The emergence of expandi.., p.33
The Emergence of Expanding Light, page 33
“We were like that,” she said as if she were only now realizing this. “And you’re burning as we burned for so long.”
Ruinae returned to one man in an instant. He nodded but did not speak.
“And we were as well?” Queen Mab asked, though she knew. “It was like being in a pool of lava. We were drowning in each other, so much power, so much lava and light and mud and dust and space, we were everything, but we were three things and we needed to separate.”
“And the light burst forth and separated us,” Olwenn said. She looked at Pan. “And the light broke us and made us whole.”
“How on earth did he?” Queen Mab asked. She turned to Pan, and he looked away from her, ashamed.
“He doesn’t know what happened. He simply was. He never thought about it. Not until my sister found him.”
“We needed a Pan–” the Lady of the Lake started. “I wasn’t sure where to go. Dion was gone and the forest was in jeopardy in the Human World and the Fairy World. I had to do something. The Exit Points were burning and there was chaos and suddenly the Ether opened up and there was this baby. There was white everywhere and I saw the most intense bright light. It loomed over everything and then…there he was. And he grew. So fast he grew until he was this…teenage boy. Once he was this, he stayed that way and I thought it was his form, his true form. And he was such a good pan. I could tell from the start. But he could do other things, like heal. He could take care of creatures and he was so kind and then, when he met Pippa, his capacity for love did something more to him, something other than his nature, the nature we knew. It terrified me. It terrified all of us and we tried to forbid it, but it was like another force was at work. I’m sorry, sister,” the Lady of the Lake said to Olwenn. “When you left we were so lost. So powerless but I shouldn’t have taken from the Ether—”
“You took what was needed from where you were supposed to take it,” Ruiane said. “It has to break. Three of three must never be.” The words were stark and final. They hung in the air, but they showed no malice. Queen Mab bowed her head and the Lady of the Lake glanced at Pan, who kept his head down. The ground rumbled once more, the sky flickered, but there was still silence.
The Lady of the Lake stood calmly where she was. She did not move, as if a mote surrounded her and she needed to stay safe in her bubble. She looked at her sister and nodded. “Your hair is red,” she said.
“And yours is white,” Olwenn replied. Then the sisters laughed. First it was a dainty giggle, but soon they burst into big belly laughs as if the most hilarious thing had happened.
Pippa looked at her mother, confused, but her mother kept laughing.
“All the time with the jokes about the hair,” Queen Mab finally said, more casually than she’d been. “They used to tease each other about changing their hair color. One time a fairy dyed Viviane’s hair bright pink, then it was blue for days. It was really unsavory!”
“It was cute,” Olwenn replied. She took a few steps forward and the tiny white flowers that had followed her mother in the Ether followed her once more. They sprouted from the disturbed ground and all around them the grass grew back green. “The way we’d all laugh about our hair. You’d think the fate of two Universes wasn’t at stake.”
“Talk of hair and cooking together, going for walks, those were good times,” the Lady of the Lake said. “And I miss them.”
“It was a million years of talking about hair as the fairies played. It was a million years without change,” Queen Mab said.
“It had to end and so it did,” Olwenn replied. “First you fell in love with Dion. Then there was the child, that’s when I knew I had to go.”
“You left because I had a son?” Queen Mab asked. “Could you not handle that change?”
Pippa’s mother paused like she was thinking hard before speaking. “All that has come to be meant to be, sister, don’t you see? We are the first three, the Morrigan.” The title Morrigan hung in the air for a moment, the weight of it crushing. Pippa had heard of the Morrigan, a goddess that is one and three. She is associated with war, power, fate, and death. “We came not out of the earth as the human story goes, but out of the light. We crawled from the dawn of three worlds that connected and were never supposed to collide. A world of magic, a world of realism and a world of peace.”
“Sin é an fáth nach mór dúinn é a scrios,” Pan said.
“What did he say?” Pippa asked. “Pan did you just…did he just…tongues? This is tongues?”
Queen Mab laughed and shook her head. “Not the ancient language, no. That language is human, very human. and very old —almost dead. They said it came out of the Ether, but nothing comes from the Ether.”
“That is why we must destroy it,” Pan said. He looked at Ruinae. “And we must destroy him.”
Ruinae smiled and opened his arms like he was ready to take a blow.
Eros stood in front of him. “You can’t just destroy him. We can fix him. We can stop this and save him. Mom, Olwenn, Vivianne, how did you break?” All three Queens stared at Eros as if he too had started speaking in tongues.
“They don’t know,” Ruinae said to Eros, speaking for the Queens. “You don’t know how you’re born, and you don’t know how you will die. And yet the past, present, and future hang in the balance, a choreographed dance that has been done for all time.”
“You don’t have to die. They’re not dead and they broke apart,” Eros said, motioning to the three Morrigan Queens.
“They were one, she was Morrigan. She was powerful and wonderful and beautiful, and she ruled over a primordial world with no other life because life could not thrive here. They, she sucked up all the oxygen.” Ruinae said.
