Work Text:
I.
It does not speak to her until the fifth day. When it does, it calls out to her from the fruit she holds in her hands, new-picked from the tree. Thou art Mono, it says. We have never met, although we gave thou life. We are the one known as Dormin.
Mono drops the fruit and watches it strike the ground, chunks of flesh falling apart. It lays dormant. It is only a fruit. The animals will eat it.
She backs away, her whole body shaking with fear, and she does not eat from that tree again.
II.
Agro is good company, as she heals from her injuries she listens to Mono talk, never straying far from Mono’s side and joining her in her daily hours of watching over the baby, but Agro cannot answer questions. The baby cannot answer questions, either, for he is an infant newly-born. The animals that live in the garden cannot answer questions, and it is questions which fill Mono’s mind from morning to night. They keep her from her sleep, a constant deluge of them running ever and always through her mind.
On the thirteenth day, Mono returns to the fruit tree which once spoke to her and picks another fruit.
There are some questions to which she does not need answers. Mono was dead, now she is not dead. The how of it hardly matters, for the what of it has been done. Agro is here, but Wander is not, and Agro would never willingly leave Wander’s side, so for that, too, she needs no explanation. The collapsed bridge answers the question of if she could ever leave, and the where she knows in her soul, for these are the Forbidden Lands.
How far had Wander ridden, and under such duress, to bring her here. Those are questions Dormin cannot answer, for the why of Wander’s choice has gone with him. The how of their arrival here itself does not matter, for the outcome is settled: Wander brought Mono here, and brought her back to life, and he is gone. That is not the question that she wants answered.
Mono plucks the fruit and asks it, “What was it that killed him?”
We did, Dormin speaks from a half-bloomed vine. We set him upon ourselves, and he died in the fight. Still he carried on, and would carry on even now as our vessel, had we not been struck down by the mortals who followed him.
“Why do you speak to me from the plants?” Mono asks, crouching down beside the vine. “There are stories of you as a great black beast, of the glow of sunlight. Why are you so small?”
Thou have a cursed fate, Dormin replies, and will not speak further afterward.
III.
On the twenty-third day, when Agro has finally begun to regain her strength, Mono fashions a sling for the baby out of her burial cloak, which she found three days earlier, folded beside her head when she awoke. She offered Dormin her thanks, as was only gracious to a kind host, and now she has a way to carry the child.
He will need a name, Dormin comments, from a falling leaf that passes beside her ear as Mono leads Agro slowly, slowly, down the steps from the garden. He, too, has a cursed fate.
“I have been cursed before. It is no terrible thing.” Mono’s death was easy and painless, and her resurrection kind and quiet. That which came between the two is only silence.
To be nameless is, too, a curse.
“Then I name him Follow, and hope he stays but does not go.”
He is that which was once Wander. Thou would not name them the same? There is one of her questions, answered without her having asked it. Mono sighs, lifting the child to settle against her chest. She shakes her head. Thou didst not love him? Do thou not desire his return?
“Is it not a curse to try to live the same life twice?” They are nearly down at the base of the shrine now, the leaf flicking beside her face. “Let him choose who he is to be. We four are all there is here, and we four expect nothing of him. He was not born Wander before, and he will not be born Wander now.”
Thou art strange.
Mono looks at the leaf, hovering free of the breeze before her, and plucks it from the air. She tucks it into her hair, and says nothing else except to call Agro, to help her leg heal, as they practice moving about the grass around the shrine.
IV.
On the thirty-ninth day, Mono tires of fruit, so she strings Wander’s bow and goes to hunt.
Why dost though know the arts of war? Dormin speaks from the dead body of a lizard that lays on the rock beside Mono as she waits to aim at the next. Thou art chosen.
She fells another lizard. “You were mortal once, were you not?”
Were we? Dormin asks, and sounds amused by the very idea. Tell us the story.
Mono debates asking for something in return—for Dormin to tell her where the best potential sources of cloth are, for her clothes are funeral garb, and they are not meant to be worn and moved in. She could ask for better advice on where to hunt. It is all-knowing, here in its own lands, in its great kingdom where once it was worshipped.
She does not ask.
Mono says, “Long ago, in the days where it was still of use to wish for a thing, there was born in the desert a child who dreamed of one day bathing hir feet in the ocean. Sie was born with a crone’s back, however, and every step hurt hir, but to hir dream sie held true.” Another lizard. “And so, when sie had grown as strong as hir own two legs could make hir, sie began to walk.”
What has this to do with us? Dormin sounds bored, which is odd, for a dead lizard.
“You asked for the story. I am telling it as I was told, as was my mother, as was my mother’s mother, all the way back to the days of the first birth.” Mono shakes an arrow at the dead lizard. “You will listen.”
We will listen, Dormin agrees.
