Happy March!
Ah, autumn ... at least now the weather can stop depressing me ;D
Much reading have I done and much time have I wasted today. Dolls cropped up again somehow. Wish I hadn't looked in my bookmarks folder this afternoon. :P Oh, and this morning I had three hours to wait for a class, and suddenly I wrote a Thing.
They said to me - my gaolers - that I should write a history.
I didn't want to, at first. And I didn't; not for the first century of my imprisonment. Amongst other things, I didn't see the point. The victors write and tell the history. Who ever hears the chronicles of the defeated? Or cares? All they wanted was fuel for the gloating accounts that were so prevalent in that century.
But a hundred years in the Iron Hold taught me many things. Above all, it taught me about the value of knowledge.
I am here, and alive, because men still want to learn the old magics of the fae. This is a knowledge that they prize above their own lives - or the lives of their researchers, I should say. When the men of iron caught me and held me in the first prison, I swore never to do them harm, as they asked. But some of my fellow captives swore no such oath ... and yet the researchers and archivists go to meet with them anyway.
Sometimes they are hurt. Sometimes they die. And they all - researchers included - consider it a fair trade.
I never dealt in such knowledge. I still don't. I don't like to encourage such a bizarre skewing of priorities. It reminds me too much of bad, older days. Worse than these? Not for me, perhaps. But bad all the same.
When I first came to - was brought to - the Iron Hold, there were fifty of us held here in iron under the earth: moon fae, sun fae, beast fae, yes, and sea fae like me. I'm sure others must have felt as I did. I don't know; I've never talked to a fellow inmate in all my time here. But it's expensive to keep a fae prisoner, expensive to keep all those guards, all those cells. Dangerous, as well.
A hundred years after my imprisonment, I read a book which referred to us as the Twenty of the Iron Hold. A hundred and fifty years later, we were the Ten. Now, of course, fully four hundred years since the door of this iron cell closed on me, we are the Seven. At least the attrition rate has slowed.
I might well have been one of the prisoners who died. In a hundred years I answered not a single one of their questions about magic, artefacts, the works that the fae people left behind. I can only assume that other prisoners were just as unhelpful, and perhaps violent into the bargain. In any case, I survived.
I've digressed. I apologise. I was talking about knowledge.
A hundred years after my imprisonment, or thereabouts, another researcher came into my cell. I was waiting for her to ask all the old questions: what does this wand do? what does this sigil mean? how do you make X out of Y?
Instead she asked me, Where did you live? What was it like? Did you have family?
I sent her away like all the others. Difference is arrogance, as we used to say ... some of us. I didn't spare her a thought; I believed that she was trying to ingratiate herself, that she was still somehow obliquely fishing for that first kind of knowledge, the idiotic blood-knowledge. I didn't think that men saw any value in the other kinds of knowledge. If there were fae who never saw it, how would that powerless, mayfly lot ever manage?
She came back a year or two later. I think she'd been asking the other fae, and probably with as little luck. She asked me the same questions again, and then again a few months later, so I kept sending her away.
I was becoming curious about her, though. A little. Another researcher came in to talk to me one day - what does this sigil mean? when will you teach us your language? - and so I asked him about the other one.
The researcher told me that she was from a new department: the Department of Fae Culture and Historiography, or whatever it was they called it in those days. I still remember how he rolled his eyes when he said it. Then he told me something that returned a little spark to a very tired heart. He said that the other researcher - my researcher - spent all her time scurrying from fae to fae and asking them all her pointless questions.
I asked him: all the fae? not the fae who never swore a no-harm oath, surely?
He told me that was the 'maddest' part of it all. My researcher had spoken to Arathalian, Nebeshanin, Cochalyon, Elisdes. Elisdes is dead now; he killed more than fifty men and answered too few questions to trade off the debt. But my researcher had visited them all. She had risked her life to find out where they lived, and what it was like, and whether they had family.
