I remembered my family's motto, translated from a crumbling scroll of written centuries ago in a language of symbols long forgotten. Symbols from a land long since turned to ash. Burned and buried.
We will protect from now until our souls fade into dust on the northern wind.
Who was I protecting now? I was protecting myself, protecting my people by staying away. But I couldn't protect my loved ones from the hole I'd leave in their hearts.
When I was younger, Grandma took me to see our family's tree, an eternally growing tapestry of embroidered branches that hung in the art gallery in the village. It spanned hundreds of years, a twist of boughs and twigs, starting from my most distant ancestor, Kaimen Corrado Zarramere, a conqueror. Whose name was stitched in a thread fraying and dull, dusty but remembered. A landowner from the East, who found his soulmate in the native tribes of the Northern Lands, whose legacy continued to this day and as far as I know, will continue for hundreds of years longer.
Until the end of our days, we will protect. That was what we toasted to each other at family gatherings, what we told each other when we sat together, flickering fires casting eerie glows onto chiselled faces.
It took me a long time to even get started on trying to fall asleep, my thoughts filled with people I knew and loved, Father, Mama, Grandma. The tribal officials who used to treat me, my friends, Arla and my Narreta. Ricco, even Maeven, who liked to practise painting makeup on my face, who braided my hair, who brought me and Narreta flowers. My mind was trying to hold on, to retain those beautiful memories of a blissfully oblivious childhood, but there is only one thing I could remember clearly about my mama, who was the love of my father's life. Mama, of course, didn't have my family's sapphire eyes, but I missed her soft hazel irises every time I closed my eyes.
I thought about the bed I was supposed to sleep in, in the next room of the Chief's Villa—where my family lived. The villa was arranged in a vague U-shape bordering a flowering courtyard; Grandma and Grandpa, the High Chief and Chieftess, slept in the middle, or did before Grandpa vanished suddenly, my parents on one side, my uncle and aunt on the other, me on the end of my Mama and Father's lodgings, my cousins on the end of their parents'. Other rooms with ubiquitous purposes were scattered throughout.
I remembered telling myself I would miss the eternal beauty of the sea against the sky when I became an adult, and therefore, as tradition called it, had to move into the empty suite between mine and my parents'. Had to.
When I was younger, I thought the youngling Chiefs and Chieftesses were lucky to have the view, but now I think there is something else behind it. We were taught responsibility from a young age, but we are allowed to run free and wild, without any sense of duty and obligation, like the powerful ocean. As we grow older, however, we must turn our attentions away from the outside world, from what is out there and waiting, to our lifetime burdens. Our subjects, who we can see clearly all the time from the windows of the High Chief and Chieftess's rooms, who we must protect, love, and rule over wisely from the Agecoming until death. I remembered telling myself I would miss the eternal beauty of the sea against the sky when I became an adult, and therefore had to move into the empty suite between mine and my parents'.
Had to.
Should've had to.
The first step of truly shouldering my load beyond the part I was presented with upon turning sixteen, my part of the deal I'd struck with my birth. As I age and Father becomes a High Chief, more and more pieces of the weight should have been piled up onto my back, but I had to it all for the sake of my people. My family's people.
Father said caring for his people is much the same as caring for me. He had obligations to both, although our father-daughter bond has no match.
That's what he said, before I left him forever.
But he has also maintained time and time again that loving his people and loving Mama is altogether different. He loves his subjects on a similar but higher level to a child loving his toys. But he always maintains that love for a person, your significant other, is that of a different kind. It breaks you apart and not only if they leave you. It shreds apart souls and yet forges them. Father said that Mama came from a rival village tribe, and when she came with some messengers to discuss mutually governed matters, it broke his heart because he knew she had to leave. He said it was like a cruel creature ripped out his heart, stomped on it, and tossed it roughly back for him to stitch it back. He put it back, healed eventually, but it was still like dying a little bit every day, never healing, never deteriorating completely. Love is your undoing. With your soulmate, all barriers are broken, all exterior masks peeled away, revealing the true heart and core of a person. The light and piety, and the darkness and sin. Love takes you apart and puts you back together. Destroys and forges. Forges, moulds someone in a way that changes one forever.
Love starts out as nothing, a spark when fingers touch, an energy-charged connection that is felt when eyes make contact.
But love is a seed, and nothing can stop it from blossoming into a flower of everything.
The story of how my parents met is told in countless different ways. I like it the way Father or Mama used to tell it, the original and the best. It isn't written down, like the other stories of our tribe. Our stories are sacred, and if we all died out, we would take them to the grave. It begins simply, like all fairytales do.
Once upon a time, in the Kaleveh tribe off the coast of the Northern Lands, there was lived an untried Chief. Asil was his name. His Agecoming ceremony had only just passed, yet his father was already about to take the title of High Chief. He loved his people with all his heart, but he needed someone to rule beside him. Old age came unnaturally quickly for his family. A wife to share the burden was what he needed. Besides, his first love had left him broken a few moons ago. A wife to fill his home with warmth was also what he wanted.
