Canon Hub » Bellerverse » The Bird, The Witch and The Scribe
Canon Hub » CODENAME: Green King » The Bird, The Witch and The Scribe
The end of the world wasn't that bad, honestly.
Sure, billions died. I mourned them. Still do. But, if I'm being completely fair, their deaths bought me something I'd never had before: privacy.
I tried to stop it. When that didn't work, I tried to save people. I still remember the last evacuation shelter I built. Six hundred and twelve people. I counted heads three times, hoping it'd get bigger each time. Those didn't work either.
I spent the first couple years in despair, wandering from ruined city to ruined city. I tried to rebuild, tried to bend reality to before the end, but it wasn't enough. That put me in an even worse mood. No, the real reason I enjoyed the end? Cause the Foundation was gone.
No more task forces. No more listening for helicopters. No more wondering whether the stranger at the next table was actually a spy. No more agents tracking my every step. I was free. Finally, actually free. Nobody was looking for me anymore.
Honestly, it's ridiculous, thinking on it now. How small the Foundation was in the grand scheme of things. It used to be such a big part of my life. Everyday, I'd wake up, worried that they'd finally tracked me down, that my insiders had been compromised. Now, I can barely remember any of it. It barely merits a footnote now. Crazy what four thousand years does to memory. Hell, I can barely remember my husband. My husband… I can barely remember the faces of the people who hunted me, I'm fine with that. But my husband's..?
I remember pieces. A smile. A laugh. The feeling of falling asleep next to him. Sometimes I think I've forgotten the sound of his voice, then I hear somebody speaking around a campfire and it comes rushing back for half a second before disappearing again.
Four thousand years is a long time to carry a memory. Longer still to watch it fade.
I spent a while trying to hold on to the old world. Longer than I should have, probably.
I'd wander through the ruins looking for things I recognized. Street signs. Books. Old photographs. Once I spent three months trying to get a vending machine to work. I don't even remember why. I think I wanted proof that some part of the old world had actually worked.
Eventually, I made my way down to Australia. I had been in North America when the world ended, and I spent the next few decades wandering the rest of it. At first it was to try and find people, but I gave up on that halfway through Africa. So imagine my surprise when I came to Australia and I found a fishing village.
Seeing people fish at the coast, I was scared. What if the Foundation had managed to survive? It sounds ridiculous now. The world had ended. Continents had burned. Entire nations had vanished. And somehow I was still worried somebody would toss me in a containment chamber.
The fishing village was called something in their language that I won't attempt to say, because the word involved a click sound I never fully managed. It meant something like "the place where we slept and liked it."
I watched from a distance for three days before I walked in. Old habit. Looking for anything military, anything that smelled like the Foundation's fingerprints. But I didn't find any of it. I found a woman arguing with a fisher over a fish, children playing in the mud, elders sitting on chairs. I went up to an elderly woman, rocking on a chair watching the kids.
She thought I was a spirit. I guess she wasn't fully wrong. I'd been alone long enough that I probably looked the part. She asked me if I had come from the place of the dead. I told her I had come from the north, and she had nodded. She gave me a cooked fish. It was extremely good. I had not eaten anything in a long time, which tells you something about where my head had been.
I decided to stay for a while.
That's the shorthand version of the next several centuries, honestly. I stayed at a tribe or village for a while. Moved on. Stayed at a new one. Moved on again.
The tribes were varied — nomadic hunters through the interior, fishing communities along the coast, a few farming settlements slowly, stubbornly figuring out agriculture with the particular determination of people who had no idea it had already been invented. I liked them. I liked them in a way I hadn't liked people in… I'm not sure I had liked people before the end. There had always been too much threat in every interaction. With these people, I was just a strange woman who showed up and was occasionally useful.
Speaking of, they started calling me the Witch.
I didn't choose the title. It started because I fixed a child's broken arm in a village I was passing through. Fixed it properly, I mean, not just set it. The kind of fixing that would have earned me a polite letter from the Foundation once. The family told their neighbors. The neighbors told their neighbors. Three generations later, apparently there was a story about a pale woman who walked out of the north, knew the old tongue, healed the sick, and — this part was new to me — could breathe underwater.
