※
You were born from the earth nine hundred and twelve thousand, eight hundred fifty-four nights ago. Human hands pulled you from deep, deep underground and gave you a body to contain your breath.
Practiced hands gave you form. You were wet clay, shaped. Widespread wings to engulf the sky. Enormous eye to survey, to watch and guard.
Careful hands gave you color. Gold you were, for the fields of wheat. Blue, for the endless sky. Green you were, for the towering trees. Black, for the glimmering night.
Calloused hands gave you fire. From the kiln you received warmth, and from that warmth your skin grew strong enough to withstand any impact.
But gentle were the hands that gave you life. Into your shell he breathed a name—
sigilyph. You were made to protect.An obsidian knife flashed across an open palm, calling blood to rise above skin. It was smeared on the tips of your wings, across the edges of your being, and in that moment the pact was complete: red you were, for the human that shared your life. From the moment that the blood touched your skin, you were one life, one pain.
And so the two of you were one, human and pokémon. He gave you some of his red and in return you protected the red he kept within him, until, one day—the roar of dragons split open the skies, cleaving day and night. Lancing thunder struck down the towering forests. A raging inferno devoured the plains of wheat. Blue, black, green, and gold faded, and when the fighting eclipsed all else and reached your home, they took your red as well and cast him deep into the earth.
The land and his flesh were blown away. The earth that had once been protected by the humans and their hands withered and rotted into the brown of the desert sands. But you remained, your skin a multicolored farce of what the land used to be. The events of that day were sad. But far worse was when the sun rose and fell around you, crafting a tragedy two thousand years in the making until only the dunes remained, dotted here and there with crumbling relics, a lone spire.
Only the dunes remained, and you, to watch the sands dance.
※
You call upon the zen ones sometimes. The ancient darma stand guard over the remains, guarding the castle you once served even as it sinks further into the sands.
When they were solidified into stone, they were given no eyes, no ears, no movement. Unlike you, they received no red when they were chiseled out of the earth’s loving embrace, and so they stand solemn guardian, unable to move or feel. Their burden is to witness, and to those who are worthy, speak.
Where you were once two and now one, they were once five and always five, the last living things to remember your era. You return to the entrance of the ruins once each sun, to remember and bid them tidings of the world they never saw. They are five specks of green in the desert, like the forests you once knew.
{Greetings,} you say, hovering over to them.
{Greetings, loresinger,} says Four. {Were the sands kind to you?}
You dip low, your own sort of nod of affirmation. {The sands were kind. I hope they were for you as well.}
{They were, and we have known nothing else. Tell us something new, loresinger,} says Two. {Tell us what you have heard this year.}
And there is so much, and yet at the same time there is so little. It feels like you are living in a halcyon period. You’ve seen it happen before. First the air settles, then the clouds roll in, and then the rain pours down. For a few serene hours, the maractus wander across the moonlit dunes, the spines of the desert greedily gathering all the moisture they will see for an untold number of moons. The sands are quiet, and the desert is calm. When the sandstorm returns, it will do so with stinging winds and scorching sands, but until then, there is a fragile peace.
{Yes, loresinger,} says Five. {What news do you have of the world?}
Tonight the winds are still, but one day soon they will sing. And with them will come a sandstorm so great that you fear this entire world will be consumed. You have seen it in the clouds. And yet, despite that, the people are calm, unaware of what lies just beyond the horizon. And so you find yourself saying: {I have nothing new to share. The sands were quiet this year.}
Three is unsatisfied with that. You sense that much. Even if they no longer have the movement to convey it, it lies in their voice. {Nothing new?} Three says scornfully. {Then give us something old, loresinger. You who have seen so much.}
Something old. Unbidden, the memory springs to you, an echo of the sandstorm rising on the horizon. What you think of is more than
old; it’s ancient, and yet it’s the same story that you’ve heard wander across a thousand nights. A story whispered into your clay as soft hands stretched your wings, gave you shape, gave you flight. There is beauty in what precedes the storm in these parts. You imagine the calm before the rain, the way the winds crescendo and then fall silent to listen for just an instant before the downpour begins. After all, you
are the loresinger. What better tale to tell on a halcyon night than this one?
