Eagles and Swans
Chapter 39: the sky has no boundaries
Preface 05: The Uncaging
The storm had been raging since yesterday evening. Hollia heard a high lamenting cry in her sleep—a frightful sound that shook her straight out of her nightmares, thrust her headfirst into the night.
Rubbing her eyes, she stumbled out of her room and towards the kitchen—and her mind was occupied with the thought of just one thing: her mourning doves.
They’d been building a nest before the rain had begun, and it had suddenly become so clear, their singing, their flying, the twigs in their mouths. Hollia had found the beginnings of a nest in the upper branches of the great circling tree, and her heart had grown tender with joy.
That joy was all but absent in this booming darkness. Snatching a lantern and a box of matches from the mantel, Hollia struck a flame and lit it. She crept into the kitchen and through the back door.
A second bright cry startled her straight—a cry that travelled across the shivering netting. She gasped and scurried outside, forgetting her slippers and umbrella.
Rain immediately tumbled upon her, soaking her gown and her hair. But for once the rain was the least of her concerns.
The cry had been a mourning dove’s. But strange, strained. Distorted.
She raced between roots and over low bushes, twigs tangling in her rain-soaked gown, just as the dove raised another rumbling cry through the rain—where are you? Where are you?
She glanced up through the branches. A dove sat alone in their half-built nest. But the other—the other wasn't there.
She strained her ears in search of a reply in the thundering rain. Then, gently, she heard it, far, far away, from the great tree down the sandy road. I'm here, it sang. I'm here.
Hollia could only listen, wide-eyed, as that cry shrieked helplessly through the rain, here, I’m here, as lightning tore from the sky in a blaze brighter than heaven, and crashed into the tree.
The father dove kept crying out through the night, where are you? Where are you? but there were no more answers. He could not comprehend death so sudden; he pulled his eggs closer, still calling for his mate as if his voice could bring her home.
And that night, a great boom shook the entire beech cottage—followed quickly by the snapping wood and twanging of wires and a tumult of crying birds. Hollia tossed in her bed, tears of terror beading on her eyelashes.
Down crashed the tallest pole of the aviary, cracking through the middle. Down through the wires it tore, ripping them from their joints, plucking them from the wood as if they were no more than hairs.
The roar of light and gushing rain ascended, and for the first time in half a millennium—for the first time since those dreaming Ihirin had strung these wires up and sawed the wood into pillars—the aviary split wide open.
…wake up…wake up…
All was trapped in glowing stasis. Nothing seemed to move or breathe, not the icy air itself.
The creature could not blink—it hardly even knew what blink meant. It lay supine, like a limp doll.
…awake…
The pealing resonated through the white room. But the thing felt no more significant, nor sensible, than a stone.
Something was creeping across its eyelids now—snowy light.
It blinked this unremembrance away.
It became she.
She drew breath through her mouth. She knew this feeling; the place that cradled her was coming into focus, too, along with her knowledge—arching white walls, flawlessly shimmering floors (marble without veins? What was marble?), the scent of rain, a chill down the spine, frigid cold…
She yelped, flipping on the floor and realizing she could move. The floor was cold. Pulling herself upright and hunching over her crossed legs, she rubbed at her arms, as the remains of her memory trickled back through the maze of her brain.
Name: Ruthenia Fulminare Cendina.
Age: 17.
Hates: being ordered about, the clergy, Literature classes.
Loves: flying on her umbrella.
…my umbrella…
…is gone.
Like a cold slap in the face, the thought jerked Ruthenia's mind back through the layers of hazy unconsciousness, landing right where it belonged inside her skull.
And the first thing she said was, “Did I die?”
Her eyes shot up to survey her surroundings, tracing the pillars and searching for detail to remember—but deeper inspection only revealed a lack of it. The network of archways on either side of her seemed almost nondescript, smooth, impossible to pin down exactly. The clear blue sky glowed in them.
