointed action. She wanted me to know that the steel scissors could not hurt her, that she was more powerful than folk superstitions on faeries would have me believe. It was a show of strength, like the baring of a predator’s teeth.

“Principles are of the world of man. Things which you and I will never entirely understand, being what we are.”

oooo, solidarity from the pale queen

Her eyes were disconcertingly large, reflecting in them a thousand points of light. Constellations that would never be lived in the reflection of her eyes.

Dozens of spiders crawled from the corners and cracks of the room and swarmed onto her lap. One scrambled onto her finger, leaving pale blue dots upon her skin where it trod. She gestured for me to lean closer and I saw that the spiders had glinting, needle-like legs that each ended in an empty eye. Each blue point upon the Pale Queen’s skin was a pinprick of blue blood as the creature danced its sharp course upon her.

AAAAAA, SO COOL

You’re bleeding,” I said, alarmed. “Are you–” “It hardly matters.” She shrugged. “It will be upon the cloth soon enough.”

I asked the Pale Queen how she would take hers with care, and she delighted in the ritualistic answers.

The picture they left was not a rose. It took me a moment to recognise it: the distended jaws of a beast wrapped around naked fleeing souls, the flames of hell around them and the red robes of the Risen Christ. Each of the figures was picked out in black thread but for Christ, from whom gold thread radiated. Their faces all had that doe-eyed squint so common in medieval illumination, especially the beast of hell who but for its teeth and flaming jaw had an almost cute air.

I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light.

I teeter on the brink of eternity. Among these degraded, despised yet beloved shadows, I am the last vestige of the real.

once stained with the chthonic magics, now outstretched to receive the emblems and seals of the Redeemer's love, I had a foretaste of heavenly glory that shattered my heart like glass.

and I earn my martyr’s crown.

They wish to cast my fate in blood but they say the stars are silent.

That Within cannot bind me even as the truth binds them.

They would never lie if the truth can hurt more. And the truth c...

I had once thought the world of it, but now its silver-grey taffeta rather reminded me of cobwebs and the blotchy underside of the moon fish.

lurked a pair of the Pale Queen’s shadowy bird people. Upon our approach, they folded their long, fan-like tails. I had glimpsed them holding up their stained glass tails to the pendulum sun earlier in the day and marvelled at the bright flashes of colour. It reminded me of the petals of rose windows, where each light curves to a flame-like shape.

The candles within were all extravagantly lit, though instead of an inferno, they exuded an eerie coldness.

I wanted him to refute my dreams.

I could not pretend an unshakable faith in my own brother, not anymore.

Still, I could tell the truth: “I miss your sermons.”

the fragility of the moment.

What do the fae care of the suffering of Job? Or the loyalty of Ruth?” He grimaced. “Do they even share the sin of Eve?”

Nothing makes sense here. Parables can’t mean anything when nothing means anything.”

“I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.”

“They call it the Bible of the poor, you know.” He gesticulated at the chapel around us. “The windows and the statues and the paintings. Think it was one of the tracts for the Times that argued that we need again this ritual, this popish finery. We stripped bare our altars and no longer understand how to delight the masses.”

“Faith isn’t about delight,”

“I’m trying to explain concepts bigger than mere words to beings that are them...

“Words. You will say words and they cannot...

the lives of the saints, the life of Christ, all there in light and colour, written in upon the windows an...

“There is a wonder there. The sublime, the sense of eternity in the lines of a building, in the face of a saint. I can’t speak that wonder. Every stone, every ray of light here speaks and I can’t speak the way it does.”

“They will become the right words when you say them.”

catherine is so much more appropriate to be a missionary to the fae than laon you have to have wonder & whimsy, & he's had it taken from him my masculinity & the severity of the church

It will be enough.”

“Fae are so literal sometimes.” He sighed long and hard. “I was trying to explain the pain of being severed from the Lord. Hell as a separation, an emptiness, an absence. A banishment from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power…” “And she wanted to hear of the ever-burning sulphur?”

It was every other Sunday growing up; our father was as fond of Milton as he was of Calvin.

“How where peace and rest can never dwell, hope never comes ...

speaking of the Harrowing of Hell and I confessed its decline in iconography as some think post-death second chances make us complacent.

tiny antechamber to the chapel

Given its haphazard construction, I wondered if it was once an anchorhold, where some medieval lady who had sworn to a life of solitude and prayer would be walled in and forgotten.

like, for an anchorite

“Oh, the birds are the worst, but they weren’t…” He frowned. “Just outside. In the courtyard.” Laon shrugged before sighing and rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. He conceded, “It doesn’t matter. I probably wasn’t looking.”

does he not see?

It was the sort of food that made one homesick.

I was never told what happened to my predecessor.

HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE ASKED, YOU GREAT FECKLESS GIT?!

Elizabeth Roche.

“Arcadia is full of secrets,

the mad hand and its ominous ravings.

tell him about Enochian and the revelations it promised,

There simply wasn’t ...

“Don’t try to solve this place.

is she really trying to solve it or is she doing what you haven't bothered to try: shift her mind around to fairytale logic?