liminal, pt. i

I found a spirit in the lowlands outside the capital. She was a tiny wisp, a fragment of a fragment of something great, but she shouldn't have been possible at all. Not there. Of course she couldn't explain how she even existed. (Could you answer that question? I'm not sure I could.) And yet, there she was, in the form of a butterfly, shimmering in the shade.

I was a kid, overwhelmed by being forced into a world I did not understand and a culture I had sworn to destroy. This was . . . probably a few months after I was taken. I was angry and afraid and confused and at that moment, as I dipped my feet in the river and watched the spring leaves dancing in the wind, all of that stopped mattering. Here was something impossible. Here was someone who needed my protection.

"I've never met a human before," she said, while I stared in awe I couldn't have explained if I wanted to. "Are all humans this pretty?"

"Some," I said.

We talked. She was too new, too small, to hold much knowledge or recollection of the world, but there were fragments that suggested memories. She had so many questions about the world, about me, about the empire I'd vowed to topple. I felt, at first, wholly unprepared for something so momentous as educating an impossible spirit in the ways of the world. And then, as I tried to describe the life I'd had among my clan, there was clarity.

I understood, then, why the order that made her impossible needed to fall. It had always been this abstract ill: that I, tattooed like the hunters of old, would hunt that most dangerous of monsters, empire, and that I would stand in its ashes a conquering hero. Now that ambition took on shape and new purpose: it was mine to defend those who could not defend themselves, and so long as the empire stood, I could not stand as a champion of the weak.

I built her a shrine, then, out of fallen branches and flower buds and spring leaves. I promised her I would make the world safe for her; she promised friendship. Our contract sealed, I carved its sigil in the largest branch I'd found, and we both left that place changed.

That marked the beginning, I think, for both of us, as we both found a way to thrive and grow and change in an environment that should have been hostile to us. And one day we would be powerful enough to change the world.