5. Something New

5

Something New

Celyn

M any thousands of years ago, the magma deep beneath the bedrock of the world sought the taste of the air and the sight of the sky. It pressed upwards, yearning; the stone held tight, resolute. But the heart of the world is so much stronger than even the implacable stone, and something gave. Was it a fissure, some weakness in the solid rock? Or perhaps merely a weak point, somewhere that the magma could push against until it broke? Only the basalt knows, and it has never told me.

The fire beneath our feet found a way to the sky, and erupted towards it. But no such ecstatic leap can last forever. In time, the magma subsided, and the home it had made for itself collapsed in on itself. Where once the greatest of fires lived, rain collected, pooling. What had been the blood of a volcano became the cradle for a lake.

Humans call such things calderas. I never needed such words until I met a man. All I knew were the patterns of rain and snow, the times of drought, and the touch of the things that lived in my water or came to drink at my shore. The grass grew young and fresh with the melting of the snow, and I knew the taste of it. The rains in the first weeks of warmth caught the pine pollen in the air and carried it to me, so that a soft slick of yellow drifted on my waves and gathered on my shores. The wolves and the deer found me, and sated their thirst.

I always knew the forms I could wear. One like the deer, and not: a strong creature, fast, with four legs tipped in hooves, two clever ears, and a long muzzle. Another like nothing else in the forest: a softer thing, standing on two feet, with clever hands that could do many things, and a flat face. When I took a solid form I always had the same tail of long dark hair and the same blue, slot-pupiled eyes.

The first creature I saw that looked like me spoke to me, words I had never heard before and yet understood with the same familiarity that I understood the patterns of the sky. I went to it, curious and young. It tried to bridle me, a concept I first knew from the first moment I saw the straps of leather in its hands. I let it touch me, and then I made it ride me, and then I drowned it in my waters and let the fish eat it.

Years passed, then hundreds of years, then thousands of years. Humans came, and humans left. Those that dared to try to claim me died. Those that chose to speak to me I allowed to use my waters, just as I allowed the wolves and the deer. They raised homes on my shores and abandoned them. Time and the trees reclaimed everything they left behind.

One day, great ley powers that named themselves sorcerers came, and spoke to me. I granted them the same things I had granted the others: you may drink my waters, capture my fish, place boats upon my surface, and raise buildings on my shores. They spent years on the island that had once been the mouth of a volcano, and grew from it a strange stone edifice, stretching high into the clouds.

Such things will fall, in time. I have seen it a thousand times. One day, something will change, and even that great thing will collapse and come tumbling back to the stone from which it was born. Perhaps the volcano will wake again, and I will end alongside it. Perhaps not.

Another thousand years passed. The humans never left, though there were never more than a few. Great powers replaced each other, one after the other, a chain of them. I wondered what they thought of their small lives. They burned so brightly, like flashes of lightning. Did they think of themselves as the bolts of light in a great thunderstorm, as I saw them? Or did they believe themselves to be edifices of their own?

Sometimes they spoke to me. Sometimes not. On occasion, one would choose to bargain with me, and I often agreed to the things they wanted out of curiosity. All of them treated me the way the deer treat the wolf, as if I might leap out of my water without provocation and carry them into the depths to tear the flesh off of their bones. It didn't trouble me. I knew what I was. Even the greatest of those who carve paths for the ley cannot stand against the forces of nature.

They called me different things. Water-horse. Fey elemental. Tsirisma Lake. None of these names were mine, but I answered to them, nonetheless.

The Spire was still standing when I saw a new face reflected in my surface.

It had been a long time, as humans reckon it, since someone new had come to me. The sorcerer of the Spire had left two years previously, and none had yet come to replace him, nor even to stay for a short while. Only three people lived on the island, and none of them cared to speak to me. No one had spoken to me for well over a century, living the patterns of their lives surrounded by me, yet with no interest in me. No one had so much as stooped to drink a palmful of water since the first few years the Spire had stood.

I looked at her with my human face, gazing up from beneath the water. She looked tired and worn, with frizzing dark brown hair and exhaustion in her near-black eyes. Her dusky brown freckled skin, the color of the pine cones after they have worn in the sun for years, was chapped and flaking around her nose and mouth. And yet, she had an irrepressible beauty, in the elegant shape of her face, the smooth way her broad nose flowed into her cheeks, and the fullness of her mouth. She looked different from the others on the island, in a soft way I liked, and none of them ever looked me in the eyes as she did.

I supposed that she wouldn't either, once she realized what she looked at.

"Hello, lake," she said in a soft voice, as if she wished for only me to hear her.