I cannot do that.
What I could do, however, was survive going into ceitus. The ruins of the old world, that's what they called them. Scattered across the continent. It was mostly Foundation sites, funnily enough. Every tribe had taboos about them. The things that had gotten loose in the last days were still in there, still wandering corridors dripping with the blood of security teams. The tribes wanted things from inside those ruins. The city people to the east called them Wonders and traded heavily for them, and a tribe that had Wonders had leverage.
So in exchange for food, or shelter, or just company, I would go in and come back out. I learned to frame it well. The entrance always alone, always at some odd hour. I emerged with whatever they'd sent me for and a carefully maintained expression of mild mystery. I never explained how I'd managed it. I let them fill the gaps themselves.
Once, I came back to a tribe I had visited two hundred years earlier. Different people, obviously. Same fire-circles. Same careful way of watching the horizon. I was sitting at their fire when an elder started telling the story of the Ageless Witch. A pale lady had walked out of the north a very long time ago, the elder said. She had invented the old language and mapped the old places. She had fixed a child's wound that should've killed him, and the boy came back better than before, with a faint blue light under the skin that lasted three days.
The others at the fire looked at me. I hid the smirk on my face behind the soup bowl.
The one they sent me to one autumn — and I'm using "autumn" loosely; the seasons down here had always been their own opinion about things — was a half-day's walk east of camp. Unremarkable from outside. A long low ridge in the earth, a concrete corner pushing up through the grass, the kind of hidden that screams Foundation-built. It was a secondary site, not the Home Ceitu, which was sealed and lost and somewhere I was absolutely not going. This was something smaller. Maybe storage annex, or an overflow facility.
I went in the usual way, which is to say I phased through the door and climbed down.
Inside, it was cold and dark and smelled of mineral water and old metal and undisturbed air. I put a light up and started walking.
The site had been evacuated in a hurry. They all had been, at the end. Paperwork scattered on the floor. A broken mug reading W-RL-'S OKA-E-T RESE—CH-R. Containment cells down a long corridor, most of them open and empty.
I was looking for a specific thing. The tribe had described a small metal box with a painted face that played a short tune, and I was fairly sure that was some SCP-something-something. An easy get that I could hand over to make them happy.
I was about two-thirds down the main corridor when I heard something move. I froze.
The Foundation's bones weren't always just bones. There were things still in some of these places. Creatures that had gotten in after the evacuation and made themselves comfortable, or things that had been contained and outlived their jailors. I held very still and extended my senses. It's not as mystical as it sounds. It's more like… listening to the hum of a building and noticing where it changes?
There was something in a supply room to my left. Small. Warm. Alive.
I opened the door. The room was stacked floor to ceiling with filing cabinets, half of them rusted open, papers cascading from them in a slow waterfall. A window near the ceiling had let in some light and a lot of moss. And there, on top of the third cabinet from the left, precisely in the ray of late afternoon light, sat a rook.
She looked at me. I looked at her.
She opened her beak and said, with a voice somewhere between a croak and squawk, "FOUND ME!! HAHAHAHA! YOU FOUND ME! CONGRATULATIONS!! I KNEW SOMEONE WOULD COME EVENTUALLY. IT ONLY TOOK—" she seemed to squint, doing some internal calculation " —A VERY LONG TIME!"
I stood in the doorway of the filing room and tried, really hard, to remember the last time anything had surprised me like this.
"Hello," I muttered.
"HELLO! I'm Greg! What's your name? Do you want to play hide and seek? I'm the hide and seek world champion! I've been hiding for so long and nobody found me, and I hid from everything! Old age tried to find me, I hid from that. Death tried to find me, but I was very well hidden." She paused to catch her breath. "Are you real?"
"I'm Josephine, and I think so," I said.
"Okay. Okay good." She ruffled her feathers. Then, with slightly less volume, she asked, "Did they send you? From the Site? Are they okay?"
"No," I said. "I'm sorry. I'm not from the Foundation."
