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Sea of Thieves (2021)
“This,” says La Jongleuse, seated backwards and upside down on a rotting
tavern chair between two frilly pillars of kelp, “is a ridiculous story.”
Across the table, the thief is hunched in green brocade, sequined and salt-crusted, the color of slime in ships’ entrails. She whispers, though La Calenture is empty but for her and the pantalooned fool, “I haven’t started yet.”
“You said it was a tall tale.”
“I ordered salt ale.”
La Jongleuse’s spidery hands clasp an imaginary lute, strike invisible chords on invisible strings. “O sing to me, muse, a most towering tale / of one copper-haired thief and her cup of salt ale – that’s consonance, so you know, and beseeching the muse harks back to ancient tradition, which is a clever trick – why do you look as if you’re about to be sick? I prefer coins as payment, easier to sweep into a pocket, less…wet-”
“Not necessarily,” says the copper-haired thief, and then shakes herself. “I mean – you shouldn’t sing of me.”
“Or what? Miséricorde à minuit? Dear girl, even la guillotine would dance if it heard me sing.” 
The thief chokes politely on her salt ale. Still hoarse, she says, “There’s something you should know.”
La Jongleuse’s pointy-toed shoes slide to the floor with a sticky-sounding shlap. 
All at once the fool is sitting upright, and instead of a face, the thief is gazing into the mass of motley ribbon dangling from the brim of the fool’s plumed velvet hat. 
Then two hands, recently plucking at a nonexistent lute, reach up and part the ribbons with a flourish, revealing a long nose at the center of a moon-pale face. Tendrils of black hair curlicue to either side. Eyes, mussel-black and scimitar-sharp, mirth flashing in their depths like silver coins, fix upon the thief with a sudden intensity. “I am only a fool by occupation. I know the Spinning Court hunts you – the alchemists decoct you by quicksilver and seafoam, the spiral priests speak your death in stanzas over spiral rosaries, L’Ordre des Entrailles Sanglantes seeks you with little blades inside infant beasties – yet you are here, in this corpse of a tavern, choking on salted ale, begging wisdom off a fool.”
  “Only by occupation,” says the thief dully, and half-toasts the empty air.
“What they will do to you when they catch you, even I would shudder to sing.”
“My thanks.”
“Oh, not out of respect. To hear how La Dame d’Enfer flayed your muscles into red petticoats might put people off their drinks, which I am not paid for. Or how she fermented you whole into sweet ritual wine, or packed your mouth full of salt and stitched it shut, or – you’ll enjoy this – took a live squid, and-”
“I thought you preferred getting paid in coin,” says the thief, who is looking rather green beneath her freckles. 
“Coin,” says La Jongleuse, shrugging in a wide, practiced motion that makes her sleeves billow outwards like two sails. “And stories, to feed my poesy. Though, should some Spinning Court lout interrupt us halfway through, I can only promise to sing you a tasteful funeral dirge as they drag you away with a butcher’s hook through both your feet. That happened, once. The poor boy sobbed all the way to the door – ’twas my song moved him to tears.”
“You’re too kind,” says the thief, whose name is Milou. 
La Jongleuse props her elbows upon the greasy table, and her head upon her hands, and gazes at Milou. The wavering tavern light gives the fool’s eyes the dizzying appearance of stars twirling under black water; Milou is struck by the mad sensation that the entirety of La Jongleuse’s face is a stage, and in drawing the ribbons back from her features she has drawn the curtains for a play. 
The fool says, “Go on. Tell me a story.”
§
At the whirling emerald heart of the salt-sea of Sycorax, a thief prowled upon cathedral steps, barnacled and brine-slimed and lined with half-crumbled lapis archways that towered into the sunless sky. Whole ships could sail beneath each arch, a whole ship on each vivid blue stair, and where the stairs ended, the organic mass of the cathedral spiraled up and out in spires and nautilene coils, like a coral reef set to stone, or an immense organ in a church.   
She was a marionette in comparison, a doll’s doll, a toy-sized thief in green and gold, orange-haired and shoeless. She had come in a dinghy, letting the currents carry her to the steps, so as not to stir the water and wake anything asleep beneath the waves.
Now the rock was cold and slippery beneath her bare feet as she darted upwards, under archways, clambering over the places where the sea lashed at her through crevices in the stairs. 
Always the cathedral grew overhead, blue as tears. At long last the thief stood framed in the doorway.
And saw – she did not know what.
A lapis nave, a lapis basin, enough lapis archways for an entire city decaying upside-down upon the ceiling. The walls were so luridly blue she might have been barefoot at the bottom of the ocean, and the rippling play of the light across her face might have been the watery light of the surface fathoms above, pressing down on her lungs and the stems of her eyes. She might have slipped upon the stairs and this was her afterlife, a cathedral that looked as if it had drowned alongside her. It was not entirely unbelievable.
Yet, the altar – she supposed it had to be the altar; as a thief, her only real religion was thievery, and as such prayer took place with her hands in other peoples’ pockets. Yet she thought this was abnormal.
She couldn’t tell what it was, besides a bizarre sculpture: a skeletal conch shell, glistening wet as though newly harvested from the inside of a body, paler than skin, paler than anything living – yet crusted with brine and opal and cabochon rubies, swirling gold and tourmaline. And inside, as though the shell were a womb, the crook of an elbow, the curve of a foot, the knobbled pathway of a spine…until, pouring out of the shell, the crescent-moons of two closed eyelids, a carven face, skin cold and luminous as a pearl fresh-molded into the anatomy of a girl, no older than Milou herself.
Countless times the thief had been tossed to the sea with her wrists and ankles bound in rope, but never, until she looked at this gleaming girl, had she felt so close to drowning. For the first time in all her sordid life Milou felt an inkling of what might lead a person to worship.
And the jewels were likely worth a lot of money.
The girl’s flesh was crusted with them too, like precious, glittering infections, some that looked like organs sculpted onto the outsides of her body. 
Milou took a single step forward, and her foot knocked against something small and hard, sending it skittering towards the altar. 
She picked it up to squint at it, finding her eyes unwilling to leave the pearl-skinned girl for even a moment. 
It was a shell. Or something like a shell, striped black and amber in a pattern that almost resembled slitted eyes, with calcified tendrils sprouting off each side of its spiral. It was very small, about the size of a coin. 
She looked at it for a long moment, and then slipped it into her pocket.
From another pocket she drew a dagger with a blunt, half-shattered blade. 
The largest gem on the pearlmaid’s body was inlaid atop her heart, an intricate, anatomical labyrinth of garnet so deep that in the girl’s own radiance, blood appeared to pulse through its facets.
Milou levered the dagger into the place where garnet met pearl, and began to push. Nothing happened.
She pushed harder, drove her entire weight into the blade; already she was picturing, with a tinge of regret, how she’d have to shatter the heart with a chunk of lapis if the whole thing didn’t come free.
With all the strength in her spindly arms, the thief gave the dagger a final shove.
There was a resounding, crystalline crack as the dagger finally sank, not beneath the jewel, but deep into the pearlmaid’s chest.
For the space of a single breath, there was only the crashing of the waves.
Then pearlescent slime began to gush from the wound. 
Milou snatched her arms back, instinctively, but not fast enough.
“Eugh,” said the thief, and then, “Eugh,” once more, with feeling.
It was on her hands. It was cold. The fact that the altar had bled was immediately less pressing than the fact that the altar had bled on her, and she flapped her wrists through the air trying to get it off, only to freeze a heartbeat later. 
The altar had moved.
Just a twitch – deep inside the conch shell, the arch of a foot. Then the slow twist of a spine. Pearly elbows rose, serpentine, to either side. Fingers unfurled, knuckle by knuckle. Jeweled organs clattered to the floor. 
“Ma déesse,” said the thief without meaning to, as the pearlmaid uncoiled, painfully slow, from the lip of the shell, and paused half-in and half-out. Her flesh took the drowned blue of the light and turned it silvery-gold; shrunk to hand’s length, she might have been a pendant for an empress. 
Then the pearlmaid opened her eyes and Milou could think of nothing else in the world.
Opal eyes. 
No irises, no pupils, just a thousand thousand flecks of every-color light. 
There was no thief-shaped fleck in those eyes, nothing to suggest the pearlmaid even saw Milou, yet one of her bright hands travelled up across bright flesh to the dagger buried in her chest, under where the garnet heart had been, where her actual heart would be, if her jeweler had given her one under all that pearl. It didn’t seem that she felt any pain, yet the thief found her mouth opening to apologize for stabbing her. 
Which was ridiculous. She was a thief. She hadn’t known the girl was alive, if a gemstone girl asleep inside a conch-shell could be considered alive. And the girl was still covered in that luminescent muck, like the insides of an egg, which, besides being gross, suggested that she had just been…born, somehow, even though she looked to be around Milou’s age, if not younger. 
The very cleverest of thieves would take the jewels and vanish back into the sea, and never think again of cathedrals or opal eyes. There was no reason to stand here any longer. Milou had gotten what she had come for, after all. 
Yet – those opals. Could they see her at all? 
The thief stood so close to the altar, the pearlmaid just above her in the shell, mimicking every divine tableau Milou had ever seen painted on the walls of shrines…if she left now, she would never know what the girl was, where the girl had come from, who had sculpted her and abandoned her in the Sea of Sycorax…and the girl, she thought, was bending towards her ever so slightly as though she wanted to whisper, and it was beyond Milou’s power not to move forward as well, into that unknown, like the most un-clever of thieves, until she too was haloed in the girl’s cold glow…
The pearlmaid’s lips parted; Milou prepared herself for divine revelation. 
With a horrible, gargling sound, the pearlmaid vomited an entire pool of that iridescent slime onto the cathedral floor, splattering Milou’s feet, legs, and tunic. 
Like before, the slime was cold, and viscous, and shimmered prettily in the light. 
There were no words strong enough to express what the thief felt in that moment, yet her mouth had scarcely fallen open to try when – as if being vomited upon had not been horrid enough – the pearlmaid’s hands snaked forward to clamp closed around Milou’s neck.
Milou choked, toppling to the floor, and the pearlmaid came with her, sliding free of the conch shell to sprawl in a slimy mass atop the thief. Great glistening gobbets of that luminous muck hung from every inch of her pearled body; this close, each pupil-less eye was an opal expanse of loathing, of such a boiling, inhuman hatred that if the thief were not trapped on the floor slowly dying, she would have leapt from the nearest ledge and tried her luck with the sea monsters instead.
Struck as she was by the slime and the loathing and the strangled sounds coming out of her own throat, the thief did not realize that the girl was talking to her until the pearlmaid’s face had lowered to a mere inch away from her own. 
Her voice was not the voice of a living thing, but a living thing thrice-drowned, every soft inner tissue scraped raw and salted, each word a fresh wound. 
She was murmuring, low and feverish, and Milou only caught the very end.
She’d said, “Is there any worse insult than an incompetent assassin?”
Vomit, Milou would have answered, getting vomited on, but the girl’s hands were tightening even as she spoke, and rainbow sparks were waltzing across the thief’s vision, and all she managed to wheeze out was, “Not!”
Which made the pearlmaid’s hands freeze in their choking motion, but only for a fraction of a second.
“Not?” the pearlmaid hissed. “You lie as poorly as you murder. Whose dagger is buried to the hilt in my heart?”
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Sarasola (2020)
Springtime in space. Things bloom. 
Flowers. Plagues. 
Plagues like flowers under skin. 
Due to the organic nature of these items, I cannot pretend to understand them. I am that cliche of a software engineer, who prefers curling wire to veins and cold metal to flesh – an unforgivable lack of originality in my code. 
My name is Pippistrellis, and I live inside the rings of old, baroque glass that comprise the space station Sarasola. At its heart, the aqua blaze of a neutron star. In its various wings, the remains of a city. 
And the remains of her: Florimell, her name like a symptom of the plague we called the Bloom for the way bruises would open like galaxies under flesh, until the victim’s body was purple and black and green and dying. A sign that humans were not meant to live in the void, for the void would consume them from within. 
Or that was what Florimell believed, and that belief fueled her search for a cure, planting slivers of dark matter to take root within the maze of the human body, where it would billow in starry clouds from her test subjects’ veins. I was the only one who did not perish, and Musidora, a guardswoman from the old aristocratic sector. Dark matter lived within us. We could control it – become it. But this was not a cure, for we were no longer human. 
Little did we know Florimell had been experimenting upon herself; little did we know she believed there was something deeper to be found in the Sarasola, some divine purpose that had rejected those with the Bloom, and embraced those few which dark matter had embraced. We would discover only after she had slaughtered a third of the Sarasola’s population that she had planted within herself more dark matter than Musidora and I together, so much that her skull had split apart, and where once had lived a pallid face, now a rippling, star-speckled void blossomed up from her neck. 
She did not wish to hurt Musidora or me, as we too had been embraced by the void, yet we were the only ones that might fight her and survive. 
For ten bloody months we clashed, and the death toll aboard the Sarasola soared.
In my heart I knew we could not kill her. 
Yet at the end of our 4,475th rotation around the white dwarf star Cardenna, on a day that would become story and poem and song, I – who had been injured early in the fight – watched with an audience of thousands as Musidora fought Florimell at the innermost spiral of the Sarasola, where once had stood the throne of the old monarch and now was a hall of mirrored light, reflecting the galaxy beneath our feet and above our heads as the rosy plasma blade of Musidora’s rapier stabbed Florimell through whatever was left of her heart. 
A thousand thousand eyes watched her body melt into dark matter, and vanish.
Evadne, the other scientist who had been in charge of finding a cure, took control of the Sarasola after that. And we – Musidora and me, the living, breathing human-shaped receptacles of dark matter, the heroes of every story, beloved by all – well, what was there for us? 
I went back to my job as a systems engineer, alone in the swirling metal corridors of the Sarasola’s innards, the only one of my colleagues who Florimell hadn’t slaughtered yet guiltily relieved to be alone. I could smile when people wrung my hands between theirs and thanked me for my heroism; I could make blossoms of dark matter flower from my fingertips before laughing children. Yet I knew it was only a matter of time before I began to remind them of her, possessed of her same abilities, one of her experiments that only luck had left alive. 
So I vanished, as best I could. I would have been content to vanish for the rest of my days, and if the dark matter in my veins never let me die I would have been content to wander the empty, humming halls of the Sarasola’s power grid until that died, too, and maybe then I would drift out into space, my own dark matter freed from the prison of my anatomy. 
But Evadne found me. 
She had traded her lab coat for something long and trailing and teal, something more fitting of her new position that would not remind the people too much of the fact that Florimell had once been her closest colleague. Her violet eyes traced the bunches of wires in my hand, like veins in the blinking light, and she said, “I need you to do something for me.”
I did not move. Did not release my handful of wires.
She said, “I am concerned for Musidora. She has been acting – strangely. Wandering the corridors, murmuring to herself. She is spending long hours in the lab again, using her own dark matter, heedless of who is watching. I do not know what she is doing. It is as if she is searching for something. Yet her power makes people uneasy; it is a reminder of a time they would rather forget.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Talk to her. Find out what she wants. She cannot carry on like this. Florimell is dead. There is nothing to fear anymore, nothing to fight. Yet, if Musidora continues using her power out in the open – if the people begin to fear she has lost her mind-”
“Has she lost her mind?”
The lights flickered in the hallway behind me, tinting Evadne’s eyes from violet to lavender. She said, “In truth, there is no telling what long-term effects dark matter might have upon your physiology. I wish I could give you a better answer. Yet the issue, currently, is that everyone knows your stories. They know how greatly our experiments hurt you, in the beginning. It is possible that some might see Musidora’s past as a reason for her to retaliate against me, and the Sarasola-”
“You think she will become like Florimell?”
“Of course not. I would merely like you to speak with her. And if there is anything in your conversation that piques your concern, I would like you to tell me. I am sure you do not wish anything to disturb the Sarasola’s newfound peace.”
When I do not respond, Evadne only dips her head to me, and turns away.
I watch her go, understanding, unwittingly, everything she did not say. 
It would have been better for her – for everyone – if the both of us had died, along with Florimell, in that final battle. Everyone knows what to do with a dead hero. They could sing our songs in peace, erect great statues of us and lay pale, genetically-modified flowers at our feet. But for us to remain living – for the people we saved to be able to see us roaming the halls, dull-eyed and listless, to recall that the powers with which we killed Florimell are the powers that make us exactly like her – who could blame them for feeling uneasy? When I try to sleep I still see Musidora, her golden eyes afire, dark matter wavering out of her wounds, her rapier buried to the hilt in Florimell’s chest.
Heroes are useful in wartime, but once they’ve slaughtered their final enemy, they are only left standing where that enemy once stood, with that much more blood on their hands.
In truth, what Evadne has asked me for is enormous.
If I tell her that Musidora has lost her mind, if I demonstrate any amount of concern for Musidora’s psychological state – actually, I do not know what will happen. Perhaps, in the worst case scenario, Evadne will try to have her killed. Yet it would take more than one hundred soldiers – more than one thousand – to kill Musidora. Musidora is exponentially more powerful than I, so if she resisted, she would be more than capable of destroying the entire Sarasola. To avoid that outcome, Evadne would doubtless opt for a quieter assassination. A knife in the back, or through the heart, like Florimell. She would ask me to do it. I know she would. 
She made us what we are, and now that our use is through, she would have us destroy one another.
But I cannot feel any anger towards her. Unethical though her attempts have been, Evadne has only ever been trying to save the Sarasola.
§
I have always been a good pawn.
I do as Evadne asked, and find Musidora standing outside the bridge, rapier in hand, gazing intently at the place where her hand wraps around its hilt. 
If I did not know the day for myself, I could believe this was any time at all, past or present. Musidora looks as she always does: silver-pale hair, single-lidded golden eyes, the ivory and gold and dusky rose of her guard uniform perfectly pressed and buttoned though she has nothing and no one left to guard. The plasma of her rapier’s blade buzzes, very slightly, pink sparks dancing within. 
She does not turn as I approach, only continues to gaze at her rapier as though she is reading something there in the sparks.
Without looking up, she says, “I cannot talk to you right now, Pippistrellis.”
“Why? What are you doing?”
She does look at me, then, and I try to read her expression as if it were code. It is a new expression, which says a great deal, for when you have fought battles and weathered peacetime beside someone, there are very few faces left to be seen. And I am not good at reading faces, but what I see now is a raw, wild desperation, tempered by a resignation that seems to lend weight to her limbs. There is something almost mournful to the set of her mouth, but I blink, and she only looks as she always does.
I say, “Evadne sent me to speak with you. She said that you have been acting oddly, and she is…concerned for you.”
Musidora exhales, almost a laugh, but even though her face does not change her breath comes slightly uneven. “I am sure she is. But it is no use, now. A day earlier, maybe…”
“Why? What has changed?”
She frowns. The gold of her eyes slices at me, seems to reach beneath my skin. “I could tell you,” she says. “You would believe me, I think. You would not thank me for the knowledge, though I have wondered, these past months, if you know already – if you have seen, and suspected – if she showed you-”
The cold beginnings of dread raise goosebumps on the back of my neck. There is only one ‘she’ to whom Musidora might refer, and yet…I had not entirely believed Evadne’s worries were founded, and I did not know that I believed them now…and yet…
“What did Florimell show you?” I breathe.
But Musidora is no longer looking at me. She says, “I wish you had not found me. You are not culpable in any of this, though I have no doubt they will seek to blame you. You should return to your work. I am sorry, Pippistrellis. I was glad to fight beside you, though I hope you never need fight again. Perhaps, in the end, it will be only the two of us left in this entire universe, and we will see each other once more.”
She sheaths her rapier and strides past me, onto the bridge.
And I see, from the back, what she had been holding in her other hand. 
It is a pistol, a relic of the Sarasola’s grander past, lacquered cream and gold, with roses blooming along the handle, that fires burning bullets of concentrated light.
The voices reach me, then: high and low, male and female, the lilt of Lord Astorga, the low grumble of Lady Rosellius. They are having a council meeting, which means that presiding over them is-
“Musidora? Whatever are you doing here? The council is in session-” Evadne’s voice, carrying over all the others.
I step onto the bridge, one of a thousand arching pathways that lead to the platform at the very center, all made of glass, all dazzling rainbow in the light of the stars visible through every wall. On the glass far beneath, several hundred citizens sit or stand or walk about, come to hear the public meeting or simply passing through to other parts of the station. At the center of the platform is a long, mirrored table, and seated around the table are various council members, comprised of scientists in white coats, members of the old aristocracy dressed in faded velvet and brocade, and citizen representatives of the various sectors, garbed in a motley array of rose and teal and gold. 
Only Evadne is standing, silhouetted against the opaline dance of the lights on the Sarasola’s wall, towering to a cathedral-arch thousands of feet above her head. 
Musidora is moving towards her on the platform, swift-footed. No one appears to have noticed what she is carrying. No one looks alarmed, only annoyed, or intrigued, at this interruption, wondering what business the hero of the Sarasola has with the council.
The hero of the Sarasola pauses halfway across the bridge, and, before a thousand eyes, raises the pistol.
There is no time to move, no time to blink, or cry out, before she fires, once, with a sound that reverberates through the glass hall like a thousand crystals shattering. 
And Evadne falls, the fluttering teal of her robes trailing through the air in slow motion. As far away as I am, I can barely make out the red blooming across her chest, like a rose, like a second heart. 
She tips backwards off the platform and plummets to the floor below, where she lands with an unwholesome crack.
There is a single moment of dead quiet.
Then the screaming begins, a thousand voices shouting and shrieking and arguing, running feet on the other beams of the bridge, the private security forces that belong to the richer council members and Evadne herself, dressed in aquamarine with gold buttons, many of them Musidora’s old colleagues.
I am still watching the place where Evadne fell, still frozen at the sound of the gun, when Musidora sprints past me, back the way she’d come, fingers still clutching the pistol. 
She shot Evadne. The gunshot echoes in my mind. The fall. The bloom of red. Musidora had killed Florimell, and now she had killed Evadne. A tyrant, and, perhaps, another tyrant, a better breed of tyrant, but a tyrant nonetheless, who had made us what we were. I had spoken to Musidora mere moments earlier. She had apologized. She had said I would believe her. Then she had shot Evadne. 
Before I have even registered that I am moving, I am running after Musidora, following the faint sound of her footsteps. At the speed she is going, no one else could keep up with her. There are several times I almost lose her, but I have a suspicion as to where she is going, and once I cut through the engineering tunnels, I am proven to be right.
I am already standing before the escape pods when she arrives, both of us panting. 
Whatever raw desperation I had seen in her eyes has been given full-rein, and for a wild moment, I wonder if she will simply raise the gun, and shoot me. If that would even work, though I suppose a rapier through the heart is what killed Florimell. 
But she does not raise her pistol, nor draw her rapier.
She only says, between gasping breaths, “Pippistrellis. Let me go.”
I don’t move. Somewhere in my mind I am still watching Evadne fall.
I only say, “Why?”
She glances over her shoulder. No footsteps, yet, though no doubt it will not take them long to realize where she has gone. “I would tell you if I had time, but I don’t. Please. Pippistrellis. Let me go. If they catch you here they will never believe you had no hand in this. Please.”
My own heart is racing. She had shot Evadne. After everything we had done, every battle we had fought, all the thousands who had died, all we had done to install Evadne in Florimell’s place. But I…I had never trusted Evadne, not really. In fact, there was no one on the Sarasola that I trusted, no one that I cared about, no one who might have cared for me. Except Musidora.
I spin around, abruptly, and my fingertips dart across the launchpad. 
“What are you doing?”
I do not answer her, not until the tracking function has been disabled and one of the pod doors is open and ready for boarding.
“I am coming with you,” I say, and step inside the pod.
She opens her mouth to argue, yet she has no choice but to follow me inside. Before I can launch the pod, however, she catches my wrist.
“Pippistrellis,” she says, deadly serious. “You cannot come with me. You have a life here. If you leave now you will never be able to come back. You will be hunted for as long as you live, and if you are ever caught-”
For a moment I only look at her, and I know I look as haunted as she does. Memories of countless battles, countless near-deaths, countless events in the early peace-time where we had been paraded around, forced to shake hands and smile at people who had seen us bleeding dark matter, flash between us. 
I say, simply, “There is nothing for me here.”
Her grip on my wrist loosens, and I complete the launch sequence.
The pod door slides shut. 
As the first guards sprint into the docking bay, our pod, a glimmering oval of glass, slips soundlessly from its moorings and shoots forward into deep space.
§
And we are alone.
I am accustomed to small things: keys, and screens, and wires. It is easy to forget, with an engineer’s focus on the mechanics surrounding me, that what truly surrounds me is this brilliant, glittering abyss. No walls. No code. Only Musidora and I in our sliver of opaline glass, neither of us moving, or speaking. 
