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Every Shadow Burns My Face

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malins

malins

Stumbling Seeker
[ a little fairytale of a story which will twist its way to the kind of end such tales have. The ingredients are all in the pot, such as kings and quens and knights and frogs, good and bad but it still needs some stirring. Though no dwarves or dragons - but fire, and, of course crosses. That might take a while because sometimes it's a long journey for someone until they learn to accept and appreciate the cross...]


1
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They found the emaciated creature in a ravine not an hour's march from the monastery.

She must have barely subsisted in the wilderness for weeks, if not months. Seemingly unable to speak and barely crawling, she offered no resistance when they lifted up her tattered cloak to look for any dire wounds or signs of infectious illness. Skin and bones, jutting ribs, deep, livid bruises, scratches and sores.
However, the attempt to pull back the hood over her face brought a sudden storm of kicking and screaming, from whatever reserves remained in her exhausted form.

“Don't”, she cried.
“The fire in my face. Every touch of light will burn my face. The moon, it burns my face…”
“...Even every shadow burns my face.”

They left the hood on, they picked her up, carried her.
“We have salves and potions,” they promised; “the scars will never go but trust us, you will be able to bear the light again.”

“Devil-fire”, she had said, that it was devil-fire.
“And if you looked upon me, it would burn you too.”

They said nothing more then. The hood stayed on.
They knew about devils.

In fact, many had joined the Order because the courses of their own lives had given plenty proof of demons and devils at work, and brought them to seek gods to counteract them.

With the outbreak of war, they had witnessed many works of devilry and taken in many broken creatures.

It was rumored that when Tsilsne had tired of people's presence, strings of molten sulphur were poured over their faces. And perhaps worse things put upon them, curses crafted from wicked words.
 
Up to the monastery they carried her.

There they noticed her right arm was broken and had set badly; they broke it again and reset it with a proper splint.
The woman endured it without complaint.
Perhaps she had been able to fend for herself in the wilderness before whatever had happened to break it, and sought the proximity of human settlement only after the incident.
Her callused feet told of months roaming barefoot in the wilderness.

At the monastery, she asked for nothing but darkness and they gave her darkness, in one of the abandoned hermits' cells.

She asked for no food; it seemed then, that she was looking only for a place to die in.
They brought food nevertheless, setting it down at the entrance into the rockface and taking it away later.

The cell itself always had a trickle of water.
That reminded her of how she had survived between the rocks and in the crevasses.
She could not resist the temptation of slaking her thirst.

They kept offering food, and from the third day on, she took of it.
The cell could be made utterly dark with the stone rolled in front and no light filtering through the serpentine entryway.
Here she could be alone for days and nights on end.

The night vigil observed that she began to emerge in moonlight, the hood always in place, and sought to wash herself. After two weeks the hooded figure first came into daylight.
 
She hardly uttered a word, but the Sisters noticed that, when no-one stood too near, she often sang to herself.
Mostly lullabies and nursery rhymes. Mourning lost children, perhaps.

But sometimes they caught her voice on the wind, carrying old songs of legend.
She decorated them with melismatic airs and unexpected trills, as if she'd learned her singing from creatures of the forest.
Perhaps she had forgotten there to speak and learned to sing.

Sometimes the brothers and sisters pricked up their ears to disquieting chants, familiar and foreign at the same time, as if someone had spilled the secret songs of ceremony, but it was her again.
It seemed impossible to tell whether that voice really came out from under the shroud or from somewhere beside her.
When she ever spoke, single words or short phrases, her voice seemed squeaky, constricted and breathless.

They gave her a shift like the Sisters wore and a newly fashioned hood, and a veil to wear beneath that, and bandages to further wrap her face underneath that, and a cape to drape above it all.

Removing the hood was left alone to her, when she needed to feel herself, in utter darkness.
Tracing her hands over ridges and scabs and corrugations that seemed to crawl and buckle, as if her face was forever slowly boiling and melting and bubbling from the devil-fire, then crusting and congealing again, settling into new contortions.

But as long as there was no light, there was also no pain. In the dark the fire didn't burn.
Driving her away from the light was part of the curse. The slits in her mask that allowed her to see were already enough to constantly torment her at day.

How she loved the moonless nights.
Child of darkness, child of the new moon.

 
2
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While he waited for the delegation of the Guilds to present their new engines of death, the General's gaze rested on the jagged peaks over the colorful tiled roofs of the autumn town of Iannistraie by its pleasant lake.
The snow-caps were dull gray and had retreated far up the slopes. New snow should have come even in the valley, but it seemed the gods were sending back a second summer, one they had stolen nine years ago.

