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Unable to perceive the shape of You,
I find You all around me.
Your presence fills my eyes with Your love.
It humbles my heart, for You are everywhere.
***
Hakim Sanai
***
I.
“Atto,” she asks, and you can hear the newborn thought like an echoing sigh, an electromagnetic distortion that you will never shut yourself to: Olindë’s thought against your own is a soft light like the touch of fingers in fur or the deep humid green scent of moss.
“Yes, my Lindë?”
Her face scrunches in a thoughtful expression, like she’s deciding if she should ask. Something fills your heart like your blood became the sweet potency of affection: she didn’t wish to hurt her father by asking and it reminds you how utterly precious she is. You reach out, easy as a reflex, to reassure her with the nearness of your own mind not-so gentle as hers. Pale, crooked distortion— shadowed frost and ultraviolet— but Olindë does not mind the frayed threads of your light, smiles as your thought casts more shadows than it illuminates. Darkness, for Olindë, was never a source of fear but of comfort. It reminded her that you would never deny her questions, even should some be too difficult for you to answer.
She pats her small hand on your cheek as if to soothe you. It does, like small moth-wings fanning kisses.
“Why can’t you change your shape like me and Ataryo?”
***
II.
You can recall trying to find your hands once, hands on your lap: char of flesh and sinew, sloughing murmur of skin peeling from the memory of bone, catching on the drape of your velvet shroud. You’d been rotting onto your throne for so long that it hurt to leave it: rigor mortis kept you seated upright and a withering, gasping atrophy made sure you’d never try. Now your eyes were rotting too like the mush of ethylene-fruit, cataracts over pith, tears so full of puss they form grey deposits on your eyelashes. Now you can’t even see your hands: just the light. Only the light.
You laugh. Did you know then that you laughed or did it come back to you through the latency of the Void? But later you knew you laughed because you didn’t know what else to do while decomposing, nothing different from you and the inanimate throne. Even worse because nothing could come of you, unlike the sepulcher. No leaf-litter could sponge your body, no hyphae could sink into the give of your black-pale meat, no life to smudge from your ashes. Just corium and invisible light molded in the horrid shape of man.
Dry, slurred laughter. It’s more of a cough, really. A desiccated husk of a breath flaking from parted lips. Hear the shouting coming nearer. The armies marching up to your door. You laugh. The chamber isn’t even bolted and you couldn’t get up to lock it anyways. The harsh sound of armour. Clang of a fight. Lifeless sigh of laughter because you won, you won, you won and you finally got a glimpse of relief like a clear vision of peace in a fog of everlasting ache. It wouldn’t be long now.
The shouting is close— down the hall. You think of calling them but your lips don't move. Hung open, looking for hands but could only see the final heat of red like blood pulsing through the cord of your optic nerves, like a hematoma on the back of your skull, like someone lit a beautiful flame in the small cup of your retinas. Mairon fleeing was your terminal lucidity, and the catch of him turning from you remains hanging from your skeleton long past the rags of your tissue and the smell of corpse wax.
So. You laugh.
Nothing left to lose.
***
III.
Now you like to be silent. Quiet like the hush of a shadow lengthening as the sun drifts down under the cover of the horizon, like the sound of things growing through the loam, like the flutter the snow makes as it falls and lands. Pretend that you are a stone worn by time, a tree with hundreds of rings, a particle of carbon that was once a part of the body of proud Archaeopteryx, once part of a leaf, now floating around with the air.
Easier to breathe when you’re that small.
You like to stand in the middle of the fields before your cabin in Ered Mélamar, a black shape like a tear in faded canvas as you pray along each of your carbons like rosary beads. You’ve always loved the cold stillness of the night and the bright darkness of the winter, the whole world in inverted monochrome. Love the low hollow hum of the land that might just be an illusion your neurons make to fill in the utter silence, love the sharp coldness of the snow under your feet melting from the vibration of your atom’s song.
Existing had taken you eons to learn.
***
IV.
Another thing you love: painting with your daughter.
She babbles on about the shape of her secret world: iridescent like a bubble but made of diamond and silver and home to a Garden. All of her creations live there, and they have tea parties and snowball fights and when the stars come out, instead of sleeping they fly up to pluck them from the great boughs of galaxies like berries bursting light and tangy-sweet on their tongues. Down below they can see the Garden: mountains with terraces made of woven pine-needles and candles that smell like a floral richness in ambergris, a sea in the shape of a hand that holds you above the water and lets you taste the foam of white nougat and honey. A home where there’s a crackling fire and a bed of clouds and her beloved stuffed wolf.
