The First Storyteller

by Varun Gwalani

  A shrug. “You pick up a few things when you travel the Forest for as long as I have.”

  “It gets lonely,” I said quietly chewing. Nobody said anything for a while. The sentence hung in the air, a deadly blade that could kill if not handled right.

  I decided to try to sheath it once and for all, so that I may finally free myself of its dangerous power. “Don’t you feel it too, walking the Forest without a companion?”

  The doctor kept chewing, but I could see he was struggling with something. Finally, he turned to me and, with only the slightest hint of unevenness, said, “It can.”

  I kept my face sympathetic but my heart soared. It did not seem disingenuous at the time; all that occurred to me was that I had finally found someone who understood.

  “But...” He continued slowly, choosing his words carefully, enunciating every syllable, “I chose that.”

  My heart plummeted to the ground in spectacular fashion. “What do you mean?”

  “I’d rather not say,” he said, growing uncomfortable and turning his head away.

  I should have left it there at that point. “You can tell me. Please. Isn’t whatever it is killing you from the inside? Don’t you want to let it out?”

  He looked back at me, the blade swinging between us now. The hesitation now showed on his face.

  “I don’t know...how. I’ve never told anyone before.”

  I gathered my strength, stood up slowly and staggered over to him. I clutched his hand and said, “Tell it the best you can. I’m not going to judge.”

  He looked right at me with an intensity I had not seen before. “Yes, I know you won’t.”

  The doctor had resuscitated my heart, which was floating along gently a few feet off the ground.

  He took a deep breath, withdrew his hand slightly until only the tips of our fingers were touching, and then he started.

  “On the Coast, I did treat people for a while, but only a certain type of people, and only in secret: The Returned, the people who failed in their journeys and came back broken. Everyone else would shun them, would isolate them, but they needed to be taken care of. I took it upon myself to take care of them, using my unorthodox techniques. I think the elders knew, but they did not care. I was “corrupting” those already corrupted, what did it matter?” He paused, and seemed to be unable to continue, but I rubbed his fingers with my own, and smiled encouragingly. He gave me a small nod and continued, “Some of my treatments were partially effective. It lessened their physical pain and a few more overt mental ailments. But I couldn’t get to the root of the problem, I couldn’t save them completely.

  “A woman once came back from the Forest and I surreptitiously provided a check-up later. She had a variety of physical ailments and wounds, but her mental state was startling. She was hysterical and angry, as the Returned often are, but she seemed otherwise sane. Once I had spent some time with her, after she had tried to talk to me, it became clear to me that she was desperate. Desperate to have any sort of connection with me, and desperate to feel again in the presence of another human being.” He looked me straight in the eye. “I couldn’t give her that. I didn’t have the ability to give them what they most wanted, what they most needed.

  “So, I left. I don’t walk a Path because I don’t deserve it. I know that I’m not capable of the passion it requires. I wander the Forest fixing sick travellers, so that I can help them in whatever way I can, but I still can’t help them the way they most need.”

  He looked at me almost sadly now. My heart struggled to stay in the air. The blade was swinging faster. His fingers began to retreat slowly.

  “No,” I said.

  Everything froze. The sun was at its peak in the sky, blazing upon us. “No,” I repeated. My heart was stable. The sword slowed by the very force of my words. “I refuse to believe that because it is not true. You’re in the Forest for a reason, and that reason was that you wanted to help. That’s your Path and it’s important. You helped me, you’re helping me now, and you can continue to do so. We can walk our Path together, and when we reach the end we can use whatever we find there to do good. That is what I’ve always wanted, and now I finally have someone to do it with. Please, let’s walk together.” Everything slowly began to move once again as he moved his fingers slowly forward and finally gripped my hand. His face held a small smile.

  My heart soared higher. My hand clutched the sword, ready to sheathe it. But I could not stop. “You know, I see so much more than in you than you think there is. You keep saying that you fix people, and maybe that’s the problem. Humans don’t need to be fixed, they need to be healed; and you can’t heal yourself. You can heal me because you understand me and I can heal you because I understand you. After we travel, maybe you can finally see what a beautiful person you are, the way I see you are.”

  His face froze. The heart had flown too close to the sun. The sword had swung too far and slashed me. He now said, “No.” And his hand retreated. “No, no, no.” He repeated as he stood. I stood too, bewildered. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, slightly frantic now. Seeing him in this state was worrying me.

  “Of course I don’t understand, you’ve not told me!”

  “No, I mean you don’t understand me.” His eyes locked onto me, and what I saw scared me. “You think that you can change me. You think that there’s some wonderful magnificent person just locked away inside me that only you can bring out. Well, you’re wrong. There’s nothing of that kind, and if you really believe that there is then I need to leave because it’ll just end in more tragedy.”

  He made to collect his things, still frantic, and I did the only thing I could think of. I kissed him. For one beautiful second, the burnt heart stopped mid-fall, the bleeding ceased.

  Then we broke apart and his face was blank, as if it had been carved from stone. He picked up his things and said, “Maybe it’s better I don’t heal, if the result is going to be this. Goodbye and take care of those wounds.”

