Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,132

Year by year I bolted on a new body, plate armor like a beetle’s shell, with enough holes for that eventual demiurge to slip his orders, to feed in his unalterable programs. A space had to be made for him. A space was made.

I remember that morning, when I slipped out of the world and he slipped into it. A slab of metal in rock—how could such a thing come to mean so much? It was no more or less part of the city than a grocer’s storefront or a chipped curb, yet no one proposed that we prognosticate by those. Steel and stone and all of us agreed without speaking, made this covenant with the city streets and skies, that that knife in a rock meant more than melons in a pyramid or old yellow paint in an alley. Even when we had forgotten about it and let it grow over with dandelions and blackberry whips, it did not lose what we had so long ago given it: for my brother pulled it up and the light passed from me to him, the light and the horse and the tutor and the epaulets, which he was welcome to.

His name became like the sword in the stone: write Arthur on the skin of your hand and it means more than a boy so named, it means him, always him, forever.

My name became irrelevant.

There is water over my head already, clear and green. I can see the sun, still, shining in shafts through the little waves. What a place this is, how bright, how sere. The water is warm.

Afternoon, Third Day

In my brother’s great hall there is a painting. An angel in red so bright it is nearly orange speaks to a scribe, and out of the seraphic mouth comes a long ribbon, winding and whirling and corkscrewing until it enters the scribe’s ear. On this ribbon are written divine words, undeniable words, words that originated on the sea of glass and, shard-bright, fell until they tore open the ribbon in shapes of themselves.

This is what my brother’s commands are like.

He speaks and I can almost see it, the ribbon snaking out of his mouth, yellow and black, coiling through the air to enter me at the place in my back which was made for him, made for the receipt of quests, made to ingest his desires and make them manifest. There is no sound but the ticking of this ribbon into me, the slow click of a king’s calligraphy, holes in the shapes of divine letters slotting into my sinews, whispering angelic and severe, locking my joints in place. His ribbon susurrates in me, insists that an object is required, a child stolen away to the bottom of the sea, to Annwn, the other country, which is west, and there are kabbalistic coordinates which burn themselves into my corneas—but it doesn’t matter what the object is. There is always an object. He always requires it. His hunger for them is never quiet. Nor does it matter where they are: they are always west, they are always out, they are always beyond, they are always in the otherworld, which is only to say the other world, anything that is not circumscribed by these walls, these floors, these steels and stones. The ribbon wraps my lungs, sets my constraint: nine days without breath, as near to the limit of my capsules as makes no difference—and this does not matter, either. Everything the ribbons demand extends our limits, no matter what those limits are. If I could hold my breath for ten days, the ribbon would demand ten.

Retrieve object. Return. Simple as stone. Execute.

The ribbon disappears under the plates of my armor, under the beetle-carapace of my second skin. I turn on golden heels. I walk in a straight line, unaltered and unerring until the air is so full of salt my joints cry out.

This is all I am.

West. West is the direction of blue water and gold land—we are aimed this way and thus we go, and we do not stop, we cannot stop, until the Pacific tells us that to go further is to find east and wind and light and silence. We pool in this place, in Annwn, in the otherworld which on maps purchased from salmon and seraphim is called California. Pass through fog and marsh and come out in the desert, pass through the desert and come out by the sea. I walked over the mountains and saw