Perhaps it had started with that. All from a fluke of the seasons.

The banners of white on black snapped angrily in the shifting gusts of the warm, foreign winds.
Sometimes as they twisted, those tempest blasts carried the shouts and rhythms of exercising soldiers, or the distant bustle of the markets, the bells of the service or the clanging from anvils.
Fire in the forges, flames on the mountain, sparks on the wind.

He remembered then how the air had rushed past them, sucked up into the sky, driving sparks and embers to the clouds.
How they had stared, friend and foe stricken in awe, at the enormous spiraling sheets of flame.

“You can watch the witch burn, but don't breathe her in. Be wary of her ashes on the wind.”

It was one of those things she'd say, as she sat writing.
She'd turn, toss the curls from her face, seek him with her eyes, and throw out something like that.
It wasn't because she was mad – she was, he'd come to understand, but that wasn't how it showed.

Just too full of ideas. People like that usually weren't long for this world.

It hadn't occurred to him then that she might have been feeling out her own future.
Was that what it was – make them all breathe her in, so no-one could ever forget her?

He surely had her inside him. Those dreams couldn't be put off.
When he saw her walking up to Death Himself standing there with Scythe and Spade and spitting in His eye, that was no recollection and no imagination. That was a visitation.

You made that huge pyre for yourself, so you'd be spread far and wide, further even than soldiers marched in your name? So your soot would settle all across the land?

They go and burn witches; she wasn't a witch as far as he knew, and burned herself.
Some say it was out of pride, some say just the opposite.
Ruses, yes – any manner of deception, but all along, he'd never seen witchcraft at work. Some unwitting enchantment perhaps.
She hadn't minded people believing it though. For the sake of notoriety. A reputation fueled with ever more grotesque threats and ultimatums.
Not all that was said of her was true, but, where there's smoke there must be fire, and some of it was real.

And she'd always said she didn't belong here. He'd thought she meant the South, Belquemer, or the Middlelands, or... all or any of that; but she never tried to go back North, she'd meant the world.

Smoke and mirrors.
Most of the battles of course had been great games of confidence, too.
The first ones had been more like raids.
But the last one had been all to real, to the end.
A better end still than could have been expected.
But that had been thanks to the discipline of the footmen.
And that was what they were training outside, under that row of dull jagged teeth, that ended far beyond the horizon with that broken tusk, that fateful peak.
 
To battle, she'd gone with the finest coat of mail gold could buy, a three-quarter length sword, and a fiendishly sharp dagger.
The mail would offer some protection if any blow came through the ring of guards around her.
The sword a last-ditch defense; her skill with it at best basic, her discipline poor for further training.
Several times though he'd found her facing a mirror, contemplating the dagger.
It would be her own misericorde set against her in case of imminent capture.

What whim of the gods was it - to choose of all possible people, this creature as the magic mirror to reflect, five ten fiftyfold, the cruelty of kings back at them?

Friend and foe inevitably would wonder what she'd look like, at her most vulnerable, that fearsome warrior queen. That unwilling queen.
He knew; and beholding her like that raised by itself the desire to see her suffer.
You needed to know then, what she would look like – crying and twisting and screaming.
You wanted to see her utter surrender.
He knew that too.

It was unthinkable what would have been done to her at the hands of enemies.

In fact she'd thrown that right at them – was it not proof that she must be an instrument of the gods; how else could someone so visibly unsuitable lead such an improbable army from victory to victory?

It wasn't that she was weak.
Often she rode clandestine, apart from the main force, along circuitous routes.
But reclining in the tent, all in all too much of fertile curves and fragile features.
Oh you could, each on their own, point out a nose that was perhaps too sharp or a line of the jaw too angular, but taken with the entirety, her colors, her scents, her moves, she was the singular specimen of her own unique category of perfection. Not only in his eyes, that much was sure. Much more likely than to seek out flaws you would forget time while you drifted in the emerald pools of her eyes.

She was easy to look at.

In the sense that she let you do it, let you take her in, instead of turning away or averting her gaze.
In return, after a time, she'd rise, walk up close to you, unnervingly close, just outside of kissing close, and lock her eyes on yours, deeply, she'd be studying your face, reading the lines; then she'd place her hands on your shoulder, a very soft touch, let them become heavy for a moment, sinking into you, and then withdraw.

Something would stay though.

Whether you loved or hated her, man or woman, young or old, she would not ever let go of you after that.

