Epilogue
Dying was certainly a novel experience. At least, insofar as she could remember.
Certain things came back quickly. Aching limbs and a great deal of awkwardness marked the first year as her reborn body accelerated through a decade’s worth of physical growth.
Speech. Movement. Spatial awareness. Things more of the body than the mind, which still needed to be learned whether one emerged from one’s mother or from a rebirthing womb-fruit within the Great Tree.
By the end of the second year she had remastered basic arithmetic, logic and the foundational algebra that served as the basis for thaumaturgy. Simple language, too, though she often found herself floundering for want of a word, its absence felt as a lacuna in her thoughts.
It was not unusual, Arno explained, while he sat with her at a table in the learning crèche for one of their weekly check-ins. There were often holes in memory, at first. Death was traumatic, and rebirth equally so. All would return to her, he reassured, in time.
And he was right, in part. The words returned to her by the third year. Much of her memory did not.
Everything before she left the City was clear enough, only shrouded by an expected fog, the same occlusion that steals the clarity from all our memories over time.
She remembered all eight rejections from the research board with a searing, white-hot clarity.
But after her departure there were holes, and more of them the more recent the memories.
It was as though her life were a story being told by an increasingly drunk and lazy bard—details omitted, characters forgotten, plot lines dropped as the teller became less focused on the tale and more on finding his bed for the night, and perhaps a friend to warm it.
There were strong images, stripped of context.
Great towers of bone, pulsing with sickening, twisted power.
An aleph, like the one in the courtyard near the crèche, but in a courtyard readied for war.
A pale, dark-haired girl, smiling and singing on a stage, or kneeling on a rooftop, and in either case evoking a deep fascination and profound sorrow.
But another image of folk gathered around her, full of warmth that cut against her sadness.
Most frequent was a towering, four-armed figure who stirred that same flutter that had burned through Fola continually in her third year of regrowth—a year lost almost entirely to a firestorm of emotion and physical change while her body sprinted through puberty.
In the fourth year, Arno finally conceded that something might have gone wrong.
‘Memory is a fragile thing,’ he explained, folding his long- fingered hands beneath his chin.
He had a white, curling beard now, which she did not remember from before her death.
‘Even those who never experience death and rebirth lose parts of themselves to the mind’s slow, inevitable decay.
And as individuals forget, so cities, nations, and peoples forget.
That’s why we write so many things down!
It’s part of the motto, even—“The archive guards against forgetting”. ’
They were sitting at their usual table in the crèche.
One set off to the side of the courtyard, shrouded by gossamer webs that dampened sound between the trees for the sake of privacy.
Light filtered from a lattice of glass filigree and twining vines overhead.
Frog—her stalwart friend, her saviour—peered down at them from his perch among the branches, slowly blinking his wide, thoughtful eyes.
Nearby, at another such table, a few children sat with a teacher, spell-slates and thaumaturgist’s pens in their laps.
The quiet murmur of their lessons was punctuated by sharp peals of laughter and sudden bursts of magical light.
Cold fireworks, one of the first lessons taught to every child who chose to study magic.
Fola re-membered learning the simple spell, and growing frustrated with its simplicity, tinkering with the design on her own while the teacher was inattentive.
As clear a recollection of her first, true childhood as she could muster.
An early experiment that had ended in some burnt eyebrows and singed noses, a sharp telling-off, and muffled laughter behind her back for the next month.
She was sure there were other moments that had built up her reputation, each one isolating her from her peers, each a stone laid on the pathway that had led to rejection, frustration and—eventually—her death. This one moment, though, was bright in memory, while the others were silhouettes in fog.
She said all of this to Arno, and then, ‘It’s different, though, because I still have the silhouettes, at least. The memories I’m missing from my time in the wider world are lost entirely.
Holes, not shadows. And there are random spots of light.
Things I remember clearly, but they’re like islands in a sea of …
well … nothing. Like stars. Otherwise, I’m almost entirely back to my old self.