“The dreamer who wished for the sea began to walk, and met upon the road a bull of a woman, wide-chested and with legs like the trunks of trees. She thought the dreamer was a crone, wizened and bent, and said to hir Grandparent, let me help you walk. When she saw that the dreamer was but a youth, she did not mind, for a hand given to one is a hand given to all, and into the sands they did walk.”
Mono tucks Dormin’s lizard into the sling she made from half of her funeral shroud, the other half wrapped around Follow where he is strapped to her back, and continues to tell the story as she goes to gather her gleanings. “In those days, before there were roads, it was not uncommon to lose entire caravans in the sands. Soon they came upon a lost elephant, separated from those whom had once journeyed with it. The dreamer, as I said, had a crone’s bowed back and a crone’s crooked feet and a crone’s rheumy eyes, so sie asked the elephant if sie could ride upon it, and to the dreamer it bent its head.”
Mono has killed six lizards, and six lizards go into her sling, plucked of their arrows, which she will wash and reuse.
“Next, the dreamer came upon a swordsman who had been injured, one hand severed at the wrist, so weak he had bound his sword to his remaining hand. For a fortnight, the dreamer nursed him well, healing the infection with hir parent’s magic and hir sibling’s poultices and hir grandparent’s wisdom, until he awoke on the sixteenth day well again. He, too, joined the entourage on their long walk to the sea.”
Mono has not gone far from the garden, not with Agro left behind, but it is still a long enough walk, she thinks, to tell the story as it must be told. If Dormin still listens, it gives no indication. The lizards in her bag are silent. Follow sleeps.
“Along with the swordsman came his horse. Next to join their number was a hawk with a broken wing whom the dreamer nursed well. A hermit who heard their passing left his hovel when they reached the woods, and chose to walk their path even though he, too, was bent. In the forest there was a great fish trapped in a net who the dreamer rescued and promised to bring to the sea, if it so wanted. An injured lizard, tortoise, and snake; a lion with a hurt paw, loyal once its pain was seen to, another guard to sit watch over their camps at night. From the forest to the jungle, where a great ape followed always at a distance, unsure of these strangers in its lands.
“They found then a dragon, the last of its kind, blind and dying, so old it had wasted away to naught but skin and bones, its skeleton so light the wind itself could move it, and it, too, they carried. A beaten dog they rescued from its wicked owner, the guardian of a city turned away from its gates. The dreamer led them, one by one, across sand and soil and tree and grass and root, and when they rested upon the last great hill looking out towards the sea, the dreamer felt nothing but love, love for the road sie had taken and travelled beside such good companions.
“On the final morning, hir fifteen companions awoke, and found the dreamer dead, smiling in repose. All among their number sent up a great cry, and bore the dreamer down to the sea, hir hair littered with flowers and hir body wrapped in scarves. They washed the dreamer in the salt water, and lamented for how close sie had come to bathing in the waves, to feeling the salt air upon hir face, and every one among them wished they could offer their life in return for the dreamer.”
Mono stops now where she stands at the edge of the garden, the wind blowing up off of the Forbidden Land to tangle her hair. It begins to grow too long. She needs to cut it.
“This was still in the days when it was of use to wish for a thing, and their wishes were such that one by one, the fifteen dropped dead, their souls yearning to let the dreamer know but one breath of the joy sie had so longed for—but when sie opened hir eyes, sie found hirself alone. The dreamer had no more dream to dream, for the friends that had dreamed it with hir were gone. Weeping, wailing, the dreamer bound their souls, one by one, until one was made sixteen and sixteen made one, and they would sleep, dormin, and always dream their dream.”
A story, Dormin agrees.
“What story would you tell?” Mono asks, closing her eyes to feel the wind on her face. “How came you to be shut away here?”
We are, Dormin says, which is neither an answer nor an explanation.
V.
On the forty-third day, Mono wakes to find new clothes folded beside her head. They are plain cotton and otherwise unremarkable, but they will serve her needs, and she recognizes a gift in return for her story. She dyes them ochre and green, and there is joy in being freed from the last trappings of her would-be grave.
VI.
On the one hundred and twenty-sixth day, Agro is finally well enough that Mono thinks she can make the journey they need to make. Over the following day and a half, she moves everything they’ll need down out of the garden to the shrine below. Agro, Follow, and Mono come first, then the fruit, then the canteens Mono made from leather she found suspiciously left out where she could find it alongside their blankets and bedrolls. Finally, she lowers the last load down over the edge on a long vine rope, the large watertight baskets stacked inside each other, rakes balanced precariously.
When Agro is saddled, loaded, and ready and waiting, Mono stands in the grasslands at the foot of the shrine and looks up at the garden in which she has lived all of her new life. They will be back, of this she is certain. The Forbidden Lands are not necessarily inhospitable, but they are barren, and the garden is anything but. It is, however, not able to provide all things they might need—or not, at least, in the quantity they need them.
They need salt.
Mono mounts up on Agro, Follow slung over her chest and playing with a flower, his brown hair a growing tuft between the horns on either side of his head, and turns them all towards the south.
