There is quite some delay in the next letter dispatched from Reunion to Mist. Rather than sit down to compose right away, the writer at this end set upon the materials he was sent, studying them and the letter with intense fascination. It is only once the workbooks have been several times filled out -- and truly filled out, teeny-tiny letters filling all the available whitespace, so that he may wring all the practice he can from these few precious volumes.
When his reply does come, it is in a few sheets tightly folded together and secured with woolen string; on the outside is written in bold and plaintive letters, "Please, do not put letter in water." The papers wrap around the slim end of a tea brick, a slice of enough weight to brew a just couple of cups -- thankfully, the courier did succeed in keeping the package from getting damp.
Unfurled, the pages are crammed with text; this time, the letters are arranged more neatly in lines across the page, though they're still a little oddly-shaped, as though the author continues to draw each one meticulously as a glyph. The Eorzean is a little easier to understand, too, the sentences more skillfully composed, and the capitalization and spelling have become a little more standard, with cross-outs and corrections here and there.
A letter for - Slick of the Mist by Limsa Lominsa.
I rite write on this day before the holy day of Dark Moon. That day is the day before the holy day of White Moon. That day is the first day of the year of Mol, Qestir, Oronir, and many other of The Tribes, all that come to Reunion. The first day is holy as the middle day of Naadam, but in stead of killing other tribes the warriors only fight un-armed in the bokh and save blades for the sheep and horses. The rituals are many, and the blood of many animals is on the cold ground, the meat for the people and the soul for The Eternal Blue Sky. I make the buuz and think about them.
There is The Sun Father and The Moon Mother, and their house of marrage is The Eternal Blue Sky. In night you see it turns, the tent of The Creators walking over the world. The earth feels the foot prints of The Creators when they step in the shapes of stars, the breath of the earth gathers in them. The animals and plants and people live between the threads of the cloth of The World, and when it moves, they are pulled. And we feel even the small moving of that power, and it makes and destroys our small lives.
I think about the sheep and horses and the souls rising in the air and I think about if The Creators feel them or if their souls are too small to feel.
The writing pauses here for a drawing of a small section of the night sky. The brightest star is drawn with exaggerated diffraction rays to identify it, and constellations are joined by light lines and given names in small print. The largest in this segment, "The Bow And Arrow", is almost identical to the Arrow of Llymlaen well-known to Eorzeans.
I want to know many things, but some things must be hard to know.
I want to have the skill of reading, and I want to go to Limsa Lominsa and to read the memories of the wars and floods. And I want to read the memories of all people with small souls who live and die and dis-appear. I want to learn what is a thingy and how people built it.
... The paragraph continues, but at a slightly different angle with slightly drier ink, as if there was a long delay before the writer decided to continue.
In the place that I was a kit, they do not learn, and they do not re-member. In the memories of The Tribes, in the memories of The South People, are memories of how to do evil. So they do not re-member anything. They re-member only The Creators and how to live the same, one winter after one winter.
I want to learn everything.
Again there was a delay, and finally he concludes in a less heavy tone:
I am very thank full for the learning books. I read them and I wrote in them very much. I hope you can read better what I write now.
I drinked drank the tea of The the Twelveswood. I liked it in water in stead of milk. That is good for I can not drink milk well. The cups of White Moon will be full of milk and airag and it will be very bad for me.
I can only send a small tea. In Reunion it is drank in milk with salt, but I will not think you are strange if you drink it in water for I would like that better also. I would drink it in water with small grass seeds cooked on flat with a small part of butter for that is even more good. I do not know the name of the grass in this language and I do not know if it grows in Limsa Lominsa, but grains like rice cooked just a small bit are very good on top of tea.
The babies are how old? You are helped by a wife or a husband?
I wrote slow, and now this day is the holy day of Dark Moon. I have to clean now. Good bye.
A small parchment envelope made its way to Reunion from the port of Kugane, sealed with a bit of purple wax pressed with a leaf sigil. Inside was a letter printed with neat and slightly uncertain letters along with a small, silver-print photograph.
Dear new friend,
I hope this letter finds you in a happy and safe place. The flyer that came back to Limsa with our shipments sounded interesting, so here I am.
My family and I have a little cottage by the sea in the Mist, by Limsa Lominsa. You can see all the way out til the sky ends from here. I make medicines and write down memories for people so they won’t be forgotten. Hopefully we can trade some stories back and forth in the coming moons.
Be well, and safe trading!
- Slick
[[ For the BRPN penpal exchange - @tenesen-khuu ]]
He didn't think of it much before the letter arrived; an "exchange of written words with the far-away west" sounded intriguing, and he added his name -- or rather, his anonym, Tenesen Khuu -- to the list with hope that it would help him prepare for his journey's next leg, but so busy the village immediately became with the meat-drying that he nearly forgot all about it.
