Keeping the Fire: A Place in the Story

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Polena remembered a story, an important one. It was one of those told so often and with so much importance that you cannot remember where you heard it first. Presumably it was some time when you were a child but the story is now so familiar to you that it is part of the weave of your life, a story inseparable from your own. In this story there was the Grandmother Fate, Stone-Hearted Fate who creates and destroys without emotion. All of Creation was Her's but it was a creation meant to grow and change on its own. Soon she no longer understand it and so she bore children, the gods, who dwelt above Her creation and helped Fate understand it. But once we allow something to grow we cannot always control that growth. The grandchildren of Fate came, unexpectedly into the world, born of the dreams and emotions of the gods, and of these the first and highest was called Maela, or Luck. Honey-Eyed Maela helped the gods to rebel, to steal Fate's crown, smash it to pieces and cast them to burn forever in the fires of the All-Wurm Honary, whom mortals call the sun. But Stone-Hearted Fate is defeated, not broken. It is still Her course that the world travels, Her players that move the plot, Her world when at last it reaches its ending. But for luck. But for lady luck, be she smiling a bright as the glory of morning or coy and quiet as the smallest candle flame, Honey-Eyed Maela let's us break the chains and plot our own course. She is fickle, but she is there. And that was the gift Polena drew from that story. 

There was another story that Polena remembered, this one just as important as the other but somehow shadowed. It was like the recollection of a dream something that had to be nurtured and constantly relived or she felt certain it would wash away and be gone forever. In this story there was a great castle of stone, it's halls so twisted and arbitrary that it felt like the houses one finds in a dream. It was full of people, all of them kind until you looked away from them. It was bits and pieces, less of a story and more a hani, the djashar word “poem” sharing the same meaning as “plumb” something to be savored but for a moment. This story was removed from her now. At times, when she was most in pain but her thoughts most clear, she felt that it was her story, only, that she had been sent from the stage, her pages pulled out of the lectern, the runes that made up her name long forgotten. She was in the darkness now, kept safe by the cool hands of the roots. They urged her to forget such stories the way a mother urges her child to forget a nightmare, to go back to sleep.

“Be calm, think little, sleep here. Let go.”

But Polena would not forget those stories. The darkness was strong there, as strong as the deepest stones, but she felt there was a little light in it. It was just a candle, a fragile and lovely thing hundreds of miles removed from her. Yet, are not the glittering stars but as small as a candle light to we distant watchers?

“Be Calm. Let go. Stay Here.” the roots told her.

“Denza,” she replied. After that, the roots felt more a dream and her own life more and more the waking.

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