I dissolved in my surprise, dropping back into my truest form of water. I had no time to recover and greet her in return, for the rowboat arrived at the stone spit, and she didn't pause to look at me again. Nor did she glance at me as the minotaur brought her across my surface, or even look back once she reached the island.

Days passed. She never returned to my shore, staying well up on the island, gardening with the man who had tended the plants for more than three decades. I tried to forget those words, given to me in a gentle voice by someone who had perhaps not even known what I was when she looked at her reflection in the water. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't. A century was a long time, even for me, and my desire to speak to her again only grew.

I watched her sometimes, though never from close by. A very few times, she saw me, and turned back to her work without comment. I left her alone after those times; if she didn't come to me, I was determined not to force my presence on her. I had made my agreements with those sorcerers who had raised the Spire, and I still wanted to keep them.

The gardener left, and only the woman remained to tend the plants. They had used a pump often, a small metal thing that burrowed deep into the ground and called up water. The spell on it was a weak thing, and old, the channels for the ley not much more than scratches. Now the only one who used it was the woman.

Temptation seized me, and not so many days after the man left, I went up and touched the pump. I didn't even need to work to break the spell; the touch of any of the great fey powers, who are innately creatures of power, can overwhelm many such things, like floodwaters washing away ditches. The spell crumbled, and I waited. Now, surely, she would come and ask for a thing I could give so easily: water.

She did not.

To my great frustration, the woman used the pump with her hands. I didn't want to dismantle it; I had told those long-ago sorcerers that they might raise their buildings on my shores, and that I wouldn't destroy them. To run my fingers along the surface of a pump was one thing, a natural sort of wear to the scratchings of a spell. To go up to it and wrench it out of the earth to force a woman to speak to me again was beyond my comfort.

I gave up. I wanted to talk to her, and if she would not come ask, I would go and... and offer.

It was more delightful than I had anticipated. She didn't seem to notice or care that I was a great power. She scolded me, tried to command me to help her, and told me I was behaving as if I had an attraction to her beyond boredom. She attempted to ignore me, as if I would be content to be ignored any longer, when I had come to make a bargain with her. And then she... laughed at me.

I had never been laughed at before. I didn't know what to do.

She turned her back on me once more, and I fled back to my waters.

I remained near the island, uncomfortable in an unfamiliar way. It felt as if there was something I was supposed to be doing, and as if something bad would happen if I didn't do it. What such thing could there possibly be, though? A lake has no duties or tasks it must fulfill. My entire purpose was to exist, a reflection of the impression of the waters of my lake upon the world. I was an elemental creature, not some scurrying human with tasks.

Yet my conversation with the woman seemed incomplete, like the heavy mass of water-weeds and grass caught in a half-submerged log that one particularly ambitious loon had attempted to turn into a nest. Ridiculous, to think that a few exchanged words could turn into a rotting mess as the half-finished nest had, but as I paced on four feet through the water and tossed my head, I could think of not much else.

At last I emerged again and went up onto the bluff to look down at her as she pulled small plants out of the ground on her hands and knees. She caught my regard, but instead of turning back to her work as she always had before, she called out to me.

"If you feel like helping, you could eat the weeds I've pulled!"

I almost reared in surprise, jerking backwards. She turned away, and I fled again.

I didn't know what to do with someone like her. She didn't act afraid of me, as if I was merely some flesh-and-blood creature coming to annoy her. She'd claimed I was pestering her, as if I was some biting midge. The human woman was small and insignificant, standing on an island surrounded by me, and yet she spoke to me as if I was someone like her. It was the type of conversation I'd never had before, the sort of thing I had only ever overheard between the people who had lived on my shores.

She knew what I was, and still she looked me in the eyes. She laughed at me.

I should have hated it. Many of the sorcerers had hated such things, that a ley creature with barely more power than the animals of woods should speak to them as if they were the same type of creature as the great powers. The deer despise the flies that trouble them and the fish consume anything small that dares to come near .

But I didn't hate it. I... craved it. Those strange things woke in me a hunger for more, as if I had become, suddenly, one of the social animals, who cannot live alone without going mad.

I had always been curious about the creatures on my shores, living their small lives. The patterns of man were not strange to me any longer, and hadn't been for thousands of years. This woman, though... She was doing something new. Novelty is an irresistible lure for curious creatures of any kind, whether they're animals or great powers.

When night fell, I came up on shore again, and ate her weeds. The woman had invited me to do so, in a way that was closer to asking than telling. Perhaps now she would see that I could help her, and ask, so that I could give her a price for my assistance.

All I wanted was conversation. Surely she would accept such a minor price, for the sake of the misery of blisters on her hands.