There are paintings of my mother now. The most famous one was done in the Lapsan style. It looks quite boxy to me. The one Ugnis was gifted so long ago was more realistic, but it never looked like her to me and it’s not the way I see her in my head, even now.
In here, she’s not a painting, nor is she real. She’s like a drawing in charcoal. All blacks and whites, but in motion. It’s difficult to explain, but so much of my memories seem colorless since I left home.
They say that your homeland holds a powerful magic over the fabric of your life. For me, my home is where the color of the world bled free.
When I think of my brothers back then, under that deep purple sky, they were always holding hands and never speaking to each other. LoPa taught them to sing and dance. Medis was always smiling, singing terribly but dancing beautifully. Akmuo’s face was writ with concentration. The lines deep on his forehead and his mouth tight as he tried to force his limbs into the movements LoPa made.
With HoPa they dragged clay from the river and learned to throw it into usable pots. They sat beside the kiln with him, feeding it moss or twigs or sometimes leaves or big chunks of wood. They helped HoPa cut vegetables and skin animals. He taught them to sew and stitch fabric together. They were getting to be too old not to know how.
This kept them busy that final year we were together, but any free moments they had were spent watching mother go through the forms of Mirtis Kardas. When Medis missed a day or two of watching mother, he became agitated and grouchy. Even though he’d never be allowed to wield a spear or sword within the clan, he hungered for it. The heart of a warrior beat in his chest, but he was destined for a life of making pots and skinning rabbits.
That’s what we all thought then, anyway.
I hope he still lives but I hope he never found his way to the life of a sword. It’s a short and brutal life. A vicious one. A sorrowful one. A lonely one.
It’s funny, too, how I think of them still as children. To me, they’ll always be that age. If they still live, they likely have children grown and grandchildren. They may have lived full lives and died like so many die. Without reason or purpose.
But back then they watched mother. Akmuo watched because Medis did but Medis watched to soak in every movement and memorize it so his body could follow along.
HoPa sighed heavily when he saw Medis practicing mother’s forms.
“He’ll get over it,” mother said.
HoPa shook his head, “I know what it is to be a boy, dreaming of greatness.”
Mother snorted, “And you learned. We all learn our place.”
LoPa tuned his lute, plucking at a string and twisting the knobs at the lute’s end that tightened or loosened it, “I never did.”
Mother smiled, “Yes, a second husband you became.”
“A useless one for anything beyond love and music.”
HoPa gripped LoPa’s shoulder, laughing, “That’s what second husbands are for. First husbands are the foundations. They build the home and keep it functional. The second husbands add the light and laughter.”
“What’s the woman for then?” A wolfish smile came over LoPa’s face.
HoPa laughed hard. The sound booming from him as if taking him by surprise. “The woman is the tree we nurture and grow from. Her roots dig through the first husband and her branches contain the second husband’s love. From her come the fruits that become children. With the second husband’s light and the first husband’s soil, these fruits will become trees of their own, if it’s a girl. Or, if a boy, our light and soil will make them beautiful blossoms to be picked by another.”
“I still don’t see why we need her.”
HoPa’s laugh burst from him again, “Vilka, I still marvel at how you tamed Dain enough to bring him home.” His hand moved to the back of LoPa’s neck and he turned towards him, “One of my happiest days was when Vilka brought you home to me.”
LoPa leaned his chin up and HoPa kissed him.
“Fine, fine,” mother laughed, “bring that affection over here before I get jealous.”
HoPa lifted LoPa from the ground and carried him inside without looking at mother. Her jaw dropped in feigned shock and very real amusement. “Bastards!” She chased them inside and we heard them tumbling into one another, laughter echoing from the darkness of our home.
Medis and Akmuo kept banging their sticks together. I walked away from the noises coming through the open doorway and sat in the grass watching them.
It was cold, the grass. Cold and soft. Clouds stretched like fingers over the purple of the sky and a light rain fell. I raised my face to it. The sky still bright with the sunslight but rain fell even so. It was more a haze than proper rainfall. With the brightness of the day and the new wetness, the grass sparkled and the trees glimmered. The wind kissed my skin and butterflies darted through the air, stopping at flowers and dandelions before buzzing on. The only other sound was banging sticks.
I followed a dragonfly towards the forest, past my brothers who were wet with either sweat or the hazy rain. The dragonfly hovered, its wings battering so rapidly to keep itself aloft. It didn’t fear me like so many other insects or creatures of the forest. Ignoring me, I could watch it. Its long tail and its big, faceted eyes. Like black jewels. As it flew past my face I raised a hand and caught it by the tail between my fingers. Its wings kept buzzing. It didn’t seem to understand what had happened.
“You’re mine, little dragonfly.”
It only buzzed in response.
“Will you come back if I let you go?”
Only buzzing. I let it go and it darted away from me. I wandered on towards the forest where butterflies fluttered and bees swarmed. At the first tree, I saw a beehive. Like a yellowbrown sack wedged at the armpit of two branches.
