Vishardsh's sandbox

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The wind gusted snow into the hollow of the burrow’s main gate, stone brick dusted with white and the time-darkened spruce cold and barred behind the wanderer. He shifted his stance rhythmically, pacing back and forth, eyes always on the field before him.

“I know you are there,” he called, out into the white. He could see scarcely a yard, the world seeming to terminate in fathomless, featureless nothing. “Show yourself.”

Distant, just below the surface of hearing, a set of footsteps could be heard, crunching against the snow. Then a figure emerged from the slow storm, long of face and wrapped in a dark cloak that once upon a time would have been finery, now ragged and caked in ice.

A nail rested in his hand. Dark steel, just like the wanderer’s.

“Hello, Syr,” he said, voice cracking.

“I am Orpek,” said the wanderer. “I have promised to protect this burrow.”

“Why,” said the thin rat, “I am Kerfel. And I have sworn to protect mine.”

“Come no further,” snapped Orpek, Kerfel halting his advance a dozen paces before the larger rat. There was a silence, for a moment. The wind whipped the hood from Kerfel’s head and he drew it back with a shivering hand. Then he spoke again.

“Perhaps I am not the berserk raider you expected,” he said. A laugh dropped from his lips.

Orpek watched him. “Perhaps.”

“It started with a bolt of lightning,” he said, a voice that was used to halls and grand gatherings stumbling over a frozen tongue and a rising panic more chilling than the wind. “It struck our fields and turned to smoking ash what would have been the greatest harvest in a generation. Then came this winter, faster and c-c- fuck- colder than any in memory. And then came the war, and our stores were taken, nothing but bare boards left. We- we had expected peace and prosperity. We had acted according to the shining world we believed we had found ourselves in.”

“Litterlings,” said Orpek, heart seeming to slow. “You multiplied.”

“We have children with us,” he said, voice breaking. “Three dozen still survive. Will you let us in?”

Orpek addressed the gate behind him without letting his eyes leave Kerfel, voice raw. “Liege Harnen, hear this rat’s entreaty.”

They both shivered, the wind slicing at their chapped faces.

After a long silence the outer gate opened and a mouse emerged, thickly wrapped against the cold and wearing a crown of gold-traced hawthorn upon her brow. At her waist hung two iron sickles, at either shoulder a guardsman in red and black and silver.

“It’s been a long time, Kerfel.” she said over the ruff of her fur coat. “Speak your piece. I will hear you.” Her paws hung near the hilts of her blades.

“We are a peaceful people,” he began, but Liege Harnen cut him off with a laugh.

“Anyone would say that,” she said, the voice that had been harried but warm when it welcomed Orpek to the burrow two nights before now as sharp as the ancient metal all three carried. “I would. Don’t speak like a leader. Tell me what you want.”

“Shelter,” said Kerfel. “Food. Your burrow, your stores for our survival. Our children’s survival.”

“We have barely enough for ourselves,” said Harnen. “I’m sorry, Kerfel. But we’ll all starve if I let you in.”

“Then just-” Kerfel said, wrapping his cloak tighter about himself with his free hand- “Then just the warmth of your halls?”

But Liege Harnen was already shaking her head. “You know it couldn’t work,” she said. The wind hissed and Orpek blinked, jaw working as he made his own silent calculations.

“I’m begging you, Liege Harnen,” he said. “Please. For my people. For your legacy. For goodness, just plain goodness.”

Harnen shook her head.

Kerfel shifted his stance on the freezing earth, eyes pleading. But Harnen was unmoved.

A shuddering paw reached his mouth and a long, thin whistle pierced the air.

From the storm behind him huge shapes loomed, mice dragging engines of war and ranks of soldiers with the ragged light of desperation in their eyes. They halted behind Kerfel, a wall of wood and brass and ballista, locked shields and locked jaws.

“So this is a siege,” said Harnen, hands resting on the hilts of her sickles.

“Will ye let us in,” came Kerfel’s reply, distant in the wind. The ranks of his soldiers made no sound.

“We will not,” she called back.

“Then this is a siege,” said Kerfel. He drove the point of his shining nail into the snow-scabbed dirt.

Orpek watched as a storm raged behind Harnen’s eyes.

