5.6 - Remara and the Tiny Man

Wildspeech enters, placing his sun-dot in a wall-sconce and filling Eldest Stem's home with light. A few terse sentences of explanation later, things begin to move. Nutte Wildspeech is woken and dispatched to shuttle individual coals to Remara.

Bone Weaver, the sharp-tongued healer who oversaw Wildspeech's treatment upon his return from slavery, is brought in to tend to his burn. She bustles in, long brown braid swinging and arms full of clay pots and rolls of moonweave. She dons long gloves that she wears to treat his arms and unwraps the affected limb, applying salve to the burn. As she does, Wildspeech recounts events of that night in full detail to her and Eldest Stem.

"Remara is the cure for my arms," he concludes. "She can burn the deathspill out of me."

"Foolish!" Bone exclaims. "This here is the damage she did just touching one spot on your arm! And you say you passed out from this? What you're proposing is like as not to kill you! What does she have to say?"

"She doesn't want to, but I think she'll do it if I'm sure."

"Then she's a fool too. Look at this!" She lifts his tainted arm up, the middle of his forearm swaddled in a strip of moonweave. "Has this deathspill you carry killed you in all these months? No, you are here. Has it caused you pain on any other night? No, you'd have come to me. It's inert. It does you no harm, and meanwhile you live life. You're alive and home and you should be grateful."

Wildspeech gapes at her. Her cheeks burn and she drops her gaze, releasing his arm. "I only mean—"

"Alive?" he sputters. "This is living? This is a half-life! I can't live as a skyte if I can't fly or reach past the world to grasp its essence! You all feel it too. I see it in your faces every time you look at me! You didn't see this deathspill respond to her. It tried to save itself. It's nearly alive!"

He turns to Eldest Stem, who sits with head bowed and arms folded. "You say I can come when I need anything, but can I live among you? No! Because I don't have wings, because my arms are a danger, and because it hurts you too much to look at me and it hurts me too much to look at you. I can't live like this! This is the first chance I have to be rid of the poison and—and she hears the song of the Maker, Stem! The Maker!"

Eldest Stem leans forward, his storm-gray eyes weary with sorrow. He places his elbows on his knees. "How can you be sure the music she hears is our Maker?"

"How can I know anything? How can you know that humans aren't the ones that place our eggs in the forest? She's like every description of the Maker's heart I ever heard. Maybe the Maker heard me and sent her to bring me mercy! But even if not, I'd risk this miserable half-life. What could I get back for it? If this works, maybe I can reach past the world and help sick and injured animals again. Maybe I'll grow new wings!"

Bone Weavers hands fly to her mouth. Stem closes his eyes. But Wildspeech spreads his stained arms, pleading his case. "Then I can stand in front of the Maker as a skyte is meant to! The Maker will see my regrown wings with my full story and be pleased! And if it doesn't work, what am I risking? A shell of a life. Stem…" he slides off his stool and sinks to his knees. "Eldest Stem. I need you to risk this with me. If it works, I could rejoin you. Let me be whole again. And let me do it now. Who knows when Remara will leave?"

The next day, Wildspeech watches preparations from his perch on the uppermost roots of Eldest Stem's oak. In front of a neighboring sycamore, Bone Weaver tends two clay pot of water nestled in glowing emberpits. Occasionally another skyte emerges from the forest, bringing some berry, root, or bit of bark. She takes each, inspecting the offering with eyes, nose, and tongue. Many she sets aside. A few she adds to one pot or the other, churning the concoctions with gnarl-handled living ladles hour after hour.

Bone Weaver's diatribe echoes in his head.

"Understand," she snapped at him last night, as she re-wrapped his arm, "there is no sleeping through this kind of pain. I could put you out and you'd only wake up screaming a moment later. I can kick the pain farther away, but I can't give you sleep until it's done."

He understands, but even so, her warning isn't real to him. Not as real as the chance that he'll get his life back.

Edge Stonemason darts past, flying straight for Eldest Stem. He gestures back along his flight path, explaining something in tones too low for Wildspeech to catch. Both take wing and leave. Not long after, the familiar ta-ta-tink, ta-ta-tink of Stonemasons at their craft echoes faintly in the forest.

"There you are my friend Arc Wildspeech."

The drawn-out, sluggish words catch Wildspeech's attention, drawing his gaze to the base of the roots where they sink into the earth. Remara stands there, her featureless face pointed up at him. Her colors are more reddish orange than fluid yellow.

He slides down the roots and lands near her. This close, his forearms prickle in a protest he ignores. "Remara. You still don't have enough heat?"

"Nutte Wildspeech brought enough coal for me to leave the badger's burrow and travel here but the storm left so much cold here that it is hard to move again so he has gone to prepare a large fire for me."

