Ooops

[winterdrake.livejournal.com]

Let's try that again, with the cut tags written properly :).

I remember the look in his eyes. So familiar, so strange. So loved, even then, when in the rest of my life I didn’t know the meaning of the word. And Dain, steady presence of knowledge, of comfort and strength. Again, so soon to be familiar and known and yet, at that time, a stranger. What can I say to the voices of the lost as they call across the gulf between the worlds? How can I atone? I see them as they were at the beginning, see myself before the onslaught of the years and if I could I’d weep for all of us. For our innocence, and our certainty; for the pain that was to come.

Huh. I’m losing it again. I had no idea that this would be so painful, that when I looked back I would be in those dreams again, not safely locked outside as an observer, but experiencing them as if for the first time, as if I could go back and change the way it happened. I can’t, of course, which is why I’m sat here writing it all down in the futile hope that someone will come along and tell me that it’s not my fault, that it doesn’t matter.

You know, I never realised at the time how incomplete Dain’s first explanation was. It seemed perfectly sensible to me then, I didn’t even have any questions I wanted to ask him. Not that I could have done, since that dream ended with Arman and I speaking, in unison, together in a way I had never known before and have never found in all the years since then. But I’m sure I should have wanted to know a few more details. Where was ‘here’, for example. And who were ‘we’ and ‘us’. And what exactly did he mean about seers and souls and predicting the future. Thinking about it, most of that never was explained. I think the knowledge of it must have slowly seeped in from the ground we sat on. I was never told and yet somehow I’d always known. However that doesn’t make it very easy for you to follow and, since it’s extremely unlikely that you’re sat in that clearing while you read this, absorbing the same knowledge out of the air and grass, I suppose I’d better do a bit of explaining. Although if you are sat in that clearing, or another like it, take my advice. Either get out and stay out, right now, or accept that you’ll never be the same again. That nothing will ever be the same. In fact, you’re better off assuming that from now on nothing you ever do or say will make any sense to anyone around you. Take a good long look at that proposition before you agree to do anything; there’s more behind it than they’re telling you.

That isn’t fair, and I know it. That’s almost the worst of it. If I could just turn around and blame this whole thing on Dain, or Arman, or even on my parents, life would be so much easier. The whole mess would be someone else’s responsibility. I can’t do that, of course, since even if the explanations were a bit ragged round the edges I knew exactly what I was getting into. The details may have been a bit vague but it was clear from the beginning that this was going to be all or nothing, and probably the most important thing I’d ever do.

Anyway. Explanations. I’m going to have to skip forward a bit here, and to ask you to accept some odd stuff. I didn’t put a lot of this together in a sensible form for years and almost all of it is enough to give your average shrink case-studies for the rest of his life. The only thing I can say about that is, if you don’t like it, leave. No-one’s forcing you to be here. If what I’m about to tell you finally convinces you that I am completely round the bend, put this down and go and get some healthy fresh air or something. I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to accept it. Now that I’m not living it, I wonder why I found it all so easy to believe. You see, Arman and Dain aren’t from this world. Don’t look at me like that; I mean it. They come from a place called Airil and it’s not on any map of ours I’ve ever seen. They have maps, of course, but not ones that show London and New York and Moscow and such. Their maps are full of names like Marillor, and Gashawk, and the Deep Forest. I’d stake my life and be prepared to swear in court that these places exist. I’ve seen most of them and spent a lot of time in some. They just happen not to exist in the particular corner of the universe we call ours. Now I don’t know how you want to explain this to yourself, whether you’ll be happier with the idea of Arman and the rest being little green men from another planet, or people from one of those alternate worlds that could have been ours if someone had chosen a different flavour of ice-cream last week, or beings from a different universe entirely, or just good old-fashioned figments of my imagination, but I promise you, Airil is as real as this earth we’re sat on

