Paint the Sky with Stars
A spin-off of The Gardener about Tao and Ruze. Writing this at night, listening to my 6-month-old coughing and wheezing in his flu-plagued sleep, I realised there's a theme ever-present in my work. When something is wrong. And you can't fix it.
Loosely inspired by Paint the Sky with Stars by Enya.
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Paint the Sky with Stars
Ruze wasn’t sure what the shadow cloaks meant, but there were so many things he had to make sense of, the shadow cloaks had to take back seat. He had managed to ask one of his brothers: “Do you see that?” – “See what?” – “The dark aura everyone has.” – “I don’t see anything.” It did feel like they weren’t supposed to be there. A shadow hanging in the air. A cloud of black miasma. Thicker around some, thinner around others. They swirled occasionally, and Ruze couldn’t help but be wary of them. If he came in too close, would he breathe them in?
He was being introduced to everyone when he saw a shadow cloak as dark as night. It gathered around a tall but skinny Neverhoodian, standing back, not mingling with the others. The Hoodian was watching Ruze and his brothers, narrow-eyed and judging. Only when the introductions were nearly done did he go and make himself known.
“Tao the watcher,” he said with the hug of a dead fish. “If you could call me she and her, I’d be grateful.”
Ruze lingered with the answer. This person… this woman looked familiar. The yellow skin, the long black hair… and the blue fjord stone on her forehead.
“Ruze, Guardian of Invisible Forces,” he said. “You’re a Seer, right? Goldenblack?”
Anger. Alarm. Fear. Fury. Tao grabbed his hand and pulled him away. Some shouted after them. She didn’t stop. Ruze let her drag him along, her long skirt billowing as she hurried, her shoes clacking in the hallway. She took him to a closet; there was a big machine covered with a white sheet and not much space beside it. She slapped the light on.
“How do you know?!” she cried out.
“How do I know anything?” Ruze parried. He wasn’t scared. His hand ached where she had gripped it, but her outburst didn’t frighten him. He wasn’t sure why.
“Don’t tell anybody. Ever. No one must know I’m a Seer.” Tao paced around the closet. She opened the door and peeked out. She closed it again. “Did you hear me?!”
“Why must no one know?” Ruze asked.
“Because our king has decreed so.”
Ruze examined the angry woman. The sludge of black around her was clearing. A silent radiance from the inside was eating on the darkness.
“Well?!”
“I will not tell a soul,” he promised.
“Good.” The shadow flooded back in, like ink swirling in water. No… that isn’t good, Ruze realised. She… hates keeping it secret, doesn’t she?
“How long,” he asked slowly, “have you lived in this shadow cloak of lies?”
Tao laughed, short, loud, swallowed. “Close to five hundred years,” she said. She backed him up against the wall and hissed: “Do not tell anybody.”
Her skirt flapped after her as she darted back to the Throne Room.
Ruze’s hand was still aching.
And he realised, much too late, that he should have grabbed her, stopped her and given her a real hug.
***
The first night in Ruze’s life was sleepless.
Three of his brothers were sleeping around him. They had huddled together on instinct that they don’t get separated for the night. Bad enough that one of them was already missing. They were too shy to sleep on top of one another, but they did lie so near that Ruze could hear them all breathing.
He, in the middle of his peacefully passed out kin, could not sleep. There was an ill feeling upon him. If I sleep, something bad will happen and I will not be there to help. He tried to convince himself, what could possibly happen? In a land without death, sickness and suffering? Yet the dread stayed, draped around the nape of his neck. Like a slug. He couldn’t sleep. He tried and tried and couldn’t sleep.
He got up at last, embarrassed that he couldn’t get his own spinning thoughts in line. He would wander around a while, hopefully grow tired, and go back to sleep.
It was 1:46. The soft ambient light of this land, which had disappeared at midnight, was seeping back in. Ruze could see by it, although he knew others could not, in full colour and detail. For him, the darkness drew back. For the Guardian of Invisible Forces, whose eyes could see the truth, darkness was just another degree of light.
His ill feeling thickened when he came under a tall, conical mountain. Ruze looked up at it, insides squirming. Oh. Oh, this dread wasn’t pleasant. Someone was in grave danger. But that was stupid. There was no way anyone here was in true danger.
He began looking for a way up the mountain.
Up in that small, isolated bedroom, he saw her at last, dreaming, stretched out on her back with clasped hands. She was Seeing. Bending time out of place. It made his guts twist. But it was nature to her. Tao the Seer, bound up in the lie she had been living for nearly five hundred years like in a black shadow cloak.
Tao the watcher.
He returned to his brothers and lay down among them. Hopefully he’d get used to the ominous feeling of a Seer doing things to his universe no one should be able to do.
Dawn came before sleep did.
***
Sleep deprivation can be used as torture, Ruze thought as he attempted to pay attention to Krevel’s story. Between starving a man of food, of water and of sleep, he will die first from lack of sleep.
He had slept. A little. Tao didn’t See at day, so what little sleep Ruze had scraped together had been with daylight glaring through his eyelids. Some of it were involuntary naps. Already the king had chided him; he was supposed to sleep at night. Ruze didn’t explain anything to him. It wouldn’t help him get used to the nightly Seeing. The only time he could sleep undisturbed was an hour at dawn. Tao woke up before daybreak, which gave Ruze a bit of respite before things got moving. He looked forward to that hour, slept through it with a vengeance and hated when he was roused from it. It was his only reliable sleep. The only reason he was holding on.
The story was finished. Ruze had no idea what it had been about. But at least he hadn’t nodded off.
