Post by Liessel on Apr 15, 2024 14:08:06 GMT -5
This time Liessel would descend alone down the tight spiral of the stair.
Every step down was an echo of her heartbeat. There was no way to quicken her steps in that ceaseless downward spiral. The way was too steep, and too curving. The stones too old for her to trust blind footing. Once she had convinced herself to start down that path, stepping from the light of the church into the darkness of the stairwell, the only way she could go was forward. She would not allow herself to turn back. Light, dim as it was, would eventually reach her, and then after a thousand or more steps into the heart of the place, she would find herself at the bottom where her boots met with the flat ground of Missus White's chamber. As her feet had, in her first coming, they scuffed against the floor having gotten used to the rhythm of taking step after step.
Her dress, this time, was different. She didn't come wearing anything elaborate, nor was it simply the color of her clothing that had changed. Liessel had come in her vestments, the light blue and gauzy fabric peeking out from beneath the robe she wore. She'd done her hair up in a tight bun, as well, foregoing a braid that would turn messy and haphazard. At her side hung the weight of her kit, much as it had the first time she'd come to call.
Her greeting as she came into the open chamber was a tip forward of her head, and a sweep of her eyes around the open space before she was saying, "Thank you for seeing me again."
The open space.
The empty space.
Her greeting echoed off water and stone.
The pool was there, shallow with subdued currents, giving off light in a way that threw aqua traceries from the motion of the water up across the ceiling like a madness of banners in the wind.
Without Missus White in it, it seemed one could easily see the bottom of the pool, mere inches beneath the surface of the waves. A small pebble here or there aided that sense of dimension. And without Missus White in the pool, it was either made plain or changed from before, so that it seemed a shallow rivulet of water led out and into the deeper shadows of the cavern beyond. The light from the water seemed in conflict with that darkness. The blue-green luminence across rock ceiling split and raced throughout it.
What would the place look like without that strange glow from the water? It did not take much for Liessel to imagine just how thick the darkness around her would have been if it weren't for that glow. She would be down there, isolated under how much weight, and surrounded by darkness that would have been blinding.
These thoughts had not come to her the first time she'd been down there. She'd had Adam with her, and the sight of Missus White standing -- sitting -- existing in the middle of that pool of water had carried her thoughts toward the more productive reasons of what had brought her there that fear, that particular fear, had not been given a place to curl around her heart.
But it was not dark down there, though that chamber she had come into was empty but for the water, the stone, and the light. What she could see was force enough to squelch the rising of those fearful thoughts.
Shoulders squaring, chin rising just a little bit, the last of the Seven Sisters, the youngest of them, stepped forward to follow where that rivulet of water might lead. Because as long as there was light, there was a way.
Past a little neck of rock, there was no way to proceed but by wading into the ankle-deep stream itself.
Coming up to that point, where rock choked in against water, leaving no space at all for a body to slip past unless it took to the water itself, Liessel had a choice to make. She was wearing boots that were dirty, and not just from the dirt of The Bells. These were shoes that had seen her through a slug-fest in the mud of Denver. They had taken her up mountains and down again, and across streets that had belonged to a time in a world when Gerold Schoen could look on the face of someone he'd lost. They carried much on them, and the water she had been following looked so clean. To dirty it with her shoes struck her as blasphemous in some way.
Her choice: to step into the water while wearing those boots, or to remove them and continue barefoot.
She stopped there and spared the moments she needed to slip her feet out of them, and her socks, leaving them behind in that stone cavern as she slipped one foot into the water, and then the other. Her kit was shifted, its weight hung from her shoulder to keep it from getting in her way as she lifted the hem of her vestments and once more began to follow in the footsteps of Aquarren.
The water was cool, but not cold.
It had every right to be cold, but there was a song in it.
As Liessel explored onward, she wouldn't hear this song with her ears. The water without sang with the water within. Where it licked at her ankles and occasionally splashed at her calves or knees, a harmony came, as if Liessel herself were waving at someone on the far side of glass. It was this that dominated the energy in the air here, that sometimes uncomfortable hum: a sense that what was in her was in communication with the stream, and the stream likewise in return.
Stepping into the water brought a faint sense of it, but the longer she was in the water and moving through it, the more she was aware of it. A resonance was struck. It pulled at her, a vibration both without and within. One song in two different pitches, but both sung so that it was a lovely sound. A strong sound, one that found a way to stiffen her shoulders and a way to drive the urge for her to lean down and dip her hands into the water.
Hands in the water…
Aquarren was with her. The water within, and the water without. She would not allow herself to stop and answer that urging. Not yet, though the song that it sung into her unhearing ears was powerful enough to cause her steps to become cautiously slow.
Water splashed up against her legs with each step, catching in places against the hem of her vestments. She was finding herself glad that she chose them for this trip. The lightweight fabric was not nearly as weighed down with water as her previous attire had been.
It went on, and the song was there, a hidden melody and a more familiar beat, in her blood, from heart to fingertips to the delicate places in her eyes. Like the stairs that led down from the church (and the tower?) atop the Tor, her wending path went on and on.
Also like those stairs, the glow and a change of sound signaled a widening of the tunnel. Here, though, she'd see it as the busy radiance of the reflections across the ceiling grew higher and higher, and farther and farther flung, like a crazed blue-green sunburst.
A different light, paler, which the mind wanted to stamp as reminiscent of dawn light, took over the heart of the space.
Which was a forest of gigantic white trees so tall that Liessel would see only the trunks and their roots disappearing into damp earth carpeted by tarnished silver leaves.
The stream widened out, and hooked away to the left. Missus White depended like a grand branch from one of the trees.
And also from another.
And another and another.
