???, after S14 E02 2:10:00
The Pale Lands
Ixtalan
She walked, numb, rivulets of blood seeping down from the holes punched by her fangs in her arm. Gray grass and gray sky and fog billowed around her, changeable and eternally the same no matter where she looked.
Gray grass, and gray sky, and gray grass, and gray fog, and gray sky, and gray fog, and gray grass, and gray sky, and gray fog, and gray grass, until her toes splashed in something different, and she looked down, momentarily roused out of the fragments of memories she’d moved through.
Water. A rivulet. No, a river. Something like hope stirring within her, she raised her eyes. Wide, and placid, with nary a ripple disturbing a surface that would be a mirror, if there were anything to reflect other than flat gray sky overhead. Unlike the last time, there was no other bank.
It didn’t matter. It was different, and different might get her out of here.
She waded forward, feeling the cool water rise up around her, warming until it felt as though she moved through thick, sludgy air, like there was no separation between her skin and the outside. The bank deepened rapidly, rising over her head until she was forced to swim, stroking for—what? There was no other side.
There was a current of some kind, though, and it grabbed her in its slow but inexorable sweep as she turned over on her back, minimizing the efforts of limb and lung and leaving just her face above the surface. She floated, feeling-but-not-feeling the blood-warm water around, seeing not the sky above her but the memories.
Memories, clashing and clamoring behind her eyelids with each breath, memories in which she had not recognized, until now, their intrinsic conflicts, their sharp edges cutting into and occluding one another.
Seeing black waves and teal-pink lights rushing toward her until a full-body slap enveloped her, suffocating, swirling, memories vanishing and leaving until only blackness remained, and yet also—
—feeling Lati catch her arm just as she reached the deck railing, then Mama the other one, and feeling more than hearing the shriek as a wave caught Lati and threw her overboard—
—catching fish from the docks as Papa and Auntie Tezha threw them at them, the purple-furred little dock boy chasing as hard as he could to catch up—
—screaming as Mama left her behind in a strange port—
—Mama dragging her along by the wrist, telling her she would be safer with her, but she had to swear to listen and heed Mama, and tearfully swearing she would—
—screaming as Papa said he’d fallen in love with some cow and she was expected to just move away from the sea, from where Lati had been taken—
—the old water man spitting out a line of swears, then laughing as she repeated them, her face screwing up in the effort to replicate the sloshy syllables—
—her fists, pounding bloodied against the inside of a brig—
—roaming the hills with the sheep, seeing the square thatched roofs of the town and feeling relief to be away—
—running across the rounded grass domes of the town, waiting for the perfect moment to push a stack of crates and topple them on the unsuspecting sailor—
—climbing through the rigging, the burn of a fresh tattoo she was trying to conceal on her calf, because Mama had said 12 was far too young to be getting tattoos, she ought to wait until she was at least 14—
—her first kiss, with Artanen—
—her first kiss, with Eleni—
—no, she’d never kissed anyone, it felt too intimate, but anything else was fair game—
—the train, exploding—
—the train, escaping into the sky, its horn shrilling through the air—
—the mass grave, the dozen or so survivors looking on blankly before the pit is covered in wood and oil and flame—
—the dozens of silent wrapped bodies, weighed down with rocks and tossed into the bay, the best compromise they could do with only fifty survivors and kindling scarce—
Images and emotions, experiences she knew she’d had, could recall those memories with a razor clarity that seemed—strange.
Because there were others, not nearly so vivid. Boarding the Diamond, a wisp of recollection of how the carved letters felt under her hand as she ran her fingertips over the name, arm poked between the railings and stretched way down to touch it. A vague memory that it had hurt, but not how much, when the hook hidden inside a spiny fish got lodged down her throat, and her disgust at the bitterness of the tonic the physicker gave her before blackness overwhelmed her, but not the actual taste of it. Playing find-the-rabbit with her sister and a blue-furred dockboy and Yev chasing after them, wanting to be included, but just a few disconnected images and the overriding emotion of annoyance at having to slow down for the little kid. The flow of words that would trip out of her tongue when a crab, or a song, or a funny image would spark an idea, and the swell of pride she felt when she saw the faces of a rapt audience drinking in whatever she was putting together, believing it, if only for that moment. More often than not, that audience was a face like her own, but shining with joy or excitement, or screwed up in petulance, or grumbling annoyance, or open wide with surprise, a face that often as not mirrored and amplified the emotions she felt.
Lights, pink and teal and blue, and their irresistible lure; the silvery swirl of bubbles and scales, but no memory of what must have been a freezing water; a burning in her lungs, but blankness all around, save for that half-glimpsed face like her own, hair in plaits, screaming in terror.
Grabbing Kaisi’s hand—so much higher than it should be—and feeling the world stretch around her, impossibly, feeling her self being pulled apart, straining against an implacable barrier as the living world recognized and rejected her.
Finding seeds of images, sensations, memories, crystalline and shardlike, swirling past her and grabbing them, hiding inside a refracting mirrored casket of years and experiences and identity.
Feeling the barrier loosen, lighten, until it dissipates, begrudgingly slipping its hold on someone who isn’t just little Tala Vekhir, obviously can’t be, because she’d had so many years of living.
She opened her eyes. Somewhere along the way she’d sunk below the water without ever feeling the breath leaving her. A thin barrier rippled between her and the sky pale as underbelly, but for a moment she imagined she could hear the crystalline crack of an impossible sky.
Taking in a breath, she expelled the thick, sluggish water without pain and righted herself, her hair plastering against her skull as she broke the surface. It had grown shallow here, enough to stand up straight with the water rising only to her collarbone. There was still only one bank visible, but it lay on her other hand now—the opposite bank, or perhaps she had become turned around.
“Lied so hard I believed myself,” she said, and was mildly startled by the hoarse rasp of her voice. “And convinced the world along with me.”
She began to laugh, helplessly, and fell back beneath the water without a splash.
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