In that way, she was unbearable to look upon.
Unbearable unless you could accept to be touched by her.

Was it because of this that it seemed the world couldn't rest until it was rid of her? And she'd returned the sentiment.

Up from the South, from one of the republics on the narrow strait, those that were tacit allies, enemies of enemies - there had been a painter, who stayed at the winter residence and even followed on some of the campaigns.
The artist worked in that shocking new style where the portrait looked right back at you.
As the artist explained, one thing you had to do was make the face just slightly cross-eyed, so when you stepped in to study it, the painted eyes would lock on you out of the canvas.
The artist wasn't interested in any of the politics or the war; she was just the perfect subject.

And he'd done it, he'd captured her.

One of the portraits, it hung here in the room.
Where the sun would strike her face before sinking behind the peaks.
You could imagine that she would start speaking from out of her golden frame on the wall.
She did, at night, and Tsilsne's whispers floated through the corridors and sank into his dreams.
 
You could imagine that she would start speaking from out of her golden frame on the wall.

And he hadn't been there of course, but he could imagine:
How it must have been when she made her appeal to that handful of warriors, offering nothing but an honorable death for a hopeless cause.
A newborn babe on her arm and all the rest, husband, father, children, slaughtered in red treason.
Who would bear to see her like that and not want to die hopelessly?

And she had made a rite of that; requesting of the gods only the gift of death, and holding out no other promise for her followers.
So much of death for me, sparing me only for the sake of harvesting my sorrow? Then why not - Death for all and everyone. That had been their song.

One might ask what indeed had been the most important weapon in the field – the pike, the arquebuse, the drum that kept the squares and lines together – or the invisible armor built from those invocations of Death.
And they'd called her death-defying when she'd always sought His embrace, but when she finally met Him, she was disappointed, like a lover from afar who meets an adored who doesn't live up to expectations.
And got angry with Him.
Poked Him in the eye.
So, the dream told.
Bad idea.
In the end, she had been mad.

Smoke and mirrors. Soot of the witch.

“Be wary of her ashes on the wind.” - And then she'd sneezed.

Go to the sea, he'd said – there you'd get rid of that damned hayfever.

Get some fresh air in your lungs. Listen to the lapwings. She could have stepped out of the tent and pointed in the direction of the distant sea – any sea she wished to see – and the soldiers would have brought her there. Kingdoms in between would have made way, willingly or not.

I'll go after I'm done with this, she'd said.
When would that be, when she didn't seem to desire any attainable victory.
Surely the winds had taken grains of her to sea by now.

Hastinbar must have taken in a lungful of her too.
His whole town. Full of unrest, one heard. Strange sayings in the streets.
The wind often went that way from Peak Gaunabant.
Half the gold coins going around in that town still had the mark of Tsilsne beaten on the reverse, or so the traders said.
He'd been listening to their stories.

He'd heard the rumors, that the pyre was still smoldering, months after – that there were still wisps of smoke rising off the flanks of that mountain, denuded of anything combustible.

She kept on getting inside of people.

Stop it. Your story is done. Stop it and let us find our own story.
 
Stories had started to spread, - like the dreams, they couldn't be discounted as mere recollections, however embellished.

Legends.
Soot of the witch in the air. Whatever breath they'd taken in, it came speaking out of each who told them.

Fragments.
A few people might care about saying or hearing it as it was.

But who could tell that story and where to start?

One might start with the threats and the nightmares, the possessed dreams.
Dreams made flesh when the need came - when they just wouldn't surrender the guilty.
For that, he had been there.

One might start with a family drowned in the blood of their own.
Blood carefully leaked into a pail, a pint from each so none would be unconscious, so they had to watch as the first of them had his head submerged, and when he was still after the horrid struggle, was then exsanguinated, and so it was with each in turn, until finally, after the penultimate was drowned, the King, he sank into a huge red cauldron. All, all drowned except any child as young or younger as her own sweet twins had been when hacked to pieces by those traitors.

Or princes bludgeoned to death with their sisters' severed heads.
After she'd herself braided the girls' golden hair into single thick braids so, after the chop, the henchmen could swing the heads like maces, crushing.

Or liquid sulphur poured over faces or others strangled with their own spilled guts after they'd been rolled in salt and straw.
Ridiculous threats, some of which had to be made true, until they did not fail to intimidate.

The last king she gave orders to, there, she hadn't even needed to make threats.
The nobles had cowered in their citadel and when the drums had ceased the king had thrown open the gates and sent out half his gold as tribute.

All in all though,
pretending it had started there,
that just wouldn't be quite fair to the poor creature.

