Vir Dirthera

Their nights were made not for dreams, but for stories, instead.

When it was her turn to share an anecdote by the light of the campfire, Fianna continually found herself telling Tristan tales of her past companions; the myriad of subjects they inevitably educated her in when night fell and her curiosity once again found itself in control of her jaw far more inspiring than anything she had learnt for herself. And on a night as crystalline and idyllic as this particular night, when the sky was not, for the first time in weeks, eclipsed by the charcoal-black canopies of thick woodland, one tale begged to be told.

There was one man, she began. An aging gentleman who called himself an astronomer, with the desire to attend a gathering alongside his fellow enthusiasts in celebration of a rare celestial display, a desire she made a reality. He obsessed over stars and the cycles of planets that many would never witness or hear of in all their lives, his head was rooted firmly in the clouds whilst her eyes remained on the earth. When the night sky hung overhead, free of haze and clear as the finest of glass, he would point her keen eyes toward constellations, and every time he would wish aloud in his placid voice for the heavens to part so he might teach her of just one of the many planets he had discovered hiding behind the curtains of clouds and the veils of stars.

And one night the heavens listened.

The mad rush to assemble his equipment by the light of a single camp fire taught her the finer points of putting together a telescope, albeit in a horribly unsophisticated fashion. For four whole hours their heads sat in the sky, and the pair of them watched as stars swam out of their eyes and exposed a planet; distant, a whole lifetime away and so small, even through the magnifying lens of his complex contraption, that her carefully-placed thumb could obstruct it from view.

And in spite of admitting that she appreciated the opportunity to learn of such wonders, their existence, she confessed, failed to strike her with the force she had anticipated.

The fire crackled as she struggled to string an analogy together, her lips rolled shut after her tongue picked at a dry flake of skin at the corner of her mouth. Her fingers laced themselves and rested between her knuckles as she explained that it had been as though the magnitude of his revelation - like the stars themselves – sailed over her head, out of her reach. She could welcome the marvel - she could even understand why the man had devoted his life to such phenomena - but she could not, and her emphasis came in the form of her fingers unfurling and fanning themselves out, care for it.

“But... why?”

She claimed that the stars and the planets could not comfort her.

The astronomer, she said, had asked her the same question on the night that he explained how the forest they sat in, on the planet they shared, revolved around the sun, when he was unable to grasp how truly uninterested she was in the discovery. Because the knowledge of worlds beyond could not help her to navigate forests or keep highwaymen from catching them unawares. Because the time she could waste on contemplating the skies’ contents could be better spent on pondering what she could reach and change.

But still the man could not understand, and she asked Tristan if he knew what she said next, in spite of knowing full well that he hadn’t a clue.

“Because for now, my world revolves around you.”

Little did the blacksmith know that she was no longer speaking of the astronomer.

Wait a minute, little back porch lady.

Fnar fnar for changing all Japanese names to English.

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It was only as her footfalls softly skulked across the tiled floor, when the reassuring voice of Galahad interfered with her hesitant-if-not-inwardly-excited train of thought, that Fianna was struck upside the head by the revelation that she was no more than a slave to her own ardent curiosity. She didn't think about it for long. She never did.

It was generally considered a marvellous trait for one to possess, but like all other attributes and quirks, and even the likes of temptations a soul could encounter as it traversed through the alleyways of the afterlife, curiosity only remained marvellous when it existed in a diluted state. Watered down and weak. It was when curiosity was given strength, intensity, and the opportunity to drag common sense by the hair, kicking and screaming, to the peak of imagination’s precipice with the intention of throwing it over the edge, that problems began to manifest. Playing observer to the events that dared to blossom with every step she indulged in, Galahad felt as though her curiosity was preparing to lynch her unsuspecting common sense from the shadows.

The sight of the pearl-haired woman, already the bearer of broken flesh and crushed veins, venturing further into the unlit unknown on a basis constructed upon simple intrigue filled him with fear, and it took all of the knight’s iron-clad will to prevent his lips from uttering the words ‘this is how natural selection picks off its targets, you know’ to dissuade her from her course, but it also took just a second’s foresight for him to consider that there was a high chance she would not pay him any heed if he made the effort.

Oblivious to his musings, Fianna sampled the savoury scent lacing the air, its heartily pleasant tang enough to goad her docile stomach into lamenting over its tragically empty state. Her sandaled feet could barely find the bravery to birth whispers across the floor. It was a rail of honey-tinted light slipping across the floor in the distance that gave her ambling true direction, though the slow pace that she maintained to catch it beneath her feet failed to hint at her inner enthusiasm.

Tracing its origin with a slow glance to her left, Fianna seemed to pause for a moment to briefly ponder what her curiosity would lead her to this time. Her front teeth pinned her lip down before she could grin, like one would quickly turn a spigot to cut off a sudden burst of water after underestimating the strength of the tap.

You could always turn back, he reminded her, you could simply accept that there is, indeed, someone – or something - here, and be content with that knowledge as you turn your back and walk away.

The hint of hope that he could not quite veil from the woman was lost under the weight of the silence she nurtured. Not one iota of her thoughts revolved around his fear.

‘...but you aren’t going to do that, are you?’

Couldn't Wash the Echoes Out

The howling of wolves never calmed her at night, because before their growls and warbles came their screaming. Worse than any wound she could possibly bear, than any battle beneath the lush viridian canopies she could ever fight. Many of their guests would set up camp in a specific spot, at the foot of a particular tree, under a certain rocky overhang they could not help but to gravitate towards, and wait the sunlight out. She would occasionally tread over half-chewed books, find their pages tattered, soiled and scattered like leaves across the forest floor as she regulated the woodland. Glimpses of those dismembered sentences burrowed into the forefront of her memory and prompted her to wonder for the rest of the night just how many of those discarded novels were actually thumbed through, of how their owners could sit so calmly and wait for their torturer to take her place in the sky, if they were calm at all.

In that first hour of night, the atmosphere of their forest transformed, much like its visitors, into something that belonged locked inside a torture chamber. To call the collection of cries a chorus would have been generous, if not utterly heartless. There was nothing harmonious about the noises that erupted when all corners of the forest fell dark. Some were hastened by breathing or sobs, while others were so shrill and clear she halted in her stride as discomfort raked up her vertebrae, paralysed until the echoes were lost beneath the cover of fresh cries. In that first hour they would all shriek and screech until their vocal cords were stretched so far beyond their original shape that screams hitched in transforming throats and the ability to express but a fraction of their unfathomable pain was completely robbed from them. It was this knowledge that sullied the silence in the forest and tarnished the tranquillity brought about by its crisp fresh air that, in truth, had lasted all of a few weeks when she and Hannelore first descended upon the woods with a view to discovering its every surprise.

And when their torturer retreated under the horizon and the sun returned to the sky, the cacophony stayed with Fianna like her shadow. It kept her awake in the morning. It would echo between her ears as she laid her head against her pillow, where the backs of her eyes became walls on which moments were projected. Split second glimpses of naked bodies rocking themselves back and forth between the silhouettes of tree trunks taunted her until she imagined the inevitable moment she would find herself standing before a plot of earth shredded apart by what were clearly human fingertips, a thought far too unsettling to sleep upon.

She wandered through the morning and trudged through the afternoon until her body finally lost the will to soldier on midway through an episode of Jonathon Creek, or perhaps at the start of a new paragraph in a book that would find itself on the floor when her arm slid off the edge of the sofa, and would eventually be relocated to the coffee table at the same time a blanket would be cast over its reader’s long legs that would eventually be rearranged.

Because Hannelore would be damned if the lanky bitch took up the whole sofa just because she couldn’t sleep in her own bed.