The Changing of the Sun

by Lesley Smith

  This little one, this precious survivor, was lost and confused, grieving for the loss of her parent. She was alone and afraid, and would die if someone did not help her.

  “Elys,” he said with a dawning awareness.

  “What?” Rand asked.

  “This….” he indicated the strange alien creature. “This being sang to me. Her name is Elys and she and hers, they need our help.”

  “What is it?”

  Caspa sought words to describe things he had never seen, and didn’t quite understand. “She lived in the Sea of Reeds, in a great underwater forest. She and those like her were ripped from their parents during the great wave which destroyed Aiaea,” he said slowly. “We’ve got to help them. It’s important.”

  Jio frowned. “A Water Child?”

  “I suppose,” Caspa replied.

  Jio looked fascinated as he carefully retrieved a branch that was pinning down an identical creature in a nearby pool. The creature stabbed his palm and he yelped, but then gasped. “She spoke to me.”

  “Ow!” Rand flinched and collapsed to the floor, a tendril around his ankle had pulled him down. “Aia’s grace…”

  Thus did the Varaiah find their true vocation as the custodians of the Orphans of the Devastation, and when the rest of the Varaiah returned to find their brothers and help reclaim the sacred grotto, they joined minds with the Singers also, forging a great contract that saw the survival of not one, but two species.

  In that act of trust, Caspa assured his name would live on, in his sons and the Water Children they protected.

  Sorrows

  Aia whispers so even that in the darkness we might have a light to guide us.

  The writings of Kaiene the Blessed, first Oracle of Aia.

  Jeiana drifted. One moment she was sitting on the beach by a gently crackling fire, the next lying in a sweat-slick pallet in a room that smelled of death and misery. She knew which one she preferred and she looked to him, poking the fire with the remains of one of their walking staves.

  “You’d rather stay in the dream eh?”

  “What are they doing to me?” She asked, trying to peer through the blurred grime that obscured her vision of reality. “I don’t like it.”

  “Stay with me. It’ll be better for you,” he said. “Sit and listen. Senna is about to amputate your hand just above the elbow. You can’t wake up because she forced enough sedation herbs down your throat to sink a giant. What do you call it? Uryen’s Mercy?”

  Jeiana’s eyes fell to her left hand. The one she wrote with. “It looks fine.”

  “This form of yours, like mine, are your thoughts given physical shape. You can look like whatever or whomever you want here.”

  “You look like that? With that long hair and no tail?”

  “You liked it once,” he said softly. “The hair isn’t something I can change. It used to be as dark as yours, as black as midnight or a raven’s wing. Then I died. Well, then I suffered a lot and then I died. The shock turned my hair white and, even able to change form as I am, it stays that way.”

  “A scar.”

  “Basically. One very deep in my soul, one which makes me, me,” he said. “You know this is going to hurt?”

  Jeiana suddenly felt detached from herself, as if a binding thread had snapped and her soul was hanging free and blowing in the celestial winds.

  “You could die.”

  “You won’t let me,” she countered.

  “I said I would come for you. I said I would help unbind you but this isn’t the time. It’s our one gift, I suppose, but your heart could still stop, you could still go into septic shock. I’m not—well, you would call him Uryen, but even I know that removing body parts is not without its dangers, and that’s even on worlds where medical technology can work what would be miracles in the eyes of the Kashinai. Here, even if done right, it can be as much a death sentence as cutting off someone’s head or stabbing them in the heart.”

  Jeiana gasped, sensing nerves lighting up that she didn’t know she had here in this in-between place. “What is that?”

  “Senna’s smart,” Ash observed. “She knows there’s a point where the brain—any brain, in any species—gets its signals muddled. Pain can become pleasure and pleasure can become agony.”

  “So she’s hoping I’m going to have the mother of all orgasms?”

  “Better than the agony you’ll endure otherwise,” Ash said, and after a moment he handed her a skin of water. “She is a true healer, and this is her greatest lesson.”

