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The Palais Mermonia Archives are the third-vastest library in all-Tevyat, preceded only by the Fontaine Research Institute Archives and the Akademiya Library. A dutiful subdivision of the Gestion, open to interns as young as fourteen, works rigorously to manage it. They dust bookshelves and alphabetize thousands of books, keeping track of those that were borrowed. The Head Archivist is always offered residence in the Palais if they so desire.
Graceful Moonlight casts Her rays into the library. Its books date back to the Pre-Archon War and Remurian periods, written in languages all-but forgotten. It is one of the immortalized parts of the Palais: one of the wooden floorboards near the door whines and creaks loudly upon the gentlest step, a touch-me-not, as if to announce the entrance of the interloper, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience. The staff and executives of the Palais Mermonia have their own offices, of course, but the library brings a sense of novelty to the old dance of signing paperwork and reviewing frayed law books.
Lady Furina appears at the door, the delicatest of flats and billowing chemise still procuring a dynamic change from the floorboard. There had been rumors as of late, of a nymph, an angel or a ghost or a fairy. The dark was where She thrived. A wisp of the Heavens, pale, white-lashed, dressed in their whirlwind of purity, She was found wandering eerie streets under the shroud of darkness and cloud. Bathing in the Weeping Willow of Erinnyes. Wielding the Hauteclaire to nobody in particular. She disappeared into roiling waves— and emerged back, relatively unscathed— before the arrival of the sickening red-orange hue of the Future.
Far be it for Furina to deny these rumors. Far better a rumor than truth. There are always rumors in the Nation of Hydro. There have always been. There is the prophecy, which lives in the furthest ruins and an Island in the Sky, only spread so far by benign word-of-mouth. There is the Hydro Dragon. No one is completely sure how humans came to know about the rain, or the tears. He predates their creation, Their Usurpation, by eons. The history books on such a front are elusive and never checkable. The walls have eyes, and checks wind around fragile human necks. She knows it well; she likes to attach clippings of tabloids to her wall, echoes of her own mistakes. They are covered by bookshelves and tapestries and paintings for the wandering guest-eye, but she marks her name, for the Hydro Archon loves the spotlight.
The Wisp enjoys night. She enjoys it because it does not judge her. The rude sounds of the day are gone by night, and, like a glaze-lily, she flourishes away from prying eyes and the idle noise of criers, the scrutiny of the Great Heavens above. She enjoys it because all those she encounters are free to ignore her presence on the pretense of feverish dreams, exhaustion seeping into their bones. And the Heavens offer more leeway this way: it is Night. What duties must she carry out when there are no waking humans to do it for?
Late-night reading has become a habit of the Lady. She knows the law books and historical documents like her own body. Next is research: water levels, power sources, contingency measures, but she also favors research of things that pique her interest. Music theory, the native wildlife of every nation, the language of flowers, and languages beside Tevyat Basic. Next come the novels. She imbibes the taste of different kinds of prose, sucking them into her mental repertoire, and giggles and kicks her feet for romance and political tension nightly.
The book she checks out tonight, writing her star-pointed name in neat cursive on the checkout sheet, is an encyclopedia. Midnight approaches. Jellyfish: A Reference Guide. She has been told she looks like a jellyfish by co-stars and diplomats, pushed along by some sweeping current of gaiety, of opening night, a trade deal well done. Her mirror self hadn’t had such a hairstyle: a frilled bell, or fiercely curled twintails. She wonders what She had been thinking, brushing and styling her hair before she awoke.
— — —
When she returns the book, she decides jellyfish are her favorite animal, and continues to hold this opinion for the rest of her life. She fawns over the fluffy rabbits and scruffy cats she sees on the street, but jellyfish are… personal to her. They are brainless, emotionless things, simple nerve networks. They devour prey through their bells. They suck them in like she embraces attention.
She feels a stirring in her chest at them, when she wanders into Erinnyes. They are emotionless. They don’t understand her. Large moon jellyfish blooms happen when the ecosystem is out of balance. They are like her, yet. They thrive in the darkness: they can live in most ecosystems. They are bait to be swallowed by any manner of more intelligent, larger creature. They adhere their oral arms to any smaller thing in their radius, and they poison. That is their role. She draws in crowds for a higher purpose. She poisons them with her lies, to see the world as a stage, because she is an actor and that is all she can do.
