The Tale of the Five Omnibus by Diane Duane

Author:Diane Duane
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: Lionhall Press
Published: 2011-07-14T19:21:11+00:00

***

The pain, experienced at last, slowly fell away and left her among her mdeihei with the fiery tears running down her face. They held their silence, waiting to hear what she would sing before beginning to weave counterpoint or dissonance about it.

She was exhausted. It was fifteen years since that afternoon under the willow. Fifteen years since she had shown herself any more than Balen’s terrible smile, or thought of the experience as more than “the rape.” She had thought she was over it, past it all.

What idiocy.

As she grew, she had quickly given up thinking much about sharing her body with others. Her agemates indulged in all the delightful anticipation of adolescence—the feeling that something magical awaited them when sharing began. But she had already been plunged into an experience that had about it nothing whatsoever of magic. When she came of age, every sharing, however innocent, had a touch of the sordid about it, a taste of fear which made her want to get it over with quickly. Afterwards, she would inevitably plunge into another sharing, in search of what had been missing. She never found it. Nor, as she got close to the brink of focusing, had she ever managed that, either. How could she, when sharing felt so much like Fire?

It’s so simple. Since the Fire feels like loving, allow yourself only sharings that can’t work, or won’t last. Reject those who love you, pursue the uninterested. That way you’ll never have to do much of what feels like the Fire, but isn’t. And let that furious, hating part of your mind betray your Fire every time it’s close to focus, forcing it to starve away to nothing, so you won’t have to spend the rest of your life with that inside you—what feels like loving, and isn’t.

She could just hear the Shadow laughing.

Slowly Segnbora lifted her gemmed head, and sang relief and grief and weary regret at the walls. From the shadows her mdeihei took up the dark melody and shared it with her in compassionate plainsong. “Oh Immanence,” she sang, “I’m full of Power, and in danger of running forever dry; I’ve shared a hundred times, and I’m virgin still; I walk on water, and yet thirst…” She brought her wings down against the floor in a gesture of bitterness.

“And the nightmare was right, too. I’m a killer. The Shadow has merely to touch that memory ever so lightly, and I kill yet again. Is this my destiny, then? To be a clockwork toy that can be set to killing by anyone who happens to find the key?”

In ruthless but regretful honesty her mdeihei answered her in one long note that shook the cave. “Yes!”

“Or so it seems…” Hasai said.

She looked over at her mdaha, catching for the first time the unease that had always been in his voice. Segnbora had never before been Dracon enough to hear it. He gazed back, gentle-eyed, huge, terrible as a thundercloud with wings. And yet, to Dracon eyes, he too was frightened, crippled, shadowed.

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