It’s as real, but it works by slightly different rules. Particularly when it comes to things we (and they, for that matter) call ‘magic’. For most of us here, that’s just a word. At best it means conjuring tricks done by some bloke in a dinner jacket up on stage and well away from anyone enquiring too closely into his methods. At worst, it means witch-burnings, persecution, prejudice and pain. For Arman, Dain and the others, magic is entirely real. It’s a force that can be controlled and manipulated, just like electricity or gravity or radio waves are here. The only difference is, there aren’t that many people who can manipulate magical energies. This means that those who can are usually highly respected and a little feared. Magic in Airil does most of the things that science and technology do here, so magicians and seers and such have a great deal of power and, just like here, some of them use it sensibly and honourably and some of them are right bastards. Oh, and that’s another thing. People who touch the magic fields are always specialists. None of them can do everything. Usually, they have one particular area they’re good at. Very rarely, they might have mastered two or three. There are magicians, who deal with the everyday application of magic; things like lighting, heating, sewage, communication, transport and all that. There are seers, who (as Dain said that time in the clearing) can predict the future, although with varying degrees of accuracy and success. There are wizards, who mostly do big show-piece stuff dealing with unusual situations or disasters, and who usually work in teams. There are shapers, who take the raw magic lying around in the universe and build things with it. Anything you care to name, if they’re any good. Most public buildings are pure magic made solid and so are the homes of some of the very rich and the palaces of most rulers. Some shapers are artists as well and spend most of their time turning out trinkets or sculptures for people to take home. They cost a fortune, but they’re truly beautiful. Then there are magi. Not magicians, magi. The magi are Airil’s version of doctors, only they put doctors here into the shade. A good magi can deal with pretty much anything from a paper cut to cancer, from insect bites to broken bones. Watching them work is truly amazing, although they pay a high enough price for what they do. I never did find out how the theory behind all the magic works. It isn’t something that most people there know about; it’s specialist knowledge, the same as how to perform delicate surgery or build a nuclear bomb is in our world. It’s also too much a part of the way things are there for anyone to bother enquiring, unless they’re talented themselves and likely to make a career out of it. With the exception of a few theorists and historians, most people just use the stuff that magic’s made and leave the whys and wherefores to someone else.

Which is another thing I probably ought to tell you. The social organisation in Airil isn’t the same as here, either. They never really got beyond what we’d call the middle ages, although it’s a mistake to think of them as feudal knights charging around bashing each other with lances. In a lot of ways, they’re more advanced that we are, but they’ve kept to a monarchic social structure that values chivalric virtues. Most of what happened needs viewing in that light; there’s some things that would never have been an issue here that nearly scuppered the whole enterprise, and some things that would have caused an outcry here that were perfectly normal there.

Anyway. What have we got so far? Airil is not this world. Rationalise that in whatever way you’re happy with it, but accept it, because if you don’t pretty much everything from here on in is going to be nonsense. Magic is a real force there, one that’s used in almost every aspect of life. They live their lives in a different way from people here. Not better, not worse, just different. And, for some reason, a seer had decided that Arman and I were the only hope for getting Airil past some appalling disaster that was looming in the future. I still wonder what would have happened if I’d refused to help. If I’d walked away that first night and never gone back. Maybe I should have done. It would have worked out better in the long run.

The dreams continued, pretty much every night. They were part of my life. Arman was my closest friend, and Dain was our teacher. Every night, there’d be a new lesson, something else to try. The lessons went on for about eight years altogether, although looking back they seem both to have been over very fast and to have lasted pretty much forever. Although that could be because it was about now that the time the dreams took in our world began to get out of step with the time I spent with Dain and Arman. I could dream that I’d been away for days, or weeks and wake up normally the morning after I went to sleep. That got very disconcerting in places, since I aged physically in the dreams at the same rate I was living there. In other words, when I was actually eight, I was dreaming I was ten and by the time I was fourteen, I was dreaming I was twenty. It got difficult in places to untangle one memory from another. Never mind that some experiences that are fine for twenty aren’t so great at fourteen. Anyway. I’m going to tell you about these training sessions, rather than trying to write them down; they were similar in a lot of ways and I wouldn’t want to bore you with anything other than the edited highlights. Which is, of course, another way of saying that I can’t handle the pain of looking back too closely at those years, when everything was pretty much as good as it could get. It’s easier to write about it than to relive it.