“They could have waited until Krevel was done…” – “Yes, well… you know them. Always in a hurry.”
Was it lunchtime yet? The Neverhoodian clock was stupidly inaccurate. Midday was apparently measured in “well I ate until I was full in the morning but now I’m getting kind of hungry again”. It could be anywhere from 11 to 13. Earlier if no good game was on.
Tearrrr-
Ruze froze. Wide awake, he scanned the horizon. His gut screamed as time was twisted all out of proportion, rent and shredded, just over there, behind the Coded Door…
“What’s wrong?” a brother whispered by his ear. Ruze shook his head. A promise was a promise. She was fine. This can’t have been the first time this was happening, she was fine…
He was on his feet and headed for the Coded Door. His dread curdled to an acute, wheezing pain. Even if she was fine, he had to see her. What was the code sequence? Focus, he had to get inside –
“Piss off,” came a voice from the other side of the locked door, “go away.”
“Is Tao there?”
“She’s in the Hall of Records, dumbass. Go away.”
He had missed the correct symbol. No matter, he’d take the shortcut. Why hadn’t he thought of that in the first place?
When Ruze climbed through the window on the upper floor of the Coded House, he was met with a bellow: “I said, go away!” He ignored it. He jumped over the railing to the bottom floor and came face to face with a livid Krlesh.
“Are you stupid?” the misanthrope spluttered. “When I say ‘go away’, is that a fucking invitation? Hey-” he blocked Ruze’s view of something on the floor covered with a white sheet, “my face is over here!”
“Let me see her.”
“There is nothing to see!” His shadow cloak of lies rippled violently. And then…
“Would you teach it to me?” Tao said. Ruze fell back with a moan. Oh Mother, he was going to puke. Those calm words had been torn right out of time’s belly. They were not supposed to be here.
Krlesh was glaring at him, as furious as a dog protecting its owner. If he was alarmed that the Guardian of Invisible Forces was on the verge of fainting, he didn’t show it.
Ruze leaned against the wall. “L-let me see her. Please.”
Tao was saying something else. Krlesh was yelling over her. Ruze was going to fall over any second. But he couldn’t back down. He had to see her. He had to make sure she was alright. A mother, waking at night and finding her newborn isn’t breathing, does not run away.
“What’s with all the shouting?”
Tao was sitting up, black hair spilling on the white sheet, blue fjord stone glinting with power. She stared at them in confusion.
Krlesh whipped around and knelt down by her, brushing her hair from her face, looking into her eyes. “You okay?” he said quietly. “Everything settled down? I’m sorry, I tried to keep him out, but he just wouldn’t leave. He heard you talk a little, but nothing that made sense.” He gave Ruze a hateful glance. “You can fuck off now, you know.”
Ruze didn’t feel like leaving the safety of the wall. Time was ticking freely once more. But the terror was still beating at him in ripples and echoes. His stomach wouldn’t settle. Tao was alright. She was looking at him, and there was pity in her dead black eyes.
He didn’t want to be pitied.
He was halfway up to the upper floor when Tao asked, coldly curious: “Were you scared for me?”
“I shouldn’t have bothered,” Ruze said, pulling himself up. Mother, he wished he wasn’t so clumsy. “You already have a guardian.”
She was saying something else, but he jumped out the window and landed outside.
He felt stupid and exhausted.
***
Ruze woke up with a start. That wasn’t right. He had been sleeping. Actually, soundly sleeping. He’d even had a dream. What was Tao doing awake at 3:20 in the morning?
Sneaking past his brothers, he headed to the Cathead Mountain. He looked up its sheer, silent slope. “Tao?” he called quietly.
In the small bedroom, he discovered the Seer wasn’t in her bed. He looked out the window, forcing himself to calm down. There she was. Sitting on the rim of Bil’s Pit, watching the sky. Legs dangling over the abyss.
She didn’t look up when he sat down beside her. She just curled up, pulling her knees in, sidling away from the edge.
“Can’t sleep?” Ruze asked.
“I can’t talk about it,” she said in a hurry. “I speak my lines aloud in a vision. This time is safe because I’ve never seen it. Fate thinks it’s a good night.” She hesitated, breathless. Then the words spilled from her. “I was afraid you might feel it. As the Guardian of Time. You looked really ill. I won’t tell you anything. Not because Hoborg said so. It’s my own personal code. I’ve heard stories of Seers making prophecies. I never will. I will not drag anyone else down into the hell of inevitability. I’m sorry about Krlesh. I think he hates you, haha. I don’t know how much he has heard. We never talk about it. Couldyou-” She gasped. For a moment only her lips moved. “Could you or one of your brothers kill me?”
It hung suspended over the black abyss. Foul and desperate.
“I’ve wanted to die for so long.”
Her shadow cloak of lies, which had been steadily drawing away as she rambled, was clearing. She was staring at him with dead black eyes full of hope.
“It would be a kindness.”
Ruze looked away. He screwed his eyes shut. He reached out for her and pulled her close to him blindly. He hugged her tight. She frightened him. But he refused to throw her away.
Tao began laughing. “No, fate, no! Don’t… don’t say this is a good thing!”
Ruze held the old Seer from the dark, afraid of her, afraid for her. He held her in his arms for long, painful, endless minutes… until she stopped shaking. Until she said, softly: “You made a beautiful sunset the other day. Could you paint some stars on the sky for me?”
Ruze had never done so, but he tried. The little white lights flickered and drifted across the black. Tao smiled at them and stayed still and no longer laughed nor spoke nor wished for death. They watched the fake stars together.
Until the dawn’s first light drowned their little hopeful lights out.