In a couple more years, I’ll be fully caught up to my preferred physical age, even. ’
He smiled at that. ‘Thirty-two. Clearly no longer a child, but still youthful. I wondered if you would finally let yourself finish growing up, after death.’
‘Maybe I would if I could remember how I died,’ she snapped. ‘You’d think that would stick in memory, at least.’
It had something to do with the girl, she felt. She had no real knowledge of this, no image or conversation she could recall, but the feeling persisted.
‘Four years is a long time to be away, Fola,’ Arno said sadly.
‘Generally, field work ought not to go longer than two years at a stretch. The birds of the Great Tree are powerful, but memories are complex, and carrying them for another soul more complex still. It remains a wondrous mystery how the birds do it at all. This is not the first time an overlong stay in the wider world, and a resulting death, has caused problems—though in that prior case, the length of time away was several decades, and the result much … stranger, shall we say.’
‘So I’ll never get them back?’ Fola asked.
A notion that she knew, intellectually, would have terrified herself before her death.
Yet it did not really trouble her, now. There was a sense of loss, but also a sense of relief.
How had those holes in her story changed who she was? Who she might become?
Some version of her endured, but not the same version that had existed before.
But really, wasn’t that always true, of everyone? Lives took turnings. People changed—sometimes in ways that person might not have chosen beforehand. What child can imagine, and plan for, all the contortions of a life?
She made these observations to Arno, who laughed aloud.
‘I would make a joke about you being wise beyond your years,’ he said. ‘But that would be gauche. Wiser, I think, than you were before your time away. Perhaps some of what you learned persists, though you cannot remember the details of how you learned it.’
‘I guess this all means I’ll get to decide who I want to be,’ she mused. A liberating feeling. One that might have clashed with the previous Fola, who had died. But … she had died. And now she was someone else.
‘To a certain extent,’ Arno observed. ‘It may take time for some folk to forget biases towards who you are, born of who you were.’ Another moment of hesitation, then his posture and tone became suddenly aloof, handling her at a careful distance.
‘If there were a way to go back to yourself, to restore who you were, with all that entails—the same goals, hopes and dreams, and the same history—would you take it? Or would you prefer this blank slate that Frog’s …
I want to say “failure” provides, but I can see now that you do not like that phrasing. ’
‘He did his best, Arno.’ Fola felt a strange heaviness, a thundering in her ears. A nervous apprehension.
Images arose behind her eyes. The four-armed man. The sad, singing girl.
‘Is there a way?’ she asked carefully. ‘Not that I would take it, necessarily.’
Did she owe it to that past self, the one who had died believing she would be reborn? She was unsure. It was a terribly uncomfortable feeling.
Arno smiled gently, seeming to observe the tension in her. He was very good at that—very attentive and careful. A good teacher. She hoped the past Fola had thought so, too.
‘There may be,’ Arno said. ‘Who can say, in a world like ours. Perhaps the First Folk could have managed it. I have only theories, which I will not burden you with now. Otherwise, how goes your adjustment?’
Their conversation changed course into less fraught waters.
Yes, she was making friends—mostly with new people whom she had met through her time in the crèche.
One was a poet who had lived three hundred years, but who felt his work had grown stale and had decided to experience ageing and death in hopes of a creative rejuvenation.
Thus far to little result, but he was holding out hope.
A few others were parents of young children being educated in the crèche.
None were old acquaintances of the past Fola.
In fact, of all the people she could recall from before her departure, only Arno had come to visit in the last four years.
Less fraught waters, but few things were entirely free of the occasional storm.
That showed something about the past Fola, surely. She could remember her grand dream of conjuring the souls of the First Folk. A project she had poured herself into with reckless abandon—privileging it above friendships, social standing, above life itself.
Rebirth had given her some distance from that drive. Maybe she could be happy—or at least content—without acclaim and recognition for her genius. Life in Thaumedony was paradise. Why taint that with so destructive a force as ambition, which had led her into death?
