Outworld/Liminal Discordance

Remembrance

Author: Carrion Comfort

Carrion comfort has no idea who They were- that is, who the person she remembered was. She knew at the time, of course, but not now.  They had played chess for favours, crossed swords on mountains, rolled laughing in fields of magic, sworn revenge over smoky whiskey and cheated death and each other because sometimes they were death and sometimes they were life. And yet despite the occurrences of decades -centuries, even- of time, there was no name and no face to remember.

Oh, the incidents are there. The bite of snow in the high peaks, mutually engaged in different missions regarding the same savage secret, impossibly old texts and improbable curses. The shared cell on that one sky-ship /castle/ correctional facility, when she had a weapon and They had wits, and a resigned interdependence ending in the inevitable death plunge and last-minute escape – it was getting old but kind of reassuring.  Those times one or the other had knocked the other out, to stop them meddling, or dying, or simply being annoying. That time They’d walked, bold as you like, out of the desert and right up to her HQ deep in Walker territory, to tell her They weren’t interested in a war they hadn’t even been invited to and that time she’d wandered right into the Imperatrix’ court to suggest the Valtarians didn’t have the nerve to kill her, whatever the ‘court sooth-sayer’ insisted ought to happen. So many times, so many encounters, eventually that time they broke all their rules, and made the kind of angry, burning, lonely desperate love she eventually decided was her trademark… Those had been such beautiful tears of release.

And the emotions are there, still. Wonder and joy, as aurorae danced in the sky above them. Trust – a funny kind of trust but trust, nevertheless. That one would always somehow find the other and pierce through whatever veil of violence or desperation threatened to overwhelm their better natures. Understanding, the kinship of impossible decisions and moral disagreement over methodology. Power, the dance of what they might have been if they had ever refused to play anyone else’s games. Together, they could have torn down the damn sun, if they’d decided to, and sometimes- particularly during the conflict- they had wanted to. Love, if a single word was enough to explain it and it probably wasn’t even close.

But They, somehow, are not there. Sometimes Carrion catches an echo, a wisp of dark/light hair, or green/blue/brown eyes, but she can’t be sure. She doesn’t even know if anyone else remembers Them either. She’s had long enough to think about it now, so she wonders if perhaps They never did exist at all, but there is too much real about it. It is easier to think that dissonance removed Them- any memory of them- so completely, than to imagine her mind, no matter how twisted over the years, had created someone so infuriating out of nothing. She could barely remember her own name as she crawled into the Breach, so perhaps They are somewhere equally confused, equally forgotten. Or not. Maybe the Concord did this, it wouldn’t be either surprising or something she’d never done herself. There was that time she’d locked off her own memory until Thunder Surrounding and Crooked had eventually worked out what the ‘deprogramming phrase’ was. That had been unpleasant (apart from the bemusement caused by the pair of them yelling ‘Eclipse’ at her in a variety of intonations) and a story for another time. Maybe she has done it to herself, for some unfathomable reason.

Whatever, she remembers enough to ache with loss and smile with fondness, which made it as real as anything else could be, and she listens sometimes to Their words of counsel when she wants to wipe it all away.  Which is all well and good, but she wonders who is going to be there to hold her back next time it matters.