The Halfling

Chapter 8

They had reached the stone platform Merena had pointed at earlier. It was engraved with characters the boy neither understood nor cared for.

The curlicues run about the place much as they wanted to, for all he cared. All he wished was that this moment never ended: that the moonlight illumining the pale face of the girl in front of him never fade from memory; that the way her dress traced her figure carve itself upon the eternal stream of time; that the way she smiled imprint itself upon the fabric of space.

"Yearly," Merena said, "we enacted a dance here, depicting the world's creation. How it was forged first with the sky and the clouds then the plains and the hills and the mounts, with the birds then the fishes, with the firmaments then the seas."

She moved. Her dance was the ephemeral wandering of the leaves, their every sway and fall captured by her hands and feet. She embodied them, worked them into her being, wove the world, summoning everything within it.

And still, she continued talking.

"In those strange times," she cooed, "the world was once heavenly. Full of peace. Until we knew things." She halted her movements. The boy felt his stomach drop. "All we have done and still do are attempts to return to that place, to that land of bliss, to Paradise. It is," she said, walking up to the boy, "us trying our hands at redemption. And, through that, the world. We desire perfection because we reminisce the distant past. At least, that is what the text meant. It is lost now. I can no longer show them to you. But I have something better than that."

She held the boy's hand. She made him feel.

He was everything in the world at once. He was the ochre canyons that glittered as a shower of buttery light fell upon them. He was the leaves and the fronds that sway-danced to the warm breath of summer. Sky and land; stars and landforms; light and darkness; being and non-being. He had, for a moment, experienced bliss that could not be expressed in words.

"How...?"

"The world offers itself to those willing to understand," Merena said. "But only after we have listened, only after we have waited, only after we have fasted. It is a difficult thing to be in the world rather than be an onlooker. That is the one thing the other Fairies have tried to do; and look where that got them."

Samuel's forehead creased. "And you will still pursue it?"

"Until the bitter end."

"And are you not lonely? toiling all by yourself?"

"Until now, I have been. But, perhaps," she said, pressing her fingers on his. Up close, her eyes took him in. The din of night no more reached his ears, for her gaze was a beacon of light that seized his attention. It pulled deeper and deeper into a chasm, not allowing him to escape. "Perhaps...nothing."

"What is it, Merena?"

"It's nothing, really." She took his hand. "Come, we ought to return to my house. It's getting dark. And, not long from now, you'll have to leave. For time does not run the same in Nerest."

From then on, the boy felt, Merena started distancing herself. Whenever they would near chortling and chuckling, she would catch herself and turn grave and serious. She'd lock her heart in a cage, in order to separate the boy from her. Or, perhaps, to withhold herself from the boy.

It was one of those sordid mornings when Merena entered the garden, something, she told the boy, she had fashioned herself. It was her only source of encouragement and pleasure within the hidden land.

She wove her sorcery with silence. Where the boy once watched her in glee, he now peeked, for she had warned him from ever looking at her spells.

All about her whirled the junipers and the hazels, the bushes twining and twirling their prickly thorns into such shapes that seemed delightful instead of dangerous. Now the trees themselves, the tall oaks and the smooth lindens, they rose and saluted their boughs and shimmered a metallic green as sunlight fell on them.