I will tell you a word in my language. Her memory is still precious enough to me to buy that. The word is àlvātēmârā; I'll even teach you how to sing it if you come and ask me. It translates as 'people-knowing knowledge'. In this language, it needs a few more words to describe - 'the desire to understand people', or to use an idiom, 'the desire to see through another's eyes'. There is an added implication of curiosity and warmth. It's a good word.
That was the first day I realised that àlvātēmârā and so many other concepts weren't particular to the fae and wouldn't die with the fae. It was a happy thought. It still is, as a matter of fact.
So the next time I saw the young lady - and much to her surprise - I sat and told her about Longreach Strand, moonlight on a jet-black ocean, sun on an all-blue-changing one, pranks on sharks and seaweed always tangling in my silly son's hair. And because àlvātēmârā is light and dark, I told her about iron-fear, the hordes of sailors dragged down to drown by sea fae, the wives and daughters stolen from human homesteads on the beachside.
She wrote everything down from a hundred visits and more. Books, pamphlets and all manner of paperwork ... they've always been fond of that at the Iron Hold. But the thing about àlvātēmârā, true àlvātēmârā, is that it's indiscriminate. It wants to understand all people, not just one.
One day she went to see Cochalyon again, and Cochalyon killed her. He has let them make a monster of him over the years. That's the fate, you see, of everyone who suffers bitter pain and despair without any àlvātēmârā.
I'd never grieved the death of a human before. Perhaps I should have.
I began to write my history the same day, if not quite the history that the Iron Hold wanted at first. I wrote it - and still write it - for all the humans who are the same as that young lady, because I do know they're there.
It's for her too, of course, and for myself, and for all the fae lost - those who are dead, and those who have become monsters.
That's what I get for asking myself 'why did I say Ascalain doesn't talk to researchers much?'. I think I'll have to change "The Iron Hold", because Fiannas isn't the most harmless fae any more ;)
Oh, and if you're still cross-eyed from those mad vowels, I've used different demarcations for different tones. à is a low note, ā/ē are middle-scale and â is high. I might just choose which notes I want each one to approximate if I have enough time to waste one of these days ...
Happy spring to the north-hemisphereans! ;D
Much reading have I done and much time have I wasted today. Dolls cropped up again somehow. Wish I hadn't looked in my bookmarks folder this afternoon. :P Oh, and this morning I had three hours to wait for a class, and suddenly I wrote a Thing.
They said to me - my gaolers - that I should write a history.
I didn't want to, at first. And I didn't; not for the first century of my imprisonment. Amongst other things, I didn't see the point. The victors write and tell the history. Who ever hears the chronicles of the defeated? Or cares? All they wanted was fuel for the gloating accounts that were so prevalent in that century.
But a hundred years in the Iron Hold taught me many things. Above all, it taught me about the value of knowledge.
I am here, and alive, because men still want to learn the old magics of the fae. This is a knowledge that they prize above their own lives - or the lives of their researchers, I should say. When the men of iron caught me and held me in the first prison, I swore never to do them harm, as they asked. But some of my fellow captives swore no such oath ... and yet the researchers and archivists go to meet with them anyway.
Sometimes they are hurt. Sometimes they die. And they all - researchers included - consider it a fair trade.
I never dealt in such knowledge. I still don't. I don't like to encourage such a bizarre skewing of priorities. It reminds me too much of bad, older days. Worse than these? Not for me, perhaps. But bad all the same.
When I first came to - was brought to - the Iron Hold, there were fifty of us held here in iron under the earth: moon fae, sun fae, beast fae, yes, and sea fae like me. I'm sure others must have felt as I did. I don't know; I've never talked to a fellow inmate in all my time here. But it's expensive to keep a fae prisoner, expensive to keep all those guards, all those cells. Dangerous, as well.
A hundred years after my imprisonment, I read a book which referred to us as the Twenty of the Iron Hold. A hundred and fifty years later, we were the Ten. Now, of course, fully four hundred years since the door of this iron cell closed on me, we are the Seven. At least the attrition rate has slowed.
