[story] little glass deaths
author: thornsmoke (thornsmoke)
email: lasyungwen [at] gmail.com
And once upon a time, there was a story.
At thirteen, she fell ill.
It began as a rawness beneath her bones and continued into flames that consumed her knowledge, drank deep her senses and ate of her mind. She could not speak; she could not think. The feeling blinded her eyes, stopped up her ears and cut away her tongue. Always - she recalled, writing - as a child wrapped in velvets, there existed this hard knot of emptiness between heart and belly which water would not dissolve and love could not quench.
She stopped only to call for food. And she ate, ate, ate: gingerbread, duck eggs, Turkish delights crusted thickly with sugar. Even full, she would close her eyes and see images sharp as snow, memory.
--a broken citadel, language in ghosts of painted blood stroked across the crystal walls, jagged bones lying in the dust--
At night, she could not sleep. Closing her eyes she saw shapes - diamond, spangling colors forming nothing she could recall - that she had seen in dreams that were not dreams.
In daylight, passing through mirrored rooms with ice-clear windows, she saw the skull-shape beneath her face and despaired. Her features slackened on her bones, as if skin were eating itself to the threads of the mask - as if the lands had been transfigured full of a winter-light under which she could not be seen.
Her father called it a curse and would not say more. He strode from the room and throughout the castle in his thinning leather boots, trailing dust and gray hair behind him while shouting reedily for his riding jacket, his subjects, his stallion (whose yellow teeth had long ago broken, snapping at all that his milky eyes could not catch). She heard the stories through the walls, the cupped hands of the maids: the mad, widowed king riding out to save his only daughter from being consumed by a monster that would not be satisfied by what it ate, that desired something that could not be found in the king's lands.
And the princess turned her face to the dark, and wrote.
Over the years, the maids learned to fetch parchments when she woke screaming in the night. They brought her many things: willow skins, india ink, peacock quills that broke as she held them between her shaking hands, trying to form the words. The mad stories that poured from her fingers soothed nothing. What she wrote was often another language carved from blotches and faded, dark trails sharp with salt. Often she could not speak for shaping words; when she could, they heard only the shrieks of crows and drew back for fear of madness.
Those were the days of the princess.
Physicians, magicians, and all manner of well-reputed practitioners poured in from all corners of the country and further still. All came to cure the princess wasting away of an illness that could not be named.
Oh, how they hated each other.
They quarreled amongst themselves of the diagnosis at the very gates. They spat challenges at each other at her door. They ringed her desk, stood about and shouted at one another their speculations on the correct prescription as the princess scrawled a feverish, inky path out of their noise, and they could not find a way out of the puzzle.
Days fell and nights rose, and still they had no answer for what drove the princess, nor could they decipher the words she wrote or the shape of the thought behind them. Aggravated, in one sweep the king executed them all. He left their families bereft, and did not think to question the justice of the order. He was king; that was enough.
On the day of the final execution, the last physician's only son offered himself as apprentice to the royal library.
Three years he studied, and still he did not know enough; the patterns of diseases were insufficient, so he fell to consuming fairy tales. It began out of idleness, but evolved into fascination. After all, the halls coursed with whispers of the princess' stories, and what could match the stories of the princess but other stories?
She wrote tales of ghosts, whispered the servant girls, and they sprang to life around her to possess her and sicken her further. No, others asserted, she spun tales of dreams, which twisted into the dreams of her ladies and became nightmares. Still others claimed that she must record tales of all the things that would never come to pass, and could never leave her desk. For who could finish a list of all impossible things?
He did not know; he could not be certain of anything, and still he read of princes riding forth and queens presiding with cruelty until all seemed tainted with suspicion in the princess' life.
For several fruitless years he read and studied and paced and dreamt of success. At last, fortune visited him in his twenty-first year, five years after the princess had fallen ill. Searching feverishly through his books, he came across a spell, which seemed at first - as all useful things do - to be utterly obvious and useless.
Then, about to turn the page, his hand stilled. He understood.
At once, he went to the king. The guards stopped him, for he was only a poor scholar boy and the king had years of mourning to occupy his mind. Still, eventually some strange force seemed to impel them to open the doors to him.
So they did.
He drifted through door after door, descending at last into a room hammered thin with glass and gold: into the throne room, where the king lay waiting for death or sorrow to claim him.
And into the silence he said: I know of a way to cure your daughter.
The king's greying hair had thinned to scant tufts; his eyes were hooded and weary. For a long moment, he made no sound. At last, he turned his face away and spoke: You know the cost for failure.
I do.
You know the many who have come and failed before you.
I do.
Then what do you ask?
