Chapter 5: Vivianne – Nevermore
Vivianne put a picture on her father’s lap. She waited for one of those words that always dropped out of his mouth from behind an astonished hand: wonderful, marvelous, and (Vivianne’s favourite) stunning.
This time, he said nothing. His big hand squeezed the extra flesh under his chin, his forehead moved up, forming hills and valleys. Was he trying to invent a new word or had he not liked the drawing? Vivianne stood on tip toes to study her own art. There was Lune, the way she saw it. She had never made such a big drawing before and had put together a number of papers to make the castle fit in only one picture. To do that, she had sewn together the sheets of paper, the way she had seen Marcus do when he had to assemble a new notebook for her.
She had thought Father would be impressed at how she’d learned alone to sew paper without damaging the pages.
‘She’s four years old,’ he used to say, boasting of Vivianne’s artistic feats. The way he said it, being four years old sounded quite extraordinary. Or rather, stunning. Vivianne was afraid of her next birthday. Would five years old be as impressive as four?
‘Look at the things she can do, the things she can say.’ Séramon waltzed with his daughter on his shoulders, and Vivianne uttered funny words.
‘Stunning, abscond, ubiquitous, neophyte,’ she said, her father spinning with her on his shoulders. ‘Farheim, Inlang.’
Why had Father stopped dancing? His big hands covered Vivianne’s little knees in something that resembled a hug. His shoulders sagged a bit, and Vivianne lost altitude.
‘You must be the only four-year-old child in Deran,’ said her father, ‘or maybe in the whole of Franária, who can say these two words correctly.’
But Vivianne didn’t feel the reverberation of a stunning in her father’s words. She removed those words from the list of things that gave her altitude: Farheim and Inlang. She didn’t know exactly what they were. The first time she heard them was on the day her mother didn’t come back home. Vivianne was, then, two years old, and didn’t know the meaning of Farheim, Inlang, or nevermore.
The drawing of Lune on father’s lap had not sagged his shoulders. There was no loss of altitude. But the lines on his forehead did not spell stunning. In fact, they did not spell anything good.
‘Who showed you this?’ Séramon pointed to a part of Lune where Vivianne had never been.
She didn’t understand the question. Why did anyone have to show her anything? The picture was there, in her pencil; she had made it.
‘Vivianne, who took you to the dungeons?’
‘What dungeons?’ A new word.
Séramon pointed to the drawing.
‘Here. Who took you there?’
Vivianne still couldn’t understand. She had never been there, so no one had taken her there.
‘I don’t want you to go to the dungeons,’ said her father. ‘I locked them for a reason. They are places of torture and horror. I don’t want you to go there.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Then how did you draw them?’
The question didn’t make any sense. She drew them because they were there.
‘And how did you know they were there?’
They had to be there for Lune to be complete. The same way Vivianne could picture a foot without having to remove a boot, she could picture a whole castle without having to visit it all. It was logical for Lune to have something where she had drawn those rooms. She didn’t know they were dungeons, but she knew that something had to be there for the castle to be complete. So she drew it.
‘I’m going to patrol the Wave,’ Séramon said. ‘When I come back, I want you to tell me who took you to the dungeons.’
Master Séramon of Lune honed his armour and joined his soldiers at the gates of Lune. They left for the Wave, whose peaks went so far up in the sky, that they speared the clouds and disappeared. Three days later, a lonely soldier came back, weak and injured. He uttered the same words Vivianne heard when she was two years old.
Farheim, Inlang.
Nevermore.
