BY
JY YANG
LET ME TELL YOU A story, my small darlings, my soft feathered peaches. Gather round, my sweet loves, for a story of equal parts joy and woe, a tale of love so great it scaled mountains, and of treachery so bitter it turned whole continents sick and barren. It is a story of determination so great it swelled like lava in the oceans. Of bravery so strong that it toppled all obstacles foolish enough to stand in its way. Like all stories, it contains whorls of lies wrapped around kernels of truth, and it’s up to you, my little ones, to sort out which is which.
Are you comfortable, my chirplings? Good. Space can be so cold sometimes, and we have a long day tomorrow, and the day after, and all the days after that. But there’s time enough for one last tale.
This story begins with a girl. She’s not the only character in the story, nor the most important, but by all means she’s at the center of it all. And her name is not as important as her purpose, but things need names to keep their shape in our minds, so let’s say her name is Callen. It’s a good name. Callen was young, maybe not as young as you, but in good shape, having been raised in sheltered lands where the fields are thick and green and the berries grow plump on bushes.
We start with her at the end of a long journey, which is as good a place as any to begin. She was walking alone across a great red plain with no name pronounceable in our tongue, barefoot over the hissing red earth, steam the color of blood erupting from its fissures. Above her, the sky hung heavy and dark with despair, but it would never rain in that place. It was barren and dry as a heap of bones. No trees grew there. Nothing green could survive. The things that rose out of the ground looked like trees, but they were black and dead and sharp as glass, reaching upward with twisted, cruel fingers. Callen’s bare feet had been burned by the hot ground, blistered and scabbed over. Now they felt no pain.
It had been a long journey, but Callen’s destination rose in front of her, a jagged swell of earth breaking the line of the horizon. Anywhere else and it would have been too small to be called a mountain, but here the smallest of obstacles was magnified ten times, and this thing that you and I would think of as a hill was to Callen an insurmountable peak. Yet she knew that she would have to scale it, for she had been told that the one she sought could be found at its summit, and meeting her was the reason she had come all this way, after all. The sour air seared her throat and lungs, and the heat stopped blood in her veins.
Callen was not alone on the plain. The hill that was also a mountain was home to a number of strange birds, each as large as a horse, heads shrunken by desiccation into long and hollow skulls. Their forms shifted with the wind, parts blinking in and out as though they had forgotten what their wings or their clawed feet were supposed to look like. See, the unnameable plain was barren, but it was not dead. No, it was well, alive and hungry, and it fed itself with whatever foolish creature lingered within its bounds. First it took their memories, then it took the certainty of their forms, and finally it took their names. These wretched creatures knew what they had been once, but now they shambled mindlessly across the cracked and broken earth, trying to pull sustenance from the blackened ground. Callen carefully watched their hunched forms as she walked, hoping that a lone, living traveler such as she would not catch their attention.
She was lucky. She reached the foot of the mountain-hill before one of them could wander across her path and swivel its monstrous, empty eye sockets toward her. Above her, a path curled up the sides of the mountain, threading through angry rocks with jagged teeth, too tall for her to scale. Callen knew that the road ahead was the longest and the most dangerous part of her journey thus far, so first she sat down to eat. She had been walking across this plain for three days, and she was hungry. More importantly, her senses had started to warp and waver in the strange pull of this land. She was losing her memories and her sense of self, and if she wasn’t careful, she would forget everything.
Callen’s bag, slung across one shoulder, was a tiny thing—only a little bigger than a baby’s skull—and contained nothing except a map and two soft rice cakes. To our eyes they would look like ordinary rice cakes, soft and pink and dusted with tender flour, but these were celestial rice cakes, given to Callen by her aunt, who was handmaid to the Queen Mother of Heaven. This was the same aunt who had told Callen where to find the one who could grant her what she wanted, and had set her upon her path. Eating one of those rice cakes would fill one’s stomach and sate one’s thirst for three days.
Callen had two cakes left, and she ate one, saving the other for the journey back. As she chewed, she felt her mind anchor itself back to her body. She remembered why she was here, and what she had come here to do.
When she had finished eating, Callen started on the path upward. The ground underneath her was slippery, and every step strained her weary body. In no time, her feet were bleeding again, and her fingers were cut to ribbons from clutching rock edges for purchase. But she kept climbing.