Only give me three days with her; three days and three nights. I will pursue her to the ends of whatever earth she has chosen as her own; I will chase her into the jaws of madness itself, if that is what it takes to bring her back. If, on the third day, she does not wake healthy as she was in childhood, I will willingly fall to the judgment you assign to me.
Very well, said the king. As the boy turned to leave, however, he called: Why do you chase after dreams? There are many closer to hand, and less dangerous.
When your physicians could not save her in time, the boy said, you killed them all. Among them was my mother. For that reason, I shall revive your daughter. To do what she would have done, if she had been allowed to live.
He turned from the room and went out.
At her desk, heedless of the passage of time and world, the princess wrote on. She was not beautiful as the portraits he had studied over the years had been beautiful, but there was nevertheless something stark and striking about her movements, a hard interest to her sharp-boned features and the way a blue vein lit her cheek in a vivid stroke.
And what did it matter if she was beautiful? He was here to fulfill nothing more than a debt.
Closing his eyes, he said the words of the spell.
Once upon a time...
And it seemed as if a child were speaking, but he could see no one but himself.
Then, all at once, he found himself elsewhere.
They were sitting together in a room of glass, an age away from the world he knew and themselves immeasurably separated by things greater than distance. The princess sat sedately, ankles crossed, hands smoothing down either side of her skirts. Only her lips moved - she was speaking words that he either could not hear or did not understand, though he knew from the shape of her mouth and the light in her eyes that they were the same mad things she wrote.
And still he had time to turn away, to think. It was all a dream, he thought: begun by wanting want, now no longer certain whether he would not trade the little pleasure he could derive from fulfilling the dream of a ghost for his own peace. How much easier, he thought, would it be to see the story end a different way - by driving himself out of this life and living out a quiet term in the country.
Almost inadvertently, thoughtlessly, he said her name. Her eyes lifted.
Something passed through his veins in a jolt - a word he could not name. He found himself frozen, pinned beneath her stare.
Sorrow, he thought, half-recognising that masked emotion which presented itself with such utter cleanness. Sorrow like a clean wound. A knife - a dagger - a glass shard, driven through flesh and blood to bone. Mended and washed in threads the color of her eyes, the color of despair, absinthe and burning bare.
She was looking at him still, with a glance like old poetry - so many scattered old rhymes with pathetic verse, desire and demand all unsatisfied. And still he could not speak.
Slowly, slowly, her head tilted. Her eyes slid half-shut; her mouth slipped up into the cattish curl of a child's smirk. Where are the stories? she asked, spreading her hands out to him. They fanned out like feathers, wings spread for flight. Then, impossibly, they were.
She was rising from the depths of a tempest that hurled him against the farthest reaches of the glass, and he did not understand.
Tell me something true! he shouted at her, ridiculously. Shame burned even as he said the words, for what did that mean? He had not thought of what he might say; nothing had concerned him but that he find her. Yet, now that he had found her, what did it mean? How would he seize her from this?
Her smile gleamed bright as stars down at him. She swooped close, a bird-girl with nothing of the promise of angels in her.
They'll eat you, too, she said, light and grave. Don't follow me down.
She kissed him, once and sweetly. He felt the touch fade from his burning mouth even as he reached for it, for some promise that it had ever existed at all. But nothing lingered; even the buildings were crumbling around them as he stared helplessly at the space into which she was fading.
With a wink of time, she was gone, and then he was too.
He woke without understanding, and for a long time lay gazing up at the ceiling until a nurse came to stand over him and inform him rather severely that when he cast the spell he had fallen over backwards; no human fell asleep on his feet. Also, he was an idiot, and if he thought that he was going to save the princess by bleeding all over carpets, well. Well.
Fortunately, with the quick-footed gift of heroes, he escaped her wrath with only a circle of bandages about his head and her voice ringing in his ears.
All in all, he considered, a light getaway.
He had known from the beginning that the spell could only be performed thrice. Arrogantly supposing that once would be enough, he had never bothered to find the words, the chain that would leash her back to their world and draw her in. He could not afford such a second incident; there was the king to consider, and some hidden danger which, imprisoning her still, he could not carelessly discount.
So, for several days and nights, he pored through books and stories and the tales of old wives written in the margins of dusty accounts. As he waited, he rehearsed what he thought he might say inside his head, where the words leapt and echoed. Naming reasons to return, he thought, suddenly: love.
Love fled from him - he could not remember. Ai, he thought, and it should be simpler than this casual-complex whirl through his mind of things he did not know. The words cut through the deed, and he could not do what must be done.
Was it memory, he wondered, that turned his flesh dry as chalk - hollow clean to the fragile core of the purpose he knew that he must have?
He thought of sorrow, and held his breath.