One day, everything changed. It was the day a group of messengers from their rival village, Saetche, came to discuss plans for the Tyrbery River, which flowed through both their territories. They were building a dam which collected water on Kaleveh's side of the river, and they would unleash the waters at certain times of year on specially raised farm beds they would build. Saetche believed that this would help regulate the water that the farmland took in, make it so they could control the amount of moisture hydrating it. Since the Detraim River cut through another part of Saetche, they didn't need the Tyrbery as a source of drinking water.
Here, Asil met Naoko. There was no system of Chiefs and Chieftesses in Saetche, a neighbouring tribe that did not practise regular discipline, but Naoko Elison Lille was a born leader. She was an unloved child, but nobody knew that. It didn't affect her when she became one of the most savage negotiators of the agreement. Naoko's judgement of Asil was clouded by their clans' rivalry, but to Asil she was perfect. She was honest and soft-spoken, but could be unbearably harsh if she wanted, and was ruthless in convincing Kaleveh's dumb-struck officials into agreement. Back then, she had the finest waterfall of raven hair which fell to her waist and shimmered when she moved.
She still has it.
Asil loved her right from the start.
Eventually, Kaleveh agreed to the proposal, and within hours the messengers were gone, taking Asil's heart with them.
In exactly three months, the citizens of Kaleveh woke up to find the Tyrbery River completely leeched of water. Saetche had indeed made a dam, but withheld all the water in their side. Asil's father was livid. He, who commanded the tribe's armies, the tribe's supplies, he, who had a temper of a shark, demanded to go to war. But Asil, out of his love for Naoko, succeeded subtly in persuading him not to, without his father ever knowing why. What Asil didn't know was that Naoko begged anyone who would listen not to go through with the plan. In their time apart, Naoko had grown to love Asil back.
The seed had been watered. It was beginning to push through the ground, to become a sprout of adoration.
In the end, their betrayal worked against Saetche. Kaleveh was built on higher ground, and as the dam reservoir slowly filled up, Saetche began to flood.
Asil's father was a wise man who sensed that something was off with Asil. He was shocked that his son, who he had brought up to be passive and tough, had fallen for the raven-haired beauty from rival Saetche. But he himself had learnt that true love knew no boundaries, as a commoner that the Chieftess had fallen for. Kaleveh agreed to help Saetche bring down the dam and even out the flow of water from the pent-up Tyrbery. In exchange, Kaleveh wanted the ancient rivalry between the two tribes to end. There was much to gain out of an alliance, including the celebrated wedding of Asil Zarramere and Naoko Elison Lille.
It was a story told at every village gathering, often with much more flowery language than my version. One day, Grandma told me, my own love story will be painted in the air over a crackling fire with the vividest words.
Maybe not anymore, after I left those crackling fires for those of my own making.
I lurched upwards. There was one more thing I needed to see.
It was offensively late, but I still tiptoed out of the temple, Narreta already fast asleep. Who knew how long it would be before I saw the sky from here again? I might be able to see from anywhere the same incandescent stars, the same nonsensical constellations, but I wouldn't be able to hear the soft melody of the temple bells. Nor would I be lulled by the rhythmic crashing of waves beating against the pier, or the swaying of the palmetto trees.
I sighed, stealing one more glimpse of the stars. Grandma taught me that the stars represented all the stolen, materialistic desires of our greed. But they also symbolised the caged beasts of our heart's yearning—the hopes of a soul locked in darkness. What had Grandma dreamed, as she looked up to the stars?
Now that they were gone, they were more than people related to me, who had cared for me and loved me. All of them—all of them had had dreams, hopes, desires, the groundwork for their lives. Now I would never get to know them.
I looked back towards the sea, stretching wider and wider and further and further, the lucid moonlight setting the waves sparkling. The water's slightly rippling surface reflects the sky, a splash of ink on velvet. The stars glowed with the force of a thousand tiny suns. I looked towards the east; towards an empire I had never before witnessed the wonders of.
I knew too much of that land now.
Far too much. More than I'd ever dreamed I would. And nothing is below me now. Not anymore.
I lifted my hand, in a solemn little wave, wondering who might feel my silent greeting in the bond that links us all.
The bond, the one has lasted millennia, the one that has fed and nourished every one of us. The one that is often taught, stretched to the brink, and sometimes brimming with hope and life.
How did they manage it? The agony of knowing you left them?
I thought of it every time I moved and found those images haunting my thoughts.
An image of soulless, hollow eyes; eyes that didn't shine, eyes dry as bone and black as coal.
An image of pale, chalky skin that had never felt the sun's warmth.
An image of the fire tearing out of me, blazing with such heat and yet not burning.
An image of the dirt in a perfect disc, the priest's mouth in a matching perfect 'O.'
I sifted through all of those images and memories until they bled together, the blood from careless knee scrapes and the pink of burned fingers, the orange of a thousand sunrises and sunsets. The brown of beach sand and the gold of fire.