“I will take your children,” she said, and the wind stilled for a moment. “And any food you still have. No more.”

Kerfel heaved, shoulders wracked with something that Orpek mistook for retching before the sound of laughter reached him, raw, pained laughter.

Then he stopped.

For the first time he turned back, leaning heavily on his nail as he addressed the people of his burrow.

“They who would take this offer, remain ye silent,” he said, voice hoarse and thick with something that was not quite fear. “All else say aye.”

Orpek would travel for many years before the sound of the following silence left the back of his mind. Six dozen mice, shoulder to shoulder, gritting teeth and saying nothing.

And above it the sound of a single child, crying out.

When Orpek left the burrow at the first sign of dawning spring he found Kerfel’s nail, slumped and beginning to rust in the centre of a clearing flushed with the buds of snowdrops.

The mist seemed to pour from the stars that night, the world cold and full of thick silence. Under the pawsteps of the wanderer the ground was frozen hard with frost, each blade of grass an obstacle as hard and sharp as a twig in the first frost of winter. Orpek breathed steadily. He had not slept since the day before, warned that the moors ahead were bare of trees and any vegetation taller than his waist cropped short by the roaming herd of sheep. There was no shelter out here, no hiding from the sky or the soft glow of the moon, or the hawks that were said to hunt this place. But cross it he had to.

Just then, as he crested a hill that stood between him and his destination, he heard a sound. Footsteps, at once weighty and strangely soft, but not possessed of the cruel gait of a predator stalking its prey. The rat peered into the dark and saw, with silent and growing horror, a tall shape, taller than he was by at least half a dozen times. His paw went to his nail.

The shape came closer then stopped, seeming to peer down at the rat.

“Who goes there?” called Orpek, breaking the quiet.

Through the haze the silhouette of a paw was raised, seemingly in peace, though not a word was spoken back.

Orpek mustered his wits and spoke again, quelling the quiet fear that had grown in his breast like the frost. “I am a traveller,” he called again. “I mean no harm to you or anyone else.”

The tall shape gestured at itself, then off north, crossways with Orpek’s path.

“I mean you no harm,” Orpek called again. And then, somewhat absurdly, “Fear not.”

The figure held still, then stepped forward again, long, soft footfalls crunching through the frost. Orpek beheld a creature not unlike himself, long ears, long feet and a furry body lacking a nail all beneath a pair of quick brown eyes. A hare.

“Where are you headed, friend?” asked Orpek.

The hare gestured to the north again, and then to the huge pack on its back, hung heavy with sacks and sacks of grain held in a wicker structure a family of mice could have lived their entire life within. His paws shaped the sign for food.

“For you?” asked Orpek, but the hare shook his head, snorting softly.

Burrow, he signed. Mice. Barren. Hunger.

The wind picked up, ruffling the fur of both travellers, and Orpek found himself scanning the starry sky and clutching the hilt of his nail.

“A bad harvest?” he asked, once the gust ended and the silence settled once more, but the hare shook his head again.

Barren sixteen years, he said with his paws. I carry food.

“For sixteen years?”

The hare simply nodded.

“What of the hawks?”

I carry food, the hare signed. Barren. Hungry mice.

Orpek looked up and saw sixteen years of fear, sixteen years of carrying grain across the moor to the burrow that could not feed itself, and in a flash scars around the nape of the hare’s neck, the remainder of talons that had scarred but not pulled the hare from the earth, and he understood.

“Be safe,” said Orpek, and at that the hare crouched, holding out a paw almost as large as Orpek’s head.

Be safe, the hare’s eyes said, and Orpek took his paw and shook it.

As he made his way down the hill he fancied that he could see the tall, dark figure of the hare through the swirling mist, back aching under the weight of a lifetime of nameless service to a place not of his kin or tribe, neck still stinging under the scars, long feet plodding on despite the quaking in the creature’s heart.

Orpek had never quite gotten the hang of sliding down rope.

He was a solid creature, he reflected, palms burning as he let himself down another few terrifying inches. A beast meant to be grounded in solid earth. Like a stone. Or an obelisk. No, mucking about going up or down was the business of birds, or beetles. Not rats. Certainly not this rat.