Dain taught both of us together. Despite having lived in Airil all his life, Arman wasn’t that far ahead of me in most things. We learned to read and write, although not in English, of course. We learned to ride, spending hours wandering on horseback through the woods that surrounded our clearing. We learned history and geography, poring over old books and maps until our heads spun and we got up and ran for the sheer delight of moving. We learned the balanced dance of politics, who to speak to and when, and how to watch for someone hiding something, or working against us. We learned the basics of survival in the wild, sometimes spending days or weeks camped out in the forest, living off what we could catch or trap, with Dain trailing us and trying to find us, testing our skills. And, of course, we learned to fight, with swords and knives and bows, with clubs and staves, with anything that came to hand and with our own bodies as a last resort. They were games, these lessons. Hours spent in Arman’s company, struggling against each other and never caring who won, laughing when we succeeded, sharing the frustration when we didn’t, sometimes crying because everything was just too hard. Although there was far more of laughter than of tears; Dain was careful with us always, he never tried to push us further than we were able to go. And it was always ‘us’. He never taught us separately, never told one anything without the other being there. We were together every minute of those days, waking or sleeping, and whatever bond there was between us grew stronger every day. Eventually, either of us could say where the other was, even if they were miles away. If we concentrated, we could always know what the other was doing and, sometimes, what they were thinking. There was no true communication, just an incredible closeness. We found it easier to predict the other’s moves than our own; Arman’s opinion on anything was clearer to me than mine, as mine was to him.

There are things that stand out from that time with such sharpness that they could have happened yesterday. I can see Dain’s face the day we were shooting and first managed to strike dead-centre of the target he’d set up. His pleasure in our success and the shadow of sorrow that we would one day need to use what he’d taught us. I can see the look in Arman’s eyes when we met every night, and when we parted. I can feel his presence with me every minute, a shadow standing just behind me, with one hand resting on my shoulder. I can hear his laughter when we chased each other through the woods, half-blinded by the shafts of sunlight striking down through gaps in the branches. And I can see him that night, years into our teaching, when Dain left us in the clearing on our own for the first time. When we were truly alone, no-one and nothing but the grass and trees and wind and Arman and I.

“He’s gone, Annabel.”
“I know. He said he would.”
“I didn’t believe him, though. Did you?”
“No. I bet he’s still watching somewhere, waiting to see what we do with this.”
“He wouldn’t. He said he was leaving us here and he’ll have gone.”
“True. He wouldn’t lie.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. Just lie here, watching the sky. Just be. It’s enough…”
“I know. But…”
“Go on.”
“But…we could…”
“Could what? Come on, say it. I won’t if you don’t say it.”

I can’t believe I teased him like that. I knew what he meant. Of course I did. We’d talked about it often enough, but we’d never found the courage to actually do anything. Dain was always too close, or we didn’t know where he was but he was supposed to be watching us and we didn’t want anyone seeing. Perhaps especially not Dain. We couldn’t handle the thought of his teasing the next morning. Looking back, that’s probably why he left us on our own that night. He was probably so fed up of waiting for us to get on with it that he decided to take drastic measures. So there we were. Lying next to each other and staring at the sky, still talking although we knew we were on our own because both of us were far too scared to do anything else. Not that we didn’t want to. We were just afraid of making a mess of it. The teasing broke the tension, though, and we chased each other around and wrestled for a while in a truly obvious bit of displacement, then we ended up back where we’d started, both out of breath and laughing.

Arman raises one hand and touches your cheek, tracing his fingers down over your mouth and neck. The movement is almost exactly the same as he used the night you met. You’re staring into each other’s eyes as if the rest of the universe has ceased to exist. Your hands are moving of their own volition, reaching up to rest on his shoulders. You can hear him breathing. You stop, barely touching, barely apart. His fingers have left tingling lines down your face. You raise your hand and…

Yes, well. I’m sure you don’t need the rest spelling out. Anyway. Well, what are you looking at? It’s normal enough, isn’t it? Although actually ‘normal’ was one of the things it never was. Incredible, amazing, unbelievable, all of those, particularly once I had anything in this world to compare it to, but ‘normal’? No. Although, thinking about it, you probably don’t need to know that, either. Look, just imagine the most erotic thing you can think of. The things you’d most like someone to do to you. Then imagine the person you’d most like to do them. Then imagine that that person is the partner of your soul, your closest friend, and that anything you do can only be an expression and a deepening of that. Got it? Good. Now you get the idea. It’s enough to put the porn industry out of business, one way or another. The images in my mind are enough for a lifetime, without wasting money on magazines or videos. And it wasn’t just because of all that garbage people spout about the first time being so special, either. From what I can see, first times tend to be less special and more of a messy, panicked fumbling for most people, and they’re lucky if they wind up not regretting the whole business the next morning. That’s one of the things that’s true whichever world you’re in. Kids in Airil have the same problems as they do here, at least where that’s concerned. But with Arman and me, things started well and got better. Dain gave us enough privacy after that night that we never needed to hide from him, and the whole business cemented what was happening between us.