I am Viridian. I need to write this down. If I do not, soon I will barely be able to remember it myself. I must write it down and read it every day. Every single day. Then I will remember.
I am Viridian. That is my name, that is who I am. Daughter of Aurora, wife of Biarnis, mother of Mino and Ellis. A wildwitch. A woman. Someone. I exist. I am here. I am not yet dead.
When I came to after the battle, I thought that I had won. The rocks were silent, the wheel no longer glowed. I was alive and the Bloodling had gone. Surely I must have been victorious?
I had lost too much blood. I could see it in the sand, the rocks and the wellspring – they had soaked up such copious gore, and yet had choked on these final thick shiny ribbons of blood, like a sponge unable to absorb any more. I could feel it, too, in my galloping heart and the thirst tearing at my throat and screaming from every pore of my body. Blessed Powers, what I wouldn’t give to be rid of this thirst – yet I knew that I was lucky to feel anything at all.
Blood. So much of this is about blood. My blood lives on in my heirs, Bravita has none. This, or so I thought, was my victory, even if the wounds she had inflicted on me were to prove to be mortal. Whether I lived or died, my blood would flow on in the veins of my sons, and my memory would live on in their hearts.
False was that hope, and foolish was I to harbour it.
I am Viridian. That is my name, that is who I am. Remember me. Remember!
Nightclaw lay by my side, he too had survived. I buried my fingers in his fur and rested my aching head against his flank.
Up, he said. Get up. Whoever stays down, dies first.
He was right. But my strength was spent; only my will remained, and even that was weak. I could feel it slipping away from me; I was starting to forget why it was important to get up.
Nightclaw sank a talon into my hand. Up. Up-up-up!
Oh, Blessed Powers. My weakness gored me with a claw much sharper than his, but in the end I got to my feet. He has always been very good at getting his way.
The wind whistled through the hidden cracks and passages of the cave. The tremors had died down, and the bedrock was still under my feet, almost as if it had never bucked and kicked under our feet, trying to throw us off. But the dust still lingered in the air, and now and then I could hear something clatter and fall somewhere in the subterranean dark.
I would not be able to use the old steps, I realized that after just a few paces. Too much of the ceiling had caved in, and I no longer had the strength to dig my way to freedom. There was only one way out and that was to follow the trickle of the wellspring, through the passage it had carved to reach the sea.
Before I set off on my long and difficult journey, I looked around the cave one last time. There was not much light now – what little daylight that crept through the cracks was dwindling, and night was likely to fall outside soon. But I could still see the wheel carved into the floor of the grotto. It was as still and silent as the bedrock now, still but intact. It had not been broken. Westmark had yet to fall.
I was just about to turn away when I saw it.
An impurity, a flaw. Not in the hub or in the wheel’s rim, but in the quarter of the circle that belonged to Westmark and me. I threw myself down on my knees, without thought for the difficulties standing up again would present. My own blood was spilt across that part of the circle, but that shouldn’t matter, it belonged there, I was as much a part of Westmark as Westmark was a part of me. But underneath it… I tore off my kerchief and wiped away my clotting blood as best I could. The rock looked different now, no longer a part of the bedrock of the cave. Like sand melting in extreme heat, the rock had melted and then hardened as clear as quartz or glass. And underneath the surface, I saw my enemy. Her upturned face staring right into mine, her hands reaching up towards me, and on the underside of the quartz she had written, not with my blood, but with her own, the curse that was already starting to affect me. Only one symbol – the symbol for oblivion. And suddenly I heard her voice inside me, though her frozen lips never moved:
“No man, no woman, no child. No animal. No thing will remember you. All you did will be undone, all you have said will be unsaid, all you wrote will fade. It matters not to me whether you live or die. For you will be forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, and oblivion will own you for ever.”
I barely know how I made it home. At times I wish I had not. Then I would not have seen oblivion in the eyes of my children, then I would not have lived long enough to realize how fragile memory is.
I am Viridian. I am still here. Finally I understand why people raise stones and write books. That they want to be remembered when they are no longer here is easy to understand. But that is not the only reason. For we may be forgotten even while we are still alive – still breathing, thinking, dreaming, speaking. Those of my blood remembered me the longest, but even their memories of me are starting to fade. They look at my clothes as if they cannot remember whose they are. They wonder why doors I have opened are no longer closed. They have stopped seeing me. It is as if their gazes bend around me, as if even the light ignores me. My elder son has forgotten me completely. My younger remembers me only in his dreams, and then he weeps as if I were dead. They can no longer hear my voice. I have tried penning letters, but they seem not to see the writing on the paper.
I am Viridian. I am still here. But only Nightclaw can see me now, and that is not enough. One cannot live nor die like this. Soon, even I will no longer remember who I am.
You have had your revenge, Bravita.