You listen eagerly, head tipped toward her like you want to keep the propagation of her voice close to your skull. Your hands paint without you seeing the canvas because the flush of your pride is a deep pool you dive into: how creative your daughter is! How unsullied her mind with limitation! It brings you back, long, long ago to when you were fledgling, a song with a few notes, drawn-out drone of audio transference and synthetic voices. It brings you back to the canvas of the Void-womb before it was the most terrible of prisons.
And what you paint: a cool, dark world of snow newly-fallen and mountains made of clear ice that contain an ocean in the middle, creatures swimming within the living rock of frozen water. Deep-sea vents keep the mountains alive and liquid, shifting on the crust of the world like proteins on the surface of a cell’s membrane. Magma gushes up steam from the heat at the roots, hardening rock into black glass under the waves and long strands of bubble-chimneys through the water column. Creatures that look through their living home with jewel-like eyes and up into the pale sky’s small black sun where its rays drip like wet hair down from the atmosphere’s turbulence.
Olindë pauses in her rush of words and you are broken from your wonder of her: she crawls onto your lap without preamble and you don’t mind that the scarlet tip of her paintbrush traces an arc across your shirt. Her canvas, you notice, is abstract colours, small splotches that resolve into a larger pattern of fractals like snowflakes or diatoms. But she’s tugging on a lock of your hair now and recalls your attention: gasps in that cute way of hers and the brush makes small curls of red flame on your shirt from her squirming.
You painted one of her own creations there, within your landscape, without noticing. It’s sitting there on an ice-quartz ridge on a cushion of snow and alpine sedge looking at the aurora: a half-cat, half-lizard creature she’d been describing for the better part of a half-hour. A small Olindë-like shape is tucked within the fur, a hand outstretched so the hand’s shadow looks like a little dark star within the ribbon of cerulean in the sky.
She coos, “I gonna paint you in my world too, Atto!” before scrambling off your lap and splotching black onto her canvas.
***
V.
You still think about Eru sometimes, but not so often any more. Your childhood slips away like the memory of an old story or a song you used to sing but can’t recall the whole tune. You don’t mind that it’s slipping away, that what lingers is a poignant aftertaste and not the sharp sickening tang of some venom biting your tongue— maybe you’ve finally given up but what it feels like is moving on.
Inevitable. Some nights the past comes back to attach itself like a burr to your flesh. The emptiness of the Void is an overlay that dips back into your dimension sometimes, a filter that eliminates the contrast of past-present-future so there’s only past, only the endless yawning dark. Those nights you’d sit on the front porch of your cabin and stare out into the dip of the valleys of black-green and let the emptiness that opens from you again pull the ache out like an emotional diffusion.
The pain hurts less because of distance and hurts more because now you have your Olindë curled up in her crib. Because… now your desire for a Father has come true for your daughter in triplicate. Because you couldn’t bear to hurt her so, couldn’t think about sending her down into a world she’d sung with humiliation and confusion and anger and grief as her only companions. It stings and you hiss and you don’t even know what you feel, just that you feel like one drawn-out exsanguination staining the air with copper stagnancy and something like iron oiled with syrup— sharp blade and terrible yearning.
Then you wonder why you were never good enough, why you weren’t made good enough. How someone so perfect as the One could split themselves into such an unlovely piece, why this piece wasn’t melted down into the crucible of matter and antimatter and shaped into something that wouldn’t resemble this fermenting loneliness trying to resolve itself with the modicum of peace in the present. Tears come out. You wonder if He takes pleasure in watching them dam and leak from your eyes, counting them as they’re squeezed from the aperture of your soul that’s wounded enough in pride to let them fall.
Tears come out. Sun comes out. Olindë whines— you can hear Mairon murmur to her as he begins to make coffee. Hear Tyelpë at the front door, calling you to breakfast. The memory of your childhood wandering the Void-womb slips you by like another life, but if you look closely enough, you can see the outline of it remaining on the porch, looking out like a dispersion of smoke.
***
VI.
What’s worse is remembering how you’d hurt Mairon.
There are some snapshots you catch glimpses of in Avathar where the light from the lowering sun would fall across your Beloved’s face and send half of his profile in tidal pools of shadow, sinking into the orbit of his eye-sockets and the delicate arch of a cheek. Filling in like a bruise. Vivid enough to feel the way a cheekbone could crunch against your knuckles, the burst and the colour violet-wan that traced the impact. The gush of precious blood and disappointment stifled under gold eyes that could only send you further into the corner of rage.
(Because no one could love you, because you refused to believe in anything. Because you wanted him deep down to hate you but all you ever beat out of him was devotion in spite. Mairon always wanted to fix things, to order them, to make them better. You would prove him wrong. Tear down, break things. Make them worse.)