He landed awkwardly on a stone hidden in the leaf-litter at the bottom of the shaft and gritted his teeth in a silent curse. The rat steadied his nail and fussed with the lantern tied to his waist, holding it aloft and stepping forward into the dark at the bottom of the earthen shaft.

“Young Hossi,” he called. “Young Hossi, I am here to find you.”

He waited, then forced the sudden fear below his breastbone shut like a fist around an oyster. “YOUNG HOSSI!” he yelled, the shout echoing off into the dark cavern that ran off deeper into the earth, roots hanging from the ceiling. But just as he was about to draw his nail and stride on in a voice called back, small and more than a little afraid.

“D-down here,” it called. “But don’t- don’t hurt it!”

Orpek frowned, then walked on, deeper into the tunnel. Past the leaf litter at the bottom of the shaft the floor was bare earth, dusty and undisturbed by footprints.

“Are you safe, Hossi,” he called, ears twitching to catch the direction of the litterling’s reply.

“I- I’m pretty sure,” Hossi squeaked back, her voice echoing out of a small side-tunnel. Orpek hurried, silent, and peered down the shaft.

“Ah,” he said, relieved. “You’ve made a friend.”

“That’s good to know,” Hossi replied, sounding slightly strangled. “Who are you again?”

Orpek set the lantern on the ground and stepped inside, ducking to clear the low roof.

“Hello, syr,” he said to the beast. The beast said nothing but its little eyes tracked Orpek’s progress.

Hossi sat against the back wall clutching a berry, looking extremely startled. “Um,” she said, “Would you mind telling me what’s happening? Please?”

The beast started to crawl up Orpek’s side.

“This gentleman is a millipede,” said Orpek, wincing a little at the contact. “He means no ill will.”

“Well I know that,” said Hossi, crossly. “It’s rude to assume that someone is going to eat you when you don’t even know what they are. So I assumed that the-”

“Millipede.”

“Millipede wasn’t going to eat me. Even when it crawled all over me and started tasting me.”

“That is considered polite for millipedes,” said Orpek. The millipede tasted the corner of his mouth and began winding up over Orpek’s head, making his ears twitch involuntarily. “And I must say it is- excuse me, Syr, my eyes are in use- it is-” he sighed and sat down next to the young mouse. His old eyes, the blackest red and tired with seeing, met the eyes of the litterling.

“It is brave and right to believe that people can be kind,” he said, solemnly. “In fact it is because that people can be horrid and monstrous and cruel that it is brave to believe that they can be kind.” The millipede wound along his arm and down to Hossi. It curled up in a spiral at her feet and promptly stopped moving, perhaps asleep.

“But your mother will clobber me if I delay,” he said. “Now watch where you wander or you will fall down somewhere more dire, and your mother will clobber us all.”

A storm spat fat drops of spray into the dampness of the hole between the roots of a tree Orpek had sheltered in.

On a bed of half-mulched leaves, soaking and cold and sick with fever, the wanderer shuddered, deep in the throes of his illness. Upon him came the assault of the past, as much as the rain that splattered his fur, cold drops causing him to flinch as though hit.

“Oh, Gállen,” Orpek groaned, shivering on his side, lost wandering between the mist-soaked pillars of all the years he had lived. “Oh, my Gállen-”

He remembered the warmth of his chest against his, the roughness of his fur and the way his teeth felt as Gállen kissed Orpek between the ears, and at the same time, awash in the logic of his fever, he remembered that betrayal- all the little ways he had lost him, bit by bit, as power and greed and anger turned him into somebody Orpek did not recognise but could not stop loving. And how he had raised his nail, long and straight and sharp, the sword of the second-born of his noble house, and how Gállen had rained down blows, the captain of the guard fighting the lordling with all the brutality of utter, shameful regret. How his nail had been wrenched from his hand, the tip bent as it hit the stone ramparts, and how Gállen’s blade had met his face.

Orpek started in his half-sleep, unable to see where dream and reality were cleft. He cried out, mistaking the aching of his ageing joints as the blows of nailmetal, for the flinching of betrayal. He sobbed, clutching onto nothing, and finding only cold, wet earth and the freezing wind.

