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September 3 - September 27, 2021
trees were encased in overnight ice. Branches, like freshly-minted blades, clanged against each other in an almost military salute.
The voice was as harsh as rock grating on rock, though it had an uncanny melody. It oddly harmonized with the birdsong.
Nothing in the third reach compared to this simple joy in life. He had thought that the scholars and warriors of the seminary had preserved the mores and traditions of old Vasyllia. But there, everything was formalistic, strict, conventional to a fault. Repeated movements without inner content. Everything in the potter’s world was replete with significance.
“Creating something truly beautiful requires labor pains. Vivid as childbearing. Not many willingly choose such a path, especially if every craftsman is encouraged to churn out cheap trinkets by the dozen.”
When he smiled, he was beautiful.
You can live very well with very little. Sometimes, it is better this way.”
the mist from the waterfalls showered the feasters with drops of gold and opal.
“I thought the heat strengthened the clay, Pilgrim.” “The right amount of heat does, just as the right amount of adversity strengthens any relationship between two people. But there is one fire that is always too hot. Do you know what that is?” Voran did not answer. “Envy.”
The burning aspen seemed small, its flames sputtering. Walking around the sapling, the Pilgrim caressed its leaves as one caresses a lover before a long separation. His singsong rumble was nearly in unison with the hum of the twin waterfalls, which from this vantage point appeared to plunge directly on either side of the aspen, framing it. His words were inaudible, but chant-like. His joy-pierced tones were tinged with grief.
She found a barrier between her thoughts and her words. To speak was as hard as to move a boulder covered with moss from a riverbed.
No love can exist where there is no forward movement.
Her voice was like dried peas rattling in a box.
“The Covenant is a fairy tale! Yes, in the stories it makes sense, but you cannot apply it literally. Even if we have failed in some sacred duty, what sort of a god punishes his own people only for forgetfulness? Is that our gentle, loving Adonais?”
The orchards were black and white parodies of trees, looking more like sinister old men reaching up with knobby fingers, as though enraged at the gathering gloom. They seemed unnaturally still, almost bewitched into nightmarish sleep.
The voices weaved into the melody and out of it in an increasingly complex pattern. One moment the rich tenors predominated, then the dark-toned basses, and finally the middle voices rang out, lush as stringed instruments. The voices united in harmony, then fought each other in unexpected dissonance, only to resolve in chords that echoed over the tops of the red-barks.
a wooden hut, crookedly constructed, as though it were stuck in an eternal shrug.
Aína laughed like spring rain falling on icicles.
“The heart is what matters. That’s what Adonais wants. Your heart. If you spend your entire life cleansing yourself of impurity, and yet your heart does not expand in love for those around you… It’s like scouring all the rust off a pot. If you don’t stop, you’ll rub a hole in the iron.”
The candles flared, becoming impossibly bright. Their light rose like a wave, no longer gold, but pure, blinding white. Voices, faint and ethereal. The sound of wind whistling through reeds. The voices arranged into harmony, at first simple, then growing in complexity until it was like a river bearing down on her, like the rush of wind through heath, like the pounding of the sea on stones. Sabíana fell to her knees. Three Sirin sat over the dead warrior’s body and sang. The first—her wings green as the forest—cried tears of fiery joy. The second—her wings like living sapphire and
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He leaned down and kissed the roots of every tree in the vicinity, as if they were objects of sacred worth,
True strength is found in that most humble of acts—the death of one’s self for the sake of another.”
The Sirin looked at her with eyes like lightning, opened her mouth, and sang. The weight of the song crushed Sabíana, as though she were pinned down by the full force of both twin waterfalls. But as it washed over her, it lightened her. The heaviness of her father’s sickness, the doubt over Vasyllia’s fate, the fear about her own place as future Darina, the pain of losing Voran—all of it fell away from her. She felt re-forged from within, the impurities burned away by the force of the song. The Sirin stopped, and Sabíana felt light enough to fly to the Heights. Barely evident inside her chest
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All around was brown-yellow marshland, veined over with meandering rivers of inky blue.
grey branches and dead stumps reached up from the muddy earth, giving the land an agonized look. In the riverbeds, glacial water trickled, carving through the land like a blade through clay.
Rare, sharp snowflakes did not so much fall as shoot down from the sky like arrows.
Arms once bristling with the strength of ten men were little more than brown twigs cracked by winter.
The air was still, as though all of created Nature took a long breath before the opening chord to a festal hymn.
“Did you know that the aspen sapling in Vasyllia is no longer on fire?” Aína said, her voice wafting in from some unspeakable depth of antiquity. He never felt fully there when she spoke to him. His wife—how extraordinary to think of her as “wife”—tried to explain it by saying that Aína was only really present for her. For all others, it was like speaking through a transparent door.
A thin brushstroke of gold painted the tips of the pines on the horizon, but the marshes were already the deep purple of twilight.
Her vision swam; her thoughts moved like stale molasses. Everything about this seemed dream-like in its simultaneous vividness and indistinctness. Small details took on ridiculous clarity—the ashes fell by the hearth in a floral pattern, the blood pumped through Otchigen’s temple like a wriggling worm, she had a speck of dirt under her third left fingernail. The room looked like it was underwater.
The creature was shadowy and black, all darkness and chaos spread out like huge wings, and its eyes burned darker than the darkest black. It did not speak so much as groan like falling boulders. She did not need anyone to tell her that this was the Raven. “Too late, Sabíana. You’ve let me in.” The Raven embraced her with wings of shadow and death, and Sabíana choked under their weight and the pressure of the malice bearing down on her. The door flew open with a crash, and a winged fury of dark blue feathers and ice-grey eyes flew into the room. Faintly Sabíana heard the music of wind whistling
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The voice was a bestial cackle, something between the wheeze of a sick child and the bark of a dog.
“Lord Tarin, it has no words, what I experienced,” said Voran, breathless with wonder. “It was as if the most thunderous harmony and piercing silence mingled into one. Time raced and stopped altogether, all at a still point. It was as if I actually experienced truth personally, and yet I know nothing at all. How can I explain it? If the power of the sea could be contained in a drop of water, if the limitless potential of words could be expressed in a single thought. An infinite multiplicity in a single entity.
hair like molten gold.
“The world, as intended by the Lord of the Realms, is like music. Every voice—that is, every reasoning creature—must sing its assigned part for the song to sound well. That may sound limiting, as though the notes that determine the fate of the world have already been written, but that is not quite the truth. There is a great deal of room for improvisation, as long as harmony is maintained throughout. Thus, the low voices must not break the flow of the high, so that each moment is a beautiful chord.