You remember, with a sick drop of nausea: like holding an egg with a stillborn dragon in your arms, the heavy dead weight… you remember the pleasure it was to push Mairon away. Like scratching a scab until it bled. The sounds of him retreating from you behind the door— a pause, consideration at the threshold. Thinking better of it. Loved that he was around less and less to see the way you’d sunk into your throne like the ligaments holding your bone were disintegrating and you’d be nothing but a collection of half-conscious carbon.
Hurting your Beloved because he’d be better off. Hurting him because it made you feel wretched, not so wretched any more.
***
VII.
Healing the unlight and extracting vials of antivenom: rehabilitating Avathar isn’t enough, but you do eventually find what work fulfills you.
It’s slow-going at first. Opening up a shop, inviting any who would come through the long journey of war and time to receive healing from the one who’d been the cause of their hurt. Showing dull-eyed, desperate elves how it worked on your own body, seeing how the feverish ones didn’t care, didn’t care— wanted only relief. Walked back to the shadow they’d been thrall too, walked back to the cold and the dark and the spirit of dread and found there, somehow, healing.
(Bridging the gap between the feeling and unfeeling— isn’t what you’d been looking for your whole existence, isn’t that the holy transubstantiation you wanted from God? Impossible to turn lead to gold, impossible to pray for love to one who would not listen. A way to feel again what was missing, a way to have something without ache, even if just a piece…)
You experimented on your own missing legs first: scarred stubs that healed over wrong, looked like tough pinched clay. Mairon made you contraptions of metal, moving parts that articulated graceful, synthetic elegance— but unfeeling. He made it for you with your experiment in mind, little runnels and divots missing from the metal, patterns that filled in like kintsukuroi, broken-and-then-fixed. Lightweight metal he perfected in Mordor, delicate pieces like little bird-bones.
And it worked.
Metal and mycelia decorated with Tyelpë’s jewel-work like living necklaces. The hyphae grow up the flesh of your legs where they were severed, pulsing into your skin painlessly like fingers kneading muscle and they read your ghost-movements in the precise chemical way all things read their environment if you pay attention. Biomechanical, you call it. An arm, a leg, sometimes even just fingers— pale fungi and vibrant slime molds integrating with flesh like mycorrhizae, symbiosis giving back something of what you lost. Arms that could bend and grasp and feel again not in the same way— never the same— but touch and pressure and heat.
(You cry the first time you feel the snow underfoot again.)
Elves come to you first for limbs, then for eyes. Cryptochrome receptors that unfurl over milky, unseeing pools like small green phyllids, sense the sun’s light for the blind elves so the brightness could be enjoyed not just in heat and spirit but that elusive physical way that you’ve come to appreciate through hardship of pain. Elves with living hearing aids worn like jewelry that bloom in the evening, burns healed over with organic tattoos that secrete soothing balms. Scars with thin roots compressing the ache, algae with compounds that helped the synapses remember their old concentrations. Hormones you manage to convince your cultures to make that help those reembodied incorrectly, cures for dragon-sickness that plagued those who met your children’s wrath, braces that help those whose legs no longer moved…
(So much pain in the world. You hadn’t realized how much was needed to help what had been only a few moments of destruction. A severing of a nerve, a slice to the lens, proximity to detonations, roar of dragon-flame, chemical sighs, cracking bone, spilling blood, violence of the limb held to a former body by vein.)
You work through the issues with your husbands and find that you would have been lost without them: the song needed to bind the body to fungi, to mold, to bacteria. The mechanical dexterity needed to guide the body along everyday movements, how to help the survivors into their new limb, eyes, ears, their overwhelming relief from chronic pain. How to get the fungi to survive the constant battering at the bottom of feet? How to maintain the mechanical pieces through use, how best to integrate them with the biotic? What line to place between invasive and necessary? How to help those who have trouble accepting their new prosthetics? How to comfort those seeking help for which you cannot help, at least for a time?
It is difficult work, and unnatural to you— applying your knowledge to healing and not hurt, empathy and not pain. But you know, after all, the bittersweet agony of living in a physical body, of having to mitigate the world through the layer of senses like skim over the clear water of the mind. Knew what it was like to wake up and fall asleep in pain. So you work in your labs, culture your organisms with as much care as you can manage, publish your notes into volumes and send them to Valinor for those who did not wish to get their healing from you.
It is difficult work, but it is art and it is understanding and it is the very beginning of healing.
***
VIII.
You have doubts, always have doubts.
