give us a smile, february

It's hard to believe a whole month has passed in 2020 and it's already a garbage year. (I'm just kidding, we all knew this was going to happen.) It's only just started being February where I am; the wind has picked up in the past few hours and it almost sounds like a storm out there. It's not, of course, but sometimes it's nice to pretend, isn't it?

I'm trying to write something on or around Saturday every week. Structure helps when you're trying to clear the cobwebs out of your brain, to find a cadence you can live with once again. So far the stories have been shifting wildly between genres and characters and settings, and this will probably continue, so, you know, be aware.

I never really liked February. At best it's the month where winter has really worn out its welcome and you spend the whole month dreaming of spring, imagining what it will be like when the sun is shining and the flowers are out and yet it's still so far away. Last year, after a particularly mild winter, it was easy to believe that February would just be more of the same. Then it snowed for two weeks straight. The city shut down. Winter does not like to go down without a fight.

When I wrote my weird themed stories back in 2013, February's theme was isolation. It's a cold and lonely month, after all. This year I'm going with "mo(u)rning", as suggested by effika. Maybe the parentheses weren't supposed to stay there, but I like the contrast there. It can be lively, it can be solemn.

Anyway, stay tuned for more of that sweet, sweet content. Feel free to throw more theme suggestions at me for next month, or for your favorite month down the road. (Guidelines: one word, maybe two. Thematic. Bonus points if it is seasonally appropriate, because I love me some seasons.)

beginnings, pt. iv

When the empire started collapsing around us, one of the first things I did was try to think of everything that had changed as the beginning of something new, rather than the death of the old. For instance: I had been a scholar in the employ of the principality; when there was nothing left of the principality to serve, it marked the beginning of my tenure as an itinerant scholar, one who served no master but the truth.  (It was a construct, of course, but then, so is royalty.)

It's hard to figure out where to draw the lines. When, for instance, did the scholar's robes I wore become so tattered and worn? They were once new and clean, a symbol of the status I enjoyed as a servant of an empire that had not yet realized it was dying. At what point, do you think, did it begin to die? At what point did it cease to be a living empire and begin its eternal existence as a dead one? At what point will people begin to see it not as an entity with a real effect on the world and begin to see it as lore and legend? I had often traveled far and wide in my efforts to uncover the secrets that too often are buried and lost by the sediment of empire, but at what point did my travels begin to feel so lonely? When did it begin to feel like I was not so much unearthing that which had been forgotten, but archiving that which we could not afford to forget? When did my curiosity begin to feel so important, so urgent?

As you can see, it became something of an obsession. Perhaps it was the only thing between my conscious self and the revelation that everything I had once known was gone, that the world was a colder, harsher place than I had believed, that I may have been the only living soul trying to make sure that, if it could not be saved, it could be remembered. Or perhaps my mind simply latched onto this new challenge because it seemed so insurmountable, because the very notion of a beginning is ultimately arbitrary. When does night become day? When does a kitten become a cat? When does a difficult task become a fool's errand?

When I first enrolled at the university, I believed that I would be finding answers, but of course it has always been the case that the deeper I delve, the more questions I find. The end of all things, though it has changed many things--my relationship with the wilderness, the way I dress, how my thoughts are formed--has not changed that.

But that's enough time on this little aside, I think. There is work to be done; time to begin.

beginnings, pt. iii

It was, I suppose, the snowstorm that ultimately sparked the beginning of our relationship. It was one of the winter festivals we would throw at the palace, something to keep the city's nobility entertained during the cold and the dark, complete with fencing and dancing and music and feasts. She was there to fence, and she defeated the city's best and brightest with such grace and such little apparent effort that of course I fell in love straightaway. It's hard to imagine someone who wouldn't have. I was too dedicated to being a good hostess to our guests to offer more than a perfunctory congratulations on her victory, but I couldn't stop myself from watching her as she navigated the crowds, so effortlessly confident, so carelessly charismatic, and every now and then she would catch me staring and just grin.

