[Fic] "White Lady of the Eastern Sea" -- Chronicles of Narnia
Today is NFE reveal day! I wrote three stories this year: one assignment, one pinch hit, and one tiny Madness ficlet. I will talk about each in a separate post.
White Lady of the Eastern Sea: In the third year of her conquest, Jadis locked Aslan out of Narnia and plunged that country into endless winter. But there are other powers in the world, and not all of them are pleased at the sudden changes. (1,725 words, written for
redsnake05)
-----
This was my assignment! It is also absolutely not the story I intended to write, as is sadly standard for me with exchanges.
"White Lady of the Eastern Sea" is not exactly a response to any of
redsnake05's prompts, though it makes gestures towards two of them. The first prompt was for a story about the various deities of Narnia: "How they relate to Narnia, their relationships with each other, the role of the Emperor-over-the-Sea, what powers they have, what happened in Narnia before Time started, and so on." The second prompt was for a story about Jadis, specifically: "What was it about Narnia that she so desperately wanted, that she couldn't get in Archenland or Calormen?"
I was going to write a story about gods. Not my Calormene pantheon, because that would have tossed all pretense of anonymity out the window, but a different pantheon that is in some ways equally dear to my heart.
Let me set the stage.
In two previous fics (Into Something Rich and Strange and Interesting Times), I made passing mention of the wind-weavers of the Seven Isles, and of Susan learning this particular form of magic. After a while I started wondering about the culture that produced such an art. Since all we canonically know about the Seven Isles is that A) there are seven of them, B) the westernmost is called Muil, C) another is called Brenn, D) there is a city called Redhaven on Brenn, and E) the people of Redhaven were gracious hosts to the crew of the Dawn Treader, I had wide scope for invention.
I love world-building. I am also lazy. The combination of those two traits meant that rather than build a completely new society, I stole a culture and religion from one of my own original worlds, which is conveniently also centered around an archipelago: the Metchinny people of the Tarranny Isles. I justify this by pointing at Lewis's canonical portals between worlds, which are one of the handiest crossover mechanisms ever created. *grin*
The people of the Tarranny Isles (and therefore also of the Seven Isles) worship three gods: Tarra, an earth goddess (and not a particularly gentle one, though she does do the crop and fertility thing; her home archipelago is geologically active, and she got to the Seven Isles early enough in the Narnian world's history to raise a volcano or two purely because she likes them); Djaelta, a sky/sun god (also lawgiver, patron of the arts, and general organizer of stuff); and Allinwy/Ellinwy, a sea and storm goddess, closely associated with magic, who is... capricious at best, and almost always called by epithet (the White Lady, the Gray Lady, the Lady of Storms, the Wave-rider, the Wind-rider, She Who Sows Salt, the Pearl-giver, etcetera ad infinitum, though generally just 'The Lady' for everyday use) rather than name because the notice of gods is not safe at the best of times, and her notice is much less safe than that. (Unless you're a fisher or sailor, in which case you flatter her a lot because if Allinwy likes you, she can be quite generous and protective.)
Tarra and Allinwy are sisters. Djaelta is Tarra's lover and may or may not also be her brother; mythology is divided on that question. (Mythology is also silent on who the gods' hypothetical parents might be. The Metchinny are not big on organized theology.)
Anyway, I decided to tell the story of how these three gods came to the Seven Isles, how Bacchus was the first 'native' deity (though of course he comes from another world himself) to greet them, how Allinwy claimed the Eastern Sea and Tarra struck up a friendship with Pomona, how they met various other deities, how they developed a polite distance vis-à-vis Aslan ("Thank you for creating this world; we'll keep our hands off your pet country; please keep your paws out of our islands in return"), all leading up to their reaction to the Long Winter and its repercussions on the Narnian deities.
You will note that I did not write that story.
It turned out I had religious scruples that got in the way. No, seriously.
You see, I love creating religions. They are an integral facet of human culture, and so of course I include them as part of my world-building. I also love writing about people experiencing the world through a religious lens, and discussing or demonstrating what faith and ethics and ritual and prayer and sacrifice and community and other elements of religion mean to them in various contexts.
