Fic Rec Friday #2
Provenir
by @allteacher
Read on Ao3
Esila, and stories, and consequences.
Rating: Gen | Word count: 2,043
Warnings: Canonical Character Death
Sometimes she forgets she is still growing. She has been aging faster, after they left the Distributary, but compared to humanity the pace is still glacially slow. Here she is, child and woman, wise and famed and impatient and young. Esila is carried over the crowd of Awoken, those that have fed on her stories for centuries, and becomes their voice once again. She already loves this place as much as she loves her people, and that is exhilarating and frightening.
This week’s fic rec is one of the first works of Allteacher’s that I read. Maybe I’m so soft about it because it’s a story about a storyteller, about a girl and then a woman and then a legend; about how a writer looks at the world in wonder and fishes out the crumbs that then become tales. A teacher-child with ink-stained hands, Distributary-ancient but not overburdened by wisdom. And oh the prose is so ethereal and Dreaming City-esque, I mean—“glacially slow”!!!!! I’m absorbing the language through my pores!!!!
The fighting grows worse, and Esila turns inward from a perfect world towards a more perfect one. She is older now, old enough to explore without a babysitter, though with the Theodicy War her mother seldom lets her past the garden gate. So she makes her own path out of the gates, writes her way down the old hunt-paths long ago abandoned in favor of richer prey. She learns to walk where she could not go before: under the Crystalline Lakes, into the jewel-caves of the Andalayas. The stars become a carpet and she buries her face in them when the funeral barges throw up smoke. Here she does not need to think of politics and debts and death. Here she can dream of the stars.
I remember reading this paragraph for the first time and having such a vivid image in my mind. “Writes her way down the old hunt-paths long ago abandoned in favor of richer prey”!!
Here she is: dual-ringed, two-sided, spinning stories to close the divide between her people. She cannot heal the wound, but she has spent centuries learning, growing, teaching. She can show her people how to look elsewhere, how to reach outwards.
On the last day Esila sits in the Hull and tells her mother she loves her until the connection severs. In that last frantic second she promises her mother she will write. The last thing she hears from her mother is a laugh, a promise to write back.
This is also a story about a mother and a daughter—and isn’t it interesting how Esila, the famous historian and storyteller, whose life and death was a tale in itself, is being titled “Esila, daughter of Sila”? It’s her bond with her mother that defines her, and it’s handled so beautifully in this fic.
During their journey, Esila sits by the window in the common room and writes every fable, every story, every legend she was ever told. She asks the others for the stories they were read as children, records them, marks the differences that show between tellings. When her hand cramps too badly to write she takes the quiet moments to mourn for her mother, who will outlive her. She thinks of her home, the day they left, the day they were almost shot out of the sky. Esila hopes her mother feels her daughter, alive, in her joints. She hopes her mother will not feel her die.
Oh another thing I love is the little namedrops of characters mentioned in the lore like, once. I had to look up Owome on Ishtar, and maybe that’s just me, but I find it incredibly satisfying when I have to google a name mentioned in a fic and find they’re actually a canon character. Fr his could be an entry in The Dreaming City lorebook.
Esila daughter of Sila grows and ages slowly but is still so young, so lighthearted. On the second solstice Azirim comes to her and lies and she knows it but he reminds her of one of the first stories she ever wrote, about a Corsair who shot a man with her bow and traveled the Distributary doing good in an attempt to repent. She is not Sanguine, but she adores a tale of redemption.
She agrees to listen. She will die for it. This is history in action: the consequences of her mercy.
History in action… A tale of redemption... The consequences of her mercy… Delightful, delightful.
