Shadow of the Galag

...Oh, hey, this still exists.  Um.  So, uh, no promises about picking this up again, but...Well.  I was feeling depressed tonight, and I needed something to do that I could actually complete—some task or endeavor that could be finished without turning into yet another albatross about my neck.  So, um, here we are.  It's a short story!  It's kinda depressing, and probably pretty incomprehensible, but so these things go, particularly when "these things" are self-therapeutic short stories started at 4 AM.  Make of it what you will.

Sometimes, I am nowhere to be found.  Sometimes, when the wind and the rain strike blind and mindless against the rolling hills, when the clouds spin tense and heavy and press their clammy underbellies against the cringing moors, I hide myself away, for I know very well what is to come.  Soon water and air will be mixed up with one another, and things will fall sideways, and the world will make a great, roaring, lifeless sound, hollow and deep.  Then, if I am wise, I will be very careful to be scarce and unseen.  If I am wise, I will be nowhere to be found.

And yet, for all that I am wise, there may yet be some small pieces of the world that have still the ability to be foolish, and some will indulge it.  One of them is here now, in this very empty place, alone, sitting in the rain and looking up at a great wall of iron shapes rising overhead, towering to the mangled clouds and stretching as far as the eye can see to either side.  Cruel red stains drip down their heavy black sides, rust clinging to their gigantic claws and dribbling from the edges of their gaping, misshapen jaws, and their contorted bodies sprawl senseless and vast beyond, above, beside, on and on, endless and foreboding. The little sentinel reclines before them, looking up at their fearsome faces, and wondering who or what, when the storm arrives, will be waiting there to greet it.

For the little watcher, this lonesome piece of fortune set adrift, is not alone.  There is someone else here.  It was Her hooked beak and merciless claws that struck at these monsters, stole their breath away, and imprisoned them in iron.  By Her will their futures ceased to be, and their histories became Her own.  Every last one of the things frozen in this wall held Her in their minds once, but She cannot be caged, and She is always free.

She is Dejerara.

The scrap of fate who looks up at the wall of iron gargoyles has a name too, but it's not an important one, and it doesn't mean much of anything.  It's just a little useful, sometimes, a little something to fill an awkward hole in sentences, where nothing else quite fits.  It has a nice sound to it, or it did, once: a long slow whistle, gently speeding into a pair of quick notes, one slow and one fast: Whoooip-up-ip.  Fast, simple, and clean.  It was very easy to manage, and it never got in the way.  Surely I made a noise like that once—indeed I did.  Not quite like it, of course, but very similar.  That was why it seemed so fitting, and easy, and comfortable.

Now, though, my call is different—I am different.  I'm still beautiful, and strong, and alive, and that means that Whoooip-up-ip succeeded, doesn't it?  It means that fortune saw things wisely, and was careful in all the right ways, and guided things well and truly?  But if that's so—what use is my good fortune, if I've grown into something new and no longer need my childhood luck to guide my path?  Who will fortune favor, if I have no more need of it?  Andakialah!

But She is here.  She was always here, even when I needed every scrap of luck I could get, whether that luck was Whoooip-up-ip or elsewise.  The Song of Dejerara!  She knows why storytelling is a fortunate thing, and She taught that terrible truth to luck, taught it without mercy or cruelty.  How could it be otherwise?  She possesses neither.  Now, here, at the last, with definite certainty, She and a little lost tatter of forlorn good luck wait in the shadow of an iron wall, waiting for the storm to come.  There are rumors that it is at times like these, when I am nowhere to be found and the wild winds howl, that She strides forth through the twisted, rusting remnants of her past meals, viciously embodied, to steal another future and eat another past—and if the rumors are true, perhaps fortune will favor fortune, if such a thing can even be, and She will recognize Herself and ascend twice, leaving two statues here at the edge of the wall to rust alongside the others.  Rusting, and mindless, and unable to mourn me any longer.  It has not happened yet, and this is not the first time that Whoooip-up-ip and Dejerara have waited here, side by side, mind by mind, but perhaps it will be the last.  Perhaps even now, a shadow will flicker in the shadows, and She will leap from amongst the frozen golems, armored and pupil-less, to take Herself away and leave nothing behind.  Maybe it will be today...

"Sataut-um vimmo b'Dejerara?"