I might well have been one of the prisoners who died. In a hundred years I answered not a single one of their questions about magic, artefacts, the works that the fae people left behind. I can only assume that other prisoners were just as unhelpful, and perhaps violent into the bargain. In any case, I survived.
I've digressed. I apologise. I was talking about knowledge.
A hundred years after my imprisonment, or thereabouts, another researcher came into my cell. I was waiting for her to ask all the old questions: what does this wand do? what does this sigil mean? how do you make X out of Y?
Instead she asked me, Where did you live? What was it like? Did you have family?
I sent her away like all the others. Difference is arrogance, as we used to say ... some of us. I didn't spare her a thought; I believed that she was trying to ingratiate herself, that she was still somehow obliquely fishing for that first kind of knowledge, the idiotic blood-knowledge. I didn't think that men saw any value in the other kinds of knowledge. If there were fae who never saw it, how would that powerless, mayfly lot ever manage?
She came back a year or two later. I think she'd been asking the other fae, and probably with as little luck. She asked me the same questions again, and then again a few months later, so I kept sending her away.
I was becoming curious about her, though. A little. Another researcher came in to talk to me one day - what does this sigil mean? when will you teach us your language? - and so I asked him about the other one.
The researcher told me that she was from a new department: the Department of Fae Culture and Historiography, or whatever it was they called it in those days. I still remember how he rolled his eyes when he said it. Then he told me something that returned a little spark to a very tired heart. He said that the other researcher - my researcher - spent all her time scurrying from fae to fae and asking them all her pointless questions.
I asked him: all the fae? not the fae who never swore a no-harm oath, surely?
He told me that was the 'maddest' part of it all. My researcher had spoken to Arathalian, Nebeshanin, Cochalyon, Elisdes. Elisdes is dead now; he killed more than fifty men and answered too few questions to trade off the debt. But my researcher had visited them all. She had risked her life to find out where they lived, and what it was like, and whether they had family.
I will tell you a word in my language. Her memory is still precious enough to me to buy that. The word is àlvātēmârā; I'll even teach you how to sing it if you come and ask me. It translates as 'people-knowing knowledge'. In this language, it needs a few more words to describe - 'the desire to understand people', or to use an idiom, 'the desire to see through another's eyes'. There is an added implication of curiosity and warmth. It's a good word.
That was the first day I realised that àlvātēmârā and so many other concepts weren't particular to the fae and wouldn't die with the fae. It was a happy thought. It still is, as a matter of fact.
So the next time I saw the young lady - and much to her surprise - I sat and told her about Longreach Strand, moonlight on a jet-black ocean, sun on an all-blue-changing one, pranks on sharks and seaweed always tangling in my silly son's hair. And because àlvātēmârā is light and dark, I told her about iron-fear, the hordes of sailors dragged down to drown by sea fae, the wives and daughters stolen from human homesteads on the beachside.
She wrote everything down from a hundred visits and more. Books, pamphlets and all manner of paperwork ... they've always been fond of that at the Iron Hold. But the thing about àlvātēmârā, true àlvātēmârā, is that it's indiscriminate. It wants to understand all people, not just one.
One day she went to see Cochalyon again, and Cochalyon killed her. He has let them make a monster of him over the years. That's the fate, you see, of everyone who suffers bitter pain and despair without any àlvātēmârā.
I'd never grieved the death of a human before. Perhaps I should have.
I began to write my history the same day, if not quite the history that the Iron Hold wanted at first. I wrote it - and still write it - for all the humans who are the same as that young lady, because I do know they're there.
It's for her too, of course, and for myself, and for all the fae lost - those who are dead, and those who have become monsters.
That's what I get for asking myself 'why did I say Ascalain doesn't talk to researchers much?'. I think I'll have to change "The Iron Hold", because Fiannas isn't the most harmless fae any more ;)
Oh, and if you're still cross-eyed from those mad vowels, I've used different demarcations for different tones. à is a low note, ā/ē are middle-scale and â is high. I might just choose which notes I want each one to approximate if I have enough time to waste one of these days ...
Happy spring to the north-hemisphereans! ;D