Elfen Safety

There are rings in the woods, in the mountains and on the cliffs. They are each of a single piece, neither carved, nor worn. Thin as two fingers wide, some grown with moss and some with vine, they are each a perfect circle of stone. Seven feet across, upright, uncracked and unscarred. They are absolute, and ageless.

If you see one, if you hear joyful clapping, if you hear song, stand fast. If you hear a laugh like water, whispers like wind, falter not. Face those rings. Step lightly backward. Do not trip, don’t stumble, do not look, not once, at your feet. If you feel dry breath on your cheek, if you feel sharp fingers in your hair, face those rings. Step lightly backward. Until their arc is out of sight and the song vanished among the leaves.

Carry cold iron, mutter prayers to your god. Hope that you will live in this world, and repeat these words to travellers yet to come. And if you should stumble, hope that a stone catches your skull before their deft hands.

The Dreaming League

“Who are we, Marcus? We are second sons and awkward daughters. We are parts of a machine that requires our deaths to function. We are backups at best, hindrances at worst. If men did not die in battle there would be no need for us at all. To fight stupid wars, when there are better wars to fight, to bear children until we bleed out, instead of valuing those we have. It is the same for us both. We are sacrifices on the King’s altar. On the altars of all kings. 

No more. If we are to die, let it be for a reason of our own choosing, let it be for our own battles, and our own daughters. Let the first follow the last in word and deed and blade, and weapons finer still, honed in idle hours. Silence, scandal, sufferance, the endless education of dancing and dozing, of reading, rapier, and right action. The court that exists by day has made us into a dreaming court of night. Well enough. If the night is to be our home, let us claim it. Let us form our own quiet barony. Let us protect ourselves and our heirs, but all of them, not merely those fortunate enough to be first. Let us not be shuffled on to stage, unprepared, when our brothers are clubbed to paste and dumped in rivers. Let us not lie in waiting for ever, and ever, and ever. Let us not sit in service to brutes and thugs as chattel or trade. Let them dance to our tune, instead. 

We are educated well enough, we have more wealth than we can spend, and there is injustice everywhere. Even without threats from beyond the pale, it is a crime that we should be idle. It is a crime that we should watch the rule of law devolve into violence and petty rivalry from now until the end of time. The day-court cares only for wealth and position, and demeans both by seeing them as the final end, while all around us are the ruins of a more glorious age. I have seen those ruins, and I will tell you now: We can out-do them. Without slavery, without submission, we can drag this muddy kingdom into a state of grace and liberty the likes of which has never been seen.

We should make a treaty, we second sons, we awkward daughters. Let us work as a court of shadows, let us form a dreaming league. Let us guide, and herd, and whisper, and let the hand that holds the club swing at our behest."

Kazinski

Kazinski is a miserable specimen. Nauseous, dizzy, she can barely stand. Her brain failed to learn a very simple fact early on, and now she is utterly fucked from the lack of it. Kazinski, quite literally, does not know which way is up. 

"Let's start again", I tell her, as if this time it might help.

"Just send me back, I'll tell you anything you like, just send me back up the well". It occurs to me that this might possibly be a kind of torture. Not by any of the human rights conventions, but awful all the same. I remember footage of jellyfish pulsing in frantic confusion. Clots of them, flickering feeble lunatic strobes. Hunting for even a rudimentary sense of direction. Eventually they stopped bringing them down. Now they're everywhere up there you can find water, just like Kazinski's kin. If you believe her.

"Your clan, your tribe, whatever they call themselves these days, where are they?"

"I've told you", she heaves out with foetid breath. "They're in the walls, in the tanks. The tubes. You put us up there. Every big crew, all of the stations. All of it. The cult's in all of it."

She starts hacking up a laugh, as if she's made some kind of evil joke. I don't even understand the language. Half of it is metaphor, it's arcane references and bad poetry. The other half is horrifying if it isn't.

"You put us in basements, you buried us with the machines, and then you put us up there."

They can't be everywhere. They can't be in every one of the two thousand or more man-made bodies in orbit.

Kazinski vomits again. She smiles shakily up at me afterwards. Her teeth are grey, her skin wrinkled before its time. She looks like death.

"We own it all now".

Dwarves

His leg is twisted. It has ever been thus. It is not his job, he says, to change the work of the architect. It is not for Him to dream a new dream. His name is long, for a Dwarf, and when asked what it means he looks almost awkward. It translates poorly. It is something like 'He who mends the house', although he explains this as if it is something distasteful. He is embarrassed by the rendering of it in common tongue. He explains that he strengthens walls, stops floods, braces doors. That the heart is made of chambers, that teeth are crenelations. That Dwarves and their fortresses are interchangeable. His work is the maintenance of labyrinths, and he is proud of it, in his own language. You might ask, if he is a healer (and he is) then why must he limp? And he will reply- it is either that, or leave the dream.

The Bird Garden

Pleione is a nymph. She is maybe Indian, maybe Chinese. Her name is Greek. It goes up at the end, like her nose. Like her glasses when they slide down. She spends a lot of time reading, writing, staring up at the stars. She tends a small garden, cramped with orchids, and she names things. Not the flowers: They proliferate and change faster that anyone can count.

Sometimes she leaves her garden to search for secondhand books, and she knows now that even Darwin gave up, back in 1862. There are more than twice the number of different orchids than there are different birds, and she can barely keep up with the birds. Still, she catalogues the avian content of her garden, listens to their song, peacocks and all, and writes letters.

A long time ago, much longer ago than you would guess from how she looks, she had daughters. It is a sad and tiring story, but it comes down to this: The constellations are graveyards for those most adored by the gods. It is her lover that holds them up.

So Pleione writes letters. The birds carry them to the highest heights, to the pillars of the world. Her catalogue records each and every one in their flight. She copies out what she sends, and takes dictation from her winged companions on their return. In moments of extreme loneliness she plucks an orchid from the earth, grinds the twin bulbs to flour, and combines the powder with milk and the vanilla she grows. The brew is a powerful aphrodisiac. It sends her into dreams of how her daughters were made. Her own hands become those of Atlas. He lifts her up, and it is like it was before he took every burning orb into his reach, before Pleione was left alone.

There are other types of orchids in the garden. Orchids that would kill Pleione within the hour. But she has been promised a place in the night sky. It is a threat, that she will become a burning thing in the cold, and her weight will add to Atlas’ burden.

Instead she tends her garden. She labels birds. It is a kind of quiet resistance. It will last forever.