They stop at the first tree they pass for Mono to harvest more fresh fruit. One splits when it lands, and she leaves it for the birds, a gull coming over to peck intently at it as she gathers the rest into waxy broad leaves, keeping stems attached where she can, and packs it into one of the baskets. When they ride away, the gull follows, alighting on the pommel of Agro’s saddle. Where art thou going? Dormin asks, the gull casually preening itself—apparently not bothered by either its secondary passenger or the sticky-fingered baby reaching for its feathers.
“South,” Mono replies, tying the broad-brimmed hat she wove under her chin. “We need salt.”
Salt. Dormin sounds bemused. The gull flies away, and Mono assumes that will be the last of this particular conversation.
This is not her first trip out into the wider Forbidden Lands, but it will be her longest. Over the past few months, when she has ventured out and further from the central shrine, Dormin has followed, asking, ever and always asking, no better than a child, what she is doing and why. Informing her that the garden has all she needs, reminding her that she could very well succumb to another cursed fate, be killed by some wild animal or unlucky happenstance. They have questioned her trips to the forest to get wood and branches, her time spent fishing in the river beside the collapsed stone body of one of the colossi—and questioned, too, her choice to pour out libations and a cut of each fish she catches to the deceased creature as an honor to its grave and spirit.
What little Mono has left from Wander are those things which survived his death, whatever form that took—his bow and arrows, some of his clothes, and, most important of all, his map of the Forbidden Lands. He sketched it with charcoal on an oilskin, and it is well done, and leads her without any real difficulty in the direction she wants to go.
Their second stop is the grotto at the southern end of the plains. It was the first place Mono had gone, when she’d felt strong enough to go anywhere, and she had been struck by the solid planks of wood connecting some of the upper ledges. She’d had no need for them then, but she will need them now, for Wander’s notes include marks of a bridge that has fallen, and while Agro once might have been able to jump it with ease, Mono will not now take that risk. Agro is lucky enough to have survived being nearly lamed. She need not chance anything now. Mono throws the planks down onto the ground below one by one, binds them together with cord made out of Wander’s ruined clothes, and bundles them up to lay as evenly as possible atop Agro’s rump.
They go west next, following the track worn by the wind between the cliff faces. The sun never sets in the Forbidden Lands, but they must rest, and the day has been long and their progress slow when they come at last to the next shrine. Mono prays, setting out fine-smelling flowers as an offering to the god of stones that lives here, unburdens Agro, feeds and changes Follow and rocks him to sleep, and then lays down herself.
She wakes up to find the seagull on her chest. It clicks its beak at her, head turned almost upside-down.
We do not understand mortals, Dormin says, when she has been staring at the gull for a very long time.
Mono says, “We need salt.”
Why dost thou need salt?
“We do.” Mono has been getting enough, especially now she’s eating the fish she catches, but Agro has worn through the last of the lick that was in her saddle bag, and Follow is growing. He will need salt, too. “So we’re going to the beach, to make some.”
Why dost thou not ask for salt? Dormin asks, after Mono has fed them and saddled Agro and once more begun to ride. The gull flies lazy and slow overhead. We could give thee salt.
“You gave me life. I will ask for nothing else.” Mono does not know if she would have asked them for life, either. She has only ever known one future, one ending, for herself. She has only ever known that, at sundown on her twentieth birthday, her chosen husband would seal their ritual marriage by pouring her bridal gift, rich wine laced thick with poison, and she would drink, ending her curse and freeing her people. At sundown on her twentieth birthday, Wander sealed their ritual marriage by pouring her bridal gift, rich wine laced thick with poison, and she drank, ending her curse and freeing her people.
That she then woke up again is entirely unaccountable.
Wert thou truly cursed? Dormin is laughing, if seagulls could laugh. Thou fear nothing.
“I died.” Mono gently nudges Agro into a faster walk as they go downhill. “After that, there is nothing else to fear.”
VI.
It takes the better part of four days to travel from the shrine to the beach, skirting along the northern edge of the desert, staying in the highlands. The one moment where Mono thinks they might not make it is when they reach the broken land bridge and she has to lay out the planks. They creak alarmingly underneath Agro’s weight, but they hold up, and once they’re across she lays out a full offering at the shrine on the other side, including the head and bones of the last of the fish she brought with them.
When they finally reach the beach it’s late afternoon, and Mono strips naked before she wades into the surf, letting the waves swallow her tears.
So much is different, but the ocean is always the same. It welcomes her home, just as it always has. When she swims back to shore for Follow, to bring him into the surf for the first time, he soon begins to laugh. His joy is infectious. He is still a child of the sea.
