5.4 - Remara and the Tiny Man

He freezes, his legs bent to run. There are too many things to respond to—her use of that name, her claim that his family still thinks of him, her sudden reappearance here, or the fact that she has collected even more questions for him.

Yet, that smile. She's still miserable at proper faces, but he can feel her whole-hearted affection all the way from where she stands. He didn't know how badly he missed being smiled at.

Dredging his reserves, he manages a short nod. "Remara. Just call me Wildspeech. Thanks. I'll take that in."

Beaming, she uncurls one tendril-arm, extending the pack to him. As he takes it, he gets a close look at the odd wraps she wears. They're networks of thin, greenish brown and black fibers woven into supple gloves meant for skyte hands. Several of the fingers hang limp, where she hasn't filled them. He gestures at them. "Weaver work?"

She lifts one arm, beaming at it. "Yes there is a wonderful skyte at the Keep named Search Weaver who loves collecting and studying strange plants and experimenting with their effects in clothing and he has found a plant that is resistant to heat and flame even when there is a wildfire this plant is often the only one that remains when all others burn down and he took parts from this plant and wove them into coverings for my feet and hands so I do not cause as much damage and he says he will gather more so I may have other clothings like the skytes wear." She shimmers with glee. "I was able to carry this all the way to you without any fire happening and no grass died around my feet it is wonderful!"

Light and joy radiate off her in equal measures and it is catching. He finds himself smiling a little. "I'm… I'm glad for you. One moment."

He ducks into the burrow and hangs up his wet tunic. As he dons the dry one, he considers his home. It's still a mess of scattered furniture and ransacked bedding. He does not want to clean right now, but he's not going to want to do it later, either.

Pursing his lips, he calls, "You can't come in here, so talk to me from the doorway. I could use company while I clean."

"Of course how have you been my friend?"

A sharp answer dies on his lips. The way she speaks the words "my friend" leaves no room for bitter words or pretense. "Not well," he finds himself answering. "It's hard."

She's silent for a long moment, long enough that he wonders if she quietly left. Just as he's about to peek out the door, he hears, "Is it hard because you do not have wings because nobody will tell me about that they keep changing the subject and saying they do not want to answer when I keep asking."

There is no censure in the words, no judgment in that voice. Not even pity. There's only hesitation, as if she's approaching something she knows she ought not touch but can't understand why.

Bending down, he grabs the overturned toolshelf and heaves it upright, dragging it to the far wall. He reminds himself to sprinkle it with water later. "Yes. You could say it's about that."

"And that's about why you don't like being called by your first name too?"

He sighs. She won't stop asking because she doesn't understand. Perhaps the only way to make those particular questions stop is to make her feel the gravity of it. After all, those who understand that won't even look him in the eye.

"I have to explain things. It'll make you think of more questions, but I don't have the energy to answer many. Only a few. Keep it to very important questions."

"What are very important questions?"

He considers this as he scoops up pottery shards from broken cups and dishes for disposal. "If you need more information to understand what I'm telling you, then ask. If the question is unrelated or is something you could ask Eldest Stem, or even one you could ask me another day, hold onto it."

"Yes I can do that Wildspeech."

He brings the broken shards over to his table and piles them in the middle. He will send them back with Remara when she leaves. Perhaps the pieces will inspire one of the artists in the Keep. "Have they told you about finding winglings in the woods?"

"No they did say the word 'wingling' when the smaller skytes came up to look at me and so I thought that must be the young skytes like how you told me saplings are young trees and there are many smaller animals that grow into larger animals was I correct?"

"Yes. You know how most young creatures come to be?"

"No I don't know how anything comes to be except you told me that trees come from seeds which are like tiny dots that you bury in the ground."

"Well, with animals, two animals come together and make a child of the same kind, sometimes many children. Humans do this. Dragons, too. It's different with us. We don't come together, we're found as eggs."

"What is an eggs?"

He sets down a handful of shards and approaches the doorway. Cupping his hands together, he mimics the oval form of a skyte egg with them. "A small round room, barely large enough for a wingling to curl up in. Its walls are thin, but tough. Eventually, the wingling inside breaks free," and here he opens his hands, "and leaves the egg behind."

Remara stares intently at his hands, bobbing her head jerkily up and down.

"The eggs appear everywhere. Most often in the forest somewhere near a Keep, but sometimes they're found in human villages or near a dragon's den. We don't make eggs like the animals and humans create their young, and none have ever seen who places the eggs." He ducks back into the burrow, stooping to gather pieces of his bedding. "Some winglings, on hatching, ask where the music went. They all recall the sound of music and the feeling of thousands of soft strokes on their feathers.

"From this, we understand that we're set here by the Maker's own hand, and that each feather on our wings was painted by the Maker. The wings are different each time. There are even some few among us who claim to see important patterns in the markings. We believe the Maker wrote or painted the story of each skyte's life on their wings."

There is a subdued chiming outside. He peeks his head out in passing. Remara's tendrils are up by her mouth and she vibrates, her eyes fixed on him. He gives a small, weary laugh. "Good restraint."