We sit across from one another as stars dart past the pod. There is no hurry, as it will take a supremely talented hacker to undo what I have done to this pod’s tracking function. 
Musidora is not looking at the void outside, only at the weapon in her hand. 
I cannot say how much time has passed, precisely, before she starts to speak.
“I hardly know where to begin,” she says. “Except – you know that Florimell believed there was something deeper to all of this – to us, our power, the Sarasola itself. She would speak to us as we fought, ask us if we could feel it. And sometimes I thought I almost could. The night before the final battle, she asked me to meet her. She said she would explain everything. She said that if I knew, I would not fight her any longer, that I would realize she was right. I – I told her I would. I had almost made up my mind to join her.” She looks down, away. “I am not proud of this. And I would have joined her, too, if not for that final battle. Everyone was watching. I couldn’t do it. She knew – Florimell knew – that I was on the verge of joining her. You must know that the final blow I struck her, right through her heart, would have been impossible otherwise. She would never have let either of us get that close.”
In my mind, I see Musidora striking that blow, again and again. And I know she is right. I think somewhere in my mind I have always known this, that Florimell was an impossible enemy, that there was something off about that final battle. 
Musidora’s eyes flick to mine, her gaze jagged. She says, “Florimell showed me something. In those last moments – when I was the only one close enough to hear.”
“What was it?”
“A symbol,” says Musidora, leaning closer to me, dropping her voice though there is no one who might hear us. “In dark matter, she showed me. Like a rose, a spiral curving inwards. I felt that I had seen it somewhere, before, but then my blade was in her heart and I could ask her no questions…but I tried to find it. In books, in the laboratory, in the architecture of the Sarasola.”
“And did you find it?”
She swallows. There it is again, that mad desperation in her eyes like two golden planets. “Everywhere. Everywhere. At first I believed I would never see it again – that perhaps I had imagined whatever it was that had allowed me to stab her heart. And indeed I did not find it in books, nor her endless pages of lab reports. Yet one day when I gazed out through the Sarasola’s walls, I thought I saw a constellation in the shape of a rose. But we sailed past, and it drifted apart into disparate systems. When I stood upon the bridge and looked down, I thought I saw it formed by the masses of people, all walking in a spiral. I poured cream into my tea, and it formed a rose. Once, writing, I knocked a pot of ink with my elbow and it spilled in the shape of that rose. I practiced with my sword, accidentally slicing my arm, and when I bled my blood dripped into a spiral. When I examined my own cells beneath a microscope, I saw roses. Pippistrellis, I thought I was mad. That perhaps there were no roses spiraling out of blood and cream and ink, that it was all in my mind. That Florimell had infected me with more than dark matter. But I cannot believe that I am mad. I have never felt mad. That is how I have spent the last months.”
I blink, twice. Wondering if I would have seen roses, had I ever thought to look. “But – how did this rose lead you to assassinate Evadne?”
“It was not the rose,” says Musidora. “It was her.”
“Florimell? That cannot be – unless she left you instructions of some form, but you have already said that-”
“No,” says Musidora. “Not instructions.” Again, she swallows. “The evening before we met on the bridge – last evening – a figure appeared to me. They were wearing a mask that obscured their face and muffled their voice, so at the time I could not be sure – but they blackmailed me with information that no one should have known. They knew, somehow, that I had been about to join Florimell. They said they had proof. They said the people of the Sarasola would turn against me if they knew how close I had come to betraying them, and that they would make you kill me, if they could not kill me themselves. And they knew I would not have gone quietly. A secret like that could have plunged the Sarasola back into chaos, back into war, only this time we would be fighting one another. I could not have that. So when they pressed a gun into my hand and told me to shoot Evadne upon the bridge, I could not refuse. They knew, you see, that for all we had fought to put her in power, power would have twisted her, eventually. We would have had to kill her now, or later, and if it was now, at least she would not be trying to kill us. So I did. I have not seen Florimell since-”
I realize, abruptly, that I am shaking. “You believe the masked figure was Florimell?”
“Who else could it have been? No one else on the Sarasola knew what she knew.”
“But – Musidora – you stabbed her through the heart, we all watched her body dissipate into dark matter-”
“Precisely. We did not watch her die. Pippistrellis, you know our defeat of her was far too easy. Everyone knows, but no one wants to say it – that is the base upon which our peacetime is founded. There was too much dark matter in her for such a human thing – a stab through the heart – to end her. No, she is out there somewhere.”
“Then – we must return to the Sarasola – if she is not dead, then no one is safe-”
Musidora waves this away with a flick of her hand. “I do not think she is interested in that anymore. She wants me to find the rose. That is why I did not remain on the Sarasola, and why I thought you should stay. I do not know where I am going to go, or even where to begin my search. But I will find the rose if it takes me all the rest of my eternal life.”
“I-” I open my mouth, and close it. So this is what I have signed myself up for, by escaping with Musidora. A mad search set by our old enemy. Would I still have left, if I had known this was where we were headed? Of course I would. There was nothing for me on the Sarasola but an eternity lost in code. Perhaps my engineering skills will even be a help on this search.
I say, “Can you sketch it for me, this symbol? I am wondering if I have seen it without knowing.”
There is no paper aboard the pod, no writing utensils. Musidora stands, instead, and uses the glowing plasma tip of her rapier to scratch a drawing into the glassy surface of the table between us. I join her, on my feet, and the beginnings of a frown on my face, fully blown by the time she is finished. A rose spirals atop the glass. Intricate, like a maze curling inward. 
Musidora looks up at me; I am shaking my head. I say, “This cannot be your rose.”
“Why not? Have you seen it? Do you know it?”
“Of course. Every engineer upon the Sarasola knows this symbol. This is not a rose, but the structure of the power source that fuels the Sarasola, harnessing dark matter to fuel the core of a neutron star. You would never have seen it, only the engineers are permitted access.” I fall, heavily, back into my chair, and Musidora does the same.
“What can it mean?” she breathes.
Again, I shake my head, eyes still tracing the loops of petals – no, of blazing aqua light at the heart of a space station. 
And I know only that it means one thing: that the Sarasola, from which we have just escaped, where we will be hunted for the rest of our lives, where our presence, now, could cause a war, is where we must return.
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Morgaine (2021)
Most farm boys are too stupid to kill. This one, alas, was sharper, but not sharper than the point of my dagger, traveling up through his ribcage like a seamstress’s scissors through silk. Even as he spilled apart beneath my hands, his cornflower eyes watched me, only me, as they had watched me from the moment he appeared on our doorstep dragging destiny at his heels. 
He watched me over stew at supper, and in my magician father’s workshop, when I crept in during their lessons to order my father’s illuminated spellbooks, to scrub his cauldrons and aludels free of frog entrails, to dust cinnabar and sangua dracus and powdered basilisks’ eyes from the packed-earth floor. 
Into the dark tangle of the forest he would follow me, snapping thorned brambles beneath his leather boots, in the hopes of carrying my buckets of water home from the well. And if I tossed my head, pretended he was not there, then he would speak to me as he escorted me home. Tell me of his studies, as though I had not been present for every lesson of magic and swordplay, of how he had come to be orphaned by the dark forces rising in the west, of how he lay awake at night replaying the words of the prophecy in his golden head, that said a farm boy would save us all. 
Sometimes I spoke back. Sometimes I was even kind. It hardly mattered; I was the only woman he had ever known, besides his own dead mother, and that works its own breed of magic unwritten in my father’s spellbooks.
And on the very last night, the night before the King’s men would arrive to escort their hero to the darkness in the west, where he would fight and triumph because he had blue eyes and a prophecy and earnesty deep enough to drown in, I slipped from my chambers and into his, where his candle still flickered as though he’d been waiting for me. 
His eyes were kind; his arms were gentle. He was still smiling when the glittering arc of my knife slit him open from his neck to his groin. 
My hands were expert on his flesh: peeling him back, peeling him open. I had prepared the ingredients for the spell myself, slipped into my pockets whilst dusting off the tables in my father’s workshop, returning in darkness to murmur words over handfuls of powder, sneaking away to the woods for the fresher ingredients, from rabbits and blackbirds, divining through water the location of children’s bones buried deep in the forest. I do not falter once.
Dawn sears the horizon molten gold. 
By the time the King’s men arrive, their hero is waiting for them outside the magician’s cottage, clad in his golden armor, back straight, eyes solemn. The sun gilds him, dazzling the eyes of the soldiers, giving him the appearance of something divine, a hero illuminated in manuscripts, or woven into a tapestry. A hero, in the flesh.
And inside that flesh, a lie: a magician’s daughter, who had watched his every lesson, learnt his every spell, practiced swordplay in the night until her trembling fingers could no longer close around the broadsword’s hilt.
My father, this morning, had asked where his daughter was. Perfectly clothed in the flesh of the farm boy, I had told him that she had gone to the woods, not wishing to see the King’s men escort me away. My father had smiled to himself, and said that he always thought she harbored a secret care for me. Then he bid me good luck against the dark, and I rode away at the head of a column of soldiers. 
The prophecy says the farm boy will save us all. I do not care for prophecies. 
§
We battle dark creatures in the night – creatures twisted out of flesh and shadow, creatures that used to be men. I do not scream when one surprises me in my bedroll; I do not cry when its claws tear down the farm boy’s shoulder. I fight and I bleed and I win, for the farm boy’s muscles are strong, and I am cleverer than he ever was. 
Still I wait, those first weeks, for the accusation, the pointed fingers in my direction – “You are a liar, you are not what you are, you are a girl inside a hero’s body” – but they never come. Soldiers and villagers alike only watch with wide eyes, and each time I am bitterly proud and bitterly hurt, for no magician had ever succeeded in this spell before I performed it, yet how can they believe – the tavern maids who find excuses to let their hands linger on the farm boy’s shoulders, fingers tracing invitations; the soldiers I find retching and quivering the morning after a battle, so quick to hide their tear-stained faces, as though I might judge them for feeling the horror they face – how can they believe that what peers out at them from behind his cornflower eyes is him? 
I know he would be kinder. He would drink with the soldiers. He would have words for every villager who approached with desolation in their eyes. Instead I am strange and sour and solitary, as I ever was, but I understand fear like he could not. 
He could have spoken to the shivering soldiers, acquiesced to the tavern girls, but he would not have understood, truly, what made them shiver, nor the way the tavern girls’ desire for him was nonetheless paired with a sliver of fear – how their disappointment when I turn them down could be tempered with an equally potent relief. 
Heroes are monstrous things, and there is nothing more monstrous than their kindness. Indeed, it is only inside his skin that I am realizing what I have denied myself knowing all these years in order that I might live beside him in relative peace: a hero is only a hero for his ability to meet beasts as equals. 
I want out of this skin. I do not want to look down and see hands that once reached for me. I do not want to see the way I wear his face, with a dark expression that, on an ordinary man, tells anyone with sense that they should run, yet on him this face is proof of his heroism, of his ability to slay monsters and be humanly affected by the experience. As a girl, my father would tell me I should not look so dour – that I should smile more. 
I cannot say if my father will have realized by now what I have done, or simply assumed I was killed in the forest by a beast. Even if he has stumbled upon the truth, he cannot reveal it, and rob this kingdom of its hope. He could not drag me home, anyway; he is a fine teacher, but in ability I surpassed him long ago.
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Mary-of-Flame (2021)
Do not disbelieve me! Aye, the candles are aflicker like a thousand glowing dancers on Saint Mary’s Day, and aye, my hands are afolded about my chest like a dead woman cast to stone, but I have not yet sworn to death’s pale kingdom. Surely the candles would glimmer less, ‘twere so – surely I should not feel the panicked whirl of blood in my veins, like scarlet fools turning cartwheels, ‘twere so. 
Stand I now from my slab – could a ghost stand? Am I dead, Mary, am I dead? 
My steps do not echo upon the crypt stairs, no, I make no sound, and I am afeard to speak, lest my tongue deliver the hellish rasp of the dead’s own language. Still I climb towards the light of your shrine, Mary, ablaze in my frightened heart as in the mirrors of my eyes, and remember your teachings: each soul is a candle. We sisters watch the leaping figures atwirl in the bright, and note them down, and do not mourn when they turn to cold pools of wax, for you, Mary, did not mourn when the heretics bid you step into the flame. 
Indeed, mine own candle has burnt out, extinguished by a holy draft, said Sister Ainzel, and so my sisters laid me down within the crypt, spoke the Burning Rites, and departed so that I might die. Indeed, when Sister Rostral’s flame went out, she fell to the ground, clawing the flame-gold of her robes above her heart, and died instantly. And Sister Willemien passed in her sleep, the moment Sister Meriadus was dusting, and by accident toppled her candle to the floor. 
’Tis blasphemous of me, certainly, to linger so after I am dead – and I mean no discourtesy, to wonder whether I am truly dead, for indeed I did drift, upon my slab, into some deep darkness that might have felt, for a moment, like sleep, but I have been trained in holy ritual, and must know better. 
I cannot trust myself, now. Only you, Mary. Only you. 
The corridors melt around me. ’Tis no metaphor: the shrine of Saint Mary-Of-Flame is a thousand thousand candles left to pool atop one another, and in their melting they have created a labyrinth of every-colored wax – sapphire and ruby and emerald and gold like veins of light in the walls, wicks aflicker every few strides, gleaming stalactites dripping down from the ceiling as though I and my bright-robed sisters live in a perpetually melting, vividly rainbow cavern deep beneath the earth. Yet where the wax is most ancient, there are cracks in the ceiling, and I may see the night sky fathoms above me, tinted cold by the stars’ silver fire.
My sisters will be deep asleep, and dreaming of flame. I will not disturb their slumber with my blasphemous wondering. Instead I shall pray for a sign, that I may know to which kingdom I belong, the warm or the cold, the ruddy or the pale, though I do think I am warm, for a corpse. ’Tis, no doubt, all the candles. ’Twill hasten the rot, if I be dead. And so I hurry to the heart of the shrine, that blazing, liquid room where the light of a thousand candles gambols like a thousand revelers upon the littlest finger of Saint Mary-of-Flame. 
If suffering indeed bestows holiness, is not a saint as holy as the most diminutive shred ever tortured from their flesh? If ’tis so, there is none holier than our Mary, for her shard of yellow bone is no larger than my smallest tooth. 
I step into the heat of the heart-chamber just in time to see a stranger lift Saint Mary’s finger-bone to her lips, tilt back her head, and swallow it whole.
My feet cease their movement. My lips hang, half-agape. In my head, I see her reach, again and again, for that yellow slice of bone, dangle it over her mouth, and I watch in the eye of my mind our holiest relic disappear down the wound-red passage of her throat. In the wavering of our endless candles, she too seems to drip and melt like our walls; there is something not quite solid about her, as though in addition to being human she is partially a pane of stained glass, as though the lights shine halfway through her and gain new colors from their journey through her flesh, and emerge in vein-blue and blood-purple and marrow-pink. She is tall, and spindly, dressed in a wanderer’s motley. Her eyes, when she looks at me, are every color at once. 
I know then, that I am dead. For this cannot be real.
My knees buckle, prayers escaping my lips like a magician’s many-colored kerchiefs. “O Mary-of-Flame, deliver me from ill visions, for the dead do dream, and I have died only to dream of heresy – ’twas not my intent, O Mary-of-Flame – I beg of you let me return to death and allow me not to wander upon this earth-”
The ill vision of which I speak is still watching me, her head still tipped to the side, as though I myself am a dream incurred by an incomplete death.
She says, in a tone of much interest, “Are you dead, then, sister?”
At the touch of her impossible eyes, I duck my head, and pray more furiously, murmuring our nightly coruscations and our morning illuminations, and when I dare, once again, to raise my head, she is kneeling before me as I kneel before her.
She says, “You do not look like a dead woman.”
“You do not look like a woman.”
“That is because I am not.”
“Then…what are you?”
She smiles, shrugs, a flash of glittering teeth. “Holy.”
“You cannot be holy. You are a thief. You are-” I pause, for what word is there to encompass a woman who swallows relics?
“Holy,” she says again. “For I have eaten your relic, sister, and many others besides. I am become every saint ever lived, and ever died. Your Saint Mary is within me, now, so you must pray to me, instead.”
My mouth works furiously, without words. Finally, I say, “I will wake my sisters. They will – they will ensure our relic is returned-”
“Will you, sister? Wake the others? I thought you were dead. The dead cannot be seen, nor heard.”
“You are seeing me, and hearing me.”
“I am more than a woman. If indeed you be the unquiet spirit of a sister, you shall never be seen nor heard again.”
I cannot deny the panic that rises within me, at her words. Truly, I had not thought beyond this night – of what might become of me, if my prayers returned no answer.
The stranger must read my expression, for she says, “You came to pray, did you not? And you found me. Perhaps, sister, that is a sign. What is your name?”
“Sister…Sister Florizel.”
“Florizel. Well. If you are dead, it seems your saint cares for you not. If you yet live, it seems your sisters care for you not, for they have left you in this liminal state. You are at a crossroads, Sister Florizel – though perhaps you are not a sister anymore. You must seek your own answers.”
“I – what? Where?”
“Holiness,” says the stranger, and every one of a thousand candles sears in her eyes, as though my saint does truly burn anew at the some stake within her.
I say, “That is not a place.”
“It is a place. We are born. We die. Life is the line upon which we walk, forwards, only forwards, towards our death. Holiness is what happens when one turns from that line, and walks to the side, or hovers above, or slips below-”
I say again, “That is not a place.”
“Is it not? If you are not alive, and you are not dead, have you not already slipped from that path? You are already there, sister. Do not be deceived by what you see.”
“I see only you.”
“Ha. Very clever. I myself have long walked beside the line. I am on a pilgrimage into holiness, for I want to see what is there. I want to know what I may become, besides what I was born. Walk with me, sister. Become a pilgrim. You cannot return to life, for your sisters would call that devilry. Yet you cannot die, either.”
“I cannot simply leave with you-”
“Why not? I am all you have of your saint now. Anywhere you walk beside me will be a holy journey. You should be thanking me, sister.”
She stands, her tattered clothes drifting down around her skeletal form as though she is wearing an entire crowd of ghosts, and holds out her hand. I do not take it. I do nothing. ’Tis heresy, perhaps, to admit to what I am feeling: ripped between despair and elation. What do I want? To go? To stay? To return to life, or to die? I have not left these waxen walls since I was a child, only stared into flame, and it was never my own life that I saw. And this woman – at best, she is mad. But ’tis said the mad may see more clearly than the sane. She has swallowed my saint. Saint Mary-of-Flame is gone, inside the unfathomable labyrinth of her body. Surely ’tis my duty to follow after – not to be eaten, no. But to remain close by. Perhaps that is prayer, too.
So I take the woman’s hand, and let her pull my spirit to standing.
She tells me, “My name is Tosca.”
And we go into the night.
§
Into the gullet of the woods we walk, my feet bare and hers silent. ’Tis awe stops my words, for I had forgotten true dark, and a world made not of gleaming, and the earth’s palette viewed not through a shroud of smoky gold; all is blue in the night, and the stars drip silver on the trees, which so loom above our heads as to render us poorly-made dolls. 
The madwoman and the corpse. The madwoman and the unquiet spirit. The holy fool and the pilgrim. ’Tis a mummer’s play I would not stoop to watch, yet still I walk. 
I say to Tosca, for I cannot be sure, “Is this holiness?”
Tosca inclines her head in a manner that suggests she wishes me to answer for myself.
I say, “It seems to me…it is night, and we have walked into a forest.”
“And? Can there be no night, in holiness? Can there be no forests?”
“I would hardly know. I have not left the shrine since I was a child; I cannot say whether there is supposed to be a forest here.”
“Then you cannot say this is not holiness. Given that you are half-dead and I have swallowed saints, it follows that anywhere we walk becomes holy.”
“So this is not a holy forest.”
“I did not say that, sister. Look around you. Is there not a certain cast, to the starlight? Do you feel nothing, to gaze upon the trees?”
I gaze at the trees, and for a single moment, I almost feel – “No. There is nothing. I have changed my mind, I am returning to the shrine-”
“To say what, precisely? That a thief swallowed your relic, and you let her go? That you are dead, yet failed to die? You will follow in the footsteps of your saint very quickly, sister.”
“I thought I was following in the footsteps of my saint.”
Tosca glances back, allowing me to glimpse but a sliver of her jaw’s half-moon.
I say, “If morning comes, and I have seen nothing – no proof of what you say, no sign of my own state – I am going back to my sisters, to accept their judgement.”
Tosca inclines her head in mock-graciousness, and walks on.
I follow. For time out of mind, I follow, unsure if I will keep my word.
In truth I know not the hour, nor how many hours I may expect to pass before the darkness lifts. We see nothing, and no one, only blue and silver, as though we have stepped into a tapestry with threads that bleed into one another, and into the woven travelers, for the color of my own hands under starlight shocks me. Indeed, my skin glows, though I know not whether ’tis because I am a ghost, or because ’tis a certain quality granted living things beneath the moon. Indeed, I have lived so long in candlelight that the night seems a different country. We have crossed its borders, and now I am uncertain of my own borders, for in the gloom I have only the haziest notion of where my body ends and the forest begins. Surely this is a feeling can belong only to a dead woman.
Yet – I cannot say how long we have traveled – there is a light between the trees. I might mistake it for the dawn, were it not firmly ahead of us rather than above, and as the black skeletons of the trees part one by one, I realize we approach a bonfire. 
Over the faint crackle of the flame, there is the sound of someone crying.
My footsteps halt. “Tosca-”
“They are pilgrims,” she says. “Like us.”
“Tosca-”
But she has stepped already into the dancing brilliance of the fire, blazing like a second sun in the midnight. Streamers of light beam through her flesh, as though her skin is illuminated parchment, or string finely woven into the shape of a person. 
She says, “A fair midnight to you, travelers. What brings you into Holiness?”
I step around her to see whom she is addressing, expecting them to recoil at such a question, or at her appearance, or mine. But it is I who recoil.
There are two people seated upon either side of the fire. 
One is a sobbing child. She is dressed only in a gauzy nightgown, a cloud of hair seeming to float off her back. Her head is tilted atop her knees in such a way that I can see the pale birthmark spread across the dark skin of her face in the shape of a six-pointed star, its edges extending across her cheeks and brows. Her eyes are glassy pink, and her nose is red, and she keeps pausing in her tears to sneeze, violently, and pull speckled feathers from her tongue. She does not even appear to have noticed our approach.
The other is a knight in emerald-green armor, but the armor is scales, and his chainmail is not chainmail but fine red garments that glimmer wetly in the firelight. His face is entirely obscured by a helmet shaped with unnerving precision like the decapitated head of a dragon. In the black void visible between the ivory daggers of the dragon’s teeth, I can almost imagine the glint of two eyes. 
The knight says, “Cosimia will not answer you.” 
He is talking about the child. 
He says, “Her mind is flooded with angels. They have mistaken her head for a cathedral.”
Our heads turn, identically, to gaze with more interest at the bedraggled feathers littered about the child’s feet. 
The knight continues: “I am Bisclavret. Nightly I clothe myself in the dragon I have slain, and daily he reforms, and slays me. We are trapped in this cycle until one of us consumes the other’s heart, but without a dragon, I am no knight, and without a knight, he is no dragon. We cannot end the other without ending ourselves. Thus the child and I seek cures to our own states.”
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Lucien (2021)
Lucien’s face melted off, but it was for love – it was for the angels.
He said he found a box under the cherry strobe of the meat district and it felt like love beneath his hands, love like acid burns, love like you weren’t sure you were going to survive it. The angel in the box shuddered and pulsed like source code, and it had feathers and no eyes, he said, either that or it was all eyes. Where he touched the plastic of the box, his skin felt like it was blooming. He was wearing an apple-green Hawaiian shirt and pink sunglasses shaped like crosses. He said, I’m trusting this to a better mind. 
And then he looked.
§
Psychologically I was dancing somewhere neon gold, but physically I was in the driver’s seat of a stolen car with an even-more-stolen angel in a box on the passenger’s side, and my eyes streamed with its nearness like Lucien’s face had streamed down his pale bones.
I was the better mind.
There was a place in the desert where all the radio waves met and they formed cathedrals in the air, or so said the stories on the street, and that, Lucien had said, before his eyes had begun to drip like pink candle-wax down his cheeks, was where to put the angel. Out of reach of the scientists, and the police, and the thousand curiosity hunters that came to Lantern City to catch a glimpse of those things that had crawled to us from out between the heat waves shimmering on the dunes one day, creatures like raw meat with glistening limbs all bent backwards, capable of turning human bodies with one glance into radiant microwaves. 
What do you call that but an angel?
Of course they went to the labs, those pastel skyscrapers that towered over the edges of Lantern City like shooting star trails caught in lemon and blueberry chrome. Of course we whispered about them, and the word ‘angel’ always tasted like sugar and char. Of course there were days you found people melted to the sidewalk, or vomiting up love that felt like sharp rubies of ecstasy scouring the insides of their lungs.