Her confidence cracked when my father announced that the storm had picked up, that lodging would be made available for those guests who could not make it home. I found her on the balcony, staring out into the blizzard, shivering against the cold. She was still there when I returned with tea. I don't think she realized who I was when I pressed a cup into her hand at first, until she turned back to look at me, a faint smirk on her lips. "A princess serving a mere commoner tea? What will your court think?"

"I just--you looked cold," I stammered, instead of something clever or even something passingly flirtatious like "I won't tell if you won't."

But she smiled, and turned back to the blizzard. "You don't have to be afraid of me, you know."

"I'm not afraid," I said, and hated how shrill, how unconvincing my voice sounded as I did. But I stood next to her on the balcony and gazed out into the storm with her, and if she found my presence as irritating as I knew she must have, she was too polite to say. Then, hating myself all the while, I said, "Are you all right?"

She looked thoughtful for a moment. "Someone brought me tea, so I'm going to say yes." A long pause followed. "Tell me your thoughts, princess. You must see something when you watch the snow bury your city."

I decided to take my time in answering. "It reminds me that everything can disappear in an instant, that everything I do will one day disappear. But it's beautiful. I could watch it for hours. And that makes me hopeful, even if it's a stupid reason to be hopeful."

She smiled at that. "Me, too, princess. Me, too."

beginnings, pt. ii

New York felt like a liminal space, too familiar to be foreign, too alien to be home. It was a place to disappear, to leave behind all the old trappings of our lives--one last "fuck you" from Sean after someone finally killed him. We shuffled into the city looking and feeling nothing like ourselves, after spending four hours on the bus, if you can imagine. I kept looking over to say something to Nora and thinking someone else was standing beside me. But nobody looked twice as we hauled our overstuffed luggage out of the terminal, and that was the idea. We could have been anyone. I thought that comfortable anonymity would have set my mind at ease, but instead I felt exposed. If something went wrong now, this far from everything, what could we do?

We met our contact--when I insisted she give me a real name she said, and I quote, "You can call me Charlotte, because I'm kind of a lot"--at a diner that was far too brightly lit, its colors too garish. I couldn't focus as she told us about the tech she'd added to the cheap, sensible car we would be taking west, or about the work she'd done on constructing identities for us in the event things went wrong. I didn't even have enough focus to be suspicious.

"Nothing's untraceable," she was saying, in response to something Nora said. "But anyone trying to trace you will have to get past me, and I'm fucking awesome."

The car she'd prepped for us was waiting in a nearby parking lot, where she assured us the parking fees had been taken care of. It was a far cry from what I imagined when I thought of Nora taking me on a road trip somewhere--this car was too cramped, too weak, too bland. There was no room to get comfortable, no room in the back to sleep.

It was supposed to be fun. We'd earned some quiet, Nora and I, after everything that had happened, but there was no peace to be found on the path we'd found ourselves on. Still, there was nowhere to go but forward.

beginnings, pt. i

There is something powerful about the fear of being alone that drives even the most resolutely introverted among us to make strange decisions. So I found myself at a party on new year's that, by virtue of being a party, I didn't particularly want to be at. At the time it sounded better than the alternative.

I must have been giving off some strong "not having fun" vibes; most of the people who talked to me started with "Are you okay?" and I had to force a smile and say something like "Yeah, just tired," and then we'd engage in awkward party talk until there was a pause long enough for one of us to make our excuses and wander off, or, occasionally, just quietly slip away. But, credit where it's due, the woman who had commandeered the bar made some pretty solid drinks and I did enjoy the excuse to dress up.

Shortly before midnight, when I'd ducked outside to get some air, I encountered someone else who seemed to be having as much fun as I was, and we just sat on the back porch and talked. The exact sort of quiet conversation I enjoyed, with someone who was interesting and who laughed at my jokes and didn't seem to find the sound of my voice annoying. At midnight she told me, "I think I'd like to kiss you," and I told her I'd be okay with that. And once it was no longer impolite to leave I walked her back to her house, which was not far, and then walked back to mine, which was.

