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rainbowfic2015-05-26 02:51 am
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2015-05-26 02:51 am
to those who walk after
Name: Mischa
Story: i never promised you a rose garden
Colors: dove grey (For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity), octarine (The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die), atomic tangerine (the end of the world)
Supplies and Styles: canvas, fingerpainting
Word Count: 1363
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: death
Summary: Ileana Alina, centuries later, writes about the end of the Age of Miracles and the beginning of the next age.
Notes: Major world backstory, from the memoirs of the last person alive who lived through that period.
an excerpt from the memoirs of Ileana Alina
I remember, if only faintly, the city of dreaming spires: impossibly beautiful, impossibly wrought, and impossible to hold onto, save only in my dreams. A city, a world, wrought of miracles, miracles layered upon miracles and impossibilities. I do not have the words to describe the beauty of the world that was: I was born in the twilight years of what is now called the “Age of Miracles”, and only little more than a girl when the world shattered like it was nothing more than pretty glass. The Sundering taught us that for all our power, for everything we created - there were still things beyond us. All our works, all our wonders, for all our power, nothing could stand against the great demon lords and the rest of their kind, walking blasphemies from outside the circles of the world, world-warping.
(Pray to the Three-in-One that you never see a demon in your life.)
And yet, somehow, I am the only one who has more than an echo of understanding of just how much we have lost. I am, at this last, the only human alive who remembers the world as it was. I am the only one alive who remembers just how much we have lost. Just how much we have been diminished. You call thaumaturgy a miracle, and kings bow down in wonder at the power that I wield. You have never seen the might a Melodist could wield - the power of true sorcery, their songs tapping into the very fabric of reality. A thaumaturge such as I is capable of great wonders, but a properly trained Melodist was capable of great miracles. You have never heard one sing. You have...
We prayed to the Three, when all seemed darkest - and yet, we knew nothing of what was to come. The Lady Preserver created Her children, the catfolk, to serve as immortal guardians between flesh and spirit, and sent them to us, to help us in the war. And we fought.
I will take those memories with me, when I go. Know that they were terrible, beyond anything you could possibly imagine, and know that the scars will endure in the land long after me, and long after your children, and long past all living memory. But as hard as we fought, both human and catfolk, it wasn’t enough: we gave, and we gave, and we gave, the demons kept coming. What could we do against blasphemy itself?
Finally, when all truly seemed lost, the Lady Preserver came to us, who waited close by what would be the final battlefield. She came to us, and She came to Her children, and I weep to remember the beauty of Her presence, the Second of the Three who drive the world. Starlight and the moment just before dawn, and the memory of Her face, the sound of her voice echoing still in my head-
And my mother, Mirela, the most gifted of the Melodists of the Age of Miracles, looked the Lady Preserver straight in her eyes, unflinching and unafraid, even as the others around her trembled and knelt in fear. The Lady Who Illuminates had come to offer us a choice, in order to preserve what was left of our world. One last sacrifice.
We could keep all the power that had been gifted us - the power and our long lives, the almost-immortality that had been ours even for those of us who had never been gifted with magic - and nothing we could do could save us. We would die with power undimmed, die in glory, die undiminished - or we could live. Give up most of our magical power, never be able to forge another Age of Miracles, the world would be diminished and less but it would live.
The choice was ours. And in the silence after the Lady Preserver had spoken, we could hear from outside the quiet sobbing and yowling of her catfolk children. She had asked of them a sacrifice as well - not the same as ours, but that was all I ever learned about what they had given up, even from the catfolk boy who would become my friend. The catfolk keep their secrets, and do not take kindly to those who pry.
Our choice, given that I am still here to write these words and you are still here to read them, was obvious: at dawn, after a night spent arguing, and mourning, my mother told the Lady Preserver that we would make the necessary sacrifice. Mother never told me, before she died, exactly what the Lady had told her: only that She had told her what would have to be done, and how to do it.
On the central plain of Oradea, once the most beautiful jewel in the crown of our civilization, we made our last stand against the armies of demons and their great lords. My stylus trembled in my hand as I traced the glyphs in fire and light and water and earth and air, more complex layers than I was ever able to teach, faster, stronger: I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the best thaumaturges of my day, as we all worked in synchronization, weaving a shield with strange catfolk magic to reinforce it. None of us had been trained, before the war, to work together: thaumaturgy was, and remains, an art best practiced by a solo practitioner, but necessity had forced us to find a way, however crude.