Still, at night he turned to her again and again, drawn irresistibly through the darkness to look at the proof of his failure in the princess' hollow eyes and unfailing hands.
She wrote regardless, he remembered, from the news that had scurried all throughout the palace when she had been young with a thousand rescuers lined up at her door. The princess was blind, insensate of changes; if bereft of paper, they found, she wrote on skin. And when her hands and feet and the parts of her back that could be reached by twisting were black with ink, she scrawled the stories on bedsheets, walls, until the world was caged in the words only she could understand.
They kept her constantly stocked in ink after they learned what she used without.
In early years she had paused to be fed, calling like a child for all the things she desired. Now, worn to bone, it was all they could do to feed her themselves, thrice a day. For the princess, it no longer mattered; hunger had been transmuted to another demand entirely, and in the lapse she had forgotten herself.
Where have you gone? he said into her ear, though he knew that no words would reach her in her world but her own. What are you looking for?
The second time, he dreamed a girl wrapped in books, pages pressed about her legs, her toes used to bookmark tiny novels and poems. But they pressed tighter until her flesh wore to skin and her skin to bones. Bone broke to ash and crumbled away, dissolving into a white wind which gusted past him unceasingly.
Not her, he said, and felt his breath wind into spools, dragged from his lungs by some unseen dream. He could not cry out, for in a moment it was gone and he was falling again into an impossible landscape--
He woke again, in a land consumed between ivory and buildings black as oil. The raw sky unfurled blazing; the world rushed about him, towers spiraling by in quick thrills that came and went endlessly.
At his feet lay a mirror. Seeing motion in the glass, he bent, and saw her:
She was gathering up the splinters of the mirror in her arms. He saw the edges of her eyes, swimming in scant patches that the dark did not swallow, and banged his fist against his side of the glass, which refused to break. Patterns in the reflection shifted as she snapped them one by one into place on the marble floor. At length, as the last piece flickered against her fingers, he came to see her face.
Amid the broken glass, she was all scattered impressions: a delicately-planed cheek, a long curve like a butterfly's wing, an upsweep of bright hair pulled back against her ear, pinned in a long twist by a glittering pin shaped glassily like a rose. Her eyes were of a shifting dark and bore no truth but that which changed from moment to answer-less moment.
The lines of her mouth shaped speech that rang through the glass. He felt the words shivering up his fingers, into his arm and the veins that led to his heart. Whyfore came you to this strange and distant land?
He tried to ask the questions he had planned, the words he had shepherded together so assiduously. But the only phrases he could piece together were not his.
To seek my fortune, he answered steadily, feeling his tongue curl about the alien words, and justice, and answers.
What have you found?
Fortune that is not mine to hold; justice that will not keep; riddles tangled in themselves.
The girl nodded, leaning out of the shadow. Her hands turned the color of milky firelight. He glimpsed a fragment of the mirror darkening. Blood traced the long droop of one thumb. He said, voice sharpening, leaving the scripted words, Don't do that.
She looked at him with a doll's graceful eyes, filled with cracked patterns of smoky glass. And why should I not?
In this country, he knew without quite knowing, he could not leave a riddle unanswered. The answer hung at the edges of his mind. He thought, and considered, but could not reach the truth that dangled an unfamiliar distance from all that he had ever learned. Because you are valuable, he said eventually in desperation, as all things are. Do not waste--
Her laughter swung in the air, a bell's rounded note. Waste, she said elegantly to the fading air about her, and her small-boned face shrank as she pulled back from the mirror. His nails raked over the glass without mark or sound. He thought he cried out. Spendthrift. Profligacy. There are stories about these very traits... Over the curve of her shoulder, he saw her slow crooking smile.
Can you see yourself? she asked, offering up in her palm the last shard of glass. In it, where he had expected a mirror, communicating as they did from glass to glass, there was only empty air. Nothing existed where he stood in her world; she was mad and speaking to nothing, and he was on the other end of that madness, uncertain of where he stood.
It was not like invisibility - he had studied that, in the long years searching for some cure. Invisibility promised secrecy, something to be concealed. He was not invisible; he did not exist.
Can you tell me a story? she asked, suddenly childish. Between one blink - a breath rolled from his lungs - she was gone.
The princess, he thought, and woke.
He barely stirred out of sleep for before he blurted the words and dove back into that enchanted slumber again. Tangled in questions and close on her heels, there would never be a better time than now.
So the princess sank away into a realm he hardly understood, and the son of the physician pursued.
What do you want, mortal boy, mortal child?
To find her.
There was blood on his hands when he came to himself.
He was halfway up a stair of glass shards mortared together, his palms scraping on the final step. Only, he realised, it was not mortar.