He is so used to her flood of words washing him away that this steady treacle-trickle tickles a smile onto his face. "I'm glad you're here."

Her tendrils are wound around her upper body in opposite directions. "Nutte told me how everyone is in agreement to help you do this thing but my friend I am afraid for you still you speak of how I should not come into your home lest I harm the living tree and yet I am to touch you and cause great harm and I do not like this."

His smile vanishes. He wishes he could ask her to put her gloves on so he could take her hands for comfort, but even that hurts. Instead, he takes a step closer, gritting his teeth against the surge in discomfort. "I don't like it either. I'm scared. It's going to hurt. But you're not going to harm me."

"This is harm this is damage which is harm which—"

"Harm is what the humans did to me, Remara. Harm is causing pain that won't help me at all. You can help me. You saw that, right?"

That blank face dips down incrementally. She gives a soft chime.

"You did. See, it hurt when Bone Weaver fixed my legs…" He rubs his face. "You can't understand that. Doesn't look like you have bones. It hurt. A lot. But it didn't harm me. After what the humans did, I couldn't walk. After what Bone Weaver did, I could walk."

"So you are asking me to do something for you like what Bone Weaver has done?"

He nods.

She slumps further, her shape deforming in emphasis. "I still do not like it but I will try to help you in this way Arc Wildspeech."

They stand together in silence until Nutte comes to lead Remara off to a pile of branches, dead leaves, and much of the Keep's store of coal.

"Arc?"

Thoughts and speech abandon him at the same time as he hears Aria voice his name for the first time in months. She approaches, cradling a livewood bowl filled with water. A cloth drapes over her shoulder.

She never raises her gaze higher than his chest. "Eldest Stem said… when he described what you…" she drags in a lengthy breath, releasing it in a steady stream. "This is dangerous enough without catching your whole head on fire, too. Sit down."

Stunned and confused, he obeys, sitting cross-legged on the ground. She kneels beside him, her feathers splayed in the dirt. This close, he can see the royal purple eyelets scattered across her lavender wings, each edged and center-dotted with splashes of gold.

She tells him to tilt his head back, and he does, clasping his fingers together to keep his hands still.

Aria is here. She's speaking to me. This is real. This is happening. I may die. I may face the Maker.

He grips his hands tighter.

Aria draws a small stone knife from her belt and gathers Wildspeech's ragged beard in one hand, severing the hair close to the skin on each side of his face.

"You let it get too long," she says as she sets the mess aside, returning the knife to her belt.

He tries to answer.

I haven't cared.

I didn't even notice.

Aria, I'm scared.

Aria picks up a white chunk of soap—different than the kind he uses to wash himself and his clothes—and dips it in the water once. She massages it, producing a thick lather that she transfers to his face, working the soft, foamy soap into the leftover ragged patches of hair. It smells like pine sap. His shoulders and neck sag. He shuts his eyes, soaking in the touch of her fingers on his face.

"The gossip is that our mystery guest claims to be from the Maker. I haven't had a chance to speak with her. Did she… did she tell you anything?" Aria asks, wiping her hands on a towel and pulling out the knife.

As the edge brushes his cheek, he explodes backward, ramming into the roots behind him with a cry. Heated, sharpened tools flash across his vision and he can feel them dragging along the old scars. There is not enough air for all the screams trapped in him, so he sucks in breath after breath, trying to reach the screams and release them so his spine doesn't snap from the pressure of his terror. It wracks his body, demanding that he get up. Get up and run. Run and never, ever stop.

Something holds him down. He struggles, balling up his hands and throwing them like weapons. Words come through to him, scattered and disorganized. He's surrounded by others like him, by the living dead. They're here to tear his wings off and drag him to the void with them. He writhes and kicks but can't break free.

A sweetish, sour liquid splashes on his face, dripping into his mouth. He spits, but it splatters him again and again. Each time he swallows a little. His heart slows. His punches slow as his limbs grow heavy, like he's lying at the bottom of the stream with all the water pressing down. The captives crowd around him as his vision flickers. Faces twist and spiral like someone has stirred a reflection in a pond. A hand tilts a bowl over his mouth, and he swallows more of the liquid. More. More…

The figures around him melt. Blur. Each skyte's motions leave an unending trail of frozen after-images, a train of skyte-statues marking how each passed through their second in time. Their wings are aggressively vibrant, with colors dripping from their feathers and staining the ground with with rivers of searing glory. The hues taste like seablooms in the first stage of rot.

He can't remember why he was screaming.

Someone scrapes clean his cheeks, his chin, his neck, then his head. It feels like a long-forgotten kindness, but he can neither remember why he needs it nor name what is being done. It doesn't seem particularly important to recall. There are cool, soft hands resting on his naked face and that is also a kindness. Maybe that is why his eyes are full of oceans.

