Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it?

the dead are nowhere—in a nameless hollow in a heart, in memory or in story maybe, but no presences they can speak to, to comfort or be comforted by.

“Dar of the Oak by the Lea.”

Over the course of a hundred generations the names (like

the names the People bore) were worn smooth the way river stones are worn rolling over one another, until the act or the place or the habit or the tale at the heart of a name could hardly any longer be discerned: but it was there, and still is.

“They think those ones are among them still, as they were before. They visit them in places where they died, or they avoid those places, it might be for years, thinking that dead still remain there, angry or vengeful.”

This Raven said that the Ravens are a realm, and People are too; it’s not just a place where they are, or it’s not only that. You can be there but not go there,

that the People, who preyed on animals large and small, were themselves preyed on, sought for food, by beings who were their predators and no one else’s.

“you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.”

Though he had told the People that he would never die, that he was incapable of dying even if he wanted to, the People knew how to hear these words: they understood that like all the remembered dead he would forever be among them, that he would reach for their hands out of the places where he rested or feasted or went journeying (not far away, in fact as near to themselves as their own skins), and by his touch remind them of the honors still due him and of the many stories and sayings he had given them; and they in turn would take the hands of the unimaginable invisible ones who were not yet born but waited to be, one of whom would be the Singer again, at least in part, returning to them with new teaching and new help.

they were both beings different from others of their kind, but not wholly different, and in that knowledge the difference between the two of them was lessened.

It was how People lived in the world: for them the world was made of paths, and turns in those paths; the past was where the path had led them from, the future was where it went on to. The turns and forks of paths were where their lives were lived, and were named for their two hands.

how People thought that only by their own actions would the seasons be made to turn, the days grow warm after winter and the green things grow up that they planted. They thought the sun was a person like them, and did what it pleased;

Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.

And always a precious thing lost and found and lost again.

There are five directions: North, South, East, West, and Here.

The People had stories, but no history; everything that had happened was still happening. The tall stones that gods and giants had cut and erected in the beginning of the world were still standing, and the Brothers wouldn’t or couldn’t throw them down, though they warned the villagers away from them, except for those (the Brothers knew which) that had been placed by Saints and angels as lessons.

And though Dar Oakley couldn’t attach anything single or definite to certain words that appeared again and again in the Brother’s talk, they became his to have and to taste as each dropped singly into his mind (where alone he could say them). He loved them: Faith. Prayer. Saint. Heaven. Hell. Words are greater than meanings, and can live without them.

You don’t return from there. That land returns you here, when you have done there whatever you do.

and that story will be told and told again. And when you’re dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you’ll speak and act and be alive again.

Those who die happy in the company of their loved ones and in the home they know often can sense no passage at all between earthly and heavenly life, and can believe themselves still among the living: here is the flowered path to the familiar door, here are the remembered ones who went before us, in their habits as they lived; here the table is set, the good odors of sustenance; here the apple tree and the peach tree where once they were, bearing fruit.

you refuse to believe because you’re afraid of the dark; but your refusal is itself the darkness you fear.