But I am, in personal life, agnostic -- and not just because I think the existence of deities is neither provable nor disprovable. I am agnostic as a philosophical point because I think that the existence or non-existence of deities is irrelevant, both to how I choose to live my life, and to the actual experience of religion. If you believe in a god, that god is real to you, whether or not it has any objective reality outside of your consciousness. So gods affect our world and our actions whether or not you can ever point at something scientifically measurable. Given that truth, I think that their objective existence becomes, as I said, irrelevant.
As a side-effect of this, I don't like making my fictional gods 'real' in any tangible hard-proof way. All my original worlds are agnostic by design. Maybe the various gods exist. Maybe they don't. I carefully take no stance and allow characters to interpret events according to their own preferences. But people believe in gods -- or disbelieve in them, or haven't even heard of them to believe or disbelieve; worlds are big, you know! -- and they act upon those beliefs, and beliefs and actions are what matter when I'm telling stories about people.
I've made an exception to this in my Narnia fanfic, because that universe does canonically include hard-proof tangible gods... but you'll notice I tend to keep those gods off-screen. I've written Aslan all of five times and Achadith (one of my Calormene gods) only thrice. Adding my work from this year's NFE, I have now written Allinwy and Bacchus once each. That's only ten godly appearances over six years in Narnia fandom, and two of those are actually the same scene: Shezan's dream (which I cut from "Out of Season" because I don't like divine meddling). You will note that in those brief appearances, the gods are always viewed from the outside. They may speak, they may touch, but they remain fundamentally other: unknown and unknowable.
They're like earthquakes given temporary life and volition. Or maybe like ideas -- memes, if you will -- given shape and voice. Either way, they aren't people.
And it turns out that trying to change gods into people -- trying to write a story told through their eyes and their words -- makes something inside me balk. Hard.
...
I fought myself over that for weeks. Eventually I tried to do an end-run around the problem by writing a story focused on Jadis's attempts to become a god, and how actually her death would have been a step forward in that process -- without a physical body, she can learn how to be in two places at once! -- except the Narnian deities called the other Powers of the world to a council where they bound her spirit in some fashion that blocked that path. (This is now my headcanon, by the way.) Alas, that was a transparent attempt at evasion and the inner furious, hissing, claw-spread cat part of me was not fooled for an instant. Trying to combine the two ideas into a sort of shifting timeline thing worked a little, in that I could jump storylines whenever I hit the wall of NO NO STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! on each thread in turn, but that only bought me two utterly disconnected scenes, after which my subconscious caught on to the trick and it stopped working.
At that point I said argh, gave the whole thing up as a bad job, and wrote about Jadis instead, on the theory that that, at least, I can demonstrably pull off. So much for trying new things. *sigh*
My trouble with
redsnake05's Jadis-centric prompt was entirely situational, in that I had previously written my answer to the question of what she sought in Narnia that she couldn't find elsewhere. (In brief: she wants to learn how to travel between worlds, and also to learn the source/secret of Aslan's power, and thinks both can be discovered in Narnia because why else would he have gone to the trouble of locking her out.) So what I ended up with is an episode during her long search for those (non-existent) secrets, which also addresses my longstanding but vague intention to write about her creation of the magical barriers that isolated Narnia for a century. And then, because I felt bad for not properly filling that prompt, I threw in some of the ideas from my attempts to fill the first prompt: namely, Allinwy's dislike of Jadis for the way the Winter encroached on the coastal waters near Narnia, her friendship with Bacchus, and her general indifference to Aslan and the fate of Narnia's people.
That is probably more than you ever wanted to know about my personal take on religion, but apparently it's something I needed to say, so eh. Sorry not sorry?
