sudden death, untold loss

i scrape out the memory and i can’t find him. another face wiped clean in a sea of many. the only ones to carve out are my mom and my dad and the oldest of my younger cousins, and i can’t even remember her name.

i search for him in my memories and i search for him in the world’s. but i’m 12 hours away from him and 4 more by car. wherever i press enter, he’s already gone.

duckbills are mammals, not birds—but as you lift this one by the tail with a thick leather glove, your third observation is how easily it might be mistaken for one submerged underwater. but most birds, your mentor taught you, lack the ability to survive underwater at length: even the capabilities of duckbills are finite, but far longer than all but the seabirds of the northern empty. when you first found this one, you stood back to fulfill your contract through the kindest hand to all. you watched it dive for prey in a meracydian oxbow and counted the seconds by pale green bushes. one, two, three, four, nine seconds, no, nine minutes: this one emerged after nine and some, beak first, foreflippers second, dirt still caked on its beak and falling as it shook its way back to air.

ducks, on the other hand, which the beak of this creature and its brethren compare to, have only precious seconds to spend. all this, every evolution, every ounce of aether which made them, dedicates to a blink of time to dive or even dip their beaks beneath the ripples to survive. on one of your furthest trips as a child, your mother pushed aside the moss and showed you a mallard tipping over, stretching only an ilm into the water, creating the faintest waves on the surface as it sickled the seeds and insects.

“you see, my baby bunbun?” and it wasn’t then that you ran—even though you loathed the words. couldn’t she call you something else? or just your name would suffice? still, you heard her out, because this riverbank, sitting between your mother’s arms, a bag the size of your chest in your lap with only crumbs in tissues left on the surface, was the farthest from home you’d traveled, and one of the few times she ever gave you permission. “that mallard’s so small, but it’s persistent; if most animals were placed here, they wouldn’t survive. but a mallard can live here so long as it wants, if there’s food and shelter it likes with it—and when it does, it’s devoured in seconds! it’s just like you, your lunch and all.”

“oh, inay —” you groaned, your ears flat on your head as you pushed her arms away. the bag tipped over and stretched through the edge of the mire, and the crumble-covered cloth sank in the bog. your mother laughed anyway, eyes shut tight, hands reaching out blindly for yours. pulling out anything in a bog, as your mentor taught you, time and time again, is a fools’ errand if not done wisely. but your mother paid no heed to what you both noticed you lost, and she pulled you back instead, setting the leftover bag beside you.

in the present, you pull up the duckbill and note the spurs of its feet first, handling it only by the tail to avoid them. a professor at the studium requested its delivery for academic research; they told you to ware its venom, a task for you that needs scarce warning. you tuck it away in a loose fabric bag and head off to fulfill your part of the bargain. so long as you travel back to sharlayan, through the ship to the northern empty and returning to marble grounds, your mother faint comes to your mind again.

when the final days neared, you carried countless crates from beyond sharlayan docks into the depths of labyrinthos. the burden of escorting live animals of all sizes and natures was only entrusted to gleaners who handled them best, and they knew you as one of them. quite the double-edged sword: to commend you for your performance, you were overworked and overlooked. you still catch yourself wondering if your life was worth less than the animals they would have shipped with the ragnarok. though their haste to salvage what of their world they dared love drowned away their contractor’s words, the rumors rippling through the gleaners’ guild certainly believed such.

in biology, the route through which aether charts hydaelyn’s course, there are no true hierarchies. there are rulers and there are followers who scatter across the star, but nature envelops her beloved children just the same. even ecological predators must one day lie down to die. the smallest of creatures who feed on corse and rot seek the vestiges of their corporeal aether and in so doing survive for the next who needs them, and the next, and the next. it’s cyclical, traversing the same path incorporeal aether treads. in death, memory washes away, and the soul that remains is the same as the rest of its kind: something new to be reused, something to be remade, and something to begin all over again.

you revisited this lesson days after you stumbled through sharlayan’s borders, young and glitter-eyed and naïve. when they took you under their wing, you took their every lecture to heart. you spent late nights recounting and rewriting new knowledge until the dam burst and flooded memory. you broke quills and crumpled papers until you got it right. but you’d had it right a long time ago; you just needed to remember it.

the first time you learned it was under gentler circumstances, when your mentor took you across the tesh’pyani boundary and tried to help you hold a bow. when you couldn’t do that, you cried; she smiled and told you she wasn’t upset, but she still had things to do before dinner, so stay by me a while longer, anak, and i’ll make it up to you, as if you would ever have said no.

later that day, she threw an arm out in front of your chest, and you stumbled to avoid running into it. you looked over her arm as she narrowed her eyes and made gingerly steps to a gray mass on the ground that smelled of sharp acid and wine. she reached to it once she was close enough and recoiled as condors swooped before her, stepping back just as quiet as she had before. you, too curious in all your awe, bumped into her only five paces away, and she looked at you, collected herself, and took your hand, made you pinch your nose, stepped forward again with you by her side.

“what happened to it?” you whispered. you couldn’t pull your eyes away. it was a gallowsbeak, an animal your mother warned should stay far, far away. but she didn’t run, so neither did you, though you clung to her arm like a gallowsbeak its prey.

your mother excused herself between two condors with the hand that ought to have held her nose. she didn’t touch it, and she shielded you by her back. you heard her speak to it, just soft enough the condors wouldn’t fly away. “why are you praying to it?”

she turned her head and lowered her hand, and the next pause of silence ended. “it died, elene’shpya.”  but you still didn’t understand.