But when the parchment fell into his hands, he was immediately fascinated -- and he has been since.
He lays it on the ground in front of him as he spins more wool, comparing it against the page of Southern Xaelic and Eorzean he begged off a Kha. He spins furiously, eyes darting from letter to reference to letter, lips noiselessly tracing the sounds, mind juggling unfamiliar words and even more unfamiliar symbols. The sun gallops across the sky; spindles fill up; he lays awake in the tent at night, feeling the impossibility of the task, the way it makes his head hurts.
It is an exquisite pain, of a sort he has hoped his whole life to feel.
Some time later an… "envelope", of a sort, finds it way back to the sender's address. A large sheet of parchment has been folded down in an approximation of a proper envelope's shape; where the edges converge, a glop of candlewax was clumsily dripped to seal it, and in lieu of a seal, an image has been delicately drawn in it, perhaps with the tip of a needle: a bell-shaped flower, a gentian.
Opening the letter reveals a document written in an equally strange hand, lines sloping precipitously down the page, each character copied from reference and drawn like a glyph. But while odd, it is legibily Eorzean, just as the text, while not quite idiomatic and at times creatively spelled, is comprehensible:
a letter, for - Slick of the Mist by Limsa Lominsa.
you walk for a sun from the dawn thrown and you see it if you look behind. but you walk more suns and you see it no more. the earth lies out flat to the length of the eye, or the earth just rounds, far hills just ripples. you return only by footprints of your elders in the stars. I have not seen the sea but haragin said the step is the sea of earth, the sea is the sea of water. I see this in your picture and in My mind.
I learn in reunion about the world. people tell their memories, but I only hear the memories of people alive and near. I want to read the written memories even of elders far away, far ago.
just to read a letter now is hard. please, write down letters for me, I want to learn soon. I have qestions. who made your picture, and of what. a cottage is what. the memories you have written down are of who, and where, and the first memories there are from when, and written down by who.
in Limsa Lominsa medicines are made with what. I made medicines with a teacher before. the plants and animals in the north step differ from the south step. over the world the plants and animals must differ even more. the sickness of people could differ also.
I want to learn things I can not learn here.
please, write qestions for me if you have qestions. I can not answer well, but Hopefully more well with time.
There is no signature; one can speculate whether it was purposefully omitted or the writer did not understand the convention of leaving one, but in any case he did not leave space for it on the page this time, cramming into the corner with smaller and smaller letters.
At the top of a hill, from the crest of which the camp's edge can be only just be seen, stands a boy who should not exist.
Many, many generations past, the children of the Creators lived upon the steppe, beneath the Eternal Blue Sky. Their lives were not always peaceful and never easy; at times, they quarreled with each other, or the rain would not come, and young and old died by hunger, dagger, or disease. But they lived. The sun shone upon the grass, and the beasts of the steppe grazed upon it, and the people reaped their milk and meat in the way the Creators had taught them. Thus were they nourished by the land for countless turns, summer after winter, generation after generation, in harmony and obeisance to the Earth.
Then one day, the scouts brought word of wonders they had seen in the south, beyond the steppe and the range of the children of the Creators. Whispers swiftly spread among all tribes of this far-off, fertile land, where strangers, the Southern People, lived fat and indolent lives on the easy bounty. The children of the Creators, who had never known such luxuries as the Southern People enjoyed even existed, were filled with astonishment, then resentment, then greed. They looked at themselves, their bodies tough and strong from their years on the steppe, at the Southern People, weak and puny, and wondered: why should they obey the dictates of Creators and accept such hard and meager lives when they, with their swift horses and keen archers, could take what these undeserving Southern People had? The whispers continued, and the tribes' blood was inflamed with wrath and desire, and soon the horde descended on the south, slaughtering the weaklings and taking their riches for their own.
The children of the Creators had never before enjoyed such overabundance. They not only gorged themselves on food and wine but rolled in perfumes and wrapped themselves up in silks. They even covered themselves in jade and shiny silver, useless ornaments that they had never wanted on the steppe. They were happy -- and yet their greed, far from being sated, only grew. What else, they wondered, could they plunder from the south? What new delights and pleasures could await? They raided more and more, making the Southern People their slaves, burning their homes and killing their families. And their wealth and greed grew and grew in step together; soon nothing was more important to them than increase of their plunder, and they forgot compassion and hospitality, respect for the spirits, harmony with the Earth.
Soon they even forgot thrift, and endurance, and self-denial, all the things that had once made them leaner and stronger than the Southern People. And the Southern People grew angrier and angrier each year. The persecution of the raiders had calloused their soft flesh; their shared sufferings made their bonds of brotherhood grow strong. And then, one summer, when the sun was at its zenith, at last they had enough. While the children of the Creators revelled and feasted drunkenly, the Southern People surrounded them, then set upon them. The slaughter once visited on the children and elderly of the Southern People was returned. The ground ran with blood, and barely one of each family was able to escape, and fewer survived their wounds to struggle back to the steppes.
