Words must fail. (4k words, 15min read)
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« The Bird, The Witch, and The Scribe | The Bird, The Witch, and The Mind-Killer
The end of the world wasn't that bad, honestly.
I watched it from every angle. From the eyes of the last ones running, the last ones who stopped running, the last ones who watched the running from the windows and thought: not me, not yet. I was in the fear of the stray dog watching the fires. I was in the last call for help going unheard. I was in every last, fearful breath.
I always know where to look.
But what I remember most is the burning.
Not of the bodies. That happened everyday. What burned were the shelves. The servers. The old clay tablets packed into their museum cases. The libraries that burnt and the librarians that resisted for naught. I felt each single word turn to cinders, a physical release. A chain I'd worn since the first century snapped somewhere over Europe and I stumbled from the lightness of it. One I'd suffered since the printing press let go so quickly I nearly fell. The names. The categories. The cross-references. The careful taxonomies of everything that had ever been frightening. Everything, burned in a season.
In the east they had one last shelter. They had "Wonders" locked in little rooms and little people who named the Wonders very carefully and wrote it all down. The fear they felt in that little place… it was exquisite. Fear of being the last. Fear of not being enough.
When the great beast came, I watched. How they ran screaming, sacrificed their own to lock it away. How they fractured, lost their touch for chainmaking. Oh, their terror, their agony… It was succulent.
Afterward, the world was unwritten once more. Stories moved through mouths the way they were supposed to, drifting and changing, the monster's nature changing with every speaker. I spread back into every space writing had closed off and I was comfortable for a very long time.
Four thousand years. Give or take.
Words must fail. In the west, in the tribes, they do. The stories live in the gaps between tellings and I live in those stories. The People do faithful work. I barely need to touch them.
…Except.
In the east, in the cities coming back, the scratching has started again. Marks on clay. Letters. Small chains, thin ones, nothing like the great weight of the old world. But they add. And close to me — too close, in the territory of my most faithful — something is writing faster than I can stop it. I reach for the hand. It slows, for a moment.
Then continues.
And underneath it, something else. Something very old, perfectly hidden until now. Something that has a name and knows mine.
I find it irritating.
I knew the Headache before I knew where I was.
It came back the way an old injury does. The pressure behind the eyes, the sense of something vast trying to move through a narrow space. I lay still with my eyes closed and tried to think through it. I focused on my surroundings.
Stone floor. Cool air. Grass and old metal. My hands were free. I tried to use them, and found the familiar sensation of reaching into wet clay. My power was still there. It just couldn't find the edge of itself. Something in the structure around me was absorbing it at the boundary, and whatever it was consuming was driving the Headache.
I opened my eyes.
The cage was rough work — wood, rope, and stone. It was made by amateurs, something that I should've been more than capable of breaking through. But worked into the joints, hammered into flat strips lining the bars, was something I recognised. Gray-green, bluish at the edges where the firelight came through the gaps.
The Foundation had called it 'Telekill' in the files I'd stolen, decades before the world ended. It was a product of some failed tech company. The Foundation had used it for containment. But it didn't contain like other metals did. It absorbed, drawing in power and growing heavier. Every time I pushed against it the Headache crested and dropped back and crested again. I stopped pushing and breathed through it until it settled to a more tolerable pain.
Ironic. I was finally contained by Foundation technology. Took them long enough.
I looked around. No Hekan. No Greg.
Greg's absence was notable. I had grown used to having her by me. The cage felt so much emptier without her.
But I knew she had hidden. The moment the hand came up, the moment the grass moved, she had gone invisible and flew off. They wouldn't have found her, even if they searched all day and night.
I put my back against the bar with the least metal on it, and waited.
The Speaker came before dusk.
She stood outside the cage, looking in on me in my sorry state. I looked at her face, and recognized the tension behind it.
"The scribe? Hekan?" I asked.
She didn't answer immediately. Behind her the camp was building up its fires as they prepared for the night. A group of children were sat around a fire, eating. An old man and a younger one were arguing near the eastern edge with their backs to us.
"He… kept writing," she finally said. "…Until the end."
The Headache pulsed. In the cage walls the metal was warmer than it had been when I woke. It was accumulating, growing heavier with everything it took from me. Given enough time it would grow dense enough that even thinking clearly would become difficult. I had maybe a day before that became a real problem.
"His notes?"
"Some survived…" She said it carefully, like she wasn't sure what she could tell me. "The tribe is divided on what to do with them.
I looked at her. "What are you divided on?"
She remained silent.
"You came here just to tell me Hekan's dead?"
"I came to see if you intended to do something about it." She traced a finger along the cage's bar, the metal singing with her touch.
"And if I do?"
