El’s Story

As told to Celyn, in Asineau, January 11th, 1720, in response to Celyn’s Story of Getting His Name

“I appreciate the offer [of herbal hormones], but I need it not. Let me tell you my story. I grew up in Gowerbourne, on the Wistel, one of four siblings. It was an idyllic childhood, in many ways. We ran a warehouse and trading house for the shepherds, and each spring would organize the wool and sell it to the riverboats and halfling traders taking it to Embry or Tollen.”

They finger their sleeve, which looks very well made. “We’d buy the fine cloth later, with the profits. My father loved to be seen in fine things. He could never understand how much I hated to be shown off. For when I came of age I developed curves, and I couldn’t stand the sight of myself. I think if I had told him I was growing to be a man the hard way, like you, he would have understood. But it wasn’t that, I just didn’t fit in that awful feminine body. But I was also young, and I couldn’t explain it, and my father, he and I fought over and over again when I’d refuse to wear the outfits he bought me, always looking to show off my beauty, he said, always looking to find a good suitor. I ran away from home a few times, but always returned. I did love my father and my siblings and had nowhere else to go.”

They pause, looking thoughtful.

“I do not like to dwell on those times. My twenties were difficult. I married. I lived. I cut my hair short. It wasn’t enough. And I was still a stranger to myself.”

They continue. 

“About six years ago, I started having dreams. In my dreams, I looked different , each time I slept, but always, in some fashion, right. And never so womanly as in my real life. Each dream felt like a foretelling of a possible self, like a choice being offered of a future. And I always felt like I got to choose my future, my body, my relationship to my body, like I got to be myself, not a label or a type or a gender. I became addicted to those dreams, sleeping more and more each day, neglecting my life, the business, my husband, my family. But I couldn’t stop, for the sense of possibility presented each time I slept was like nothing I had experienced before. My family knew something was wrong, but after many years of… ” They pause. “Well, it was hard to confide in them. But I finally told my youngest sister, Cece, who was the widest travelled of us – she has been as far as Tollen twice – and she told me about a man — Jor —  in Tollen, in the north, a poet, she said, but who was known to interpret dreams.”

They pause again, and won’t meet your eyes for the next part of the story. 

“I am ashamed to say, I fled home shortly after, seeking this Jor. I took my share of our family’s wealth, and left only the briefest of notes. I discarded my old name, and took off. All I can say is I was confused and naïve, despite my 30 years of age. The name Jor seemed like a talisman to me, something outside my dreams I could cling to. I found him a month later, in Tollen as my sister promised.”

“He was chaos, and a miracle, all at once. His dark days were difficult, but when the clouds parted he taught me more than I can describe. I learned to see the signs in my dreams and how to see my dreams in myself. I learned how to listen to the Wyrdling when they talked through my dreams and desires. Jor wrote prayers. Poems, really, of supplication, connection, and I absorbed them. He knew a woman in Tollen skilled in the arts of magical inks, and transformed me.”

At this point they pull up their shirt, and you see a band of ink, each letter black and grey and bright red and blue and green, somehow, all at once. Written across El’s clearly flat chest is a set of words:

“you are full of wildness and wilderness. swear to the girl you were and the boy you aren’t, swear to everything you were and are and will become: i will always find you. i will never abandon you.”

These are obviously some sort of magical tattoo. They say: “It is part of a larger poem Jor wrote, an enchantment, an embodied prayer, a gift. I left Tollen in possession of myself, sort of, but seeking a quite place, where I could listen to myself and learn anew who I was. I drifted for a year, until I found Eleanor. She radiates space, and quiet.” 

They hand you a carefully written paper, with the full poem. It is clearly a talisman of sorts for them:

a body is a skin wrapped around stories, is tissue filled with veins that the truth runs through, is a box of bones with a voice inside. i don’t want to be a volcano. i want to be a garden full of flowers bursting open toward life, all of them singing, i’m here. i mean something. i want to live.

stop trying to be a mirror, silly. remember you are a doorway, a garden, a long twisted path that leads to an ancient temple. you are full of wildness and wilderness, of secrets passed on by the spirit of the Wyrdling. go hunting in your body and devour the pleasure you find there. raise your arms to the sky and swear by your sinful sacred skin, swear by your marrow, swear by the lightning storm dancing in your pelvis, swear to the girl you were and the boy you aren’t, swear to everthing you were and are and will become: i will always find you. i will never abandon you.

