Chapter 107: Líran
The mortal mind gets used to seeing time as a line, a river eternally happening in one direction, running over the present.
But that is not the way time works. It is reality that traces lines; it is life that runs river-like. Time is more like space, but instead of stars, it contains universes. It envelops all the lines, all the rivers; it doesn’t happen, it comprehends. Everything that exists and happens is inside its sphere.
It is na illusion that we can go back in time because time is not a road. You can go back in your live, like coming back down a road to where you took a wrong turn, and you can forget that you went down that road because your mind can’t cope with it, but time does not forget. Like footsteps in the snow, somewhere in time you will have trod down that life road and back.
That was why Líran couldn’t kiss Nuille. At least not a kiss that was worth a wish. Her first kiss she had given him to become mortal. No matter how much she tried to go back, that first kiss was given. It was printed in time and it already belonged to Nuille. Her last kiss she couldn’t give, because Líran had not stopped being who she was only because she could die now. Essentially, she was still time and endless, though her reality had narrowed down to a line. Líran’s last kiss would annul all her other kisses, including the first.
Líran’s last kiss would be Líran’s only kiss.
Nuille was a wanderer, who roamed worlds and ages with Lucille, collecting kisses to break the curse that had turned him into a monster. The curse, Lucille’s birth, Líran’s kiss: none of that had happened yet. They were all in current Líran’s future. Therefore, in Líran’s current linearity, there was a Nuille before the curse; a Nuille that might not ask for anything in return for a small miracle.
There is a hidden lake. Out there. Maybe in here. Who knows? The little lake is inside the sphere of time, but is also outside. The mystery that dwells in it is larger than eternity.
It is said every road goes there, like every river goes to the sea. It is also said that no road leads there, that each traveller must cut their own path. It is said even that there are thousands of ways there, though others say there exist no way at all. There are even those who believe that there is no lake out there inside all of us.
Líran knew that all theories were true, but all those philosophised roads took a lifetime or longer to build. She needed an immediate path. She left the roads built by humans, went deep into the old forests, roamless, aimless. Difficult, narrow, painful trails.
Where to hide a lake?
Anywhere. In a forest, in a desert, in the bowles of the earth, on top of the sky, in a meteor. In many places at the same time; changing location from time to time. Líran didn’t know anymore where she had come from, where there was a village or danger.
She rationed her food, but eventually she ran out. Now she searched for Nuille but also for something to eat. Hunger, exhaustion, the fear of noises in the starless night. Now she knew what they meand, now she knew what it was like to feel them. It crossed her mind that she could die. She was aware that she was mortal, but it hadn’t ocurred to her that she could simply die.
Wasn’t that exactly what mortals did? To live until they simply died?
The longer Líran walked, injuder feet, scratched hands, the least she understood why she went on. Exhaustion didn’t lead to fate. Aimless persistence could only achieve accidental results. On the other hand, she couldn’t have na aim, and she had come so far!
Far? She left Chambert... how long ago? What distance can a mortal cover on foot without a road? Líran finally understood the awe in mortals’ eyes when they looked at oceans, horizons, stars. A simple forest between Baynard and Patire seemed endless to her.
Would this forest be Lírans tomb? To die in aimless green, without taking part in History, to simply die the most common of deaths, then be covered by funghi, eaten bu worms, swallowed by the indifferent forest.
She lay down on the undergrowth. A drop of something warm escaped her eye and went down to the tip of her nose. Her very first mortal tear.
‘My first kiss, my first tear, my first regret.’ — Líran lay on her back and reached up with her arms. Lecoeurge’s purple hat, handmade in Sejo Tíen, rolled away and rested on a root. ‘I could have warned you about the curse. You would never have become a monster, nor would you have to collect a thousand kisses, but, Nuille, without the curse, I would never have met you, you wouldn’t have brought Yukari to Sátiron and we, mysteries, would remain just that: mysteries. Now we are friends. I will die, probably today, before living my mortal story. Or maybe this death is my mortal story. It doesn’t matter. I let it happen, the curse, so I could make my wish.
‘But not only that. No, Nuille, I let it happen because from your curse, our friendship was born, Sátiron was born. Because of oyur curse I tried Yukari’s tea, I met Sáeril. Eternal in my solitude, I had friends. I have friends.
‘Funny: I never wanted friends. I didn’t need them. But once I had them, they become dear. I didn’t want to exist without that thing I didn’t need. Without the curse we wouldn’t be friends. But the fact remains that I didn’t warn you. What kind of friend does that make me?
‘Goodbye, Nuille. Goodbye, my friend.’
Thus, divided between the frustration of na untimely death and the satisfaction of having lived great fenomena, Líran closed her eyes. She wanted more but she couldn’t go on. In the darkness of her closed eyelids she thought she saw a white vein, like white reflecting in restless water. She opened her eyes and the reflextion seemed to come from under the purple hat. Líran touched the hat and it crumbled like tropical sand. A road of sand appeared before her.
Achingly, Líran stretched the rigid fibers of her worn out muscles. She grabbed a tree and hoiseted herself to her feet, swaying like bamboo in a storm. Her feet sunk in the sand, and Líran demover her shoes.