There had very well been a reason for all that.
Whether it was right or not didn't really matter, there was a reason.
Vengeance.
Right or wrong, wrong or wronger.

The reason would be the night of the knives, but then there was a reason for that too.
Jealousy.
Wrong or wronger.

That got you back some nine years and reminded you how no good deed ever goes unpunished.
When the year started with a hundred days of snowfall and the famine was relentless.
Whose granaries had been stocked well enough to save not only one kingdom but also many surrounding lands?
Hope and nourishment for those who'd been forced to subsist on their seed-corn.
Mercy.
The gods should damn it.

Was that the wrongest of all wrongs?

Had that been the crowning virtue of a Mad Queen?
The magnanimity of Tsilsne?

Whatever excuse you tried to find for that mercy, that early sign of her madness - it had made some lords and lands question and change their allegiances.

And there it was. Clear to see, a realm ruled so capably, mostly by counsel of that Queen, raised the envy of lesser neighbours and they plotted their treason.

Oh, and you might ask why some town, such as, incidentally, the town of Iannistraie, cradled between peaks upon its sparkling lake, breathing its healthy air, for the benefit of which Tsilsne made it her capital, its houses sprinkled upon the slopes, its cobbled streets clean with the mountain streams piped into its canals - why that town had declared against a king so readily. Not their king. Never had been not a hundred years their king. A hundred years of resentment. And what had come out when you lanced that boil.

That got you back a good lifetime, after the great rebellion, when the fingers were cut off the right hands of their young men and they and their grandchildrens' grandchildren were forbidden to draw a bow ever again.
Well they'd worked their way around that.

Ask why that rebellion had happened, and you tumble into ancient history.
Pretty soon you'd be all the way back to the very first name ever uttered.

How, when the first woman gave birth to the first child, and her name was found in the sounds of labor; where before there had been no names; how the child had grown and gone forth, and was pleasantly surprised that the first man laying eyes upon her had known her on sight, as unwilling his mouth fell open and out came a sound close enough to her name to bring a blush and a smile to her face; and then he laid hands upon her and then some more, and well, that's where all the rest of all people got started.
So they say. So she said.

It was one of those tales of hers where you didn't know whether she'd dug up some ancient legend or made it up on the spur of the moment.

And maybe that was her own story.
Sometimes it seemed she followed the path of ancient legend, then she seemed to make it up as she went along.

Maybe the people who were spinning it into a legend were right.
Maybe that's the only way to understand it.

And when you don't know where to start that kind of tale...

...you might as well start with a little green frog.
 
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ONCE UPON A TIME, a boy caught a frog from a pond.
A beautiful emerald of a creature with eyes of gold and amber, but those eyes were silent sparkling jewels, cold, saying nothing.

The boy decided to keep the frog.
He put him in a big jar the frog couldn't get out of.
The boy understood he'd have to feed the frog, and brought iridescent dragonflies from the same pond where he'd caught him, flies and wasps too. All of them he put into the frog's jar.

The frog didn't seem to like any of them though, and the boy went out and caught more bugs, more beautiful or bigger or smaller or different ones.
But even the most splendid butterfly wasn't good enough.

For a while, the frog ruled the boy's days like a tyrannic little deity that refused all of his sacrifices.

Then the frog died.

It took quite some time for the boy to understand that the frog's staring jewel eyes had seen a very different world than the darting brown eyes of the boy himself.
One had seen a barren desert where the other saw a generous banquet of plenty.

A frog simply couldn't see anything as edible that didn't move.

Later, the boy grew into a man of war, and a leader of men.

There wasn't much anything else to do where he grew up.

He learned a lot about fighting, he even learned a little about girls, but he forgot about frogs.

He did remember the frog's eyes many years later, while pondering unexpected reversals on the battlefield.
 
Fuck all of that.

Fuck frogs and fairytales, it was real.
Real blood, real death and real glory.
Tsilsne would do that, twist and weave tales and truth so one became the other.
Cough and spit her out for a moment. Burn the handkerchief.
Because she was dead now and that was sad but necessary.

Gods, please, stay dead please and take your soul where it belongs and stop your spirit wandering into my thoughts.

Anyway - some eyes just can't see things in plain sight, because they're not made to see.
If it's the enemy and you figure out what they can't see, you seize victory.
If it's your own commanders, you perish.
Or, you ignore their commands, and your troops make an orderly retreat, while all the others die.
And you go back to your Emperor and you have a tale to tell. The enemy's secret.