Women's torsos and graceful arms, their skin a fine bark, swung slowly, though they appeared trapped in place ultimately by the trunks. Their hair was branches, gnarling every which way in the air, creating lacey canopies for their own heads and forms, those long silken locks stiff and tipped with tiny silver leaves.
"Welcome." That from the nearest one, the one lowest to the ground. She had Missus White's pink eyes, but so did the others who came to notice Liessel. This one had been gazing toward a great stone cairn that was surrounded by a perfect circle of the tree trunks. For girth, each one was more than a match for the menhirs of Stonehenge.
The further on she moved, the more it seemed that the pitch between the two voices find greater ways to match themselves until she, Liessel the person, felt as if she was a mirror of sorts within herself. She did not have to try in order to feel it here, with her feet surrounded by that water. It would have been there no matter if she had wanted to hear it or not.
She was flowing with it, following the current of the song and the water, as if it was this that carried her steps forward and not the movement of her physical self. The sound of the water changed as she sloshed through it, her careful steps stirring up waves and ripples in ways that no soft step could ever truly avoid. It was liquid, and it moved as liquid would. But the sound changed, and the light changed too.
She barely realized it until she heard Welcome and found herself blinking away from the place that was so focused on that deep sensation of harmony.
These women -- these white barked trees. She took them in one after another, slowly, still feeling more disconnected than aware, before tipping her head forward and bringing her hand up toward her heart while saying, simply, "White Sisters."
The smiles all came in tandem, the bark looking just as flexible and expressive as faces here as they had when Missus White had been much, much closer to Liessel to Adam. "Do you know where you stand, Liessel Erphale?" It sounded like Missus White, but the growths that resembled women were all practically identical. "Do you know who this is?"
A gesture was made, slow-moving and graceful, toward the cairn.
The stones looked collapsed inward, but wherever there might have been imperfection by an engineer's eye, moss and little bushes filled in, making the mound a grey and green glory all its own kind, half in the forest floor and half emerged from it.
Head clearing from where the unheard harmony had taken her, Liessel felt her breath catch as her attention as brought to where she found herself, and the cairn. If she had been aware of where the water was taking her before would she have come this far?
Maybe that question was moot, because she had come, and she was standing there. And her heart wanted to break. It wanted to shatter into thousands of pieces. "This is --" She told the tree-shaped women on the edge of her soft voice as it dropped to a near whisper, "Where King Arthur rests."
There was no need for a nod, or a word.
Missus White--or as good as--turned to eye the stones and the small green that bejeweled them. "Sometimes," she said, "we make way for the sunlight here. But which sun, do you think? Or are they all the same sun?"
Liessel swallowed, the weight of her bag resting against her back as she made herself look toward that mound of stone, and moss, and bushes, "The sun of whatever day it might be. The physical sun will be the same, but no two days will ever give the same light."
Missus White smiled. "The physical sun. What a concept. You imagine you descended to ascend. Is that the feeling you have?"
"The feeling I have is --" What? What was it? Indescribable? More than unworthy words? Something that filled her and left her feeling as if she were floating? Her brow furrowed, pulling inward at the odd marking on her forehead which she had left unhidden for this visit. She was trying to capture it all as a woman who had walked the world above, who had seen and heard with eyes tied to the modern world -- which could have even been said of Harroway even though Harroway was vastly different from the world she had come to from there -- "--Removed, and hard to define. If there would be sun here, how could it be that from above?" Liessel blinked, still feeling as if her mind were a slug inching its way across dry ground, to look toward the white trees before her.
Only curiosity, and a patience, showed on Missus White's face when she looked back. "Yet you were so sure when you told me The physical sun will be the same."
"I was sure, but the answer I gave came from streets I had walked, and skies I had seen."
"And now, if asked the same question, you would say...?"
"I am not sure," The inward draw of her brow eased but didn't disappear as she answered, "I would like to think that it would be that sun, that light, that touches this place. But it would have to come far, and shine deeply for that to be so, filtered down through roots and stems, through rock and soil."
"There are straight lines aplenty in your world, we suspect," said the woman who was the tree or part of it. Her sisters--or selves--were leaning toward each other, and by silhouette there were many more here than were visible in the central ring. "It has long been so. There are not so many here. But we know that this is a relief as well as a challenge. It stops power from coming through most of you."
She did not detach from the great tree trunk and sprout legs. She seemed perfectly content to have a fixed position here. "Stops trouble," she mused, considering the cairn. "We spoke before about Koulm, and about the King. You know that it was by the design of your people that he came to us, and by the design of your people again that he was put back into death here, in defiance of a prophecy that was also the design of your people. Amrilaine's people. Not Aurelia's people, I think, but Catherine's, too."
Liessel felt the tug of her brow again, as if the furrow wanted to deepen itself, bringing more wrinkles to her young face, "I had not known anything about the King's story prior to finding myself in the world above. I knew of no prophecy, nor of his death until I started reading of him. That he was put back to rest after that day, I know there are many who find it difficult to -- face -- him. That he rests now, surely it is to -- stop trouble -- like all of those straight lines."
"That was the way it was told to me," Missus White agreed--without sounding like she actually agreed to more than the fact of it. "Come closer, child. Koulm came here, before these stones were brought. These stones are offerings from every coast. I was told the sea pulled back to expose them. They came to us covered in barnacles and purple sea hair and crab husks. They are the bones of the boundaries of one of many pacts."
For as much as she had hesitated the first time she'd come to see Missus White her steps here did not tarry. She was bade to move closer, and so with careful steps she did causing the water around her feet and ankles to slosh and lap at the edges of her vestments, causing the many belts at her waist, empty as they were, to jostle with the movement, "This place, it was Avalon then." She said as she got closer, letting herself look down at the stones she passed over. In that light, the stones looked like ghosts of the land. She was pretty certain that she, too, looked like a ghost for how fair she was.
