Bry'e the Ambassador

“There is a world which has always existed… a world some have never seen, because they chose not to see. I know this because my own tribe of Amnamar, born to be ambassadors to both Earth and Man, *chose* blindness. I was one of the lucky ones, because my eyes were opened to what is true about both Man and Earth - my eyes and hearts were opened to what is possible - opened to the realization that some things deemed impossible are only so because of the fear others have built in themselves. I do not have to build this same fear in me. Neither do you. And if both you and I are not afraid, we can then build this absence of fear in others. This, I believe, is how we can rebuild a world.

The earth is speaking of great change, which it will manifest in many different ways, in many different places. If we, those of us who depend on earth to live, do not prepare ourselves for these changes, and do not also change ourselves, earth will persevere. But we will not."

- (section of her speech from the Earth Summit)

***

As Bry’e and Lonna of Iridia traversed a green and stony gorge softened with dense moss and ferns, for a time the two did not speak. Lonna watched the skillful movements of her bird companion, quietly frustrated with her own uncertain feet as they slipped irregular volcanic rocks.

“I will tell you something,” Bry’e began, reaching back to pull Lonna up along a rough, vertical black stone trickling with long, cold streams of water and moss. “Something that may bring us to a more equal place.”

Lonna was still out of breath, her legs weak beneath her, but Bry’e’s gentle insistence drew the woman forward.

“I have long had a vision while I sleep,” Bry’e continued,  “a series of pictures shown to me by something vivid and powerful. It reveals a vast landscape of mountains and plains, a landscape dead with ash, and in it, there is a gathering of figures, in the ruin of a world they once knew. There are no trees, no birds - even the sky is dead. I see myself, also covered in ash, and it seems that this gathering of the living looks to me for something. I know I must speak, and I open my beak to do so, but I cannot find the words. And each time the vision shows itself to me it is the same, and when my words will not come, I wake, and wonder why these visions have been shown to me.”

Bry’e turned now to find the gaze of her travel companion, and Lonna, who was still a few steps behind, puzzled for a moment before answering. As they walked, a brief squall of rain pelted the canopy above, and droplets sifted down around them. Bry’e’s tufts of red body feathers were soon tipped with tiny beads of water. She shook her tail and a spray of mist swirled behind her as she moved on.

“Why would you telling me this make us more equal?” Lonna asked at last. The blade of suspicion was at last gone from her inquiries, but a skepticism lingered in her words.

Bry’e continued to climb for a moment. They were nearing an apex of rock shaded by great boughs, knotted with roots and littered with the great cones of massive trees. More ferns, taller than each of them, came up like spouts of green foam from gaps in the stone.

Reaching a shelf of rock on which to pause, Bry’e squinted into the distance, and a bead of Suryama seemed to fall slowly, comfortably, in the time that passed. Bry’e closed her eyes, and could almost see Suryama herself, the great celestial string of beads breaking into the pieces of time that kept everything from happening at once.

“It is my thinking that this place, this world, is like a dream to you, and perhaps in it you have not yet found your voice. The place is confusing and frightening, perhaps desolate in its strangeness, like a world of ash.” Bry’e regarded Lonna carefully, in observation rather than criticism. “As one from the other side, from the human world, many look to you for answers, and while you have answers there, in your world, here you only have questions. The answers do not come. So like me, you cannot speak as you should.”

They crested the ridge and the land again dipped down, revealing a broad stripe of blue sky ahead between rifts of pale cloud, and beneath this, a rolling panorama of wild, green conifers spreading out in every direction. They made their way down the slope grasping the trunks of the trees bracing at the hillside, and for a moment only the wind spoke. Rain fell behind them, and the branches ahead were dappled with pale bars of sun.

“When you have the vision of the ash…” Lonna thought aloud,  “is it your world you’re in, or mine?”

They came to a stream and Bry'e knelt to drink from it, going down on her haunches as she answered.

“I have never considered the answer to that.” Bry’e thought about it. At last she said, “I would say neither.” She stood, swallowed, and wiped her beak with the feathered knuckles of one hand, her irises scanning the furthest horizon.

“How is that possible?” Lonna asked, filling the gourd flask Bry’e had made for her, and then rising to stand beside the Amnamaran.

“Because,” Bry’e said, stepping into the stream to cross it, “if my vision becomes true, both your world and mine will no longer exist.”

The Dharak

"The path comes to you more swiftly now," Bry'e observed, as Lonna sprung over a sticky bog of mud. The quizzical look Lonna gave her melted away into an understanding, and Bry'e saw that her words had confused the woman at first.

"Sometimes," Bry'e chuckled, "even in my best Iridian speaking, Amnamar's way of words makes my other speech wrong.”

“I understood what you said," Lonna responded, "eventually.”

“You begin to trust me,” Bry’e observed, touching Lonna at the forearm, and then dropping her hand away to her side once more.

Lonna shrugged, wiping trickles of rain from her brow. “How did you learn English?”

“It was not among the duties of Queen Eyabrenna to attend to offspring," Bry'e explained. "So, many females were my mother. Some,” she chuckled softly, “were more… observant than others. For many beads I was free to wander alone into the trees. This,” she sighed, “being alone, was not the way of the tribe, as many dangers in the ferns could quickly take life. But I was a hatchling, and no one had taught me fear." Her eyes sparked, and as she walked she seemed to see past the world around her, into a vast memory. "I first saw only earth and sky, and the others, snails, lizards, things with wings, who moved freely between these places. Earth and sky together," she said, making the shape of a ball with her two red feathered hands, "I regarded as one of my many mothers, and within its shapes and motions I felt similar comforts, and so I was drawn into it.”