Halfway up the mountainside, her path was blocked by an eldritch bird. She couldn’t avoid it—the path was too narrow for her to go around, and the creature stood with its body between craggy rockface and craggy rockface, looking at her. Callen was terrified, but she saw no choice about the matter, because she was not turning back. Gathering all the strength she had left in her, she stepped up to the bird-creature.
“Excuse me, O great one,” she said, as politely as she could. “I need to get to the top of this mountain. May I walk past you?” Her body was shaking and her voice trembled, but she had been taught manners by her aunt, who worked in the Celestial Court, and she knew that deference and respect could be wielded as a shield against ruin and death.
The creature turned its head toward her. Light guttered in its eye sockets as though fires burned deep in its skull. Callen stood still and breathed very slowly while it studied her. The creature smelled like parched soil before the rain, and its plumage shifted between foam-white and bone-red and the pitch-black of the void between the stars.
The bird-creature spoke; its voice sounded like marbles rolling in a silver can. “I am so hungry,” it said. “My brethren and I have not had anything to eat for a hundred years. Will you give me something to fill my belly?”
Callen had nothing to offer except the last rice cake, which she was saving for the journey back. Yet she feared what would happen if she refused. “If I give you something to eat, will you let me pass unharmed?”
“Yes,” it said. “I give you our word.”
She hesitated. Without the rice cake for the way back, she would slowly lose her grip on who she was until she became no better than the bird-creatures, wandering this barren land without purpose. But maybe she could travel faster than the firmament could sap her. She reached into her bag and offered up the last rice cake. “Here,” she said. “Take this. One bite will feed you for days. Perhaps it will ease some of your hunger.”
“Thank you, little one,” the creature said. It bent its massive, feathered head, and took the offering in its beak. As promised, it stood and left the path, leaping onto the jagged rocks and vanishing in an indeterminate direction. Only then did Callen release the breath that she had been holding, and continue farther up the path.
Her reprieve was, however, all too brief. She had gone not more than two hundred meters when she found her way blocked by another one of the creatures. Its plumage was darker this time, the color of a dead heart, and it looked at her as she slowly and reluctantly approached.
“Excuse me, O great one,” she said. “I need to get to the top of this mountain. May I walk past you?” But her heart was heavy, because she had given the last of the rice cakes to its compatriot down the path.
The creature tilted its head. “Will you give me something to fill my belly?”
“I have nothing left to give you,” she said. “I gave the last of my food to another of your kind. All I have left in my bag is this map.”
“Then give me your map,” it said. “My brethren and I have been trapped upon this plain for a hundred years. Lend it to us so that we may seek our freedom.”
Callen hesitated. She was afraid of navigating these plains without the security of her map. With that map, she always knew where she was. The barren land could not fool her or turn her mind around. She was deathly afraid of becoming trapped here. Trapped, just like these bird-creatures were.
Pity overcame her then, and rode over her common sense. A hundred years was a long time to be bound to this lifeless, joyless landscape. How could she begrudge this creature its freedom? After all, on the way back she could follow the path she had taken here.
She reached into her bag and drew out the map, a glowing red ruby that, when it pulsed in her hand, fed her the names of directions. “Here,” she said, “take this. Maybe it can tell you a way out of this place.”
The creature took the ruby in its beak and swallowed it. The glow of the ruby traveled down its gullet and lodged in its chest like a second heart. When it looked at Callen, its hollow sockets now glowed with the same sacred crimson. “Thank you, my chirpling,” it said, and then it too was gone.
And so Callen continued upward, drawing closer and closer to the destination she so longed for. The air around the mountain-hill’s summit seemed thinner and sadder, but it also felt cleaner and clearer in the lungs. Callen did not know if her light-headedness was from lack of oxygen or from giddiness that her journey was nearly at an end. Perhaps it was both.
But of course stories can’t progress so cheaply and simply—we know that, don’t we, my little ones? Of course there was one more obstacle in Callen’s path. As she neared sight of the peak, her path was blocked by a creature so enormous it dwarfed the previous two combined. Its plumage was the white of bleached bone, the color so uniform it hurt to look at.
Its great, hollow eyes fixed on the tiny human in front of it. “Excuse me, O great one,” Callen said slowly.