She was quiet for a moment. The ray of light moved slightly across her feathers.
"Oh," she said. "Okay. Are you a tribe person? Do you want a Wonder? I've heard people talk about that while I hid. I know where lots of Wonders are, I've been in all these rooms. There's a singing box with a little man down the hall, I can show you! He came out once when I was very sad and he looked very sad also and we just looked at each other all sad."
I held it back a bit, but I laughed. I couldn't help it. It wasn't mean. It's just that I hadn't heard anything like this in a very long time.
"I would love that," I answered. "And I would also love some company, if you're willing."
She looked at me with that sideways stare that corvids are naturals at. Then she hopped off the filing cabinet, spread her wings once, and landed on my shoulder.
"Okay," she said. "Where are we going?"
Greg adapted to the world faster than I expected.
Actually, that's not quite right. She expanded. Like she'd been compressed into that room for four thousand years and was only now taking up the space she'd always been meant to occupy. Every new thing delighted her. The smell of a fire. The way tribes built their windbreaks. Other birds. She was extremely interested in other birds, though I noticed the interest was not always mutual.
She also rediscovered hide and seek.
I mean, she'd always known about it. But playing it with Foundation personnel who were contractually obligated to find her was a completely different experience from playing it with children. By the third tribe we visited, there was usually a small crowd of children sitting with me while I waited, each of them reporting Greg's last known position with a seriousness that suggested they had found their life's calling.
Greg, obviously, was very good at this. She had been hiding for four thousand years, defending their champion title.
She pretended not to, though. I noticed that pretty quick. She was more than capable of staying invisible indefinitely — I'd watched her simply cease to be while sitting in plain sight — but she always let them get close. Always let them almost find her before she popped out, made a lot of noise, declared them all champions, and accepted the resulting cheers as her rightful tribute.
The tribes talked. One thing that'd never changed. You could travel a week in any direction and find people who had heard about you before you arrived, the information stripped of context and rebuilt into something new each time. I was used to this. I had been a story a long time. But now, I was a story with a bird.
Greg had opinions about her stories. Mostly she felt it undersold her hide and seek credentials and overemphasized "the part where I'm always very serious and mysterious, which I can tell you for a fact I am not." I told her that the stories were a long game and she'd come to appreciate it, eventually. She said she'd believe it when she saw it.
She was starting to ask me questions about the old world. She was always slow and careful with it, especially when it came to the Foundation. She gave me room to not answer if I didn't want to.
I told her most of it. How I was a reality bender, how I was hunted by the Foundation, how I kept running, how they attacked me, how I attacked back. How I died, how I got better. How I met with the Black Queens.
I didn't tell her about my husband. What I did after the world ended. My shoddy evacuation shelters. The things I'd tried to undo and couldn't. She didn't push on those gaps, which I appreciated. Greg, for all her noise, was sensitive in ways she didn't advertise.
"What was it like?" she asked once. It was early morning, walking a ridge above a river valley.
"Lonely," I said.
"Was it better?"
I thought about it for a bit, kicking a rock down the ridge. "In some ways. In most ways, no."
"Hm." She was quiet for a moment, which was unusual for her. "I liked it. I mean, I didn't like being contained. I don't think anyone liked that. But I liked—" she made a small sound, rearranging her feathers. "I liked that there were so many people. And that they were strange. And that sometimes they came to visit and stayed for a while and played and then had to go, but they always came back."
The valley below us was quiet and green and full of absolutely no one.
"Yeah," I said. "That part was nice."
The first account came from a tribe two days east of the river.
A family had been traveling between settlements. A grandmother, her daughter, and two grandchildren. It was the standard route, a well-traveled one. They never arrived. The tribe sent scouts. The scouts found the grandmother alone on the road, alive but shaken up. She kept saying there had been many of them. She kept saying it had been very fast and she hadn't seen anyone.
I sat with the tribe's elder for a long time that evening. He told me other stories. A trader who had come through six months ago, missing two fingers and refusing to say how. A hunting party that came back one short, each member describing the incident differently under questioning. Different number of attackers, different time of day, different weapons they used.
