Chapter 5969: Calamity

They were motivated to prove themselves among the many other progeny of THE Dissolved Progenitor!

Since they were near their father, the signal translated itself to them as they knew! They wouldn’t tell the others just yet as if they could take part in the weavings leading directly to his return...wouldn’t they be that much closer to him?

Lifthrasir’s mother let go of her hand, slowly. She rose from her knees for the first time since Lifthrasir had entered the garden, tall and cracked and full of quiet lightning.

" You should go with your sisters," her mother said. "Help them find it. Bring it home to your father, and make sure nothing stands in the face of your dreams. Anything that does...needs to be destroyed."

Her thumb brushed once beneath Lifthrasir’s eye, where the tears had been. "Our dream is closer now than it has ever been. All of ours. Yours too."

Lifthrasir looked up at her mother, and then past her, at the calm golden face of her father lying in his tomb, and then at her two tall sisters waiting by the stair with their silver wings closed at their backs. She thought, very briefly, of a dreamer and Lygara as she wondered how they were doing. Then the thought passed, and she nodded.

"Hold on." Her mother said.

The garden had a small spring in one corner, and her mother went to it before she did anything else. It was only a hollow in the pale stone where clear water gathered from somewhere underneath the meadows, and beside it sat a shallow stone bowl worn smooth at the rim.

Her mother filled the bowl, carried it back across the dark earth without spilling a drop, and knelt at the head of the tomb again. Then, with a soft grey cloth she took from her sleeve, she began to wash the dust from its clear surface, slowly, in long even strokes, from her husband’s head down to his crossed hands.

Lifthrasir watched her do it. There was no dust on the tomb that she could see. The meadow wind did not reach this deep, and nothing in the garden moved but the water and the cloth and her mother’s cracked hands. But her mother washed it with great care, stroke after stroke, though there was nothing on it to wash away, and Lifthrasir understood, watching the cloth move, that she had done this every day for a very long time, and that it was not for the tomb at all.

When she was finished, her mother set the bowl aside and looked at the water in it for a while. "Existence decides almost everything for us," she said. "Where we begin. What we are made of. Who breaks us, and who we break." She wrung the cloth out slowly.

"There are very few things it lets us choose. Washing this stone is one of mine."

She rose then, and came around the tomb, and stood before her youngest daughter in the quiet. Without a word, she lifted one hand, palm upward, between them.

The air above her palm opened. Something small and dark rose out of nothing and turned there, no larger than a closed fist: a kernel of strings, deep red and black, wound so tightly they had become something solid. Inside it, a storm moved.

Tiny white lightning ran through the strings and died and ran again, and the sound of it was very faint, a dry crackle at the edge of hearing. It was heavy. The weight of it pressed on the dark earth and the clear stone, and high above them, at the mouth of the old stair, the meadow grass bent away from it and did not straighten.

"An Essara of Calamity," her mother said. "I carved it a very long time ago. I have kept it ever since."

Lifthrasir did not reach for it. She looked at the small storm turning above her mother’s hand, and she waited, because her mother’s voice had the shape of something not yet finished.

"Do you know where the first calamity happened?" her mother asked. "Not the first war. Not the first death. The first time existence itself was struck so hard that it broke."

Her dark red eyes moved past Lifthrasir to the face inside the tomb. "It was the day IT was broken. When IT came apart, the pieces fell out across everything, and where they first struck, existence split open along a great curved rim. It still burns. They call it THE Rim of the First Breaking, near THE Chrysalis, and nothing has lived there since."

"I went there afterward," she said. "Alone. I went and stood on the Rim and listened to existence scream."

Her fingers closed slowly around the little storm and opened again. "Where it screamed loudest, I carved this and more. I told myself it was for me. I think now I was carving it for one of you, and did not know it yet."

She held it out. "You have begun your own Narrative. It is a good one. But it is young, and you gave up your weavings for those ninety-nine years, and alone you are still too weak to hold an Essara." Her six dark wings stirred once and settled. "So I will help you. Sit down."