It wasn’t easy to follow the sand road. Not only because it threatened to dissappear if Líran glanced to the side, but because it was a shortcut to destiny. The road cut through every other path of Líran’s lives, the eternal and the ephemeral. These changes claimed her attention, afraid of never being lived. Histories afraid of not happening.
‘Look at me,’ called one, ‘I am your end.’
‘And I am your son,’ said a child’s voice.
Líran stopped. She let the child’s voice fill her ears. She had imagined inumerable adventures, uncountable passions. Never a son. The boy’s voice became thicker, shaping the sand, liquifying, turning, becoming. A lake.
Not even those who found the Hidden Lake know how to get there again.
It is a different path for each traveleer — wrote na elf phylosopher before she died in the Dark Age — It is in a different place for every seeker. — Many years later she wrote on the side — And that place changed in the run of our lives.
A small water mirror at Líran’s feet, more pond than lake, deeper than forever. It was surrounded by a carpet of grass, light green, almost yellow. At the background, the blurred silhouettes of trees, or maybe columns. Or nothing at all. Just white-washed light, with the texture of mists. The sun wasn’t visible in the pure blue sky, but its reflexion was on the water mirror.
On the other side of the deeper than forever pond, opposite Líran, a grey-blue rock sprouted from the grass. It’s base was rough and chipped, but the top was cusioned with moss.
On the moss there sad a frog. Lean body, long fingers with round fingertips, green skin, lighter than the moss, not as light as the grass. Two dark green stripes began on his nostrils, framed the eyes and went down his back. The soft skin on the neck and abdomen was yelowish green and there were stripes on his arms and legs. The black of his eyes expanded and covered the bright orange of his iris.
Líran fell on her knees. ‘Nuille.’
The frog moved his long fingers with a ballerina gesture. The water mirror swelled like a geiser, shiny drops fell at Líran’s feet. Each drop gained form, scent, colour: na ewer with water and a crystal glass; a wooden bowl with ripe red grapes, peaches, guavas, tomatoes; a little basked with dried apricots, dates and mangoes; bread, butter, honey, coffee.
It hadn’t been reverence, Nuille knew, that had brought Líran to her knees.
Líran sat down, crossed her legs and attacked a tomatoe, a peach, drank up all the water from the jar, ate a guava with less haste, tried the grapes. She poured herself some coffee, spread butter and honey on the bread.
Nuille waited. From him came a warm silence, softer than the moss on which he rested. Líran felt Nuille’s silence enveloping her shoulders, protecting her with a layer of mystery that reminded her of herself before shs gave up her first kiss in exchange for a wish. She regretted becoming mortal, feeble, linear. At the same time, in that silence, all the adventures reverberated, real or dreamed, the opportunities, the chances, feelings that made Líran’s blood run faster in the silent veins of destiny enveloping her.
Ah the power of being a mystery. If Líran had it now! The inconsistency of always wanting what you can’t have. So mortal. Even as a mystery, Líran was in a way very mortal. It had been Yukari that made her so; Yukari who changed the shape of her desires. Yukari, the eternal mortal.
Eternity doesn’t move in time. Líran is a mystery with no human curiosity. Then she meets Yukari and becomes essentially mortale. Then she kisses Nuille and becomes completely mortal. But Líran is forever. She is, even now, unending and immortal. Time doesn’t vanish, it expands, it becomes more. What Líran was she still is; what she is, she has always been. And all that going round in Líran’s mortal mind — immortal, stagnant — Moving mystery that wants to be small — smallness that craves for mysteries. Everything. Nothing.
And Nuille watching through the gigantic black rifts, wet, swallowing the orange of his eyes, the green stripes, the round fingertis, moss, rock, Hidden lake reflecting Franária, Chelag’Ren, Pierre, the word hero uttered by Vivianne.
Líran had to ask, but how?
And Nuille watching.
Nuille before the curse. If she warned him, if she told him, the monster would never happen, the aberrations would never exist, Yukari would never be known to Sátiron, Líran would be just forever. How would she ask? With what right?
Nuille reached out his long fingers to Líran, yellow palm facing up. Líran had to give him something. She searched her pockets, found a cold little object, na ink bottle. She put it on the frog’s hand, over the Hidden Lake. Nuille placed the bottle on the moss and used all four of his hands to unscrew it. Then he leaned forward, put his mouth to the bottle’s mouth, and spoke.
Líran couldn’t hear what he said, but she felt her bones reverberating with his thick voice. The Lake bristled, the reflexions dispersed like abstract brush strokes and mingled with the misty light forming the column-trees in the background. Nuille closed the bottle and offered the ink bottle back to Líran.
For na unending moment, Líran could only stare at the little bottle. She breathed very slowly, as though she had never breathed before and was just learning the meaning of oxygen. She took the bottle with both her hands.
Ink. And more power than Líran had ever had, even as a mystery.
‘Are you simply going to give this to me?’ she asked.
‘That is what I just did.’
Líran jumped up, took the frog in her hand and kissed his head. She was standing on the Hidden Lake. It didn’t swallow or drown her.
‘Thank you.’