The bird-creature spoke: “You want me to leave this path so that you may proceed, don’t you?” Its voice rumbled like distant thunder. “What can you offer me in return?”
Callen lowered her head. “I have nothing to offer, great one. I have given everything I carried to your brethren down the path. All I have left is my name, and a story I wish to tell.”
“Give me one of those, then,” said the creature.
“The story is the reason I am here,” Callen said. “If I forget, I will have nothing to offer the witch at the top of the mountain.”
“Then give me your name,” the bird said.
“My name?” Callen blinked. “But I need my name.”
The creature tilted it head and said nothing.
Callen knew the only way to reach her goal was to satisfy this creature, so that it would leave. She didn’t know what she would do without her name, without her identity. But she knew that the alternative—failing her quest—would be worse. If she failed here, she would never see the one she loved again. And she would not have that.
“All right,” she conceded. “Take my name, then. It’s not as important as why I am here.”
“And why are you here?” asked the creature.
“My beloved languishes in the prison of the gods, guilty only for the crime of loving me,” she said. “I was told the witch who lives on this mountain can free her.”
It laughed. “And you think the witch will help you? You think she can spring your beloved from the bars built by the heavenly hosts themselves?”
“I was told she could help.”
The creature laughed again. Callen burned with frustration, knowing that she was only wasting time parleying. “Take my name and be done with it,” she said. “Though I know not what you would do with such a thing. But if it’s what you want, then it is yours.”
The bird-creature stood and passed its massive white wings over the girl in front of it, and when it was done the girl no longer remembered her name or where she was from. All she had was a story, burning inside of her, and the knowledge that she must tell it to someone.
“Go, my small darling,” said the bird-creature to her. “See if you can find what you wanted.” And with that, it took wing and soared into the dark red sky.
The girl with no name headed up the path with the conviction of a fish returning to the grounds where it had been spawned. The top of the hill was a flat clearing, large as an emperor’s bedchamber and empty as a pauper’s pantry. In its middle sat a human figure, hunched over a green fire lit upon a bier of stones.
“Are you the witch who lives on this mountain?” asked the girl with no name.
The figure straightened up. They were of indeterminate gender, craggy-faced and silver-haired, weighed down by beads in a style unseen in thousands of years. They laughed at the girl, although not unkindly. “What of it?”
The girl sat. “I need your help.”
“Give me your name,” said the witch.
“I can’t,” the girl said. “I’ve given it away.”
“Have you?” said the witch. They looked amused. “And what, exactly, can a girl with no name offer me in return for my help?”
The girl looked at her hands, which were empty. Dirt had gathered under the nails during her long journey. “I have nothing left except a story,” she said. “I don’t know why it’s important, but it must be, because I gave up my name rather than give up the story.”
The witch stoked the fire and laughed some more, and their laughter shook the hidden stars above. “All right,” they said, “Tell me, then. I will listen, and I will judge if you’re worth helping.”
The girl bowed her head as if in prayer, collecting the strange threads of the story that was the only thing left to her. And then she began to speak: “Not so long ago . . .”
* * *
Not so long ago, in a place not so far from here, there was a river of stars that swept within sight of the deathless ones. Every so often a mortal ship would stop in the bright stream to bathe its engines in the light, and sometimes the mortals would emerge, wrapped in soft silver to protect their fragile bodies from the beautiful cold teeth of the void.
It so happened that this day, a group of young fairies were frolicking amongst the stars when a particular ship made a stop, and several mortals came out to wander, tethered to their vessel with wiry cords. The fairies, being young and sheltered, had never seen mortals before, and being curious, gathered around the intruders into their playground. And the mortals, having never met immortals before, were terrified by the appearance of these creatures that were shaped like them but shone with the light of stars and swam through the vacuum of space like jellyfish. They fled back to their ship, but one of them was too slow, alas! and was caught by the playful fairies. The fairies broke the cord tethering the frightened mortal to her ship, and she was left behind as her ship fled the sacred stream.
But mortals have mortal needs, and without the warm nurturing of her ship the young woman the fairies had captured quickly ran out of air. She stopped screaming and kicking as her skin and lips turned blue. And the fairies, in their capricious manner, became bored and abandoned her to her fate.