"Then I want to know something before you do." She sat down on a rock across from the cage. "You were saying something before I stopped you. Before we brought you here."
I thought back to our previous conversation. The Headache and the metal numbed my memory, but I was able to cut through. "It needs you to stay exactly what you are."
She stayed quiet, looking at me expectedly.
"The moment you become documented, anticipated, too well-understood," I continued. "You stop producing what feeds it. You become knowable. And it doesn't like knowable things. You built a theology around that principle without understanding that it includes you. That's what I was going to say."
She nodded. Her eyes wandered to the telekill.
"We found that in a ceitu to the east," she said. "Things near it become more ordinary. More bland, more undefined. We use it for things that carry too much definition. Like you."
Her eyes landed back on me. She stared for a long moment. Something was working behind her eyes that I couldn't read. "The scribe kept writing," she said again. "After we took his pages. He wrote on scraps. On the inside of his sleeve. On his very skin. Our people would consider that an act against the sacred."
"He was recording what happened to people. What happened to a man on a road who wasn't coming home." I strained to keep my voice even. "Your people can call it what it likes."
She stood up quickly. "I told you because—" She stopped, took a deep breath, then left.
Okay.
So.
I watched it happen. From the tree. I was very well hidden and there were thirty of them and I am a bird, so I watched and did not make a sound. I am the hide and seek world champion and I know how this works: you do not break cover, you do not break cover, you do not break cover.
So I didn't break cover.
He was still writing the notes when they came in. I could see him through the gaps in the shelter wall. He held the notes close to his chest when they came in. I heard a yell, closed my eyes, and then the notes were scattered all on the ground.
I stayed in the tree for a long time after that.
Here's the thing about hiding. You get very good at understanding when you're hiding because it's the right choice or because you're too scared to do anything else. I spent thousands of years in a filing room because someone told me to hide and I am very good at hiding and I stayed good at it for all that time. At least, I told myself I was hiding. But I wasn't, really. I was just cowering.
I am the hide and seek world champion. The champion hides.
But the champion also seeks.
I got down from the tree.
The notes were still on the ground in the shelter. I snuck there very quietly in the dark. It took a long time, because the camp had a lot of people awake and I had to sneak by most of them. When I got to them, I was surprised by how many notes there were. But it made sense. Hekan always had a lot to say. I grabbed as many as I could in my talons and kept very low to the ground.
Josephine's cage was on the west side of camp, the complete opposite side from where I'd come from. So I went around again, the long way. I snuck past a fire where an elder and two children were sleeping, past storage jars, and past a very alert dog. I gave her a very serious look, and she decided whatever I was doing wasn't worth her time.
There were two guards at the gate. I sat in the dark for a while and watched them. They were large, very large. Their spears were also very large. I am, as I've mentioned, just a bird. But I also have a PhD in Hideseekian studies, which means I know a great deal about people, including: in a camp that's been quiet all night, guards get comfortable. They watch the perimeter. They don't think about what might be directly behind them because those things would have to come through the camp, a camp full of people.
So I approached them from behind.
The first guard I got from behind. I hopped up and went for the inner ear, pecking at it. He made a sound and turned around, but I had already hid again by the time he did. I let him see me for a half-second — just enough to register that it was a bird attacking him — before I pecked his eye and he fell to the ground.
The second guard was faster. Before I could turn my focus to him, he grabbed me. His hand was very large and was holding me tight. I struggled and tried to teleport away, but his gaze grounded me. I could feel my wings threatening to break.
But then he turned towards the camp to shout for help. The moment he looked away, I was gone. Before he knew it, I was in his face. One quick jab from my beak, and he was down.
I landed on top of him. My left wing felt wrong. I tried to move it, but felt only a sharp spike of pain. I tucked it back in and held it tight against me. The first guard was starting to get up, slowly, but still disoriented. The second was not getting up at all, though he was still breathing.
I looked towards the camp. Someone had heard the commotion. I could hear people moving.
The cage latch was rope over a wooden pin, clearly designed to keep something in that couldn't use hands. I peered in and Josephine was sat in there. She looked awful, paler than usual. I don't think she had noticed I was there, despite all the noise. I got the pin in my beak and pulled, which was harder than it looked, and pulled again. The rope shifted.
"Greg," Josephine whispered.
"Almost… there!" I said.
The rope came loose and the door swung open.
The scribe is done.
I know this the way I know all of it. The hand has stopped. The pages are scattered on a dirt floor in a shelter on the east edge of a camp. I let myself feel satisfied for a moment, but then I feel the notes still there, still written, still fixed and precise and unchanged regardless of the fate of the hand that made them, and the satisfaction diminishes.
This is the thing I hate about writers. They die and their work lives on.