"They say it's the People," the elder said.
"Well," I told him, "that's not a helpful name. Everybody calls themselves that."
He shook his head. "No, not People like us. Just… people. That's what the ones who come back say. That it was just people."
Greg, sitting on my shoulder, was very quiet.
"How many tribes have lost someone?" I asked.
He shrugged and offered, with a wavering voice, "All of them?"
We started collecting accounts.
This was Greg's idea. She had spent four thousand years listening to people talk through walls, and she had a talent for sitting on a fence post and becoming, in the minds of the people, simply a bird. This was very hard for her, just sitting there, but she did her best. She'd bring me little fragments. Scraps of conversation, campfire stories, things said quietly at the edges of firelight. I tried my best to put them together, but the big picture kept changing.
Every account contradicted the others in very specific ways. Not in the vague, slow way that stories drift over generations. That process I knew very well. This was different. The grandmother who said she hadn't seen anyone and also that there had been many. The trader who couldn't settle on whether it had been one person or a group. A family in one settlement who described the sound as drumming, while another family a day's walk away who'd lost someone to what sounded like the same encounter described absolute silence.
This wasn't drift. It was interference. Something was actively preventing the accounts from settling into a shape.
I had felt this before, a long time ago, in a different life. The feeling of a story being kept deliberately unresolved. The feeling of something that needed to remain unnameable.
"They're scared," Greg said one evening. She meant the accounts themselves, I think, not just the people giving them. "Every time someone tries to explain it, they get scared all over again and the explaining just… falls apart. That's not normal scared."
"No," I said. "Definitely isn't."
"Are we going to go find them?"
There was a tribe to the north, one I'd visited twice over the past century. They had given me a fire and a meal and, once, a very good woven blanket that I still had. The latest rumors had them directly in the path of whatever this was.
"Probably," I said.
"Okay," she said. Then, after a moment: "I'll hide. You seek!"
I laughed, shaking my head. "I don't think that's how this gonna working."
Greg tilted her head. "It might be."
We met Hekan on the road north.
He was easy to spot — slight man, ink-stained hands, overloaded pack, moving through the tall grass. I had heard of him from the tribes, a wandering scribe collecting stories from them. He had a full writing kit, which in this part of the world was either very brave or very stupid, and I had a feeling it was a mix of both.
He recognized the Witch before he recognized me, something that I've gotten use to over the years.
"I've heard accounts of you from six different tribes in the past two months!" He blurted, stopping in the middle of the road. He spoke with the directness of someone used to needing to make an impression before people decided to talk to him. "Would you be willing to—"
"Have you been collecting accounts of the People?" I interrupted.
The directness deflated from him. "The — yes. Yes I have. Though they're…"
"Inconsistent?"
"Completely. Every account contradicts every other one. I've been collecting stories for fifteen years and I have never encountered anything like it. Numbers, location, direction what the attackers looked like. One woman told me they wore no colors, another said they were painted red, a third said blue." He looked at me, hoping that I could make sense of it. "I figured it was trauma at first. It, it does strange things to memory. But the inconsistencies aren't random. They're too…"
"Consistent?" I offered.
"Yes! Exactly that. The inconsistency itself is so consistent." He looked at me differently now. "You know what this is?"
"I have a suspicion," I said. "Nothing I can put a name to yet."
He wrote something down. I watched him do it, and felt something I'd been stalking for two weeks shift into something more specific. Not fear, exactly. Recognition.
Something nearby very much did not want him doing that.
"Where are you headed?" I asked.
"North. To the Bent River tribe. That is where Geyre leads me."
"We're heading the same way. Wanna join us?" I said.
Hekan nodded eagerly. "I'd appreciate the company. And protection."
Greg, from my shoulder, asked "Do you know hide and seek?"
Hekan squinted at her. "I'm sorry?"
"She's asking if you're…" I started before shaking my head, "We'll explain on the road."
The road north took three days. Hekan talked for all of it.