  He turned around. “No!” the involuntary cry escaped from my lips. “Please don’t leave me.” The stolid figure didn’t move, simply ensured to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. “Please,” I whispered. He started to walk. Tears fell hard from my eyes as my shrivelled heart crashed to the ground, its tormented screams echoing in my ears. I screamed with it, unknowingly grabbing the hilt of the sword.

  “Okay, you know what? Go! Get out of here! But I hope you know that I’ve figured out your secret. You’re scared of loneliness yourself and always have been! And you know what? You’re right to be scared. You’re so bitter and jaded, you have no hope for yourself and unless you change you never will. You’ll always be lonely, and I don’t think you even care anymore.”

  There was a moment, no longer than it takes to crush a blade of grass, in which I looked down to see that I had stabbed the sword deep into his back. He turned, the sword of loneliness sticking grotesquely out of his heart. His face looked as if it was carved from stone, but one sculpted by the hand of a master, betraying a multitude of tiny emotions if you looked closely enough. I couldn’t look too long at the face because I was too busy staring into his eyes, eyes that had given up all hope. He whispered in a voice that did not tremble, “Thank you.”

  Then he turned and walked away.

  All my anger and strength faded in stroke, and I fell to the ground against a tree, covering my mouth as tears flowed hard. I did not move from that tree for a long, long time after that, my hands covered in blood, only now they were not just my own.

  12

  Dissorder

  There’s nothing to tell. Really. It’s all still the same. Will try again later.

  Nope. Still nothing to tell. Everything around me is still the same. Maybe later. Even this statement is the same as the last one.

  It’s all the same-why am I even bothering?

  Oh goddamn. Maybe I should do a recap? That seems to start something or the other. It has
n’t the last nine times I’ve done a recap of here, but maybe the tenth time will be the charm.

  I had been trudging along wearily. The Forest had been closing in on me, and my mind was too tired to fight it off. The trees were growing around me, but also inside me. You know the dance by now, it was trying to conquer me, I was fighting valiantly. La dee da.

  So I hacked and slashed and other knife motions, but, quite frankly, I was tired. There was oppression and suffocation and all that, but I was just tired.

  I reached a fork in the Path, and I was unsure of which way to go, and I was not sure I even cared. A voice in my mind screamed, “Go towards rest!” and I asked it to shut up, because I knew.

  I went down the right-hand fork, just because. (It was not as “a symbolic reference to rightness” or some such, honest). A tree trunk fell behind me, blocking my way back. I acknowledged it courteously with a nod and kept walking, ignoring the trees growing thicker inside me and the voice growing louder inside my head. “I’m doing it, aren’t I?” I yelled at no one in particular, because the voice of course was in my head. I may have mentioned that.

  Finally the voice reached its highest pitch, which meant that the next phase was about to start. Sure enough, a thick bunch of branches blocked my way which I was obviously supposed to push through. I was tempted not to, because I knew on the other side there would be only air which I was going to fall through. I decided to get on with it.

  I pushed through the branches with barely sustained vigour, and even managed the appropriate expression of surprise as I tumbled through the air and fell flat onto the ground. I didn’t bother to straighten myself for a few minutes. When the dirt really started to flow into my nose, I grudgingly sat up to see I was at the bottom of a hill which I, predictably, could not climb back up.

  “Well, who wants to climb you anyway?” I muttered to it and turned around.

  Beyond me was a wide green plain that stretched on into oblivion, as these things often did. There was no end in sight, obviously, since oblivion isn’t really close. Hopefully. Green rolling fields surrounded me and the Path lead through it. Dimly wondering what horrors awaited me in this lush paradise lit by the dim twilight, I walked on.

  Well? No, nothing yet. I suppose there’s a little more to recap before I have a hope for anything. I was appropriately awed by the bounteous beauty of nature around me and so on. The more important aspect was that this beauty was soft, and therefore unlikely to cause me grievous bodily harm, which cheered me for some odd reason, or several. The first thing I did was check this lush greenery for traps. I couldn’t find any immediate ones, which was good enough. I lay down on a flowerbed and was too busy immediately falling asleep to make the obvious connections and witticisms.

  I suppose I did other stuff besides sleep and walk. I sat on grass mounds at the slightest bit of weariness. Since there were no obstacles or decisions, there was no pressure. My body recuperated greatly, until the point where all my remaining injuries were healed. I sprinted across the grass several times, in the hopes that that would somehow make the horizon magically appear. I had never had such a wide open expanse to navigate in before, and I ran in the grass, weaving patterns, writing messages so that anything passing by above would see and have a chat with me; other fun activities like that.

  You can see I was bored witless.

  Nothing’s happening even now. I’m just roaming almost aimlessly, everything the same as it was before. At the start of the plain I was on guard, and being paranoid made sense because I didn’t know if it was dangerous here. Then it began to make less sense because I could see anything coming for miles around, but I kept looking. It gave me a way to pass the time. I kept looking back to see if anything was sneaking up on me, I checked the ground to see if something invisible had been somehow following me (That would have been real fun!). Once I woke up to see tracks around me and I jumped up immediately and broke in to a run. I kept looking back in the ground to see footprints, which made me run faster, which made me find more footprints.