Signs of their seaborne past were all over them, puckering moss and peeking out of hollows. "Those shallows you wade in," Missus White said, gesturing to the stream behind Liessel, and beyond perhaps to the passage and her own pool. "Those are what remain of the waters of Avalon. What is above--I smell it on those who come to me. Water, but not that water."
"That would explain why I felt it when I stepped into the water but could not feel it from the water I used to get here." She had known there was a difference between the two from that first trip, and had only had it reinforced with this one. Liessel turned back, looking toward the spring she had followed, "At least it was not felt the same way."
"Would you believe," Missus White asked almost dreamily, "that once all waters in the world felt thus? From swamp to sea. All sang. All sacred. Nothing taken for granted."
"I would," Liessel answered turning back to Missus White with a small nod, "The same way I believe that all water is known by Aquarren. The world had looked very different at one time, hadn't it?"
"I have never known what it looked like above," Missus White admitted, "but I have always known what it felt like, and the way that it spoke to me and I to it. Your Aquarren never came to me with gifts or wisdom or anything else, but I think we know each other the way you know that stream. A certain kind of knowing. A kind that cannot be translated, or replaced. I did hear a name very like the one you brought me, but it's the essence I would know without question, were we to come to one another."
"Yes," Liessel said with a small nod, her left hand drifting back toward the flap of her bag as Missus White mentioned gifts. She had some, but that would wait for a moment, "It is not something that can be described in any fashion very easily because it is more felt, more experienced than lived. Water, though, and those that know it, also know Aquarren, or the essence of her. What name that was like hers did you hear?"
"Aquarrenus," Missus White mused, and then her eyes narrowed with a dangerous, wry spite. "It was very much the sound of the invaders--at least the invaders of that time--stamped to the name. As if by shaping the name, the being itself might be shaped into something acceptable."
"Aquarrenus," She repeated that, letting it settle against the name of The Guardian as she knew it. The feeling of it was wrong against her tongue, but it did bear resemblance other names she knew at least in the feeling of how it was spoken. Septimius -- Cornelius -- and there were other names that came to her then.
When in Rome.
"The invaders? The Romans?"
Missus White waved a dismissive hand, uninterested. "I suppose. The greatest bringers of the straight line to these lands. They would have turned even the rivers to spear-straight rushes if only they could have, and best for them that they could not. We would have eaten them."
"They sound as if they might not have tasted too well had you been given that opportunity." She said, unable to stop herself from smiling a little.
"Arrogance is sweet." Missus White might have been smiling a little back--it was difficult to tell. "Rots the teeth." She turned her attention fully on Liessel again, great pink eyes curious, as if she were merely albino, and not a wholly different sort of being. "Those invaders... they would have thought that if they stood atop the Tor, or over Avalon, and took the pickaxes of a great many men to the soil and the stone, they might by digging eventually reach this place. They could not shift enough earth to do so, but the minds that love straight lines would never believe that truth. Naturally, to descend a stair that does not much wander means that one has gone downward, and by any other means one might also go downward and expect the same result."
She showed teeth--and so did many of her listening sisters. "We've had great amusement over realizing this. It is sorrowful, too, though. We would have welcomed them as any, if only they might accept a little bending."
"There have been many, I would guess, that have thought the same: to dig down is the same as using the stairs to descend. From then, and from now and even in the world I come from," Perhaps more so from the world of Harroway where magic of any kind was little known, "Finding those who are willing to give, even just a little bit, seems like it could take lifetimes."
"Only so in recent times," Missus White told her. And then, pondering, asked, "What do you think of such a world as those ideas create?"
Liessel took her time, considering. It was the woman of white bark before her she considered, the waters of Avalon that swelled around her feet, is was the contrasting idea of a world where 'down' was 'down' with no depth to it otherwise. Sure, there was beauty to be found in that world, too, but what variety of it?
"I think," she said at length, "That a world such as that would lack a certain depth, a certain -- layer -- to its existence. I think that the people who live in a world like that would not have much imagination, or many ways to express themselves. I would not say it would be a dull world, or lacking in beauty, but it would not be a complete world. It would not be a full world."
Missus White did not nod, but some subtlety communicated that she was pleased, that she agreed. Which was likely no mystery at all. "When the Tor falls at last," she said softly, "one of the only remaining oases in the whole of this world will be gone forever, and the desert will hold sway. No analogy of desert flowers and beautiful desert nooks and crannies will be appropriate, other than to dismiss the end of a world that was loved by many more than have ever been known by name."
"The Tor will fall?" The furrow was back at her brow, "When? How? What would become of --everything here?" Missus White, herself, and Catherine, and that young man -- Ewan -- what would become of Arthur, and the last remaining waters of Avalon? "Is -- would there be no way to stop it from happening?"
"I've distressed you." The woman sprouting from the tree nodded, her great branchings of hair shifting easily. "It is distressing. Know that I, and the Tor, and the waters, and all the beings whose souls have contributed to the sanctuary and its tending through time, understand that all things come to an end, and accept this. It is the most simple turn of the spiral, this ending. That which opens the way for beginnings. Yet there are ways to end that are more given to offering fertility to the future than others. This Tor will suffer a demise that feeds nothing. We will not be the meat and fruit of any great prosperity. We will not be rebirthed as new life, under new stars. What comes for us kills utterly and remorselessly."
Something beautiful from something broken.
It was distressing, even for all the knowledge and recognition that life was a circle. What ended could bring other beginnings. But endings were never easy, especially if you learned of them only a handful of moments after discovering something new. It would take time for the truth of life's flow to catch up with the rest of her, she knew, but it would and she would come to terms.