The laughter of the princess rang all around him, and he followed it endlessly down dark corridors, while monkeys pelted their slanting eyes at him and shrieked when he scrambled to retrieve them. He was pursued by drifting bits of mirror that all reflected fragments of the same face: a face he should have known but no longer recognised.
The fairest of them all, he thought irrelevantly, and no longer knew what the words should have meant. But meanings no longer mattered. He could feel her in the distance, and threw all caution to the wind as he chased.
And all around him the world was eternal and impossible to understand. He thought, once, that he could hear the thunder speaking sharply to the lightning. But it was only a frog wearing a golden crown, who gave him a severe look when he told it that he was searching for the princess and leapt on without answering.
At last, he came to the ruins of a familiar city: white wreckage strewn among the fallen debris of black towers, black lands and endless black streets. In the sky he could see suspended the room of glass.
And within: the princess.
There were no glass shards left to him now, and he could not climb a ladder of blood alone. And even now, he saw, she was in danger; there were shimmers in the air, things which shone not-quite-distinct, pressing ever closer as she backed into the glass, seemingly sane at last.
He shouted at her for encouragement, for hope, for desperation and all the reasons behind human existence, but she gave no sign that she heard.
Remembering how she had spread her hands, he twitched them out in precisely the same movement, and was startled to feel the sudden rush of wings behind him. Still, fearless, he rode the winds up to the suspended room, and never thought to ask why.
In the room of glass, he found only this: a doll, child-small, in a dress that glimmered like sun and moon. Her wrists hung behind her back, bound with seaweed crystallized with salt. Bones showed beneath the slackened flesh-mask, black as though burnt. Ropes of pearls cut into her skin, the strings stained brown, the skin beneath a riot of purple and black.
The stories, he thought, and all the pieces flew together at once. You killed her, he said to the walls, the air, the quaking land that could not touch him. You filled her mind with the stories that you wanted her to tell, and you strangled her with them. She could not speak them to your satisfaction, so you--
A silver voice shone out of the darkness: It does not kill but shows the breaking things: glass, bones, children. And think of the things it mends, oh! This is the end, the end, the beginning of the end--
Shut up!
Whereupon it was still again. He was shaking, shaking, and he did not know why. You took a child and you made her into a - corpse, a thing, a machine--
A story, said the voice of all stories, and he could feel a kind of pressure building in the air now. A hard glittering was forming before his eyes. She asked - she begged. She demanded that we come, and we did. We were invited and we gave her all that she asked; in return, we asked only a little space in the world, a thought that others might think of us and we should be reborn again in words, words, words, words--
Where is she? he cried.
Gone. Here. Nowhere. Answers seemed to come in several directions at once, and he could not know which was true.
Or perhaps all of them were true, he thought dizzily, feeling the curving swoop of the universe like a sword about him, scything through thoughts and facts until all that remained was dancing. Dwarves had emerged to waltz with the snowmen now, and the gentle trees were swaying in the old wind. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, he could hear himself screaming, looking for the break that would yield to him the truth - but the stories had no reason to set him free.
He had looked for the princess, had witnessed the end of her tale. They had wrapped up the narrative and had no use for him left.
All things must end.
As the boy had promised, on the third day the princess rose from her desk, holding the hand of the boy who had never truly left her side.
Father, said the princess; father, father. I am saved.
Overjoyed to hear her speak his name, the king rewarded the boy with gold, jewels, all the gilded pictures of the princess, and did not ask why he never smiled or spoke.
Father, said the princess, smiling still; father, father. Of all these years, I have never asked for anything but peace to die; now that I live, I would marry the man who has rescued me.
The mad king gave his consent, too relieved to stand on ceremony with anything but the fact of his daughter's return. So, on the thirteenth day of celebration, the boy and the princess were married.
He died nine days after.
Cast into mourning, the princess buried him among the papers he had studied, the books that had kept him company all his life. Let him be forever remembered, she said, as the noble man who rescued a princess: the epitome of the fairy tale. Let him dwell forever among stories.
Some who attended the funeral said that the sound of the wind rustling the thin pages made the sound of screams; but who heeded wind?
(That's where it used to stop. The modern ending to the tale goes something more like this--
And the princess declared unto her kingdom: O my people, how terribly you have suffered, with the curriculum heavy with sciences and maths.
And the people answered unto her: O, it is so.
And the princess declared unto her kingdom a second time: O my people, you are saved. For now I shall install courses driven fundamentally by creative writing in every school.
And her people looked among themselves, and were joyous.
As for the world - it had always written stories before. Now it simply wrote a few more. That was all.
