Lucy Upyr > Recent Status Updates

Memory is the soul of reality.

I made it back in time for the cicadas, they thought.
“I’m going home to the Singing Hills abbey,” they said.

We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.

Always you will arrive in this city.
Do not hope for any other—

I knew she was from ancient times, from times when people knew magic, when people saw gods everywhere and talked to the plants, the animals and even the fish in the sea.

Guilt was not part of my heritage. The senior members of my family had disapproved of it. One must recognize mistakes and acknowledge them and work to break the patterns of behavior that led to them. But guilt was unproductive.
“Life is a process,” Theresa had said. “We make and remake ourselves, responding to changes both external and internal. But guilt is static.”

Now those who came saw only the Persian boy, holding a fan or drinking-cup, bringing blankets when an ague took him, sponging him and putting on dry sheets after a sweat, or sitting quiet on a cushion against the wall. I was safe, my place aroused no envy. Only one man would have taken it from me, and he was white ash on the winds of heaven.

The room grew hot; I loosed the neck of my coat, with its ruby-clustered buttons. The last hand to open it had been his.

I had found him Hephaistion’s boy, and with me he had wished for manhood. It had been my pride. So now I had given him to a woman. I sat in the hot torchlight, tasting death, and being pleasant to those around me, as I had been taught when I was twelve years old.

You drink of the River and it is clear. You drink of the River and it is foul. You breathe of the Sky and it never empties. You weep, and the Sea stings your lips. Rejoice, and mourn, for you belong to this World.
Heaven does not know you.
—NIN’HILARJAL, Psalms to Oblivion

Scripture, the Great Kyranean once observed, is history inked in madness.

“They cut so much from you, but not everything, it seems,” they said with their many voices. “They still believe memories are citizens of the mind. But memories also live in the bones, and the blood.”

Memory is water through fingers. Sometimes able to grasp half a remembrance. The boy coming to show me his sentences, play his flute. That beautiful song, the inverse to his unconfident & raspy voice.
The crew, checking to make sure Sartoris was not a corpse. Their visits are pragmatic, this I know. But still. I cannot help but be moved by their presence, shepherding me through the dark.

It was as the winged doors of the chamber folded over her and encompassed her body that she thought of edamame—a bowl of them, dusted with sea salt, on a marble counter.

She grimaced. These images haunted her in the strangest moments; images with no time or context, slipping through the cracks of cold sleep to taunt her of a past she could not remember.

And in these moments, she would catch a glimpse of his past. A history of silence that existed long before the trauma of the wreckage. A learned pain.

Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

I done outlive everybody there is to know, and if I leave it to just him, then the only story of this business will be the Tracker’s, and that silly, slutty fool don’t even know that this tale is not just bigger than him, but one hundred seventy and seven years older. Because for all his love and all his loss, that man with a nose is just a boy. And truth speaking? This is woman work.

“I’d rather a choice then a gift.”
“So now you is like a woman in all things. Tell me how it feel one day.”

They lose the boy.
The black bitch and them, they lose the boy. This must be sad tidings for some, maybe many, but all I could do is laugh. Live as long as me and there is not much that don’t turn funny, even grief, even cruelty, even loss. Because here is truth. Between gods and princesses and kings and noble people, all of this is a game, so how can one not laugh when they can’t play?

“I kill people,” I say and observe the long silence that follow. “People call me the Moon Witch.”
“Witch. The world is fickle about witches.”
“The world is fickle about women.”
“Where in all this do you fit?”
“I not trying to fit,” I say.

For when the people flock to your house in mourning, people joined by blood or by law, it don’t matter what feeling you carry for them, if you carry any at all. For grief is a burden that don’t care about anything other than we bear it. You don’t need love to withstand it, you need shoulders. I didn’t discover this until now, that mourning is the work of many, and we have only us.

“The only difference between who is a witch and who is not is one man’s mouth,” say the cook.

See the girl take her dead mother’s name, one hundred seventy and seven years ago. One hundred seventy and seven times that the great gourd of the world spin around the sun.
Sogolon.

Autumn had come down off the northern hills and spread like a tide of copper and crimson and gold across the woods and meadows of Farrland. It flowed slowly, day by day, through gardens and along hedges until it came at last to the city of Avonel, where the reflections of the turning trees cast their dying colors on the waters of the harbor, where they looked like the wavering reflections of flames.

A pool appeared through the trees, like the forest’s dark eye, staring up, glittering with the tears of reflected stars. Galton glanced up and realized that cloud had covered the moon and stars, but that did not matter in this place. Their light had been captured, and spewed from a fissure in the cliff, down a pillar of water into the pool below.

And so they held the funeral for horse-lord Hector.

“You missed, godlike Achilles![...]
Now try to get away from my bronze spear!
I hope you offer it a gentle welcome
and let its whole length rest inside your flesh.
The war will lie more lightly on the Trojans
after your death. You were our greatest curse.”

With this, he aimed his great long-shadowed spear
and hurled it, and it did not miss.

and it seems strange that in so great a time no words have been found for the pauses in speech, which have each their own quality, as well as a certain length.

He felt a kiss on his brow—so soft and full of tenderness that it was almost a word. And then another on his cheek, and then, even more softly, on his lips. Three words.

Water running over stone like an ancient song, the rock so worn now that the song had almost returned to its natural form. Still, there were vestiges of the regularity that the even steps had imposed but this was in the background now, a quiet harmony.

“Colder than starlight on midwinter’s night,
Dark, dark. My thoughts eclipse the sun.
The silence comes, stealing, o’er the heart.
But hear in the distance, the sea’s tumble and run.”