Ducking back inside, he begins teasing chunks of his nest back into the main frame. "The Maker gave us these incredible wings, so they're a mark of favor. When we age on out of our bodies, what else can we do but present our wings back to the Maker? If the story of our lives is given to us at the beginning, then at the end we should return that story to the Maker to mark the completion of our lives. If we present our wings, we'll be known and welcomed by the Maker."

There is a very soft, "Oh," from outside.

His lips curl. "You begin to see. If there are no wings to present to the Maker… well. What even are we without that favor? Without our story? I'm not… I'm not even a skyte." He forces himself to keep working on the nest, trying not to feel the weight of his words. "I'm just a tiny human with some talent for weaving and speaking to animals. As good as dead. And the dead don't keep their names, do they?

"The others know I'm dead. They don't know what to do with me. They won't let me die alone of exposure, but they can't bring me home. So, they built me a shelter out of sight. They give me all I need once a week." His tone grows harsher with every sentence. "They don't even ask me for anything, any work, any contribution. I can't be useful to them without being among them. That would be too painful for them—and for me. So, I'm not even useful."

For a few minutes, he plucks and teases and stuffs moss and down back in place. The nest is shaping up well. It won't take much longer to finish.

"Wildspeech my friend what happened to your wings?"

His fingers still. Even now she says the words 'my friend' with the same warmth and openness as if she never stopped staring into his eyes, even though she is standing outside his home. The words have warmth and weight and sorrow that wrap him as surely as if she'd draped a blanket over his shoulders. He bends over his work, eyes shut against the sorrow writhing up from the depths.

She gives a short cry. "Wildspeech what is happening?"

He can't answer. He just can't. Not this second.

"Wildspeech my friend what is happening here I do not like this what is it?"

The tone of her voice is fearful. This is not about the question he doesn't like. He drags himself up to his feet and hurries toward the door. Before he's reached it, he hears hissing and the gentle patter of rain on leaves. Remara has abandoned her wraps and has unformed into a great roundish orange blob about waist high. There is no face and there are no limbs, only the blob quivering as rain strikes and steams off her.

"This is rain. Water falling from the sky. It hurts you?" he asks, urgency pushing aside all else.

"I do not know if this is hurting I do not like it I am losing heat quicker than before please is there a place where I can make fire without harming the everything around me?"

He glances back into his burrow. There is an ember pit for cooking small meals and generating a little warmth, but his home was never meant to channel her kind of heat. Stem—Eldest Stem warned him that an indoor fire could harm the living tree.

There's a badger's den not far off. He's always been a grumpy fellow, but he's old and might appreciate some extra warmth. Wildspeech grabs the satchel and leaves his home, closing the door behind him. "Follow me. I know a place."

Dripping, Wildspeech sits in the entrance of the badger den, his back laid against the cool earth wall. In the absence of wrapping wings around himself, pressing his back flush to a natural wall is a primal comfort that eases tension. On his right, just outside, rain sheets down as far as the eye can see. The burrow is well-situated on high ground and the downpour rolls on past the burrow.

At his feet is as much kindling, dead twigs, and small branches that he could gather before the real storm broke. To his right is a pile of swiftly charring material, and on the other side of that is Remara. Every time he lays burnable material before her, it catches fire. That fire is pulled straight into her body and then the next round of burnable material begins the cycle anew. Each time she grows brighter and the air warms.

It was close. Wildspeech wonders if Aria understood the dangers of sending Remara out on a rainy day. Remara probably didn't think to tell anyone. Perhaps she didn't even know. By the time Remara was in sight of the burrow, her outside edges were clear and she would have lost a race with a snail. There was enough time for Wildspeech to run ahead and negotiate with the huffy badger for use of the entry tunnel and then retrieve all the sticks he could find nearby. When Remara finally oozed into the burrow, the entry was stocked and ready for her.

He stretches in the expanding bubble of warmth that washes delightfully over his skin. His arms prickle some at the warmth, but he shakes the sensation out of them. At this rate his hair and clothes will dry in a few minutes.

A sharp ache in his legs steals his breath. His face contorts and he grabs his knees, hissing through his teeth. All this change in temperature is not good. He rolls his breeches up past the knees in preparation. Flipping open his satchel, he rummages for the moonweave.

There it is, a small string-tied bundle of frail, silken squares. Each square shimmers, catching glints of firelight and reflecting it. He slides one free, laying it across the front of his shin.

He hesitates. He needs his hands bare for the next step. Swallowing, he shifts so that his back is to the fire and to Remara, then peels his arm-wraps off. He presses his blackened fingertips to the moonweave, reaching through deadened skin to the glistening material. Trying to reach beyond the world, where the smallest parts of the world and all unseen energies move.

The fabric lies inert under his touch. He hunches forward, focusing all his attention on the patch. Some days he still tries to coax the moonweave to sink into his skin, stretching through his fingertips one more time in the hopes that this time it will work.

He presses his fingertips against the moonweave harder. His brow furrows. It feels like he is trying to sew a fine gown with broken, squat-fingered hands caked in thick clay. Once again, he can't reach past the world. Grimly, he pulls out the extra twine Aria always sends and ties a square to each leg. This is less effective than sinking it under his skin, but it will still dull the ache.