Three hundred massed voices sang above the din of fire and flame and screams and death: I had never heard such beauty before, even in the last waning days of the Age of Miracles, and no one will ever hear the like again. Three hundred Melodists, three hundred true sorcerers, working in concert for the single greatest working the world has ever and will ever know, singing the seal that would save us all.
Lightning and rain: fire and madness and grief and death, as demons dove and shrieked and clawed and tore, the blasphemy of their existence warping the land as they passed. All around me, thaumaturges and catfolk died, trying to hold the shield to protect the Melodists as they sang, pouring every ounce of their power into their working and none into protecting themselves.
And one by one, each singer fell, the strain entirely too much, until at last my mother was singing alone, alone and unafraid as the greatest general of the demons roared and dove out of the smoking sky straight for her. I poured all the power I could into my shaping, into my glyphs, trying to buy her as much time as she needed to finish the song, and my stylus shattered in my hand-
I didn’t see what happened next: the moment the shield shattered, I was knocked unconscious, the last echo of my mother’s singing in my ears. When I awoke, several days later, the battle was over: even children now sing songs about the Sealing, the Great Seal that we had given up so much to be able to create, locking all the demons and their great generals somewhere outside the circles of this world and the next. The battle was over, and my mother was dead, the last of the Melodists to have died. For their sacrifice, we call them Elegists, and their art Elegy: perhaps, one day, someone will hear an Elegist sing again, though most of the knowledge of the art died with the last of the Melodists of the Age of Miracles, on that field. I do not ever expect to hear their song again in my lifetime.
“She died, smiling,” said the quiet, young catfolk who had been by her side when she had died, a slight dark-haired boy (or so I assumed: catfolk are androgynous and not forthcoming) dressed in white but the swinging-sleeves robe of a bride, with a white rose in his hair. “With your name in her eyes.” I thought he had nothing else to say, until he spoke one last time, with the heavy weight of ritual that matched the ache in my heart. “We will remember.”
Story: i never promised you a rose garden
Colors: dove grey (For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity), octarine (The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die), atomic tangerine (the end of the world)
Supplies and Styles: canvas, fingerpainting
Word Count: 1363
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: death
Summary: Ileana Alina, centuries later, writes about the end of the Age of Miracles and the beginning of the next age.
Notes: Major world backstory, from the memoirs of the last person alive who lived through that period.
an excerpt from the memoirs of Ileana Alina
I remember, if only faintly, the city of dreaming spires: impossibly beautiful, impossibly wrought, and impossible to hold onto, save only in my dreams. A city, a world, wrought of miracles, miracles layered upon miracles and impossibilities. I do not have the words to describe the beauty of the world that was: I was born in the twilight years of what is now called the “Age of Miracles”, and only little more than a girl when the world shattered like it was nothing more than pretty glass. The Sundering taught us that for all our power, for everything we created - there were still things beyond us. All our works, all our wonders, for all our power, nothing could stand against the great demon lords and the rest of their kind, walking blasphemies from outside the circles of the world, world-warping.
(Pray to the Three-in-One that you never see a demon in your life.)
And yet, somehow, I am the only one who has more than an echo of understanding of just how much we have lost. I am, at this last, the only human alive who remembers the world as it was. I am the only one alive who remembers just how much we have lost. Just how much we have been diminished. You call thaumaturgy a miracle, and kings bow down in wonder at the power that I wield. You have never seen the might a Melodist could wield - the power of true sorcery, their songs tapping into the very fabric of reality. A thaumaturge such as I is capable of great wonders, but a properly trained Melodist was capable of great miracles. You have never heard one sing. You have...
We prayed to the Three, when all seemed darkest - and yet, we knew nothing of what was to come. The Lady Preserver created Her children, the catfolk, to serve as immortal guardians between flesh and spirit, and sent them to us, to help us in the war. And we fought.