-- but who knows if that one's true? No one, at least, until the end of the world.)
the end
email: lasyungwen [at] gmail.com
And once upon a time, there was a story.
At thirteen, she fell ill.
It began as a rawness beneath her bones and continued into flames that consumed her knowledge, drank deep her senses and ate of her mind. She could not speak; she could not think. The feeling blinded her eyes, stopped up her ears and cut away her tongue. Always - she recalled, writing - as a child wrapped in velvets, there existed this hard knot of emptiness between heart and belly which water would not dissolve and love could not quench.
She stopped only to call for food. And she ate, ate, ate: gingerbread, duck eggs, Turkish delights crusted thickly with sugar. Even full, she would close her eyes and see images sharp as snow, memory.
--a broken citadel, language in ghosts of painted blood stroked across the crystal walls, jagged bones lying in the dust--
At night, she could not sleep. Closing her eyes she saw shapes - diamond, spangling colors forming nothing she could recall - that she had seen in dreams that were not dreams.
In daylight, passing through mirrored rooms with ice-clear windows, she saw the skull-shape beneath her face and despaired. Her features slackened on her bones, as if skin were eating itself to the threads of the mask - as if the lands had been transfigured full of a winter-light under which she could not be seen.
Her father called it a curse and would not say more. He strode from the room and throughout the castle in his thinning leather boots, trailing dust and gray hair behind him while shouting reedily for his riding jacket, his subjects, his stallion (whose yellow teeth had long ago broken, snapping at all that his milky eyes could not catch). She heard the stories through the walls, the cupped hands of the maids: the mad, widowed king riding out to save his only daughter from being consumed by a monster that would not be satisfied by what it ate, that desired something that could not be found in the king's lands.
And the princess turned her face to the dark, and wrote.
Over the years, the maids learned to fetch parchments when she woke screaming in the night. They brought her many things: willow skins, india ink, peacock quills that broke as she held them between her shaking hands, trying to form the words. The mad stories that poured from her fingers soothed nothing. What she wrote was often another language carved from blotches and faded, dark trails sharp with salt. Often she could not speak for shaping words; when she could, they heard only the shrieks of crows and drew back for fear of madness.
Those were the days of the princess.
Physicians, magicians, and all manner of well-reputed practitioners poured in from all corners of the country and further still. All came to cure the princess wasting away of an illness that could not be named.
Oh, how they hated each other.
They quarreled amongst themselves of the diagnosis at the very gates. They spat challenges at each other at her door. They ringed her desk, stood about and shouted at one another their speculations on the correct prescription as the princess scrawled a feverish, inky path out of their noise, and they could not find a way out of the puzzle.
Days fell and nights rose, and still they had no answer for what drove the princess, nor could they decipher the words she wrote or the shape of the thought behind them. Aggravated, in one sweep the king executed them all. He left their families bereft, and did not think to question the justice of the order. He was king; that was enough.
On the day of the final execution, the last physician's only son offered himself as apprentice to the royal library.
Three years he studied, and still he did not know enough; the patterns of diseases were insufficient, so he fell to consuming fairy tales. It began out of idleness, but evolved into fascination. After all, the halls coursed with whispers of the princess' stories, and what could match the stories of the princess but other stories?
She wrote tales of ghosts, whispered the servant girls, and they sprang to life around her to possess her and sicken her further. No, others asserted, she spun tales of dreams, which twisted into the dreams of her ladies and became nightmares. Still others claimed that she must record tales of all the things that would never come to pass, and could never leave her desk. For who could finish a list of all impossible things?
He did not know; he could not be certain of anything, and still he read of princes riding forth and queens presiding with cruelty until all seemed tainted with suspicion in the princess' life.
For several fruitless years he read and studied and paced and dreamt of success. At last, fortune visited him in his twenty-first year, five years after the princess had fallen ill. Searching feverishly through his books, he came across a spell, which seemed at first - as all useful things do - to be utterly obvious and useless.
Then, about to turn the page, his hand stilled. He understood.
At once, he went to the king. The guards stopped him, for he was only a poor scholar boy and the king had years of mourning to occupy his mind. Still, eventually some strange force seemed to impel them to open the doors to him.
So they did.
He drifted through door after door, descending at last into a room hammered thin with glass and gold: into the throne room, where the king lay waiting for death or sorrow to claim him.
And into the silence he said: I know of a way to cure your daughter.
The king's greying hair had thinned to scant tufts; his eyes were hooded and weary. For a long moment, he made no sound. At last, he turned his face away and spoke: You know the cost for failure.
I do.
You know the many who have come and failed before you.
I do.
Then what do you ask?