She would have died then, but the youngest of the fairies took pity on her. Gathering the silver-clad mortal in her arms, the fairy traveled back to the Celestial Palace, halfway across the galaxy. She hid the mortal from the sight of the others and nursed her back to health in the secrecy of her own bedchamber. After all, little separates the immortals and the mortals but several hundred years of magic and technology, and it took little effort to salvage a soft flesh body subject to the mere whims of physics and biology.
When the mortal woman woke from her long healing sleep, she looked upon the face of her benefactor and smiled. In that moment the young fairy instantly fell in love, and swore she would protect this mortal woman for as long as she lived. Thus began a clandestine affair in the heart of the Celestial Palace, a story of separation by day and passion by night. The fairy plied her mortal lover with sweet wines and delicate fruits from the celestial garden, the likes of which the mortal had never seen. At night, the fairy anointed her lover with perfumed oils while the larks sang outside the closed windows of the bedchamber. She taught the mortal to read, to play instruments, to enjoy every luxury the life of a celestial being could offer.
Yet the mortal woman was little more than a prisoner in her new life. A trespasser in the heart of the immortal empire, in the palace complex where only those closest to the Heavenly Emperor were permitted, she could not leave the fairy’s bedchambers for fear of getting caught. Every morning as the fairy left for her duties, she made her lover promise that she would stay within the bounds of the room, and every morning the mortal agreed. But how the outside world called to her! Birds sang in trees unseen, and fragrances wafted in through the gaps under the door. Through the thin paper of the windows she could hear laughter and songs in a language she was slowly learning to understand. How she longed to join them!
It was love that kept her true to her promise, and kept her from wandering to meet the outside world. But day by day her boredom and frustration grew, until one day she thought, “Surely a look wouldn’t hurt, just a look!” And so she pushed open one of the paper windows, just a mere crack, and peered out. How beautiful it was! The fairy’s bedchamber was one of a hundred rooms that opened onto a massive garden courtyard filled with wonders. Silver water cascaded from rocks into enormous pools where fish the size of horses swam. Trees were laden with fruit or blossoms in colors she had never seen before—purples beyond purples, blues that invoked the deepest oceans, pinks that stilled the heart with their intensity. In pavilions men played counter games while women sang and danced with silk fans. The mortal woman watched, rapt with envy, until the light faded and her lover came home.
This went on, day after day. Each time the mortal woman gazed out at the lively scene before her it got harder for her to stay where she was. She was an explorer by nature, after all, and just because she had been separated from her ship and her people did not mean that her nature had changed. Bit by bit, her resistance and her loyalty to her lover wore down, until one day she could stand it no longer, and slipped from the bedchamber to examine the fruit of the tree across from her window, which seemed to shimmer as if made of gold.
But the moment she stepped from outside the boundaries of the bedchamber, which had been tightly woven with protective wards, her presence was exposed to the rest of the palace. Every fairy, guard, magistrate, and deity knew at once that a mortal had dared come into their forbidden place. And there was no recourse from their anger: even though she ran from the star-hounds they set upon her, she was doomed to capture from the beginning.
The mortal woman and her fairy lover were both brought to the Heavenly Emperor for judgment. And no matter how much the fairy girl begged for mercy, it was not given. The Heavenly Emperor knew that leniency was often mistaken for weakness, and he would not have that. The fairy was banished from the palace, and the mortal woman was sentenced to a lifetime imprisoned in a cage deep beneath the Heavenly Emperor’s throne, in a place she would see neither sunlight nor starlight ever again.
Separated from the one she loved, the fairy would have fallen into complete despair. But her aunt, who served the Queen Mother of Heaven, came to her rescue. She told the fairy of a witch who lived on a mountain in the barren plain of exiles, once a great general and a favorite of the Heavenly Emperor’s, until they had fallen from grace and been banished. Knowing the weaknesses of the Heavenly Palace, and filled with resentment toward the Emperor, they would be the perfect ally to help her. The fairy’s aunt gave her a map and food adequate for the journey, and set her on her way. Where one story ended, another began. A story driven by desperation, but born of hope.
* * *
The girl with no name stopped speaking, her words petering out into an unsatisfying end. The witch laughed. “I see, I see. So this is what you are asking of me?”