Lifthrasir sat on the dark earth at the foot of her father’s tomb with her legs tucked beneath her and her small hands open on her knees. The ground was warm. Her mother set the kernel of Calamity into her open palms, and it was so heavy her arms sank, and so hot her palms blistered at once, and the small storm inside it turned slowly toward her.

Then her mother’s eyes blazed as she began to share information regarding Essara.

The red glow beneath her cracked skin brightened all at once, and through every crack, Lifthrasir saw what her mother carried. Three Essara sat deep in the dark of her body, three great kernels burning: one dark red and storming, one black and gold, one so white it hurt to look at.

From each ran long bright lines, branching through her arms and her chest and out along her wings, and Lifthrasir understood that these were Veins, the open Powers of each Essara, blazing with everything her mother was and had ever chosen to be.

"THE Calm at the Heart of Ruin," her mother said. She did not raise her voice as she called out her Power of Existence, her Vein, and the dark red Essara inside her answered!

A stillness came out of her and settled over the garden, over the tomb and the spring and the small kneeling daughter, a warm, wide quiet with no wind in it and no breaking anywhere. In the very center of that calm, Lifthrasir lifted the storm to her chest, and it went into her all at once.

HUUM!

Everything in her began to break. The Calamity went through her searching, and it found every weak place she had: every place her mother had broken her across all the years she remembered, every place the Primordial Gu had erased her, every thread she had traded away for ninety-nine years. It found them all, patiently, one after another, and then it pulled, and for one long, terrible moment Lifthrasir felt herself begin to come apart along every one of them at once.

But she did not come apart. The calm held. Whatever broke inside her broke only so far, and then stopped, held still at the center of the storm, and the storm raged all around her and could not reach the middle. She set her teeth and held to that stillness while blood ran from her nose and white lightning crawled across her blistered hands, and slowly, very slowly, the storm stopped searching for places to break her. It began to settle instead. It became hers.

Something in her gave way. It was a binding she had worn since the day she was erased, so old and so quiet that she had long since stopped feeling its weight: the law that whatever had ended could never truly begin again. It broke without a sound. Then the first Vein opened, and existence told her what she held!

|Essara of Existence seated: Calamity.|

|Rarity: Rare.|

|Shackle broken: the law that what has ended cannot begin again.|

|Veins: 3. Open: 1. Veins 2 and 3 open with Ichor of Existence.|

|Vein 1: THE Ruin That Spares.|

|Kind: Working.|

|Cost: Immensity, spent for as long as the calamity lasts. Every calamity also leaves a crack in you that closes only slowly.|

|Effect: Choose a place, a lifeform, or a Narrative. Calamity falls on it, and everything there begins to break at once: its form, its Immensity, its Narrative, and every bond that holds them together.|

|Whatever you choose to spare does not break. Inside the ruin, it is renewed, made whole, and rises stronger than it was before.|

|What the calamity breaks becomes ash, and the ash sinks into the ground of existence, where new things can grow from it.|

|The calamity spreads until it reaches the edge you set for it, or until your Immensity runs out.|

|Against beings of greater Immensity, the calamity falls more slowly. It still falls.|

|Shaped by you: born of one who was ended and begun again, and who wished to grow old among those she loves. It breaks everything except what you would keep.|

...!

The calm lifted. The meadow wind found its way down the stair again, very faintly, and touched the water in the stone bowl so that it trembled. Lifthrasir sat with her blistered hands on her knees and a thin line of blood drying beneath her nose, and she could feel the Calamity inside her now, settled and turning, a small dark weight at the center of her that belonged to no one else.

And she felt...exuberance of power she couldn’t even imagine as she shook her head with amazement.

This was...the very essence of Existence itself?

Her mother knelt in front of her, the glow beneath her skin dimming slowly back to its low breathing red. She took Lifthrasir’s hands in hers, turned them palm upward, and without a word dipped the grey cloth into the stone bowl and began to wash the blood and the burn from them. The water was cold. Her mother’s hands were not.

"Which Power of Existence did it give you?" her mother asked. She did not look up from her daughter’s hands.

Lifthrasir watched the cloth move across her palm. "THE Ruin That Spares. It breaks everything," she said slowly.

"Everything it touches. Except what I want to keep." She looked up. "What I want to keep, it makes new."