Oh, and one last thing. The definition of godhood that Allinwy gives Jadis is a paraphrase of the definition of godhood Sethra Lavode gives Vlad Taltos in Steven Brust's Dragaera series, specifically in chapter two of Issola: "The gods are beings who are able to manifest in at least two places at once, and yet who are not subject to the forcible control of any other being; this latter marking the difference between a god and a demon." That's not the whole truth of things in that series, and it isn't the whole truth in this story either, but it's a useful first approximation. *grin*
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White Lady of the Eastern Sea: In the third year of her conquest, Jadis locked Aslan out of Narnia and plunged that country into endless winter. But there are other powers in the world, and not all of them are pleased at the sudden changes. (1,725 words, written for
redsnake05)
-----
This was my assignment! It is also absolutely not the story I intended to write, as is sadly standard for me with exchanges.
"White Lady of the Eastern Sea" is not exactly a response to any of
redsnake05's prompts, though it makes gestures towards two of them. The first prompt was for a story about the various deities of Narnia: "How they relate to Narnia, their relationships with each other, the role of the Emperor-over-the-Sea, what powers they have, what happened in Narnia before Time started, and so on." The second prompt was for a story about Jadis, specifically: "What was it about Narnia that she so desperately wanted, that she couldn't get in Archenland or Calormen?"
I was going to write a story about gods. Not my Calormene pantheon, because that would have tossed all pretense of anonymity out the window, but a different pantheon that is in some ways equally dear to my heart.
Let me set the stage.
In two previous fics (Into Something Rich and Strange and Interesting Times), I made passing mention of the wind-weavers of the Seven Isles, and of Susan learning this particular form of magic. After a while I started wondering about the culture that produced such an art. Since all we canonically know about the Seven Isles is that A) there are seven of them, B) the westernmost is called Muil, C) another is called Brenn, D) there is a city called Redhaven on Brenn, and E) the people of Redhaven were gracious hosts to the crew of the Dawn Treader, I had wide scope for invention.
I love world-building. I am also lazy. The combination of those two traits meant that rather than build a completely new society, I stole a culture and religion from one of my own original worlds, which is conveniently also centered around an archipelago: the Metchinny people of the Tarranny Isles. I justify this by pointing at Lewis's canonical portals between worlds, which are one of the handiest crossover mechanisms ever created. *grin*
The people of the Tarranny Isles (and therefore also of the Seven Isles) worship three gods: Tarra, an earth goddess (and not a particularly gentle one, though she does do the crop and fertility thing; her home archipelago is geologically active, and she got to the Seven Isles early enough in the Narnian world's history to raise a volcano or two purely because she likes them); Djaelta, a sky/sun god (also lawgiver, patron of the arts, and general organizer of stuff); and Allinwy/Ellinwy, a sea and storm goddess, closely associated with magic, who is... capricious at best, and almost always called by epithet (the White Lady, the Gray Lady, the Lady of Storms, the Wave-rider, the Wind-rider, She Who Sows Salt, the Pearl-giver, etcetera ad infinitum, though generally just 'The Lady' for everyday use) rather than name because the notice of gods is not safe at the best of times, and her notice is much less safe than that. (Unless you're a fisher or sailor, in which case you flatter her a lot because if Allinwy likes you, she can be quite generous and protective.)
Tarra and Allinwy are sisters. Djaelta is Tarra's lover and may or may not also be her brother; mythology is divided on that question. (Mythology is also silent on who the gods' hypothetical parents might be. The Metchinny are not big on organized theology.)
Anyway, I decided to tell the story of how these three gods came to the Seven Isles, how Bacchus was the first 'native' deity (though of course he comes from another world himself) to greet them, how Allinwy claimed the Eastern Sea and Tarra struck up a friendship with Pomona, how they met various other deities, how they developed a polite distance vis-à-vis Aslan ("Thank you for creating this world; we'll keep our hands off your pet country; please keep your paws out of our islands in return"), all leading up to their reaction to the Long Winter and its repercussions on the Narnian deities.
You will note that I did not write that story.
It turned out I had religious scruples that got in the way. No, seriously.
You see, I love creating religions. They are an integral facet of human culture, and so of course I include them as part of my world-building. I also love writing about people experiencing the world through a religious lens, and discussing or demonstrating what faith and ethics and ritual and prayer and sacrifice and community and other elements of religion mean to them in various contexts.
