Prompt: Who are you? / Here on a high shelf / In webbed flask I / Hook up my folded self / Bat-leather dry / / Who were you? / The gold god goaded me / Sang shrieking sang high / His heat corroded me / Not mine his cry. / / What do you see? / I saw the firmament / Steady the sky / I saw the cerement / Close Caeser's eye. / / What do you hope? / Desire is a dowsed fire / True love a lie / To a dusty shelf we aspire / I crave to die. ~ from Possession, by A.S. Byatt by pygmymuse. 365 Challenge: Time, Love, and Scars
So when I first got this prompt, I knew this was the story I wanted to write. It just took a few tries to get it right. Enough anyway.
Liana Mir
Liana Mir reads, writes, and wrangles the muses from her mundane home in the Colorado Rockies and, occasionally, from the other side of the Barrier.
Series Listing
02. Second Era - Fae 19
02. Second Era - Fae 45
02. Second Era - Fae 73
03. Third Era
05. Fifth Era
Edge of Salvation, Edge of Fear
Into the Temple of the Sun
Nyx was a wrongness that should not be.
Nyx is dying for fear that when she is reborn, she will cease to be… Nyx.
02. Second Era - Fae 73
Faeology Science Fiction
Flash Fiction Short Story
Faeology Science Fiction
Flash Fiction Short Story
Night brown shadows had gathered in the homey kitchen, settling over the dustless cabinet tops of carven wood and looming in the corners on stone slab surfaces. A dim red light glimmered from the grate in the morning oven, where a grandmother would warm her hands and set her cup of tea in the ashes before baking.
In the stillness, wings of soft gold light fluttered in the aroma of yesterday’s bread and Nyx, eldest of the faelights, flew upward panting to land on the highest shelf on the wall near the door. Fuzzy static beat through her fleshless body, gold spirals of ancient languages in ancient figures frayed through her dying radiance.
Nyx was a wrongness that should not be, and here as she lay dying, she knew it. Faelights may sentient be, but they weren’t supposed to have feelings, thoughts, personality. Her carefully crafted cell-minds spoke to collective intelligence, not personhood, and so not understanding herself, she had foregone the restorative measures engaged by the other lights. They repaired themselves. They broke themselves into pieces and reformed. They curled up in their winged cocoons of spiraling ancient words in ancient graphemes and became reborn. But Nyx… Grandmother loved her as she sang her humming tunes and obeyed Grandmother’s thought and touched commands. She lived for Grandmother. She lived.
“Fool!” Nyx shook her head with vim. Not even a faelight could live forever.
This morning the youngest lights had screamed out laughter in their golden tongues that spoke only dead and ancient languages. They laughed at the old faelight who bumbled about as a common insect, panting her way to lighten the bread and make it rise, to fill the water in the rose jar, to weave air into droplets of water and milk and honey as any faelight could do in a moment.
What faith could the elements possess?
Rebirth in fire, in dry bround wings fraying their bones in liquid streams. And would what made her Nyx be born again with her?
Night had faded the harsh edges of the day. Eternal snow hemmed in the windows. Grandmother was asleep in her bed.
Nyx folded up herself and thought of human dreams and myths and imagining sleep, imagined dreaming of a bird born of the sun.
#
Faeology Science Fiction
If you liked this story, you may also like Baker of Souls. Please consider sharing this story or tipping the author at left.