Time spins around him on hands and feet and hands again, throwing order to the winds. Figures around him move like they are swimming through honey, then dart like hummingbirds. He watches them, content to lie still in the slurry of colors still running off their wings.

His arms are wrapped up in woven cobweb strands. He can see every fragile filament in the weave and straight through it to his skin underneath. His legs might be moving, but it doesn't matter because this tidy weaving demands his undivided attention. Every row perfectly snugs up against the next and locks into the strand next to it. No loose fibers, no uneven holes, no imperfections. He is certain no human work can compare and is caught off guard by a surge of pride at the thought of how perfect a skyte's weaving is.

When he looks up, he sees dozens of mouths nearby him that flap lips, tongues, and teeth like they are making words at him, but all that comes out are flowering vines growing off their lips to caress his shoulders, his face. His feet still walk him onward but they haven't informed him of the goal.

Ahead is a flat-topped mass stone that comes up to his waist. The top bears hundreds of chisel-marks and shallow, odd-shaped cavities have been carved into it. Many holes have been drilled near the edges of this strange stone table.

Here, his clothes and the cobwebs fall off. New fabric appears in their place. It is a strange material that wraps him. He is indignant at the gaps and bulges in this workmanship that mark hasty creation. This shoddy new tunic covers him from neck to ankles while footwraps of the same stuff secure his feet up to mid-shin. Another ream of it coils snake-like around his neck, then up and around his face and head like a mask. Only his mouth is left uncovered, allowing him air. No matter, he can see straight through the tiny holes and he giggles that they can't properly shut his eyes for him.

His arms also remain bare up to the shoulders.

Hands turn him around and guide him to sit on the table, then to lie down on his back. He finds he fits comfortably into the grooves as disembodied hands take his arms and stretch them up above his head, flat to the stone.

A rough woven cord of the same material that he wears passes over his body, pressing him tight to the table. More cords pass over his legs, his feet, his elbows, his wrists, and his forehead. There is an itch gnawing on his leg and he tries to reach it, but it isn't working. More liquid autumn is poured into his mouth by disembodied hands.

A cool hand rests on his cheek for a moment and a soft voice whispers chilled lavender blooms all over his face. Then he is left alone on the cold stone, which whispers to him about the shortness of life and the passing of ages.

Still, he smiles, because something frighteningly good is going to happen. If he could remember what it is he would surely be smiling, so he smiles.

A woman appears at his side. She is on fire. All around her, the world fades to shadows so thin he can nearly see through the trees and through the skytes behind her. She is real. She is real. And she is too close.

His smile is a rictus of fear, now. His arms hiss with a thousand unseen mouths. The overwhelming glory of melted wing-colors is a dull mockery set against this consuming golden-yellow faceless pillar of flame standing next to him. Light and heat pierce his body like he's made of fog and she hasn't even touched him.

"So real," he mumbles under the cloth, cringing like a cornered animal. "Why are you so real?"

Her entire body resounds like a bell hammered by an avalanche. "Arc Wildspeech my friend one more time I must ask are you sure of this?"

A cacophony of meaningless noise clamors from his arms, a clanging that counters the question with hideous denial and renders all beauty and clarity into unbearable distortion. He hears it with a dread born of familiarity, recognizing the quiet background natter of his life for the last two years. The light splits him wide open to his own eyes; this parasite in his arms is killing him. Slowly, invisibly, this remnant of living poison means to suck him down to the bones until he finishes its work upon him with his own hands.

"Do it!" he screams. "Do it now! Get it out—"

The column of reality clasps him at the shoulders, encircling each arm at the bicep. A single nothing happens, followed by two screams. One is his own. The second drowns him out, bleeding through his skin with sky-rending crashes and dissonant clangs, screeching furious anti-harmonies as molten rivers roll toward his hands like sleeves, leaving no escape.

His vision flickers. Off, as he shuts down. On, as the pain shatters him awake. Off. On. Off. On. Strobes of reality purging a black, writhing madness, leaving behind stomach-roiling agony and the smell of scorched meat.

The cacophony's tumult grows shrill, then silent. The burning woman releases him and flees, removing her penetrating light. The forest solidifies as she vanishes. Gibbering, gasping out sobs, he screams for her to come back.

Hands touch him. Hands cut his bonds. Hands wrap silvered gauze in layer after layer around his tortured arms, cooling them. Soothing. Pain fades.

So many hands around him.

Hands lift another bowl to his lips. Water. More water. More. Finally, fluid sleep trickles down his throat and a tender melody pillows his head. Pain fades. Grateful beyond speech, he lets himself fall away.