I will take those memories with me, when I go. Know that they were terrible, beyond anything you could possibly imagine, and know that the scars will endure in the land long after me, and long after your children, and long past all living memory. But as hard as we fought, both human and catfolk, it wasn’t enough: we gave, and we gave, and we gave, the demons kept coming. What could we do against blasphemy itself?
Finally, when all truly seemed lost, the Lady Preserver came to us, who waited close by what would be the final battlefield. She came to us, and She came to Her children, and I weep to remember the beauty of Her presence, the Second of the Three who drive the world. Starlight and the moment just before dawn, and the memory of Her face, the sound of her voice echoing still in my head-
And my mother, Mirela, the most gifted of the Melodists of the Age of Miracles, looked the Lady Preserver straight in her eyes, unflinching and unafraid, even as the others around her trembled and knelt in fear. The Lady Who Illuminates had come to offer us a choice, in order to preserve what was left of our world. One last sacrifice.
We could keep all the power that had been gifted us - the power and our long lives, the almost-immortality that had been ours even for those of us who had never been gifted with magic - and nothing we could do could save us. We would die with power undimmed, die in glory, die undiminished - or we could live. Give up most of our magical power, never be able to forge another Age of Miracles, the world would be diminished and less but it would live.
The choice was ours. And in the silence after the Lady Preserver had spoken, we could hear from outside the quiet sobbing and yowling of her catfolk children. She had asked of them a sacrifice as well - not the same as ours, but that was all I ever learned about what they had given up, even from the catfolk boy who would become my friend. The catfolk keep their secrets, and do not take kindly to those who pry.
Our choice, given that I am still here to write these words and you are still here to read them, was obvious: at dawn, after a night spent arguing, and mourning, my mother told the Lady Preserver that we would make the necessary sacrifice. Mother never told me, before she died, exactly what the Lady had told her: only that She had told her what would have to be done, and how to do it.
On the central plain of Oradea, once the most beautiful jewel in the crown of our civilization, we made our last stand against the armies of demons and their great lords. My stylus trembled in my hand as I traced the glyphs in fire and light and water and earth and air, more complex layers than I was ever able to teach, faster, stronger: I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the best thaumaturges of my day, as we all worked in synchronization, weaving a shield with strange catfolk magic to reinforce it. None of us had been trained, before the war, to work together: thaumaturgy was, and remains, an art best practiced by a solo practitioner, but necessity had forced us to find a way, however crude.
Three hundred massed voices sang above the din of fire and flame and screams and death: I had never heard such beauty before, even in the last waning days of the Age of Miracles, and no one will ever hear the like again. Three hundred Melodists, three hundred true sorcerers, working in concert for the single greatest working the world has ever and will ever know, singing the seal that would save us all.
Lightning and rain: fire and madness and grief and death, as demons dove and shrieked and clawed and tore, the blasphemy of their existence warping the land as they passed. All around me, thaumaturges and catfolk died, trying to hold the shield to protect the Melodists as they sang, pouring every ounce of their power into their working and none into protecting themselves.
And one by one, each singer fell, the strain entirely too much, until at last my mother was singing alone, alone and unafraid as the greatest general of the demons roared and dove out of the smoking sky straight for her. I poured all the power I could into my shaping, into my glyphs, trying to buy her as much time as she needed to finish the song, and my stylus shattered in my hand-
I didn’t see what happened next: the moment the shield shattered, I was knocked unconscious, the last echo of my mother’s singing in my ears. When I awoke, several days later, the battle was over: even children now sing songs about the Sealing, the Great Seal that we had given up so much to be able to create, locking all the demons and their great generals somewhere outside the circles of this world and the next. The battle was over, and my mother was dead, the last of the Melodists to have died. For their sacrifice, we call them Elegists, and their art Elegy: perhaps, one day, someone will hear an Elegist sing again, though most of the knowledge of the art died with the last of the Melodists of the Age of Miracles, on that field. I do not ever expect to hear their song again in my lifetime.
“She died, smiling,” said the quiet, young catfolk who had been by her side when she had died, a slight dark-haired boy (or so I assumed: catfolk are androgynous and not forthcoming) dressed in white but the swinging-sleeves robe of a bride, with a white rose in his hair. “With your name in her eyes.” I thought he had nothing else to say, until he spoke one last time, with the heavy weight of ritual that matched the ache in my heart. “We will remember.”