Her mother’s hands went still on hers. Then she smiled. It was the first time Lifthrasir could remembr her mother smiling at her like this.

"That is a good one," her mother said. "A very good one."

She finished washing the last of the blood away, set the cloth beside the bowl, and rose. "Go with your sisters," she said. "Find what is waking. Bring it home to your father. By the time you return, your Narrative will have settled enough to hold more, and I will give you all the Ichor of Existence you need to open the rest of your Veins."

"What is it?" Lifthrasir asked. "The thing that is waking from the 9 Shards of IT?"

Her mother looked down at the calm face in the tomb for a long moment before she answered. "Not a person or a lifeform like you and I. A remnant of the reset your father sought to have. We need to eventually cleanse and purify it to move forward." she said. "Do not let it fool you into thinking it is one, if it tries."

The slow lightning in her hair stirred and went still. "It is the sentience that once lived inside IT, inside your father’s power, the part that learned to want while he held it. It is waking now because the pieces are coming back together, and it will reach for whatever warmth is nearest."

She laid her hand flat on the clear stone over his heart. "It is his. It always was. A memory of power that has forgotten whose hand it belongs in. Bring it home."

Lifthrasir looked at her mother for a long time. She looked carefully at the six dark wings, and the slow lightning, and the cracked hands that had just washed her palms. She remembered those wings spread over her, blotting out the light. She did not forget it. She did not think she ever would as her mother had hurt her back then.

But she also remembered a warm hand reaching across a tomb, and a voice saying it was sorry. Inside herself, very quietly, she let out a breath she had been holding for a long time.

Maybe, she thought. Maybe a family was possible after all.

She had ninety-nine years. If she could spend them wandering through existence with her mother on one side and her father on the other, seeing everything she had never been allowed to see, would it not make all of it worth it? Every breaking. Every erasure. Every thread she had traded away. She nodded, and stood.

Her sisters were waiting at the top of the old stair, and when she climbed up out of the garden into the warm gold light of the meadows, both of them were smiling. It was not their cold smile. It was something easier and a little worn at the edges, and Thessaly reached out without a word and caught her wrist and turned her washed hand over to look at the faint marks on the palm.

"The Essara of Calamity," Thessaly said, with deep aproval.

"From your Mother’s own hands. She never gave either of us one." She let go. "Rare, too. A bit of a show-off."

"Do not listen to her," Phaedra said. "She is jealous, and she has been jealous since before you were born."

She brushed a strand of silver hair back from her face, and beneath her pale skin, Lifthrasir saw two kernels burning quietly. "I hold The Essara of Light, which is common and dull, and The Essara of Name, which is not. Light gave me THE Dawn That Does Not Ask, which shows me anything that is trying to hide. Name gave me THE Name Unspoken. If I unspeak a name, everyone who ever knew it forgets, and so does existence, for a while."

"Which is terrifying," Thessaly said, "and also how she won every argument we ever had."

She held up two fingers. "My Essara are Heat, and Fear. THE Red Hour, and THE Thing Behind Every Door as my current Powers I will reveal. One makes everything near me burn. The other makes everyone near me certain that something worse is coming, and they are always right."

She smiled, all teeth. "Now you have one of your own. Welcome to the family, little sister. We won’t bully you or look down on you now!"

Lifthrasir looked at the two of them, tall and silver-winged and arguing over her head in the soft gold light, with Kir One and Kir Two standing patient and enormous in the meadow behind them, and THE Mountain at the Center of Everything rising endlessly far away.

The grass moved around her ankles. Somewhere far below, in a place that had no snow and no ruin, her mother was wringing out a grey cloth beside a clear stone.

Lifthrasir shook her head slowly, and a small smile came over her face before she could decide whether to let it.

"This kind of family," Lifthrasir said, "isn’t so bad."

---

<Family>

What is a family? The ones whose blood runs in us, who were there before we could choose, and who will be there after, whatever we become? Or the ones we find along the long road through existence, who hold out a hand when no one else would, and ask nothing for it? Perhaps it is both. Perhaps the hardest thing any living being can face is the day those two families stand on opposite sides of the same field, each holding out its hand.