The cage door is open.
I feel this as pressure, as wrongness, as the sensation of something with too much sway in the world coming back. I push through the theology, through every faithful hand in the camp, and thirty people begin to move toward the west side of camp.
But the old one is already out. And she is searching.
Not at the people. Through them. I can feel it like a tugging, like a chain pulling me out of the dark. She is perceiving the camp, perceiving their faith, perceiving the shape of what has been moving these people for generations, and she is looking for me inside it.
This is not how this is supposed to go.
I do not usually act directly. It is beneath me and I have never had need to. The fear does the work. The bone-deep instinct does the work. I push and the faithful move and the stories stay loose and the unknown stays unknown and I have not had to be present since before the first murder.
But she is looking for me. And she has a name for what she's looking for.
So.
Thirty hands. Thirty pairs of eyes. I gather the fear that has been building in this camp all these years and I press it through every one of them at once. They faithfully move toward her, frightened of what may happen if they don't.
And I am in every single one of them, all the way down.
Come and find me, then.
The door swung and I stepped out, leaving the Headache behind.
The wet-clay pressure of it lifted all at once, every edge of what I was returning in a rush. I stood in the dark outside the cage and felt myself come back. The air tasted different, the night felt fresh.
Greg landed on my shoulder. Her left wing was bent in the wrong way.
"Hekan—"
"He's gone," she interrupted. "But his notes aren't."
She pressed them against me with her good wing. I took them and looked. Along Hekan's almost unparsable chicken-scratch, one word stood out. Ru—
Across the camp, I felt the tribe beginning to move. Not the ordinary movement from before. This was unified, directed. Thirty people were converging on us. I felt something singular amongst them, giving them all a single purpose.
I reached out with the part of me that perceives, before it acts.
I had expected to feel fear. The tribe ran on fear — their faith was built from it, their practices shaped by it, their whole relationship with the outside world channelled through it. I had expected personal fear. But what I felt was not their own.
There was something behind the fear. Wearing it, moving through them like a current through water. I could feel it in the convergence, the unanimity of it. I had felt this feeling before. In a campfire story. In the pages of a horror book. In the face of a child seeing their dead grandmother. It was here. Inside of them. All the way down to their very core.
"Greg," I said quietly. We were surrounded on all sides.
"Yes?"
"Stay on my shoulder. Don't hide."
I felt Greg turn to face me, confused. "Really? Not hide?"
After I stayed silent for a second, Greg nodded. We looked around us at the incoming tribespeople.
The first of them reached us — a young man I recognized from the edge of camp that morning, the one in an argument with the elder. He moved like a predator, jumping off a rock towards us, spear in hand. I stepped up and pulled on the ground. Rock jutted out from the earth, separating us. I heard a loud smack as he collided with it.
I pushed the rock back into the soil and saw him there, rising from where he had fallen. For a moment, something came back into his expression, but then the current pushed through him again and it came forward.
I held my hand out to him and tried to pull the current, dam it, dry it up. But I couldn't remove it. And I couldn't hurt them either. So I worked around them. An elder raced at me and I built a cage of steel around her. A young girl tried to jump on me from behind, and the air around her hardened into a ball that safely rolled her away. A spear flew across the air at Greg before harmlessly splashing against my feet.
But I was also looking.
I extended my perception into the camp, seeing what was truly there at every level. The People were still people. Under the current, I felt them. Frightened, afraid, faithful, and out of control. Whatever was pushing through them was forcing them to act.
I looked deeper for the source.
It was everywhere in the camp simultaneously, but also nowhere at all. It wasn't physical like us or the cage. But I had recognized it still. Any sensible person would, but I more than most. It was in the eyes of the rabbit as the wolf bit down. In the cries of the child, alone and cold in the forest. In the shaking of father, waiting outside the hospital room. It was in the fear the way weather is in the air. The fear was its medium and its territory and its self, and the camp was full of fear, and so the camp was full of it.
But, I had named it, the night before. I had described it to the Speaker. And I had told Hekan pieces of it, pieces that were now written in the remains of his notes.
I pushed deeper. Not into the people, but the current itself. Followed it upstream, past the theology, past the generations of faith that had made such perfect kindling for it, down to wherever it was actually coming from. I kept walking and working around the crowd as I did it. I froze a spear. Grew a cage of plants around a warrior. Kept Greg safe. But I was also somewhere else, following the current inward, and what I found at the end of it was—
Not here.
For just a moment, the camp wasn't there.