Only give me three days with her; three days and three nights. I will pursue her to the ends of whatever earth she has chosen as her own; I will chase her into the jaws of madness itself, if that is what it takes to bring her back. If, on the third day, she does not wake healthy as she was in childhood, I will willingly fall to the judgment you assign to me.
Very well, said the king. As the boy turned to leave, however, he called: Why do you chase after dreams? There are many closer to hand, and less dangerous.
When your physicians could not save her in time, the boy said, you killed them all. Among them was my mother. For that reason, I shall revive your daughter. To do what she would have done, if she had been allowed to live.
He turned from the room and went out.
At her desk, heedless of the passage of time and world, the princess wrote on. She was not beautiful as the portraits he had studied over the years had been beautiful, but there was nevertheless something stark and striking about her movements, a hard interest to her sharp-boned features and the way a blue vein lit her cheek in a vivid stroke.
And what did it matter if she was beautiful? He was here to fulfill nothing more than a debt.
Closing his eyes, he said the words of the spell.
Once upon a time...
And it seemed as if a child were speaking, but he could see no one but himself.
Then, all at once, he found himself elsewhere.
They were sitting together in a room of glass, an age away from the world he knew and themselves immeasurably separated by things greater than distance. The princess sat sedately, ankles crossed, hands smoothing down either side of her skirts. Only her lips moved - she was speaking words that he either could not hear or did not understand, though he knew from the shape of her mouth and the light in her eyes that they were the same mad things she wrote.
And still he had time to turn away, to think. It was all a dream, he thought: begun by wanting want, now no longer certain whether he would not trade the little pleasure he could derive from fulfilling the dream of a ghost for his own peace. How much easier, he thought, would it be to see the story end a different way - by driving himself out of this life and living out a quiet term in the country.
Almost inadvertently, thoughtlessly, he said her name. Her eyes lifted.
Something passed through his veins in a jolt - a word he could not name. He found himself frozen, pinned beneath her stare.
Sorrow, he thought, half-recognising that masked emotion which presented itself with such utter cleanness. Sorrow like a clean wound. A knife - a dagger - a glass shard, driven through flesh and blood to bone. Mended and washed in threads the color of her eyes, the color of despair, absinthe and burning bare.
She was looking at him still, with a glance like old poetry - so many scattered old rhymes with pathetic verse, desire and demand all unsatisfied. And still he could not speak.
Slowly, slowly, her head tilted. Her eyes slid half-shut; her mouth slipped up into the cattish curl of a child's smirk. Where are the stories? she asked, spreading her hands out to him. They fanned out like feathers, wings spread for flight. Then, impossibly, they were.
She was rising from the depths of a tempest that hurled him against the farthest reaches of the glass, and he did not understand.
Tell me something true! he shouted at her, ridiculously. Shame burned even as he said the words, for what did that mean? He had not thought of what he might say; nothing had concerned him but that he find her. Yet, now that he had found her, what did it mean? How would he seize her from this?
Her smile gleamed bright as stars down at him. She swooped close, a bird-girl with nothing of the promise of angels in her.
They'll eat you, too, she said, light and grave. Don't follow me down.
She kissed him, once and sweetly. He felt the touch fade from his burning mouth even as he reached for it, for some promise that it had ever existed at all. But nothing lingered; even the buildings were crumbling around them as he stared helplessly at the space into which she was fading.
With a wink of time, she was gone, and then he was too.
He woke without understanding, and for a long time lay gazing up at the ceiling until a nurse came to stand over him and inform him rather severely that when he cast the spell he had fallen over backwards; no human fell asleep on his feet. Also, he was an idiot, and if he thought that he was going to save the princess by bleeding all over carpets, well. Well.
Fortunately, with the quick-footed gift of heroes, he escaped her wrath with only a circle of bandages about his head and her voice ringing in his ears.
All in all, he considered, a light getaway.
He had known from the beginning that the spell could only be performed thrice. Arrogantly supposing that once would be enough, he had never bothered to find the words, the chain that would leash her back to their world and draw her in. He could not afford such a second incident; there was the king to consider, and some hidden danger which, imprisoning her still, he could not carelessly discount.
So, for several days and nights, he pored through books and stories and the tales of old wives written in the margins of dusty accounts. As he waited, he rehearsed what he thought he might say inside his head, where the words leapt and echoed. Naming reasons to return, he thought, suddenly: love.
Love fled from him - he could not remember. Ai, he thought, and it should be simpler than this casual-complex whirl through his mind of things he did not know. The words cut through the deed, and he could not do what must be done.
Was it memory, he wondered, that turned his flesh dry as chalk - hollow clean to the fragile core of the purpose he knew that he must have?
He thought of sorrow, and held his breath.