Those thoughts were left behind, though, as Liessel took another step toward Missus White, the water around her feet swaying, "What is it that comes so mercilessly?"
"There has always been darkness, just as there has always been death," Missus White told her. "This, too, can serve a purpose, even when it seems terrible. And this, too, has a vast number of ways that it might serve a good, and a vast number of ways that it might not. What comes for us is not interested in the stone breaking to feed into the bed of a river, or into the soil. It devours, and cares not."
" 'Progress'," She ventured after a moment, "Growth of the world above -- the 'civilized world'."
"Yes." But Missus White eyed Liessel pointedly. "I know what you mean when you say that. I also know that you likely suspect it to be its own force."
"It would be easy to think of it as its own force, yes, but it is not. There are many things that drive it, that have brought it into existence and that fuel it."
"I refer to the Dark."
Liessel's answer came softly, and with a little nod, "I do, too."
"Ah! Tell me all that you know!" Missus White said, intrigued instantly.
What did she, a girl who barely a woman, who had barely stepped away from a life of protected servitude, know of The Dark?
"It is greedy," She told Missus White first, "It corrupts and takes, and takes, and takes. If you catch the eye of any of its servants, they will find a way to keep you in their sights because they love to torment. They enjoy it, these emissaries of Darkness. And sometimes you might not know that you are seeing them, they can blend in so well with those that they surround themselves with. I've seen worlds crack open, and bleed because of The Dark. I have seen creatures who turn bone into paper and blood into dust and hunters who prey on weaker beings, scared beings, just because they can. I've seen much of Darkness, but I know I have not seen all of its depths. What I have seen of it, though, has been more than enough for me to know that it is worth fighting back against."
"And now you see it in the 'progress,' you say. The 'growth of the civilized world.'"
Liessel gave Missus White a small nod. The length of her vestments had been let to fall when she reached around behind her to lay her hand against the flap of her satchel. She hadn't bothered picking the hem up, so it sat within the waters of Avalon, just barely beneath the surface, soaking it up through the meshy fibers it was made out of. "Some of it, but not all of it. And it is more some of the people involved in that progress, than the actual progress itself. But I am only just now seeing the world, I am only just now able to. Like the King, in a way, I have only just woken up to what is around me."
"Would you do battle with it?" the being called White asked. "You say 'some of it.' Is it enough of it, for you to act at our side? To stop this destruction? Just woken or no."
"I have been doing what I can since I became aware of it," Liessel said with a small nod, "The friends I have above have been fighting it as well, and for far longer than I. But I know they will not stop fighting it, nor will I. How would you have me act? What would you see me do to stop the destruction?"
"Come to us, and learn what we know. If we end, continue."
"I would be free to come and go?" Liessel asked, going from looking at the white woman she had been speaking with toward the other white women that surrounded her, and the shadows of white women beyond them before focusing back on the White she had been speaking to.
"There might be lessons that could take more than a day," Missus White considered, "but it is difficult to say. The ties to the world above are not what they once were."
"I would need consideration for those lessons so that I might make preparations. I have people above that are depending upon me, right now, people that cannot go without communication from me -- people that I cannot go without seeing. They would need to know when I would be gone, and I would need to see that my father is taken care of in my absence."
"Ah," Missus White breathed. "It sounds as if you do not feel the call. It is not the great pull in your heart." She nodded. "So be it."
Liessel stood there, meeting Missus White's pink-eyed gaze, "I expected that answer," She told the white woman, "and must stand by my request. My father is not in a position where I can just leave him. I must see that he is cared for. My friends, they deserve such consideration from me. If loyalty is the measure of what I feel within my heart, the strength of that pull, then know that I would walk away from here with a heavy heart. My loyalty to them is not matched, nor dwarfed. Nor is it dwarfing of the pull that I feel. I cannot choose one above the other. All I ask is to know when I will be gone."
I expected that answer.
Missus White smiled.
... and must stand by my request.
"You must think I made this observation as a start to persuading you," Missus White noted. "But there are many who think they want things for which they do not burn fiercely. The hearts of your kind are often tangled as magpie nests. I am well-used to would-be trainees, even ones that come at my own invitation, who wish to squeeze such a life into a conveniently vacant slot they can conceive of for it. I make no judgment, child. I'm glad you expected it but am then puzzled by why you came back."
"I came back, gracious Lady, to hear what you had to say. I could accept your invitation without hesitation. It would be a life to which I am well suited -- a life I've lived before of sacrifice and dedication," her right hand rose and her finger tips pressed against the mark on her forehead before falling away, "I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that I would not need to sacrifice so much now, as I had for the Guardians," The weight of her bag was shifted, bringing it around to her front from behind her, "for the whole of my life."
Missus White laughed a little. "I think you hear what you want to hear, or what you fear to hear, and tell yourself your hearing is true. Fare well, Liessel Erphale."
Her right hand was moving again. Fingers to forehead, fingers to hear, and then her hand was in the air with her palm up between herself and the woman of white-bark skin, "Thank you for your time, White Sisters," Her feet were sloshing through the water, water that hadn't stopped singing its ancient duet with what was within her, as she turned, her hand falling to the strap of her bag to hold it even as she moved to follow the glowing stream back the way she had come.
Missus White nodded; so did her nearer sisters. A little sad amusement seemed communicated through their expressions, but they one by one returned to a communion that seemed made up of drifting gestures of their arms, and the slow stirrings through their branching hair.
Liessel turned back and made her way with the resonance of the water surrounding her. By the time she reached her boots she felt numbed by it. She stepped from the water and spent a moment wringing it from the length of her vestments as best as she was able. Her hands felt as if they belonged to someone else as she picked up her boots and went on her way. Behind her, as she headed for the stairs, just at the lip of the pool sat three red apples and a deep green leaf that was the size of a child's palm.
