There is one being from the Else who works for the University. Not because it’s replacing someone; the school has its Name.
It was young, once, and hungry, and fond of marbles, beautiful worthless things that they were, a human sort of glamour. It played marbles with students, by rules arcane and unexplained, and paid out just enough heart’s desires that they still sought it out with their marbles even though more often it would win an eye, or both, delicious things like soft, delicate marbles, and sometimes it won more than that and sucked the marrow from a student’s bones, leaving the rest for the Groundskeepers to clean up.
But it had been young. Cocky. It hadn’t understood how quickly a human can learn, new skills gained in just a few years, or how determined a human can be. Most vitally, it hadn’t learned what hustling was in time to avoid being hustled by the lover of one on whose marrow it had fed. “Wager nothing you can’t afford to lose,” the humans told each other, but it had bet a Name against a Name, overconfident, and it had lost. The one who won its Name gifted it to the University (traded it for nothing, as if it was worthless) and then went back to the world of Iron and never again touched a place where the borders were thin.
The school administration had never been put into such a position before. (It did not understand their dilemma until much later, the difficulty of deciding whether to let a killer go free or to keep it enslaved. It took it a long time to comprehend the value that humans place on the freedom of others, and on their own status as people-who-do-not-own-people.) The Dean decided that it would be given a job. It spent many years as a guard, a member of campus security, paid (although they need not have paid it; they had its Name) in pig’s eyes and cow’s eyes and sometimes delicious-lovely goat’s eyes as a “bonus” when it saved a student or two from being killed or stolen.
The girl who started talking to it was called Marbles, and it did not save her from anything from the Else, only scared off a drunk boy who had been trying to follow her home. Marbles stayed to talk to it, gave it her use- name, and offered it a marble “in thanks.”
“No debt is owed,” it said, the words vile in its mouth. It wanted that marble, an end-of-the-day, a unique blend of orange and purple. “I am permitted to make no trades.”
“Freely given, then,” Marbles said, and she began to visit with it during its “time off” (another strange human concept), and shared her marbles with it, playing games for no stakes at all, with rules they invented together as they went. The students began to call it Friend-of-Marbles, and it was a relief to have a name that was its own and was true, even if it wasn’t its True Name.
Then Marbles was Taken. Her human friends came to it, begged it to help, but it could make no trades to empower them, could not leave its post to seek her. They cursed at it - not curses with power, merely words, but they hurt it all the same, “false-friend” and “Marbles should have known not to trust a–” and the vilest invectives they could think of, but it was Marbles’ friend, and Marbles had trusted it, and as they turned to leave, it said, “Wait,” and breathed yearning onto the first marble that Marbles had given it, the orange-purple end-of-the-day, unique in all the world, and held it out.
“Freely given,” it said, wrestling to get the vile words out, because they would have traded with it, would have given up much for this, but it was not allowed. “Set it down and it will roll towards her, I swear it thrice; though I cannot prevent there from being danger along the way.”
They gave it suspicious looks, but they took the marble, set it down on the path and traded glances with each other when it rolled uphill, towards the woods. One of them nodded to Friend-of-Marbles, and they set off, Questing.
Days passed, seven and then seven times seven, before it saw Marbles again, although one of her human friends had returned its marble to it after only three. “She’s back,” they said. “She’s not okay yet, but she’s talking to someone in counseling. Your gift helped us find her.”
She was still not okay when she came to talk to it.
“I wanted to say goodbye,” she said. “I’m going back.”
“To the world of Iron?” it asked, but it knew that the answer would be no. Her eyes had been such a rich, lovely brown before, and now they were grey and empty, and she seemed less than before, her clothes hanging off her loosely.
“All I wanted when I was in the Spring lands was to get back here,” she said, looking at the ground. “But… it was so beautiful.” She talked about the flowers, the sight of them, the smell of them; about the music they had played in the Spring court, and how every sound it had heard since had grated on her ears in comparison; and she had been too canny to eat, but she drank from a clear spring, and she could not help but taste the artificiality of packaged food now, and the decay in everything else, the way that everything grew from the moldering remains of what had gone before and began to turn bad itself as soon as it had ripened. “I wish I could just forget,” she said, “But I can’t. So I’m going back.”
“You could give them to me,” Friend-of-Marbles suggested. “I was of the Spring lands, once; they would be no burden on me.” If it breathed, it would have held its breath in suspense. It wanted those memories, and it wanted its friend back, but it could offer nothing in recompense, was allowed to make no deals.
“I’ll try anything, at this point,” Marbles said. “I freely give you my memories of the Spring lands.”
Oh, they were delicious, a taste of home like a breath of fresh air. It was careful, more careful than it truly had to be, by the terms of the not-a-deal they had made; it took all of her memories of the Spring lands, but let her remember remembering them, though not what she had remembered. When it finished, it was full, sated in a way that eyes did not touch (delicious though the squish-pop of them was), and Marbles’ eyes were brown again.
“Thank you,” Marbles said unwisely, and flung her arms around it.
“There is no debt,” Friend-of-Marbles said, and held her close.
The next day, the Dean and a staff member it did not recognize approached it, looking cautious but hopeful.
“I’m Marbles’ therapist,” the one who was not the Dean said. “She told me what you did, and gave me permission to talk about it.”
“I took only what was freely given,” it said defensively. “And I could have taken more - she was not careful - but did not.”
“We’re not upset with you,” the Dean assured it. “We wanted to ask if you could do it again. And if maybe you’d like a different job.”
And that was how Friend-of-Marbles (who was just called Marbles now, many years after the original Marbles had done what mortals must eventually do) began to work at the student counseling center. It learned, over the years, that some students who had been Elsewhere only needed to talk to someone who would understand, who would listen and not judge (which the human counselors would have done, too, but some of the students who had wandered in the Else thought themselves monsters, and were more comfortable talking to something monstrous).
It took memories only rarely and sparingly, memories of Spring, for Autumn memories could be shed like leaves, but Spring memories would take root and grow, if allowed. The students always offered more, desperate to be free, but it learned to be discerning, taking one song, one taste, one impossible color.
(Sometimes, students offered it other memories, memories that haunted them in other ways, but it learned quickly that for them, knowing what had happened but not remembering soon became worse than remembering had been; and so it did not consume those memories but only held them temporarily, giving them back at the start of each weekly session and taking them once again at the end if the student asked it to. And eventually, they would stop asking.)
The school still gives it payment in eyes and marrow-bones, but Marbles dines well on memories too beautiful to bear, and sometimes appreciative students will give it a marble, tiny false gems, a human glamour.
