Mount Ferion is smoking. The last time the mountain woke I was a small girl. We packed our things, and Papa said we must be ready to seek sanctuary with relatives in the city. Although there had not been a violent eruption in a decades, Papa took us to see the old lava flows that crusted the south slopes, where farmsteads and homes had been swallowed up by the inexorable flow of the mountain’s ire.
Ailas said someone had angered the mountain gods, but Papa shushed him.
“When we go to the city, you must not speak such nonsense,” he said.
“Why?” My brother had worn out that word by the time he was six.
“The Fennarin might hear of it and then we’ll be in trouble.”
“I’m not scared of the Fennarin.”
That was the only time I saw Papa raise his hand to my brother.
After that, Ailas had not said another word on the matter, and we waited up the entire night, listening for when the Ferion officials came to ring the alarm bell. The mountain shuddered. A long crack fingered across the big room’s wall, but nothing more happened.
For days, the sky had been dimmed by ash that fell in feather flakes and left a bitter taste on my tongue. And that had been that. For years.
Now the mountain shudders and rumbles, and billows of thick grey smoke add to the general miasma in the air. The afternoon showers have, unaccountably, been withheld, and every breath I draw is syrupy with the faint taste of rotten eggs. Oh, for a break in this baking heat that saps the strength from my limbs.
Allies maintain chambers on the middle terrace, which means I have a window, small as it is. I do not have an ocean view like the seniors, but from my cell I can nearly see Mount Ferion’s summit and the black smoke roils out, dirtying the twilight haze.
Bleak exhaustion makes my limbs so heavy I can barely move and yet I cannot lie still on my pallet. Sleep I must, if I’m to face another day of the Trial, but every time I lie down, I see his face, his eyes searching mine and seeking recognition.
Unia, why?
He has undone me with those two words, and that fateful afternoon a decade ago plays itself over repeatedly the way a mummer’s dance turns along preordained steps. What if I’d not gone to destroy the shrine? Would the Fennarin have put me to death too? Most likely. Yet if they’ve been aware all along about my past, there is no way for me to know how the blade would have fallen back then. I imagine how it must be to have the lamp oil poured over my skin, the liquid trickling along limbs only to be followed by the bite and sizzle as the flame takes hold. How it devours. The pain that grows and grows before death offers a way out.
My chest closes, and my breath wheezes on my lips. I rise, pace about the confines of my cell.
Then I’m standing here, clutching the sill with white-knuckled hands and a splinter has dug into my right ring finger. With a curse I nibble at it to remove the foreign body then suck at the hurt digit until I can taste metal.
A low rumble shudders, grinding rocks deep beneath the earth. The mountain can be angry for days, for weeks, it’s been said. Tomorrow it can blow its top and spew fire, and yet we persist to live on its flanks. The pagan stories tell of sacrifices to appease the gods, of blood spilled to quieten the earth. Of the miraculous Firebird that is born out of the cataclysm to offer people hope. We don’t engage in such barbaric practices anymore, and yet there’s a small part that wonders if such rites ever did any good other than gift us with the illusion that we have some modicum of agency when faced with nature’s wrath.
Even these thoughts are poison, for the Word of Fennar teaches that it’s through discipline and study that we can tame the very elements, to elevate ourselves to the point where we master even the sky and the ocean.
We don’t need some mythic Firebird, for we have the Word of Fennar to guide us.
The mountain, however, doesn’t care how much knowledge we hoard.
I stand by the window and breathe in the night, and the remains of my paltry dinner subside like a lump of cooling lead in my belly. The hours that come I must endure, ostensibly in quiet meditation, purified by our Invocations against the Unseen so that my will is tempered steel.
All around me my fellow Fennarin are settling for the night. Murmured words underpin the occasional rumbles from the mountain. No alarm bells yet, but then we are far enough that the canals should do well to divert any flow. Or so it is hoped. No one has had to test them in many years.
My brother lies broken, insensible far beneath the ground, and I put him there.
He’s not your brother anymore.
Yet I can still see him laughing, chasing me with glowbugs he wants to throw into my hair. My traitorous memories tumble end over end, segueing between the tears and the laughter until I’m doubled over from the nausea.
The call of the night-whistler is out of place. No such birds should by any rights stray into the city, for there are not enough trees to hide this retiring creature. The sound takes me right back to the ravines of my childhood, of the thick-wooded gullies where the ghost lemurs cry. Me and Ailas sitting on a fallen tree, eating wild tala berries that stain our mouths crimson. Two liquid upsweeping notes query the star before descending in a bubbling laugh as though mocking us.
In all the years that we ran wild in the foothills of Mount Ferion, we only ever saw the night-whistler once, sweeping away from us on its silent sickle-wings. Those large, unblinking black eyes hold an eternity of darkness.
That last night, a decade ago, spent crouching in an abandoned shed while the insects and nightlife seethed around me. I had nowhere to run to, nowhere to go. What had I imagined would happen after the Fennarin came for my brother? That I could return to life as per usual with my parents on the farm? That we’d be happy? That my Mama would not sorrow for the loss of her only son? That my Papa would not mourn, that’d he’d be stoic? That I would not feel that hollow, aching loss gnaw at me during the dead hours of the night?
Guilt is a peculiar thing. Eventually the burden becomes a part of the body, an extra useless limb that trails along in the dirt. I would be so much freer without it, but I’ve grown so accustomed to dragging its weight with me that I cannot imagine life without it; it pains me when there is little else to distract me from its existence.
You did this.
You alone.
And the night-whistler calls, forlorn, and shudders course through my body as I tremble, though I am far from cold.
Mama always said to us that we must sleep before the tenth hour, for the night-whistler is an emissary for the vyra desiring bodies to possess, seeking out any child still awake before the deepest night. The labourers tell other tales, of how the night-whistler comes to a house only when someone is about to pass beyond the Veil.
Nonsense, I understand now. Nothing but superstitious tales used to scare people into opening their hearts to evil. And yet...
That forlorn call doesn’t abate. It follows me to my pallet, where my skin soon adheres to the rough hemp bedding. The humidity and heat is such that I cannot bear to have the sheet pulled over me but then the whine of the mosquito adds its own uneasy counterpoint to the damnable bird outside.
The dreams that come are fitful wisps that steal my vitality as a washerwoman wrings laundry. Like water, these phantasms trickle between my fingers, impossible to catch but for one. I wake before dawn, my chest tight, to the dull thuds of a nala beetle battering itself senseless against my shutters. I don’t recall closing my window during the night but I must have. Normally I’d kill the bug on sight—their grubs, after all, do so much damage to any wooden structures, and there are so many of them this time of year that they get into everything. But there is something nearly magical about the blue-green metallic sheen of its carapace, the way it scrabbles futilely on my palm. The little legs move at a furious pace. Then I open the window and, as if the creature tastes immediate freedom, its carapace lifts to reveal a delicate lacework of wings, and it buzzes away into the dusky predawn.
Wishes, Ailas always told me. The beetles carry wishes to the gods.
Which gods?
I must make a wish, some dim part of me thinks, but the words die before they reach my lips.