[Fic] "Flame and Shadows" -- original, Ekanu

[edenfalling]

This one's more of a monologue. I don't really think I have Ekanu's voice here, but it was more of an attempt to capture the philosophical/religious viewpoint she's originally coming from than an attempt to capture her voice. The various peoples she mentions aren't particularly important, just the inhabitants of the various places she's lived in by the time she becomes a full Mistress of the University. Which would make her about 30 years old here.

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Flame and Shadows
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I never wanted to leave home, and yet the moment the chance appeared, I left. I named myself Ekanu, I Listen, because I listen to others' stories -- to their language and their music -- and find the truths of their lives. I can't find the truth of my own.

My people believe truth is a spiral dance, constantly shifting as the world dreams. The truth of dreams isn't subject to understanding or logic, only to acceptance. So we accept and move on with our own dance through the world.

The Estarians, the Vinaeans, the Semrin, the Hlaenor, the Harulin, the Masters of the University -- all the people with whom I have lived for nearly half my life -- believe truth is an eternal flame, unwavering, pure, unchanging. I often find their stories unsettling. I don't trust their constant striving to burn away the dream-shadows and reveal the one truth in every action, in every life.

Their metaphor itself seems incomplete to me. Flame casts a shadow, flame moves, flame retreats endlessly into itself, shifting color and heat, changing and unknowable. Even the light of the sun changes with the hours of the day and can be blocked by clouds. Flame and light are hardly pure and eternal. But still, a flame is singular.

I left the Ice, the windswept land where the mystery and amorality of life are painted in broad, clear strokes. I came south, through the plains, the forest, the hills and rich farmland, to the city of Estara, once the heart of the world. Here, life works through people more than the land. Here, complexity and dreams fracture the world into thousands of glinting, lying facets.

My people live with simple power and so imagine hidden complexities. 'Civilized' people live with complexity and so imagine simple powers. Though I left my people because I searched for simple truths, because I wanted to understand the world instead of merely accepting it, I'm enough my mother's daughter to be uncomfortable with my southern friends and their unconscious arrogance, their blithe reduction of all experiences to a framework of stunted truths. And yet, for all their blindness, they imagine ideas of such power and beauty my people would be silenced for a time. They've invented nobility, honor, philosophy, science, and universal love. They've built a brilliant flame to which they aspire. And that same light casts a vast shadow in which they drown.

Who am I to judge them? They've created the greatest ugliness I know, as well as the greatest beauty. My people try to accept the world without judgment. Our ugliness is kin to that of bears, storms, or flowers; our beauty is kin to that of bears, storms, or flowers. One can't exist without the other; they dance together in all life, in all actions.

The southerners don't accept the world; they judge, determining good and evil, two words I can't say in my first language. Their ugliness and beauty are kin to nothing I know. Again, the one cannot exist without the other, but they're separated. Here, beauty and ugliness fight each other. Here, life is a war instead of a dance.

Unlinked to ugliness, beauty reaches a purity unknown to my people. So too does ugliness. My people know love, joy, passion, jealousy, and hatred, but no grand epics, no wars, no valiant struggles of humanity against ourselves. We are ourselves, as a bear is herself or a storm itself. People and bears are much the same.

But I left the Ice. I left my people. And here, I've learned that people, unlike bears, can change our world by changing our dreams. And I've dreamed. I've seen unchained beauty and ugliness. I still don't know how to be part of my new world, how to understand and accept the south and the University, but I don't know how to return home either.

I don't know if I have a home anymore.

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Inspired by the 1/2/05 15minuteficlets word #88: complicated

Comments

[redwolfoz.livejournal.com]

The simple/complicated contrast works well.

[edenfalling]

Coolness.