{Very well,} you say, echoing words you have not heard aloud for two thousand years. {Listen carefully my friends, as I tell you of the gift of Stormdancer.}
※
This world was born into chaos. A great storm raged in the skies and battered the plains below. Harsh winters gave way to blazing summers. The earth froze, and it burned, and it shuddered. In the storm was only violence: ice, fire, and thunder roared in equal parts.
Amidst that chaos, a great dragon was born. And she looked at the world, and she wept for it. In the flames, her tears seared off into the sun; in the cold, they froze; in the storms, they washed away. And even though she saw that it was futile, even though there was nothing she could do, she wept. From her tears rose a great ocean, which grew so vast that it absorbed the lightning, quenched the fire, halted the glaciers. The dragon then swallowed the ocean inside of herself, and the battle raged within her chest, so that through her, the land grew peaceful once more.
For many suns, the great dragon roamed the earth she had tamed, alone. Where lesser beings may have only seen a barren wasteland, she saw an avenue for great beauty. The flood had watered the earth, and she saw within it the potential for great beauty, a world that could be shaped like clay. With her wings she created the first wind; with her talons she scraped furrows that sprouted into forests; with her tail she swept mountains and valleys. Within her, a battle raged—the storm of ice, fire, and thunder that she had calmed could never truly be at peace—but without, the earth flourished.
The land that she had watered gave way to life, and the dragon witnessed this with both awe and pride. Soon, her children crawled across every corner of the earth, and yet she feared they would not be strong enough to face the troubles ahead, should the land lapse into chaos again. For the Dragonmother sensed that one day her body would fail her, and the primordial storm would break free once more. She knew her children needed to be prepared.
So to all living creatures, the Dragonmother gave out great gifts. She set some to be the guardians of the winds, others to be the guardians of earth. Piece by piece the Dragonmother gave out more and more, until she was diminished. From her rose hundreds of species of pokémon, who travelled far and wide across the lands.
This the Dragonmother watched, and she smiled, and she prepared to rest.
But as she folded her wings around herself and prepared to enter the eternal slumber, she heard a voice crying out. Unlike the rest of her children, who had grown mighty, this one was feeble and pitiful. When she had doled out her gifts, it had been forgotten, and so, like a seedling in the shadow of a red rock, it could not grow strong.
With doleful, rheumy eyes, the Dragonmother turned to her youngest child. Human looked back at her, toothless and fangless, with no weapons to call its own. It begged her for help, even as the rest of its siblings raged around it with their newfound strength and the stormclouds gathered overhead. Weakly, Human called out again, a pathetic cry that was consumed by even the faint sounds of the Dragonmother’s labored breaths.
Mother. Please.
{My sweet child, I am so sorry. I am diminished,} said the Dragonmother sadly.
And it was true. Her scales had lost their luster; her limbs had leeched off their strength. The battle of ice and fire and thunder had sapped her dry. But the Dragonmother could not bear to leave any of her children to suffer, and so in her last moments, she called close her oldest daughter.
{Stormdancer,} she said quietly, her breath growing short even as her words became ever more urgent. {To your youngest sibling, I beg that you show compassion and mercy. Teach them your strength. Lend out your gift, so that they may be like you.}
Stormdancer nodded solemnly, and with this final mandate, the Dragonmother gave up the last of her breath and turned to stone. The earth rumbled, and then unnaturally dark clouds gathered overhead, seething and more violent than any sky any living creature had ever seen. It was as the Dragonmother had feared: without her to contain it, the primordial storm was free once more.
And so Stormdancer turned to Human, who sobbed and clutched tightly to their mother’s stony form.
“Forgive me, dear sibling,” said Stormdancer, bowing low. “This is all I know how to give.”
The starry river stretched above her in a silver ribbon; below, the clouds swirled and rumbled with the terrible storm that the Dragonmother had set free at last.
But Stormdancer pirouetted once, and then wove her limbs into a twisting spiral, danced so gracefully and sang a melody so sweet and pure that the entire earth fell quiet to listen. The clouds themselves hushed. Stormdancer sang for Human and paid the oncoming storm no heed.
Like their mother before them, Human witnessed. The beauty of her performance drove Human to weep bitter tears, which fell instead of the raindrops and darkened their stony mother below.
