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The price of Seeing was the Stones; every true-living creature knew that. But when Lyr first Saw, while on the hunt in a flock of his brothers and sisters, he knew at once that that was not the true price. The price was the Seeing itself.
Behold: first he was fen, fen and fierce and shooting-star bright. Darting with his brothers and sisters, the tallgrass threshing the leading edge of his wings, him darting low low low, eyes watching for the flicker of a stalk, or a roil of soil, that meant lera below.
Then: he was lera—soft-bodied, dull-furred, soft-mouthed. He was lera and still, stone-still—still on the outside, but inside, all writhing guts and innards, a thought-without-form trembling in every strange limb of him, a thing that could only be don't see don't see don't see. The grass tall all around him, the earth pressed up close against him. He was low and soft, and above him his brother was descending, jagged-formed, open-taloned and bright-screeching—
And then he was he again, and fell from the sky, flailing.
When he came to his kin were scrambling around him, stretching on their long gangly legs to see him better, taking aflight to hover over him, craning their long necks to stare.
"Was it Seeing?" asked Nana, the littlest. "Did you See?"
"He did not," Gitkyr said. They all knew the signs. Eyes gone all white. Flight like a thresher, garish and strange, before a sudden falling. Foam at the beak. If Gitkyr said it was not, then it must not be so.
But then Gitkyr rubbed his head against Lyr's face, a gesture so unnatural that Lyr squawked at it. And when Gitkyr pulled away, there was a whiteness on his crown, soft and speckled like foam, and Lyr's heart sank.
Then Gitkyr rubbed his head into the dirt until the whiteness mixed itself gone. "He did not," Gitkyr said again, louder. Then he was up in a rush of feathers, once again on the hunt, so sleek and purposeful it shamed his other brothers and sisters into following too. And then Lyr himself joined, hunter once more, though his heart sank further as he rose, sank as low as lera.
They passed a season that way, his flock, hunting, flying, and living, even though he ought to have gone to the Stones himself. And when he did not, his flock ought to have harried him there, chased him the whole way, or else ought to have torn out his lead-feathers and dragged him. Same as killing the littlest in the clutch, so the others would live. Any mother would do it.
And yet they carried on like that day was nothing. Gitkyr sleek and purposeful as ever, Nana bright and loud as ever. Lyr had not known his kin such cowards. Had not known himself such a coward. Now and again, he looked at Gitkyr and hated him, to keep from hating himself.
Now and again he fell from the sky. The lera more familiar each time. The limbs less strange, the fleshy footing sounder, the soil firmer. Had him wanting to pluck his feathers out after.
At the season's end, when the threshers came from the north, massed as one, Lyr thought, At last. Some passing hawksbody must've seen his Seeing and told those of the Stones. Or else some sibling found their courage and told a thresher passing by, and they came back with their kin.
Even so, Lyr thought to flee. That he did not was not courage, as there was no choosing in it. He saw the swarm of them, their black-hard-jittery strangeness, and he thought flee, flee! but he went still where he was perched, the terror of the lera in him again. Went still long enough for the mass of them to swoop upon him, bright-click-clicking. And he heard Gitkyr screeching. And he heard the wind rushing. And the world was dark at once.
At the Standing Stones, Lyr awoke, and there they had to goad him into the earth.
They being the threshers around him, with their needly beaks and worm-low bodies and feathers spiked like burrs. In flight they had rushed upon him like so many locusts; here, they roiled around him like grubs on old flesh, and he was certain they would make him old flesh if he was still for too long—so he jerked forward, awkward, the stone beneath his talons too smooth for grasping.
Ahead was a passage too low for flying. And there, framed by stone, another fen waited.
"Welcome, Lyr," she called, seeing him. "I am Gatik."
She was huge and she was proud and he was terribly afraid.
Hawksbodied like him, but moreso, larger than the largest he'd ever seen, her beak bright against her stone-dark feathers, all smoothed down and confident. His head came up to her belly. She watched him watching her. She was much amused.
"Come along then," she said, and turned into the darkness behind her.
At the entrance, there was light enough to see, but that light turned to darkness in five talon-strides. And from there the stone narrowed fast, so narrow he only fit with his wings tucked in. A place for lera, and Lyr found himself balking like one, staring into all that dark, and what yawned beyond.
Gatik came back, partway. Just enough for him to see her again. "It's easier without them," she said, craning her neck toward the threshers, "but if you will not—"
One thresher nipped at Lyr's wing; another, his leg, and he squawked and flapped them away and took a hated step forward.