There was a time in my life I really loved the idea of having a meet-cute, something spontaneous and romantic that drew me together with my partner. I even dated a few people where I tried to manufacture that moment, with limited success. Back then I would have scoffed at "We met at a party where we were both older than everyone else there and we just found that we liked talking to each other" as a story of the beginning of a relationship, but it feels comforting now, like drinking tea in the winter, wrapped up in blankets, watching a fire. And sometimes comforting is what you need.

back in black!

My friends, the blog fields have lain fallow for far too long. The years have been hard, it's true, the winters harsh, the summers unrelenting, but there was a time when a traveler could walk these lands any week of the year and find blog fruit ripe for the taking, fresh from the vine, and it is my intention to make that happen once again.

I just spent the first few days of the new year reading over the old posts from 2013, the last great year of this blog, and you know what? I really enjoyed that project. It was fun to visit and revisit stories, and reading over them there's a few entries I was really pleased with. The thing I had forgotten, in my intro, is that this had started as an idea I apparently had in a conversation with someone which I have since entirely forgotten (I think I might remember who it was, though) to just give each month a theme and write on it. I'm doing that. That's the plan.

It is, to be sure, a far less ambitious project than 2013, which was about points and counterpoints, and calling it a project may be a bit of a stretch, but now is as good a time as any to get back to writing something regularly on here. I've missed it.

The year got off to something of a rocky start, but today was a good day. Good enough that I found myself actually thinking of doing this, and then sat down and started putting it down where people could see it. So let's start with "beginnings" as a theme, and hopefully by the time February comes around I'll have thought of a good one.

And now, because all good content concludes with a call to action and because the idea of readers suggesting themes sounds much more charming than it otherwise would have: do you have any good monthly theme ideas? Let me know in the comments, and don't forget to like, share, and subscribe!

does that joke even work with a blog? what did bloggers say when they got insufferable? do blogs even still exist?

time marches on

What I always liked about New Year's celebrations is precisely how arbitrary they are. There is no religious mandate for the calendar to increment, no cultural touchstone we're celebrating, just celebrating that the year is over, in much the same way that we celebrate that the weekend has come. We've decided, not because our gods demand it, that when the year starts anew, we should take the time to reflect, to celebrate, to promise to do better.

By any standard, it's been a rough year and a rough decade. I like New Year's Eve because it's a quiet, personal day, and the predominant theme of this past decade is the slow strangulation of the quiet and the personal. There's no room left for little victories, for those peaceful moments where everything feels just right. It has been a bad decade in a way that is massive and all-encompassing.

And yet. I was worried we'd end this year with the sad drizzle that has characterized much of this month, but there's a strong wind blowing outside. I still remember, distant though those memories were, finding magic in the woods on an island somewhere, stepping into a softer world for a few perfect days. I've written things I'm proud of, made friends, survived. I have no reason to think it's going to get better out there, but there is no reason to abandon the quiet and the personal.

Take care of yourselves, and happy 2020.

inktober archive

I wrote a thing "every day" for Inktober, which is an event which apparently started as one copyright troll's idea to do an ink drawing every day in October and has become an event as ubiquitous as Nano Rhino, but without the inherent impracticality that the aforementioned novel-writing event brings to the table. I am bad at drawing so I wrote fantasy vignettes about life in a dying empire and a dying world. With two exceptions, I used the "official" prompts from this year; on those exceptions I used prompts from previous years because I liked them better. Below I've collected links to all of these vignettes for your convenience.

• ring
• mindless
• bait
• freeze
• build
• sword
• enchanted
• frail
• swing
• pattern
• snow
• dragon
• ash
• overgrown
• legend
• wild
• ornament
• misfit
• sling
• tread
• treasure
• ghost
• ancient
• dizzy
• tasty
• dark
• coat
• ride
• injured
• wreck
• ripe

ripe

I did settle down, eventually. I always thought there wasn't a road long enough to take me away from my old world, but I found one in the end. A quiet little village, hidden away in the lee of the mountains. They let me work to earn my keep even though all I knew was war--honest work, not the sort of work people usually find for people like me. The first few months I was there, I kept mostly to myself, and they respected that. They knew, I think, that I carried some scars. So I spent my days working the orchard, and when I had the time I'd walk the forest, learning the landscape. I was content, but it all felt temporary.