He lived again through his fall from the wall, his blade tossed after him in dismissal. Landing in the muck.

The memories twisted and shuddered and cut into themselves. Wall- love- betrayal- nail- kiss- wound- fall- warmth-

Morning came slowly as Orpek woke. His fever had broken in the night and he found himself groggy and cold and confused, but despite all odds alive. His pack- hung from the roof of the little- was dry and intact.

Fingertips of light traced the landscape as he stepped outside, leaning heavily on his walking-staff. Puddles between the leaf-mulch shone with silvery brilliance and the moss on the trunks of the twisting trees glittered with gentle brilliance.

Orpek washed himself in a pool of clear rainwater that had collected in a basin formed from the twisting roots of a beech tree before setting off into the subtle warmth of the coming day, the sun behind him. And as he trudged through the mud and along the arcs of roots and the broad backs of fallen trees he felt his pain and saw the beauty of the world, and found wonder in it all.

“Oh, my Gállen,” he said, a heavy smile finding itself on his lips. “What I would give to show you what I have found.”

A Hand Stretches for the Stars, Knowing They are Out of Reach

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I arrived in the village on a foggy morning, the air thick and cold enough to allow my drifting mind to forget that this place lay under heaven, seeing instead slate roofs slumbering heavy over their dwellings in some silent nowhere-place.

It was almost empty, and with a sudden thinning of the blood in my heart I suspected it ravaged by plague, or drought, or famine, or the sword in the twenty-one years I had been absent, and my mind summoned the names and faces of the townsfolk unbidden. My heart lurched and the doubts that had been building in my mind began to solidify into a thunderhead. I prayed I had recorded their stories well enough.

Wooden walls creaked in the slow wind, and the restlessness in the centre of my chest that had been growing these past few months lurched like an animal in a cage.

Ahead of me on the street a shape detached itself from the shapes in the mist and stalked towards me with a strange gait.

“Hello?” it called, wariness and fear intermingled. “Who is there?”

“Lady Tianhong, Who Scribes,” I returned, starting a little myself. “Have no fear, I-”

“Oh, goodness,” returned the voice. “The scholar. I recall now. Yes, you said you would be back some twenty years ago. Ah, forgive me.” The sound of a stick thumping packed earth came toward me and the figure of an old woman resolved itself, grey hair tied into a bun above a face creased with a mortal lifetime’s worth of worries.

“Forgive me,” I said, “But where are the others? This place was thriving when I was here last, are- are they all right?”

“Oh, it’s a market day today,” said the woman blithely. “They’ve all packed off down to town.”

I will confess, the relief at seeing the spectre of suffering I had conjured in my mind be dispelled so suddenly took me by surprise. “Oh, heavens,” I said, suddenly needing to lean on a wall. “I was afraid that something had befallen them. It is the mist, it has left me fearful. I apologise.”

The woman laughed. “Things have befallen us,” she said. “But we’ve survived.” She gestured with a hand behind her. “Tea? You look cold.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I do not feel the cold but your hospitality warms my heart.”

I followed the woman into her home and sat at the low table as she fussed over the fire heating a kettle. I accepted an earthenware cup of tea measured out from a jar. The woman sat opposite me and quietly sipped her own cup.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing is the matter,” I said, smiling with a serenity I did not feel. “I am perfectly, entirely steady in my mind, body and duties, as I have always been, as I always will.”

A wisp of steam lifted from the cup in my hands and unfurled out into the air. The woman watched me.

“You have the look my granddaughter gives me when she has to decide between honey and cream,” the woman said, electing a smile from me. “Utterly lost.”

I swirled the tea in the cup in my hands, the porcelain clinking against the ring on my forefinger. Heat entered my skin and vanished, leaving me feeling as I always did, whether the sky spat ice or I walked on burning sands. Warm enough.

“I am lost,” I said, and began to cry.

The woman said nothing. She simply watched me, and waited.

“I have been given an impossible task,” I said, watching my tears dissolve before they hit my hands. “For every story I take down there are ten, fifty, ten thousand who go to the graves with their names vanishing into the wind, and though this is how things should be I feel- I don’t know. Every day I find it harder and harder to tell all the stories I need to because every day I take more down, and- I’ve been forgetting things. The exact shapes of faces, family linages I should know, the layout of streets- I got lost last week! Took the wrong left turn, and mistook one family for another! My memory is supposed to be perfect! I’m Lady Tianhong, Who Scribes! It’s what I am! What am I if I cannot scribe?”