“Luna!” Akmuo called to me.
I turned to see him and Medis running towards me.
“Don’t go in there alone,” Akmuo said. “Right, Med?”
Medis eyebrows lowered, “Were you going in alone?”
“Mother did it when she was a little.”
Medis and Akmuo exchanged information through their clasped hands. They let go, now smiling, and ran into the forest. “Catch us if you can!” Medis threw the words over his shoulder.
I ran as fast and as hard as I could. Though I was older and faster than I’d ever been before, the same was true of them. I had never thought of age like that before. It always seemed like only I grew and the rest of the world stayed the same until that moment. When they started running, I thought I’d be able to catch them. I was another Twilight older! All their strength would now seem within my grasp. Plus, I was a girl who would grow to be a warrior. There’s no way they could stand against me in a test of physicality.
But they kept getting farther away and it kept getting harder to breathe. They ran as a single unit, though Medis was faster and quicker, moving more subtly through the forest. Akmuo smashed through the underbrush and the stray branches reaching from tree to tree.
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I tried to call to them, but I was out of breath and they were too far away. I heard their laughter, but it seemed to come from all round me.
I hadn’t paid attention as we changed directions and was now lost and alone in the forest. Though I had been in the forest many times, I had always known exactly where I was or I had been with mother, who always knew where we were.
The forest looked different during the day. The rain no longer reached me and it was darker than the day. Purple eked through the spaces between leaves up above, but it was a mild light. A halflit world of vibrant greens and dark browns. The trees were beginning to bloom and many flowered with white or pink or purple, but a different purple than the Twilit sky. Less radiant but beautiful in its own way. Beautiful, maybe, because it was right here, within reach of my hands.
I wandered for a long time. I had no idea which direction would bring me home and gave up even trying to find it. I was hungry and cold and thirsty, but I kept walking. Every noise startling, but I longed to know what they were. If there was music to be found between the rustling of leaves and the cracking of branches above. Every tree was unfamiliar. Even had I walked past these trees and rubbed my hands over their bark some recent night, I still wouldn’t have recognized them in the day. Memories of touch are so easily overpowered by sight. Even closing my eyes and touching them did nothing. I couldn’t know these trees the way I did at night. Even in the relative darkness, my closed eyes were bright with reds and blues. Even the skin of my eyelids couldn’t keep the light of the day out. So I wandered on and on.
The forest was full of the murmurs of new life. Monkeys screeching above and far away. Rabbits and squirrels and whatever else rustling through the high grass and leaves that survived the winter and still crowded the spaces between trees. They were wet and slimy, as if falling apart, melting into the soil.
But then I heard almost human sounds. Like moaning. Like someone trying to speak without a tongue.
I followed it as the rest of the forest muted. These strange moans.
I came to a clearing where the moaning was loudest, full of flickering fireflies. In the halflight, they were like faraway stars at twilight, but they were in constant motion. Constellations endlessly reconfiguring themselves.
But I noticed that afterwards. My gaze was dragged to this figure at the center. It looked at first like a stone overgrown by moss, or a heap of driftwood pulled from the river and forgotten. But then it moved and sweat broke over my skin. My mouth dry from the long day without water felt caustic. As if my tongue were coated in sand or dirt. My eyes itched to look upon it and the moaning drowned out the sound of my own body.
Painful, moans. I wanted to run but needed to know. Needed to see.
A mossy, wooden arm stretched forward but it shook in the air, the way an old man shakes when Death grips him but he refuses to follow, his body too weak to keep itself together. The end of the arm split into seven fingers that clawed at the ground and dragged the heap of driftwood forward. Behind it, the grass was matted and ripped up. It had dragged itself a long way.
Swallowing though it was painful, I approached the creature. It kept moaning and if it had a head or face, it didn’t turn to me. It seemed like a wooden shell. The bark knotted and rotting. Its pattern cracked up and difficult to make sense of, but blossoms sprouted raggedly from it. Orange bulbs on greyish leaves. The stretched arm found origin in the shell and two legs were tucked in beneath it. Its arm seemed made from waterlogged ropes twined with vines, all mixed together with soft wood. Green lines ran through it, like veins. Standing beside it, watching its weird, wooden body struggle to move, I pressed a hand against the back of its shell.
The arm and legs snapped into the shell and the moaning stopped. Its sudden movement sent me backwards and I tripped. Falling onto a stone, I closed my eyes and sucked in my breath. Pushing myself up, I opened my eyes to a face like I had never seen before or since. Almost human, or some creature’s perversion of what humans might look like if carved from wood and stone, then buried for a hundred years.
Its nose long and twisted at the center of its face. Moss growing like eyebrows over eyes so black they were barely visible. It had no ears or hair, but its skin was almost like scales. Not as wooden seeming as the shell and limbs, but not necessarily similar to the scales of a lizard. They’re difficult to explain. The skin was like chainmail. Loads of overlapping scales, but the scales seemed to be made of woodchips. Lines of orange and green ran through its skin. Its forehead was smooth and unscaled, but the colorful veins running through its skin webbed there in intricate patterns that no human in its right mind would make. At first it seemed to have no mouth.