Still, at night he turned to her again and again, drawn irresistibly through the darkness to look at the proof of his failure in the princess' hollow eyes and unfailing hands.
She wrote regardless, he remembered, from the news that had scurried all throughout the palace when she had been young with a thousand rescuers lined up at her door. The princess was blind, insensate of changes; if bereft of paper, they found, she wrote on skin. And when her hands and feet and the parts of her back that could be reached by twisting were black with ink, she scrawled the stories on bedsheets, walls, until the world was caged in the words only she could understand.
They kept her constantly stocked in ink after they learned what she used without.
In early years she had paused to be fed, calling like a child for all the things she desired. Now, worn to bone, it was all they could do to feed her themselves, thrice a day. For the princess, it no longer mattered; hunger had been transmuted to another demand entirely, and in the lapse she had forgotten herself.
Where have you gone? he said into her ear, though he knew that no words would reach her in her world but her own. What are you looking for?
The second time, he dreamed a girl wrapped in books, pages pressed about her legs, her toes used to bookmark tiny novels and poems. But they pressed tighter until her flesh wore to skin and her skin to bones. Bone broke to ash and crumbled away, dissolving into a white wind which gusted past him unceasingly.
Not her, he said, and felt his breath wind into spools, dragged from his lungs by some unseen dream. He could not cry out, for in a moment it was gone and he was falling again into an impossible landscape--
He woke again, in a land consumed between ivory and buildings black as oil. The raw sky unfurled blazing; the world rushed about him, towers spiraling by in quick thrills that came and went endlessly.
At his feet lay a mirror. Seeing motion in the glass, he bent, and saw her:
She was gathering up the splinters of the mirror in her arms. He saw the edges of her eyes, swimming in scant patches that the dark did not swallow, and banged his fist against his side of the glass, which refused to break. Patterns in the reflection shifted as she snapped them one by one into place on the marble floor. At length, as the last piece flickered against her fingers, he came to see her face.
Amid the broken glass, she was all scattered impressions: a delicately-planed cheek, a long curve like a butterfly's wing, an upsweep of bright hair pulled back against her ear, pinned in a long twist by a glittering pin shaped glassily like a rose. Her eyes were of a shifting dark and bore no truth but that which changed from moment to answer-less moment.
The lines of her mouth shaped speech that rang through the glass. He felt the words shivering up his fingers, into his arm and the veins that led to his heart. Whyfore came you to this strange and distant land?
He tried to ask the questions he had planned, the words he had shepherded together so assiduously. But the only phrases he could piece together were not his.
To seek my fortune, he answered steadily, feeling his tongue curl about the alien words, and justice, and answers.
What have you found?
Fortune that is not mine to hold; justice that will not keep; riddles tangled in themselves.
The girl nodded, leaning out of the shadow. Her hands turned the color of milky firelight. He glimpsed a fragment of the mirror darkening. Blood traced the long droop of one thumb. He said, voice sharpening, leaving the scripted words, Don't do that.
She looked at him with a doll's graceful eyes, filled with cracked patterns of smoky glass. And why should I not?
In this country, he knew without quite knowing, he could not leave a riddle unanswered. The answer hung at the edges of his mind. He thought, and considered, but could not reach the truth that dangled an unfamiliar distance from all that he had ever learned. Because you are valuable, he said eventually in desperation, as all things are. Do not waste--
Her laughter swung in the air, a bell's rounded note. Waste, she said elegantly to the fading air about her, and her small-boned face shrank as she pulled back from the mirror. His nails raked over the glass without mark or sound. He thought he cried out. Spendthrift. Profligacy. There are stories about these very traits... Over the curve of her shoulder, he saw her slow crooking smile.
Can you see yourself? she asked, offering up in her palm the last shard of glass. In it, where he had expected a mirror, communicating as they did from glass to glass, there was only empty air. Nothing existed where he stood in her world; she was mad and speaking to nothing, and he was on the other end of that madness, uncertain of where he stood.
It was not like invisibility - he had studied that, in the long years searching for some cure. Invisibility promised secrecy, something to be concealed. He was not invisible; he did not exist.
Can you tell me a story? she asked, suddenly childish. Between one blink - a breath rolled from his lungs - she was gone.
The princess, he thought, and woke.
He barely stirred out of sleep for before he blurted the words and dove back into that enchanted slumber again. Tangled in questions and close on her heels, there would never be a better time than now.
So the princess sank away into a realm he hardly understood, and the son of the physician pursued.
What do you want, mortal boy, mortal child?
To find her.
There was blood on his hands when he came to himself.
He was halfway up a stair of glass shards mortared together, his palms scraping on the final step. Only, he realised, it was not mortar.