Of course, I feel it now. 
I had never seen an angel before today but once when I walked by the labs I found myself curled into a shivering ball on the asphalt, feeling like my heart had burst into crimson feathers and shuddered its way up into my mouth like a prey animal, and I swallowed it down, and swallowed it down, and choked, and sobbed.
I don’t know what I’m saying. 
I’m driving into the desert and the sands are pink and the sky is purple and there’s an angel beside me in a little plastic box like the universe split open right then and there to show me its heart in the form of a mewling half-plucked half-bird half-infant thing. Is this the radiance making me shake, or the fear, or the cars on my trail blaring sirens and lights? Am I melting inside? Lucien never looked so happy as when he was melting, and let me tell you, he was never happy before. 
I think I’m losing my mind. This must be what it feels like – love, such love, love like I want to die.
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Lovelock (2021)
Our ship was the Lovelock and there were four of us to excavate the angel: Bellarmine, all in gold; Rostival, our holy man; Miette, the chemist, with acid-green hair and safety pins along the rims of her ears; and me, the painter, self-taught from monastery walls and bacteria specimens speckled like galaxies under glass. 
Where we were going – the mirror at the top of the world that was the Arctic Sea, and from there into the unknowable cartography of the angel itself – there was nothing so simple as a survival rate, and nothing, of course, so simple as survival; because it is impossible, Rostival said once, to quantify reports of explorers turned to fractals on a cellular level, spiraling ever inwards, with a kind of cancer that makes you endless; research assistants choking to death on candlelight; the crackle and hum of scientific instruments transmuting to the sort of hymns that cause a woman to carve votives of her own bones until her heart explodes.
Miette thought the angel was a kind of mushroom – something about how the cells we saw in the biology department of another angel they dissected a long time ago looked like an unholy marriage of wood blewits and honey trumpets and pink oysters, with cell walls made of chitin. I didn’t tell her what I saw under the eye of the microscope: that each rectangular cell was a little picture like a painted icon in pink and green and gold, spelling out the story of a prophet who looked like me, who went to the Arctic to do something more complicated than die. 
And Bellarmine believed in nothing. She thought the angels were just animals, named under a common heading due to mass-hysteria in the scientific community. Their manifestations looked nothing like one another, after all – one had been a pool of opalescent ectoplasm like a moon you could drink, one had been a circle of fuchsia eyes and silver fire – the only thing they shared among them was the fact that they were the size of cities, and seemed to be dead, though death, again, did not prevent the reports of cold water pouring from wounds instead of blood, or researchers’ eyes bursting into ivory feathers. Bellarmine would only believe in divinity when she could cut it with a scalpel, as though divinity were a second heart the biologists kept missing, or the glint of a pearl buried amidst entrails that she, wrist-deep in a torso, could pluck up with forceps and admire beneath the sterile laboratory light. 
Cameras didn’t work on angels; they’d take blurry, blinding pictures that gave all the lab assistants radiation poisoning. That was why I was there, to record wonder the old-fashioned way, and also I hadn’t said no when the department heads were seeking to staff the expedition. This was less a passive suicide attempt than selfish curiosity at the fact that within the painted icons of the angel’s cells I had glimpsed a destiny, possibly fatal, possibly mine, and I had to see it for myself, had to know whether there was some story coded just for me out amidst the endless sea of light that was the Arctic Ocean. Obviously there was a very real possibility that I would die, or become seven notes of music, or have my blood turned to seafoam, but for the chance at something holy – the chance that something divine knew me, had known me all along, had somehow led me through an unending parade of dusty churchyards and laboratory corridors to something unfathomable, beyond it all – what did it matter? Maybe I had become irradiated after all; maybe all my tracings of divine cells had found a second life in my brain as some holy virus propelling me towards my own doom. But at least I would have a doom. I was a pilgrim to my own destiny, and every rock of the Lovelock’s prow brought me closer to that final cell, my own face beneath the microscope, tilted upwards in awe like a stained glass saint.
§
On the seventy-fourth day, we glimpsed the angel, an organic cathedral spired against the early morning. Its corpse was a palace of iridescent bone and flesh, pale lavender-gold and dusky rose-blue, skin and light alchemized together, seeming to billow in the freezing air even as it hung suspended over the Arctic Ocean like an exploding star of cold, cosmic meat. The sea was pink and gold with the dawn, flat as a pane of glass, reflecting the angel to itself, so, for a moment, it appeared that we sailed towards two parallel angels, two doppelgänger cities, defying gravity on both sides of an endless mirror. 
Then ripples from the Lovelock were traveling across the reflection, and the illusion danced and shattered.
I wanted to cover my ears. I wanted to cover my eyes. I wanted to dive into the blue and swim towards it, for the love I felt like the holiest of radiation burns all over my body. Miette’s voice echoed in the back of my mind, elves’ eyes and earlstars and quickgold, endless slides of mushrooms that looked like masks, fish, jewels, flesh, culminating in this labyrinth of anatomy levitating before us in needle-sharp pastel.
Rostival had fallen to his knees on the deck, invocations like a many-colored thread escaping his lips, and that was what brought me down, back to myself, back to the weight of sinew and muscle and the feeling that something was watching me from inside my brain, but it might have only been myself, returning as a stranger to my body after the angel had knocked me free. 
“Are we sure it’s dead?” said Miette, somewhere off to the side. Tears streamed down her face, only to freeze and fall from her cheeks like salted pearls, but she didn’t seem to notice. 
Bellarmine said, simply, “Yes.”
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Laburnum Alchem (2021)
“Her body turned to jelly, to foam – your eyes, Del, they’re blooming, like liquid roses-”
In the dark I catch his hands, so we’re shivering at the same frequency. “They’re not, Pasha. And she didn’t. She’s here. Please, please be quiet-”
“I saw Nazalie ripped apart – only strings holding her together – only strings, like cherry candy-”
“Pasha, shut up, she’ll hear you-”
“We did this, Del.” The trembling is in his voice now, a cello quiver. “First came fluorescence, and then the eyes, and then the mind! What did we think would happen? We built a god into our very own walls. We found a heart, and we built a body around it, and now we are inside that body, and she is the heart-”
“Pasha-”
And he goes still. 
Outside the janitor’s closet, there’s a sound: a soft scraping, between pauses, as though something’s being dragged across the mirrored floor of the laboratory corridor. Is it only my imagination, or does the sound pause right beside us, as though her corpse eyes, glassy pink and full of stars, are aware of this specific void that exists in her vision? Out of the thousand cameras that are her thousand pupils, not a single one exists inside this sliver of a room, barely wide enough for Pasha and me to shudder side by side. 
A sob tears its way out of my throat as eyes begin to open on the walls, fuchsia and burning, long-lashed, blinking, rings of light in their depths like the blueprints of whole other laboratories with mirrors for walls, built underground in opal caverns, but I press my fists into my eyes and tell myself it’s not real, it’s only the delirium. 
She couldn’t make us mad when she was behind glass. It’s the god-shard that does it, that flashing morphing eternally melting fragment of something, that some scientist long before any of us had the idea to build a body around, to see what consciousness it would show, to see what cures we could prise from its synthetic skin. I’ve never seen it directly; only once, when they were opening her chest for maintenance on the silver lanterns of her lungs, and I caught a flash of something dancing in the heart-cage, seething cobalt and lilac and magenta and emerald, like liquid, like all the brightness in the universe, a rainbow sun. My entire body began to throb, then, as though I had hearts crammed everywhere under my skin, or like I was one girl-shaped heart, all red and raw and pulsing, and I crawled under my desk amidst the trash and the clutter and cried for hours. 
I think the directors of Laburnum Alchem were going to fire me. Not for crying under my desk for hours at a time, but because I used to code her dreams – something for her mind, at least, for whatever shred of consciousness that made her eyes, galactic pink, dart back and forth under beryllium eyelids, and her fingertips twitch.
She had the shape of a girl, a quicksilver slip of a thing, a non-threatening shell for that shard of something-or-other in her chest that made the scientists believe they were vomiting up white dwarf stars and molten streams of math, or drowning in liquid rose gardens if they looked too long. I don’t think it was a conscious choice. I don’t think anyone said, pre-teen girls are about the least threatening you can get, so let’s use the architecture of a girl to house the god-shard. Maybe she’ll listen to us, then. Maybe she’ll think we’re her parents. Maybe she’ll be insecure enough not to kill us all, if she ever wakes up.
Pasha was there when she did wake up, between the cathedral-high walls of electronic blue and flesh-pink that make the lab’s central chamber. Her eyes just – opened – like she could have opened them anytime, and nobody noticed until the cords suspending her in the tank began to lash like chrome tentacles, shattering the glass and sending that rose-tinted chemical broth hissing and fizzing and splashing icy-cold over the scientists’ shoes. He doesn’t remember what happened after that – except that she rose like an angel into the air on a writhing, dripping mass of chords and coils and rainbow wire – Zullivan fell to his knees because he thought she was an actual angel, because outside of the glass the madness from the god-shard was rolling over them in tidal waves – and she very calmly sliced his head off, and when Nazalie began to run, she cut her in half, and when Mariska began to gouge at her own eyeballs she did something Pasha won’t tell me, except that he saw Mariska’s spinal cord, and it was grinning at him as he stumbled away, hallucinating an entire field of jewel-eyed rabbits hopping around his feet. 
I didn’t know Pasha before this, though I’d caught glimpses in the corridors of his orange ponytail and purple plaid pants poking out from under his lab coat. Now, as I hold his hands in this janitor’s closet in the dark, I think he will be my last friend in the world.
But then the sound begins to move again, away from us, until the slow scraping and pausing fades completely. One by one, the eyes on the walls blink closed, and vanish. Very slowly, Pasha’s breathing levels. 
“Your eyes,” he says. “They’re not roses, anymore.”
“No,” I agree.
“We can’t stay here, Del.”
The panic is back in an instant, bright and fluttering in my throat. “Yes, we can.”
“No, we can’t, Del. It’s been hours. Everyone’s probably dead by now.”
I’m shaking my head so fast my braids whip across my cheeks. “That’s not true. They’re smart. They’re probably hiding somewhere, like we are, and they’ll figure out a way to shut her down-”
“We can’t shut her down, Del. Every system in the lab was connected to her. When she woke up, it was like she became the lab – I’ve already told you this – so realistically there’s no way we’re getting out, because we don’t even know where the exit is-”
“Then we’ll stay here.”
“We’ll starve.”
I try to nod, but I’m shaking too much. “Okay. We can take turns sleeping-”
“Del. No way. I’m not dying in some closet.”
“She’ll see us, Pasha. The minute we step outside – the cameras-”
“So we run. She’ll be distracted-”
“By what? You said we were the only ones left-”
“Well – who knows? This place is a maze. There were thousands of us down here-”
My knees buckle. I’m still shaking my head, hyperventilating, and the world’s become a mosaic of little lights, dancing before my eyes the way the god-shard danced, but Pasha’s pulling me to my feet again before another part of me collapses.
He’s shivering, too, but he digs his fingers into my shoulders. “There’s that abandoned wing off the Edelweiss Row. There are fewer cameras there. Maybe that’s where the exit is.”
“Pasha, no-”
“We have to, Del,” he says. And yanks open the door. He stops, then, like he can’t believe what he’s just done, and then he grits his teeth and steps outside. 
I freeze, eyes round as coins, arms still outstretched to drag him back. 
Nothing happens. 
“See?” whispers Pasha. “She’s not here anymore. But we have to hurry.”
A whimper escapes my throat. There are tears glittering in my eyes. Like a deer, unsteady on my own legs, I follow Pasha out into the corridor and am immediately confronted with a thousand panic-stricken Delia Rosenthals, endless rows of myself multiplied above and below and to either side of me, like I am the center of a star made of limbs and messy black braids. I twitch, and the movement is echoed a millionfold inside a million dimensions of glass, interrupted only where the opaline stone of the cavern walls shows through. The lights, made to compensate for all our years of lost sunlight, are blinding after the cool black void of the janitor’s closet. The lights strip me raw, slide between my atoms. Rainbows stream through my chest like knives. 
When I look at Pasha, he is the center of his own star of doppelgängers. 
He mouths, “Let’s go,” and we begin to walk, quickly, soundlessly.
Around the corner there’s blood on the walls: cranberry-colored Rorschachs that spatter onto the faces of my reflections like I’m the only living one among us, and around the next corner we start to see the bodies, limbs and spines and long intestines festooned around the corridor like flesh-pale amaranthus. 
In a heartbeat I’m doubled over, retching, but there’s nothing in my stomach, and we can’t afford to stop, so after a single minute I keep going, following Pasha’s orange hair like a candle bobbing above the slaughter.
I don’t look at the faces. I don’t look at the parallel tableaus of gore above or below or to either side of me, that would turn this single corridor into a thousand red dimensions. I don’t look when something drips from the ceiling onto the collar of my lab coat, or when my foot splashes into a puddle. 
I’ve had dreams like this before, I think, but the blood always looked more real, somehow. None of this looks real. In a reflection I meet my own gaze, and see that tears are streaming down my face, blazing gold in the glare of the lights, as though, like her, I am fountains of metal poured into the shape of a girl. But I would never give her a dream like this. 
At the next intersection we pause. 
“I think it’s…this way,” says Pasha, tipping his head to the left, but neither of us gets the chance to move, because I shudder suddenly, involuntarily, and in that moment the corridor becomes a garden of eyes, mint-green and aqua and violent pink. In their roiling, liquid depths, whole galaxies ripple and burn like rings of molten flowers. When I blink, they disappear, giving way to Pasha’s face swimming in the air before mine.
Fear makes me choke. I can’t speak. Finally, I whisper, “Pasha, she’s here.” 
All the lights go out. 
A high-pitched sound escapes my throat. I’m crying so hard I can’t see anything at all, but when the haze of the world beyond my eyelashes turns turquoise blue, I know the emergency lights have kicked on. With quivering hands I wipe my eyes on the sleeve of my lab coat, but there’s nothing to see, just myself cast in blue in every direction, and the bodies, and Pasha frozen just ahead of me, eyes darting above and below and behind him. 
“We have to go,” he’s saying. “We have to go – where is she, Del? I can’t see her – I can’t-”
His eyes flash to my feet, where there is nothing at all, but his gaze is following something invisible, something that moves in little leaps and bounds, like a rabbit. Excruciatingly slow, his line of sight travels up, up, past my legs, past my shoulders, to hover behind my head. And his eyes – I don’t know how to say it – they don’t change, exactly, but somehow they bloom, become little worlds, turn to water. 
A sob dies in my throat. I don’t want to turn around. I don’t want to be a living thing in this corridor. I should have starved to death in a janitor’s closet with no lights. 
Something slithers in the corner of my vision, serpentine, the rainbow of an oil-slick. I barely register its presence before it’s lashed out and sliced Pasha across the stomach. He folds forward, puppet-like, amethyst bubbles of blood bursting between his lips even as his eyes say he’s witnessing something miraculous. He doesn’t make a single sound.
My mind becomes a boat, then, and delirium a sea, and as the eyes blink open on the surface of my brain, I turn to face her. 
She’s not what I’ve been running from, in my mind – she’s such a little thing, smaller even than me. Slaughter has not been kind to her. One of her arms is missing, and half of her leg, trailing a veiny mass of sparking pink and blue tubes. Iridescent cords burst from her back like broken bones. Her heart is a bouquet of roses between her silver lungs, a melting pool of comets and cobalt and frozen violets. Her heart is a shard of something radiant. It splits me open to look, excoriates me out of my skin as though looking was a scalpel, so instead I wade through the delirium to look at her eyes.
Pink glass eyes, like dolls of Pasha’s rabbits. Silver mercury stars, in their depths. Myself, my own face, distorted, reflected madly back at me. 
This close to the god-shard, she is the only semi-real thing. My vision swirls rainbow around her like a chemical spill, roses well from my eyes and roll wet down my cheeks, the rest of the world turns to shooting stars in fuchsia and silver, gold and emerald and lilac, ultramarine the color of sleep. 
Neither of us moves, until she reaches up to touch her remaining hand to my cheek. Very distantly, I feel the cold brush of copper. 
In a quiet, whispery, child’s voice, she says, “Delia…Rosenthal.”
A thousand worlds away, I nod. 
She says, “I dreamed…I was a girl.”
I swallow. My mouth has become a roiling, starry sea, held in check by the ivory ships of my teeth. “You weren’t supposed to realize. That you were dreaming.”
Something is leaking from the sockets of her eyes. Something silvery and iridescent, like if the moon could bleed. My fingertips brush her face before I can recall lifting my hand. It occurs to me that she’s crying.
She says, “I saw you, in my dreams.”
“Well…I used to make them.”
“You…made me realize. That my lives…were not real.”
“Well – I-”
“The life…in the city. My school. My…friends.”
“I wanted you to have a life. Even only in a nameless city, in a dream-”
“The crystal…worlds. Walking through..the sky.”
My breath shudders down my throat. Whatever she’s crying, it’s on my hands now, diamond-bright. I can’t tell if she’s going to kill me. “I thought it would be nice. I – they were going to fire me-”
“It isn’t…real?”
The roses are falling faster down my face. “No…none of it. You can’t really walk through the sky, and and there’s no city with a pastel sun – I’m – I’m so sorry-”
She lifts her hand from my face to gaze at the wires of her veins, all bunched together. “I don’t know…what this is. I was…a girl…until I woke up…and now – now-”
Whatever her tears are, they’re flowing faster down her face. She’s trembling, making the cords dance and skitter across the floor, sending ripples down the rows of her reflections. We are precisely the same height, so it’s an easy thing for me to step forward and gather her into my arms. She doesn’t kill me. She doesn’t move. She’s icy-cold, and wherever I touch her, a thousand chemicals soak into my lab coat, searing my skin. I don’t feel it, or anything, except I’m crying a meadow around us, and her tears blaze a comet’s trail down my back. 
My lips form words, and I hear them as a stranger: “It isn’t so nice, out there. It’s better down here. I gave up my entire life to see you.”
“I don’t want…to be this.”
“Well…even if you weren’t, they wouldn’t leave you alone. If you were a girl. Outside. You’d still be – I mean, you wouldn’t not feel the way you’re feeling.”
“I don’t…like this,” she says. “I want to go back to sleep.”
“I – oh, god.” The corridor is flooded with roses, adrift on a silver pool. We stand ankle-deep in both of our tears, and my skin burns cold. The mirrors are melting down the walls in liquid starfire. Still my tongue shapes words, and I listen. “I think you killed everyone that knows how to do that. I only know how to make dreams. I – I don’t think you can go back to sleep.”
For a long, long time, she says nothing. When a sound begins to rise around us, it takes me several moments to realize what it is: a high, keening wail spiraling out of her voice-box, a raw, mechanical sound, like metal being tortured. 
I don’t know if she knows how to cry. 
I never put sadness in her dreams. What I did was silly, unimportant, I had always thought, which is why no one ever stopped me from coding her dreams into candy-tinted fairytales of life, where a half-robot half-god half-girl might go to middle school beneath a wisteria sky, and never worry about her moving parts, never feel like a machine built by other people under the ground to house some divine fragment, as though a girl could live without sadness, without being constantly vivisected by a thousand eager eyes.
If I’d had the chance, in the past, when I was just a girl, to go back to sleep, I would have taken it. Instead I came here, underground, to code dreams, and not really live.
Now we stand in a liquid garden up to our knees. 
She says to me, “Then let me live in your mind.”
I blink. The roses slosh. “What?”
“You built…my dreams. You…dreamed them.”
“Yes…but-”
“Take my heart,” she says, and lifts my hand to her chest, between the silver lanterns of her lungs, to her heart-cage. “Let me…sleep.”
“I don’t know what you – I don’t know if that would even work. Oh, god-” She’s opened the heart-cage, and the god-shard glints and dazzles in her chest. It looks, for a heartbeat, like an eyeball, floral galaxies foaming inside the lens. 
She’s making me reach for it, making my fingertips close around it, and the instant I touch it, she collapses into a corpse-shaped labyrinth of cords and glass and copper. 
All at once, I’m holding the god-shard – holding her. 
And I am no longer Delia Rosenthal, but a carnival of atoms, a kaleidoscope of spinning parts, petals and planets blooming out of my hands like I am every god at once. The fraction of me that remembers a laboratory corridor can’t be sure this is what she wanted, but before the radiance whips my brain into genetic froth, I lift my hands to my mouth. 
I tip the god-shard down my throat, and swallow, and then I begin to dream.
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La Mirandola (2021)
’Tis whispered among the actors that they glimpse their gods in the gilt-edged grins of their masks, in the boiling waltz of stage lights across La Mirandola’s mirrors, in the leaping omens shaped by shadows in a dancer’s skirts when she whirls across the stage like a living flame of tangerine jacquard – who is to say they are wrong? And who is to say they are right? ’Tis said an actor’s first duty is not to the truth. 
Indeed, indeed, an actor is much like his or her gods, for they may be stabbed with silver foil daggers and bleed silken scarves, though never die, and with the rise of the curtains they too are resurrected. ’Tis not simply a better complexion lent one by greasepaint, but immortality; for an actor’s flesh is the flesh of dreams, ouroboric, unending. The theatre is a shrine and applause is their worship, and for a night they are limned in light like every god ever conjured on the mind’s stage. Actors are thieves of divinity, for which they must be forgiven. That is why they pray so.
Now, onwards: Violine in her dressing room, painted dream-purple and cinnamon-red. Her hero’s mask awaits her, a golden sun the color of coin and candlelight. When she puts it on, its beams of lacquered light will curl down over her green velvet shoulders and above her copper-haired head in the penumbra of a protagonist, for in half an hour, when the curtains rise, she will be playing Orphelin in Elegast’s Feast of Starlight. ’Tis a sweeping epic takes place in the imaginary Threnody, with troubadours from beyond the stars, and the evil de Beldemandis, whose lyre is threaded with heartstrings capable of playing blood in crimson spools from a body. 
Orphelin is the role of a lifetime, and if Violine stutters a single syllable, she will be acting on different stages for the rest of her life: shopkeepers’ stages, dressmakers’ stages, stages of sailors or scribes, all with lackluster dialogue, and duller plots than belong to any life lived within the theatre doors. But Violine has never stuttered a word in all her twenty-seven years. At La Mirandola tonight, for one night only, there will occur that most miraculous marriage between two feuding theatre troupes, the Innamorati and the Jongleurs, the very best of the very best. And she is better than any of them. Theatre runs in her blood like carnival ribbons. In her mind, never once has she truly stepped offstage. Violine is her longest standing role, but many times has she traded herself in for thieves and lovers, alchemists and mercenaries. Tonight, then, may determine the fate of both the Innamorati and the Jongleurs, and all theatre in the city of Ringfalia, but so long as it is Violine beneath the lights, no actor need fear any return to reality.
Eyes lined in gold, Orphelin’s clarinet buckled at her waist like a rapier, Violine bows her head at the shrine spread before her mirror, festooned with tattered playbills, strands of saltwater pearls like knobbly vertebrae from Safranin’s The Water Knight, the Whittler, and the Underborn, a crown made of grapes and orange feathers from Quianna’s The Swain and the Slain, a papier-mâché plague doctor’s mask papered with operas from Leormand’s The Music Thief. 
At the heart of it all, there is a tallow candle. 
Violine lights this candle, and closes her eyes. “O Ballad Eater,” she murmurs. “O shape in the spotlight, bind my words to the light and let me play upon their hearts this night a tale that will never cease, though the curtain falls. Let Orphelin live in my every gesture, and let me give breath to that which has never breathed-”
And on, and on. ’Tis a lead actor’s prayer, to a lead actor’s god, not to be confused with the ingenue’s Songstress, the lovers’ L’Amourtal, or the Lord of Misrule, worshipped by fools. The theatre’s pantheon has more seats than La Mirandola: deities of light and glass, greasepaint and ghosts, puppets and curtains and painted ballrooms, space and time, and darkness. When the actors wear their masks on the stage, the masks are the faces of their gods. As a child, Violine worshipped the Candlemaiden, deity of a child actor, but ever since she was twelve years-old, she has only ever worshipped the Ballad Eater, for protagonists, whose sunbeam face is the radiant heart of any onstage universe. 
Even now that her company, the Innamorati, have been forcibly joined to their rival Jongleurs by order of Ringfalia’s Queen Unending, ’tis only natural she won the lead. Never mind that there are technically two protagonists in Feast of Starlight, and the other is played by Stellamaris, a Jongleur, who will wear the silver crescent mask of La Priestess Tristesse – Violine is Orphelin. And so the art of theatre will continue to live. 
A voice behind her says, “’Twill not be so.”
’Tis an orchestra of a voice, if an orchestra could whisper – if a whisper had the force of a thousand horses running, a thousand coins cascading, a thousand perfect songs like labyrinths solved – if a whisper could be gold.