Dormin does not appear again until Mono has begun to trace out the salt ponds. They land, once again as a gull, on top of a nearby rock. They don’t speak, instead watching her begin to dig with her spade that is really a particularly well-shaped piece of thin shale she's slotted into a sturdy stick. She goes up to the top of the cliff again and pushes a few rocks off so that they shatter below, then takes those pieces to line the ponds, reinforcing their walls, and lays out dried rushes from the grasslands on the bottom of each of them.
As the sun sets into the ocean, Mono fills the first pond with a single pail of water. She is exhausted, tired, salt-sticky, and immensely pleased with herself.
Why? asks Dormin, when they land beside the cove that Mono has chosen to pitch camp in, the gull clawing in the sand.
“The answer was salt before,” Mono reminds them. “The answer will be salt now.”
The gull leaves before Dormin can respond, and Mono tries not to laugh—tries, and fails.
VII.
After a week, her traps have begun to catch fish and she has raked her first pond into her second and refilled the first. That night, Mono roasts one fish on a rock over the fire, salts it, and almost cries with joy at the taste, the meat so hot when she bites into it that she burns the roof of her mouth.
Dormin is there the next day, watching as she rakes the salt. When it begins to drizzle at midafternoon, they watch her lay all the planks out over the two filled ponds, then join her, Agro, and Follow up at the shrine, crouching inside the tiny dry breezeway while her baskets collect water outside.
Thou knows many things. Where didst thou learn?
Mono, curled up against Agro’s side to share her warmth, Follow nursing on her finger and his fruit mash, considers ignoring the question—considers, and then reconsiders, because Dormin’s curiosity is her own in turn, and they can barter as they have thus far.
“Long ago, in the days where it was still of use to wish for a thing, there was born a boy in a village beside the sea where the boats go out and the boats return. He was given a cursed fate, but through no fault of his own. To kill him as a newborn would be cruelty; to punish him through neglect would make those of the community no better than the curse itself—but to expect him to live a normal life knowing his curse, too, was an unkindness. For many days the elders of fishing and washing and weaving and salting and building and buying and caring debated what must be done, wanting neither to harm the babe nor to harm their people.”
We have never known mortals to put the needs of others before themselves.
Mono ignores Dormin. “After twenty days and twenty nights, the elders presented their conclusion to the village where the boats go out and the boats return: The curse was no fault of the babe’s, but a fault of the village, as a whole, for no newborn commits a crime. As no one alone could be blamed for having brought the curse upon the babe, the village as a whole would all take equal responsibility for the boy as he grew. As for the boy who was cursed, when he had lived twenty years, one year for every day the elders had debated his fate, he would take equal responsibility for the village in turn, and would die by his own hand to spare himself and his kinsmen the curse.
“For the first five years of his life, the boy lived among the children under the watchful eye of the carers. He learned to live, talk, run, gather eggs, pluck birds, and care for himself, and all the village children were his siblings and all the carers were his parents.
“For the next two years, he lived amongst the herders, and the goats were his cousins and the herders his parents. For two years after that, he lived with the weavers, and the clothes and baskets he helped to make were his children and the weavers were his parents. For each of the next two years, he lived with another community—the washers, the fishers, the builders, the salters, the buyers. On his nineteenth birthday, he began to court a bride, living with her family beneath their roof, where she made a groom’s tabard for him, and he provided by doing whichever trade he loved most, for they were all his trade, and the village was all his family.”
An idyllic life, Dormin muses. To never want for love, to never want for family, to never want for care. Many children die for far lesser sins.
“There is a difference between what is taken and what is freely given.” Mono looks at Dormin, the gull clinging to a loose piece of masonry and preening. “Did Wander not freely give himself to you?”
He did.
“If you had taken instead of being gifted, could he have returned you to being whole?”
No.
“And that is why, at sundown on his twentieth birthday, the cursed boy and his bride sealed their marriage by ritual vows and she poured for him his marital gift, rich wine laced thick with poison, and he drank, ending his curse and freeing his people. He gave a gift to his family, as they had given gifts to him, and in that way none paid any price beyond their means. So it has always been in the village where the boats go out and the boats return, and so it shall always be. I lived for five years with the carers, two with the herders, two with the weavers, two with the fishers, two with the washers, two with the builders, two with the salters, two with the buyers, and one with my husband. In this way, the village gave to me a complete life in full, a family and children and husband, and I gave them freedom from my curse.”
They put many resources into keeping thee alive.
“You put many resources into keeping Wander alive.”
Dormin is silent after that.
VIII.
When the first of the salt is ready to harvest, Dormin and the gull come to watch as Mono rakes it all up out of the pans and starts separating it into that which she will use for cooking, that which she will use for preserving, and that which she will turn into a salt lick for Agro and some of the other animals in the garden, for scrubbing and washing, for making soap.
The gull comes over, interested in the salt, and as soon as it’s close enough, Mono reaches out slowly. It doesn’t bother to flinch.
She takes it by the neck and snaps its spine in one clean motion. Dormin makes a noise that is not unlike a question as she sets the dead bird aside and ties the last set of reed knots closed, packaging her salt-cakes. That does not harm us, the dead gull says. We are not the bird.