  “What does she need to learn?”

  “That sometimes you have to hurt the ones you love in order to save their lives.”

  Jeiana woke to a mind which felt like wet sand, the kind right at the edge of an advancing tide which sucked in your feet and tail, feeling more like mud than grains cast upon the shoreline. She stared for a while at the plastered walls, at the shadow which seemed to change depending on how to the light spilled.

  Where was she? It took all her effort to remember. Who was she? That was much harder. She remembered being a child toddling on the sand at her naming ceremony, she remembered being taught the hieratic for ‘Jeiana’ in her lessons. Her teachers explained it was the name given to the marbling of pearl on caavashell. The Seaborn always chose the blessed names for their daughters and sons and hers was no exception, the marbling held all the shades sacred to the gods.

  “Jeiana,” the name tumbled from her lips. “I don’t feel like her.”

  The name sounded so alien, it had lost all of its familiarity. It didn’t feel like it belonged, as she didn’t feel like she could be defined by it.

  “Thank Uryen, you’re finally awake.” The woman, Jeiana knew her name, it seemed much more familiar. She was Senna, and the cup of water in her hands was the sweetest thing in all the land, even if it had the bitter tang of something designed to numb her pain as an aftertaste. “How do you feel, Ana?”

  “Senna?” She asked, the words chased by fear and rising panic. “I don’t know who I am.”

  “It’s all right, it’s the draught I had to give you, and the shock.” Senna knelt beside her. “Your name is Jeiana, you’re Seaborn and you’re something else too. You’re indwelt by the Lady of the River. You got an infection. It was serious and, I’m so sorry, I had to remove your hand and forearm.”

  Though the fog, memories broke like shafts of sunlight. They blazed, and Jeiana’s eyes fell on the stump, still wrapped in bandages. Now that she saw it, the ache began, a slow burn which carved fissures into her soul.

  “Ana, focus on me,” Senna reached out and grasped her remaining hand. “You need to breathe.”

  She forced air into her lungs and a wave of nausea flooded through her, bile rising fast behind. “My hand, Sen…”

  “I know, I know,” the healer had tears in her eyes. “But your life was more important.”

  Her tears came, it was a part of things. She had lost a part of herself, her writing hand, and that would take a lifetime, if she even had that long, to come to terms with. She was glad of Senna, the warmth of her. The bitterness of grief didn’t feel quite so bad when someone else shared the pain. Senna’s burden, though, was always going to be the greater share, and Jeiana was glad she had done what needed doing, made the hardest decision of both their lives.

  “Thank you,” she rasped.

  Senna looked up. “You’re not angry?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m alive…that’s always better. I need to thank you now, so you can remind me later.” Jeiana pressed her forehead against Senna’s. “I’m slipping, Sen, and I never want to blame you for saving my life. Ever. Remind me, and if I ever do, you can slap me.”

  “I won’t, but I know what you mean, beloved,” Senna said. “The boy, Kadian, he’s been loitering outside, asking after you. Vashi too. They’ve been so worried. They held a vigil for your soul, offering prayers to Uryen and, well to Jaisenthia.”

  Jeiana couldn’t resist a laugh. “The irony.”
<
br />   “Uryen did save you,” Senna said.

  She frowned at this. “He was forbidden to intervene, everyone was.”

  “His scrolls and tools meant I could do things better and faster,” Senna said. “The scrolls were an inventory of items, joined with the instruments after who knows how long.”

  “He would find a way to break immutable rules,” Jeiana said, her voice sad, but glad as well. “I am blessed to have you, Senna, and your skill.”

  “It wasn’t all me. The Edoi found the herbs I needed, memory drifts with them too, you know. The Year of the Night Plague is seared in their minds, even after this long.”

  “Can I see them? Vashi and Kadian?”

  Senna pursed her lips, healer first and everything else after. “A few moments only. You’ve slept for three days, and your recovery will be a long one. I need you rested enough to move later.”