The orchard belonged to a woman who had recently inherited it--I didn't pry into the details, but there was too much to tend to on her own and there weren't enough people in the village to help. I stayed in a room in a house that was much too big for her, and though we spent most of the day working together, we seldom spoke of anything personal. Still, she seemed to enjoy my presence, and I liked working with her.

As a beautiful autumn started to give way into winter, the village prepared for its annual festival, celebrating the harvest and the turn of the seasons, honoring the spirits of the land. "It's a time of transition and transformation," my host explained. "Those are worth celebrating." And, she added, it was a festival for the dead--not to mourn, but to celebrate. "And to show them we're doing well. I imagine they worry."

She insisted that I attend, despite my initial reluctance. "You're part of this town. You helped make the cider we'll be drinking. This is your celebration, too."

I relented.

The whole village was alive that evening with revelers gathered around bonfires, drinking cider from barrels that I'd helped fill, feasting on foods grown and harvested here or gathered in the forest--apples, yes, but also pumpkins and corn and cheese, wild berries and meats. Children in costume ran around, shrieking happily as they ran and played in this somehow otherworldly landscape.

Now and again someone would recognize us and compliment the cider. "Your finest since, well, since your folks were still with us," was a common sentiment. And she would smile and say that I deserved some of the credit, and they'd clap me on the shoulder or shake my hand and thank me, not out of politeness, but because they genuinely appreciated my efforts.

As the night wore on and the crowds thinned, my host and I walked through the orchard, spreading cider for the spirits--"They work hard, too," she said when I asked, a levity to her tone I wasn't quite used to. Then we sat on the steps of her house watching the distant fires, waiting for the first light of dawn.

"I don't know who you lost," she said, after a long silence, "or whether they can see you tonight. I'm sure that they'd be very happy if they could, though, just to see you smiling. To see you living well."

"Am I living well?" I asked.

 

"I think so. I think you've allowed yourself to be happy, despite the darkness. And I think that together we can do our best to keep the dark at bay in this little part of the world." She took my hand in hers. "And just maybe, remind each other to smile now and again?"

"Maybe," I said.

We sat there like that, my head on her shoulder, her arm around my waist, until the first light of dawn glimmered on the horizon. In the morning there would be more work to be done, but perhaps allowing ourselves the time to have fun was not so bad a thing after all.

wreck

I had planned on coming back, at first. Even after the shipwreck, when I found myself washed ashore on an island that, as far as I knew, was uninhabited, I was planning on finding a way home. Burn the wreckage to signal a passing ship, perhaps--the island was thickly forested, so I had no real worry about shelter or forage. I could afford to waste time thinking about home. Even once I found the village--or rather, once they found my makeshift shelter and insisted that I come back with them--at first I still dreamed of home. They were nothing but kind to me, but even with war looming, even with everything that had happened--everything she did to me because she thought I'd let her--I missed it.

If we're being honest, I still do. But the war never touched the island, and if I managed to lure a ship here, would that change? I certainly didn't look like I'd survived a shipwreck. After they had gone to such lengths to elude the grasp of empire, would I bring empire to their doorstep? Was finding a way home worth destroying someone else's?

So I stayed. I stayed and I promised I wouldn't let myself wallow in regret and nostalgia--they had offered me a life here, and it would be rude of me to squander it by living someone else's life. We had hard times, of course--I don't think anyone fully escaped those--but it was peaceful. And I felt like I was part of something bigger than me or any one person, far more than I ever did back home.

But yes, I planned on returning, and a part of me still wishes, no matter how I try not to think about it, I'd managed to at least send a message. But I suppose no matter what you do, the past will always tempt you with the idea of closure, of what-if. And no matter what you do that will never be enough.

injured

The first time I almost died, my friend--arguably the only real friend I had in the whole ragtag lot of us--gave me a charm to keep me safe. That night I had a strange, beautiful dream, full of doors leading to a world more beautiful than my mind could comprehend. All I remember of that world is my emotion upon seeing it, an overpowering sadness that I could only access it in dreams. I awoke the following morning in tears, still overwhelmed with the sorrow and beauty of it all. And for some reason, I could only glimpse the world these doors led to.