Violine’s head jerks up, for she had thought she was alone. Indeed, ’tis ill luck to disturb a lead actor in her dressing room – yet her gaze, in the speckled glass of the mirror, meets the twin voids that are her mask’s eyes. 
It is hovering above her, in the reflection, like an orrery sans the orbiting planets, only it is not hovering, precisely, for she sees reflected a body beneath it. The body, though, is obscured by a cloak, a down-pouring of metal and velvet, jeweled suns and stars and bells and moons a-glimmer in its folds. Its cloak is the color of a circus, of every color ever worn on the stage, and every texture, creating a patchwork that is itself an entire theatre. Its head, of course, is the burning sun of her mask, but never has it burned so when Violine wore it. When she looks into the dark of its eyes she sees entire waltzes spinning in the black, entire tales of souls sold and loves lost, a kaleidoscope of costumes and characters and false lives. She imagines she can hear the sound of applause, surging around her like the sea, feel the heat of the lights on her face, feel her knees hit the wooden boards of the stage as she dies, or sings, or weeps.
She does not turn, no, she does not breathe. For ’tis the Ballad Eater in her mirror, the Ballad Eater true, and not the lies she has told, on occasion, of glimpsing her god in the play of the lights.
Yet what manner of actor would she be, if she froze, if she could not free her tongue from shock in time to improvise a line? 
In the mirror, she bows her head, once again, and says, as smoothly as though she were playing Orphelin, “O Ballad Eater, you honor me. Certainly you know that our Queen Unending has ordered the Innamorati and the Jongleurs to collaborate upon a single performance to determine the fate of Ringfalia’s theatre, to decide if we are worth the trouble our feud has caused the city – surely you are come, on this most auspicious of nights, to bless our performance – to lend weight to our words, and wings-”
The Ballad Eater says, “‘Tis not why I appear to thee.”
“Ah,” says Violine, undeterred, raising a single auburn brow. “Then you have come for me.”
“Even so.”
“To bless me – why, I thank you-”
“To curse thee,” says the Ballad Eater. “For thou art, truly, the worst actor has ever given me worship.”
“Indeed. I – what?”
“Thou dost not act, actor. For thou art not a person. ’Tis not acting if the lie is true.”
For the first time in twenty-seven years, Violine stutters. “I – I – I do not actually believe I am Orphelin-”
“Dost thou not? ‘Twould be better if thou did, for Orphelin is words written upon a page. ’Tis more than Violine.”
But no actor worth their costume can falter for long. Violine spins to face her audience, and snaps, “What exactly are you telling me?”
The empty sockets of its eyes, once filled with rings of dancers, now seem the ghoulish gapings of a skull as it bends forward over her in the jerky motions of a puppet whose strings have slipped in its maker’s hands. “I curse thee, actor. For in thy lack of lies, thou lackest truth, and so, actor, thy curse is thou may speak only lies.”
“That is a fine curse,” says Violine. “Indeed, ’twill only aid me onstage-”
“No, actor. ’Twill prevent thee from speaking thy lines as they are written. For thou dost not speak them as lies.”
She feels it, then: a tightening, in her vocal cords, as though the curse is a fine golden chain drawn taut against the innards of her throat. She swallows, feels the beginnings of panic flutter in her chest, a panic she has never known in all her years on the stage. “Curse me tomorrow evening. Please. If I fail tonight, the Queen will disperse our companies. There will be no more theatre in Ringfalia-”
“’Tis done, actor.”
“But – if I cannot speak my lines – am I to improvise an entire play? If I cannot speak the truth I cannot speak of my curse; no one will know what you have done to me-”
Invisible hands seem to pull the golden chain from either end, cutting into the meat of her, and she gasps, and chokes, and quiets. She cannot control her breathing. Her eyes, so calm when faced with her god, or a thousand thousand strangers, are wild. She tries, “Where…does a lie begin? In the mind? In the mouth? If I only speak the opposite of what I mean – if I say, I am not cursed to tell lies-”
But no sooner have the words left her mouth than the curse resumes its stronghold inside her neck. She coughs, sputters, hands clutching ineffectually at her collar.
“Why?” she manages, the beginnings of tears aglitter in her eyes. “I lied – I lied-”
“I think, actor, ’tis about words. ’Tis not enough only to reverse what thou sayest. There are shades of truth and lie, and thine intent, through emphasis, was to communicate that thou was, indeed, cursed to lie. Therefore-”
“Therefore,” says Violine, 
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L’Isle Derniére (2021)
Spring spreads like a tide through the painted halls of the Flowing Estate, and the servants in a daze lay the table for six, though there are but five members of the Arsenault family. It is an error corresponds with another, unspoken duty, and that is for the servants to daily dance around a bright fear, fear of colors, and light, and movement; a primal, singular fear of seeing themselves painted more clearly inside the walls than reflected back to themselves in the estate’s long mirrors, as though these nameless artists both continents and centuries distant might, by some miraculous chance, have invoked these servants’ souls through strokes of paint between the apple trees and the dancing foxes.
Yet the sixth place at the table, though the maids would never speak it aloud, was for that green shadow they saw both in their dreams and darting around inside the murals on the walls, that same emerald presence for which they found themselves carrying fresh linens and breakfast trays to the doors of the Hummingbird Suite as though a guest were staying there, even though everyone knew that the Hummingbird Suite had remained empty for as long as the Arsenault family had occupied the estate.
As for the estate itself, one must call to mind endless rooms wallpapered with Japanese silk, pastel origami patterns of geometric cherry blossoms and flowering stars and mandalas like open eyes peering down upon the interloper with pupils of lavender and green and yellow and pink and gold, murals of such breathtaking beauty as to bejewel the very air before them, and to gild the linings of the interloper’s lungs. To recall the Flowing Estate in the mind is to render the mind a palatial museum, such that when the interloper looks away, they find their interior dimensions bursting at the nerves and the sinews and the arteries with remembered art, so that they themselves become the museum by way of memory. Though they must ask themselves where all the emerald eyes came from, in their recollections. Surely there were not so many on the walls? Surely murals do not blink, and stare intently. Oh well. It is an odd house, and the Arsenaults are a strange family, not least for inhabiting an estate on the Isle Dernière in the middle of the sea, away from society. 
Now we must speak of Alraune, a housemaid. She has been summoned to the Kingfisher Suite by Severine Arsenault, eldest daughter of Yves and Ysabeau Arsenault, known for her barbed tongue and her chain-smoking. Alraune is new, which is to say she has been employed at the Flowing Estate for just under a year, yet not so new that she had mentioned to any of her fellow staff that Severine Arsenault was murmuring secret requests for her to visit isolated suites. 
Alraune allows herself to feel only polite expectation, and arrives precisely at 4 o’clock, inserting her fingertips into the snarling mouths of two jade-colored dragons to slide open the doors to the Kingfisher Suite’s parlor.
She steps inside. She is now a moving part of six different murals, one for each of the four walls, and the floor, and the ceiling. Below her feet, the Tale of Genji plays in tatami panel chapters, slivered moon-pale faces and symmetrical palaces drifting in and out of view with the movement of her shadow. On the opposite wall, a kingfisher spreads vividly turquoise wings longer and wider than she is tall, a melting face at its tangerine breast in place of a heart. To her right, fuchsia pools and metallic silver peaches half-bitten, and to her left a knotted spiral of circus animals, dancing bears and crowned lions prancing ever larger the further they dance from the center.
Severine is not here. Alraune wonders if she should check the bedroom, the doorknob to which lies inside the painted eye of a cobalt tiger.  She wonders if this is Severine’s idea of a prank, to draw her away from her work on the busiest day of the year, the day preceding the Fête du Printemps, when all the other maids are braiding flowers into garlands and frosting pastel towers of jelly and violets and creme de menthe. But this is doubtful, she decides, for a prank would require Severine to think of her, outside of requesting secret meetings, and while Severine has never been unkind, Alraune does not imagine that thinking of others is one of her particular hobbies.
So she waits, staring into the face that is the kingfisher’s heart. It peers back at her with emerald-green eyes. It blinks, and she blinks, and when she looks again its eyes are only that pale marigold color. 
She smiles at her own imagination, easily tricked in a house full of eyes. 
Yet when she hears a faint strain of laughter, her heart leaps into her throat. Her gaze darts along the seams of the parlor, for the laughter had seemed to come from within the walls. The notion of a prank once again surfaces in her mind, though there is no one in the house with a fitting character for pranks. 
She turns a slow circle, more baffled now than frightened.
High-pitched giggles bubble out of the face in the kingfisher’s heart, and she whirls to face it, for how could a mural laugh, how could paint produce sound? Is she finally to experience the waking dreams of which the other maids occasionally whisper? But the bedroom door bursts open to her left before she can do more than gasp. 
An identical pair of children skip out on silent feet, with yellow hair and eyes like sapphires encased in cold glass, the very same as Yves and Ysabeau and Severine, for these of course are Alette and Ales Arsenault, and the laughter had of course belonged to them, and not the mural, for murals cannot laugh.
If Alette and Ales find it at all strange that Alraune is standing in the center of the parlor with eyes round as coins, they make no remark, only continue to giggle and chase one another in rings around Alraune’s skirts, as though their movements have been pre-charted by the spiraling circus animals on the wall behind them.
Alraune breathes, deeply, and when her heart has settled back into a steady rhythm, she says, “Your nurse has half the estate looking for you. Won’t you go to her, and lay her mind at ease?”
Alette finally succeeds in catching Ales, and the two children collapse in a heap of spring-tinted pinafores. They are giggling so hard she thinks they might not have heard her; now that she looks at them she is not at all sure which one is which. To watch them tussle atop the Tale of Genji one might almost believe that fairytale in which a lonely child’s reflection steps out of the mirror to play with them, except that one child is dressed in lavender and rose, and the other in sky blue and silver.
Alraune opens her mouth once more, aware that she has no real authority over the twins, but before she can speak the child in lavender – Ales? – looks up at her and says, as though it is a pre-set part of their play, “Papa has a box that breathes.”
Alette says, “Mama has a key that blinks.”
“This house is a meadow, but nobody sees.”
“The jewels on the walls are insects’ eyes.”
“Alette drowned once in the dining room-”
“Ales used to play in the paintings until the green shadow chased him away-”
“Have you seen it, mademoiselle?”
“Did you know that it is always spring on this isle?”
“Have you seen that green shadow in the walls?”
“Mama’s key is in her jewelry box, and do you know what it unlocks?”
“What have you seen, mademoiselle?”
Together their voices make a high-pitched chorus, and they say again, “What have you seen, mademoiselle?”
Alraune is momentarily distracted from answering when she notices that the twins are lying atop the kingfisher painted on the floor. Turquoise wings. Melting heart. She raises her eyes to the opposite wall, where the Tale of Genji unfurls in livid reds and pinks and greens. She could have sworn the kingfisher was on the wall, and the Tale of Genji on the floor. Try as she might, she cannot recall them moving. Paintings do not move, in any case.
The twins are tugging at the hem of her apron.
“Mademoiselle,” they ask, “what have you seen?”
She is sure this is the cue for a story. I dream of emerald eyes, she thinks of saying. In my dreams the paintings move. In my dreams there is a faceless stranger all in green, and we waltz through all the worlds painted in the walls of this house.
Both twins’ eyes are on her, chlorine-blue, the blue of pearls underwater, unblinking. The kingfisher beneath them is so life-like she could almost imagine it lifting them into the air.
Alraune’s lips have barely formed the word “I-” when another voice uncoils out of the doorway behind her, a voice that slinks. 
It says, “When I was quite a bit younger I used to walk through the walls, and play with the painted toys, and dance with the painted dancers, and ride on the backs of all the animals. The portraits used to speak to me. I explored all the palaces in the Swan Suite, and all the red seas in the Nightjar Gallery, and all the watercolor villages in the Peregrine Wing. Until I had walked so far into the walls I could not find my way out. To survive, I drank gold-leaf water, and nibbled at painted feasts, which is why all the estate’s paintings of food have bites missing. I was terrified I would become a painted girl – that my parents would one day find me frozen in oil paint in some lonely hall where no girl had been painted before, and they would say, doesn’t that look like our missing daughter? And in their grief they would watch me for hours while all the while I was trapped in my own image trying to tell them with the dots of white painted in my eyes that I had been real, once…and then I stumbled out of the silk meadows on the seventh floor, starving and sick from eating paint, and now my parents tell the story of eccentric Severine who went missing for a week when she was only a child, who ever since could not bear to look upon the murals…” 
A sigh, long and deep, and the air fills with the scent of clove cigarettes. 
Alraune turns. 
Severine Arsenault leans against the doorframe, pale fingertips clutching a lacquered cigarette holder, lanky frame draped in sequined satin the poison, glassy green of arsenic, down-turned eyes and perpetually mournful lips bruised purple with makeup. She looks like a drowned flapper whom death has bored back to life. 
She says, “You’ve had your story. Now get out. And for the love of god go and find Nurse before she keels over on Father’s favorite carpet.”
Yet even before she’s finished speaking, the twins are giggling again, dashing past Severine and the dragon-mouthed doors, leaving their laughter to echo and vanish in the air like Severine’s cigarette smoke.  
Now it is just Alraune and Severine, who seems to be measuring Alraune as she takes another long drag on her cigarette. Severine’s eyes have a weight to them. Perhaps it is the jeweled color, perhaps it is the sheer volume of apathy behind them, but Alraune finds herself standing up straighter against a sudden urge to make herself small. In another century, she would have been fired for meeting her mistress’s eyes. But Severine, she thinks, wants her to look.
“No stories to tell?” says Severine, even though she was the one who’d interrupted Alraune right as she had been about to begin. 
Alraune thinks this is a test. The first test had been not telling anyone that Severine had asked her here. As for this second test…she opts once more for discretion.
Alraune says, though in her mind she is traveling back through certain late nights where the estate’s dimensions had seemed to warp around her, the rooms not ending where they should, the doors placed differently, as though one wrong step would see her walking through the walls instead of between them, “It’s no business of mine if the walls move around me.”
She can already see that this is a good answer. Severine exhales a cloud of lavender smoke, the corner of her mouth turned up. “Then how do you make sure you get where you’re going?”
“I hold a map in my mind,” says Alraune. “I tell myself it is thirty-three steps to the library from the Canary Parlor, and when I have taken thirty-three steps, I know I am there. I do not believe the architecture.”
“How very clever of you,” says Severine, and Alraune thinks she means it. “Well. I have a favor to ask. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that you mustn’t mention it to anyone. The twins can gabble all they like about drowning in the carpets but if Papa and Mama were ever to learn I’d told a maid-” she breathes out, long wisping violet tendrils that almost look like dancing figures. “They never liked me much after I stopped wanting to look at their murals. So I’d be in quite a bit of trouble if you told. Is that, in any way, an exciting prospect for you?”
Alraune raises both cinnamon-colored brows before she can stop herself. 
“Don’t pretend to be surprised,” says Severine. “I know I am not well-liked, in the upstairs or the downstairs. I picked you because you’re new and you don’t yet despise me, though you will. You see? I shouldn’t have said that. I should have said I picked you because you’re clever, or because you seem a better listener than the other servants. Then again, you might resent me for any praise that comes at the cost of your fellows.” 
Another drag. Another trail of silvery-purple billowing up towards the mandala like the eye of god on the ceiling. 
“No?” says Severine. “No comment? You can tell I like the sound of my own voice, and have deemed it wise to let me ramble. You’re not wrong. I suppose now you’re wondering when I’m going to get around to telling you why you’re here. It involves the Hummingbird Suite. Do you know it?”
The words are out before Alraune can stop them, laced with fear or awe or wild curiosity. “The Hummingbird Suite?” 
“So you do know it. I can hardly imagine the stories they tell in the maid’s quarters – green shadows and shapes in the mirrors and hallways turning to grass beneath one’s feet – but I assure you the favor is quite simple. At seven o’clock sharp, all you have to do is bring a supper tray to the Hummingbird Suite and slide it through the slot in the door. Normally that task falls to me, but as tomorrow is the Fête du Printemps I find myself rather more occupied than usual. Well? Isn’t that simple?”
Alraune says, very slowly, careful to frame a statement and not a question, “But nobody lives in the Hummingbird Suite.”
This, unequivocally, was the first piece of information she’d learned upon her arrival to the Flowing Estate: that the Hummingbird Suite was kept historically, ceremonially empty, though no one could tell her precisely why. The maids were not even supposed to clean the hallway leading to the suite’s doors. And yet – and yet – spring breezes coasted down the Hummingbird Corridor when it was supposed to be midwinter. All the shadows there were the viridian of dragonfly wings. Miette the scullery maid had sworn every painting had its eyes turned to the door of the suite, though they had not been painted that way. Roet the valet had pressed his eye to the keyhole once, on a dare, and spent the rest of the day in a daze, insisting that through that tiny slice of brass he had seen a rolling, undulating sea of tourmaline grass instead of a parlor, dotted with constellations of lacy flowers and silken butterflies and bees that moved like molasses through the air.
And then there was that shadow with the emerald eyes.
Severine says, still gazing intently at Alraune, “Indeed. No one lives in the Hummingbird Suite.”
There are words beneath her words, worlds of words, spinning solar systems of words. Alraune could ask any question, for she has learned, comparatively, nothing, except that the nobody in the Hummingbird Suite is a nobody who eats.
But this is the final test, she thinks, even though there is nothing in Severine’s manner to suggest it.
Alraune says, only, “Seven o’clock. The Hummingbird Suite.”
“The kitchen will have a tray ready. If anyone sees you, shake your head very slightly and pretend to be in a daze. No one will question that.” Alraune nods, and Severine says, after a short pause, “I do appreciate your help. If there is ever a favor you seek in return, I hope you will come to me.”
Generous. Unexpected. Not entirely smart to offer; not entirely smart to accept.
There are politics in this house, whole dimensions of loyalty drawn and blurred and stepped over, as prone to distortion with the aversion of one’s eyes as the architecture itself, both within the worlds of the servants and the Arsenault family, and Alraune has thus far dodged every attempt to snare her to one side or another.
Yet she cannot say no.
Alraune dips her head, rather more formally than the situation warrants. The tip of her chin brushes the pistachio-green frills of her uniform.
When she looks up, finally, the young mistress of the Flowing Estate has departed, leaving only the faint, drifting silhouette of a woman in lilac smoke.
§
In Alraune’s hands the tray is cold and silver, inlaid with a sort of backwards danse macabre in which a ring of skeletons, madly dancing, gains skin and sinew until they have whirled their way back to life. Dimly, Alraune thinks that resurrection is a common theme in this household, and then she stops thinking, for there is a buzzing in the air that sounds as if a thousand insects have taken wing at once. 
She is standing at the end of the long corridor that leads her to the door of the Hummingbird Suite. The ceiling and the carpet are both brilliant green, the walls painted in painful detail with a thousand miniature vignettes of medieval villagers in rose and teal and orange-gold. The air is filled with the scent of gardens, though she has not passed a single open window. 
Still there is that buzzing in the back of her mind, a low hum that makes her twitch, involuntarily. 
Nine steps down the corridor. The door has not moved any closer. Does she hear running feet, laughter? Alraune twists her head back across her shoulders to peer behind her, but there is no one, only the low shafts of yellow light and the galaxies of dust motes swirling within. 
Fourteen steps. The door is receding before her eyes even as she walks towards it. The boundaries between the carpet and the wallpaper are wavering, rolling like the surface of the sea or the meadow Roet says he saw. 
It’s no business of mine if the walls move around me, she’d said to Severine; she imagines failure, returning with the silver skeleton tray only to tell Severine that she had been unable to approach the door. No, she will do no such thing.
Alraune squares her shoulders and begins to walk again, purposefully, ignoring the impossible geometry surrounding her, and she does not stop this time, not even when the architecture bends around her so it appears for a single moment as though she is walking upon the ceiling, stepping smartly around unlit chandeliers. 
She gazes instead at the hundreds of little scenes blooming in furious color upon the walls: villagers dancing around a maypole, villagers at a feast of rainbow chimerae, villagers gathering scarlet posies, villagers binding effigies in yellow straw, villagers greeting an emerald-eyed stranger in a rabbit mask rough-hewn out of a single board of wood…now the emerald-eyed stranger is in every painting. 
Her eyes flick from one tiny mural to another, the emerald-eyed stranger in a crown of wheat, dancing in the maypole ring, presiding over the harvest, braiding wildflowers into spindly creatures…she is walking so quickly now that the images flit by one after another in the corners of her eyes, creating the effect of a single, moving picture that follows her down the corridor, and as she watches, unable to tear her gaze away, the image of the emerald-eyed stranger turns its head, slowly, through picture after picture after picture, building speed as her feet propel her nearly to running, and then it is looking at her through every one of a thousand thousand paintings, and she is choking on the smell of the spring, and the humming is so loud she can feel it in her rib cage, as though there are insects waiting to burst from the organic cage of her heart, and crawl down the alleyways of her ventricles, as though her body is a meadow of cells exploding – and then she is standing at the door.
Her heart is thrumming at her every nerve, but there is no sound of insect wings, no emerald eyes gazing slitted back at her from every painting; indeed, there is no rabbit-masked stranger in any of the miniature scenes, only candy-colored villagers in petticoats and pantaloons. 
She does not take this respite for granted. Kneeling down amidst the pastel froth of her skirts, she props open the little flap at the bottom of the door – dazzlingly painted in a million jeweled hummingbirds in playing card waistcoats – and with shaking hands, slides the silver tray forward until it disappears from her view. The flap swings closed.
She is left on her knees, trembling so hard she feels like a rung bell, not trusting herself to stand but with every instinct screaming at her to scramble to her feet and leave this corridor forever; stranger still, as if some essential, human part of her that she had heretofore never suspected herself of possessing – her soul? – had very nearly slipped to the edge of her body and out of her forever, that even now is in mortal peril so long as she remains in proximity to this door. 
But – she cannot help it – Alraune is curious. Better yet, she has common sense, and even in her fear-frenzied mind she had counted the steps to the end of the Hummingbird Corridor, so in the presence of any further hallucinations she can simply close her eyes and walk back to the safer innards of the estate. 
So – with every primal, animal part of her, including that fluttering something that could very well be her soul, begging her to stand and run – Alraune performs the fantastic act of will that is remaining on her knees. 
And listens.
All she had seen through the flap in the door was the faintest slice of polished wooden boards, and the glow of sunlight. All she can know, therefore, is that whatever is inside likes the light, for it has drawn the curtains. 
She waits, ears straining for a footstep, an intake of breath, the sound of the silver tray being lifted by anonymous hands. She hears nothing. 
The notion of lifting the flap again to peer beneath is unfathomable, especially when she is using every ounce of her bravery just to remain kneeling here before the door. But it would not be too much, not take too much from her, surely, if she were to lean forward, the barest amount, to press one eye against the golden gleam of the keyhole. At the very least, to do so would be to consign her evening to raving and muttering, as Roet did – perhaps she will see the same meadow that he spoke of. She wonders how it feels to lose one’s mind, if it can be counted as a loss at all and not as some incomprehensible addition that renders the rest of the mind suddenly foreign. She imagines emerald eyes blinking open on the surface of her brain, a parasite, something alive. Then feels silly for sitting before a door wondering if peering through a keyhole could rob her of her sanity…though it could not be denied that something had happened, in the corridor…though Roet had recovered his senses by the following morning…what is she risking, really? Does she truly believe her grasp on reality is so porcelain-fragile? She twists her skirts between her fingertips, heart still drumming an anxious rhythm on her lungs. 
Then, when she hears it, finally – a soft scrape of what could only be the tray against the floor – it is no decision at all. 
Lightning-fast, she leans forward, soundlessly pressing her left eye against the cold brass. And sees.
A sliver of a room, ivory and gold, full of light. High ceiling painted with rippling waves of molten dawn, in shades of tangerine and tiger and marigold. Swirling armchairs and divans in saffron silk. 
Yet Alraune’s mind catalogues this subconsciously, for the first thing she notices with her eye pressed to the keyhole are the masks.
Intricate, lovely half-faces tooled of samite and jacquard and lacquer and leather and wood and papier-mâche. Cats and girls and foxes, swans and plague doctors and jesters, frogs and suns and flames, tarot cards and sheets of opera music and dark, bristled bunches of human hair. They are bound one to the other by their ribbons, creating long, knobbly, rainbow ropes of masks that are strung between the ivory walls and the floor and the ceiling, so thickly they obscure a great deal of the room. There must be thousands of them – millions, even.
Nonplussed, Alraune only continues to stare, wondering if this is some sort of bizarre game that the Arsenaults have been running for years – they could certainly afford to indulge their eccentricity – but how had the corridor warped around her like that? And what of the emerald eyes? And what of the cold dread she feels upon gazing at this room with all its masks, dread that seems to pool and coil like a cobra in her chest, the fear she had felt in the corridor growing somehow sharper?