It's now quite warm in the tunnel. He leaves the breeches rolled up and rewraps his hands and arms. Only then does he turn back to check on Remara.

Most of the material he gathered has been consumed. To his surprise, she has reformed a bipedal image and sits in the same posture as him, silently watching among the ashes. Squinting at her, he notices her legs are no longer stumpy columns. They still aren't quite right, but they have begun to bulge and taper in approximately the right places. There's even a little bit at the end of each that bends forward at an angle, like feet. The end of each tendril-arm now has a blob with five smaller tendrils on it.

Her face, however, is still unsettling, with two staring dots and a flat slash of a mouth.

He clears his throat. "If you're going to work on your form, do something about your face. What you have is… frightening."

The two dots shift ever so slightly, fixing on his face. "I am sorry it will take me time and a lot of study I have to concentrate hard to change anything but I will take your advice about what to work on next I need to look at your face for a long time that will help would you keep your face turned this way please?"

He nods his head. "Did you have enough fire?"

"It would be nice to have more I do not think I could get back to the Keep right now but I have enough to move a little and speak to you and keep the tunnel warm like the badger wants."

"When the rain stops, I'll get help from the Keep." He fishes in the satchel and pulls out her gloves and footwraps, handing them over. "They'll bring you all the fire-starter you need. Some of them trade for coal, that should help."

She holds the gloves and wraps, twisting them absently. "Wildspeech my friend there are markings on your legs that I do not see on the other skytes is this something that also happened when you lost your wings?"

His shoulders come up to his ears and his knees up to his chest. He loops his lengthy arms all the way around his knees and back up to clasp his shoulders.

The warmth intensifies as her light draws nearer. Under his wraps, the skin of his arms crawls and prickles.

"Friend Wildspeech you were going to tell me about how you lost your wings."

He will. He means to. He was all ready to tell her, but now his tongue sits like a stone in his mouth and his teeth are a locked gate before it. He has only spoken of it once, and nothing important changed afterward. Already his talk of wings and their importance ensures he's in for a sleepless week, riddled with dreams of wandering the wastes and voids of reality. If he tells this next part, the dreams will be about the hammer. Hands the size of his body crushing bones and flattening him against the tables. Of a slow, deadening feeling spreading up his arms and down his back and the day he saw his wings on the ground at his feet and watched the man pick them up and hang them on a rack with half a dozen others—

"What were your wings like?"

Breath comes in short gusts through his nostrils as he darts a glance at her from the corner of his eye. She is close, now. Only two handsbreadths away and still watching his face. Her mouth moves slowly around the words. Her mouth is still out of sync, but she is clearly attempting to match the motions with the sound. "You said that every pair of wings is different and beautiful and has a story written on them and I have seen many lovely wings today but I have never seen yours and I never will so will you please tell me what your wings were like?"

It's like there are needles pricking the inside of his arms. It's difficult to focus on her. He shoves off from the wall, standing so quickly he hits his head on the roof of the tunnel.

"Wildspeech—"

"I'll be back. Stay," he mumbles, hurrying from the tunnel.

Rain sluices over him, cold and biting, driving off all the warmth he's accumulated. He splashes through shallow puddles, aiming for his tree.

Home. Have to get home.

What were his wings like? There is no way to answer that question in words. It can't be done. And yet, he desperately wants her to know. They exist only in memory, now, but there is a way to give her a glimpse of the glory that was once his. The Maker's favor. The joy of Arc Wildspeech, whose chosen name reflected the path he would trace through the sky as he challenged every bird he came across and bested them in flight.

The moonweave cannot dull the razor-sharp pain in his bones anymore. He stumbles on, nearly falling through his own front door. Limping toward the nest, he bends down and crawls behind it, whimpering. Back there is a trap door to a storage compartment dug into the ground. Lifting the door, he reaches in and pulls out a large, well-oiled leather-wrapped bundle. For a moment, he kneels there, clutching it to his chest.

The sky outside cracks once. Twice. Three times before he drags himself back up and out into the rain. He stumbles over a stone once, choosing to meet the ground with screaming knees rather than drop the bundle to catch himself with his hands.

She waits at the very edge of the tunnel. Her mouth moves, but he can't hear her over the storm. She slides away as he staggers back inside. The heat embraces him, chasing off the cold and he crumples to the ground. She says something but he can't focus on words. The world narrows down to the bundle in his arms, which he lays on the floor between them. With numb, swollen fingers, he fumbles with the leather strip that binds the whole thing together. After several tries, he pulls the knot loose, then slowly unrolls the bundle.

Remara has stopped speaking. Wildspeech will not raise his eyes. There, laid side by side, one after another, are twenty-seven sunrise-orange feathers.

Note: Here’s a thing worth mentioning: I write while listening to a Spotify playlist I've curated specifically for this story. I also collect songs for this playlist, based off of either the way it sounds or the way the lyrics play into aspects of the story. How I pick the songs is HIGHLY subjective, however, I’m always looking for more. Do you know any good songs that this story/the characters remind you of? Please let me know. The playlist helps fuel the writing.