Michelle Sagara - Cast in Sorrow

They defined time. They defined its passage.

The creature spoke.

He spoke as Kaylin caught this one thread, and buried it; he pulled at it. She could feel him as if he were a giant, intelligent vortex into which all meaning must vanish.

She didn’t understand his purpose. She didn’t understand why anyone would want to summon something that ate words, that consumed meaning. He was here, yes. But this was not where he belonged.

She understood why fire was summoned; she understood water. Even earth and air made sense to her—but they were inextricably linked to this world. Fire, water, earth, and air existed without will in everyday life. There was no echo of the small dragon, the large dragon, or the creature it had become, in Kaylin’s world. What ate words? What devoured meaning?

And yet, somehow, this creature or one part of it, had been summoned before.

Why?

What did it mean?

“Kaylin!”

She didn’t shout. She had, she realized, been gathering strands of history as if they were objects. Those that spoke to her in some way, she kept. She didn’t question why; it was entirely instinctive, but at this moment, she had nothing but instinct to guide her. She wasn’t surprised to discover that the stories about words and language had drifted into stories about life. About birth. About the first rough attempts to create something small and contained that was nonetheless independent enough that it could live and grow and create in a diminished fashion.

There were rules, she thought. Life had rules. Not the ones parents handed down; not even the ones the Emperor did, although flouting those generally ended the life they were meant to govern. The words that gave life—the names— were True Words. But they were more. She couldn’t quite figure out how; they didn’t change. But they grew, nonetheless. It was the act of living that altered them, in subtle ways strengthening some part of their essential meaning.

It was why the loss of the word—not the life that contained it—was so wrong.

And those words had been given to the lost children, not when they’d been chosen to enter the green, but when they had been presented to the Consort. At that point, no knowledge of what awaited them in future guided her choice. Kaylin wasn’t certain what did, in the end. Nor was she certain the Consort could explain it, if asked.

Something had happened to the children, here. But...their names hadn’t been changed.

Kaylin glanced at her palm; the mark that lay against it was the color of new blood, which was not a color she associated with True Words. It was the color she associated with life, with birth, and with pain. She had kept it, and knew now that it was one of eleven such names. It existed in the green, and only in the green—but it didn’t belong here.

Why had it been protected all this time?

The stories about life drifted into stories about being, becoming, and ending. She didn’t understand that endings meant death until she found the story trapped at the heart of the green, and she lost so much of it to the creature that had ridden on her shoulder for most of his existence.

There were no stories about him that she could hear or touch; she kind of wanted him to choke on them, at the moment. But she concentrated on the stories about death at the heart of the green; death at its edges were part of war, and although they might have hinted at something important, she couldn’t afford to hang on to them. She could keep hold of so little, between the creature and the speed at which the information was offered.

She held on to the deaths at its heart; she did more. She spoke of them. Aside from shouting at Teela in frustration—and in fear—they were the first words she had deliberately spoken out loud.

The green was alive in some sense; it was sentient. It spoke. It felt—as ages passed—sorrow and inexplicable grief, and it felt joy in equal measure. But it was not alive in the way the Hallionne were; it was not alive in the way the Barrani were. It existed where worlds existed, but it existed apart from them. She didn’t speak of its birth because if its birth was part of the multitude of histories that left Nightshade’s lips, she hadn’t rescued it in time.

It was like—and unlike—the True Names that gave the Barrani life. The words at the heart of the green were not words meant for the living; they could not exist in Kaylin’s world. The words that gave life to the Barrani were words it could read; it could see them so clearly, it defined life by words. Mortals made distant sense to the Hallionne; they made sense to the green only the way cockroaches, mosquitos, and plants did.

Blood was not forbidden the green: death was.

And death was forbidden the green because the words of the dying could not escape its grasp. They weren’t meant to be part of the green; the green was not of this world. And yet, not of it, it was part of it. It touched and spoke with the Hallionne, who were altered in just such a way that they could hear its ancient, endless voice, its plethora of voices. It heard the Hallionne’s voice, its many voices. It heard the Hallionne’s dreams.

And it heard the voices of the Barrani during the recitation. A window was open, then; a moment permitted in which the two—the lesser, fragile, fixed children of the Ancients, and the greater and eldest—might communicate. It might tell the Barrani their history. With will, and the right combination of Barrani, it might speak to the Barrani of its own history; it might give them a glimpse of the things that did not naturally walk the world. It might speak of its desires and its dreams and—last—its fears.

Kaylin understood these things only as a mortal might, although Nightshade spoke of dreams and desires and fears, and she fed those, her hands shaking, to the creature.

When the Barrani died in the heart of the green, when they shed their blood upon it, they surrendered the thing that gave them life: their name. Kaylin felt horror at this—it was a profound, an endless, loss. Mortals believed in souls. The Barrani believed in names. Teela often equated the two—souls and True Names.

The Barrani lost their souls here. They weren’t trapped, as they were in the High Halls; they were drained of the very thing that made them names. She closed her eyes. Opened them again. She couldn’t see the Consort’s face, and for once, she was grateful. She knew what she’d see in the Lady’s expression.

But the power that the name gave the Barrani conferred the ability to speak directly to the green. It made their desires—their final desires—as clear to the green as the green’s own desires were, because for a moment, before they were extinguished, they were part of the green.

Those wishes, those desires—they couldn’t be coerced; they couldn’t be changed.

The people of the Vale had died in the green. They’d died by order of Teela’s father. His name flitted past, and she let it go with vindictive fury, hating him for just this minute. They didn’t understand what their lost thoughts would do. They didn’t understand what their hatred and, yes, fear, would cost the green.

No, that wasn’t true. One woman did. One woman. Teela’s mother. She was Vivienne, of the line of Wardens and Guardians. She knew. She emptied her thoughts of rage and fury and bitter betrayal. The only thing she wanted, the only thing, was the safety of her daughter. The fact that her daughter bore the blood of the man who commanded the killings meant nothing to her.

She regretted only the fact that she had repaired to the High Court, away from kin and home and green; that her daughter, Teela, had not been raised to hear the distant voice of the green and to understand its ancient and abiding will.