— — —
Learning to die is an art of its own.
She has been assassinated before. No, not attempted. Assassinated. She has woken up, lungs burning, choking on poison and her own bubbling blood. Such is natural after such a sharp, stark shift of power. The stories say that the Gods have blue blood. Of course, stories are stories, and she is human.
When Focalors told her “you will not die,” she didn’t mean just longevity.
She has died various times. She does not think anyone has seen it. The deaths, sure. Checked if her heartbeat stopped? If her body had grown cold? No. What would such a God die for? She is Focalors. She is Furina de Fontaine. Daughter of Egeria de Fontaine. She is Wisp. She is untouchable. The dosage of the poisons they try to kill her with are absurd; she’d scoff if it were a novel. Only in this play may the protagonist survive.
She has been attacked, as well. Stalked, not always with the intention to kill, but to touch, for she is spectacle, for she is legacy. When they do try to kill her, they are powerful. They strike when she is unguarded, at her pressure points. They are strong enough to wring her by the neck. She is swallowed, and she waits for when a crowd emerges. Lady Furina lives for the spotlight, and that is why she waits. She speaks filthy words to get them to loosen their grip, and when they are shocked, that is when she frees herself. When she cannot, she waits for herself to die, sink to the floor, only to rise spectacularly, phoenix from ash. She keeps a dagger in her pocket, just in case, but she knows how to use a sword, just in case she needs to prove herself. Not well, mind, but she knows. The sword’s flashiness does much of the talking. Seeing the contrast of steel gleaming a luminescent yellow to bright crimson blood is a morbid pleasure of some Fontainians. Her combat is a stage: then ring out the gasps, because she’s so great, so spectacular! She needn’t even Hydro to defeat those pathetic shrimp!
The boundaries of Focalors’s curse have been tested by herself, as well. The Wisp does not survive the waters because she is divine. She does not survive.
There are books on knot-tying among her personal shelves, as well. Flowers, herbs, because she needs to know where to pick her poison. She fears water, for all humans fear the unknown, but she immerses herself in it, limbs flailing and lungs screaming as she dies. She pulses like a jellyfish through the current.
Furina knows the danger of being seen, of being caught, but in her darkest hours, she thinks, Good. They will finally see me as I am. Furina’s bloodied wounds heal, always, before they can scar, before they can bruise. Her bones snap together as if magnetic when her injury point swells like a bloated pufferish, or, more horribly, a womb. It’s always enough to hurt. “Accident” with some props: cake-cutter, letter opener, cat paw.
She needs it sometimes— to remind her that she is alive.
— — —
Scene 42044: She wakes being carried by her Iudex. Her heartbeat had not taken so long to restart, this time. By the look of the sky, she hadn’t even hit pallor mortis. It is cloudy, and rain is soon, but not flooded. She repeats the words in her head like a mantra. She is fine. Neuvillette had not noticed.
From her position, she can hear his breaths. The din of the streets have quieted as throngs of people part to make way for them. Forever the musician, forever the artist, she thinks they are a harmony until the bitter end. Her clothes are stained red in various places. She moves her arm, examining the crumpled cuff.
Furina is prone to drifting. Her thoughts jump from one point to another rapidly. She is prone to forgetting things, which is why she writes out her schedule in prim, neat handwriting, each minute planned. It is a script. Days or weeks go by when she feels like a part of the audience and not the stage. Her voice rings out and doesn’t feel like her own. When she regains any semblance of consciousness, her thoughts move to hurt, acrid, and to escape them, she sleeps in the day and not the night. She sits under the running burning-hot or freezing-cold water of the shower, and lets its sting linger.
In these episodes of drifting, or in her own hours after each death, she plays with her hair, feels her soft flesh, unfurls her palms and limbs, even if they are set with hurt. Like an infant, she struggles with rebirth. It is her own kind of rigor mortis. When the whole world looks dead, Furina feels her most alive.
Her eyes flutter shut. Water rushes in her ears. Sometimes, Furina drifts, and she doesn’t know how to stop.