She nodded. In the process of telling the story she had remembered some things, fragments of fragments, little slivers of time that did not form a complete story, yet told enough of it. The first glimpse of a lover in the cold brilliance of space, the long nights in a warm room, the fragile swell of a mortal heartbeat pressed against her own chest. “Please,” she said, “will you help?”
The witch stroked their chin. “Here’s the interesting thing with stories. It always depends on who’s telling it, doesn’t it? From your end, what you’ve said sounds like a sweeping love story. A great romance, a tale for the ages. Told from another perspective, however, it sounds like the tale of kidnapping and imprisonment, with the victim having to pay the highest price. How do I know what the truth is?”
The girl sat silent for a long time; she could not find the words she wanted to say. Finally she wet her lips and whispered, “I’ve told you what I believe is the truth.”
“Yet one’s belief and the truth are rarely the same thing, not even for immortals like you. Especially not for immortals like you.”
The girl’s heart turned to stone in her chest. “Are you not going to help me, then?”
The witch rubbed their bony fingers together. “Who am I really helping here, child?”
Something caught fire in the mind of the girl who had no name. She sat up straight, her spine a pillar of freshly ignited conviction. “I’m here because of her. I want you to help her. I don’t care what happens to me, but she deserves her freedom.”
“Even if she chooses to return to her people with the freedom that she gains?”
“Even so. Please. I have come so far, and I have lost everything, even my own name. Set free the one that I love. That is all I ask.”
“Alas, when I was banished here I was bound to this forsaken land, and I cannot leave until the one who cursed me is dead. But you have told me a fine tale, child, one which has entertained me in my endless torment. For that, I am grateful, and in return I shall tell you one of my own.”
“A thousand years ago the universe was at war. The immortals, the two-legged creatures whose ancestors were made of soft flesh and lived on planets breathing air, were engaged in war with the great corvids that soared in the spaces between the stars. The corvids—a mighty race—were as old as time itself, but their numbers were few, and the immortals had learned to harness the magic of the stars, which gave them an otherworldly power. The war had gone on for longer than both sides remembered, and they both ached for peace.”
“The emperor of the immortals offered a truce to the corvids, and invited them to his palace to discuss a peace treaty. The corvids accepted his invitation in good faith, but they were soon betrayed, for the emperor knew nothing in his heart but the desire for victory. One of his generals, a close childhood friend, tried to warn the corvids, but it was too late. The emperor killed their leader and cursed the rest of the corvids, taking their memories and banishing them to a barren land in a forsaken corner of the universe. He exiled the general he had once called a friend too, for he was nothing if not a petty man, and not prone to reason or forgiveness. So the one he used to call his dearest friend has lingered a thousand years alone in the desert, while his foes remain wandering and lost, locked into their fate, any hope of justice the mere forgotten shadow of a dream.
“See,” the witch said, leaning forward, “sometimes it’s not enough to right the single injustice, if that injustice is the least thing that is wrong with the situation. Sometimes, to undo all the wrongs you have to undo the entire system.”
The girl tightened her fists. “Tell me what I have to do.”
The witch grinned. “You have already given them the tools they need to escape their bondage. Go down the hill and speak to them, if you want to. Their leader’s name is Liercal.”
“And what about you?” she asked.
They laughed. “I’ve told you: I’m bound here until the one who cursed me is dead.”
“I see,” said the girl.
She turned and went down the hill, treading the crooked path with its treacherous walls. It was easier going down than coming up. At the bottom she found an army of the bird-creatures amassed, gazes fixed upon her, the great white one at their head. The rice cake she had given them, imbued with the magic of the Heavenly Palace’s kitchens, had awakened their memories, and now a different hunger filled them.
“Your name is Liercal,” she told the white bird.
“And yours is Callen. You’ve freed us from our long years of bondage.”
“You remember who you are now,” she said.
“Yes, and we remember what we are owed.”
“Then let’s go and take it back,” she said.
And so, you know what happened next, sweet chirplings. Callen and her new army crossed the stars with the map she had been given, and along the way we corvids woke the sleeping broods that have been in incubation for a thousand years, with no one to tend to them. We took ourselves, all of us, across the galaxy to our final destination, and we rest now, gathering our strength before the final battle. The Heavenly Emperor in his palace has no idea what’s coming for him. But soon he will, my feathered darlings. Soon he will.