The City held a wealth of beauty, which her past self had largely ignored, fixated as she was.
So she set about exploring it, walking roads of seamless brick, climbing towers of glass, or structures built into the hearts of mighty trees, or formed of floating islands suspended by the First Folk’s magical artifice.
She began an informal survey of the portals into worlds tucked into the fabric of reality like pockets in a garment—some no larger than a ballroom, spheres with a steep horizon and a nearly infinite sky full of alien stars and distant fire.
Another year passed in this way. She took up music—chasing, perhaps, that haunting half-memory of the singing girl.
She was a fair enough hand at the keyharp, though less interested in performing than the pleasure of practice and the puzzle of composition.
To that end, she had begun writing an opera in praise of the City’s wonders, for little more reason than to structure the thoughts and feelings that arose from her explorations.
The dilemma of the past Fola, the distance between who she had been and who she was becoming in rebirth, began to fade.
Until, one crisp day in early autumn, in the grand plaza framed by the Great Tree to the south and the Starlit Tower to the north, a few notes of a song, and a chance meeting, brought those questions into sharp focus once again.
She was on her way to her meeting with Arno when she heard the melody, woven with reed flute and gittern.
At first she thought she recognised it, but could not recall from where.
It was like the scent of reddened leaves, or the fall of the last petal of spring—beautiful and melancholic, regret and grief tinged with remembered joy and hope for an imagined future.
There were lyrics, only a vague murmur at this distance.
She changed course—Arno could wait a while—and followed the faint music towards the Starlit Tower.
Morning light fell through the glass tower, draping the square in a half-shadow full of scattered silver.
In that bright shadow a stage had been set up.
Wooden blocks pushed together. Poles strung with bunting.
A sign hung from a pale wooden staff—or a sword?
—bearing the emblem of a rising moon over a placid lake, a white tree growing from the waters, and a raven perched in its branches.
A real raven, though with a reddish tint to its feathers and yellow eyes, perched atop the sign, along with a brown-speckled dove and a crow the pale white of birchwood.
Two figures played upon the stage for a crowd of several dozen—small for the City, but respectable if these were newcomers without an established reputation.
There were two performers: a man and a woman heavy with child, he with the flute and she with the gittern.
Ram’s horns curled around his ears, draped in tangled curls.
She sat beside him on a stool, her gittern braced gently against her rounded belly, her eyes closed and mouth open with song.
A braid as black as ink spilled down her shoulder, strikingly dark against her pale throat.
There was something familiar, too, about her—the rough texture of her skin, visible even at this distance.
At the edge of the stage sat a young boy, no more than two or three years old, swinging his legs in time with the music. He kept his eyes down, only glancing up occasionally at the pregnant singer, whose oddly textured skin he shared. Her son?
No … Somehow, Fola did not think so. Absurdly, she felt he might be her father.
Such strangeness was possible in the City, whose powers of rebirth she well knew.
‘It’s a new song,’ said a voice, rumbling and heavy. ‘A familiar melody, though.’
She turned towards the voice, a flutter in her chest.
‘They wrote it on the journey,’ the voice went on, rambling, overcome, his torrent of words a desperate flailing for solid footing.
‘Had plenty of time. It took a while to find this place. They played it in near every inn from here to the western sea while we searched. He’s writing a play, too.
Damon is. Or, I guess, revising one he’d already written. ’
History defines us. Memories, unearthed and patched together. A story we tell about ourselves, about others, about the world. A forgotten moment, a fact denied, can twist that story away from truth—away from who we are, and who we could be, in the light of honesty.
But a moment remembered, a truth unearthed—even one hard and sharp with pain—can create wondrous possibilities. To make amends. To be better.
‘Sad, isn’t it?’ he asked, trepidation in his voice despite the obvious strength of his frame, his four arms, his hands—one missing, one broad and scarred, the others small, and kind, and gentle. His face, too, was kind, and wet with tears as hopeful as the song.