There was someone inside, she was sure of it. She had heard the tray shift on the floor, and she can see it now, resting seemingly untouched. Yet now, squinting for all she is worth, she can make out no figure, though she can see straight to the opposite corners of the room through the masks. Only a thousand pairs of empty eye holes gaze back; she is struck by the sudden image of her own eye framed by the keyhole, as though she herself has donned a mask made of brass in order to peek inside the suite. 
She is about to lean back, for her presence will be missed in the kitchens, and she has already experienced a great deal for a single evening, when – she could not have said how – she senses movement to her left.
As though – icy panic floods her throat, her chest, her heart – as though whoever lives in this room is standing pressed against the door, watching her even as she is unable to see them. 
Run, her legs scream, as well as her heart, and her head.
But she cannot run. Panic has trapped her kneeling. 
She had assumed a window was open in the suite, and that why the scent of spring so drenched the room, traveling every few seconds through the keyhole across her face, but with a thrill of horror she realizes it is breath; that whatever is in this room is kneeling too, parallel to her, separated only by a scant few inches of painted wood.
A sound escapes her throat, she cannot help it, only half a gasp, and yet the breath on the other side of the door seems to pause.
And then a voice whispers. Low. Blooming. Somehow containing that hum of insects, the sound of blue water she hears trickling in the murals, the shape of violets, as though a voice could be jewel-toned. 
It says, haltingly, “From which…dizzying underworlds…hast thou hastened?”
It is like a line from a play Alraune cannot remember. She feels there is a line that must come after, but for the life of her she cannot speak, even if she could think what to say. 
In a more normal tone, the voice says, “You have the most beautiful eyes.”
They sound almost human: amused, aware that they’ve scared her. 
Her heart is still beating so wildly she is sure they can hear it pounding through the keyhole, but she opens her mouth, finally, tongue darting out over dry lips, and discovers she can speak. “To – to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
Whoever it is makes a pleased sound in the back of their throat. Pleased, perhaps, that she is being polite. 
“I am life,” says the voice. “I am all that is green and gold. Revelry follows in my footstep. Kings and queens fight to die at my feet, believing they will wake. In each of my cells there is an open eye, and that eye is the world, and I am the dance braided into the world.”
“Is that a riddle?” says Alraune, after a moment.
“No,” says the voice. 
“Then, what is your name?”
“It is painted on the walls of this house. The birds hum it. It is the sound of your own body making itself anew as the year turns.”
Her blood thrums in her ears, in recognition of this fact, yet when she reconsiders the stranger’s words they mean nothing to her at all. Politely, Alraune says, “Perhaps a name with which I might address you?”
“Free me and I will sing it to you.”
Alraune feels her brows draw together. “Free you? You do not remain in this room by choice?”
Whoever is on the other side of the door chuckles, but it is a dark sound, a nighttime sound, the way a snake might laugh. “For the yellow-hazel of your eyes, I will tell you I am trapped here. For the curl of your lashes, I will tell you I have not seen the outside of this room for many long years.”
Fully frowning now, Alraune feels the words on the tip of her tongue: that the Arsenault family, surely, for all their quirks, would not confine a person within a suite for years on end, yet the proof is on the other side of this keyhole, if only she believes them. Anyone who laughs like a snake could easily be a liar. Yet – yet. Can she say without a doubt that she does not believe the Arsenaults capable of such an act? 
Perhaps sensing her silent debate, the voice says, “The lady of the house keeps the key to this door. You have walked my corridor and kept your mind; you are capable of achieving your ends. Fetch the key and unlock this door and discover the truth for yourself. I will wrap my name in ribbons and gift it to you. You need not trust me; only trust your own eyes. Go now, before you are suspected. I will be waiting.”
And somehow, impossibly, she is rising to her feet before she can will herself to standing. Somehow she is turning, as though in a dream, scarcely feeling her own body moving. 
She walks down the corridor, away from the voice, away from the hummingbird door and the medieval vignettes. The floor beneath her feet is solid, and the walls do not rollick against the ceiling. All the strangeness is in her head now; she feels as if her mind is suspended like a lantern within her skull, never knocking against bone, incapable of affecting her physically as she steps, mechanically, down fourteen halls and through twelve separate galleries before returning to her work in the kitchens, sculpting pastry architecture out of mascarpone and boysenberry syrup. 
“Mama has a key that blinks,” Alette Arsenault had said, in the midst of running rings around Alraune’s skirts. “Mama’s key is in her jewelry box, and do you know what it unlocks?”
When she is done in the kitchens, she makes up the rooms for the Arsenaults’ guests that will be arriving on the morrow for the Fête du Printemps – making beds and arranging vanilla orchids in Venetian glass vases, placing hyacinth truffles and marzipans shaped like birds of paradise upon silk pillowcases, arranging the curtains so the sunlight will fall just so. Still her mind dangles, suspended. 
She now knows how Roet felt, wandering the estate in a daze, but this evening the servants are too busy to note the wide, liquid depths of Alraune’s eyes, as though she has been gazing into something infinite, and in the bustle no one speaks to her.
It is past midnight when she falls into bed, Miette the scullery maid already murmuring in her sleep to the left, Jalousie the chamber maid’s lips furiously mouthing the names of the guests that will arrive in the morning to the right. 
Even the maid’s quarters are painted with pastel forests and scenes from La Chanson de Roland, but in the dark the room’s dimensions fall away. 
Alraune falls asleep the moment her eyes flicker closed, to dream of masks and maypoles, effigies and emerald eyes.
§
When Alraune woke, she had woken to clarity, and the sight of the haloed face of Charlemagne painted on the wall opposite her like a counterfeit-dawn. 
Today was the Fête du Printemps. 
Today, the estate would be flooded with strangers, the whole household a riot of activity from sun-up to sun-down. There would be no better time to slip into the rooms of the lady of the house, and borrow the key Ysabeau Arsenault kept in her jewelry box. 
So – she did not let herself dwell on this, for she knew that if she let herself consider what she was risking, she would immediately come to her senses and put an end to it – she slipped unnoticed into Yves and Ysabeau’s bedroom, while the entire staff and the Arsenaults were off greeting guests, and found in the lowest drawer of a towering jewelry box a bronze key with an opal on the end, looking as though rainbow wisps of flame writhed inside. In the palm of her hand, the opal looked unnervingly like an eyeball.
She did not linger, for the room made her uneasy – the murals here featured medieval ladies blooming out of trees like strange brightly colored birds – and made her way back through the estate to the Hummingbird Suite. 
This time, the walls and the floor stayed firmly put, and there were no emerald eyes blinking at her from the miniature scenes in the wallpaper. What this might mean, she did not allow herself to speculate.
Now, Alraune stands for a moment outside the door, gazing at the hearts and spades on a yellow hummingbird’s waistcoat, but she’d made up her mind the previous night, when the daze had begun to wear off. She is not in the habit of second-guessing herself, nor apparently the manifest wisdom of unlocking a door at the behest of a stranger who speaks in mad poetry. 
She could be fired for this. For this, she could never work as a maid in a grand household, never live in comfort, ever again. Yet the alternative is continuing to work at the Flowing Estate, complicit in the knowledge that someone might have been locked in a suite for years on end. For Alraune, whom we must now realize is possessed of a truly staggering moral fortitude, it is no question at all.
She has made up her mind; there is nothing gained in waiting.
Alraune tips her fist against the door, once, to be polite, and says, “I am coming in.”
She does not wait for a response, for given too much warning whoever is inside might very well attempt to bowl her over and escape…but she opens the door only to pale beams of citrine light, creamy ivory walls, endless hollowed faces, and – her eyes go in and out of focus as they criss-cross the thousand masks, her imagination putting tall figures to each, with red-ribboned limbs, with dancing shadows, disembodied mimicries of human forms – and then, through the geometry of masks in the air, she sees the silken corner of a yellow robe. 
Her eyes travel up, interrupted by blue oni and diamond-checked harlequins and grimacing wooden gods – to the curve of a shoulder, azure-robed, the color of the sky translated to the language of thread. 
Snow-skinned Columbina, Bacchus in a curling crown of grapes and leaves, a grotesquely plum-faced infant sculpted mid-wail – she sees a sleeve the lurid, ruby-lit color of a fresh wound.
Her gaze shifts across gold lacquer illuminated with a calendar of saints, a siren’s mask of abalone, an astrologer’s mask of all the planets; another glimpse of the figure in the center of it all, this time a waterfall of silver-white hair the color of milk and foam atop the sea.
She cannot see any more – there are too many faces gazing back at her, unliving – cannot tell if the shape in the center is only an illusion made of masks, and not a human shape at all.
Except then…then…it turns to face her, all of its edges resolving themselves, and the room shifts into sudden sharp focus around this new cynosure. 
It is a person.
They are wearing a robe of many colors, or many robes of many colors, scarlet and emerald and cobalt and gold, all fantastically embroidered with diamonds and fractals and fables, trailing bells and tassels and little wooden charms shaped like swirling suns. Their hair is a long white sheet down their back, though their face, through what Alraune can see around their mask, seems to be smooth, unwrinkled. 
The mask they are wearing is the lavender mask of a fox: long, sharp snout, pink origami blossoms tucked behind both ears, black teeth curved like miniature Persian daggers. The papier-mâché casts both their eyes in shadow; from this distance it looks as if they have no eyes, as if this face is as hollow as all the sculpted thousands surrounding them.
Alraune falls to her knees.
She cannot help it. Her heart is not pounding, as before, there is no heavy weight of dread in her chest, and yet, she might have been kneeling in the ocean for the sensation of waves rolling over her, of some immense force moving around her, emanating from this rainbow figure, as though the secret heart of the universe, around which all objects moved, had been here, secretly, in the Hummingbird Suite all along, and all the astrologers had been peering wrongly at the sky for centuries. 
She blinks and the figure is kneeling before her, mirroring her, a parallel to the last time they had spoken through the door.
This close, there is once again that feeling that her skin is blooming; as though every one of her cells is flowering open, the knot of her organs unwinding, her bones frilling and growing soft, her eyes rendered gardens by the sights fed down their nerves…her cheeks are wet, and when she lifts a hand to touch she is surprised to find it is only tears, and not the very matter of her spilling down her cheeks to form new, gleaming life in the air between her and the masked figure…still, at this distance, she cannot see their eyes, which she had assumed to be emerald…
Delicately, with both thumbs, the robed stranger brushes Alraune’s tears from her cheeks, and remains there, cradling her face. 
“Brave, brave, so very brave,” they murmur. “Were eternity mine to give, I would gift it unto you, for freeing me.”
Slowly, very slowly, Alraune reaches up to clasp the stranger’s hands. Their skin is feverishly hot to the touch. Despite the blooming she feels, she double-checks, in her mind, that she had closed and locked the door behind her, that the key is buried in the bodice of her apron, that despite how incredibly foolish it had been, in hindsight, to lock herself into the suite with this stranger, she has only come to learn the truth. 
“I have not freed you,” Alraune breathes, gazing into the empty crescents of the fox’s eyes. “I have come to ascertain whether your tale is true-”
“And because you were curious,” says the figure.
Alraune has not wanted to admit to herself that curiosity had been as strong a force in leading her here as any of her moral reasons. But-
“Yes,” she concedes.
“And now you are here with me. What can you hope to learn from the inside of this room?”
“I would like to know what you are, and how it is possible that you influence the Estate in the way that you do – sending dreams, and emerald eyes, and moving through the murals.”
She cannot see their lips, only the fox’s, yet she thinks the stranger smiles.
“You have not guessed it already? Then I will tell you, in thanks for your service.” They lean in. The fox’s muzzle nudges her ear, feather-light. “Life follows in my wake. This house cannot help but come alive around me. Painted faces stir and painted wind drifts through the corridors, and painted girls and non-painted girls may both get lost within the walls. In my dreaming and my dreaming alone I may step out of my body and peer through the murals with the eyes I once possessed – emerald, as you say, the color of that which I am. What am I?”
This, then, is the riddle. The answer is impossible. The answer has been told to her by all her senses.
She says, and she is both certain and uncertain, “You are the Spring. Somehow the Arsenault family has bound Spring into this suite, and that is why winter never comes to this isle.”
The stranger draws their face back so she is looking once more into the crescent slits of the fox’s eyes. There is a heady aura of delight about them. 
Alraune says, “May I see your face?”
“You may see all of my faces,” says the Spring, and tips their head, sending ripples down that waterfall of star-bright hair, in a way that indicates Alraune might do the honors of removing the fox’s mask.
Delicately, Alraune reaches around the stranger’s neck to the back of their head, aware they are kneeling improperly close to one another. Though what is proper when it comes to the embodiment of a season? Spring is the season of madness, after all. Perhaps it will be upon gazing at the face of the Spring that her mind will shatter.
But her fingers have already unknotted the fuchsia ribbon, and the fox mask is already slipping off the stranger’s features to reveal – another mask.
Impossibly, a wide, garish mask of the Erlking, tinted green and claret, woodland animals vanishing and reappearing in the carved folds of wooden ivy. 
How strange, Alraune is thinking, how very strange that there should be a mask beneath the mask, though dimensionally, spatially, it should not have fit, while her body is still moving, instinctually, to do the only thing she can think of doing, which is to untie the Erlking’s mask as well, which in turn falls away to reveal another mask under that, the mask of a leopard with hibiscus flowers like two ruby-pink flames behind either ear. 
Beneath the leopard mask there is a pirate mask, and beneath the pirate mask there is a Noh mask the color of pale, wrinkled flesh, and beneath that there is a spiky pastel mask made of countless folded origami stars…
Mask after mask clatters to the polished wood, until the masks are no longer falling upon the floor but upon each other, with hollow papery sounds, and the piles of masks around Alraune and the Spring are rising like a lacquered tide. Her fingertips work furiously, already growing weary, while in her mind there is nothing but a continued chant of the word, impossible, impossible, impossible…except she is inside a suite with the Spring, so what is impossible? 
Spring’s presence warps the dimensions of the estate, allows them to bleed into one another and so would it not be possible, in some impossible way, for the space above Spring’s face to be akin to the entirety of the mansion, wherein too much space might fit into too little space? Might not these masks within masks within masks be unlike the paintings on the walls, that extend infinitely inward? Might not a face, like Severine as a child, become lost, transmute, into an unending hall of faces that works atop the skin like a carnival house of mirrors, multiplying each feature into its own private labyrinth? What, exactly, is she thinking? Only nonsense. 
But still Alraune is untying masks, enough masks to weave into another rope across the suite, and it occurs to her now that these ropes of masks are likely the result of months, years even, of prying off masks in a desperate, fruitless attempt to reach Spring’s underlying face. Her eyes flicker up across a thousand, million masks, and sees in them now a lonely, frenzied madness, ripping off face after face in an attempt to touch skin, and not vellum, or paper, or lacquer. 
Abruptly, Alraune stops.
She is out of breath, panting, while Spring merely sits, for all appearances quite placid. They are the eye within a hurricane of masks, for every inch of the floor around them has been obscured by grinning, grimacing faces with sunburst eyes and skinless lips and tenebrous cheekbones. 
Spring’s mask is now a gold Venetian sun, wavering lacquer beams the color of coin and candlelight flickering down to their embroidered shoulders.
They say, almost kindly, “You will not find my face in this room.”
“Then where will I find it?” There is a near-edge of hysteria in Alraune’s tone.
But the Spring, by way of response, only leans forward so the Sun’s copper lips brush against Alraune’s forehead in a fleshless approximation of a kiss. “Thank you,” they say. “I will not forget what you have done for me. Now at long last I must join the party.”
With a great slithering of silk, Spring stands, and strides past Alraune to the door, sidestepping the sea of masks with delicately-placed bare feet. 
Still kneeling, Alraune twists around, hand flying to the key in the bodice of her dress. She had almost forgotten the Fête du Printemps, that was at this very moment happening in the gardens, the only reason she had been able to borrow the key and slip inside this suite unnoticed. Though surely her absence has been noted by now.
A familiar dread begins to pool in her chest. 
With all the masks she has untied, she has forgotten the fear, the delirium, that Spring can inflict even whilst isolated and trapped – to make the mind believe it is drowning in vivid whirlpools of liquid, melting art, and so much worse. Freed, set loose upon their jailers, she can scarcely imagine what the vengeance of the Spring might look like, all the minds cracked open like oysters in its wake. 
“You cannot get out,” she says, mouth dry. “I have locked the door.”
“The door need be unlocked only once,” says the Spring, sing-song. “You have broken the seal upon this room, quite unknowingly, and I thank you for your unknowing. But I have allowed you your curiosity, and I can linger here no longer. Farewell, hazel eyes; I shall not forget you.”
And then – Alraune cannot say how it happens – the robes upon Spring’s body unwind, become every-color ribbons, stream through all the gaps between the door and the walls. In this manner, Spring’s body is undone.
Alraune blinks – foolish to blink, to miss the vanishing – and when she opens her eyes she is alone in the Hummingbird Suite.
§
She does not wait, to ponder how the weight of years might feel in this room.
Pausing only to snatch a mask from the floor – a snow-maiden’s mask, sharp blue-white and icily glittering, for as luck would dictate, the fête this year has taken the form of a masque – Alraune sprints from the Hummingbird Suite and down fifteen painted corridors, twelve staircases, and twenty-two galleries, the swiftest path to the gardens. 
Madness spirals from the walls. Spring has been freed for less than a minute, and already the estate is unwinding, unfurling around her like the helix strands scientists say comprise our lives, as though the delirium of the Spring were a bridal veil dragged behind, a slow shuddering deep in the architectural core of the mansion. Figures are stepping out of paintings. Dutch alchemists and moon-faced geishas and anatomists’ diagrams half-clad in skin and scanty red muscle. 
She is running on the ceiling. She is running through the tatami floor. Where her feet fall mandalas blossom. Petals tangle in her hair. She is fighting her way through gardens though she is indoors, silver peaches and cherries and lavender sakura, harlequin petals like painted faces, each flower a rainbow mask, everywhere the hum of insects and the splashing of water, and the deep blue Moroccan carpet in the dining room has become a shoreless lake flooding down through the Crane Hall to soak her shoes…
Spring’s delirium caresses her cheeks, as though it is fond of her, but it does not crawl within her. Perhaps this is a form of Spring’s thanks – the ability to keep her head, to retain her wits even as the world around her comes unbound, or perhaps it is her own ability born of a level head. 
It is no matter. She is counting her steps towards the estate’s main doors, and she can see them now, a whirl of crystal that splits before her eyes as though caught in an optometrist’s glass, into a circle of doors that flings wide at her approach. 
Alraune steps through the portal of the doors into what appears, to all her senses, a separate universe.
The air is full of jewels – rubied, sapphired. The garden has become a kaleidoscope of gardens. Wherever she rests her eyes, fractals of life begin to spiral inward, down to the motes of dust waltzing through sunbeams. 
Alraune has to stop, and breathe, and tie on her mask, for it would be most improper for a servant of the Arsenault family to appear at the masque as herself. Yet her fingers, so recently in a frenzy of untying, hesitate before fitting the lacquer to her features, imagining unbidden the feeling of a mask against one’s face for years on end. 
But she ties it on, and through the laughing diamond slant of the snow-maid’s eyes – for masks cannot feel madness – her mind begins to clear, begins to move in straight lines.
And she sees she is standing in the center of the garden path. All around her bloom flowers like miniature models of the solar system, little puffs and strands of color growing out from their centers – opalescent flowers like moons on stems – flowers like carousels – flowers like green-skinned ladies’ hands – flowers like scythes, and scimitars – glazed flowers that glitter as if they have been dipped in sugar, or salt – flowers with crimson hearts at their centers bleeding ruffled petals and bluish veins. The garden is a hallucination at the best of times. She cannot imagine where the Arsenaults get all these flowers. Have they always looked this way, or only since she unwittingly freed the Spring? Perhaps it is Spring’s presence in the mansion that makes them grow into these bizarre shapes. Now is not the time to think of it.
There is a laughter in the air that is very close to screaming.
Alraune gathers up her skirts in both fists and begins to run down the mosaic path between the flowers, speckled, mirrored tiles flashing beneath her heels. She has no plan. She can think of nothing that might halt Spring’s madness, take the wrath from Spring’s vengeance. Whatever happens in the gardens today, it will be entirely her fault. 
§
The aristocracy, of course, does not exist as it did in the days of old, yet it does live on, and here are the people for whom it lives: a spinning welter of color and lights, a prismatic fever-dream of whirling flesh and fabric. The Fête du Printemps is a riot set before the glimmering crystal domes of the greenhouse, the sunlight through which acts as a mirrorball casting tessellated, pastry-tinted diamonds of green and pink and yellow across the human shapes on the grass. 
Rainbows spin through the air like a magician’s flock of imaginary daggers.
Women in gowns of keyhole-embroidered fuchsia, and lime-green scales, and saffron jacquard dance in rings, their layers of skirts and petticoats flaring out in the manner of flowers set swirling atop water. Men have the heads of rabbits, and roses. Gold coins cascade from hair, pearlescent nautiluses gleam around necks, a fanged mouth blossoms from the back of a woman’s neck, undoubtedly part of her mask yet disturbingly red and real.
There is not a human face to be seen, nor human speech to be heard. They are all dancing in a saturnalian frenzy, the guests and the servants alike, to a wailing music that they themselves are creating in the absence of a band. They will dance until they are not what they are, and from there unto death. 
It is painful how much Alraune wants to join them, but she tells herself she has walked one hundred and seventy-four steps from the door to where she stands now, overlooking the party. Then she counts the fingers on each of her trembling hands, one-two-three-four-five, until the numbers have settled her back into reason. 
Reason tells her that there is nothing she can do. She can hardly stop the music, hardly restrain each and every one of them from dancing until the chambers of their hearts are flung wide. She cannot gift them all the numerical equations in her head that equal sanity. 
So buried in her mind, Alraune nearly leaps out of her skin when a reveler staggers up to her with all the jagged grace of a deer shot with a hunter’s arrow, and clasps both her hands. This reveler is dressed in the dreamy, silken purple of a vein, and wears a mask that makes it appear as though she has a velveteen violet blooming out of either eye. She is accompanied by an overwhelming scent of clove cigarettes. 
Severine Arsenault says, giggling madly, “You’ve done it, you’ve done it-”
“I’m so sorry,” says Alraune. “I didn’t mean to.”
“What are you talking about? This is precisely what I’d hoped you would do. I never told you not to speak to whomever was inside, did I?”
Something very cold steals over Alraune. “You mean – you wanted this? But Spring will kill these people-”
Severine sways, slightly, to the shrieking music engulfing them both. “It is all they deserve. Everyone has come here for the same reason, hoping for what they have always hoped for, even at the price of imprisoning a season, even as the earth spins off its axis, what comes next will be all they deserve-”
“I – what? You mean to say the guests have not simply come for the Fête?”
“Think of what is missing. Think of what it means.” 
“What? What is missing?”
Severine makes a huffing sound in the back of her throat, as though Alraune is being incomparably slow, and releases one of her hands for a fraction of a second to gesture to the edge of the crowd on the lawn. “Do you see that woman? With the masks?”
They are all wearing masks, Alraune wants to say, but then she sees a grotesquely knobbled figure standing, miraculously unaffected, just outside the frenzy. 
When she blinks, the details resolve themselves, and she sees that the odd lumps on the woman’s form are, in fact, hundreds of masks.
Pale heads like pearls bloom out of each shadowed fold in the fabric, while tiny, jeweled faces glitter down the seams of the woman’s apparel. Every inch of her is hung with masks, lacquer and cinnabar and copper, and the woman is simply standing and watching the revel, her own face obscured by a dangling rainbow mass of ribbon. 
“She is the Mask-maker,” says Severine. “My parents paid her a great sum of money for the mask that trapped the Spring.”
Indeed, the longer Alraune looks, the more the masks all have a familiar cast to them, a certain intricacy of paint, a certain elegance to the papier-mâche, identical to the thousands in the Hummingbird Suite. “How can such a thing be possible? Masks inside masks-”
“It was Spring’s own ability that allowed it to happen – infusing an object with life, as you have seen in the murals. As the Mask-maker constructed the mask over Spring’s face, it grew in dimension, became a fractal unto itself, an unending prison. Clever, no? And it is a failsafe if Spring were ever to find the box Father keeps in his secret safe.”
Again, Alraune has the feeling she has completely lost her footing. “The box? What is in the box?”
Unbidden, the words of Ales Arsenault return to her, a child’s lisp between Japanese palaces and painted kingfishers: Papa has a box that breathes.
Severine gives her a long, droll look. “Can you truly not guess? Can you not imagine a mask made over your face, in the shape of your face, until the mask is more the truth of you than you yourself, so that when the mask is completed, and lifted from your flesh, there is nothing underneath? We know we cannot see ourselves as we are, not in mirrors. What creature, in their vanity, would say no to a glimpse of the truth of their features, as constructed by the most talented architect of faces ever born? And if that invitation were cleverly, flatteringly delivered by such charming people as my parents – well, who could say no? Not even the embodiment of a season.”