When Stormdancer was done, Human was speechless for one day and one night, drenched in the downpour that finally came, that Human endured. Finally, Human said, “Your music was beautiful, Stormdancer. But how can I learn from this? I cannot dance like you; my limbs will never be as graceful as yours. How can I learn your gift?”
“My sweet sibling.” Stormdancer smiled. “Listen to yourself. You already have.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come back to me on this day each year, and I will sing for you my aria, and so share with you my gift of Voice. When I sing, the world has no choice but to stop and listen.” Stormdancer swept out one leg and curtsied deep. “The same holds true for you now, dear sibling. When you speak, all creatures in this world will listen. This is the gift we share.”
※
By the time you finish your story, the winds have fallen completely silent. A rarity for this deep in the desert.
Four speaks up first. {Thank you, loresinger. That was a good offering.}
{A good offering,} Two repeats solemnly.
{It was only mine to share.} Unbidden, the words of the old traditions fall from you, like spare feathers. {May you pass it along.}
“I always heard there was a different ending,” says a voice, and you and the zen ones all turn to see a human emerging across the moonlit dunes, casting a sharp shadow on the fuzziness of the sand.
{A different ending?} Three asks.
“Yes, one that a hydreigon told me.”
{Aha, and my friend the King of Unova told me you’re full of shit,} says Five, which sends a few titters echoing amongst the zen ones. {A dragon, telling stories to a human. Imagine that.}
But One isn’t so easily stirred to humor. {Besides, what would you know of these matters?} they scoff.
“It was just a story I heard once,” repeats the voice, walking up to you and then folding himself so he sits cross-legged in the circle of the zen ones. “Forgive me, my friend. But your words do not fall on deaf ears. When you speak, I have no choice but to stop and listen.”
{Oho!} Three chortles. {You are a feisty one indeed. Look at this human, my brethren. One gifted with a voice, deigning to speak to the voiceless. See how he claims to know the secrets of dragons and tells us a new ending to our own story. You humans are all the same, trying to put words into our mouths while claiming to listen. But we are of the sands, foolish boy, and we will not sit quietly while you reshape our history to us.} One laughs whole-heartedly alongside, and Five chuckles, but Two and Four are silent. Curious. Like you. He heard your story, but it’s more than that—he speaks like someone who understands what it means.
“I apologize for intruding upon your sands,” says the human. Around his neck he wears a strange symbol: a black orb with rings of blue. It shimmers with the reflection of the milky stars stretching above. “If you want me to leave, tell me, and I will immediately go.”
{Do so, paleskin!} shouts Three, gleeful. {We Darmanitan have guarded this place from your kind for centuries, and we shall do so for centuries more. Your soft words cannot delude us. You may have a human voice, but when you speak we will not listen.}
You tense, expecting fire. The human carries no pocketspheres at his waist; he has no servants to whom to issue commands. He is gifted with voice but he has yet to use it to make others into his weapons. How will he fight them off?
“I understand,” he says instead. “Thank you for your letting me share your company.” He unfolds once more, extending long, gangly legs like those of a zebstrika, and he bows low. “May the sands be kind.”
{For you as well,} replies Three, almost without realizing, and before any of them can say anything else, the human pads away into the silent night.
{May the sands be kind,} you say quickly to the zen ones, the words almost coming out in a jumbled mess, and even as the chorus of
“for you as well” rings behind you, you’re already fluttering up behind the human, your shadow twining with his on the smooth dunes as he retraces his steps.
From behind, you can see the corner of his lips tilt up into a smile. “Hello. It’s nice to meet you.”
{You are not like other humans.}
He exhales quietly, his breath cold in the desert night. “I get that a lot.”
He keeps walking with a single-minded determination, one foot in front of the other. Around you, the sand is untouched, windswept, indented only by a single pair of footsteps trailing towards the desert ruins, and the half-trail that loops back the way it came.
{Where are you going?}
“Truly? I don’t know yet. Forward, I suppose.”
There’s the soft whisper of his footsteps in the sand, and nothing more.
{Are you angry that the zen ones dismissed you?} you ask at last.