This wasn't a problem. He was the kind of talker who actually listened while he spoke, which is rarer than it sounds. He'd ask a question, you'd answer, and a minute later he'd connect it to something he'd heard a year ago, and suddenly three separate things were one. He'd spent fifteen years doing this, weaving stories together, and he was amazing at it.
Greg adored him immediately. He was new and strange and had excellent handwriting, which she found fascinating, to my surpirse.
"Why do you make them different?" she asked, watching him write on the first evening.
"Different how?"
"The marks." She pecked his parchment. "Some are tall and some are wide and some are leaning."
"They're different sounds. Each mark is a sound. Put them together and they make words."
Greg stared at him. Then at me. "He can do that?"
He taught her the sounds that night by the fire. She picked it up with the focused intensity she brought to hide and seek, and by the time we banked the coals she could read her own name. After she picked it up, she kept looking back and forth from the fire to the parchment with her name on it.
"It's me," she said excitedly. "Even when I'm not there! It's still me."
I told Hekan what I need about the People. The accounts, the way they were messed up, the feeling of something that needed to stay unnamed. He listened intently, nodding along. When I'd finished, he opened his pack and showed me his notes.
They were a mess.
Not his usual notes. Those were meticulous, cross-referenced, full of little marginal symbols flagging things of note. These were really messy. He'd gone back and tried to correct things, lines crossed out and rewritten, arrows pointing between accounts that contradicted each other. In two places the ink looked weird, like it had gone bad — can ink go bad? And there were gaps. Places where the notes simply stopped, then resumed two paragraphs later, as if he's sat down to write and then come back to find the page blank.
"I thought it was me," he said. "I thought I was getting sloppy, losing Geyre's touch. But I've compared it to my other notes and… It's not worse. It's just… absent? Like I came back to the page and couldn't remember what I'd been going to say."
"What were you writing about?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I'm not sure. But I know it was about them."
We arrived at the tribe on the afternoon of the third day.
They were there. I was embarrased, a little, by how much I'd been holding the alternative in the back of my mind for the whole walk. They were there, fires burning, children playing, horizon-watching.
But the watching was different. Before, it had been habitual, the practiced vigilance of people living in open country. Now it was taut. It seemed like half the tribe were out there standing guard.
The elder I knew was waiting at the tribe's edge. She had gotten older, which always surprised me a little She looked at me, then Hekan, then Greg, then back at me. She had an expression like she was deciding whether to tell me something.
"You heard?" She asked.
"Some of it. Tell me the rest."
Three nights ago, a couple from a neighboring band had been traveling in for a seasonal gathering. They knew the route, they'd done it every year for decades. One of them, the woman, arrived at dawn, on foot, looking like she had run through the night. Her man wasn't with her. She couldn't say what had happened.
"Couldn't, or wouldn't?"
She looked away. "I don't think she knows. I think she was there and then she was running, and she left the story of why behind. She tries to tell it and she just can't."
Behind me, I heard the soft scratch of Hekan writing. The elder's jaw tightened slightly.
The scouts had found signs of a camp. Three days northwest, the shadow of a collapsed ceitu. The fire had been there a while. Cold embers. There was no belongings. Nothing marked. Not so much as a footprint. Just the cold embers and ring of rocks.
I sat at the edge of our own camp afterward and thought for a while. Greg landed next to me.
"You're doing that face again," she said.
She raised my eyebrow and turned to her. "What face?"
"The one where you're figuring something real bad out."
I looked at her sideways. She looked back, entirely unabashed.
It wasn't quite that I'd figured it out. It was more that the shape of it was becoming clear, and the shape was familiar in a way I didn't like. The deliberate obscurity. The erasure of story. The hostility to anything that could make the unknown known.
I looked across camp at Hekan. He was sitting with two of the tribe's elders, telling stories to some gathered kids. He caught my eye and raised his eyebrows.
"Greg," I asked.
"Yes?"
"Can you hide them?"
She tilted her head. "Like, hide them hide them?"
"Make them difficult to notice. Is that something you can do?"
She thought about it seriously. "I can try. That's a lot of people, and it's harder with Hekan's scratching…"
"We'll work on that," I said.