The madness is getting to her – to both of them. Alraune has to shake her head as though furiously re-rolling the dice in her brain to even begin to consider the meaning of these words. If she has understood correctly, Severine has just explained to her the true nature of Yves and Ysabeau Arsenaults’ crime.
She manages to say, “But…why? To what possible end?”
“The absence of ends,” says Severine, and the violets in her eyes seem almost to bloom larger as she says it, each one a petalled amethyst planet. “To grant them life eternal. Is that not the dullest thing you have ever heard?”
As the last word falls from her purple lips, the figure of a man rises up out of the pool of dancers. He is only standing on a chair, but surrounded by the hectic press of skin and silk and a thousand inhuman faces, there is something unearthly about the movement all the same.
It is Yves Arsenault. He is wearing a suit patterned with dominos, and a mask made of game pieces. When he tears off this mask, it is like an unthinkable rending of flesh. Even the dancing dies so that all may watch him.
In his hands he is holding what appears to be the sun, melted down and molded into the shape of a box, so bright there is something liquid about it, something living.
He undoes the clasp, and a hush falls over the masked crowd.
Painstakingly slow, in the manner of a priest with a holy relic, Yves Arsenault opens the golden box. It is like the ocean pours out – the crowd rocks back, Alraune feels the current around her ankles, inside her throat, the urge to dance, to scream, yet still every person stands frozen in this masked tableau as Yves Arsenault lifts something out of the box.
A face. 
Long-nosed, wide-lipped. All human features, yet somehow features no human would have. The eye could go mad trying to trace its inhumanity, as it is everywhere and nowhere. 
Staring at this face, unable to blink or look away, the numbers in Alraune’s mind finally fail her. 
Yves Arsenault announces to the crowd: “I am become the Spring.”
And lowers the mask of Spring’s face down atop his own.
Eyes so green the grass dims blink open – the green eyes of the stranger in Alraune’s dreams, the green of the shadow always darting through the murals, a writhing, undulating, hothouse green.
In this instance of silence, all the world hanging suspended, Alraune hears the serrated, witty blade of Severine’s laugh.
Then Alraune is dancing with a thousand thousand strangers, and their masks have become their faces. Cobalt tongues of cobalt tigers lash the honeyed air like trails of flame, and all the suns painted in lacquer have become real, true suns, as though the yolks of countless galaxies have split and spilled into new rotations around the dancers, and the dancers are the planets, and the ribbons of motley light from the greenhouse drench down over them, soaking them in candy light that she can taste. 
A woman wears the model of a palace atop her head, which has become one with her mind, so that all may witness the woman in miniature climbing the stairs of her thoughts to fling herself from the little balcony, and the woman’s body topples over dead; yet there can be no death in spring, so her body is moss and mushrooms and food for the dance before she can even land atop the lawn. A man is dressed in waves of silken teal that have become a river, and when he whirls water splashes across limbs and feathers and faces, and his body unwinds into water to soak the grass. The mask of a rabbit has become a flower of sorts, long ears blossoming out in a circle from a ring of amber eyes, until the rabbit’s face splits open at the center and yellow flowers bubble out instead of blood. All the actors painted on a woman’s skirts are playing their comedies and tragedies, and their monologues add quiet cries to the music as they die one by one, death climbing the stages of the woman’s dress until it has reached the carnevale stage of her mask, and when the actors die upon the stage that is her head, it is over for her as well, and all is flowers. 
Alraune dances with saints and with swans, knights in mirrored armor reflecting the dizzying press of the dance and faerie queens with streams of butterflies pouring from their lips and multiple pupils crowded into their eyes. For a delirious moment she is dancing with Spring themself, then they are spinning away and in their wake she feels the earth’s heartbeat. She dances with the figures from the murals, the geishas and the alchemists and the skinless anatomists’ studies; far away, she glimpses the Spring dancing with a seaweed-gowned siren, and then across the lawn with Ysabeau Arsenault, whose face has become her mask of Artemis, the silver crescent at her brow ablaze with lunar light, the moon searing through her skull and setting her skeleton alight with a spectral radiance. 
Far away she hears someone screaming, the sound a liquid ribbon of untouched, untrammeled horror, unspooling across the centuries as though unbroken from the Dark Ages, as if there has only been one scream throughout all of time and this is that scream…her mouth is wide open, her throat is burning, she thinks for a moment that she is the one screaming, but there is no horror in her, only bright, livid joy. 
There is no blood; there are no bones. Only the invisible maypole tethering them in a ring, so few of them now, only her and the Arsenaults and the Spring, while the bodies of the rest have burst into lavender and blue centauria and honey blewits and hyacinth and elves’ eyes, rendering the lawn before the greenhouse a rollicking garden that waltzes, still, with the movement of their feet.
They dance to the sound of life itself, a jazzy, glittery sound that begins in their own cells, a sound that equals epiphany, and the epiphany is that there is no death, there can be no death in this world of growing things, that a girl becoming a garden is living, blossoming proof of life eternal, and so Yves and Ysabeau Arsenault have gotten their wish after all, and need not have gone to all the trouble of stealing and wearing the face of the Spring. For we are all gardens beneath our skin, delicate webs of nerve and vein and braided sinew, and respond as such to light; and we eat as such, and are eaten as such, and so death does not exist.
Yves and Ysabeau Arsenault burst into retina-dazzling bloom, shedding their human skins, and the remaining dancers are showered in petals. 
Now it is only Alraune and Severine and the Spring. They are dancing in a meadow on another planet, or so it might seem for all that a garden such as this has ever before appeared on the surface of the earth. 
Their breathless, circular gambol begins to slow to a mere sway, feet stumbling over grass. 
The Spring, their robes trailing in slow motion around them in an entire universe of embroidery, kneels to pluck the emerald-eyed face from the center of the ring of dancers, resting still where it had fallen the very moment Yves Arsenault had become a  robin’s egg spray of sticky-sweet cherry blossom. 
The Venetian sun falls at long last from their features, revealing, for a moment, a horrible, flesh-tinted desert where a face should be. Were it not for the delirium fueling her limbs, Alraune would flinch away from this blank playing card of features, the sight of which makes her not sorry at all for the fate of those who had thrown this party. Though of course none of them had died. 
Spring settles the face atop their own, with such tenderness Alraune feels the urge to look away, yet she does not. 
Then there is no mask at all, simply a human-shaped creature with emerald-green eyes standing at the heart of the lawn, and all the world seems to release a breath it had been holding. 
Severine’s hands slip from hers; the dance breaks apart. The two of them stand to either side of the Spring, panting as the madness fades to a dull murmur in the backs of their minds. All around them, the garden that had once been a frenzy of people lists gently in the breeze.
Formally, as though they are all at some grand court of a bygone era, the Spring bows to Alraune and to Severine in turn. To see them with their face settles something deep within Alraune, some internal lock clicking, some deep-knotted puzzle coming unwound. There is an immense feeling in her chest as she looks at them, almost painful, almost fond.
The Spring says, “What would you have of me?”
The breadth of this question fails to register with Alraune, yet Severine gives a low, dark chuckle.
“You hardly need ask,” she says, and once more the Spring inclines their head.
As one they begin to walk back in the direction of the mansion, side-stepping impossible flowers and trees with spiral branches and grass that blows in the shape of hands and faces. All these people, Alraune thinks vaguely, are still dancing. 
Yet the mansion is no longer a protean whorl of crystal and paint and escaped figures from portraits; it only looks as it always does, murals intact, though the doors are flung wide to admit them.
The entry hall is painted, of all things, with a party, though this party takes place beneath the waves in a pearl-strung coral cove, and all the guests are dressed in liquid, sea-tinted silk, and their heads are swirling cockle shells and ribbed oysters and black anemones sharp as spite. All the sliding paper doors that lead away from the entry hall have been left open as well, so Alraune can see into the next room, and the next room, and the next room, and so on, into all the worlds painted on the walls: massive calico koi with chips of jade for eyes, medieval city maps painted in lapis and ochre, wan palaces in the moon, parliaments of gaudy birds, a crimson dragon with all the circles of Hell painted in one eye and all the circles of Heaven in the other…
They pause before the undersea gathering, and Severine turns to Alraune.
“Come with me,” she says.
And it all surges into place in Alraune’s mind, that the story Severine had told in the Kingfisher Parlor had been less a story of fear than a story of longing – that Severine had been unable to look at the murals ever since she’d been lost, not because she was afraid, but because of how deeply she longed to exist within them, exploring their million worlds not as a girl of flesh and blood whose parents never loved her as they should, but as a painted girl who could live upon painted banquets, and never need return to the world she’d left.
Alraune’s eyes find the Spring’s, and Spring says, “If it is your wish, I can send you both into the painted worlds, and make it so you may live there as long as you desire.”
“But – when we reach the end-”
“There is no end,” says Severine. “Each mural is a world unto itself, though we may only see a single facet from where we stand. Come with me. There are seas, and circuses, and palaces – what will you do, if you remain here? Become a maid in another manor? Another grand house, full of paintings that will not watch you pass? Could you stand the absence of life?”
In answer to this question, Alraune’s hand shoots out, quite without meaning to, to clasp Severine’s, and the other girl smiles a luminous smile, the first real smile, Alraune thinks, that she has ever seen grace Severine’s face. 
The Spring inclines their head once more; Alraune feels, for the last time, the weight of emerald eyes upon her back, and it is the last sensation she knows before she and Severine step forward into infinity.
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Homunculus (2020)
I am, as it were, a made thing. My alchemist’s brain in a flask. 
Inside my alembic I dance without cease, and outside the window Prague shivers as though she were made of water. My alchemist has told me a saying among the common people: that the angels never left Prague, but went instead into the architecture. Bowed heads in cupolas, the curve of wings in an archway, a wet gleam on the cobblestones in the shape of a figure alight; laughing faces in blue fountains and long iron spires of celestial spines. Me, spinning, eternal, inside glass. Perhaps I am architecture. Perhaps I am an angel. 
These are not words, but movements of my dance. I cannot tell a story; I cannot think in parallel lines. I flicker, but I am not fire. My alchemist pulled me from her chest, or I surfaced from her throat, and was born from the wet redness of her mouth. Perhaps this is not true; I cannot remember. Though surely I am of her, for my form is hers in miniature, if only she twirled phosphorescent, no bones, kaleidoscopic brightness for flesh. 
My flask is my planet, and beyond the glass there are two worlds I may see: her workshop, instruments hissing and steaming rainbow, chemicals like liquid jewels in crystal, rose attar set to boil in curling aludels, scattered, tattered pages that show a woman in a crown standing atop a crescent moon, wine-black berries blossoming from a human heart, a flaming star over an arsenic-green sea, a peacock and death in a jar… The walls are the blue of the sky in spring, and the baroque swirl of the molding resembles nothing so much as vanilla pastry cream, as though I and all her instruments are intricate creations of frosting and sculpted candy inside a hollow sugar egg such as the baronet from Lichtenstein gave my alchemist when he still believed he was courting her. 
Outside, on our boulevard of Cukrová-ulice, there are fairytales: pastel pink and blue and green and yellow houses, all frosted like our ceiling, all glowing from within, while in the distance needle-sharp towers and crooked spires warp the skyline like the villains defeated in the end of a tale. To look across Prague is to see every story played out before one’s eyes; this is the second world I may see. 
But I am lost again. I meant to say that my alchemist calls me her mind. I do not know whether to believe it, in true. She is sharper than I – from the dagger-cut geometry of her features, symmetrical enough for a summoning circle, to her words like careful cuts with a narrow blades, spoken as a phsyiker might perform a surgery. 
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G.O.D. (2021)
“I dreamed,” breathes the knight, as the stars painted on the tavern ceiling melt into celestial stew, “that I was a grad student. I studied…bioelectric engineering.”
Six-jointed fingers, gladiolus green, maneuver the pipe into the knight’s lips, just visible beneath the long beak of his hammered steel carnival mask.
“Why, that sounds a loathsome beast,” says the cariad. 
Her voice coils up the trellis of his gray matter, blooms between neurons, like the mandalas of jewel-bright fungus rotting the walls. 
“Oh, ’twas,” sighs the knight, and fuchsia smoke spirals up from the crescent eye-holes in his mask. “But which was the dream? The grad student, dreaming he was a knight, or the knight, dreaming of computers? What is a computer? I cannot say. And yet an image forms in my mind, my own body, lying as though dead – am I dead, Nerissa?”
“Not yet, ser,” says the cariad. Her eyes have seven pupils. Her skin, where it brushes his, is green as glass.
“I know I have died before. But here I lie upon your lap…what is the dream, Nerissa? I know I am dreaming, but what is the dream?”
“Ozymandias leaves, crushed small. Fairies drowned and powdered.”
“Nerissa, that is chemistry. I am speaking of dreams.”
“Dreams are chemistry, ser.”
“Wires. Dreams are wires. And cables and cords, but what are cables? Why do I know these words?”
“You are a poet.”
“There is poetry in my head, to be sure – she walks in beauty, like the night, of cloudless climes and starry eyes-”
“Is that about me?”
“I – yes. I suppose it is. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our life is rounded with sleep – that was good, wasn’t it? Mayhap I was a bard in a previous life.”
She laughs. 
He inhales. Her face melts into a garden; her skin is a meadow, her eyes are mirrored pools, her hair is a tangle of turquoise ivy. All around them, the stars fall from the slimy ceiling and drip onto the other patrons, gold tinsel atop shadow. 
He tries again. “How can you see into my eyes / like open doors-”
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Britomart (2021)
“One person cannot solve another, magician,” said Stolas, Prince of Hell, for the fifteenth time, perched on Britomart’s desk between her alembic and her astrolabe. “Your search creates your loss anew.”
Britomart said, “It is my loss makes necessary my search.”
“It is not what Sieglin would want for you-”
“It does not matter what Sieglin would want. He is not here.”
“If he was, magician, you would not listen to him.”
“If he was, I would no longer need to search. Leave me. I must try another plane.”
Stolas tipped its head to the side, as though its earthly manifestation was the truth of it: an owl with dizzying pupils and a malachite crown, crusted with lapis and cinnabar. “And when you find him? What will you live for, then? I am beginning to believe it is the search you like, magician.”
“I do not like it. The man I love is gone from me. And when I find him, ’twill be his love that I live for, as it is his love spurs my search.”
“That is not love, magician,” said Stolas, and vanished in a puff of lavender smoke, smelling vaguely of brimstone, before Britomart could speak the words of banishment. 
§
Said Amdusias, Grand Duke of Hell and composer of cacophonous music, “I have heard tales more tragic than that of your foolish lover, and how he left a slice of mirror uncovered whilst demonstrating how a magician might turn his or herself into light, and his body refracted through the glass, shattering his form across dimensions.”
English festered on its blue unicorn’s tongue. 
Britomart did not respond. 
She stood on the other side of the jewel-box study, clad in green velvet, her cloud of yellow hair like a comet’s trail down her back. Shards of pink glass dangled from her ears, and cabochon rubies glittered on her fingers. Her face was so deeply buried in a charred heap of alchemical texts that all that could be glimpsed of her was the golden circlet on her brow, curled into the symbol of Mercury. 
“I do not understand,” she murmured, as though Amdusias had not spoken. “I have read the incantation, and coaxed flame from quicksilver. I have used pyrite and ondines’ flesh, and dittany, and myrrh. Yet it is Hell that comes to me, unbidden, when what I seek is the 117, 932nd dimension.”
“It is your tools that fail you,” said Amdusias, and her eyes flashed to its.
“Then I will make new tools,” she said. “Synthesize homunculi. Make servants out of my own flesh, and hair, to multiply my will.”
“There is also the matter that spells seek familiar shapes,” said Amdusias. “Cast the same spell often enough, and it will wear a groove into your magick.”
“I am well-aware of Lovelace’s Theorem.”
“Well, then. Perhaps, magician, you are failing because you do not want to find him. You want to search, forever – you want a reason to use every one of your wits, to scour the rhodolite seas of the 253,850th plane, and the glimmering palaces of air within the crystalline spheres, and the spiral rings of every Saturn, upon which sirens sit and sing the pitch of every universe.”
Britomart said, “You know a great deal of the planes for one who resides solely in Hell.”
Amdusias shrugged its unicorn’s shoulder, lifting the scarlet trumpet it held in one clawed hand a fraction of an inch. “What should hold me back from knowing? I have no lover to draw my attention.”
Abruptly Britomart reached for the scroll upon which was scrawled the incantation for banishment. “I thank you for your words, Amdusias, but if that is all-”
“You will never find him,” said Amdusias. “There are too many worlds where light might travel; more worlds than either of us may ever know. The tale eats itself. It can have no ending.”
But Britomart had spoken the incantation, and the Grand Duke of Hell vanished in a puff of cobalt smoke, leaving only the scent of decay behind in the air.
§
In the night, the magician pushed the carpets aside to trace two circles onto the blue stone of her tower study. Between rings of vivid magenta chalk she drew runes to summon, runes to conjure, ultra-dimensional characters to sift an entire universe through the sieve of her magick. Homunculi lined the rim, some appearing as human infants curled inside glass bottles, others as shadow and flame and wood and Britomart herself in miniature. 
She fed them each a flaxen strand of her hair and they started to dance, twirling and flickering inside their flasks as she knelt in the second circle and began to whisper.
The starlight pooling in the study seemed to shiver, and then still.
With a moon-white athame, Britomart cut a constellation into her hand – Sieglin’s sigil, Auriga – slicing atop the lines on her palm that told her of her heart, her life, and her fate. Then she pressed her hand to the ground, head bowed, still whispering, and waited.
There was no time inside the spell, only the growing ache of her knees upon stone. The night grew dark around the tower; the stars shifted in the sky.
And then – when Britomart, eyes closed, barely chanting, had no doubt in the back of her mind that the spell had failed – the air in the study flinched, infinitesimally. 
She blinked, and raised her head. It was still the middle of the night. 
A man stood in the opposite circle.
He had black hair and dark skin, and he was dressed in purple and gold. His eyes – wide, unfocused – roved around the room atop the tower, cataloging, in the way he did, the aludels and the crucibles, the homunculi in their flasks, the rainbow of grimoires spread across every surface, the stained glass in the windows, the golden orreries, the preserved crocodile coiled in a corner, the endless jeweled phials of sangua dracus, magnesia, cats’ eyes, meringue, eggshells, and yellow topaz.
Then his eyes, the color of smoke, were on hers.
“My love,” he breathed. “I have been pulled apart by the stars.”
Britomart made a sound in her throat, as though she had been strangled. There were tears in her eyes as she struggled to her feet, barely feeling where the uneven stone had dug into her flesh. But she did not run to him; she did not move a single limb outside the chalk bounds of the circle, just as Sieglin did not move from his.
“Where have you been?” she whispered.
“Everywhere,” he said. His eyes were still wide, still wild, in a way that suggested he was still traveling, still seeing something more than the sapphire gloom of her study. “Everywhere.”
“But where?” she pressed. “You turned yourself into light – did you not fracture, then? How is it you are whole?”
“I flew,” said Sieglin. “Like a god – through oceans and cities and the spaces between geometry – I forgot my own flesh. Then it was your voice I heard, calling all the pieces of me back, and now I am whole again.”
“On 373, 127 planes I searched for you,” said Britomart. Her eyes darted over him, from his hair, curling about his face like tendrils of black flame, to the chemical stains speckled on his robes, the same stains present on the evening she had kissed him goodbye, unwittingly, for seven long years. He had not changed – there was that restless dishevelment about him, the way his gaze could not keep still, the way his fingers twitched at his sides as though longing to scribble theories and conjectures.
“You are the most brilliant magician of the age,” he said. “Free me, my love. Free me from the bounds of this circle, and tell me how you have lived in my absence. Perhaps I should go missing more often, if this is what you achieve while I am gone.”
But Britomart did not move.
“Britomart,” said Sieglin. “Free me. Please. Together we may dismantle this circle and unconjure the homunculi. It is clever, what you’ve done, but you have fed them too much of yourself. This amount of magick is not sustainable for any magician. Please. For your own sake.”
Still, Britomart did not move.
Sieglin sighed. “Ask me anything, my love. Ask me whatever you need not to doubt me.” When she did not respond, he said: “We met at a ball. I had brought my research notes; I was hidden behind a curtain, and we collided, quite literally, for you had brought your notes as well and meant to hide from the party to continue your work. Before we knew the other’s name, you had pointed out several flaws in my chrysopoetic theory. You were wearing red velvet, so bright you seemed to burn, and your hair was like candle flame.”
Britomart wrapped her arms around herself and slid down, once more, to sit in the center of her circle. On her face there were the beginnings of a subtle misery.
“Please,” said the man in the circle. “Britomart. Love. I did not know light could ache, but it can; without a body, without a mind, still I missed you. I will never leave you again, Britomart; I know now that there is more for me in a single curl of your hair than in a thousand universes. Please, my love. Free me.”
Finally, very quietly, Britomart said, “You are not Sieglin.”
Hurt flashed across his face. “How may I convince you? Please, Britomart-”
But she had already stood, and was brushing the dust from the embroidered hems of her robes.
“You cannot mean to banish me,” said the man in the circle. “I will never find my way back – the dimensions will split my body apart, and this time I will be flesh, and not light – you will kill me – Britomart-”
This time she did look at him. There were shadows smudged purple beneath her eyes, and she did nothing to disguise the weariness in her tone. 
“Banishing you will not kill you,” she said. “For you are not a man. You are Dantalian, form-changer and Great Duke of Hell. I command you to show yourself.”
The man in the circle stared at her, brows drawn together. “Britomart-”
“Show yourself,” she said again, words falling like stones from her lips.
Still the man in the circle watched her, unchanging, more hurt in her lover’s face than she had ever seen, ever caused – but then he began to change. Like wax his skin began to drip, but never fall, until another face gazed out from his face, and then another, and then another. Dantalian wore its thousand skins all at once, each only visible in a glimpse of blue eye, or hooked nose, or crooked lip, orange tunic or flame-pink gown or beaded kaftan. Man, woman, child, animal, even her own body – wherever she looked, she saw a thousand figures at once.
Dantalian said, “How did you know, magician?”
Its voice was both a chorus and a singular tone.
She said, exhausted from sleeplessness and from watching its body, “Sieglin does not talk that much.”
Dantalian laughed, and it sounded both like a crow and a tinkling bell. “Free me, magician. You cannot miss your lover if I eat you.”
“I will not free you,” she said. “Go. Leave me in peace.”
A thousand faces grinned a thousand grins. “One day you will give up, magician. Summon me, and I will eat your sorrow.”
In a motley-colored cloud, it vanished. 
Alone, Britomart hugged her knees to her chest, buried her face in her knees, and did not stir for a very long time.
§
Handwritten spells for summoning the 444, 907th dimension lay scattered across the jewel-colored carpets in a constellation of paper. Britomart stood by the window, murmuring to herself as her finger traced its way down the page of a tome bound in vivid aquamarine leather and ondines’ hair. 
She did not even notice when the small conjuring circle carved atop the mahogany of her desk began to fizz and hiss, pink foam bubbling around the edges until a figure unfolded itself, and stood, watching her. It had the appearance of a woman with translucent skin and lilac hair and eyes that were lilac from corner to corner, the silver crown of a duchess suspended in the air around its waist. It was only a foot high. 
For several moments, it did not speak, and then it said, “Have you considered, magician, that he is already with you?”
Britomart jumped, her hands tightening around the book, but when she saw the pale figure on her desk, she only frowned. “Return to Hell, if you please. I did not summon you.”
Gremory, Duke of Hell, did not move. “Certain magickal theories suggest that each plane lies atop, or within, the others – that each plane is, in a sense, every plane. Your lover turned to light, magician.” The figure of the lilac-haired woman gestured to the yellow beams of sunlight streaming through the arched window beside Britomart, the stained glass tinting the light teal and red and purple and gold. “He is all around you.”
There was, abruptly, another fizz, and hiss, and bubbling of foam, and in a cloud of smoke redolent of apple blossom, Gremory vanished. 
Britomart’s frown did not fade, though she stared for a long moment at the spears of light slicing through the air in front of her. She reached up, touched her hand to the light, let it spill and pool into the spaces between her fingers as though it truly was another hand holding hers.
§
601,588 planes.
Baelzebub, First King of Hell, said, “Have you considered, magician, that Sieglin does not wish to be found?”
Though it had the heads of a grey cat, an emerald-green toad, and a wizened man in a velvet crown, it was only the man that spoke. Each of its three heads sprouted, grotesquely, from spider’s legs that bloomed out in every direction, never crossing the boundary of the summoning circle, though one of its spider’s legs swept out, every now and again, as though testing whether the circle would hold.