Every step down was an echo of her heartbeat. There was no way to quicken her steps in that ceaseless downward spiral. The way was too steep, and too curving. The stones too old for her to trust blind footing. Once she had convinced herself to start down that path, stepping from the light of the church into the darkness of the stairwell, the only way she could go was forward. She would not allow herself to turn back. Light, dim as it was, would eventually reach her, and then after a thousand or more steps into the heart of the place, she would find herself at the bottom where her boots met with the flat ground of Missus White's chamber. As her feet had, in her first coming, they scuffed against the floor having gotten used to the rhythm of taking step after step.
Her dress, this time, was different. She didn't come wearing anything elaborate, nor was it simply the color of her clothing that had changed. Liessel had come in her vestments, the light blue and gauzy fabric peeking out from beneath the robe she wore. She'd done her hair up in a tight bun, as well, foregoing a braid that would turn messy and haphazard. At her side hung the weight of her kit, much as it had the first time she'd come to call.
Her greeting as she came into the open chamber was a tip forward of her head, and a sweep of her eyes around the open space before she was saying, "Thank you for seeing me again."
The open space.
The empty space.
Her greeting echoed off water and stone.
The pool was there, shallow with subdued currents, giving off light in a way that threw aqua traceries from the motion of the water up across the ceiling like a madness of banners in the wind.
Without Missus White in it, it seemed one could easily see the bottom of the pool, mere inches beneath the surface of the waves. A small pebble here or there aided that sense of dimension. And without Missus White in the pool, it was either made plain or changed from before, so that it seemed a shallow rivulet of water led out and into the deeper shadows of the cavern beyond. The light from the water seemed in conflict with that darkness. The blue-green luminence across rock ceiling split and raced throughout it.
What would the place look like without that strange glow from the water? It did not take much for Liessel to imagine just how thick the darkness around her would have been if it weren't for that glow. She would be down there, isolated under how much weight, and surrounded by darkness that would have been blinding.
These thoughts had not come to her the first time she'd been down there. She'd had Adam with her, and the sight of Missus White standing -- sitting -- existing in the middle of that pool of water had carried her thoughts toward the more productive reasons of what had brought her there that fear, that particular fear, had not been given a place to curl around her heart.
But it was not dark down there, though that chamber she had come into was empty but for the water, the stone, and the light. What she could see was force enough to squelch the rising of those fearful thoughts.
Shoulders squaring, chin rising just a little bit, the last of the Seven Sisters, the youngest of them, stepped forward to follow where that rivulet of water might lead. Because as long as there was light, there was a way.
Past a little neck of rock, there was no way to proceed but by wading into the ankle-deep stream itself.
Coming up to that point, where rock choked in against water, leaving no space at all for a body to slip past unless it took to the water itself, Liessel had a choice to make. She was wearing boots that were dirty, and not just from the dirt of The Bells. These were shoes that had seen her through a slug-fest in the mud of Denver. They had taken her up mountains and down again, and across streets that had belonged to a time in a world when Gerold Schoen could look on the face of someone he'd lost. They carried much on them, and the water she had been following looked so clean. To dirty it with her shoes struck her as blasphemous in some way.
Her choice: to step into the water while wearing those boots, or to remove them and continue barefoot.
She stopped there and spared the moments she needed to slip her feet out of them, and her socks, leaving them behind in that stone cavern as she slipped one foot into the water, and then the other. Her kit was shifted, its weight hung from her shoulder to keep it from getting in her way as she lifted the hem of her vestments and once more began to follow in the footsteps of Aquarren.
The water was cool, but not cold.
It had every right to be cold, but there was a song in it.
As Liessel explored onward, she wouldn't hear this song with her ears. The water without sang with the water within. Where it licked at her ankles and occasionally splashed at her calves or knees, a harmony came, as if Liessel herself were waving at someone on the far side of glass. It was this that dominated the energy in the air here, that sometimes uncomfortable hum: a sense that what was in her was in communication with the stream, and the stream likewise in return.
Stepping into the water brought a faint sense of it, but the longer she was in the water and moving through it, the more she was aware of it. A resonance was struck. It pulled at her, a vibration both without and within. One song in two different pitches, but both sung so that it was a lovely sound. A strong sound, one that found a way to stiffen her shoulders and a way to drive the urge for her to lean down and dip her hands into the water.
Hands in the water…
Aquarren was with her. The water within, and the water without. She would not allow herself to stop and answer that urging. Not yet, though the song that it sung into her unhearing ears was powerful enough to cause her steps to become cautiously slow.
Water splashed up against her legs with each step, catching in places against the hem of her vestments. She was finding herself glad that she chose them for this trip. The lightweight fabric was not nearly as weighed down with water as her previous attire had been.
It went on, and the song was there, a hidden melody and a more familiar beat, in her blood, from heart to fingertips to the delicate places in her eyes. Like the stairs that led down from the church (and the tower?) atop the Tor, her wending path went on and on.
Also like those stairs, the glow and a change of sound signaled a widening of the tunnel. Here, though, she'd see it as the busy radiance of the reflections across the ceiling grew higher and higher, and farther and farther flung, like a crazed blue-green sunburst.
A different light, paler, which the mind wanted to stamp as reminiscent of dawn light, took over the heart of the space.
Which was a forest of gigantic white trees so tall that Liessel would see only the trunks and their roots disappearing into damp earth carpeted by tarnished silver leaves.
The stream widened out, and hooked away to the left. Missus White depended like a grand branch from one of the trees.
And also from another.
And another and another.