  It was more time than I care to admit that I realized that all the tracks were my own. It was telling that I was disappointed that no one was around to see that.

  It was time to accept that this plain was really a place of peace and respite.

  And that’s when the real trouble didn’t begin.

  A story is never really complete. A storyteller can never tell you every single detail of every single action of every character. That’s what real life is for. But they still had to go through long scenes of monotony and reality between every action which storytellers glossed over. We were painfully aware of it, in the miniscule pause between every word we spoke; in the patches of white created by the spaces between the written words. We knew how much of a life we could simply skip over, invalidate, as if it was not important.

  Suddenly now I had become stuck in that white space. I had encountered it before, but I had been too busy resting and moving to pay attention to it. Something interesting had almost always occurred before the boredom became too much. But now I was trapped in the plain of boredom where I was doing nothing besides walking, which by itself didn’t seem enough.

  That’s when it didn’t hit me. It was simply not there one moment and there the next, the thought that this lush wasteland, this peaceful hell, reminded me of my home. Everything was the same, every step an illusion. I also knew what was causing it. The void was back. It was not the void of Chaos anymore; it was the void of Order. This void was so much more common and so much scarier, because it did not attack you outright, it crept up on you slowly, embedded itself into your actions until you were repeating yourself over and over, forming a sort of hypnotic pattern of illusion that distracted you from the emptiness inside.

  I could not really tell the story of the plain, because there was nothing to the story.

  Beneath all my misadventures and anger and sorrow, there was the thought, the growing fear that there was nothing beneath it all. A long-held terror that there would be nothing after this journey was over, filled me up. I acknowledged the white void. It wanted me to stop moving forward, to live in this illusion, to spare me that terror. I refused.

  No sooner had I resolved to this that I heard a loud sound behind me. I smiled as I turned around to see a knight in armour that shone bright even in the fading sun, seated upon a horse. There was not a single dent or scratch on his armour, not a creak as he moved. There was not a hair out of place even on his horse, combed as it was to pristine perfection. They both looked utterly unnatural.

  The knight raised his smoothly-oiled visor to reveal a chiselled jaw, perfect teeth and an unblemished face, the kind of face that you would want to punch, just to see if it would sustain a scratch.

  “I have come to save you,” he said in a well- modulated voice.

  I waited for him to continue. He did not, instead regarding me with an expectant gaze. I did not budge. He gestured with his hand for me to say something. I did not. A flash of frustration crossed his face. “Since you are not conforming to the give-and-take relationship of a conversation by responding, I have no choice but to turn this into a monologue.” He cleared his throat as if to give an inspirational speech before battle. “You may ask, ‘Who are you and why have you come to save me, oh Knight of Order?’ Well, that is simple. I have come to save you from yourself, of course. You can build a life for yourself here, structure it in a reasonable fashion, instead of going on blindly into the unknown where you might find things that you are uncomfortable with. What kind of life is that, I ask you?”

  The Knight looked as if he was going to go on for quite some more time, and I had had enough so I broke off in a run.

  “Let me complete my speech, then you make an angry or witty comment, then you try to escape, then I chase you!” I heard him yell. I heard hooves behind me. As I looked out at the horizon, I suddenly saw trees. I was finally near the Forest again! I could easily lose him in there.

  I could hear him gaining. I went
even faster, my adrenaline pumping more than it had in all my time on the plain. The rest that my limbs had received were admittedly helping.

  Just as I was reaching the Forest, the horse sped past me and then reared up in front of me, blocking the way.

  “Caught at the last minute, as it always been!”

  I just grimaced and backed up.

  “Now,” he continued, raising his gleaming sword out of its sheath, “Since you have ruined the moment for me to give my speech, I shall continue now by using my abilities to prevent you from ever again entering this Forest.”

  I want to say that time froze as he raised his sword. But it didn’t. Time passed normally, it was just that inside my mind something clicked, something intuitively told me what I must do and so I unlocked the gates of Chaos.

  So when the Knight paused when his sword was the highest, framed against the sun, and asked, “Do you have any final words?” I nodded.

  “I do.”

  The Knight waited expectantly so that he could finally bring his sword down in a heroic swoop and close off the path.

  “Go for it.”

  He was so stunned he jerked the reins and his horse reared, his pose breaking. “Excuse me?” “Go for it,” I repeated.

  “You’re not supposed to want me to do this!”

  “But I do. Please go on.”

  “No!” The Knight was steadily becoming more confused and enraged. “You’re supposed to beg me, coerce me, blackmail me, and fight me! But since I am the white knight, I will prevail. Then you will try and act like it hasn’t happened, then you will get angry at me, then you will try and see if there’s any other way out, (or in, as it were) then you will grow morbid and upset, and finally you will accept your fate. That is how it is supposed to be!”