The dream lingered in my mind through the day, distracting me from the thoughts I should have been having, like the fact that I felt much better than I had previously, far better than a single night's rest should have been able to accomplish. And more importantly, it made me forget about the charm. I still wore it, of course, because it was a gift from a friend, but nothing else about it struck me as noteworthy.

Two things changed from that point on: every now and then I'd have some variation on that dream--never exactly the same, but always just as powerful as the first time; and I seemed to bear a charmed life. Every time I should have taken serious injury, whether due to my own mistakes or some misfortune, I somehow escaped . . . if not entirely unharmed, then at least with less harm than I ought to have taken.

I came to rely on it, without entirely realizing it. I could use it to protect my comrades, to keep everyone safe, to make sure we all made it through to the end. It seemed important, somehow, as if maybe if everyone made it out alive I could finally access the beautiful world of my dreams.

I couldn't, of course, and as the years wore on I found that the charm didn't extend to my friends and allies. Sometimes, no matter how I tried, I couldn't protect them. And every time I'd walk away and wonder why I had been spared, what I was supposed to see, or do, or if it wasn't just there to torment me.

It was years later that I finally ran into my friend again, and from the look in her eyes they had been no kinder to her than they were to me. She smiled when she saw the charm, though. "I'm glad it's kept you safe all these years." And like a spell being broken, I remembered. A few weeks later I met a traveler who still had the spirit to fight, and gave her the charm--"For good luck on the road," I told her. "It's kept me safe over the years, but the fight's gone out of me." She smiled, and thanked me, and continued on her way.

The dream never changed. Every time I had it, I would awake with the conviction that there was something vast and beautiful out there that would be forever beyond my reach. But there was a hope behind the sorrow now. This world didn't seem quite so bleak as it once did.

ride

In the days before the end, she sent me--and everyone, really--on a lot of errands. Everything, no matter how trivial it should have been, took on a level of absolute urgency. We knew the end was approaching, both from a strategic and logistical standpoint, and because you could feel it. I could, anyway, and I think the others could, too, even if they didn't know it: there was something oppressive in the air, like a storm building, except it didn't break. It just kept getting worse, and it put everyone on edge.

And, yeah, part of it was the princess. She was getting desperate--there was a reason she was losing followers--and desperation pushes people to strange things. And I don't mean "strange" as in "making poor strategic choices," but strange as in "sending urgent letters to people who wanted no part of the rebellion." And she still had that way about her where if you weren't careful you'd just go along with her ideas, wouldn't question it until you were already committed.

Sometimes I think she'd stopped trusting anyone, even those of us who had stuck around, and was trying to get us out of the way so we couldn't stop her. Other times, when I'm in a particularly dark mood, I'm convinced she just wanted to separate everyone right before she destroyed everything. And very occasionally I entertain the idea that maybe she did it to save us from the fallout.

That night she pressed a sealed envelope in my hand and told me to ride for the estate of some countess or other--it would be several days' ride for me, and I was equipped to deliver messages quickly; any meaningful help the countess could provide would arrive too late. And yet, the way she asked, with such confidence, such conviction . . . maybe she knew something I didn't. Maybe this would avert disaster. What choice did I have but to ride?

coat

One of our friends gave my sister and me a coat she'd inherited from a family member, and since we couldn't both wear it at the same time we decided we'd say it was mine. I wore it quite a bit, and eventually it became my thing. That is, people associated me with the coat and vice-versa. The princess--this was before she inherited that title, I suppose--liked to tease me about how much I liked it, and it was too much energy to argue. And it was a nice coat, I suppose. 

My sister liked using it when we were pretending to be each other, especially once people got wise to the trick and started looking for the little clues they thought we'd overlooked. Somehow it only reinforced the idea everyone had that the coat held some deep sentimental value for me, and at some point everyone else's attachment to the idea of my attachment to this coat stopped wearing on me and became something fun and whimsical I sought out.