Women's torsos and graceful arms, their skin a fine bark, swung slowly, though they appeared trapped in place ultimately by the trunks. Their hair was branches, gnarling every which way in the air, creating lacey canopies for their own heads and forms, those long silken locks stiff and tipped with tiny silver leaves.
"Welcome." That from the nearest one, the one lowest to the ground. She had Missus White's pink eyes, but so did the others who came to notice Liessel. This one had been gazing toward a great stone cairn that was surrounded by a perfect circle of the tree trunks. For girth, each one was more than a match for the menhirs of Stonehenge.
The further on she moved, the more it seemed that the pitch between the two voices find greater ways to match themselves until she, Liessel the person, felt as if she was a mirror of sorts within herself. She did not have to try in order to feel it here, with her feet surrounded by that water. It would have been there no matter if she had wanted to hear it or not.
She was flowing with it, following the current of the song and the water, as if it was this that carried her steps forward and not the movement of her physical self. The sound of the water changed as she sloshed through it, her careful steps stirring up waves and ripples in ways that no soft step could ever truly avoid. It was liquid, and it moved as liquid would. But the sound changed, and the light changed too.
She barely realized it until she heard Welcome and found herself blinking away from the place that was so focused on that deep sensation of harmony.
These women -- these white barked trees. She took them in one after another, slowly, still feeling more disconnected than aware, before tipping her head forward and bringing her hand up toward her heart while saying, simply, "White Sisters."
The smiles all came in tandem, the bark looking just as flexible and expressive as faces here as they had when Missus White had been much, much closer to Liessel to Adam. "Do you know where you stand, Liessel Erphale?" It sounded like Missus White, but the growths that resembled women were all practically identical. "Do you know who this is?"
A gesture was made, slow-moving and graceful, toward the cairn.
The stones looked collapsed inward, but wherever there might have been imperfection by an engineer's eye, moss and little bushes filled in, making the mound a grey and green glory all its own kind, half in the forest floor and half emerged from it.
Head clearing from where the unheard harmony had taken her, Liessel felt her breath catch as her attention as brought to where she found herself, and the cairn. If she had been aware of where the water was taking her before would she have come this far?
Maybe that question was moot, because she had come, and she was standing there. And her heart wanted to break. It wanted to shatter into thousands of pieces. "This is --" She told the tree-shaped women on the edge of her soft voice as it dropped to a near whisper, "Where King Arthur rests."
There was no need for a nod, or a word.
Missus White--or as good as--turned to eye the stones and the small green that bejeweled them. "Sometimes," she said, "we make way for the sunlight here. But which sun, do you think? Or are they all the same sun?"
Liessel swallowed, the weight of her bag resting against her back as she made herself look toward that mound of stone, and moss, and bushes, "The sun of whatever day it might be. The physical sun will be the same, but no two days will ever give the same light."
Missus White smiled. "The physical sun. What a concept. You imagine you descended to ascend. Is that the feeling you have?"
"The feeling I have is --" What? What was it? Indescribable? More than unworthy words? Something that filled her and left her feeling as if she were floating? Her brow furrowed, pulling inward at the odd marking on her forehead which she had left unhidden for this visit. She was trying to capture it all as a woman who had walked the world above, who had seen and heard with eyes tied to the modern world -- which could have even been said of Harroway even though Harroway was vastly different from the world she had come to from there -- "--Removed, and hard to define. If there would be sun here, how could it be that from above?" Liessel blinked, still feeling as if her mind were a slug inching its way across dry ground, to look toward the white trees before her.
Only curiosity, and a patience, showed on Missus White's face when she looked back. "Yet you were so sure when you told me The physical sun will be the same."
"I was sure, but the answer I gave came from streets I had walked, and skies I had seen."
"And now, if asked the same question, you would say...?"
"I am not sure," The inward draw of her brow eased but didn't disappear as she answered, "I would like to think that it would be that sun, that light, that touches this place. But it would have to come far, and shine deeply for that to be so, filtered down through roots and stems, through rock and soil."
"There are straight lines aplenty in your world, we suspect," said the woman who was the tree or part of it. Her sisters--or selves--were leaning toward each other, and by silhouette there were many more here than were visible in the central ring. "It has long been so. There are not so many here. But we know that this is a relief as well as a challenge. It stops power from coming through most of you."
She did not detach from the great tree trunk and sprout legs. She seemed perfectly content to have a fixed position here. "Stops trouble," she mused, considering the cairn. "We spoke before about Koulm, and about the King. You know that it was by the design of your people that he came to us, and by the design of your people again that he was put back into death here, in defiance of a prophecy that was also the design of your people. Amrilaine's people. Not Aurelia's people, I think, but Catherine's, too."
Liessel felt the tug of her brow again, as if the furrow wanted to deepen itself, bringing more wrinkles to her young face, "I had not known anything about the King's story prior to finding myself in the world above. I knew of no prophecy, nor of his death until I started reading of him. That he was put back to rest after that day, I know there are many who find it difficult to -- face -- him. That he rests now, surely it is to -- stop trouble -- like all of those straight lines."
"That was the way it was told to me," Missus White agreed--without sounding like she actually agreed to more than the fact of it. "Come closer, child. Koulm came here, before these stones were brought. These stones are offerings from every coast. I was told the sea pulled back to expose them. They came to us covered in barnacles and purple sea hair and crab husks. They are the bones of the boundaries of one of many pacts."
For as much as she had hesitated the first time she'd come to see Missus White her steps here did not tarry. She was bade to move closer, and so with careful steps she did causing the water around her feet and ankles to slosh and lap at the edges of her vestments, causing the many belts at her waist, empty as they were, to jostle with the movement, "This place, it was Avalon then." She said as she got closer, letting herself look down at the stones she passed over. In that light, the stones looked like ghosts of the land. She was pretty certain that she, too, looked like a ghost for how fair she was.