Gatik roused at that, her feathers lifting and then smoothing in a great roil, from the tip of her beak down to the end of her tail. And then she stepped ahead of him, steady, once more into the dark.
Lyr followed, gangly and awkward, his talons clacking behind her. It was not good to be deep in the earth, he knew. Sky was the source of knowing.
Meanwhile she moved as lera, soft and quiet and supple, her talons making not a sound. As if she were lera, but—no. She could speak and think. Fen, not lera.
She paused in a place so dark that the only light was a whiteness around her eyes. And as they waited, the light grew brighter, and the whiteness broader, until he realized she must be Sighted too. And then the light was bright enough for him to see a little ways around them, though there was not much to see. Smooth twisting walls of stone all around. Smooth stone below. Nothing else stirred.
"Past this turn," she said, "and a few more, there will be no wind, no breeze, no air moving at all." She regarded him coolly. "Take care not to move it yourself. We will stand there in silence and then we will wait."
She led the way, talons going sfft sfft sfft. His own, clack clack.
She turned a last corner, gestured with her beak, and then was still.
He matched her, stork-still, those stillest of all true-living creatures.
Gatik's eyes alone shone in the dark. He did not like to look at them, with all their whiteness, but there was nowhere else to look.
Then we will wait, she had said, so he waited. Waited, expecting—something. He remembered what it was like, to be lera, with his brother's talons wide-stretched and hurtling toward him. He expected it would be like that, except he would feel the snap.
But instead there was nothing. Stillness and stone.
Lyr could be still a long while. He had to, to hunt, as he had for three long summers before coming here. Some days you threshed the fields, true, back and forth, over and over. But some days you clung to one lone twig all the day long, until you saw the sure stirring of a lera in dirt, and dove at once.
He imagined himself back there. Twing-clinging, all-seeing, ruffled against bright sky. Imagined himself strong and hunting.
So it was a very long while before he grew tired. A very long while before his attention wavered, though he could see, from the whiteness of Gatik's eyes, that she wavered not at all.
"Gatik," he asked, "how long until—"
And at that slightest stirring, the sound of his speaking, a bit of dust stirred—so slight it missed even his hawk-sharp eyes, but it did not miss his Sight—
—and he was lera, some furless lera in some other place, leg-deep in in a dark lake, and shouting at the creatures just over the ice, their bodies small and soft, their beaks flat and wide, like fen turned lera, terrible to look at, a dullness to them that no feathered face ever had—
—and he was lera, the same lera, but now overwarm, touching the pinkish skin of another of his kind like mating, except soft flesh where there ought be hard talon, squelchy and lurid as a fresh kill, and he was sick with the mixing of them, and then the lera was sick too, with something else, a dread too mighty to be held in by all that softness, retching forward and fouling the air—
—and he was lera, staring at markings on thin white leaves, furious, because he knew-without-knowing-how-to-say what those markings meant, a feeling like an interloper in one's own flock, except moreso, the kind of brazenness that could only be answered with talon-strength—
—and Gatik was rousing over him, much-pleased.
Lyr came back to himself in spurts and stutters. Like little furred lera did, when he swiped untrue, and only nicked skin with a strike meant to kill—he'd see the thing scurrying away mad, mindless, then see it as it stilled to catch its breath, saw it blinking and staring and blinking again, all while he'd found his new perch and could only glare from afar, having lost the strength of surprise. The lera would stare and stare until, at last, its terror faded, it knew itself and it knew the meadow once more, and looking at him then, it seemed almost fen.
Gatik waited until Lyr was fully in himself again, waited to see him look at her same way.
Then she said, "Those were fen-before-our-kind, the ones you saw there."
Lyr remembered the sickly-dun flesh of them. The scant fur. "They are as lera," he said. "It cannot be."
"Tell me it is not so, ehn?" she said, and waited for him to answer.
He thought of how it had been, to see as them. To look upon those marked leaves and know things a thousandfold. The vast strangeness of it. The distance between him and them, as great as the distance between him and the lera had ever been. Moreso, even.
He did not answer.
She nodded. "Those fen-before-us, here they true-live on forever. You See and so you See as them." She gestured behind him—he turned to look, and saw those twisting walls of stone, beyond which that dark chamber lie. "Some Sightless brute might go in there and see only specks of dust but we are cleverer than their kind."
Lyr looked behind himself again, toward that chamber, and felt a dizziness worse than he had ever known. Felt, all at once, the weight of the earth above him, all those miles of stone, felt it like it had all collapsed in on him at once. He was a thing alive, of light and sky; this was no place for him. A terror, then, not like lera but like drowning—he felt he was drowning, surely as if he'd swallowed water—he flailed for flight in the still still air, shrieking madly—
But of course there was nowhere to fly, the ceiling too low for it. Gatik blocked the only way out, and already she was stepping forward, already crowding him back. She was bigger; she was stronger. Met his blind slashing with talon-strength of her own, all handy deflections; his sharpest strikes hardly seemed to move her.
