Under the Pendulum Sun

by Jeannette Ng

We built on their landscape, exotic buildings that were just our little whitewashed church in Birdforth in disguise. We rained down on strange soil the same Yorkshire rain as that which drenched our skins and drove us inside, peeling off our clothes, housebound by the weather and desperate for diversion.

For all the many contradictory theories I had read on the relationship between our world and that of the fae, I was no more enlightened. It was said to be underground, but not. It overlaid our own, but not. It was another place, but not.

Though silent and lonely, it was far too skeletal to be termed picturesque.

The patchwork of different styles alluded to a long succession of prior owners, each with their own eccentricities of taste.

University had only nourished and nurtured his ambitions, but education had stifled mine. I had been taught to tame my wild impulses and desires that had agitated me to pain. I had folded it with my soul and learnt to drink contentment like you would a poison. Drop by drop, day by day. Until it became tolerable.

Laon disdained tranquillity. He could not learn my glacial stillness, for all that I had tried to teach him.

And so, here I was: clutching the compass he had left behind, knot tightening within my heart, under the light of a pendulum sun.

How could I limit an infinite God with finite words?

More than being on the moors of home, more than standing on the docks of London, more than being lost on the North Sea, this reminded me of how limited my twenty-five years has been. All the restlessness that I thought I had buried alongside my sister, returned with a passion that left me breathless.

“Blood binds blood,” she said, a little primly. “And blood knows blood. You can’t expect mortal salt to do all the work. You need to keep yourself out of harm’s way too.”

“Secrets keep you safe.”

She had thoroughly mastered the art of saying a multitude of words without any substance.

The gnome grinned to himself, causing the lines of his face to deepen as he noticed his verbal fumble created words that pleased his mouth. He savoured them like someone would sweets or chocolates. “Mot nuch, not much.”

“Weeds happen. You can never pull them out completely.

It was, perhaps, a foolish thought. But I had been restless for days and both soul and mind needed more than simply bread to sustain them. Presented now with something more, I eagerly plunged into that darkness.

My fingers smudged over my aching eyes.

Another lacuna.

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 one.

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

And when you bleed, you will bleed broken glass, bleed poison, but you will not bleed, not really, because you will be so used to bleeding inside, you will not feel it.

“I know who I am.” “You know who you are not. That is not the same thing.”

Ink and paper can defy even death.”

her speech was halting, stumbling her phrases over one another as though no sentiment could escape unimpeded by caveat.

Whatever promise that was made, whatever geas that invokes, it applies to me as well.”

Everything has a price.” “It is a very high price.” “It is that way in stories,

The ground clung to it, each sandy grain meaningless but the sum of it overwhelming.

That single, cold hand anchored me. I breathed into it.

There was a comfort in ancient, beautiful words, I supposed.