“I don’t care about you,” Mono replies. “The gull is enough meat to feed me for days; the bones will make good fertilizer. The feathers will let me make a pillow for my head. I told you a story, and you brought me a meal. That is an even trade.”
We will only come back again.
“Then you come back. If you want to learn more about the salt, come with a body that can help, and I’ll teach you to rake it.”
The next morning, a thing of shadow not higher than Mono’s shin is waiting beside the salt ponds. She creates a small rake for it, and Dormin joins her, motions jerky, never speaking, as they rake and move and dry the salt, as the ocean water evaporates, and they create something new.
IX.
The sun never sets and the seasons never change in the Forbidden Lands, so Mono tracks the passage of days and weeks and months by when she sleeps and when she wakes, tallying them with chalk on one of the walls in the garden. She adds seventy-two days when they finally return, her hair grown long, Follow now able to sit up and crawl about on his own.
With salt and the ability to preserve food, she goes and digs up clay from the wetlands to the north and slowly, painstakingly, she builds a kiln and shapes herself pots and dishes. She explores the ruins and finds other things nearly as useful as her precious wood planks, including a plain sword that she uses as a makeshift knife to plane the trees she chops down with her stone-headed axe, nails and some of the heads of Wander’s arrows that become woodworking tools, and so she creates buckets and cups and slowly, bit by bit, she builds herself a life.
Over the next two years—between harvesting wild flax and replanting it nearer to the shrine, between Follow learning to walk and speak and run—the only times Mono sees Dormin is on their once-yearly trek to the ocean. They do not speak to her, only raking the salt and raking the salt and raking the salt.
In the third year, when Follow is now grown enough to ask questions, when Mono is harvesting the catch from the traps in the river below the shrine, he brings her a shiny rock from the riverbed and says, “It talks.”
“Hello, Dormin,” Mono says to the rock.
Hello, Mono, says the rock.
“Leave Follow alone.”
We do not obey thee.
“I’ll trade you for it.”
We will consider this.
She carries the rock in her pocket for two days before it speaks to Mono while she washes their laundry. Long ago, in the days where it was still of use to wish for a thing, there was in the darkness between the stars an inkling of that which could be, if only it was wished for. Follow, who has been chasing a butterfly with a stick, comes over and sits at the edge of the river to listen, and Mono takes the rock from her pocket, setting it between them on the shore, as she rinses the last of the soap from their clothes. And so the darkness between the stars looked for a wisher to wish upon it, but found only those who wished upon stars. For twenty days and twenty nights it searched out mortals that could wish, until it found an old man, eyes gone blind, who no longer could see stars to wish upon. He cried out, lamenting his loss of the night he had once loved, and asked the darkness to watch over him in their stead, and so the darkness did. For twenty days and twenty nights the darkness searched for another who would wish upon it, and found a young woman, her heart broken, who asked that her enemies fall into the darkness, and so the darkness swallowed them whole.
Fourteen others it found, fourteen other wishes, until the darkness between the stars had eyes and nose and ears, hands and feet, and breath, and then, did it come to answer wishes.
Made, we were, of mortal and cosmos both.
The rock says nothing after that, but Dormin does not speak to Follow again.
X.
Three years later, Follow learns to ride. Agro takes him easy and careful, and it is on one of these sunny afternoons at the foot of the shrine, Mono sitting upon the wide marble steps as she watches Agro carefully walk him back and forth, that the being of shadow sits down beside her, hands upon its knees.
What was he to thee, Dormin asks, featureless black head watching Follow and Agro, for you to raise him as a child?
Mono has had five long years to consider this. Did she love Wander? Perhaps she could have, in another life. She cared for him, her childhood friend and playmate, her husband for a heartbeat, the man who gave his life for hers for reasons she will never, ever know. Her murderer, even if she was the one who took the poison and the one who drank.
Mono smiles. “He Was.”
He was?
“And now he never will be again.”
We do not understand why he wished thee returned. We do not understand why thou care for him-that-is-not.
“Children are our future, even as they are our past.” Mono sets down the hat she has almost finished weaving of rushes and cattails. “Why he brought me back, that I cannot tell you, only that he did.”
We do not understand.
“Neither do I,” Mono sighs, watching as Follow almost falls off of Agro’s back. “Neither do I.”
Perhaps it was guilt.
Perhaps it was service.
She will never know, and that is guilt and service too.
XI.
There are no goats or sheep in the Forbidden Lands, so Mono teaches Follow less about animals and more about survival. He learns to use a sling and becomes so precise with it he can strike a lizard at forty paces. She teaches him to climb bare stone, clambering up the many cliffs that make up the plateaus, and they sit for long hours atop them, feeling the wind over their faces and laughing under the clear sunlight.