"Not so jittery, fen," she said, much amused, "else you'll only stir the dust again, ehn?"
The dust. The breath. The Seeing after.
He stopped flailing at once, though he did not stop trembling. She stepped forward, the way fanged lera did, when they found some fat round lumbering creature to make into a meal, and gathered round to push them back, back, back. Over a cliff, or into some muck, or into one of their waiting jagged mouths.
Lyr found himself stepping backward, much the same. Around a corner, then another, and another—and then he was inside the chamber once more.
He could just make out the dust, now. The faint brightness of it, glistening in the dark.
He felt all his feathers flatten. He went still as stone, except for staring. Staring at Gatik, begging with his eyes, because he could not risk speaking. Inside he felt as soft as lera.
Gatik looked each way, and then past him. "Take care, fen," she said. "Next time I won't drag you out." And then she turned and loped her way on out, somehow stirring nothing as she went—and he was still there, alone in the dark.
What was it like, standing in that place alone? willing himself to stillness, lest the dust stir again?
Like snatching a leaping fish, mid-flight, and piercing it though the heart in one motion. Like landing on a reedy thin branch without stirring it the littlest bit. A thing he could do for certain—once, and many times more. And many, many times more, if he was careful and clever and strong.
But not forever. Not every time.
And when he let the fish slip away, when he missed the branch—when his head grew heavy with nodding or his shoulder itched, or his wing jittered just so, and the dust stirred in turn—
—he was robed in wool, thick and gray, with heavy booted feet, squelching in muck, and facing a line of lera-like-him. And the lera-like-him, those men, they lifted their limbs as one, and also they lifted smooth brown things with slick sharpness on the end, sharp like talons but silvered and huge. He could smell killing in the air, and yet he was running not away but towards that row of silvered talons, and thus was gashed himself, tenfold, and trampled—
—and then he was robed only lightly, the air so thick and sticky he thought for a moment he was underwater, but it was only air. The sun bore down, harsher and brighter than any he'd ever known; he found himself panting. And he was staring at a man who eyed him like lera, a man whose gaze made him twitch with running, except when he twitching to move his limbs stopped short, and he saw grasping things around his limbs so he could not run. He looked to the side and there were others like him, all panting, the blackish gleam of grasping things around their limbs too—
—and then in the Stone, he was writhing, and that writhing churned the dust anew, so that there was no breath between the visions, no space between them, just a churning, churning, churning—
—and he was she, and thin, and flailing, as a foul-smelling someone wrestled her onto the floor, and outside she heard shouting, could smell burning in the air—burning reeds, yes, like plainsfire, but also earthier and fouler, a burning that made her retch onto her stomach. Which only made the foul one on her furious—she made out the words, knowing-without-knowing them, heavy and coarse, wincing with them—
—and he was small and thin, half-grown, shaking inside something like the Stones, but small and sleek where the Stones were huge and still. He was small and thin, hunched in the back, while the thing he was in shook with speed, and from upfront he heard shouting like dumbfucks I'll end it here I swear I will and then they were veering wildly, jolted every which way, and the shouting started to slur—
—and in the Stone, he still writhed, but less so now, from sheer exhaustion. Every inch of him so stretched and worn that, had a fanged lera happened his way, he could not have lifted his head a feather's breadth in protest. His talons were cracked and ground to blunted tips from his scrabbling at the stone, little shards off them scattered around, blood-flecked and dust-mixed. The stone remained stubborn and smooth as ever. Blackness took him, then, at agonizing length.
And when he stirred to awareness, a long time after—enough to blink and see some white in the darkness, and enough to feel his wing twitch, dangerously, in a way that risked stirring the air—he craned his neck in a panic and bit his own leg, as powerfully as he could, so his world would become just that one sharp point of pain. So he could hold in his screeching and feel only that, just that, one point of agony to keep him still.
And that worked, for a time. Until he turned his neck just so, and bit so hard that the bone beneath groaned, then cracked, and that pain was not a sharpness but a bright blinding thing, which startled him into squawking, and then the dust had him once more—
—stabbing shearing sprinting; walking lumbering harvesting; clutching clutching clutching—
—and when he came back to himself, from then on he only bit the soft part of his leg, feathered and fleshy, to keep from snapping it further. And he could manage that way quite a while. The scabs and snapped feathers were thick in his mouth. The darkness lightened by degrees. The pain: a point of lightness, a sound perch, a single thing to live by.