He squares his hands in the pockets of his pants, hunches his shoulders against the wind—but the night is calm. There’s nothing to guard against. “A little,” he admits. “But I don’t know if anger is the right word. It isn’t their fault. They aren’t wrong to scorn me.” He pauses. “
Putting words into our mouths while claiming to listen.” And this time, there’s no mistaking the tinge of bitterness that colors his words. “Pokémon never tell lies. The darmanitan can see it, even if I no longer know myself.”
This human reminds you of the stone carvings your old human once made of the Dragonmother, her chest a writhing mass, the edges of her body sharp and jagged from the chaos she can’t contain. {Can see what?}
He doesn’t answer your question, not at first. Instead, he stops and whirls to look at you, takes in your entire form. He’s not angry, he’s not awed, he’s not greedy. Over the years a hundred humans have looked at you rising above the sands, but few of them heard the questions you asked and tried to answer. “When I was a child, I heard the same legend as the one you just told now. He called it
Meloetta and the Nocturne Lament, and it was a story of music so powerful that it had the ability to change hearts and minds alike. She was the true bridge between humans and pokémon, able to switch readily between her fighting and her words. When humans called to her, she gave them her voice, and turned to her dancing instead. But the dragon who told me this story had a different ending. Would you permit me to share it?”
You bob up and down expectantly. But when he doesn’t take that as affirmation, you quickly chime in, {Of course.}
He nods, and then, with a quiet storyteller’s voice, he speaks. “For years, the human returned to Meloetta on the longest night of the year, when winter was at its peak and the world was at its coldest. And on that night, Meloetta would perform her relic song, a final vestige of an older time.” He tilts his hand toward the silhouette of the ruins on the horizon, speckled with the five zen ones. “They named her venue the Relic Castle, for the gift of her song. Eventually, humanity prospered, and soon it wasn’t just one human, or two—an entire generation gathered for her. They were always silent when they watched her, and at the beginning of her performance they only greeted her with the sounds of their hands, but when she was finished, they could all Speak, and they sang their praises with their lips and shared her gift amongst themselves.
“But one day, a war broke out between two nations. Intending to hit his enemies where they would suffer the most, and wanting to end the war quickly before it would cause any more harm to his people, the king of one of the nations gathered his armies and found where Meloetta rested before the winter solstice. He sought to steal her gift for himself and his people, so that it could no longer be turned against him. And so he commanded his people to creep up on Meloetta as she slept, and they surrounded her, and they tore out her throat.
“They made a fatal mistake, for they could not kill their sister so easily. But even as they clutched their prize in their hands, even as she lay bleeding in the dirt, Meloetta looked at the one who had gathered all the others to his side, and she chose not to strike them down where they stood. Instead, with the last of her strength, with her voice stolen from her, she rasped her final gift.” The human looks at you, and he looks past you, and he looks
through you. And when he speaks again you can hear the power leave his voice. He’s quiet. Hesitant, almost, when he says, {Our mother gave out many gifts, but remember this, dear sibling: she gave gifts of strength, not power. You must never forget that. Strength allows you to endure pain. Power lets you inflict pain on others. Now that you have my gift of blood, you must learn the difference, or else lose yourself.}
He falls silent.
{You can speak like us,} you say at last. It’s the easier thing to address.
The human stops walking for a second, and turns back to look at you. His hair blows in the wind. You haven’t seen many human smiles, but this is certainly sadness in the shape of one. {The dialect of sand is my native tongue.}
The only sound is your wingbeats, and even that is dampened on the massive expanse of sand. It feels wrong to fill the moments after Stormdancer’s song with anything but silence.
This is a strange human indeed. He has Stormdancer’s gift, but he speaks, and he listens. But what drove him this far into the desert? What does he seek? And what has he found?
Strangers to the desert may not understand what makes it so strange, not at first glance. It takes hours, days even, to see: the sands shift with time. Imperfections are buried. If you do not know where to look, you will lose yourself. This human looks everywhere but forward.
{Why does understanding our tongue make you sad?} you ask finally. If you must break the silence you may as well do it with a question. {It is a great gift. Many humans would be jealous.}
{Do you think they would? I find that many humans already think they have this gift. They listen and think this precludes them from understanding.}
You don’t quite know how to answer that.
