Solo #1: Canticle
He thinks of her most often at night, when the cacophony of noise outside his window has finally quieted and the stars are out en masse. He thinks of her name: Embla. He thinks of her hair, long and black; of the bright eyes, the way they gleamed under tangled locks. Once he heard them described as round sapphires, flecked with golden dust. His own eyes, he knows, are like verdigris, blue and green and pale as water. Perhaps he romanticizes her in memoriam, strips her of flaws--the drug addiction, that was a flaw, it is a flaw he remembers well and he misses it, and he thought he never would--and therefore does an injustice to her memory. It’s a weakness in the Muted, the memory that takes even regrettable traits and turns them to endearing things. It’s a weakness and he knows it, but he still imagines it as a miracle of memory that he can remember at all.
Some things he can’t remember: The taste of his favorite festival foods, the color of Embla’s favorite gown, his mother’s favorite flower. It bothers him. It drives him to distraction, drives him to the chair before the window to stare up at what few stars he can see. He can vaguely sense them--just a little. He had never been a psion, for all he had grown to be able to withstand the psychic contact and sense just a touch of the stars. It just happened, he thinks, remembering his lessons. Spend enough time with a Psion and you become attuned to them. When he has forgotten so much, it seems to him unfair that he should remember her only in psychic skills that were never his.
But at night, sitting in his tiny apartment over the restaurant, he also remembers:
He used to watch her while she slept, guarding her from the night--stupid, really, because he was (still is) the one who needed (needs) protection. Aska remembers how she would curl around a pillow, her face flushed from the heat. He liked to look at her, even then. He had told her, asked her once, as he worked a design into a chair for her sitting room: Do you think that’s an intrusion, Lady Embla?
He remembers how she laughed at the question, tipping her head back. Clear, bell-like, high-pitched and wonderful, the sort of laugh that made a man wish to hear it once, twice, a million times. He loved to look at her, loved to hear her--would love to see and hear her again, to touch her skin with his fingertips. He would look at her in so many ways, were she to return to him, or he to her. In front of her, standing, or behind her, or on his knees. He remembers how she would change when he moved, how what looked so triumphant from one angle became broken in another. Became heartbroken, if you knelt to ask her what was wrong. He misses her, his Lady. His Embla.
It seems unfair that he remembers her best when she was hurting. The small, scared waif of a girl--sometimes he forgot she was only nineteen when he left. Just a child, really, and one who had never been allowed to stand on her own feet. He wants that for her--freedom to stand without being made to lean on others who would use her. If they let her, she would do what other Psions could not. His faith in her, even so far away, is unshakable.
In the end, that’s why he doesn’t only give up and die. He knows that she’s out there in the universe; perhaps insane, perhaps alone, but Embla is there, and she is looking for Aska. Not because she loves him or because she hopes to see him again, but because she does not give up on the people she chooses as hers. As he had been chosen, to be kept safe--her Muted male.
When she finds him, she will be angry. He knows it. He welcomes it. He watches the stars from his bedroom window and he thinks that, somewhere, she looks to the same stars. She understands more from them than he could; Navigators read futures in the stars, divine meaning from the alignment of planets. Aska sees spirits and creation in the stars. They hold stories unnumbered, and now, he knows they hold worlds. Not an underworld, not an endless purgatory, not even a brilliant and shining Heaven, but places like home. He sees those things, things to be held close and treasured, where she sees nothing but a storybook to read at will--but he loves her regardless, endlessly, across time and across space.
He wants to go home, he thinks, rising from his chair; the thought of her coral lips curving in a perfect smile passes through his mind like a ghost as he strides over to the window. From it he can see a street lamp, pennants strung between it and its two neighbors. A girl stands with her friend, a lantern in one hand as the boy holds the ladder beneath her steady. Technology, he thought, watching her light this last lamp; isn’t it grand? He closes the curtains, the metal rings scraping over the rod holding the flimsy things up, and rests his forehead against the white fabric. Even now he can’t allow himself just a moment to acknowledge the things he knows he missed. Thinking how he should have accepted Embla’s offer of--he forces himself to think it--marriage. It would have changed nothing, but refusing it changed everything. Had it been the last straw for the men who wanted him cast out? Probably not. Would it have changed anything? No.
But it would have given him something to hold on to. He needs that, he knows. Instead, he has only memories, and quiet nights.
It is not to be for very long.
word count: 1094