The quality of the floor, seamless and smooth, was such that the light split into glittery pieces inside it. Blank lace banners rippled like ghosts overhead. Farther down the corridor, there was a sort of altar raised on a rectangular dais, carrying a single rectangular artifact she couldn't make out.
The faraway dais was white, too. Lights glittered across the steps, and further looking made her realise that that light came straight through the transparent ceiling: more sky shone through, blue without summer heat.
Ruthenia blinked.
She remembered the gushing of water into her lungs, the slow squeezing and crushing of the sea. But now as she dragged herself to her feet and stood up, she felt as tireless as a child.
She broke into a dash, and dozens of pillars rushed past her, all the same. The dais and the object on it began to drift into focus, details beginning to clarify themselves. Ruthenia's heart leapt: like an apparition, a person had shimmered into being upon that box she'd only just realised was a throne.
More details rose out of the pool of light. The person—or humanoid being, in any case—sat straight backed, feet flat on the ground. She smiled briefly. They seemed neither male nor female; their robes glowed so white she imagined any sort of stain would sooner cower from it than attempt to mar its purity.
But that was not all. A second figure blurred into being at the foot of the throne, like a mirage. Wearing a blue skirt and a ribbon around their waist, with wings instead of arms. But it was not the skirts or the wings that reeled her attention in. In the middle of their abdomen, like a rose, bloomed a bright patch of blood.
The child's eyes were shut. The enthroned person's hand sat in the silver locks of their hair. They had no eyes for the visitor, only eyes for the one by their feet.
"Excuse me!" she yelled, racing down the slippery floor, but without once slipping. "May I know where I am, and how I may leave?"
She stumbled to a stop, three feet from the dais, gripping her knees and bending over to pant. Suddenly Ruthenia felt terribly small, and devastatingly unworthy of the spot on which she stood.
"You are awake," they answered instead, in a voice both ordinary and distinctly ethereal.
Ruthenia quailed, and stepped back. She knew who this was. Her eyes moved to the child beside the throne, bleeding more profusely now, the red blood seeping down into her skirt.
"Li—Lilin?"
The girl's eyelids did not stir; her sleep was deeper than the sea. Her gaze drifted upward, but she could only make out Ihir's eyes.
He nodded, with a wayward glance that could almost have been sadness. "What a surprise," He said, while Ruthenia averted her eyes, "but so it is, that I find myself in the debt of a mortal, for doing in my stead what I could not do myself. And that absolutely will not do."
She stared up at Him oddly. "For saving her?" she asked, and choked back a guilty laugh. "All I did was convince her to kill herself."
He shook His head. "Yet you freed her, with simple words, where I have spent a hundred years fighting with every drop of my power to revoke a curse I cast in my rage." His eyes closed, almost refusing to see her. "I must thank you."
Ruthenia bowed deeply to receive His thanks, deeper than she remembered ever bowing before—but she felt so awkward, and little, here before the God of the Sky—that her courtesy only seemed crude and clumsy.
"Now," He said. "Your act, and indeed your life, have brought to my attention a problem of negligence on my part. I do not intervene in the corporeal world without serious cause, but I see cause here. And now, I must have you send a message to my people."
“Me?” she shouted. “There are far greater people in the country who could do that job better!”
In a flourishing flutter of robes, Ihir stood from His throne. "Perhaps so," He said. "But if I were to make you my messenger, then it would save your life."
"But I am a sinner, a blasphemer—I have done things to spite your name! Are you sure they will listen?”
While she shook, Ihir strode to the edge of the dais. If He had divine shoes, or divine feet for that matter, His robes did not reveal them, though they were beginning to flutter as if tossed by eddying gales.
"You may not love me," He said, twenty wings unfolding in a blinding flash, "but I do not ask for love. You do not love nor hate, you who are your own. You always knew I was flawed. It is your refusal to delude yourself with visions of my perfection that makes you the right voice for my message. So I say this to you. My old laws are no longer sufficient, nor relevant, to the country that Astra has become. Go to the people, and tell them it is so!"