Signs of their seaborne past were all over them, puckering moss and peeking out of hollows. "Those shallows you wade in," Missus White said, gesturing to the stream behind Liessel, and beyond perhaps to the passage and her own pool. "Those are what remain of the waters of Avalon. What is above--I smell it on those who come to me. Water, but not that water."
"That would explain why I felt it when I stepped into the water but could not feel it from the water I used to get here." She had known there was a difference between the two from that first trip, and had only had it reinforced with this one. Liessel turned back, looking toward the spring she had followed, "At least it was not felt the same way."
"Would you believe," Missus White asked almost dreamily, "that once all waters in the world felt thus? From swamp to sea. All sang. All sacred. Nothing taken for granted."
"I would," Liessel answered turning back to Missus White with a small nod, "The same way I believe that all water is known by Aquarren. The world had looked very different at one time, hadn't it?"
"I have never known what it looked like above," Missus White admitted, "but I have always known what it felt like, and the way that it spoke to me and I to it. Your Aquarren never came to me with gifts or wisdom or anything else, but I think we know each other the way you know that stream. A certain kind of knowing. A kind that cannot be translated, or replaced. I did hear a name very like the one you brought me, but it's the essence I would know without question, were we to come to one another."
"Yes," Liessel said with a small nod, her left hand drifting back toward the flap of her bag as Missus White mentioned gifts. She had some, but that would wait for a moment, "It is not something that can be described in any fashion very easily because it is more felt, more experienced than lived. Water, though, and those that know it, also know Aquarren, or the essence of her. What name that was like hers did you hear?"
"Aquarrenus," Missus White mused, and then her eyes narrowed with a dangerous, wry spite. "It was very much the sound of the invaders--at least the invaders of that time--stamped to the name. As if by shaping the name, the being itself might be shaped into something acceptable."
"Aquarrenus," She repeated that, letting it settle against the name of The Guardian as she knew it. The feeling of it was wrong against her tongue, but it did bear resemblance other names she knew at least in the feeling of how it was spoken. Septimius -- Cornelius -- and there were other names that came to her then.
When in Rome.
"The invaders? The Romans?"
Missus White waved a dismissive hand, uninterested. "I suppose. The greatest bringers of the straight line to these lands. They would have turned even the rivers to spear-straight rushes if only they could have, and best for them that they could not. We would have eaten them."
"They sound as if they might not have tasted too well had you been given that opportunity." She said, unable to stop herself from smiling a little.
"Arrogance is sweet." Missus White might have been smiling a little back--it was difficult to tell. "Rots the teeth." She turned her attention fully on Liessel again, great pink eyes curious, as if she were merely albino, and not a wholly different sort of being. "Those invaders... they would have thought that if they stood atop the Tor, or over Avalon, and took the pickaxes of a great many men to the soil and the stone, they might by digging eventually reach this place. They could not shift enough earth to do so, but the minds that love straight lines would never believe that truth. Naturally, to descend a stair that does not much wander means that one has gone downward, and by any other means one might also go downward and expect the same result."
She showed teeth--and so did many of her listening sisters. "We've had great amusement over realizing this. It is sorrowful, too, though. We would have welcomed them as any, if only they might accept a little bending."
"There have been many, I would guess, that have thought the same: to dig down is the same as using the stairs to descend. From then, and from now and even in the world I come from," Perhaps more so from the world of Harroway where magic of any kind was little known, "Finding those who are willing to give, even just a little bit, seems like it could take lifetimes."
"Only so in recent times," Missus White told her. And then, pondering, asked, "What do you think of such a world as those ideas create?"
Liessel took her time, considering. It was the woman of white bark before her she considered, the waters of Avalon that swelled around her feet, is was the contrasting idea of a world where 'down' was 'down' with no depth to it otherwise. Sure, there was beauty to be found in that world, too, but what variety of it?
"I think," she said at length, "That a world such as that would lack a certain depth, a certain -- layer -- to its existence. I think that the people who live in a world like that would not have much imagination, or many ways to express themselves. I would not say it would be a dull world, or lacking in beauty, but it would not be a complete world. It would not be a full world."
Missus White did not nod, but some subtlety communicated that she was pleased, that she agreed. Which was likely no mystery at all. "When the Tor falls at last," she said softly, "one of the only remaining oases in the whole of this world will be gone forever, and the desert will hold sway. No analogy of desert flowers and beautiful desert nooks and crannies will be appropriate, other than to dismiss the end of a world that was loved by many more than have ever been known by name."
"The Tor will fall?" The furrow was back at her brow, "When? How? What would become of --everything here?" Missus White, herself, and Catherine, and that young man -- Ewan -- what would become of Arthur, and the last remaining waters of Avalon? "Is -- would there be no way to stop it from happening?"
"I've distressed you." The woman sprouting from the tree nodded, her great branchings of hair shifting easily. "It is distressing. Know that I, and the Tor, and the waters, and all the beings whose souls have contributed to the sanctuary and its tending through time, understand that all things come to an end, and accept this. It is the most simple turn of the spiral, this ending. That which opens the way for beginnings. Yet there are ways to end that are more given to offering fertility to the future than others. This Tor will suffer a demise that feeds nothing. We will not be the meat and fruit of any great prosperity. We will not be rebirthed as new life, under new stars. What comes for us kills utterly and remorselessly."
Something beautiful from something broken.
It was distressing, even for all the knowledge and recognition that life was a circle. What ended could bring other beginnings. But endings were never easy, especially if you learned of them only a handful of moments after discovering something new. It would take time for the truth of life's flow to catch up with the rest of her, she knew, but it would and she would come to terms.
Those thoughts were left behind, though, as Liessel took another step toward Missus White, the water around her feet swaying, "What is it that comes so mercilessly?"