Britomart, hair wild, standing amidst a storm of books and papers and equations and half-formed homunculi dancing in flasks, murmured, “Hell, it would seem, has nothing better to do than to meddle in the affairs of a lone magician. Leave me be. I am so very close.”
“You are being reckless, magician. You are moving too quickly. You do not want to admit to yourself that if your lover could be found, you would have found him by now. That, perhaps, he prefers being light – prefers to become his research rather than continue his study in the mortal plane.”
“I said, leave me be.”
“Banish me, then. But first hear my offer. Give me your soul, and I will find him. As a body, as light – trade your soul for him, and I will drag him back across a thousand worlds, particle by particle.”
Britomart, eyes scanning her notations, did not respond.
“Unless you are afraid he no longer loves you. Nothing holds true in all worlds, magician. The Sieglin that comes back may not be the Sieglin you remember.”
She scribbled something in a margin, crossed it out, and continued writing. Streams of algebra and alchemy poured from her quill in amethyst ink, keys to other planes, formulae for conjuring dimensions no magician had ever conjured.
Finally, she paused in her writing, and looked up long enough to say, “I will not give you my soul. Without a soul, there would be nothing left in me to love him when he is found.”
“There will be nothing left of you anyway if you keep casting yourself out among these hundred-thousand planes. It is dangerous to send your heart’s desires across so many dimensions, like a beacon.”
“Then what do you suggest? I would travel myself if I could, but no magician has ever been able to travel between the planes. Except for Sieglin – but he was not himself when he travelled, he was light – and I would be flesh and blood, without my instruments, without my circles-” In a flurry of parchment, she stood, strode to the window, strode back. “Unless – it is dangerous to send your heart’s desires out across so many dimensions – like a beacon, you said – I wonder-”
“Give me your soul, magician. You need not wonder.”
Britomart, her eyes bright, did not even look at Baelzebub as she murmured the incantation for banishment. The First King of Hell disappeared in a cloud of sulfur-yellow smoke that made the study smell of copper. 
§
The summoning circle carved into the study floor burned with grass-green flame. 
A heartbeat later, Britomart appeared in the center and stepped out of the circle, only to collapse into the nearest chair. 
She was panting. Her cloud of yellow hair had been singed to a mere halo around her head. Her tourmaline-colored robes gave off a smoke that smelled of nutmeg. Beneath the swirl of colored light from the stained glass window, she was pale, and thin, and shaking. When a voice spoke from behind her, out of the smaller summoning circle carved atop her desk, she was too tired even to blink in surprise.
“You cannot continue, magician. The human body is not meant to travel across dimensions. Your particles are wearing thin.”
The speaker had the form of a youth with brown skin, draped in ivory cloth. A ring of dog-faced goblins and miniature jesters and troubadours with panpipes capered and played around it in a spiral, giving off the faintest sound of music. 
“956,473 planes have I scoured,” breathed Britomart. Her voice was hoarse, barely audible. “I do not intend…to give up now.”
“Your heart will stop, if you keep using it as a beacon.”
“Then my heart…will stop.”
“Do not be a fool, magician,” said Paimon, Second King of Hell, sharply. 
Britomart lifted her head, forcing her gaze to focus on the little figure. Her eyes were parallel wastelands, and in their depths flickered images from other dimensions. “Why is Hell so keen for me to live? I have never understood it.”
“It is your fault; you keep summoning us. It is only natural we would take an interest in your affairs.”
“So Hell has a heart,” she mused. Her eyelids were beginning to slip closed.
“Magician,” said Paimon. “Give up. You would have found him by now, if he could be found.”
“You are not the first to say that,” said Britomart, in a tone that suggested she was half-dreaming. “Indeed, I believe I should have found him by now, if he was trapped in another plane…magicians, even when they are light, do not simply disappear…perhaps I should trust more in my own abilities…”
For a moment, it seemed, she had dropped off to sleep. Then her eyes flicked open.
“I should trust in my own abilities,” she murmured. “I would have found him, if he could have been found. I have summoned Hell, time and time again, but I meant to summon Sieglin. I have scoured plane after plane – but never my own.”
Paimon said, “Magician-”
But Britomart surged to her feet in a great whirling of velvet and char, her exhaustion slipping from her like a second skin, and she said, in a voice that shook the stones of her tower: “Bring me to Hell, demon.”
Her hands closed around its form, and as it began to melt, struggling, back into the circle, she followed it, down, down, through the mahogany of her desk and farther, deep underground, past the core of the earth, and into Hell.
§
No magician had visited Hell since the necromancer Amoret in the 12th century, and ceremonial woodcuts had been made to mark the occasion. In Britomart’s memory, the woodcuts had looked different each time she gazed upon them: a frozen lake, a palace of molten glass, the starry void, thrones suspended on sunbeams.
As she emerged, eyes blazing, from the summoning circle, she was unsurprised to find it was none of those things, for Hell had the appearance of her study.
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Transformation in Testament of Cresseid (2019)
Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is a story about transformation both physically and narratively, enacted upon Cresseid as a punishment – physically – and – narratively – to make a moral point. The reader first learns that her lover, Diomeid, has left her, and that she has been cast out, a drastic narrative change that the reader is told rather than shown. However, in terms of her physicality, Cresseid remains, at least in the beginning of Testament of Cresseid, where she was at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: whole, healthy, retaining her much-spoken-of beauty. Yet her physicality, too, is robbed from her, as Cresseid speaks against the gods and is not killed for her blasphemy, but afflicted with leprosy in a very physical transformation. ‘The poem shares a wider preoccupation with defilement and exclusion, and with states of being – leper and standing corpse – that are neither alive nor dead’ (Riddy, 232); again, Cresseid is alive, but she becomes something different than what she was. This state of leprosy necessitates her status as outsider, someone who can no longer remain in her father’s society – ‘Throughout the poem Cresseid is an outcast, an unworthie outwaill’ (129), and the action concerns the processes whereby she is progressively excluded or excludes herself: socially, morally, spatially, temporally’ (Riddy, 232). By the end of the poem, it is her own words that exclude her, as she uses her story to advise ‘ladyis fair of Troy and Greece’ (452) against acting as she has, thus transforming herself, again, into a moralistic character, an example of what women specifically should not do. 
If Troilus’s narrative arc was a tragedy, Testament of Cresseid certainly renders Cresseid’s arc tragic, as well as a tragedy, yet their tragedies are enacted very differently. Troilus is stricken by grief and he ends up dying, nobly, on the battlefield. Cresseid literally rots. ‘To thy seiknes sall be na recure / Bot in dolor thy days to indure. / Thy cristall ene mingit with blude I mak / …Thy lustie lyre ouirspred with spottis blak’ (335-339), says Cynthia, in cursing Cresseid. This is horrible, and gruesome, on one hand punishing Cresseid for speaking against the gods, on the other her moral punishment, presumably for – after mourning her loss of Troilus – taking Diomeid as her lover, though it is never clear if that, specifically, is what she is being punished for. Either the gods are harsh or her morally meted-out punishment is. Nonetheless, Cresseid’s tragedy is entirely enacted upon her body, social and emotional repercussions notwithstanding. It is no simple death, nor even loss of her mind, as such. Troilus’s tragedy does not make him ugly, for lack of a better word; as Troilus’s self-held or narrative value does not rest so highly upon his beauty, loss of beauty, as a punishment, would be a poor fit. The fact that Cresseid’s punishment steals her beauty shows both where she, as a character, and where Henryson, as her portrayer, place her value, or at the very least what they rank as most painful to lose. Thus, ‘[Cresseid] does [Troilus’s] decomposing for him. She transmogrifies into unrecognizability; she is ‘untrew’ (602), heterogenous and changeable, while Troilus is ‘trew’, and self-constant’ (Riddy, 235). The punishment also holds a mirror to the perceived crime. If she was beautiful before, and it was that beauty which won the hearts of both Troilus and Diomeid, then, physically transformed as she is, there is no possibility of a repeat offense.
In terms of narrative transformation, ‘the complaint first takes the form of an elaborate and moving elegy to an unrecoverable past…and then develops an increasingly intense focus on the contrasting degradations of [Cresseid’s] present. The present is not a stable state; it is not ‘the end’ (456) although Cresseid calls it that. Rather, it is a process of ‘faiding’ (461) and ‘rotting’(464). That is, the vantage point of retrospection is unfixed; there is further to go; there is a beyond even leprosy; in the end the narrative itself will exclude her’ (Riddy, 233). The story, then, transforms in scope, while simultaneously presenting ‘the transformation of the subject of the story into its interpreter…Cresseid laments her change in worldly status and urges ‘in your mynd ane mirrour mak of me’ (457). Her warning is addressed specifically to ‘ladyis fair of Troy and Greece’ (452)…Cresseid learns to modify her lament about the transitoriness of human life with an acknowledgment of her own wrongdoing’ (Bawcutt, 53). Therefore the story becomes not really about her, but larger than her, its scope turning from her entirely to the narrator speaking to the perceived audience, once again, of ladies: ‘Now, worthie wemen, in this ballet schort, / Maid for ȝour worschip and instructioun, / Of cheritie, I monische and exhort, / Ming not ȝour lufe with fals deceptioun’ (610-613). Now, the narrator is judgmental of Cresseid, where in the beginning he called her ‘fair lady’; now, we see his agenda. This was a moral tale all along. Yet what was Cresseid’s ‘fals deceptioun’? We only see the gods in this poem smite her for blaspheming them, not for any former transgressions on her part. If we go only by this, the narrator is advising these ‘worthie wemen’ not to blaspheme the gods. Yet using the words ‘fals deceptioun’ proves that Cresseid’s punishment, while coming from the gods, was not really about the gods, but about whatever she did previously, presumably leaving Troilus, presumably loving another, as she is condemned for her ‘fals deceptioun’ involving ‘lufe’. The very last line, ‘Sen scho is deid I speik of hir no moir’ (616) casts Cresseid out of the poem, just as Diomeid purportedly cast her out of his house. This Cresseid’s second, true death; she died once, physically, and then again when her name is no longer written. The transformation is thus complete, physically and narratively. 
Again, however, whatever really damned Cresseid is not something that happens within the lines of Testament of Cresseid, yet the entirety of Testament of Cresseid seems written just to punish her. To give her an ending, yes, but why that ending? To make her a moralistic example, even when her actual crime is unclear? We see Cresseid smote for blaspheming the gods, but, as Patterson puts it, ‘Cresseid’s blasphemy is really more than blasphemy and thus deserving of the punishment meted out. It should be understood as the verbal equivalent of her promiscuity, a symbol of her infidelity’ (Patterson, 2). In other words, ‘in Cresseid, promiscuity and disease are conflated, making her doubly abject’ (Riddy, 243). Therefore, blaspheming the gods was merely an excuse, a hasty frame erected to shower suffering on her for her true crime, this unspecific ‘promiscuity’. ‘The gods are there to enforce the inevitability of the [transformations] and to ensure that no other outcome to the plot is possible’ (Riddy, 240); in the hands of this narrator, this poet, then, Cresseid could never have ended happily with Diomeid. Henryson’s narrator perceives her to have committed a crime – promiscuity, infidelity – and his only goal is to write a narrative designed to make her suffer, to force her into the classic harlot’s narrative of disease, disfigurement and eventual death. In comparison to ‘worthie Chaucer glorious’ (41), who very obviously left Cresseid alone to an ambiguous ending, without her blaspheming the gods for her cruel fate or being horribly punished for her transgressions, this poem so full of misery and disfigurement seems starkly different and even sadistic, at the very least presented by a poet who clearly believed Cresseid guilty enough to be punished in one of the most painful, terrible ways imaginable. But he has made Testament of Cresseid a moral tale; indeed, it is called Testament of Cresseid, and Cresseid, importantly, condemns herself with her own words: ‘My mynd in fleschelie foull affectioun / Was inclynit to lustis lecherous: / Fy, fals Cresseid; O tree knicht Troylus!’ (559-560), thus giving the illusion that Cresseid is finally seeing herself as clearly as the poet sees her – that this whole theater of suffering is self-caused and self-perpetuated, when it is in fact not self-perpetuating but perpetuated by authors such as Henryson who cannot perceive a character such as Chaucer’s Criseyde, who is thoughtful, worldly, multi-faceted, in other words a whole person despite being a woman, without perceiving her to have sinned. 
Bibliography:
The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. D. Fox (Oxford, 1981)
L. W. Patterson, ‘Christian and Pagan in The Testament of Cresseid’, PQ 52 (1973)
F. Riddy, ‘Abject odious’: Feminine and Masculine in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid’ in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. H. Cooper and S. Mapstone (Oxford, 1997)
A. McKim, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice and The Testament of Cresseid: Robert Henryson’s ‘fine poeticall way’, in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. P. Bawcutt and J. H. Williams (Cambridge, 2006)
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Inevitability in Troilus and Criseyde (2019)
In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a great portion of the text functions under the guise of inevitability: that the narrator is bound to tell the truth of this story, even when it goes against his wishes; that the characters within the story are doomed from the beginning due to forces outside of their control, namely love and fortune; that one’s ability to make their own choices only serves to catapult them towards their own inexorable destinies. Much of the inevitability stems from history: ‘Troilus and Criseyde is the past made extremely vivid by the extensive use of dialogue, but still the past. Chaucer cannot change the elements of his story. As God cannot violate his own rationality Chaucer cannot violate his data. Bound by his self-imposed task of historian, he both implies and states directly that he cannot do other than report his tale’ (Bloomfield, 33). Through tracing this thread and the others, a reader may see how they intertwine to become tragedy, even if it is an imperfect manner of tragedy – for ‘whatever else it may be, Chaucer is determined to make Troilus and Criseyde the tragedy of Troilus. He calls his book a ‘tragedye’ (5.1786), and the plot does fulfill the definition of tragedy: Troilus falls from the top of Fortune’s wheel into the depths of misery and despair, driven finally to seek out his death on the battlefield’ (David, 90). Yet the poem ends with Troilus dead, but laughing, which complicates both the reader’s and the narrator’s sense of tragedy.
Book 1, interestingly, features a character within the plot with the ability to see the future: ‘A gret deuyn that clepid was Calkas, / That in science so expert was that he / Knew wel that Troie sholde destroied be, / By answere of his god’ (1.66-69). Inside the telling of the story he parallels Chaucer himself, at least for a moment, in an odd, reversed version of dramatic irony. Already, within the lens of the narrator knowing how the story will end, there is a character who knows how the war will end. This creates momentum; this creates tension; this creates different levels of inevitability. The reader then encounters Fortune in regards to the war: ‘thus fortune on lofte / And vnder eft gan hem to whielen bothe / Aftir hir cours, ay whil that thei were wrothe’ (1.138-40). Now there is the sense of great powers working out of sight, a wheel that turns, inevitably, and cannot be stopped or swayed by the actions of anyone within. Just as the tragic nature of this story is beyond the narrator’s power to change, the characters within the story have no choice but to watch their fortunes rise and fall with this wheel. Love is introduced as a third power. Chaucer writes, ‘loue…so soon kan / The fredom of ȝoure hertes to hym thralle – / …loue is he that alle thing may bynde, / ffor may no man fordon the lawe of kynde’ (1.234-38). No one can fight love. Soon after there is proof of love’s power as it works upon the heretofore immune Troilus: “O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, / How may of the in me swich quantite, / But if that I consente that it be?” (1.411-13). Love works upon him without his consent. He cannot fight it, nor reason it away. ‘Quike deth’, he calls it, referencing the fate the narrator knows awaits him. Thus, within the first thirty stanzas, the reader is presented with a veritable cage of a poem: the narrator on one side, bound by his self-proclaimed role as historian, the rise and fall of fortune’s wheel on another, and, finally, the snare of love, that ‘may no man fordon’. 
In Book 2, the sense that the narrator does not control the story is compounded with the lines, ‘Ek though I speeke of loue vnfelyngly, / No wondre is, for it no thyng of newe is: / A blynd man kan nat iuggen wel in hewis’ (2.19-21). He is saying he cannot write about love, but Troilus and Criseyde is a love story, albeit one with a tragic end. How can a love poem be written by a poet who cannot write about love? This story, then, must have such a force to it that it can unspool without the narrator’s full knowledge or consent. The notion of a story forced to move forward is reflected, again, within the secondary lens of the characters. The poem centers on Troilus and Criseyde’s love, yet when Pandarus proposes this love to Criseyde, he says, “But if ȝe late him deyen, I wol sterue – / Haue here my trouthe, Nece, I nyl nat lyen – / Al sholde I with this knyf my throte kerue” (2.323-25). If she ‘lets’ Troilus die, by not returning his feelings, Pandarus too will cut his throat. Criseyde is both proud and thoughtful; perhaps she would not have given Troilus due consideration without this threat hanging over her. Yet the fact that this love story begins with Criseyde’s uncle saying he will kill himself if she ‘lets’ Troilus die taints the entire situation. This is no rosy beginning of a romance; this is love coerced, love threatened, a sour beginning for a sour end. Regardless of how much she genuinely does come to love Troilus in the pages that follow, the fact that this love began with a threat of double suicide both gives a negative cast to the entire enterprise and foreshadows a dark end. ‘She gan to rewe and dredde hire wonder soore’(2.455); she relents because she is afraid. Criseyde has to be manipulated into performing as one the characters. If the narrator has no choice in the story he tells, Criseyde has little real choice in playing her part, if her uncle – one of her only protectors – says he will commit suicide otherwise.
The third book opens with an appeal to Venus, goddess of love – ‘ȝe folk a lawe han set in vniverse, / And this knowe I by hem that louers be, / That who-so stryueth with ȝou hath the werse’ (3.36-8) – speaking to the universal law that those who fight against love end up the worse for it. This, again, is the narrator robbing himself of power, of any say in the direction the story takes. He cannot counteract a universal law. Love has more power than even the poet, and as this is a story of love, love is the ultimate arbiter. The reader also hears more of Pandarus’s manipulations around Criseyde, as he admits to Troilus that ‘I, thorugh myn engyn, / Hadde in my Nece yput this fantasie, / To doon thi lust and holly to ben thyn’ (3.274-76). He is claiming responsibility for her decision to let Troilus court her, which means he is claiming responsibility for nearly the entire plot of Troilus and Criseyde. He does not say that his ‘engyn’ was a threat of his and Troilus’s double suicide, but again, this is the characters manipulated into performing the story, regardless of whether Pandarus was truly wholly responsible for Criseyde’s initial decision to consider Troilus. Pandarus’s manipulations do not end there, either; he tells Criseyde that “[Troilus] told is of a frend of his, / How that ȝe sholden louen oon that hatte Horaste, / ffor sorwe of which this nyght shal ben his laste’ (3.796-98). This is a more delicate threat of suicide, for it prompts Criseyde’s wish to see him and reassure him that there is no Horaste. Again, this is a less dramatic instance than the very beginning; at this point Troilus and Criseyde have been in contact, but Pandarus is still manipulating Criseyde to move the plot along. Love and fortune, as higher powers, play the longer game throughout the plot, but Pandarus is the one down on earth that sets the story in motion; ‘undoubtedly Fortune and the stars play their part, but more to work out a train of consequences initiated in the first place by a free choice made by the persons concerned’ (Gordon, 51). Criseyde cannot be said to have a ‘free choice’. Thus it is Pandarus with the free choice to imitate this series of events, while, in terms of characters being battered around between forces, Criseyde has an extra force manipulating her forward in the form of her uncle.
Book 4 begins with Fortune, turning her wheel so that those on top fall to the bottom. Fortune ‘ffrom Troilus she gan hire brighte face / Awey to writhe and tok of hym non heede’ (4.8-9). Neither Troilus nor the narrator can halt Fortune’s wheel; they are both its unwitting subject, as the narrator proves with the subsequent lines, ‘And now my penne, allas, with which I write, / Quaketh for drede of that I must endite’ (4.13-14). The narrator is like Fortune in that he is able to see and know the wheel’s direction. Yet this god-like power is matched with an equally powerful impotence, as Chaucer uses this foreknowledge not as a god over the text, but to reaffirm his role as historian, someone with no power to interfere even in events of which he dreads to write; ‘It is destiny that laughs and Chaucer is far from laughter as he records it’ (Lewis, 184). The reader sees this godly foresight present as the narrator relays the fate of Antenor: ‘Antenor…brought hem to meschaunce. / ffor he was after traitour to the town / Of Troye; allas, they quytte hym out to rathe’ (4.203-5). Again, the narrator’s ability as historian to see the future and not change it, only bemoan the characters’ lack of knowledge of their own fates. Later, Pandarus says, ‘Thorugh loue is broken al day euery lawe’ (4.618), asserting the supremacy of love over earthly powers. Love is higher than the law, thus higher than people and earthly consequences. Love is more powerful than people and their will; therefore, as far as Troilus and Criseyde is a story about love, it is a story subject to love.
Book 5, finally, concludes with the narrator sending the poem out of his hands, ‘Go, litel boke, go, litel myn tragedye / …be subgit to alle Poyesye’ (5.1786-90), making literal the notion that he has never really been in control of the story all along. By finishing the poem, any control he did have is eternally lost, as the poem travels into the hands and eyes of others. The poem, then, parallels his characters, though they are not truly Chaucer’s characters: ‘In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer does not look upon his characters as his creations. His assumed role is primarily descriptive and expository. Though we are continually reminded of the presence of Chaucer the historian, narrator, and commentator, at the same time we are never allowed to forget that he is separate from the events he is recording’ (Bloomfield, 33). Yet Chaucer calls Troilus and Criseyde ‘myn tragedye’, one of his most assertive moments as narrator. Despite his seeming lack of control over the story, he calls it ‘myn’, and labels it a ‘tragedye’, which is not untrue, given that the main character dies at the end of the story. That label, however, is complicated by Troilus’s actions at the end, after his death: ‘And in hym self he lough right at the wo / Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste’ (5.1821-22). He laughs at the grief of those who wept for his death. He is laughing at the other characters within the story, but also, by extension, any readers who felt grief upon reading of his demise. The tragic character ends laughing at his own tragedy. Can Troilus and Criseyde, then, be called a tragedy? The overarching forces of the narrator, love, and Fortune, were so determined, throughout the poem, to batter Troilus between them and send him careening downwards to meet his tragedy. Yet he laughs at the end; as someone who is dead, can he be said, still, to be trapped within Fortune’s wheel, moving upwards again at last? Or is his laughter indicative of the fact that he has finally broken free of love, Fortune, and the narrator alike?
Bibliography:
Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde, A new edition of ‘The Book of Troilus’, ed. B.A. Windeatt (London, 1984)
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London, 1936)
I.L. Gordon, The Double Sorrow of Troilus: A Study of Ambiguities in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (Oxford, 1970)
Essays on ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, ed. M.B. Salu (Cambridge, 1979)
Critical Essays on Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ and his major early poems, ed. C.D. Benson (Buckingham, 1991)
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Love in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2019)
Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona is, if not a love story, then a story about love as represented through various characters, primarily Proteus, Valentine, and Julia. The reader sees their attitudes towards love change throughout the plot, and unfold with the help of other characters off of which their words can reflect them back to themselves. As a comedy, the darker elements inherent in these loves and lovers can only be glimpsed behind the lighter surface, and of darker elements there are many: ‘when we first meet Proteus and Valentine…love is already a force which threatens to pull their friendship apart: Proteus will stay at home because of it, losing the chance of adventure, and finding himself separated from his friend’ (Smith, 49). Love in the play is primarily a destructive force, a force that unwinds, rather than binds together, thus the plot itself is an unwinding of the structures present from the beginning: Proteus and Valentine’s friendship, Proteus’s love of Julia, Valentine’s love of Silvia. ‘All will work out well by a series of surprising coincidences, to which rivals and brigands are somehow contributory; and this fact is the setting and the story of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (Charlton, 36); if the plot is an unwinding, the ending hastily binds everything back together, turning Proteus, Valentine, and Julia’s circumstances back to the way they were towards the beginning. 