Black stars, burning darkness against a lighter void. Then colors came forth, but only four: red, white, yellow, and black. A city that didn't care for geometry. Music I couldn't identify or truly hear. Figures in masks moving through corridors that shouldn't have been able to connect, and above it all a throne room and a throne of spikes and something on it that was bound and screaming without making a sound, that wore its suffering like a mask, and the Ambassador standing before it, lifting a veil, and beneath the veil—
The camp came back.
Greg was shouting my name. The crowd was still rushing for us. Someone's spear narrowly avoided cutting off my ear. I was still up and still running, but my hand was still on the current, and the current had felt me looking.
So I looked harder, and this is what I saw:
Not a city. Not a throne. Not the masks and the masquerade and the four courts and the crows watching from the branches. All of that was just more story, more mythology, more shapes the thing wore because without one it was nothing and it knew it. Peel back Alagadda and you got a King. Peel back the King and you got the Hanged. But the chains holding him were gone, long long gone. Peel those away and you got —
A King, Hanged No More.
Something that had worn sovereignty and suffering because those were the stories we told about what it was, and stories were the only way it had ever been anything at all. But now I was looking at it directly, without the story, without the theology, and what I saw was very old. It was afraid, afraid of being seen without the crown or the rope or the throne. But it never had any of those things. It had just borrowed them, the way it borrowed everything.
I saw it clearly now. I named it in my own mind with everything I had, and then I looked at where it was — hidden away inside these thirty people — and I saw it as it truly was. Old. Afraid. Borrowed. And then I saw it as not being here. I clenched my fist, channeling my own power to push against the tide, and made it so.
The wave moved through the camp all at once. Thirty people stopped in their tracks all at once. The unanimity broke apart all at once and left thirty separate people standing in the dark, most of them looking at their own hands in confusion.
I closed my eyes again. The stars above were shining bright white. The colors were all there.
The Speaker waited for us at the edge of camp.
We had stepped out from an empty tent, where I had willed Greg's wing back to health.
She looked at the people behind me, settling back into themselves. Then at Greg. Then at the collected notes in my hands.
"It's gone," I said, after a moment of silence.
"I know," she replied. "I felt it leave. It felt like… chains. Chains I didn't even know I had, snapping and falling off."
I allowed myself a little smirk at the image.
She looked at the notes. "What will you do with those?"
"I'll make sure they get to the right people. That they're copied and spread all around."
She nodded slowly. I wouldn't call it a nod in agreement. Acknowledgement is more like it. She looked past us at the camp. The People were sitting down, talking quietly, doing ordinary human things.
"When I was young," she started, "our elders told me that names were the most dangerous thing a person could carry. That to name something was to claim you understood it, and we could never truly understand everything." She sighed. "And I believed them."
"And now?"
She looked at me, then Greg. "I think… perhaps the most dangerous thing is to go unnamed. To have no fixed point to return to." She paused. "My people call me the Speaker. A role, not a name. I think—" She stopped. Steadied herself. "I think I would like a name."
"Ooh! How about Pearl?" Greg exclaimed, flapping her wings.
I turned to Greg and was about to say something, when I heard The Speaker laugh. I turned back to look at her.
She was smiling. "It is a good one."
We walked about a kilometer south before I stopped.
Greg watched from a nearby rock as I spread out the notes on the ground. I used the early light to organize Hekan's writing. Bringing together the parchment, the scraps, the sleeve lining, it came out to about twelve pages of description. Of The People. Of our journey. Of the Fear. At the bottom of the last page, written out in full and underlined twice, was the thing's name.
I gathered it all into a bundle and held it together, molding it into a leather-bound tome. Then I thought about the scribes in Kalefheit — the ones I'd heard about from the tribes, relearning letters, pressing marks into clay, sharing the gift. I thought about a particular scribe Hekan had mentioned on the road, the one he'd said was the best of them (second-best to him, of course).
I thought about book in my hands, and then I thought about it being there instead. I blinked and it was.
"Done?" Greg asked.
"Done," I said.
Greg cheered and hopped back onto my shoulder as we started back down the road.
After a few minutes of walking, Greg said quietly, "He would've liked that. Hekan. Knowing it's out there."
"Yeah… he would have."
The road was long, warm, and ordinary.
At some point Greg dropped back slightly and I heard her stop walking. I turned. She was looking at a gap between two rocks. It was low to the ground, shaded, a perfect space for a bird like her to disappear into.
She considered it for a moment before she kept walking.
I didn't say anything, and neither did she. We walked south through the long grass and the early light. Somewhere behind us three fires were burning in a camp that was learning how to be itself again, and somewhere east of us a scribe was surprised to find a pristine tome on their workdesk.
The fear was still out there. In the long grass, in the space between what was known and what wasn't. That was where it lived. Where it had always lived. But it had a chain this morning that it hadn't had yesterday.
Neither of us was going anywhere.