At length, Lyr became aware of Gatik there.
He came up from a churn and there she would be. Feathers plushed out and pleased. He watched her a moment, met her eyes. Then some little twitch, some unconscious shifting of his weight, and he was churned again—
—but on the other side of it, she was still there. Was there all the time, he started to think. As the time between churnings grew greater. When he was in himself, more and more, to notice her there.
Sometimes she was rousing, bristling her feathers one by one with glee. Sometimes she was only looking.
"Awake, ehn?" she'd say sometimes, when she sensed him watching her. And she'd stand there waiting, rapt, until he faltered again, and he knew her not.
Once they stood watching each other a long time. Too long for her liking, it must have been, because she'd said, "Again," with an impatient hiss, a hiss that, of course, stirred the dust—
—and he was robed in wool again, and sprinting in mud—but sprinting steadier, this time, holding his fingers firmer around the long talon in his hands, and he fell upon that row of rivals like a fanged thing—tore into six of them, before one pierced his chest through, and even then, he found himself stretching his strange lips wide enough to show teeth, and with the last strength, pulled himself close enough to stab through the one stabbing him—
—and he was jostling in the back seat, and he knew he would die, but he could do this much at least—crept forward and reached his hands around the neck of the man upfront, the thing soft and white as lera, and his shameful-thin fingers could do at least this much—
—and he was she, the air still burning, covered in her own spittle-filth, that foul-smelling man pressing his limbs against hers so that she could not move. Outside this place, out in the city to the edge of the walls, she could hear wailing, a feeling like—like all her kin being devoured, only her kin was not a dozen but thousands of thousands, and these men come to treat them low as lera. She looked up at that him, that man, and with a talon-sharp hardness quite unlike the soft of her skin, set her shoulders, set her strength, wrenched one wrist away, and jabbed two fingers into the soft flesh of his eyes—
—and then he was the foul-smelling man, screaming, sightless, as she writhed beneath him, as sly wriggling lera do. But even sightless, grabbing blind, he could find her hair to grab her by, and so then grabbed her head, and then smashed it into the ground. Heard a crack and felt a thrill at it, his blood up now. Smiled and pressed his limbs against hers again—
—and he was staring at Gatik again. Her feathers sleek with pleasure.
"Yes," she said, like a coo. "You See." And then she craned her neck to preen his head-feathers, one by one. Slow and careful as a lover.
He did not answer. Did not preen back in turn.
And at length he became aware of others in the dark. Other fen, like he.
But sicklier, wearier. He could see the outline of their feathers as they spasmed, and could see those feathers scattered on the floor, whether plucked or molted, in ragged little piles. Could see that they could not see him, even though they could See. Could hear them, too, though he did not remember hearing them before. All shrieking and hissing and groaning as wounded lera do, though there was no wound, and so it went on for hours and hours and hours.
When one died it was a long while before Gatik went to drag them away. And when one died, the mites and flies did not crawl upon them, as they would have outside; their flesh did not turn acrid in the sun, for there was no sun. Too deep in Stone for that. Instead it just sit there, same as in life except for the stone-coldness. Their eyes blank and huge in death. A terrible thing to see, and Lyr wished he couldn't.
Sometimes he could feel them, too—the other-fen. The fen who lurked in the dust. For that was what they were, dreadful as it was to know it.
Lyr would go down for a churn, and churn, until he righted himself just enough to see one of them—not as looking through them, the way it was with Seeing, but looking at them, and when he managed it, he felt them staring back. Some creature like he but thousands years old, thousands in the dark.
Do you know? the other-fen shouted. Do you know? And Lyr did not shout back. Could not, in any language they would understand.
Let us die, the other-fen shouted. He did not answer that either.
Though he wondered if others did. Those other fen in the dark with him.
Most were sickly, true, most were only writhing, but one or two looked well. Well in that their feathers were well-kempt, and their shrieking rare.
Less well in that their eyes had a glaze that unsettled Lyr, made him think of the foul-smelling fen in the dust. They blew air through their nostrils on purpose, just to stir up the dust, and plushed their feathers out in pleasure as it swept over them.
But they too grew sickly in time. It only took them longer, and looked different. Kept their feathers sleek and preened til the end, from how they worried them, over and over. But they would grow bored of eating, tired of breathing, rasp strangely and scrape their beaks against the ground and scrape and scrape until they scraped it soft and round. And they would start staring senseless. And then Gatik would drag them away.