  “When?”

  “A day or so. Thaeos rises ever higher and Canhei is still a good few hours away, half a day maybe, as you are now.”

  “For once we have a little time to play with,” Jeiana said. “Please, Senna.”

  “All right, beloved, but when I send them off, no arguments.”

  “I am tired,” she agreed. “But I need to thank him, Sen.”

  Vashi had colour in her cheeks but Kadian looked sick to the pit of his stomach. Jeiana felt awful but she hadn’t exactly had control over the situation.

  “Jeiana!” Vashi knelt to hug her, ever so gently, just in case. Jeiana’s stump was bound to her chest by a swath of bandages, designed to keep the limb in place so it didn’t get banged or knocked. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Tired,” Jeiana answered. “Kadian, it’s all right.”

  He looked like a frightened sand mouse. “No, it’s not.”

  “You made the unbearable bearable and kept my soul anchored.” She reached out with her remaining hand. “Silly boy, it’s all right.”

  He was shaking. “I’m sorry, I really am.”

  “Hush, hush.” Jeiana soothed, aware of the echoes of drowsiness that were starting to pull her under again. “I don’t blame you any more than I do Senna.”

  “But…“

  “No buts, Kadian,” she said. “I’m alive, thanks to you.”

  Vashi looked concerned. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m just tired,” she said. “Senna, what was in that water?”

  “Something to help you rest, beloved. Come you two, Jeiana needs her sleep.”

  Vashi rose. “Thank you, Senna, it’s appreciated. Come on, Kadi.”

  Jeiana’s eyes rolled back into her head, Senna supporting her as she went limp.

  Ash was tending a campfire, they were sitting on the beach by the ocean. Was it Caerim or was it where they had started, on the edge of the Forest of the Lightflies? It didn’t matter and yet she felt it was both places. Was this before she incarnated? Was this after Senna had removed her arm? She sensed it was both, they were out of time, no longer bound by its current.

  “You passed out then,” Ash didn’t ask, it was a statement of fact, spoken as he stirred the cauldron of stew hanging over the fire.

  “Senna mixed something with my water,” Jeiana said, sounding more sure of herself than she had in a long time. “I need my sleep, apparently.”

  “Sensible,” he agreed and passed her a bowl of stew. “This isn’t real but it might help.”

  “Fake stew?”

  “It’s as real as you want it to be, everything is,” he said. “So how are you feeling?”

  “Weird, my memory is fragmented,” she put the bowl to her lips and drank, the meat gave her sustenance, the gravy rich and dark from hours over the fire. “This is the beginning of the end then.”

  “You’ll be okay, you won’t remember. It makes it easier.”

  “You say this from personal experience?”

  “No,” he replied. “But this is why we do things in pairs, in groups, to remind each other of who we are. Even if full incarnation only happens once a millennium or so.”

  “Incarnation?” she asked.

  “Being mortal, as completely and as utterly as we can be,” he said. “I will always remember you, dearest.”

  “How goes the ferry?”

  “More souls each day,” he answered. “It makes me sad, but not everyone listens, free will and all.”

  “I feel like a failure.”

  “Being what we are, and giving up what you gave up always comes at a price,” Ash said. “You’ve done brilliantly.”

  “Stop it,” Jeiana said, and threw down the bowl. It was made of wood and it clattered, the last of the stew spattered across the camp fire. “I’ve done nothing but try to survive, just like Eirian and the others. I’ve watched thousands die and I only had the ability to save one innocent woman.”

  “Don’t think that won’t help. In the long run, you set something in motion when you saved Sarivashi. She’ll remember, even when she forgets who she was in this life.”

  Her anger cooled a little, overcome by curiosity. “She’s one of the important players in this story then?”

  “She was there at the beginning of it, she’ll be there at the end.”

  “You could tell me who she is,” she suggested.