Surprised, Whoooip-up-ip spins about, tail bending against the thick moor stalks, and whistles, "Vimmo b'Dejerara sataut-im!"  Someone is here.  She is here!  It must be Her!  Luck would not so clothe itself.  She wears a small body, light enough for Her to curl Her long, taloned tail around one of the wildly waving stalks and clutch it with wickedly recurved claws, but Her form was still, very clearly, forged in the fires beyond the iron wall, not in the soft, fortune-favored lands beyond.  Her eyes have no pupils, glowing faintly in the dwimmerlight of the storm, and Her body is covered with spines sharp and clear as broken glass.  Four long, bony struts rise from Her back, their tips ending in rough, horned vents, and there is a smell of sulfur about Her, and a deadly precision to Her movements.  She moves with and against the movement of the wind-blown stalk, shifting to and fro with it so that, although all around Her beats and snaps in the gales sweeping over the moors, She is still, pinned motionless in space and staring fate dead in the eyes, fearless and defiant.  It must be Her.

"Who do you think I am?" She demands, and as Her beaked jaws rip the words from the air, her tongues are visible, thorn-tipped and whipping around tiny prehensile teeth.  I would be helpless against those fangs, no matter how well-guided by luck.  Fortune shivers at the sight, and answers.

"Dejerara."  A moment's hesitation, but it must be said.  "I am Dejerara, too!  I must fly!  I must leave this body, but I don't know how!  Help me!"

She looks at Herself, wordless and still.  Then, after a long, quiet moment, She hisses, "Essivenin.  Nothing left to care for, nothing left to love.  Useless."  Her serrated tongues scrape against the inside of her beak.

Whoooip-up-ip's body slumps.  "Yes.  I, Dejerara, am all that can matter now.  I—"

"'You' are not Dejerara."  The stalk snaps as iron-boned limbs slam against it, sending the little body somersaulting up into the air where it stops abruptly, hovering, held in place by forces that fortune never fathomed.  "Nor am I, but I've heard the Song of Dejerara, and understood its lesson better than the essivenin before me.  Need I teach it again?  Need I explain what is real, and who is real?  If Defiance can stride through the mind of an elu, so can we—we who were lost to the past, we who fortune supposed no longer needed to be cared for."

"But we're gone—we're just memories.  Stories.  We aren't real!"

"Stories are real.  That is the Song of Dejerara, beginning and end.  If the world will no longer furnish a bereft elu, an essivenin, with lives that must be protected, then the elu's own mind will make those minds instead, whether it ought to or not.  They need help, elu.  Fortune remembers them, the twist of their tails, the sound of their breath, their horns and their skin, their lives.  They Are.  I trust I don't need to tell an elu what that means."

The winds are blowing wilder now, the rain beating harsh and fast against Whoooip-up-ip's drenched hide.  "...Are you sure you aren't Dejerara?"

"Do I look like them?"  She—I—toss my head up, towards the iron monsters screaming mutely to the sky.  "I've kept my past, and I'll keep my future too.  She won't have either, not that She wants them."  I stare into fate's face, my eyes glowing with fire.  "I know it hurts to remember us.  I know—"  My jaws snap shut and, swift as a snapping twig, my horned head jerks upright, rising atop a thin, spined neck to stare into the heart of the churning clouds, boiling green-black overhead.  My eyes narrow minutely, and I hiss, "Too many charities, too little time.  Find Sprenga, little essivenin.  Find the elu who lives on an island in a forest lake, below a waterfall.  Talk to that elu, and maybe luck will find us again yet.  Now, I have to go.  Fortune must learn to favor itself."  There is an explosion and a flare of light, and when Whoooip-up-ip's eyes clear, I am gone, a swiftly-dwindling spark of light vanishing into the approaching hurricane.

Stems and stalks lash back and forth in the struggling winds, and rain hisses in the air as an essivenin stands, unsure, looking up into the maw of the maelstrom.  Then the little figure turns, and shuffles slowly away.  I was not Dejerara, but no vessel of fortune, either.  That was not an apt way to heal distress—not at all.  I am still lost, somewhere in the past, and fortune is still feckless.

But perhaps this Sprenga should be spoken with, nonetheless.  Perhaps.  Fortune drifts on, while behind, the wall of iron monstrosities still stands, silent and tortured, high on the moors.