But I am, in personal life, agnostic -- and not just because I think the existence of deities is neither provable nor disprovable. I am agnostic as a philosophical point because I think that the existence or non-existence of deities is irrelevant, both to how I choose to live my life, and to the actual experience of religion. If you believe in a god, that god is real to you, whether or not it has any objective reality outside of your consciousness. So gods affect our world and our actions whether or not you can ever point at something scientifically measurable. Given that truth, I think that their objective existence becomes, as I said, irrelevant.
As a side-effect of this, I don't like making my fictional gods 'real' in any tangible hard-proof way. All my original worlds are agnostic by design. Maybe the various gods exist. Maybe they don't. I carefully take no stance and allow characters to interpret events according to their own preferences. But people believe in gods -- or disbelieve in them, or haven't even heard of them to believe or disbelieve; worlds are big, you know! -- and they act upon those beliefs, and beliefs and actions are what matter when I'm telling stories about people.
I've made an exception to this in my Narnia fanfic, because that universe does canonically include hard-proof tangible gods... but you'll notice I tend to keep those gods off-screen. I've written Aslan all of five times and Achadith (one of my Calormene gods) only thrice. Adding my work from this year's NFE, I have now written Allinwy and Bacchus once each. That's only ten godly appearances over six years in Narnia fandom, and two of those are actually the same scene: Shezan's dream (which I cut from "Out of Season" because I don't like divine meddling). You will note that in those brief appearances, the gods are always viewed from the outside. They may speak, they may touch, but they remain fundamentally other: unknown and unknowable.
They're like earthquakes given temporary life and volition. Or maybe like ideas -- memes, if you will -- given shape and voice. Either way, they aren't people.
And it turns out that trying to change gods into people -- trying to write a story told through their eyes and their words -- makes something inside me balk. Hard.
...
I fought myself over that for weeks. Eventually I tried to do an end-run around the problem by writing a story focused on Jadis's attempts to become a god, and how actually her death would have been a step forward in that process -- without a physical body, she can learn how to be in two places at once! -- except the Narnian deities called the other Powers of the world to a council where they bound her spirit in some fashion that blocked that path. (This is now my headcanon, by the way.) Alas, that was a transparent attempt at evasion and the inner furious, hissing, claw-spread cat part of me was not fooled for an instant. Trying to combine the two ideas into a sort of shifting timeline thing worked a little, in that I could jump storylines whenever I hit the wall of NO NO STOP WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! on each thread in turn, but that only bought me two utterly disconnected scenes, after which my subconscious caught on to the trick and it stopped working.
At that point I said argh, gave the whole thing up as a bad job, and wrote about Jadis instead, on the theory that that, at least, I can demonstrably pull off. So much for trying new things. *sigh*
My trouble with
redsnake05's Jadis-centric prompt was entirely situational, in that I had previously written my answer to the question of what she sought in Narnia that she couldn't find elsewhere. (In brief: she wants to learn how to travel between worlds, and also to learn the source/secret of Aslan's power, and thinks both can be discovered in Narnia because why else would he have gone to the trouble of locking her out.) So what I ended up with is an episode during her long search for those (non-existent) secrets, which also addresses my longstanding but vague intention to write about her creation of the magical barriers that isolated Narnia for a century. And then, because I felt bad for not properly filling that prompt, I threw in some of the ideas from my attempts to fill the first prompt: namely, Allinwy's dislike of Jadis for the way the Winter encroached on the coastal waters near Narnia, her friendship with Bacchus, and her general indifference to Aslan and the fate of Narnia's people.
That is probably more than you ever wanted to know about my personal take on religion, but apparently it's something I needed to say, so eh. Sorry not sorry?
Oh, and one last thing. The definition of godhood that Allinwy gives Jadis is a paraphrase of the definition of godhood Sethra Lavode gives Vlad Taltos in Steven Brust's Dragaera series, specifically in chapter two of Issola: "The gods are beings who are able to manifest in at least two places at once, and yet who are not subject to the forcible control of any other being; this latter marking the difference between a god and a demon." That's not the whole truth of things in that series, and it isn't the whole truth in this story either, but it's a useful first approximation. *grin*
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)