It was the coat I wore when they appointed me as her protector, the coat I wore as the fragile order of our world started falling apart. I was wearing that coat when I earned some of my scars, and each time I cleaned it up and patched it. Each patch was a mark of pride, or at least a reminder of what I'd done.

When most of us parted ways for the first time--we could feel disaster approaching even then, years before the war--I gave the coat away as a token of friendship. If she's to be believed, she wore it until it fell apart. By then, she told me, it became something of a legend--but then, she likes telling stories, so of course it did.

The world is altogether less sentimental now, but there's still a place for whim, I think. Even if there's not much hope left there's no harm in a smile and a story about that time your lucky coat protected you from harm.

dark

Growing up in the capital, it never really got dark--not in the sense that I always imagined it, so dark you can't see your hand in front of your face, the kind of dark where you're lucky if you can see the suggestion of shapes. I didn't think about it often, but every now and then I'd catch a glimpse of it. It used to frighten me, as my imagination would fill the darkness with horrors or, worse, would imagine it completely empty, a void that would swallow everything given the chance. My heart would race every time.

It's normal for children to be frightened of the dark, I suppose. And perhaps it's normal for that fear to linger--why else build a city where there is always light enough to see by? The monsters may be gone, but surely we must believe that there is something lurking in the shadows, something that can be banished if only the lanterns stay lit.

I don't know when I became obsessed with the dark. Perhaps it was the sheer novelty of it--in the city the darkness was hard to find, but out here, all it took was a cloudy night and the shadows would overtake everything.

I remember one night a storm rolled in after everyone was asleep. I wrapped myself in a cloak and felt my way away from camp, off the trail, and into the woods. The wind and rain and hail were impossibly loud, and my only illumination came from the occasional flash of lightning--too quick to do anything but disorient me further.

When I'd gone far enough--far enough that I wasn't sure I could find my way back, perhaps, or maybe I simply couldn't bring myself to go any further--I found a tree to sit down against, and let the storm rage around me. I was cold and lost and I don't think my companions could have heard me even if I shouted for help.

I still couldn't tell you why I felt the need--no, the compulsion--to do this, but I can tell you that it felt amazing. Surrounded by nothing but storm and darkness, with so little protection against the world, my heart racing like it did when I was a child--I felt alive, like I'd found something I didn't realize I was missing.

I made my way back to camp when the sky began to lighten enough for me to see. By then the rain had let up, and I wanted to start a fire. No one asked why I was up so early, or why I was soaked and grinning. My companions, I think, understood me better than I did.

tasty

I picked up the habit of carrying around an easily accessible pouch of red pepper from an old friend who started a lot of fights and told me she found it a lot easier to fight when the opponent is blind and in pain. I figured it could help me out of the occasional scrape, but these days, I mostly keep it around because it's tasty. There's a lot of empty road out there and after a while having a bit of spice to your meals helps make them more tolerable. My friend was the one who did the cooking back before we went our separate ways, so I guess it's nostalgic in a way. I'm not as good as she was but it still brings back memories when I cook something up in the evenings.

I met a merchant on the road the other day and she gave me a look when I asked if she had any red pepper. "It's funny," she said. "Just yesterday I ran into someone else asking for pepper. Don't usually see travelers looking for it."

"This traveler. Skinny, scruffy, talks a lot?"

"That's the one."

"She was heading north on the road here?"

She nodded. "You could probably catch up if you hurry."

I paid and hit the road again. Prior to this little exchange I was just wandering, but now . . . well, I was just saying how I missed my friend's cooking. Maybe I can catch up to her on the road. No luck so far, but I have a good feeling.

dizzy

I never liked crowds, but it got worse over the years. Every time I was forced into a large gathering, I was afraid that I might lose a piece of myself to the crowd and never be able to find it again. Sometimes I was afraid that I would return diminished; others, that I would return different, changed. It didn't help that I was good at people--not as good as my sister, but we had both learned to use a smile as a mask. So inevitably, when we needed to win someone over, one of us would be sent. And every time I would steel myself, hide behind my mask, and try my very best not to drift away.