They look at you: “And in the last few days, something new has awoken in me that I do not understand. A lightning storm dancing in my pelvis, to quote Jor. A tingle in my skin, a wildness in my heart. Is this what the Wyrdling feels like, when you do their magic?”

Celyn has to think about this for a bit.  “I would not say the magic comes in a single sensation, a single emotion, though… particular things will have similar flavors.  Light comes with hope, for me.  When I call upon the power that let me settle the room for the meeting, that has lightning under it, tingling.  A blessing of protection might shimmer like a rainbow.”

He has a long pause here.  “Healing … healing miracles depend on the person, more than the magic, I’ve found.  The first person I healed was my cousin, who’d been kicked by an ox.  After I came back from learning from Eirian.  That was a wild, savage feeling: he was stupid but I was not going to let him die, I wrestled the undertow for him.  For people I have healed after battles, people I didn’t really know, I give the touch of hope, of pleasant dreams.  It’s … changeable.  Individual.”

“For me”, El says, “the dreams are comfortable, if strange. I am always in them, and I can walk and see and inspect. I knew to stop here when I walked the village in my dreams each night, cold. lost, but always finding my way to a hearth in Asineau. By that night, when the zombies came. It was different from my dreams, my beloved and understood dreams..”

Celyn considers that for a long while, drumming his fingers on his leg in complex rhythms.  “The miracle of protection you were given is larger than any miracle I have brought through.  I imagine it must … burn.”  It’s clear that he’s sure this isn’t quite the right word but he doesn’t know what the right word is, so he’s just echoing El’s word.  “I have brought a blessing of protection, but it is small and weak - one person, not an entire temple, and only lasting so long as that person does not bring violence or the strength of the small miracle fades.”  Another pause, a laugh, and, “Though the temple grounds are unlikely to offer violence, I suppose, regardless of what the people going in and out do.”

He looks up, then away; he never meets people’s eyes more than fleetingly after all.  “I have never had such a great miracle pass through me as yours.  I expect I will not, unless fate brings need to me and the dice align, but I do not know.  I can only hope that the strength I have learned from taking the twisting road would be enough to hold it as well as you did, if such a fate comes to me someday.”

His voice turns philosophical.  “Small miracles - miracles that can be held by one person more easily, without the overwhelming power of the gale, overturning all things - can still be immense, can still turn someone’s fate.  I laid hands on a man whose leg was going to rot and gave him back his hope, on a woman whose shoulderblade had been shattered so she could not hold her weapon, and gave her back her ferocity.  These are smaller things than protecting the temple, perhaps, but to that man, to that woman, they are also everything.  But I do not know what Robin knows, the cleansing of disease from the body, the miracle that the Wanderer has given him to summon, which he has used to try to heal Eleanor.  That miracle holds too much for me to reach, now.  Perhaps when I am wiser….”

They close their eyes, and have a look of part terror, part awe. “A burning came over me, an intensity like lightning, starting in my toes and burning its way to my mouth. It felt like chaos, like a whirlwind, a thunderstorm, like something outside myself I could barely contain. It came out of my mouth and hands and the zombies fled from that power. And Ari, he was outside, but the whirlwind from my mouth, it engulfed him, and the zombies, they could not touch him.”

“It was not comfortable, that feeling. I am not sure. Do I embrace it? It scared me, the chaos burning through me. But I felt so strong....”

El looks thoughtful at this, and lets it sit between you, comfortably. They don’t seem inclined to  continue talking about magic and miracles, and after a moment, but something about the idea of small miracles seems to have caught their imagination.

“A small miracle, of a dream perhaps, that would be something to learn.” they say, before asking: “It is cold this afternoon. Would you like tea?” and turning the conversation to more mundane topics.