Dormin often accompanies them in whatever form that they think fits best. Sometimes a small rock or a flower, easy to carry—sometimes a bird to circle overhead or a lizard to scramble alongside them, a long-legged grasshopper jumping in the scrub. They rarely speak, but Mono always knows, some sense-memory of her time among the dead alerting her to their presence.
She tells Follow stories, about everything she can remember. Dawn and sunset, moonrise and the dark of night, bustling markets and the voices of multitudes. She teaches him the mechanics of milking and shearing. He learns to make maps and write and read, how to test for the wind.
After two years pass, Mono begins to teach Follow how to grow and harvest cotton and flax. He watches her card cotton and then copies her with unsteady motions, but takes to a drop spindle with ease. The first thread he makes she teaches him to finger-weave into a bracelet, a traditional amulet of protection.
When they go to the saltery, Follow weaves on a lap loom while Mono and Dormin rake the salt, and she tells them stories of market days, where there would be buyers and sellers from all over the sea, haggling over well-made wares. Follow’s cloth is lumpy and uneven, but it soon begins to smooth, and when after two years the saddle blanket he throws over Agro’s back is made by his own hands, his joy fills every inch of his body, an ebullient glow on his face.
XII.
Follow has been fishing since he was old enough to help bend green striplings into baskets, and he has begun to make linen nets that are so fine they can take them to the headwaters of the river to the northeast and trawl for little fish that make fine fertilizer and finer soup stock—nets that are strong enough to catch birds and hares and other small wild animals throughout the Forbidden Lands. Even his rod fishing is good, and he once caught a fish nearly as long as his leg that, when preserved, lasted them months.
Mono can teach him nothing more of the art of fishing, but she can teach him the art of sailing—if they have a boat.
They go out to the wetlands and pick through the pines that must have been felled in Wander’s long-ago battle with the colossus who lies as sand and gravedirt in the middle of the bog, to whom Mono offers salt and three thumb-sized clay plates in thanks for his trees. The best one they find is just long enough to make two small dugouts, and the sledge they make to roll it is old sticks and Follow’s cloth. Between the two of them and Agro they pull it back to the shrine, chop it in half with the ancient blade, and then Mono shows Follow how to knap a flint knife, how to shave the tree, and how to shape it.
Over many months as they plane the wood and hand-drill the holes and shape the canoe, Mono tells Follow the story of how the world was born. Dormin, in forms great and small, joins and listens.
“When the first star was born, in the days before sunrise and sunset, the first star grew curious of the greatness of the cosmos, and so it built for itself four winds. The four winds stretched in all directions, and when the star let them loose, the winds carried with them the first star’s light and all its dust, and together they lit up the universe. In giving all its light up to fill the cosmos, the first star had made itself very dim, and now it was cold and lonely, so it called out to all its many children and asked them each to send it a companion. In this way, the many stars created a small world, one small enough that it could be held close to the first star and could reflect its rays back onto it, making it warm again. The world was populated by mortals, the first humans, and they loved their star, but it was too dim for them to grow crops and make salt and dry bricks. In those days, it was still of use to wish for a thing, so they together wished for their star to grow brighter in the sky so they could flourish.”
The dugouts begin to hollow, one slow pass at a time, of hours and days and weeks spent with sand and flint.
“The north wind believed that if it coiled around the star, the star would be buffeted by its breezes, and it would make the light grow brighter even if the star grew no hotter, just as a fire grows when the wind throws the flames flickering. For a time this worked. The north wind, however, was cold, and the longer it blew the dimmer the star became, until the first star was only a flicker of a thing.”
They sit on the beach at the river, beside the fallen colossus, and their canoes shape into points, prows made to break the surf.
“The east wind, loving the first star, did not want to make it weaker, and instead it flew out into the darkness of the universe, between all the other stars, and as it went to each it asked for a bit of light for their mother. The stars gave freely, for each had grown strong as they had grown older, and had plenty of light to offer, so the east wind brought that light back and added it to the first star’s glow. The first star rested, trying to regain its strength, but the light from its many children alone could not grow the crops or bake the bricks.”
When their canoes are shaped, Mono ties a rope to the front of Follow’s boat and they wade together into the river. He paddles while she stabilizes his canoe with a rope around her waist, and he laughs and falls out over the side again and again, a child’s unfettered joy.
“Next tried the west wind, which came down to the world that they had created and went to all the fires of all the mortals and took one ember from each, and it carried those all back to the first star, like one would stock the coals in the hearth. The first star, now it had more fires to burn beyond only itself, kept them safe and grew warm, but still, it was not brighter.”
Beside the sea, paddling together out from the shore, Dormin perched as a gull atop the prow of her boat, Mono raises her face to the sun, and listens as Follow raises his sail.
“The youngest of the four winds was the south wind, and it was the strongest. It was so strong that it worried if it tried to blow across the first star it would put it out, so instead, it returned to whence it was born, inside the heart of the first star, and blew from within. It whipped up the embers that the west wind had brought, warming the first star against the north wind’s cool breezes, making it bright enough that the dust from their many cousin stars could add to, not dilute, its glow. In this way the first star burst back into life and became our sun.”