"There has always been darkness, just as there has always been death," Missus White told her. "This, too, can serve a purpose, even when it seems terrible. And this, too, has a vast number of ways that it might serve a good, and a vast number of ways that it might not. What comes for us is not interested in the stone breaking to feed into the bed of a river, or into the soil. It devours, and cares not."
" 'Progress'," She ventured after a moment, "Growth of the world above -- the 'civilized world'."
"Yes." But Missus White eyed Liessel pointedly. "I know what you mean when you say that. I also know that you likely suspect it to be its own force."
"It would be easy to think of it as its own force, yes, but it is not. There are many things that drive it, that have brought it into existence and that fuel it."
"I refer to the Dark."
Liessel's answer came softly, and with a little nod, "I do, too."
"Ah! Tell me all that you know!" Missus White said, intrigued instantly.
What did she, a girl who barely a woman, who had barely stepped away from a life of protected servitude, know of The Dark?
"It is greedy," She told Missus White first, "It corrupts and takes, and takes, and takes. If you catch the eye of any of its servants, they will find a way to keep you in their sights because they love to torment. They enjoy it, these emissaries of Darkness. And sometimes you might not know that you are seeing them, they can blend in so well with those that they surround themselves with. I've seen worlds crack open, and bleed because of The Dark. I have seen creatures who turn bone into paper and blood into dust and hunters who prey on weaker beings, scared beings, just because they can. I've seen much of Darkness, but I know I have not seen all of its depths. What I have seen of it, though, has been more than enough for me to know that it is worth fighting back against."
"And now you see it in the 'progress,' you say. The 'growth of the civilized world.'"
Liessel gave Missus White a small nod. The length of her vestments had been let to fall when she reached around behind her to lay her hand against the flap of her satchel. She hadn't bothered picking the hem up, so it sat within the waters of Avalon, just barely beneath the surface, soaking it up through the meshy fibers it was made out of. "Some of it, but not all of it. And it is more some of the people involved in that progress, than the actual progress itself. But I am only just now seeing the world, I am only just now able to. Like the King, in a way, I have only just woken up to what is around me."
"Would you do battle with it?" the being called White asked. "You say 'some of it.' Is it enough of it, for you to act at our side? To stop this destruction? Just woken or no."
"I have been doing what I can since I became aware of it," Liessel said with a small nod, "The friends I have above have been fighting it as well, and for far longer than I. But I know they will not stop fighting it, nor will I. How would you have me act? What would you see me do to stop the destruction?"
"Come to us, and learn what we know. If we end, continue."
"I would be free to come and go?" Liessel asked, going from looking at the white woman she had been speaking with toward the other white women that surrounded her, and the shadows of white women beyond them before focusing back on the White she had been speaking to.
"There might be lessons that could take more than a day," Missus White considered, "but it is difficult to say. The ties to the world above are not what they once were."
"I would need consideration for those lessons so that I might make preparations. I have people above that are depending upon me, right now, people that cannot go without communication from me -- people that I cannot go without seeing. They would need to know when I would be gone, and I would need to see that my father is taken care of in my absence."
"Ah," Missus White breathed. "It sounds as if you do not feel the call. It is not the great pull in your heart." She nodded. "So be it."
Liessel stood there, meeting Missus White's pink-eyed gaze, "I expected that answer," She told the white woman, "and must stand by my request. My father is not in a position where I can just leave him. I must see that he is cared for. My friends, they deserve such consideration from me. If loyalty is the measure of what I feel within my heart, the strength of that pull, then know that I would walk away from here with a heavy heart. My loyalty to them is not matched, nor dwarfed. Nor is it dwarfing of the pull that I feel. I cannot choose one above the other. All I ask is to know when I will be gone."
I expected that answer.
Missus White smiled.
... and must stand by my request.
"You must think I made this observation as a start to persuading you," Missus White noted. "But there are many who think they want things for which they do not burn fiercely. The hearts of your kind are often tangled as magpie nests. I am well-used to would-be trainees, even ones that come at my own invitation, who wish to squeeze such a life into a conveniently vacant slot they can conceive of for it. I make no judgment, child. I'm glad you expected it but am then puzzled by why you came back."
"I came back, gracious Lady, to hear what you had to say. I could accept your invitation without hesitation. It would be a life to which I am well suited -- a life I've lived before of sacrifice and dedication," her right hand rose and her finger tips pressed against the mark on her forehead before falling away, "I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that I would not need to sacrifice so much now, as I had for the Guardians," The weight of her bag was shifted, bringing it around to her front from behind her, "for the whole of my life."
Missus White laughed a little. "I think you hear what you want to hear, or what you fear to hear, and tell yourself your hearing is true. Fare well, Liessel Erphale."
Her right hand was moving again. Fingers to forehead, fingers to hear, and then her hand was in the air with her palm up between herself and the woman of white-bark skin, "Thank you for your time, White Sisters," Her feet were sloshing through the water, water that hadn't stopped singing its ancient duet with what was within her, as she turned, her hand falling to the strap of her bag to hold it even as she moved to follow the glowing stream back the way she had come.
Missus White nodded; so did her nearer sisters. A little sad amusement seemed communicated through their expressions, but they one by one returned to a communion that seemed made up of drifting gestures of their arms, and the slow stirrings through their branching hair.
Liessel turned back and made her way with the resonance of the water surrounding her. By the time she reached her boots she felt numbed by it. She stepped from the water and spent a moment wringing it from the length of her vestments as best as she was able. Her hands felt as if they belonged to someone else as she picked up her boots and went on her way. Behind her, as she headed for the stairs, just at the lip of the pool sat three red apples and a deep green leaf that was the size of a child's palm.