The human continues: {When I set out, everything seemed so simple, so black and white. But the more I speak to humans and pokémon, the more I realize they are both afraid to change. My voice alone cannot convince them. I wonder if a better human might be able to do more; or perhaps if a pokémon with the power of Voice might’ve been a better messenger than a human with the ability to listen.}
You still momentarily. {You dislike the way things are.}
He doesn’t understand what you’re saying—you can tell that immediately, because he answers, {It saddens me that we make pokémon fight, yes.}
Fight. You’ve seen what these humans and their pocketspheres call fighting. It does not strike fear in you. These battles, at least, are survivable. No longer do they call fire and thunder as they once did. These fights do not leave scars in the earth that will last for a thousand years. {My kind have not been forged since the Great War,} you reply evenly. It’s an empty statement, but one that you don’t fully know how to express. There is a story for this, perhaps. If you could but remember it.
Perhaps, despite himself, he adds, {Humans have changed since the sigilyph were forged. At first you were the only ones we made to fight. But now we think that is the purpose of all pokémon.}
Your purpose.
You were forged for a war. You know that much. They painted you with their colors, but they shaped you with their hands. And the shape they gave for you was one for violence. You had eyes, to take in the battle. Wings, to fly above. A great magic, sealed within you, to unleash in rippling waves on the unprepared.
But the war came and went, and all those who started it went as well, but you stayed. Without the war, what purpose would your Red have given you?
And with the war, if that was all you had, what would you become instead?
Perhaps as if to answer your question, your gaze drifts northward, to the crumbling ruins of a desert tower in the sand.
{I have heard your ending before,} you tell this human at last. {It was a sad one, then and now.}
{As a child I thought it was a pokémon who sought to steal Meloetta’s gift,} he admits, sounding almost ashamed. {But as I grew older I realized it could have only been a human.}
An interesting assumption, one you never would have made. You were shaped with many purposes, but the one you wanted most of all was a mouth. They forged you for a purpose, but that purpose was not to speak. If you could steal his Voice by simply tearing out his throat, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?
While you consider, his mind goes in a different direction. He blinks against the stinging wind. {Do you think she knew?} he asks quietly.
{Knew?}
{When she was the first to invoke the nocturne lament. Do you think she knew what it would come to mean?} The questions spill from him with the force of having been pent-up for centuries. This strange one carries the sandstorm inside of him. {Stormdancer gave her greatest gift to help those who would never understand the true weight of her sacrifice, what it would one day cost her to share her Voice with those who envied her gift. And she helped a lot of people, yes, but do you think she knew how much it would hurt her?} You watch. He swallows nervously. Looks off into the distance. {And if she knew, do you think she would’ve done it anyway? Or would she have held her tongue, and simply watched the human suffer?}
You can sense the second question buried beneath his words, archaic and imposing, a relic in the sands. He is one with the gift of voice. Should he share his words with those who would sooner tear out his throat than hear his wish?
He is quiet for a long while. As are you.
You feel rather than hear a tremor run through the sands, something stirring deep below, a rumbling so ancient and powerful that it could only have one source—
What he asks is a pure ideal. If there is such thing as sacrifice, if a gift can be given with the understanding that nothing will come out of it. And it is in understanding this gift that you know what answer you can give him, even if you know it will take him time and more time to understand it.
You know. Gentle hands shaped you, once. Gave you form. Drenched you in red. They gave you a great gift, and you gave them one in return. But neither of you ever asked or took, only gave.
{We have our two endings to the story,} you tell him quietly. {In mine, Stormdancer sang for the humans, as she did in yours. But her ending was much the same. As she sang, her Voice poured out of her and into Human; the light faded, and her magic left her. On her final pirouette, she no longer had her voice; by the time Human left her to face the world, she could only dance. From that moment on, she was still Stormdancer, but a part of her was diminished, just like her mother. Without her Voice, she faded from our world and was swallowed by time.