Those who returned soon realized that they had forgotten the teachings of the Creators, and, naked and starving, many more died. But, slowly and painfully, the few survivors remembered what they could and learned anew what they could not. They remembered how to hunt and how to herd, how to shelter from summer heat and feed the flock through winter cold. They lived -- not with the luxury of the fertile south, but they lived.
They remembered, and their children remembered, with some difficulty. But their grandchildren began to forget, and by the time their great-grandchildren had grown into women and men, again the whispers began to spread across the tribes. The south, once ravaged, had blossomed again, and was said to burst with even greater riches. The young people talked not only of jade and silver but of diamonds and gold, and of how the Southern People had grown soft again, while the children of the Creators were strong. Greed and bloodlust burned in their hearts, and the joyous chorus went up, crying for a new and wonderful war.
Only one tent was quiet; in it, a mother and father mourned. The other tribes cheered at the thought of the prosperity to come -- but the mother and father knew that theirs would be no true prosperity, but an evil medicine that would bring only suffering, again and again and again. And so as the warriors swung into their saddles and turned their horses south, the mother and father rolled up their tent, gathered their herd, and turned away, into the deepest part of the steppe. There, they and their children hunted and herded, suffered the storms and the snows, starved and lost, and lived, as the Creators had long-ago taught, in harmony with the Earth. And when the other tribes returned from the south, bloodied and battered and begging for succor, they would no more speak with them, and turned away.
That is why we live the way we do, away from the other tribes. We keep the old ways, carrying only what we need. Our bodies are thick and strong, but our arrows are for the hunt, and our horses are for herding. We defend ourselves, but we do not murder and plunder, for greed is a hunger that deepens when fed. We honor our ancestors, the spirits, and the Creators, and we live and die between the Earth and the Sky. So it is for all who are truly one of us.
That is what they said.
Many, many winters past, under a black sky that thundered without rain, the Dark Stranger came. Some thought they should have killed her, this infiltrator from the Outside; more thought she should at least have been expelled and left behind, in obedience to the laws of ancient custom. But she appealed to them -- threatened them -- offered handfuls of iron rings, strong colored thread, hunting knives made of what she called steel -- put a hand to her belly and begged. It was the shaman's decision that allowed her to remain, and the rest obeyed, although they were uneasy.
For three moons' nights she slept outside the tents, in the saddle of her black horse. In the day she stood apart or disappeared into the hills to hunt, bringing back a marmot or a gazelle. When one of the men remarked that no woman he'd ever known could shoot a bird out of the air, she went with the hunters the next day to do exactly that; they murmured about the ease with which she pulled back her giant bow and the distance from which she could loose a deadly arrow, not all in complimentary tones. When the day shortened and her body swelled, she sat with the women spinning wool around the fire, and they stared at her jet-dark arms and their covering of scars. From then she slept inside, and they shared with her their food and drink, and they answered her questions, when she spoke -- but would not question or touch her.
She gave birth on a sunless noon, the sky once more black and roaring. No one would come within; she tied the infant's cord herself and wrapped it in her shirt. She nursed it a few moons, sitting astride her horse, eyes on the distant horizon. Then, at the frost, she left. The child was left behind.
None of the women wanted it; it was the shaman who picked him up, carrying him tucked inside his jacket as he drove his own small herd. On mare's milk the child grew withered and limp, and he ought surely to have died once, twice, on many nights. He lived, small and sickly, and cried only softly, when he had breath. From a weak and tiny baby came a weak and tiny youth, dull-eyed and sedate, who when outside would never run and play but sit, silent, on a mound of earth, staring at the grass and the clouds or looking into the distance.
For boys to learn to shoot and wrestle they had to be bold, strong, and bright, full of the blood and vigor of life. He could not run without making himself sick, and airag made him sicker. He was left behind with the women and sheep. His hands were small and nimble enough to cook and to sew -- but more often he burned or mangled what he tended, for his mind and eyes were elsewhere. They'd fix his mistakes with a sigh, remembering that he was good for nothing, this child whom they never should have allowed, a child who shouldn't exist.
"You're different," the shaman would tell him, "and special. You come from hardship, through hardship. And beyond hardship is great destiny. My ancestor made me aware of it, bade me protect and guide you until you are ready. On the reverse of weakness is power, power you must ready yourself to receive."
He shivered instead through a dozen illnesses, receiving nothing but a great dollop of blood on the dawn of his eleventh spring.