The laughter of the princess rang all around him, and he followed it endlessly down dark corridors, while monkeys pelted their slanting eyes at him and shrieked when he scrambled to retrieve them. He was pursued by drifting bits of mirror that all reflected fragments of the same face: a face he should have known but no longer recognised.
The fairest of them all, he thought irrelevantly, and no longer knew what the words should have meant. But meanings no longer mattered. He could feel her in the distance, and threw all caution to the wind as he chased.
And all around him the world was eternal and impossible to understand. He thought, once, that he could hear the thunder speaking sharply to the lightning. But it was only a frog wearing a golden crown, who gave him a severe look when he told it that he was searching for the princess and leapt on without answering.
At last, he came to the ruins of a familiar city: white wreckage strewn among the fallen debris of black towers, black lands and endless black streets. In the sky he could see suspended the room of glass.
And within: the princess.
There were no glass shards left to him now, and he could not climb a ladder of blood alone. And even now, he saw, she was in danger; there were shimmers in the air, things which shone not-quite-distinct, pressing ever closer as she backed into the glass, seemingly sane at last.
He shouted at her for encouragement, for hope, for desperation and all the reasons behind human existence, but she gave no sign that she heard.
Remembering how she had spread her hands, he twitched them out in precisely the same movement, and was startled to feel the sudden rush of wings behind him. Still, fearless, he rode the winds up to the suspended room, and never thought to ask why.
In the room of glass, he found only this: a doll, child-small, in a dress that glimmered like sun and moon. Her wrists hung behind her back, bound with seaweed crystallized with salt. Bones showed beneath the slackened flesh-mask, black as though burnt. Ropes of pearls cut into her skin, the strings stained brown, the skin beneath a riot of purple and black.
The stories, he thought, and all the pieces flew together at once. You killed her, he said to the walls, the air, the quaking land that could not touch him. You filled her mind with the stories that you wanted her to tell, and you strangled her with them. She could not speak them to your satisfaction, so you--
A silver voice shone out of the darkness: It does not kill but shows the breaking things: glass, bones, children. And think of the things it mends, oh! This is the end, the end, the beginning of the end--
Shut up!
Whereupon it was still again. He was shaking, shaking, and he did not know why. You took a child and you made her into a - corpse, a thing, a machine--
A story, said the voice of all stories, and he could feel a kind of pressure building in the air now. A hard glittering was forming before his eyes. She asked - she begged. She demanded that we come, and we did. We were invited and we gave her all that she asked; in return, we asked only a little space in the world, a thought that others might think of us and we should be reborn again in words, words, words, words--
Where is she? he cried.
Gone. Here. Nowhere. Answers seemed to come in several directions at once, and he could not know which was true.
Or perhaps all of them were true, he thought dizzily, feeling the curving swoop of the universe like a sword about him, scything through thoughts and facts until all that remained was dancing. Dwarves had emerged to waltz with the snowmen now, and the gentle trees were swaying in the old wind. Somewhere in the depths of his mind, he could hear himself screaming, looking for the break that would yield to him the truth - but the stories had no reason to set him free.
He had looked for the princess, had witnessed the end of her tale. They had wrapped up the narrative and had no use for him left.
All things must end.
As the boy had promised, on the third day the princess rose from her desk, holding the hand of the boy who had never truly left her side.
Father, said the princess; father, father. I am saved.
Overjoyed to hear her speak his name, the king rewarded the boy with gold, jewels, all the gilded pictures of the princess, and did not ask why he never smiled or spoke.
Father, said the princess, smiling still; father, father. Of all these years, I have never asked for anything but peace to die; now that I live, I would marry the man who has rescued me.
The mad king gave his consent, too relieved to stand on ceremony with anything but the fact of his daughter's return. So, on the thirteenth day of celebration, the boy and the princess were married.
He died nine days after.
Cast into mourning, the princess buried him among the papers he had studied, the books that had kept him company all his life. Let him be forever remembered, she said, as the noble man who rescued a princess: the epitome of the fairy tale. Let him dwell forever among stories.
Some who attended the funeral said that the sound of the wind rustling the thin pages made the sound of screams; but who heeded wind?
(That's where it used to stop. The modern ending to the tale goes something more like this--
And the princess declared unto her kingdom: O my people, how terribly you have suffered, with the curriculum heavy with sciences and maths.
And the people answered unto her: O, it is so.
And the princess declared unto her kingdom a second time: O my people, you are saved. For now I shall install courses driven fundamentally by creative writing in every school.
And her people looked among themselves, and were joyous.
As for the world - it had always written stories before. Now it simply wrote a few more. That was all.
-- but who knows if that one's true? No one, at least, until the end of the world.)
the end