— — —
She wakes in a bed, dressed in a pale blue hospital gown made of flimsy fabric. It makes her feel more fragile, to not have her frills. She thinks back to jellyfish and their frilled arms. Neuvillette’s posture is stiff across from her, sat in a wooden chair, legs crossed. His gloved hand is soft, clasped in her smaller own.
“What happened?” she asks. She’s surprised at the softness of her words.
He blinks. His expression is stony, at least for him. His voice is gentler than she has ever heard of him in kind: “Do you not remember?”
She shakes her head. She recalls where they’d been: the Epiclese. It had been a murder trial, and the crazed convicted had lunged at her, grabbed at her clothes. That is where her memories blank. She only remembers a fall, the scent of blood, and then water. The Opera was Focalors’s domain, and she assisted her in any way possible.
“That man attacked you.” His voice is back to the vicious hiss she is used to by now. Usurper, she is used to it saying. The anger, to some bloom of surprise inside of her, is directed at the man. “You fought back, but not before he could strangle you.”
That had been what the water was for. To keep on a show, the appearance that she was fighting back with her whole heart. She remembers her kicks, the cold metal of a knife against her skin. “Oh.”
“The water had you falling from the balcony.”
And he had caught her? Full of surprises, that dragon. Or not, considering she died.
“Why?” he asks. And Furina ponders for a second before realizing he thinks she controlled the water.
Under the delirium of sedation, or the drift, she whispers, eyes suddenly transfixed on her bare legs, “I thought you would be glad to be rid of me.”
He looks like a bucket of cold water has been poured on him. It’s the most proof of emotion she’s ever seen on his face. It’s raining, she realizes. “It was not your fault, that the Usurpers did what They did. I’m sorry, Furina.”
He hardly calls her that. In the beginning years, it had been Usurper. Upon the closing years of the first century, he had switched to Focalors. It was another reminder of her own identity: void. Null.
Despite herself, she smiles. “You had every right to be angry.”
His expression crumples. “Not at you.”
— — —
The jellyfish is small. It’s smaller than the nail on her pinky, squirming for release.
When she returns home, she reads about it.
Turritopsis dohrnii, commonly known as the immortal jellyfish, is a species of small, biologically immortal Medusozoa (jellyfish) found worldwide in temperate to tropic waters.
She skims.
If the T. dohrnii jellyfish is exposed to environmental stress, physical assault, or is sick or old, it can revert to the polyp stage, forming a new polyp colony. It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation, which alters the differentiated state of the cells and transforms them into new types of cells.
Theoretically, this process can go on indefinitely, effectively rendering the jellyfish biologically immortal, although in practice individuals can still die. In nature, most Turritopsis dohrnii are likely to succumb to predation or disease in the medusa stage without reverting to the polyp form.
— — —
Every time she visits Erinnyes, the jellyfish comes back with gravity. It is like her. Immortal. It reverts. She can only wonder how it ended in the Weeping Willow: none of its natural predators exist here. She knows they do not have brains, but it’s almost like it recognizes her. What a ridiculous thought.
Over time, she begins to see the jellyfish as an extension of herself. Like the Wisp, she doesn’t like to be judged, and a jellyfish cannot. She tells it stories, her feet half-submerged in the pond muck.
As the prophecy rears its head, she visits it less and less. She is more preoccupied with balls and civil speeches full of empty platitudes. The old books, her brain supplies, call it panem et circenses. The day before Poisson, she picks a Lakelight Lily and lets the water carry it.
— — —
A clear and clean azure flower, it is born where Water Veins come together. It has a simple, cool, and elegant fragrance, pungent and refreshing yet gentle.
In the language of flowers, it means "waiting" and "everlasting promise."
In ancient legends, the Mistress of Many Waters gave a flower as pure as Lakelight to the last Lochknight as a farewell gift. To this day, Fontaine maintains the tradition of picking a Lily and giving it to those on long journeys, wishing one another a road ahead as tranquil as pure water, and that those most precious will be able to follow its cool light, returning to their side.
— — —
When she moves, she no longer goes to Erinnyes. She has less to escape from, these days. A suppressed part of her mind worries for it, what the jellyfish will do, given just a flower and its immortality.
Well, she supposes, it will survive. It thrives in darkness. It rebirths. It will do it all alone.
Just like her.