The sun was going down. In the northwest, above the treeline, there was nothing. No smoke, no silhouette, no birds. The absence of things which, as I was starting to understand, meant the presence of another.
That night was long.
I sat with Hekan after the fire had gone low and told him what I suspected.
"The accounts aren't drifting," I said. "Stories drift when they're retold and they pass through enough mouths. This is different. The inconsistencies aren't random. They're in exactly the places that would let you identify something.
He was writing quickly. I watched his hand glide furiously across the parchment.
"Like it's deliberate. Consistent inconsistencies, like we said," he murmured.
"Like it benefits something for the story to stay obscured." I turned the thought over. "Your notes going blank. That's the same shape. Every time you got close to a description that held, it vanished."
"What kind of thing does that?"
"Something very old," I said. "Something that lives in the space where understanding fails. The not-knowing. The Other." I paused. "Beyond that… I'm guessing."
He looked up, putting down his pen. "Guess, then."
I sighed, and continued. "There's a group of people out there doing the killing. That much the accounts agree on, even when they disagree on everything else. What I don't know is whether they understand what they've connected to, or whether they'd even recognize the description if I gave it to them." I looked at the fire. "I want to talk to them before I decide what they are."
He picked his pen back up and wrote something down. "And if they won't talk?"
"Then we'll know something useful from that too."
In the morning, Greg came back from a scouting loop with a proud look on her face.
"Three fires northwest! About two hours' walk. Thirty people, maybe more, I didn't want to circle too close." She landed on my shoulder. "They've got sentries in the trees. Not moving, barely breathing. I would've missed them if I wasn't such a good seeker."
"Did they see you?"
"I'm not the hide and seek champion for nothing!"
We left at midmorning, the three of us and a borrowed spear I had no plans of using. The elder watched us go. She had offered to send warriors along with us, but we respectfully declined. A group too big might scare them off.
The landscape northwest was open country. Low grass, scattered rock, the bones of a ceitu half-swallowed by nature. Three cold fire-circles became visible from half a kilometer out.
The camp was empty.
Not abandoned empty. I could feel eyes on us from outside the camp's perimeter.
"They're here," Greg said quietly, affirming what I felt. Despite that, I looked around and saw no one. No one in the trees, no one in the bushes, behind rocks. I bit my lips to think.
"We're going to sit at the center of camp," I said, "and wait.
"That's the plan?" Hekan asked, surprised.
"A start of one."
We sat for almost an hour.
The campsite was silent. A particular kind of silence. An artificial kind. Like it had been arranged just for us.
Hekan wrote while we waited. I'd told him to write everything: the camp, the stone circles, the quiet, the shape of the hill. He wrote without hesitation, which I appreciated. Once, mid-word, he simply stopped. Pen on page, staring at nothing.
I said his name and nudged his shoulder. He shook his head and blinked. He looked up at me, back down at what he'd been writing, and kept going.
The woman came out of the grass to the north.
She was older than I'd expected. She moved with a graceful stillness. I watched as she walked into the camp and stopped about ten feet away. She looked at Hekan. Then at me. Then at Greg, and her eyes stayed there.
Greg looked at back her. "Hello."
The woman didn't answer. She tilted her head slightly, like she was trying to figure out what Greg was.
"She's a bird," I offered.
"She is not a bird the way other birds are birds."
"Um, I guess not."
That was apparently the right answer, because the woman's attention shifted to me. "You've been to the other tribes. Asking about us."
"Hearing about you," I corrected. "The accounts were hard to follow."
"Correct," she said simply.
Beside me, Hekan's pen moved. The speaker's eyes went to him immediately — not startled, more like a reflex. I saw something tighten behind her gaze.
"He's a scribe," I said.
She looked at the parchment for a moment, then back at me. "What do you want?"
"To understand what's been happening to people."
"They ran into us."
"And the ones who survived can't say what happened."
"No," she agreed. "They couldn't."
She said it without apology. She wasn't boasting. It was just the nature of the thing, as far as she was concerned. Her gaze drifted back to Greg.
"How old is she?" the woman asked.