  “And that would spoil the fun. Once upon long ago and far ahead in a future time. What are a few lifetimes compared to eternity? You could look at them and you’d know them but, personally, I wouldn’t waste your energy. You have one last thing to give to the Kashinai and when that’s done, you’ll wake up and be Jeiana.”

  “Will I remember Senna?”

  “You’ll remember her and Vashi both, but you’ll be a bit confused. Those around you will fill in the gaps because you asked Senna to embrace you as Jeiana, not to try and reawaken dead memories of you once her original personality reasserts itself.”

  “It feels odd when you say that. Each time I see you I feel less like myself, and yet she, Jaisenthia, is easier to find.”

  “The blurring of the lines. Here you’re dreaming of your past self, there you’re becoming Jeiana. The moment you remember being my soulmate, you will be Jeiana in reality and we won’t see each other again until the day you pass across the River, to use the Kashinai turn of phrase.”

  “When I die,” she clarified, feeling rebellious for naming the act for what it was.

  Ending and completion, the severing of bonds and the breaking of ties. The Kashinai beautified it with the analogy of The River, but it was a good choice. A river could look beautiful but you could also drown in it.

  “Death gets such a terrible reputation, no one gives birth such stigma. Both acts can be planned but only one involves a choice by the person involved. You don’t want to die, you want to live, and you will, things willing, but you won’t be her.”

  “What’s my name?” She asked.

  “You never use your original one.” He spent a moment refilling his bowl. “None of us do, instead we take new names as we choose. We are, however, remembered for what we do, so of the gods known to the Kashinai, Uryen is the Healer, your sister is the Bard and her beloved is the Scribe and so on and so on.”

  “But we’re not gods.”

  “No, we’re not. On that all of us are resolute.” He had produced another bowl from nowhere. “Do you want some more?”

  “I suppose I need to keep my strength up for whatever is to come.”

  He grinned and handed her a bowl. “Senna would be proud. Uryen too. You listen to those who love you.”

  “Tell me my name.”

  “These days you prefer Kalika. It’s the name of a goddess on another world. She is the goddess of time, ferocious and terrifying, who endures even after the end of reality itself and yet to her disciples she is like a mother. You took it because it suited you. ‘Kali’ means black as well as being the feminine word for ‘time’.”

  She stopped drinking from the bowl, the realisation clear as crystal in her mind. “My hair, I’ve always ha
d dark hair. Even before, during the Endless Age.”

  “Just as mine has always been this shade of silver-white. Well, almost always.”

  “And your name?”

  “The one I used before our little chats? That’s the name of a psychopomp in a religion which hasn’t come into being yet. An angel who comforts the dying and releases the soul from their body, guiding them to the places after life. I was the first person to die and it was a blessing. You killed me and changed the universe, and even now, aeons on, I’m still thankful for that.”

  “What we do is a kindness.”

  “It is, and most people thank us for it. After, of course. Deathshock is unpleasant but it passes soon enough.”

  “That’s what this is, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose. Jeiana did die.”

  “And I will follow her.”

  “In a way.” Ash reached out and took her hand, squeezing it tightly. “But you have one last thing to do first, remember? It’s the reason you came.”

  She remembered now. “Lyse has asked for her release so many times.”

  “And yet she knew there was a purpose,” Ash said. “Help her, then forget, and embrace your life as Jeiana. As she has waited, so have you, and that patience will be rewarded.”

  “Thank you,” she said to him, and he was gone.

  Jeiana woke slowly. Her mind now recognised that her hand was missing, and there was no blissful moment between dream and waking. Her stump had been bandaged and she found herself waking, more and more often, with her other hand protecting what was left of her arm.

  “Ah, you’re awake.” Chelle was sitting with Kadian at the end of the pallet. He was helping to feed Kei’a while Sui’a suckled from her mother’s teats. “How do you feel, sister?”

  “Weak,” Jeiana said.

  “Would you like some water?” Kadian asked, already reaching for a pitcher of iced water covered in netting to keep the flies out. “You sound parched.”