It worked right up until it didn't. The princess needed allies--this was just before she got too paranoid to continue trying to build a coalition--and she wanted any support we could muster. I tried to protest, as I always did, and she brushed off my concerns, as she always did. So I traveled, I dressed up, I tried to steel myself, and I put on a smile.

Panic gripped me as soon as I walked into the ballroom. My heart pounded, the world spun, and I stumbled my way into a corner, murmuring apologies to the guests, hoping this would eventually pass. Someone--my traveling companion, I assumed--guided me out to a balcony, and sat with me until I calmed down.

"I'm fine," I said, once the imminent sense of being attacked had faded into something somewhat tolerable. "Just got a bit dizzy." And I smiled immediately, while my companion frowned at me.

"That must be it," she said. "Poor rations on the trail. Entirely my fault."

"Right," I said, and spent what felt like another eternity trying to get my breathing under control. If I could just get my breathing back to normal, everything would be fine.

"You know," she said, "if you're feeling faint, there's still some food at the inn. I could cover for you here." She hesitated, then added, "It was, after all, absolutely unconscionable of me not to take care of you on the road." And there it was: a way out. Give up, go home, and take care of myself, or hope that my fear of crowds had abated enough that I could endure the evening and maybe achieve someone else's goal for them.

She escorted me through the crowd and out the entrance. We'd think of a story to tell the princess on the road. Much later, we'd wonder, over a bottle of wine she nicked from the cellar, if this was what sent her down the road to paranoia. None of us were quite the same after.

ancient

There's an argument I have with the princess all the time, where I ask her why she has any right to rule and why any of us should be following her, and I pick holes in her responses until she gets tired of me and kicks me out. It always comes down to this: her family has been there the longest, so the throne is hers by right--you know how it goes. Tonight something I said must have stuck with her because she's sitting outside my tent when I get back from wandering the woods.

She's tired of trying to find an answer I like, and wants me to give her one. So I tell her to follow me and lead her off into the woods. There's an old ruined shrine here--the kind that's been ruined since before any of this started, so overgrown and decayed that you could miss it if you don't know how to look. "Why do I like places like this?"

"Because you like anything that reminds us that we exist at the sufferance of nature?"

"Well, yes, but that's not the answer I'm looking for." I sit down against a crumbling wall. "This place is ancient, and there's still some power here, but not enough that anyone's likely to care about it. There will be no wars over a place like this. So why did I lead you out here?"

"Because you delight in being cryptic and irritating?"

"Also true, but still not the point." I lie down and close my eyes. "I like these places because they're beautiful, and peaceful. I feel safe here."

"So . . . you think you should be following me because I'm pretty?"

"You're trying to bait me. I won't bite. But you're not far off. There's plenty of ancient things in this world with no merits to speak of, to say nothing of the ones that are actively harmful. If there is a reason for us to follow you, it has nothing to do with tradition. Be worthy of it, and you'll convince me."

She sits in silence for a long while, and eventually lies down next to me. "How do I convince myself I'm worthy?" she asks, quietly. Like she's afraid that if she speaks too loudly, the world might realize she's human, with human vulnerabilities. It breaks my heart, just a little.

I don't have an answer to that question, and maybe she just thought I was asleep. I keep my eyes closed and my breathing steady, until my feigned sleep becomes real and the night becomes morning.

ghost

I always thought I'd notice if I died--if there was any of me left to do the noticing, I suppose. Surely there is something that ties us to the bodies we're trapped in for our entire lives? But it was weeks, months, possibly even years before I noticed that I no longer had a physical form. It was such a seamless transition, almost as if I were meant to live on as a ghost.

Almost. Sometimes, much of the time, I forget that I was ever human at all. Humans are so small, so fragile, compared to the eternal majesty of this form--except majesty is such a human concept. I am the continent, I am civilization, I am the order that humanity has imposed on this world--and it's so easy to forget, when you are so vast, that you were once so small.

Perhaps it's better that way. I always had strong will, for a human, but did I have the will to shatter this world and reforge it anew? I very much doubt it. I still wanted to be loved, wanted people around me to be happy, and who can say they are happy now? Who could possibly love me now? Better, much better, to forget about being human. It is fortunate that my flesh perished long ago, unmarked and unmourned.