Meanwhile Lyr was—not well, but fine. In time he could make out more and more. Of the other-fen there, and the walls around him, which were not bare stone but marked. He saw the markings on the walls, and in time, saw meaning in them. Meaning, where he'd seen none before. Like how the dust-lera became fen, and the fen became men, and the men became people, all without him noticing. He saw the etchings in the stone and knew counting. And a little later on he knew words. And tools, and shapes, and trade, and things stranger still—
When he stirred the dust now, he knew why the fen was furious at the things on the paper. Knew it was paper, and how it was made. Knew the shape of that world, nearly as well as he'd once known his flock. Still he could not bear to answer the fen, when it cried out to him, Do you know? But he knew. He knew, in a way.
He was fine, just fine. Not staring-mad. And not sickly either.
And that was when Gatik came to him, and looked him over, and said "Come," and she turned to lead the way out.
Gatik led him, not to the surface, but deeper still into the earth.
By now he could see in these chambers as well as he ever had outside. So his eyes must glow like Gatik's, now. And he moved like her, too, long loping strides. He wondered how else he had changed. Wondered if Gitkyr would still know him, if their paths ever did cross.
In one twisting passageway, he saw some threshers scurry by. And he saw they were not threshers, but made things—made like the metal of the other-fen, made like their gears and rods and watches. Made, though those other-fen had been dead for so long that they were dust and dust alone.
"How?" Lyr asked.
Gatik tossed her head smugly. "Come and see."
In that deepest darkness even his new sight began to strain. Could see only outlines.
But he sensed fen there, like how the other-fen had sensed the burning of her city. Or like the dark and vile mills in which some of those other-fen had labored. Only it was not past; it was not other-fen. It was fen, kin. Hawksbodied shapes in the dark.
Threshers, new-made, swarmed below them. They, perched neatly above.
"Wonderful, ehn?" Gatik said. But Lyr had stopped short, had stepped back cringing.
He could see it, then. Almost as clearly as Seeing itself:
They would perch themselves here, and bring other fen into the fold—those who could See, to See, and the rest to strain here—
And the fen would fill the burrows, and in time learn to see in the dark, even without Seeing, and so lose their fear of stone—
And the fen would grow, warp, change, and the earth would grow and warp and change in turn—
And then they were the other-fen, beaks full of blood and feathers, talons scratching curses into leaves and letters and walls and tombs and machines, not from hunger but hate—the thing in the dust, the only eternal thing, from which all else came—
"I'd rather be lera," Lyr gasped, with the last thing that was fen inside him. "I'd rather be dead."
He said that and it felt true, the only true thing. Better to fledge and fly and hunt and die. Better that than this.
But how he felt and how he thought were different things, now. He had not known the like before. It made him dizzy.
This Gatik—he saw her, now, like a sly bird dropping her egg in the nest of another. This thing in him, hatched and whole, hungering, devouring all, but it was of his nest and he could not turn it out.
"Is that what you'll do, then?" she asked, dry as dust. "Die?"
He did not answer.
"If you so want to die," she said, drawling, easy, "you know how. Know it from the dust."
A sharp thing in the throat. A jump from a tall place. Going out in deep still water to dampen his limbs and wait until strength failed. He had Seen hundreds of ways. Knew them like he knew hunting, by now. Because of her.
"Funny how that goes, ehn? You would do it, to be without it, but you could not do it without."
So he was mangled either way. He hoped Gitkyr never saw him again. Hoped it mightily. Oh to have been the littlest of the clutch, and killed then.
"You took to this so well, Lyr," Gatik said, saying his name for the first time ever. She was beside him, taking his feathers gently in her beak, and she preened them well, so well he felt his chest swelling with warmth—
He drew back. Glared at Gatik as he would a rival. No—among his flock, he'd had rivals, and this was nothing like. He stared at Gatik like the boy staring at the drunken father, like the woman in the room with the soldier—if he was mangled either way, well—he spread his talons wide—
And she drew back, her gaze now full of ire. "Perhaps you need more time," she said, rustling her feathers.
He nearly asked her what she meant. Then he looked down and saw, too late.
There was dust on the ground here. Thicker than he'd ever seen before. Dust she'd carefully steered them around, but if she rustled her feathers just so—
He wanted to move. Wanted to fight. Wanted to kill like those other-fen did. But he saw her spreading those great wings, and all that glistening dust, and instead he went limp as lera. Begged with his eyes.
She flapped her wings only once. Once, and the dust rose up around her, thicker and whiter than he'd ever seen. Rose up, and roiled toward him in one great cloud—that Gettysburg, that Carthage, those thousand broken ghosts—and his shrieking rose up with it, up and up forever.