A faint wind pushed against the walls, rattling them like wind chimes.

“I don’t know,” said the woman, and shrugged. “I’ve only met you three times. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Because I don’t know,” I said. Partially from a need to calm my nerves, partially a desire to hide my face, I took a sip from the cup.

“And what of the world beyond?” I continued, quieter now. “The places where I do not go? The people who do not have someone to, to write them down so that when they re-enter the cycle they are not lost?"

“You’ll never get to them,” the woman said bluntly. “When they die- poof!” She splayed her fingers for emphasis. “Gone! Never coming back! That’s just how it is. Us mortals have to make peace with living like a fish in the rapids above a waterfall.”

“But you shouldn’t have to,” I whispered. “You deserve every beautiful, confusing moment of your lives cast in immortal gold and hung in the sky like stars.”

“If that were true,” said the old woman scoldingly, “Then we wouldn’t be able to see the moon.”

“I need to tell your story,” I said, hastily putting down my cup. “I need-”

Then there was a finger prodding me in the head. “Young miss,” she said, “You need to do no such thing. I have another story I want you to take down.” She stood from her chair with a mild oath and pulled her shawl over herself tightly before thumping out the door, cane in hand. “Follow me or I’ll thwack you,” she said.

“I’m immortal,” I said, slightly dazed. “I am a hundred and sixty-three years old!”

“Now you sound even more like my granddaughter,” the woman laughed. “I told you to follow!”

Something about her voice bid me to listen, and so I did.

A path wound up the mountainside behind the village, mountain flowers and grasses waving in the light breeze. Soon the thick mist hid the homes below us, though our progress was slow, the old woman testing the path before us with sharp prods from her cane.

On the way up I told her stories, reeling them out from memory, making sure they were ones I had not told before.

“Nearly there,” the old woman would say whenever a gap in my telling appeared. “Nearly there…”

We reached a plateau on the side of the mountain and the woman stopped abruptly, almost causing me to crash into her.

“Here it is,” she said, moving to a fallen log carved into a crude bench and taking a seat. “My favourite tree.”

Before us, clinging with spidery roots to the edge of the precipice, was a pine. Its needles were thin, the trunk barely thick enough to be a bow staff and far too knotted. Its branches were thin and spidery. I reached out a hand to touch its trunk, dark needles scratching harmlessly at my skin.

“It’s a tree,” I said, confused. “Forgive me, but I miss the message.”

The old woman harrumphed. “Maybe I should be the scholar, then. Always seemed obvious to me.”

I closed my eyes, breathed, and looked again.

Then I understood.

“It’s going to fall,” I said. “If the tree grows larger, its own weight will pull it off the cliff.”

“It’s reaching for the stars, like all trees,” said the old woman. “It knows it will never touch them, and even standing as it is on a mountain it is still not enough. And one day it will get too close to the sky, and yes, it will die. But if it had grown with a trunk as thick as two great oaks, if it had spread branches far and thick enough to blot out the sun, tall enough to see from halfway round the world… if it had grown as large and strong and fast as its roots could drink from the earth… it would already be down in the valley below, feeding the woodlice.”

The bark was rough and damp from the mists at my touch. The empty air yawned beneath me and I leaned into the tree, allowing myself to feel the thrill of the threat of falling.

“Don’t try to be everything,” the woman continued. “We’re all doing what we can, gods and mortals and wandering scribes who tell people’s stories.”

“Thank you,” I said solemnly, feeling the wind tugging at my hair as gravity pulled at my robes. “I aspire to one day have your wisdom.”

The old woman chuckled. “Wisdom?” she asked. “I saw you were upset and afraid, and I made up a story to help you find the answer yourself. You really are just like my granddaughter.”

“Wisdom it is,” I returned, a smile coming to my face unbidden.

I left with the feeling of damp bark under my palm held fast in my memory and in my heart.

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page revision: 359, last edited: 22 Oct 2025 11:13
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