But if the Emperor looks out of those same jewel eyes, unseeing, he banishes you to worthless northern holdings.
Bogs that mean nothing except to the bog-devils living there.
And dutifully, you fight, take a grave wound, but finally you desert from an Empire that has no use for you, and become a mercenary.

Soon after they chop up the Emperor and throw him in the river and he goes out to sea as a flotilla of bobbing gobs of meat.
Because there's finally one intrigue too many, one scandal too many, one legion too many wasted against the superior strategies of the Sultitan Behemothep. It doesn't do you any good though.

Years and years later you come to a city, outside of which are camped two hosts destined to soon face in battle.
Disguised, you slip in and inspect both.

The proud knights, coming to crush a few peasants and a handful of retainers clinging to their loyalty to a deposed and defeated dynasty.
Not much more than riding down the usual uprising. So they see it.

The rebel levies, training grim-faced with their pikes.
The reverent hush and how they bow as one when among them floats the spectral apparition of Tsilsne.

It's an easy choice which to join, and so it begins. Discipline and doctrine wed with raw genius and death-defying audacity, and a great beast bursts out into the world.

You turn away as a noble family is drowned in its own blood, and another bludgeoned to death with the severed heads of its siblings.
None of those slaughtered in the night of the knives would be made alive again by these pointless celebrations of vengeance.
But the drums pound out doom, and kings squirm in the dust, kings without crowns, kings without graves. Some of them deserved it.

Looking back you realize that you should have had a pendant made of the fucking frog, a magic amulet, perhaps out of green jade with amber eyes. It could have been a constant reminder.

Because eyes had become unseeing.
His own eyes. Not wanting to see.

Mad Queen. In the end, it had become too true.

When Hastinbar surrounded her, and her army surrounded him in turn, because she'd made them only pretend to disperse, then - finally she'd agreed to parley.
Or again, pretended to.
There had been no bloodshed between them. Ask him, he'd said.
For free passage and for him to let you enter, alone, into the garden of remembrance behind his castle, where your sister lies.
One lost loved one that didn't die under an assassin's blade, but because the gods had given her the greatest riches of all gifts, except in the number of her days.
It would have been the perfect place to work out a peace.
If she'd wanted peace in this world.

When he'd felt that wind rise and draw up the air over the walls at the redoubt she'd chosen, he'd understood that she must have planned it that way for a long time.
That she'd preferred a pyre of her own making, to honest parley with anyone.
 
And so it had come that he alone now commanded a glorious, magnificent army.
In a few seasons, raised and trained and swelled in its ranks, as if with spells.
Honed in battle, proven in victories and most importantly, steeled by disaster.

An impatient army, though. Soon it would need to fight again, or disband.
This time though it would have a strategy.
His.
That would make the difference between building and destroying.
A decisive battle, a clear goal, a great throne to seize.
Instead of scouring the world, trying to drown monsters in their own blood - and in the end, becoming a monster yourself; lastly not even caring to win… or live.

But still they marched under that banner, and still he needed to sign decrees 'In the Spirit of Tsilsne'. For now he had to live in the legend. Had to accept they would only follow him as long as he appeared the custodian of that legend.

What your moment in history is going to be is decided by fate.
Don't be too proud and don't be too modest. In the days of a growing Empire, a commander of his talent would have been a decisive conqueror. Perhaps a Province named for him. In this age, the greatest achievement to make was turning a defeat from total destruction into ordered retreat. Twice. Once at Tepshin-Yarl because the Empire he fought for was a declining one; once at Tajnapaert because the Queen he fought for …

… her mind had gone out of her. To drift about.

So he just had to watch out that it didn't slip into him; that she didn't start speaking out of him.
Get clean air into his lungs.

A few numbskulls had claimed that she was just a figurehead, a puppet in his hands. They had tended to die with puzzlement in their eyes when she'd sprung her surprises on them. Things he couldn't have come up with. That's why Tajnapaert had happened, because he'd trusted that it was indecipherable genius again, when for once it had just been stark raving madness.

So, now that it was over, he need be mindful of that madness mixing into his dreams… rising up as vapors from the underworld or filtering down from the darkness between the stars.

And anyway, always remember the little green frog.

A rap on the door and now he'd be receiving the Guildsmen and looking at their new hellcraft.
 
whew!
This is quite a ride, a tale of mystery and blood, humanity and magic.
And a frog.
“You can watch the witch burn, but don't breathe her in. Be wary of her ashes on the wind.”
And we breath in the tale, it's imaginative ash weaves its magic in our minds. And it has only just started!
 
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