It’s unexplainable sometimes, why you suddenly can’t get out of bed. But when you wake and the weight of everything is sitting on your chest, compressing it like you’ve been bricked up in your own body and then you can’t roll out, just lay there paralyzed with the knot in your throat keeping even your voice from leaving. It reminds you so much of the Void that you tremble with the memory of swallowed-screams and the stuttering gasp for something your lungs could hold onto.
(Dying and coming back again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and—)
Unlight, unsound, unmaking. Nothingness. Can’t see yourself, can’t hear yourself, couldn’t pick your likeness out of a mirror. Mouthing words into the dark so thick it's like a richness, like velvet made of lead. Like your tomb was a neutron star, slow-turning and cold and dark and pushing you into your smallest density.
But that was what you wanted, wasn’t it? It mocks you. You wanted this. Nothing but you, no other creation. You. Only you, only…. Weeping and begging. Mairon, my Maia, my precious, my beloved, my love…
(Eru.)
End it.
***
IX.
The first time Olindë is placed into your arms.
A part of you in your own arms, a part of Mairon, a part of Tyelpë. A part of the world. A part wholly unique. Creation other and One: her own will, spirit, song. She is bright against you, small and curious, a bundle without words but raw with feeling, a consciousness learning how to remember. She is more brilliant to you than the revelation of the World To Be at the Beginning of Time and any sense of claim you desired of the world (wistful scraps and nostalgia of might) is lost to her gurgles.
Her presence in the world was Present: no past and no concept of the future, but a continuation so small, so fragile, so new that it was almost straggering to hold such an important part of you and already being unable to understand what it was like to live without. Holding her, she shares with you freely every strange wonder at faces, at light, at colour, at sound and shape and texture and the voices she’d heard but never knew that they came from lips. She shows you the Present: no past, the future far away— just you and the small weight of her in your massive hands.
The first time Olindë is placed into your arms is the first time you understand why Eru split Himself into two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four…
***
X.
It’s midwinter and snow falls on the mountain so thick you wonder how there is any water left in the sea. Great drifting dunes make the towering pines look delicate, and the sun you used to despise glows behind the milk glass of the clouds and comes down gently on the snow that clings to the evergreen.
Olindë’s laughter rolls off the slopes of the mountains and fills in the hills below and you would follow that echo into the very last note at the shores if you could— but right now you are trying to run away from a barrage of half-melted snowballs, and you can hear her little boots crunch on the snow as she runs half-sunk behind you. Sometimes she stops and you can hear the song of focus coming from her like a ripple of inward waves, let it pass through you and then she’s back again, snowball no longer melting in the intense flame of her palm where her joy surges from the power that she’s learning to control.
You remember when she first shook the stones underfoot— Olindë wanted to make the mountain higher, high enough that she could get a closer look at the stars. She was trying with all her little might to push the peak up with a song that fell from her lips in instruments of colliding plates and magma currents, earth-life and the fire at the heart of the world. You’d placed a hand on her shoulder, asked her to stop and she turned because Why not?
“Remember what Atya said, that we have to think about others. What about the deer and the birds and the foxes? What about their homes getting so high that they get too cold and miss the sun? There are other taller mountains you can climb instead.”
She wrinkled her nose, unconvinced at the time, and insisted that she didn’t like the deer anyways because they kept eating her flowers every spring. But she thought about it, and when she came back to your reading-chair later in the evening you could see that she’d been upset.
“I don’t wanna hurt the nice foxes or even the deer, Atto. I didn’t mean it.”
And each time you think you cannot find more wonder in her, more pride, more love, you are proven wrong in the best of ways.
***
XI.
You think to yourself that:
You have changed shape many times, still change shape every day. Just three ages ago you were nothing but a living corpse, decay in the vague shape of a man, a shadow of swarming flies. Sometimes you feel like you have been carrying yourself up a mountain, dragging your own dead weight and now you’ve just decided to make a home halfway up. Struggle every day to keep from slipping back down after everything you’ve done, everything that’s been done to you, everything that you could have had or been…
But you are here now, with Olindë looking up at you with love and trust so innocent and unconditional. Not knowing your past and not caring because the you here, before her, is her Atto. That three people love you despite this, despite your shape being the shape of water.
What you’ve learned and what you want to teach:
That healing never ends but there is fulfillment in the trying. You sweep away a leaf and another one falls to take its place. That’s just fine. There is no difference between the process and the goal. And so you work every day. For Tyelpë, for Mairon, for Olindë. For the world. For yourself. You know that your hands will always ache even in memory, and they will remind you what needs to be done. Not for penance or regret, nor obedience to Eru. Not for the empathy you still learn. But for love.
Yes, you have changed shape many times, still change shape. You sweep away a leaf and another falls: in healing as in love there is no difference between the process and the goal.
Endless, and yet it is worth living for.
***