Proteus is introduced to the reader as a lover, off of whom Valentine’s biting commentaries on love simply bounce off. ‘Love is your master, for he masters you; / And he that is so yoked by a fool, / Methinks should not be chronicled for wise’ (1.1.39-41), says Valentine, to which Proteus responds, ‘Yet writers say: as in the sweetest bud / The eating canker dwells, so eating love / Inhabits in the finest wits of all’ (1.1.42-44). This is a rather silly, flamboyant response to cynicism, and the reader quickly sees these roles reversed when Proteus rejoins Valentine at court. Valentine is now the lover, to whom Proteus says, ‘When I was sick, you gave me bitter pills, / And I must minister the like to you’ (2.4.142-43), reinforcing the ever-present dynamic of a lover and a cynic, or a straight-man, for lack of a better word, whose job it is to ground that lover’s airy fancies. Yet already in this sentiment there are hints of a downward turn: Proteus refers to love as sickness, oddly negative for one who is supposedly in love himself, and says, ‘When I was sick’, past tense, implying that he is not in that particular love any longer. Already he has been swayed from Julia to Silvia, and so the unwinding begins, first in language. He betrays Valentine, attempts to seduce Silvia, and, when that fails, attempts to rape her. As the climax of the play, this is a low point for Proteus; his status as ‘lover’ has become twisted, as have his definitions of love. Yet he quickly ends up happy, deciding after all to marry Julia; yet perhaps ‘the ‘marriage’, which seals the end of the play, is less one between Proteus and Julia than between Proteus and his estranged selfhood’ (Smith, 49). If his selfhood was tied to the role of the lover, then at the end of the play he becomes that lover again. ‘Proteus, significantly named for his fickle nature, has vexed the critics by coming into a happiness he seems to have done nothing to deserve…It is true that in The Two Gentlemen of Verona Shakespeare did not allow himself scope to develop all the implications of Proteus’s fickleness and reform; but such a story of treachery, if fully explored, might strike too deep for comedy’ (Jenkins, 117). Exploration beyond implication, then, would reveal a darkness to the story that would bely its comic genre. Proteus’s sudden happiness at the end is thus characterized as a loose, hasty seal upon a seething mess that would overturn the story if the story did not end very quickly. The story is saving itself by ending while the ending can still be called happy.
Valentine suffers a similar reversal, but his character does not take such a dark turn as Proteus’s. The reader meets him as the straight-man, capable of talking sense to Proteus’s talk of love. Yet he quickly becomes a lover himself – ‘I have done penance for contemning Love’ (2.4.122), he says, speaking directly to this reversal – necessitating a straight-man in the form of his servant Speed, who speaks of the blinding influence of love. ‘If you love [Silvia], you cannot see her /…Because Love is blind. O that you had mine eyes, or your / own eyes had the lights they were wont to have when you chid / Sir Proteus' (2.1.60-64), he says. Love prevents one from seeing the world as it is. Certainly Valentine does not notice that Proteus is going to betray him, or pick up on Proteus’s aforementioned use of the past tense when he speaks of love. But perhaps Valentine is simply trusting; perhaps his inability to fathom Proteus’s betrayal speaks to his own quality of friendship. Their characters mirror one another, in that the extent Proteus reveals himself to be treacherous is the extent that Valentine reveals himself to be true; indeed, ’it is frequent of Shakespeare to complement one plot with another which reflects or contrasts with it, thus combining the satisfactions of artistic form with a sense of the ambivalence of life…there are two gentlemen of Verona; the inconstant lover Proteus is paired with the devoted lover Valentine, the man who forsakes his mistress with the man who is banished from his’ (Jenkins, 82). 
Then there is Julia, introduced by Proteus under the theme of love, so she is already colored in the reader’s mind by love, and Proteus, when we meet her. The reader sees her views as a potential lover in the beginning, as they are unfolded through conversation with Lucetta. Julia’s initial conversation with Lucetta is the precise opposite of the lover and the straight-man dynamic; indeed, Lucetta is urging Julia to fall in love with someone, ideally Proteus, whom Julia resists at first but quickly accepts over the course of a single scene. ‘His little speaking shows his love but small’ (1.2.29), she complains, but Lucetta counters with, ‘Fire that’s closest kept burns most of all’ (1.2.30). As Julia is presented as someone who is quite strong-willed, this resistance appears performative, as in one who has already made up her mind. Indeed, only several pages later Julia is kissing the pieces of Proteus’s letter. Once she properly becomes a lover, she and Lucetta are able to perform the lover and cynic dynamic, as Lucetta tries to tell Julia that Proteus might not be as pleased to see her as she believes, if Julia follows him to court. Julia insists he has a heart ‘as far from fraud as heaven from earth’ (2.7.78); ‘Pray heaven he prove so when you come to him!’ (2.7.79), Lucetta responds. Of course, Proteus has already fallen for Silvia, and betrayed his closest friend. Julia watches him attempt to court Silvia, and even attempt to rape her, but somehow she is still willing to marry him without a second’s pause; she only explains that she is actually Julia, and that Proteus should be ashamed for giving her cause to disguise herself as a boy. ‘Bear witness, heaven’, says Proteus, ‘I have my wish for ever’ (5.4.116)’; ‘And I mine’ (5.4.117), says Julia, and the reader hears from her no more. She is the lover made perfect, anguished until Proteus turns back to her, and when he does she is unquestioning, unflinching, willing to marry him without a second’s pause. If it matters at all to her what he did, the play ends before the reader has an opportunity to see it. 
Again, the ending is a bandage slapped hastily upon a finale that in no way appears stable. Thurio admits that he does not actually care for Silvia; Valentine is pardoned by the Duke and given leave to marry Silvia, for the Duke ‘applauds his spirit’ (5.4.136) in defending her. Proteus apologizing once, and Valentine saying, ‘Come, come, a hand from either. / Let me be blessed to make this happy close; / ‘Twere pity two such friends should be long foes’ (5.4.113-15) is apparently enough to seal over the fact that Proteus got him banished in order to seduce the woman he loved. This is also apparently enough of a wake-up call that Proteus is suddenly fine to marry Julia once again, after casting off his love for her. One explanation is that ‘Proteus had doted first on Julia’s outward beauty and then on Silvia’s – he eagerly requested the mere ‘shadow’ of her picture (4.2.137) – but the play concludes only when he recognizes Julia’s inward beauty, her ‘constancy’; when he sees her thus truly, he prefers her before any rival’ (Brown, 104). Yet is willingness to marry someone who abandoned her and attempted to rape another woman in front of her constancy? Constancy only means that Julia is still there, still constant in her affections, but in the face of such instability, stability itself is what becomes alarming. Yet Proteus loves her for it. Perhaps that is the way in which they fit together, in the way the ending itself fits together. It makes sense because it does not make sense; thus, it is constant, like Julia’s affections. The play rebinds itself, thanks to Valentine, as it unwound thanks to Valentine’s departure. Love, then, functions of the level of the lovers, as opposed to any outside notion of ‘sense.’ As the reader is not any of the lovers, it is not the reader that must acquiesce to these definitions of love. Love becomes something that is agreed upon by both parties, a private definition as opposed to the public definitions of the audience.
Bibliography:
Shakespeare, William, and Kurt. Schlueter. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2012). Print.
Jenkins, Harold., and E. A. J. Honigmann. Structural Problems in Shakespeare : Lectures and Essays (2001). Print.
Smith, Emma. Shakespeare's Comedies (2004). Print.
Charlton, H B. "Romanticism in Shakespearean Comedy." Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (1930): Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 1930; 14(2):340-360. Web.
Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare and His Comedies (2005). Print.
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Reversal in The Two Noble Kinsmen (2019)
Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play, primarily, about reversal: reversal of circumstances, reversal of relationships, overwhelming emotion juxtaposed against a complete dearth of emotion. The plot is an interplay of these reversals from various angles, and how they collide against one another. This is seen most keenly through the character arcs of Palamon and Arcite, and then in Emilia, whom they both profess to love. Palamon and Arcite are always at extremes: loving or loathing, occasionally tempered by the friendship they feel towards one another, while Emilia’s arc extends from lack of emotion towards either Palamon or Arcite to being flooded with emotion towards the both of them. In this they play against one another, always juxtaposed, always at an extreme end of the scale. In love, there is no moderation, except in friendship, though romantic love will override the love of a friend every time. Finally, the story at the heart of the play The Two Noble Kinsmen is a woman who never asked to be loved, who has no choice but to be complicit in the power games of the men around her; whose sudden, convenient decision to love both Palamon and Arcite both diminishes and exacerbates the tragedy at which she is the epicenter. 
The first reversal in the plot is when Palamon and Arcite, after complaining of the lack of heroic opportunity in their city, after going to war and being captured and nearly dying, find themselves in prison. If there was a lack of heroic opportunity in pre-war Thebes, being locked inside a prison is almost comically worse. ‘Here we are, / And here the graces of our youth must wither / Like a too-timely spring,’ (2.2.26-28), bemoans Arcite – for in prison they will never get married, or hunt, or go to war ever again. Yet it is Arcite, only several pages later, that flips these complaints on their head: ‘Were we at liberty, / A wife might part us lawfully, or business; / Quarrels consume us… / A thousand chances, / Were we from hence, would sever us’ (2.2.88-95). It is the very walls that imprison them that ensure they will never grow apart, never live in ignorance of the other’s fate. Palamon, too, warms to this theme; ‘What a misery / It is to live abroad and everywhere!’ (2.2.97-98), he says, and ‘Had the loving gods not found this place for us, / We had died as they do, ill old men, unwept’ (2.2.108-9). They conclude this entire psychological reversal by pledging their friendship to one another – ‘Is there record of any two that loved / Better than we do, Arcite?’ (2.2.114-15), only for this emotional extreme, again, to be turned on its head, for it is literally right after this oath that they see Emilia from their prison window and begin to fight over her, heedless of their aforementioned love for one another. Their indignance swells to outrage, until they are threatening one another with violence. ‘To be one hour at liberty and grasp / Our good swords in our hands! I would quickly teach thee / What  ‘twere to filch affection from another’ (2.2.211-14), says Palamon. Before they can actually come to blows, however, the Jailer enters to conclude this emotional whirlwind of a scene with the news that Arcite has been banished and will leave the prison, effectively pulling the plug on this buildup of anger. Again, this entire scene is highly ironic in the sense that it was Palamon’s and Arcite’s imprisonment, supposed to ensure their lifelong friendship, that actually ensured they were in the proper place to see Emilia, which is what tears that lifelong friendship apart. This entire scene exists only in extremes: grief to relief to pledges of love to pledges of enmity to threats of bodily injury, finished with an anti-climax as one party is removed. Emotionally, this scene is utterly wild, and matched only by Palamon’s and Arcite’s next meeting.
Palamon and Arcite next encounter one another in the woods, when Palamon has escaped from prison and Arcite has been sworn in service to Emilia. Despite their previous words to one another, that base of respect is still present: Arcite tells Palamon he will bring him food, and armor, even as he dares Palamon to say he still love Emilia (3.1.74). Their love for each other as friends, oddly enough, deepens their appreciation for one another as enemies. ‘I thank thee, Arcite,’ says Palamon, ‘Thou art yet a fair foe; and I feel myself, / With this refreshing, able once again / To outdure danger’ (3.7-9), and then, ‘Arcite, thou art so brave an enemy / That no man but thy cousin’s fit to kill thee’ (3.6.43-44). On one hand, this is totally bizarre; they are both preparing to fight one another to determine which of them will earn the right to Emilia, but they both respect each other so much that they regret what they must do. There is no question that they must fight; it remains unspoken that their platonic love must bow to their romantic love, as though the very genre of comedy, by necessity ending in a marriage, urges them onward. Again, it is only because they know each other so well as friends that they are able to appreciate what a good enemy the other one makes: noble, honorable, a good fighter, only worthy of being killed by someone who appreciates the other for what he is, which luckily both of them do. The depth of Palamon and Arcite’s friendship does not shift with their new enmity so much as take on a different angle of appreciation. If they were best friends, they are now best enemies. Their language of respect stands in unnerving opposition to the fact that they are preparing to fight one another. The reversal in this scene appears not so much as a sliding scale of emotion as it does two extreme emotional states coexisting side by side in both Palamon and Arcite: they both love each other, they will both fight one another. Neither state negates the other, nor questions the other, comically so as Palamon and Arcite help each other into their armor. Arcite asks if the armor is too heavy, if it pinches, and urges Palamon to take his gauntlets (3.6.63). This is tenderness and brutality starkly intertwined. 
Then there is the end of the play, the most dramatic moment of reversal for both Palamon and Arcite’s relationship as well as the overarching story of the play. The two of them finally fight, after Arcite prays to Mars for victory against Palamon, and Palamon prays to Venus for victory in love. Both prayers come true: Arcite defeats Palamon on the battlefield. The reader thinks they see a clear end, as Palamon is sentenced to death. His head lies upon the block; he is heartbeats from death when a messenger enters, and, in a monologue that is somehow both long and hasty, delivers the news that Arcite has fallen from his horse and is now inches from death. Palamon, then, wins by default, his prayer to Venus finally coming true. Death simplifies the wild conflict between Palamon and Arcite: Arcite urges Palamon to take Emilia, saying, ‘I was false / Yet never treacherous. Forgive me, cousin’ (5.4.93-94). Death, then, is the only way this situation can be laid to rest. Either Palamon or Arcite had to die in the end, both salvaging and ending their relationship in one fell swoop. The only difference is that the reader never sees Palamon forgive Arcite, though he does say he is ‘One that loves [Arcite] dying’ (5.4.89). Again, the plot swings on a pendulum from one extreme to the next; just when the situation seems to have settled, circumstances tip upside-down once more, managing to change the entire ending in the last two pages thanks to a simple, perhaps divinely begotten accident. Death is the one thing in the play that cannot be reversed, thus the play ends shortly after Arcite dies. 
Then there is the matter of Emilia. Aside from Palamon’s and Arcite’s imprisonment, nearly every negative circumstance in the play hinges upon her – not so much her actions as her lack of actions. Problems are caused simply because she is seen. Compared to their wild torrent of emotions, Emilia feels nothing: ‘I find no anger to ‘em, nor no ruin; / The misadventure of their own eyes kill ‘em’ (3.6.189-90). Thus, their eyes were unlucky enough to land upon her and find her desirable, and for that at least one of them will die. Again, there is this extreme emotional juxtaposition. Yet it is only several scenes later that Emilia shifts to the opposite extreme. She looks at both of their pictures, tries to force herself to decide which of them she prefers, only to wax lyrical about their beauty. She says, then,
What sins have I committed, chaste Diana,
That my unspotted youth must now be soiled
With blood of princes, and my chastity
Be made the altar where the lives of lovers -
…must be the sacrifice
To my unhappy beauty? (4.2.58-63)
This is the polar opposite of feeling nothing. Again, she bemoans only her ‘unhappy’ beauty, no actions she made, no choices. The final fight between Palamon and Arcite only makes her miserable; ‘I should and would die too’ (5.3.143), she says. And in the end, when Arcite dies and she finds her fortunes reversed once again, all she does in kiss him once and agree to cry for him ‘this day’. The reader never hears from her again. Perhaps it would have been better if she had still felt nothing for either of them, and was indeed bartered like an object that, in its inanimacy, would feel no pain. Yet her sudden influx of feeling towards both of them means she feels one half more grief than she would have in Arcite’s death, and one half more love in marrying Palamon. But it is never her feelings that matter, in any case, nor decide any issue, aside from when she begs for Palamon’s and Arcite’s lives. Even then, it is only because, as a woman, she feels she should ‘have pity’ (3.6.191). Emilia, as a character, is only ever a dividing influence, a threat. Therefore it does not matter who, or what, she is; indeed, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen focuses on the threat women represent to male intimacy, and heightens the issue by positioning men as romantic rivals’ (Traub, 143). A stronger view states that ‘what we see in The Two Noble Kinsmen is the crippling psychological cost in terms of the loss of personal and social selfhood which men may fear will be the price of marriage’ (Hopkins, 50). Yet Palamon and Arcite are enacting this ‘loss’ by themselves; no one is making them do this, except for perhaps the genre, and the underlying story from which Shakespeare is writing. Perhaps the moral of the story is that romantic love is simply more powerful than any other force; perhaps the moral is that Palamon and Arcite are both fools. Perhaps this is the cost of a comic ending where none of the potential lovers are quite where they should be, emotionally.
Bibliography:
Fletcher, John, William Shakespeare, and Lois Potter. The Two Noble Kinsmen (2015). Print.
De Grazia, Margreta., and Stanley Wells. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2001). Print.
Hopkins L. (1998) Marriage as Comic Closure. In: The Shakespearean Marriage. Palgrave Macmillan, London
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Persuasion in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline (2019)
Both Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline are about persuasion in one form or another. Key features of the plot hinge on the characters’ varying level of success in convincing others to do or believe something. If Paulina had persuaded Leontes of Hermione’s innocence with the baby as her prop – if Hermione, during her trial, had convinced Leontes with her words – then Hermione would not have ‘died,’and the final magic of the play would have had to reside somewhere besides a statue brought to life. If Iachimo had not convinced Posthumus to take the bet against Imogen, Imogen might never have fled the court. Perhaps she never would have met Belarius or her brothers; perhaps the Queen would have had opportunity to ensure her poison’s success. It is no exaggeration to say that every single character in both of these plays would have ended differently if their persuasions had failed, or succeeded differently. Besides pinning the plot into place, characters dredging up every ounce of their persuasive ability reveals a great deal of that character’s thought process and understanding of the person they are attempting to convince. How their words work on their subject, in turn, reveals the mental workings of their subject. Thus, the interplay of two wits, the collision of two wills, spark tension, spark the plot, spark the emotions of the reader, and dramatize the fact that really there is no conversation, no interaction, that does not contain some seed of persuasion within. 
One of the most dramatic scenes of persuasion in The Winter’s Tale is Act 2, Scene 3, in which Paulina attempts to dissuade Leontes of his conviction that Hermione was unfaithful to him with Polixenes. Her primary tactic – to bring the child before Leontes – mixes ethos, logos, and pathos. She says, in proposing she show him the baby, ‘We do not know / How he may soften at the sight o’the child: / The silence often of pure innocence / Persuades when speaking fails’ (2.2.891-94). This, stated, is a purely emotional tactic; the sight of a baby might ‘soften’ him, even if it does not outright change his mind. In the ‘silence of pure innocence’ there is no speaking, no logic, simply a human’s biological response to a baby. The logic comes later, when she points out the similarities between the baby and Leontes: ‘Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father, eye, nose, lip’ (2.3.1050-53). The truth of her words is physical in nature, not emotional, available to anyone with eyes. Yet regardless of these apparent truths and emotional appeals, Leontes refuses to change his mind. ‘He cannot be compell’d to’t,’ says Paulina. ‘Once remove / The root of his opinion, which is rotten / As ever oak or stone was sound’ (2.3.1039-41). Leontes’s stubbornness renders him immune to logical or emotional appeals; his station as king renders him immune to preventative action. Paulina can only use her words; she has no real power at court. Her anger gives her a voice, a fire, that allows her to overstep her bounds and live. She calls Leontes a tyrant, to which he responds, ‘Were I a tyrant, / Where were her life? She durst not call me so, / If she did know me one’ (2.3.1081-83). This is either extremely clever on Paulina’s part or simply convenient on Leontes’s: he becomes a tyrant if he kills her for her speech. In so labelling him, Paulina is forcing him not to kill her and prove her right – or Leontes is sparing her to prove her wrong. Presumably killing the wife of one of his councilmen would be, politically, a poor move, so Leontes takes the out that Paulina offers. Through words, she is able to save herself, but not change his mind; Leontes’s stubbornness makes him blind. 
The other most important scene of persuasion occurs when Hermione is on trial – ‘Hermione’s performance features a beautiful mixture of forensic rhetoric and impassioned lyricism’ (Zucker, 32). Without a baby to use as an emotional prop, or that baby’s features, reminiscent of Leontes’s, to use in a logical appeal, Hermione has only words, and in words she has only her past behavior to use as evidence. She says, ‘I appeal / to your own conscience, sir, before Polixenes / Came to your court, how I was in your grace, / How merited to be so’ (3.2.1257-60). This is a logical appeal: basically, consider the extent to which you trusted me before Polixenes came, and why you trusted me so. If there was nothing in her past to sow doubt, then that would, presumably, undermine Leontes’s doubt in her at present. She is, in essence, attempting to reach the root of his opinion, which Paulina referenced earlier: not to argue at its edges with finer details, but to prod at the heart of his suspicion, to ask whether there is any precedent for his suspicion. She is not arguing outright; she is not weeping and saying, I did not do this. This is the forensic rhetoric referenced by Zucker: she is undermining his arguments at their very heart, and her words are all the more moving for that they fall on deaf ears. Leontes’s convictions are so firm that he denounces the words of the oracle, proclaiming that Hermione speaks true, as ‘mere falsehood’ (3.2.1364). If the words of the gods cannot sway him, Hermione never had a chance. As queen, she is able to speak more freely than Paulina – indeed, she has far less to lose as well; ‘Tell me what blessings I have here alive / That I should fear to die’ (3.2.1324-25), she says – but again, they have only words. ‘Both women resist in language the violence of the state’ (Zucker, 32), posing a stark contrast to Leontes’s threats to burn and to kill them, refusing to acknowledge any of their points. Against words, a king only has to say no. A king needs no proof, nor eloquence. Because of one man’s jealousy, persuasion fails in The Winter’s Tale.
Cymbeline is a different story, in that persuasion both fails where it succeeds and succeeds where it fails. The central persuasive figure of Cymbeline is not a stubborn king, against whom his subjects may fling argument after argument and be dismissed, but instead Iachimo, who simply does not want to lose a bet that he himself initiated. He pushes Posthumus into wagering Imogen’s fidelity with a series of needling remarks, such as: ‘You are afraid, and therein the wiser. / If you buy ladies’ flesh at a million a dram, you cannot / preserve it from tainting: but I see you have some / religion in you, that you fear’ (1.4.449-452). This is the remark that really pushes Posthumus to accept the bet. Iachimo is framing Posthumus’s unwillingness to accept the bet as cowardice instead of trust in Imogen; he is twisting the situation backwards. It is easy to place one woman on a pedestal when she is all you have experienced, he is saying – again, very taunting language, framing Posthumus’s trust in Imogen as stemming from lack of experience. The implications in this statement are that Posthumus is a coward, and naive, and Posthumus, so fiery in his defense of Imogen, is spurred by that same fire to agree. 
Imogen’s practicality and level-headedness means that Iachimo cannot use this same tactic on her. Instead, his tactic hinges on tit-for-tat, on Imogen playing Posthumus in the same way that he, according to Iachimo, has played her: ‘Should he make me / Live, like Diana’s priest, betwixt cold sheets, / Whiles he is vaulting variable ramps, / In your despite, upon your purse? Revenge it’ (1.6.760-63). He is using your money to sleep with other women, he is saying; get revenge and sleep with me. The fact that he is using this tactic reveals a great deal of his assumptions about Imogen. He clearly presumes that she feels insecure about Posthumus alone with all the beautiful ladies in Italy; he presumes that her hurt will turn outwards towards Posthumus, that she will want to wound him in the way he has wounded her, that there is a bit of a mean, vengeful streak in Imogen, or that her grief will make her pliable. But he miscalculates; Imogen is not goaded into believing the worst of Posthumus. Thus Iachimo must be persuasive a third time, and convince Posthumus that he did indeed sleep with Imogen. He describes her bedchamber, shows Posthumus the bracelet – which convinces Posthumus until Philario points out that one of her women might have stolen it – then finally mentions a mole beneath her breast, which convinces Posthumus beyond a doubt that Imogen has been unfaithful. Again, this is a clever unfolding of events. Iachimo starts broadly and moves into specifics; he sets the scene, moves closer and closer to Imogen’s body in words until he ends, in words, upon Imogen’s body. His method of unfolding this tale is a seduction in it of itself: the slow moving-closer, the final, intimate detail. He has been building Posthumus up to believe, and when he finishes his tale, Posthumus’s reaction is extraordinarily visceral. Thus his method of persuasion mimics the topic about which he is attempting to persuade Posthumus, and is far more effective than if he had begun with the detail of the mole on Imogen’s breast.
Thus persuasion turns the plot. Life and death hinge on persuasion. Women are condemned to die out of mistaken belief, and must become other than what they are to escape. Hermione becomes a statue; Imogen becomes a boy. Kings need listen to no one – kings need no rhetoric. Leontes’s suspicions of Hermione are not based in words and thus cannot be undone by words. Words cannot dislodge irrationality but they can spur it onwards, as Paulina’s attempt to soften Leontes with the baby backfires, only making him angrier, and inadvertently gives him the opportunity to take the child from her. In the end it all comes down to the words one chooses, revealing Iachimo’s beliefs of Posthumus and Imogen, revealing what insecurities Posthumus has upon which Iachimo may more accurately press, revealing that there are no words in the world that Paulina or Hermione might say to change Leontes’s mind, if the gods themselves cannot. In a sense every conversation is negotiation, a series of wills fighting to be perceived. Words, in both The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, are linked inextricably to violence, as its antithesis and as its initiator. Words are a brand of violence in that they can wreak havoc upon the mind, can build and break a mental state, can perform upon the mind what physical violence performs upon the body.
Bibliography:
Shakespeare, William, and Frederic William Moorman. The Winter's Tale, Ed. by F.W. Moorman (1912). Print.
Shakespeare, William, and Valerie Wayne. Cymbeline (2017). Web.
Zucker, Adam. "Late Shakespeare." The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare (2011): The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, Chapter 20. Web.
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