She stopped, stood on a massive root sheathed in moss and flexed her toes, leaning on the trunk of the massive tree that rose like a living beam into the wandering mist. Craning her neck, she gazed far up the trunk as she spoke again. “I had not long been wandering into the trees before I felt something, something not so quiet and still as the branches, and not so quick and busy as the water. It moved like me. It’s scent was like me. Yet it it seemed it was made only of patient shadows. I began to go into the ferns seeking it out, feeling it move around and above me, but always I was unable to see it. And when I had done this a number of times, finally, it showed itself to me.”

“What was it?” The curiosity in Lonna’s voice uplifted Bry’e, and her eyes squinted as she smiled.

“First," Bry'e glowed, "I found only feathers, some gray and some white, some edged with red. The scent of the feathers was like smoke and blood and wet stone, and these same scents moved in the trees with the shadows. Then I saw many gray feathers moving together. At last," she chuckled, "I saw two eyes looking down at me through leaves - wise eyes, still pools of knowing, large enough to look deeply into. And when I spoke to these eyes, a voice answered me.”

Bry’e’s enthusiasm was infectious - obviously the creature about whom she spoke was no threat. Lonna waved the bird woman on with one hand.. “- And? What did you say?”

“I asked what he was made of.” Bry’e smiled to herself. “His answer was ‘Sheh, L’awah, Yirth, the Amnamaran words for wind, water and wood. And then he added ‘Chim’qiti,’ which, on your tongue, means stars. Then he spoke the words as you would  - and so these things were the first human sounds I heard.”

“I asked if he was made of shadows,” Bry’e added. “He did not say yes or no - instead, he said ‘yit Cre’aphau’ -”

Lonna blinked, and as her brow furrowed, Bry’e cocked her head to one side in inquiry.

“You know these words?” the bird woman inquired.

Lonna grimaced. “Yit feels like ‘and’, and Cre’aphau… it means Light.” She squinted now, and slipped her hands into her armpits, seeming uncomfortable, as though she stirred in a quiet pain. “Doesn’t it?”

“These are an older language I only learned later, but…” Bry’e nodded. “Yes.” Bry’e squinted quizzically, and the silence the bird woman and the Iridian held a gaze that was both accepting and fertile.

“Still I was curious," Bry'e went on. "I asked if he was only eyes and feathers, and these strange things, wind, water, shadow, wood, light… He told me he was also leaves and thoughts, songs and paths, bones and dances. He told me I was made of the same things. And then at last he stood, and he was a tree, tall - both bird and man like me, but he was also sky, earth and water… it seemed he had not lived with these things, as I had, but that he came *from* them. His arms and legs were branches, his wrists and ankles feathered, and his great face, neck and beak were also dancing with soft plumes. His tail was like the rays of the sun as it is rising over the hills, the feathers dipped in red. His face was long, that of an egret or a stork. He was very large, strong through the chest and long through his back - the males of Amnamar are all small, thick and broad, low like ferns - this creature was was much more like a tree - but there was nothing..." she paused, searching for a word, then sprung upon it "... menacing, about him. He had painted himself in a red pigment of mud, making thumb prints on the bare skin of his body… In some places he had plucked away his feathers to make elaborate patterns, spirals and dots.”

Lonna stepped deftly over a crack between large roots, and Bry'e took note but said nothing. “Was he old, wise, like a shaman?”

“I do not know how old he was,” Bry’e mused. “But yes, he was a constantly turning wheel of medicine, a seer, a river of wisdom, memory, and teaching. Every day after that, I went into the woods and learned words and secrets from him. Sometimes he was very quiet, and let everything else around us teach me. Sometimes he let me teach myself, making room for my thoughts and perceptions, letting me answer my own questions. And then," Bry'e giggled, "sometimes he talked and talked - until my ears fell asleep.”

Lonna chuckled. Then she pondered something. “You left him behind as well, when you abandoned the tribe... It seems he was important to you.”

“He told me I would leave," Bry'e said resolutely. "I think also that he may have seen you were coming. But I have been given visions that tell me we will meet on the path again.”

Lonna thought for a moment before inquiring again. “Why do you think he showed you these things, you and no one else?”

Bry'e stopped, hunched down at a break in the roots and placed her fingertips on the moist soil between her knees. “He said I could hear the earth, and that the earth could hear me, in a way that others in my clan could not." She looked up at Lonna, her gray eyes filled with the light pouring down through the leaves above. "He also said that to make myself small when danger threatened was wise… but he said to always be small and hide away was a different danger." She rose, and walked on into the mist. "I think his eyes could see that my tribe, out of fear and rejection of humans, had made itself dangerously small.”

“But if he only taught you, and no one else in the tribe, then…” Lonna trailed away, and Bry'e understood the paths on which Lonna's thoughts moved.

“There is one I left behind," she answered, and a fissure of sadness mingled with love moved through her brow. " One to whom I gave all the secrets the Dharak gave to me. It is my hope that she can plant the same seeds in others that have now flowered in me."