This star called the sun is young amongst the stars, made of not fire but many great powers beyond your knowing. The Dormin-gull quarks at her. Why tell stories that are untrue?
“Why tell stories that are true?” Mono counters, and puts her oar into the surf.
XIII.
Follow already knows how to wash and care for cloth and leather, how to make soap and how to seal with wax and honey, so rather than take two years to teach him that which he already knows, they begin to learn to build. They lash together new stone-headed axes, chop down trees, make brick molds and build a new, larger, mud-brick kiln than the ones she has used for many years, built mostly from collapsed stone rubble. They make bricks from mud and pots from mud and clay, tools from stone and wood. Follow practices lashing together wood to make huts, splitting logs with stones and nailing together joints that stand up to all kinds of weight.
After one of his long forays into the wilderness, growing tall and strong, Follow returns concerned, having found a small pond where the water has turned orange, and Mono almost cries with joy when she returns with him and sees the unmistakable rusty glitter of iron in the water.
They spend a week in the woods reducing the iron down into smelting powder, and carry it slung over their shoulders back to where Agro waits, taking more loads than Mono ever thought she would be lucky enough to have to their kiln. When they burn it down to smelt, Dormin in the guise of a shadowy bird throws charcoal and twigs into the fire, watching curiously as they pull out the resulting slag, picking out the prils.
They make hooks first, for fishing, and then knives, and then a small cup that Mono uses to melt glass finer than she can in mud or clay, and Follow and Dormin both watch, fascinated, as she creates tiny rods of colored glass and breaks them, hollows them out into fine beads even nicer than the ones she’s made of stone and bone.
She offers the first bracelet to Dormin, and the shadowy crow wears it around its neck, strutting and preening as the glass catches the light.
XIV.
Five years for the carers, two for the herders, two for the weavers, two for the washers, the builders, the salters, and the buyers. There are no merchants or buyers in the Forbidden Lands, so instead, Mono prepares other things. They make beads of glass and stone and bone by the hundreds; they fish out two pearls from clams along the beach shore, gather bits of obsidian scattered here and there. They weave and dye fine cloth.
Mono teaches Follow how to barter, comparing what was made and how much work it took to make it, what is rare and what is common, and what it is worth. A bead is worth a bead. A pearl is worth all five bags of beads. Obsidian is worth one bag of beads, so on and so forth.
Thou dost teach him of a world he will never know, Dormin tells her, one night when Mono is unable to sleep and sits, carving soft wood into new spoons. The shadow bird is curled in her lap, staring at her from its eyeless face. These dream s are of a future he cannot experience.
“Nothing is forever,” Mono replies, and they have no response to that, for nothing is forever. Not even Dormin.
XV.
For Follow’s nineteenth year, there is no ritual bride for him to join in her family’s home. He looks like-and-not to the Wander that Mono remembers. Setting aside his horns completely, which are simply a part of what he is, his hair is longer, his eyes clearer, his skin darker with a tan from years spent outside, his fingers and hands covered in the scars of a thousand days of hard work, his arms and chest strong from lifting, not from swinging a blade. He is a capable rider, but not as liquid on horseback, for the only horse he has ever practiced riding is old and now nearly lame.
Still, Agro walks with them, when they begin their final journey. Wander’s map of the Forbidden Lands marks each fallen colossus, and one by one, they go and attend to them. At each, they light a small fire of flowers and incense, offering salt and fruit-wine and simple cloth bracelets, and pray. One by one, they retrace Wander’s steps—they follow where he led, until sixteen small pyres have been lit and sixteen fragments of Dormin’s undying soul finally laid to rest.
When they return to the shrine, on what Mono knows will be their final night in the garden, she sets Dormin in their black-winged bird form on the branch they like to sit upon, and lights a fire. She takes the mask she has carved from driftwood, as is traditional, and places it upon her face. As the sparks spiral up around her, she feels the shudder of generations down her back, lessons and stories as old as the water in the sea.
Mono says, in the voices of all who have said the words before, “That place began from the resonance of intersecting points. They are memories replaced by ens and naught and etched into stone. Blood, young sprouts, sky—and the one with the ability to control beings created from light. In that world, it is said that if one should wish it, one can bring back the souls of the dead... but to trespass upon that land is strictly forbidden.”
“Why?” Follow asks, eyes wide.
“Because long ago, in the days where it was still of use to wish for a thing, there was a woman whose wife grew weak with child. When it came time for the babe to be born, either her daughter or her wife could live, and her wife wished for it to be her child. Left alone but for her daughter to raise, the woman wept and wailed and rent from her head her hair, put ashes upon her face. In those days, people still lived in that place of intersection points. They offered sacrifices up to the voice of the light and the sun, and in return they received gifts great and small, but those gifts always came for a price. For every day of blessed rain, you had to offer a day of drought, and for every forest, a fallow field. Something cannot come from nothing. All creation arises from the dead.