That summer when the Dhoro met, the shaman took the boy with him when he traveled between tents, speaking to the families of the ill and afflicted. He helped his mentor into his regalia, then sat quietly to the side, tearing off sprigs of dried thyme to add to the fire. He observed as the shaman pounded his drum and spun, whirled till the glinting mirrors on his robes flashed like lightning or a fall of meteors, and thrummed and screamed in combat with the malignant spirits. He watched the frightened family cry and cling to each other, then gasp in amazement as their ailing mother sat upright. Then he stood and aided the man who, on return from his flight, felt unsteady, and observed the thanks of the family, not only spoken in words but counted out in goods. Then on to the next tent to make diagnoses and dispense advice, to speak blessings or shamanize when appropriate.
At the end of one treatment, when the two had left the tent, the shaman turned to him and asked, "Could you feel it, when the soaring-demon surrendered and took flight and the oppression lifted? Your sensitivity to the spiritual is very strong. Tell me, did you notice the turning point and feel it go?"
He felt nothing.
Their relationship continued, winter after summer after winter after summer. Among their families at their camp, at the greeting of one camp by another, and at the great meets, he followed along and assisted, observing. He smelled a great deal of smoke, burning herbs, and juniper, and he heard many songs, chants, and wails, and the myriad intrigues and tragedies of their clients' families. And the listened hard for spirits and demons, the murmurings of ancestors below and beings above -- but he heard nothing.
His sensitivity was strong -- to the wind, the sky, and the grass. He knew, before the shaman told him, when they passed over an underground river, from the tingling in his feet and the plants he saw growing around them. He watched a family of foxes the rest of the camp never knew denned beside them and knew, from the fluttering of the birds, the very day they had moved on. He knew the iron zud was upon them before it was explained to him what one was, and he knew which animals would first die. Sometimes, in certain places, when he was very quiet and still, he thought he could feel the earth breathing, sometimes deeply, sometimes shallowly, sometimes as if in a peaceful or restless sleep.
He knew the myriad insects and animals, flowers and clouds, rocks and winds, more than his language had named. But whenever his mentor listed for him the types of demons and devils, the names of the heavenly beings, the attributes of the White Old Man or the Very Old Grandmother, he didn't understand.
"It is lore I learned from my master and from the ancestors who have visited me," the shaman said. "When you become a shamaness, your ancestor will teach you the names of the demons and spirits and how to conquer them."
But he knew that would never happen because a boy could not become a shamaness.
In his fifteenth summer, he felt it, long before they stepped into the client's tent. The presence hung like a heavy cloud over the residence, an oppressive miasma, as if the air had been twisted into a thousand invisible threads and knotted into a thick, obstructive blanket.
The shaman did his work, threatened the demon with his staff and dagger, spun to a stop and prayed with the family. The ill girl raised her head and smiled at him, full of hope -- and it was true that the air in the tent had become lighter.
The boy alone kept his eyes on the shadows in the tent, shoulders tense, frowning.
"You should give libation to the cairn at the river-crossing this summer to ensure it does not take offense once again," his mentor advised them.
That won't be enough, the boy thought.
And she did die before summer arrived.
"Sometimes the opposing spirit is more powerful than those I can muster," his mentor said, when he dared to ask.
But how do you know it is that? How can you be content with such an answer and move on? How much -- how little -- do you really understand?
He needed to understand.
He began to watch the shamanizing with doubled attention. He visited the cairns himself, standing with his bare feet on the earth and staring at them, searching. He left the tent one night to climb up the slope to a burial site, a place the shaman had warned him to never set foot, lest the ancestors take offense. He lay among the rocks and bones; he kicked one off the mountainside. There was no evil there, no twisted air and shuddering earth -- not like the plains they sometimes crossed that smelled like ancient, dried-up blood.
The shaman named demons and spirits and ancestors confidently; the boy lay on his back and looked up at the stars and tried to count how many of them had no names.
A plague swept through; he should have been stricken, but he wasn't. Instead, the camp's newest-born daughter went limp in his arms, drowned, as he tried to revive her.
"The old ways are hard to live by."
He cursed the old ways.
Many, many nights later, the boy who stands at the top of the hill looks down at the sheath in his hands. He pulls the knife from it, twists it in his hands -- sees in it his blurry reflection.
Steel.
He looks up at the sky full of stars; he looks back at the distant shape of the camp.
He looks forward -- towards the south.
On his back is the staff of the shaman, one that he was told could only be his when he at last became a shamaness. He has held it before, taken it out into the darkness for years, and practiced the dance of fire; with no ancestor, no possession, no initiation, he bent it to his will nevertheless. Another law of ancient custom he defied, to be added to the list of dozens, hundreds.
But the ancient customs are not his, just as the ancestors are not his, just as the Dhoro are not his. The old ways are not good enough for him. The ancient understanding, the wisdom of ages, the teachings of the Creators -- none of them are good enough for him.
This tiny corner of the steppe, where they hide from the vastness of the world, fearful of the unknown, is not enough.
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