"Old. Thousands of years old."
"Then she should be dead?"
"I hid!" Greg answered.
Something moved across the speaker's face that I couldn't quite read. She looked at Greg for another long moment. Greg, to her credit, simply looked back, unbothered.
"We, my people, don't name things we don't understand," the woman said finally. Not to me or anyone in particular, more just thinking aloud. "To name a thing is to say you know what it is."
Greg ruffled her feathers. "That sounds inconvenient."
"Her name is Greg," I said. "She named herself."
The woman's eyes moved back to me. "Then she's braver than most."
The conversation that followed was slow and careful.
She asked me what I was. I told her: old, like Greg. Something the old world had found weird and spent a long time trying to file away.
She nodded, as if confirming something. "They did that," she said. "The old builders. Named things. Contained them." She looked toward the ceitu half-swallowed by nature to the north. "Their ruins are full of things they couldn't name properly."
We sat. Ariund us, the grass was still, but I was aware of the others hiding in it. The woman seemed to know that I knew.
"The people that you attack," I said eventually. "What happens to them?"
"They encounter us," she said. "After that, they're changed."
"The woman who came back couldn't describe what happened."
"Correct."
"Couldn't, or—"
"When people try to tell it, the telling breaks." Her tone wasn't defensive. She was just stating the nature of the thing. "The sacred doesn't stay in words. That is how you know they were real."
Beside me, Hekan's pen continued moving. Her attention snapped to him. I could see her resisting a frown.
"Will you ask him to stop?" she asked.
"No."
She looked at me. Her expression was hard to decipher, but she looked almost disrespected.
"He documents what he observes," I said. "That's why we brought him."
In the grass, something shifted. I could feel the air shifting with a moving body. She raised one hand, barely. The movement stopped.
"What he writes," she said to Hekan, "you understand what it does?"
Hekan blinked, looking up slowly. He had been silent this whole time, acting as a passive observer. He looked like he forgot he was actually present. "Um, it makes things permanent? The same every time someone comes back to it. It lets one version of a story live on, unchanged."
She looked at him for a moment longer, then back at me. "The old world named everything it found. Built cells for them. Locked them away. And it ended because of it."
She paused, waiting for me to respond. Seeing that I wouldn't, she continued.
"You ran from it your whole life. And yet, you carry its tools into our camp."
Her gaze had settled back on Hekan's pen, a furious disgust hiding behind her eyes. I thought about the hand she raised — the authority in it, the ease of it — and I was thinking about something she hadn't said yet.
"How large is this tribe?"
"We are what we need to be."
"And that is?"
"…We have never grown beyond what is right."
"And when you have?"
"The unknown, the sacred corrects us."
"How?"
She didn't respond.
"Sickness," I said. "Failed hunts? Disasters from no clear origin? I imagine you call them tests of faith?"
The grass was very still.
"What if it isn't a test," I asked, "What if it's just.. maintenance?"
I waited. She made no move to respond.
"Whatever you serve," I said cautiously, "it needs you exactly as you are. Small, wild, impossible to describe completely. If you grow too large, too organized, if a full account of you exists somewhere, you become knowable. And knowable things are…" She watched me intently, like she was hoping I wouldn't say the next word. "… chains. That's it, isn't it?"
Something moved in her expression. The glimpse of disrepect morphed, sliding into discomfort.
"We are the sacred," she whispered.
"You're the instrument."
"You're saying… fear controls us?"
"I'm saying it needs you to stay exactly what you are. Th—"
She suddenly raised her hand, the motion sharp as a knife. I could feel bodies moving in the grass, crawling towards us. At the perimeter, one figure stood. Then another. Ten, twenty, thirty more.
I heard Hekan slowly stop writing next to me, looking around. Greg's claws tightened slightly on my shoulder. The woman rose slowly to her feet. She looked down at me, her eyes meeting mine. I could see fear darkening her eyes.
"You shouldn't know that," she said.
Before I could reply, I felt something prick the side of my neck. And the world went dark.
The Bird, The Witch, and The Scribe | To be continued… »