{In both of our stories she lost a part of herself. But which is truth? I have seen two thousand years and I could not tell you which is which.} You look at him and his sad smile. {I prefer to think she knew, and gave of herself anyway. Stormdancer had two gifts, after all. From her the humans received their voice, and with it the power to be heard by all. But to pokémon she gave the nocturne lament, and with it the strength to see things through to their bitter end, to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Her words carry great power—across all of Unova, no matter what language we speak, every pokémon can recognize the nocturne lament, and we know what it calls us to do, and what will become of those who steel the courage to invoke it.}
Your singular eye blinks once. You think of the day that you first heard the dragons roar. You survived. You stayed. You were forged for a war, but it wasn’t duty that held you there. You remained for your Red, and you remained every day after that.
The human nods, but he doesn’t look convinced. {That was the mistake the king made. Stormdancer’s magic was not in her throat, but in her voice,} he replies softly.
The tremor stills. Unaware, perhaps, the human does as well.
Perhaps unintentionally, he has betrayed his thoughts. He cannot fathom a world in which Stormdancer would choose to give of herself; the only one he could believe in is the one in which her gift was taken from her.
So you tell him what you learned then, what kept you going even after your red vanished into the desert sands. {When you love someone more than you love yourself, you give it power over you. Whether Stormandancer sang until her voice grew ragged and her gift flowed out of her, or whether the humans one day crept up and stole her song for themselves—I think she knew what her fate would be. The truth is she did not care what it would cost her, and not caring destroyed her. That was the price she paid for us to receive of her gifts.}
The green-haired human goes completely motionless, and it is when he stands still that you sense it fully: a sandstorm rages within him, so great that he will consume the whole world, forge it anew. His hands are practiced, calloused, careful, gentle—he will shape this world, surely, someday.
He is young, though, and it will take him time. He is too wrapped up in questions of purpose, of being. If Stormdancer meant to do this. If you were meant for war. If he is meant for a destiny beyond his comprehension.
There is a reassurance to be found in decisions made beyond your control. You know why he would prefer the ending where Stormdancer’s voice was stolen alongside her choice. It is simpler sometimes to imagine that the world that shaped you is stronger than you, that the form you are forged into must determine your life.
After the war, you became the loresinger. You decided it for yourself, without your Red, because that was who you wanted to be.
So you ask him a question to see which one he will offer in response, a tradition from long ago. {The dragon who told you of Stormdancer. What did he tell you happened to the Dragonmother when she rose from her stony slumber?}
{She was sundered by a pair of selfish humans,} he answers immediately. {Two irreconcilable creatures arose from her stony form, and they have never touched since.}
{Like you,} you say, {I have heard a different ending. Again, I do not know which is truth and which is imagination. Would you permit me to share it?}
{Of course.}
{The Dragonmother was lonely. When she next awoke, she saw that all of her children had grown away from her, and she walked the world without equal. The earth’s children love their mother, but she has strength that cannot be matched: where she wanted companions, they saw only a goddess. She chose to divide herself into two, so that there would always be one in the world to understand her. It hurt her greatly. From that day forward she was never her whol self. But from that day forward, she would always have one who could stand beside her. One became two so that two could be like one.}
He looks at you for a very long moment, and when he speaks again, it is the question you wanted him to ask all this time, with his Voice: “Why are you telling me this?”
You look at him, and imagine a voice pouring from the mouth no one saw fit to give you. {Because Stormdancer inherited more from our mother than just her Voice. She took our mother’s burden: to be understood by the world you must give it some of yourself. To shape the world you must accept its contradictions.}
He blinks against the cold wind, and then says, “Do you think that’s why she did it?”
Easier to answer his question with another. {I wonder which you think is most important. Does it matter why Stormdancer’s voice was lost? Or when, or how, or by whom? Or for her, does it merely matter that she no longer has it?} You have seen wars, and death, and time. They will shake you no longer; ever since your Red died, they ceased to hold power over you. Here in the desert, the sands of time became a blur. But you know, as this one is beginning to learn, that the most important questions, the ones that lived through the suns, were always the ones that began with
why. These were the questions that became the lore. These were the questions that led you to sing.
This time, he does shiver in the cold wind, in the storm that brews around him. He is strong enough to endure it, to change this land, and yet you know: it will change him as well. That is what the winds always do, even to the tallest rock. “It is a question with no answer,” he says slowly. “She had no choice.”