“…so? shouldn’t we stay away?”

“no,” she said. “it can’t hurt us.” so she stayed there anyway and continued to pray, undeterred by the rank of the open sores. it was seeping through the small gaps you couldn’t plug with your hand, stronger and stronger as the condors pulled it apart. you stared slack-jawed with ears curled in wonder and felt further and further away.

“are they hurting it? is that why?” you frowned. your mother shook her head. “they didn’t do this. and they aren’t wrong to, either. they’re scavengers,” she pronounced the last word slow and gentle, though you’d heard it from her before.

“like us, and the plants?”

“like us, and the plants.” she nodded, and she kneeled to your height, still gazing at the scalekin. “this world is a community. have i told you this? a lot like us, and the village. when something dies here, the others that make this their home reuse what it left behind. the condors eat almost everything left because no one else will take it, and they have to, or they could die, too. and it’s important that they don’t.”

could a civilization that abandoned its entire home recycle anything it left? when that “teeny-tiny toy boat” with too little space and too little time to save the star, let alone its city, escaped the final days, what would be left to recover? if the new ecosystem migrated to the last moon, a founder population and the last of its kind, and had brought so little with them, would they still manage to survive?

it was all important, you said, when faced with the truth of the threat. just the same way the world keeps living. no life can be deemed less important in matters concerning the heartbeat of the star. we cannot yet abandon it.

“why?” you asked, the age-old curiosity of children, and she had to hold her tongue. instead, she answered, “there are a lot of things they have left to do.” and you finally understood.

even then, your mother stayed, still finishing her prayer. so you sat down with her and tried to pray yourself for all the condors had left, and all that the gallowsbeak could not still do.

the first time that you leave, you don’t forget her. you don’t forget them. the home you grew up with will always be yours. you are your mother’s son and your mentor’s pupil. they stay with you in name, and they stay within your heart.

you mask your voice and you mask your name. but years in the future, it won’t stop strangers from recognizing you as her dear baby son, the boy named for the life of their village, the child who cried when his mother went away and always longed to follow. they don’t forget. neither can you.

when an arm wraps around you in tuliyollal, you already know its owner. “wuk lamat,” who announces her presence in sneaking steps too heavy for your hearing, beams when you recite her name.

“erenville! oh, it’s been too long since i saw you.”

“no more than two years, surely.” you shrug beneath her weight. at first, wuk lamat’s arm presses down on your backpack, and you have to shift onto your toes so she doesn’t knock you back. but then her arm finds the crevice between the fabric and your neck, and she sweeps you away from your roots that bloomed on the market stalls’ path. the two of you continue in bayside bevy at a brisk pace while you barely keep up with her stride. “that’s still too long to me.” she laughs in your ear. “well, how have you been? still so busy in sharlayan?”

“busy, yes. working.” no more than a year ago did you thwart your early grave. now they task you with returning the migratory miracles, procuring new agents of change. some asked you to go west and cross the bridge into xak tural. if you shut the senses gleaning relied on most, you could mistake it for what life had been before the final days.

wuk lamat cries out like you’ve pierced her heart. you both know you can’t aim an arrow to save your life. “don’t tell me you brought work home with you.”

you shrug again and cleave her heart in two. “just a few short assignments. i was planning to return regardless; i simply moved the date to match my contracts’ needs. i’ll be traveling to shaaloani tomorrow.”

“tomorrow?! but you just got here! we have so much to catch up on! don’t you want to see the rest of tuliyollal before you go? oh, i bet papá would love to see you, too—”

“it’ll have to wait for another time.” this time, you manage to shrug off wuk lamat’s arm, and you step away with your gaze to the north. “i told my mother i would be returning. if i keep her waiting, i’ll never hear the end of it. i’m sure the dawnservant will be plenty busy in the meantime.”

your mother was always out traveling without you, but she would always come back home. you, like a lost lamb, sat still and waited patiently until she returned, your head craned up to watch the front door. always, she returned with sights beyond your imagination: her shirt disheveled from days of traveling beneath hot sun and ragged air, her knapsack and pockets set to burst, her face alight, and more. when she returned, the flutes chimed the steps of her arrival, and she laughed out, “my little bunbun,” with them. each time, without hesitation, you ran to her side and closed the door behind her. iyaate, still sat at the dining table, waved to your mother and asked how her trip had gone. while you picked up a bag, always the smallest and lightest of her purchases, and the only one she would let you carry, and dragged it into the kitchen, she told you both of a world that you yearned to see.**

thank you to my uncle. i still miss you, deeply. i'll always think of you, but each time i cross the aitiascope and ultima thule, and with each zone in tural which reminds me of the province, i will remember you there most.

For uncle Eric (May 2024). With apologies and love to one of his brothers, my itay. You’ll never read this, but Cahciua reminds me of you both. I thought of you, and I still do, playing through this expansion, and I poured out everything I had to keep the memories intertwined, though each and every line hurt.

Tito, I think this is everything I wanted to say to you last year, and maybe this. It took a while to write it all, but I thought of it, day by day. I hope you’re well watching over us. I’ll see you next year by the beach, okay?

Itay, if you read this, please never tell me until we are both dead, when I have passed the family legacy. I hope the beach will be as beautiful as he wanted it to be.