These days it seems that I am spending more time aware of my humanity, more time as a ghost, haunting the halls of a single building rather than a spirit that stretches for countless miles in all directions. My work is unfinished, and yet only rarely am I able to sense what needs to be done, much less effect the necessary change.

If I remember the stories (and it has been so long since anyone has told me a story), ghosts linger because they have something left to do. Is that why I'm here? What could I possibly have left undone? Everyone who betrayed me, everyone I betrayed in turn, are dead now. I have left a broken world behind and no matter how I try to fix it, fixing it eludes me. And now I can no longer even make the attempt?

I always thought of my body as a prison when I was alive, but at least it was not shackled here in this dead tower, waiting for . . . what? Some hero to come and put me to rest? The heroes all died.

There is a thought in my mind that keeps trying to form, one that I am unable to grasp. Sometimes I can see its shape, sense its magnitude--it is something vast, something to do with prisons, the reason I keep meditating on that word, but already as I talk about it it's gone, vanished exactly like a ghost.

treasure

When the dust finally settled, when there was no more ash and soot and endless winter, when it no longer seemed optimistic that we might survive to see another summer, a few enterprising individuals started scavenging the ruins in search of the things we left behind. Tools, weapons, cookware, trinkets--we'd lost so much. The hope, at the time, was that we could recover some of it.

Within a few years, most of the towns and villages--at least, the ones that were easiest to reach--had been more or less picked clean of valuable finds. Many of us stopped scavenging, then, content that what we had found was enough for whatever our purposes was. Some of us, however, continued exploring the deeper, more remote places. I can't speak for anyone else, but if you'd asked me at the time I'd have said it was curiosity that drove me. Maybe I still would.

There were ruined shrines and temples scattered throughout the wilds, cities and towns where the cataclysm had rendered access nearly impossible. Some of them were days, if not weeks, from the nearest settlement--too remote, most of us decided, for anything but a dedicated expedition, and who had time for that? I was probably not the only one mad enough to attempt it on my own, but there weren't many of us. These sites would be pristine, untouched.

So I learned to live off the land as well as I could, and I set out. Whatever treasures these lost places hid, I would find them. There was so much to discover, so much to experience, before someone looked at all of this beautiful decay and saw only profit, before there was nothing left out here to treasure.

tread

I tried to learn the sound of everyone's footsteps in my time at the monastery--the steady, dull tread of the abbot, the soft, easy stride of my protector, the hurried gait of my fellow shrine-keeper. It was far from foolproof, but it helped convince them I wasn't helpless simply because I couldn't see.

For the longest time, her footsteps were the only thing I knew about my protector. They weren't allowed to talk to anyone outside their order, and the usual methods of getting around that--writing it down or using their sign language--you can imagine had some problems. The others--the abbot and my fellow--seemed puzzled that I had any interest in communicating with her in the first place, so I received no help on that front. We developed some basics, but otherwise she was like a ghost, someone whose presence I could sense but could never really see or understand. The quiet tread of her boots on the earth was at once comforting and unnerving.

I started talking to her, from time to time. Our rudimentary system of knocks for responses didn't allow for much in the way of conversation, but it helped her feel less like a looming wraith and more like a person, and I imagined, at least, that she appreciated having someone at least make the effort.

Every now and again she would leave, usually for a week or two--some business with the protectors, probably. One day she returned and left something on my desk--a small necklace with a stone that pulsed with energy. "For me?" She knocked once to indicate yes. "Help me put it on?"

Her hands were rough but dexterous as she fastened the chain around my neck. After she had withdrawn, I tried to focus on the feeling of power, when I noticed a voice in my thoughts--something quiet, and clearly not my own thoughts.

The aristocracy were fond of giving these to their most trusted retainers, said the voice. There aren't many left, but I found a collector who was willing to trade. And a jeweler to set yours in a necklace.

A set of sending stones. A way to communicate at last. They were meant to send messages that could be retrieved in a moment of quiet meditation, but it was something. And that day, exhausted though she was from her travels, it seemed her footsteps were a little livelier than they had been in quite some time.