{She had no choice.} You mull his response over and find you disagree thoroughly. It was in thinking of the Dragonmother that you saw who you wanted to be. She was unsatisfied with herself, how she fit her purpose—so she changed. So you changed as well. Perhaps she was afraid, in that moment before she decided who she wanted to be. Perhaps she didn’t hesitate. You certainly did. {But did that stop her from doing what needed to be done?}
This time, the question makes him flinch. “No.”
You come to a halt in front of him. This child would wander for miles into a desert to find a better ending than the one he was told, but it never occurred to him to tell one of his own. He will find that such answers do not come easily. But if he gets nothing else out of this, he must understand this. {You think questions of
why matter less than questions of
what. Then allow me to ask you one final question. Have you ever heard the nocturne lament Spoken?}
{Spoken?} His voice lilts on your pronunciation. Not a true native speaker, then.
{Not spoken, but Spoken,} you confirm, and this time he seems to understand the emphasis. {We can retell her words without feeling them, as we can with any words. As I did in my story just now—I spoke. But.} You draw yourself up to your full height, wings outstretched, voice unyielding. {If we understand it. If we mean it. For a brief moment she lives again. She Speaks, and through her, so do we.}
Across the sands, you have seen and heard so much. Yet each time you see Stormdancer’s words given life again, you find it beautiful, and terrifying. Sometimes she is invoked in these words, secreted down across the generations, across the world. Sometimes she only lives on in a gesture, in a cry, a gaze. Yet the intent is unmistakable.
“Her story is a reminder to me that the world only changes through sacrifice. You must embrace the imperfections of the world if you want to shield others from them,” he says softly, after much consideration. But you see that in him the words are inert; they do not spark his torch into flame. The two of you walk a bit further. The zen ones and their domain receded into the night long ago. “But in our stories, Stormdancer and the Dragonmother both got to choose the nature of their sacrifice,” he says at last, refusing to look you in the eye. “And both of them chose to give of themselves. But … if the change I seek requires someone else to sacrifice in my stead—would you still call that sacrifice at all? Would that still be worth the change?”
If you could’ve died in your Red’s place, you would have, without question. But that choice was never offered, and instead your Red chose to die for you, and leave you to endure the sands alone. {I suppose that sacrifice’s worth,} you say levelly, {depends on if you can believe in it.}
Legends say that the Twin Gods draw strength from conviction—but you have always found it such a distinctly odd, distinctly mortal idea that this would be unique. All things draw strength from conviction; all things matter only as much as people think they do. Once you live enough suns and see what sinks, what stays, this simple fact becomes undoubtable.
“You think belief is that powerful?”
{Do you think power is that inevitable?}
The question is out before you can stop it; it was born and lived too quickly for it to be purely rhetorical. But once it hangs in the desert air you can inspect it, and question it, and wonder if you were asking it of him or of yourself.
{In her generosity,} you continue, {Stormdancer was swallowed by time. History is unkind to the voiceless. But across the sands I have heard many stories of Stormdancer and the Dragonmother, from many who wander.} He may be the first human in many suns to trade stories with you, but he is certainly not the first person. {For some, Stormdancer is a great ocean spirit, who at the change of the tides switches skins between a man and an enormous turtle and ferried many people away from the first flood. For others, she is the trickster, who took pity on a human child and taught them how to lie. For others still, she is the bravest of their clan, marked with the stripes of the storm to symbolize how they stand apart from the rest.}
When your Red passed, for a while you had no purpose. Only he could command you to rest. Without him, what could you be instead? The desert winds revealed the answer to your own question of purpose, as they always did. Like a fossil slowly shaking free from layers of sandstone, you came to see the sun again. You are the loresinger. You know the stories, and you pass them to others, so that those who live on in you will live on in others as well.
Stormdancer’s gift to you was a personal one, even if she didn’t know she was giving it: she reminds you that a word is only as important as those who will listen. You were not made to speak, but that does not mean you cannot find your voice on your own, that you cannot recount the voices of others.
{For me, she is the muse,} you conclude. {But which is more important: who she truly was, or who we believe she is?}
You cross the desert sands with him, waiting for him to return your question with one of his own. Night turns to day, and still you receive no response.
No matter. You have the time.
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