Standing over me, I only saw its face. So close to me I could smell it. Like wet, rotting wood. Its mouth appeared behind the curve of its nose. A black opening that had a faint greenish glow. Like it held a moon deep inside. Its voice warbled and it formed words the way the wind might. The consonants barely there and the vowels long and slow, as if clinging to them and fearing the hardness of consonants. “What way are ye, human?”
I blinked and pushed back and away from it, but its face remained right in front of mine, though I didn’t hear it move. My body vibrated unpleasantly, and tears clawed up my chest and at the back of my eyes. “No ways.”
It blinked. A sound both wet and clicking, like well-polished wood kissing together. “What way will winds wind ye?”
Senseless. I had never encountered someone whose brain had escaped them, though I had heard such stories from my parents. Tales of men and women who slid between memory and the world round them without reason or rhyme. People who couldn’t distinguish between their imaginations or what was really before them. Those stories flooded me with fear. “Are you hurt?”
Its black eyes stared at me hard and long. Then it rolled back away from me, its body creaking and clicking. It opened its glowing mouth and moaned that horrible moan that melted my insides. It fell back onto its shell, its limbs sprawled out and its head pulled in. The underside of its shell was smooth and yelloworange, but for the cracks in it. The cracks were wet with a dark yellow liquid. Or, not liquid because it didn’t flow like water or wine. It was like…like the inside of an egg. Almost like mucous. The creature had three arms. One on the left and two smaller ones on the right that separated at the elbow, like branches on a tree.
Standing, I approached its moaning and went to touch the tacky substance leaking from its cracks, but its two right hands caught mine. Its grip like a vice, cutting into my skin. Its head popped out, “Foul winds wind in ye to touch!”
Poison. I didn’t understand its words, but the meaning was in me. Poison. At the same time, an image flooded my eyes of a tree whose plants would help. The poor creature was dragging itself there. It was right there, just a few body lengths from where it lay moaning. I ran to it. The leaves were too high for me to reach, but the trunk was small enough for me to wrap my arms round. I grabbed on and tried to remember the way Medis told me to climb. Grabbing it, I used my left foot to push off the bark, raising me up. Then I reached up with my right hand and grabbed hold of the bark. I got my right foot on the bark, and pushed up, reaching higher with my left hand. I repeated this, using my hands to hold me and my feet to push me higher till I was in the lowest branches.
Just a bit over my own height off the ground, but I was elated. Smiling and panting, I forgot the creature below for a moment as I stared out into the trees and through their branches.
Then it moaned and I nearly fell. Catching myself, I scooted myself along the branch till I could grab some leaves. I grabbed handfuls and stripped it from the branches, then dropped down.
I hit the ground and twisted my ankle as I fell over. A scream escaped my tiny lungs. Tears were in my eyes, blurring the light of the fireflies, but I wiped and blinked them away. I brought the leaves to the creature, whose head was back in its shell.
The cracks seemed to ooze more and the yellow looked darker. Fear tugged at my shoulders, pushing me away, telling me to run. But I stayed and shoved a few leaves in my mouth, chewing them. It numbed my mouth and made everything taste minty for a few days. I mashed them with my teeth into a paste, then spit the paste into other leaves and carefully placed this over the cracks.
Once all the cracks were covered, it stopped moaning, and all its limbs were pulled within the shell. The shell wasn’t large. Maybe the size of my torso now. But it managed to fit everything inside there.
I sat beside it, spitting and spitting, trying to get the taste out of my mouth. Trying to rid my mouth of the last of the bits of leaves. I even reached inside and ran a finger over my teeth and gums, then I stuck my tongue between my teeth and pulled it back in, trying to scrape the leaf residue off.
It didn’t work.
The whole time, the shell remained where it was. The fireflies hovered above it.
A long time passed like this and the thought finally came to me that it would be night now, if it weren’t Twilight. So I stood and walked away. At the edge of the opening, I turned back, hoping to see some sign of life. Some change in the creature. But there was nothing.
When I got out of sight of the creature, the sounds of the forest returned to me and I heard my name. My heart pounded, believing that the forest was finally speaking to me. Maybe singing to me.
I ran towards the sound of three voices shouting my name until I ran into LoPa.
“Luna!” He lifted me up, “Where have you been?” His voice was a mix of anger and sorrow and fear and love.
I started crying and he comforted me while calling for my mother and HoPa.
I cried the whole way home, even after I ran out of tears. They fed me roasted rabbit with berries and I drank water until my throat soothed. HoPa brewed tea that pushed me into sleep.
Far away, I heard mother shouting at my brothers, but I was so tired all of a sudden, I could barely lift my head or open my eyes. I wanted to return to the forest under the moons, but then remembered that night wouldn’t come until Twilight was over.
I dreamt of a tree that pulled up its roots and walked away.