“The woman knew this, and yet still she strapped her newborn child to her back, wrapped her wife in her funeral clothes, and walked upon a long, long journey to the shrine where the god of light spoke. When she arrived, she laid her dead wife down upon the altar of offerings, and said to the god of light—“
She spoke unto the light, saying, I was told that in this place at the ends of the world, there exists a being who can control the souls of the dead. And so we did reply that we are the one known as Dormin. We said to her, souls that are once lost cannot be reclaimed, for is that not the law of mortals... but that it was not impossible, if she managed to accomplish that which we asked. But heed this: the price she would pay may be heavy indeed. All creation arises from the dead. That which is made must be unmade. To have one you must have the other. So did the woman die, and her wife rise, and rend her hair in grief.
“There came others,” Mono continues, when Dormin goes quiet. “A boy, robbed of his grandfather. A child, whose pet had been struck by a plague. A dog, longing for his master’s return. A father, his children swept away in a flood. A priest, his fellow penitents slain in battle.”
Fifteen did come and offer unto us their souls. One by one were they cut and carved of stone, until for each an effigy arose as a memory in mortar. One by one did they begin to walk the earth as shadows to our light, and one by one were they cursed.
“From that place did all mortals henceforth go, calling it forbidden, calling that which slept there undying. With the last of the great magics did they seal it but for a blade and a prayer, and go into the world.”
Until a boy came.
“Until you came.”
Mono takes off her mask takes Follow’s hands over the fire, the heat licking their bare skin. “Twenty years ago, the man you once were, the man I wed for but a night, despaired of my loss, for I had been given a cursed fate. I know not why he made the choice he made, but he did, and came here to trade for my life, although it cost a terrible price.”
Thou didst free us, crumbled the effigies to rubble, made us whole. Thou didst bear us, for a time, as a seventeenth soul, and thou didst die.
“And then you rose again, anew, and whole. In the village you and I were once born in, the first time you were born, those who bear a cursed fate marry and die upon the night of their twentieth birthday, but there is none here for you to curse.” Mono holds Follow’s hands tighter over the fire. He does not try to pull away. “Your curse is to live out the past and return whence you first came in that other life, to the far away village beside the sea where the boats go out and the boats return, and give them back the ancient blade. You must make your own way there, alone, and wander for as many years as it takes to do so. You must struggle, survive, work and sell and barter and buy, and do as all mortals have done since time immemorial, and live. Like all others with cursed fates from that village, you lived for five years with the carers, two with the herders, two with the weavers, two with the fishers, two with the washers, two with the builders, two with the salters, two with the buyers, and one with I, who was once your wife, before you were yourself. In this way, the village gave to you a complete life in full, a family and children and bride. Now, you will take that which the village gave me and I gave to you, and return it thence, and tell them of what you have seen and lived here, of the stories you have been told, of the sun and the colossi and the being which controls those made of light and I, who died and lived once more. You cannot die for them, or any other, for the curse you have only hurts those who live here, and there are none who live here who can be hurt. You will die, someplace far from this shore, at the end of your many days, in a world where none but you know the cry of the gulls in a land without night, and in this way, you will make atonement for what you have done.”
Follow cries, and Mono cries with him. This is the fate of those who are born cursed, and there is no other choice but for him to go to other worlds than this.
XVI.
Agro comes with them all the way north, to the cliff and the towers that demarcate the cave from whence once began the bridge, connecting the shrine to the world beyond the plateau of the Forbidden Lands. Laden with his goods, the ancient sword, and his own strong back, Mono holds Follow once more, tight in her arms, and kisses his forehead goodbye. He pets Agro, who lips tiredly at his shirt, rubbing his forehead against her nose, this horse now grown old and blind and nearly lame, his companion across two lives. He bows to Dormin upon Mono’s shoulder, then turns and bows to the Forbidden Lands sixteen times, one for each of the colossi, turning to them in order.
And then, before he can look back, Follow goes to the high shale wall, equipped with all the skills he needs, and climbs.
Mono, Agro, and Dormin watch until Follow finally crests the lip of the platform high above. He turns back once, shouting “Agro! Mono! Dormin! Goodbye!” and Mono’s eyes burn with tears, hot and heady, as Follow disappears into the shadow and the cave beyond.
And now? asks Dormin, riding upon the shoulder of her dress. Mono is a woman grown. She has lived one life and now a second, and her hips and knees and back ache, her menses grown slow, her hair to grey. Thou art alone.
“No,” Mono says, smiling as the heat off of the northern desert dries her tears, as the sand sinks between the toes of her sandals, as she reaches up to pet the bird. “You are here.”
So we are, Dormin agrees, and together, they begin to walk home, three fading things in a fading land.