“But you were there,” Pippa said. “Weren’t you with them?”
“I was there, I remember the flashing of their power and cowering from it. Even as I burned in monstrous form, they were more. Nothing could exist with them, they sucked up everything and I was there, cowering in the corner. First I felt terror and then I felt anger. And then one day, the fear, the anger at always cowering, drove me mad and I struck them. The light crashed, it was all around, and they broke into three separate pieces and those pieces were flung into the three realms. The Human World, the Fairy World, and the Ether.”
“I was never in the human world!” Queen Mab said. “Not for longer than an hour…maybe a day, tops, that time when I met a kindly human gentleman.”
“You were never in the human world longer than a day, sister. You were flung into the fairy realm and the first creatures, they were not nymphs, they were fairies, and they were yours for many years before the others came. I lived in the human world,” the Lady of the Lake said. Her eyes were soft and glowed blue as she spoke. “I lived in the water and played with the whales and dolphins and other mammals. I watched that world go from water to solid ground, I watched those creatures who were meant for the water defect to land. But when that world became too much, so many people, so many others, I flew back to my sisters.”
“I remained in the Ether until one day it cast me out,” Olwenn said. “I was there and there was no time, no space, I did not remember my sisters or the world before, but then it cast me out and I entered the Fairy World. We all met, Queen Mab, in your realm and became the mistresses of that world because by then we knew no other. The human world changed. It was theirs and only theirs and the Ether was forgotten for so long.”
“And where were you? Why would they lock you in a cage?” Pippa asked Ruinae.
“I was the other, still three writhing in pain. I reminded them of what they were and never wanted to be. I tried to break my brothers free. I begged them for help, and they turned me away. They locked me in a cage and said I never was.”
“He begged for help,” Olwenn said, “by setting fire to the Fairy Forest and decimating the earth not once, but seven times. Before the floods, before the thunder lizards perished, there were so many apocalypses on earth. So many annihilated planets and all at his hands.”
“Other planets?” Pippa asked, picturing Ruinae out in space. She knew it was a vast place that humans did not know much about but to think of Ruinae there was stranger than all she’d learned so far.
“While galaxies fell to his insatiable need to break apart we were unsure of what to do,” Olwenn said. “We knew if he kept up his antics everything– both worlds, would be destroyed. We knew we had to fix what we could and make sure he could not harm anyone else. We did not have our worlds. We had forgotten our own realms, but we knew we had to stop him.”
“Then stories of him started to crop up,” Queen Mab added. “And we had to squash those as well. So, we said he wasn’t real, he was only a story made up to scare children. We put a spell upon ourselves to forget him.”
“And you locked him away. He suffers as you once suffered and you left him to rot,” Eros cried.
“We didn’t see it that way,” Queen Mab said. “He did not just throw a temper tantrum. He did not ask for help in any recognizable way. He destroyed whole planets, planets that might have had life in the future. He sucked up all the debris inside galaxies and spat it at a hundred stars. What were we supposed to do?”
“Listen,” Pan said with finality. He looked at his hands and they glowed white. “Listen to a language that is not your own. Listen to a language you do not understand. And even if you don’t know a word, a sound, a thought that is said, still you listen until it is clearer. And if you are confused, you do not do the most destructive thing because it is easier in the short term, you ask for help.” He said the last words with such finality, such purpose that even Pippa looked away from him.
“Help from what?” Ruinae asked. “Those?” he asked, looking at Pan’s hands.
“You ask for help,” Pan said again.
“But don’t you see, there are so many other pieces,” Queen Mab said. She was more defensive than she’d been before. But she was also taking this more seriously than she’d ever taken something. “It was the others, so many others. There were three, you say, three of three, three worlds, three Queens and three…whatever you are,” she looked at Ruinae dismissively. “And then there were animals and fairies and nymphs and creatures of all kinds and some of them were fine. They didn’t do much of anything or they took direction well–”
“You mean you could control them, Mother,” Eros nearly sneered at her.
“But then there were satyrs and pans cropped up and they had jobs to do and a world to protect and it was like we weren’t even needed. And humans. Do not get me started on humans!”
“So much agency, we humans have,” Pippa said.
“We?” Queen Mab asked, looking Pippa in the eye, daring her.
“I may not be one, but I was raised to think I was one, right, Mother.” Pippa looked at Olwenn and then she heard herself speak. The way she’d said the word ‘mother’ was the same way Eros said it to Queen Mab. Eros caught it too; he raised his eyes at his sister and shrugged.
“There were many lies,” Olwenn said. “But it was only because without them there would be no truth.”
“That makes no sense,” Pan said. “Ends and means are the same thing.”
“Not when emotion is at play,” Olwenn replied calmly. “But you know as well as I that emotion is a force in the Universe. Namely, love. Oh, there are others. We have preferences. I like cake over pie…I’m being simplistic, but you know what I mean. But there is love and the antithesis of love. That is what we have. All other emotions are variations on that theme, threads on a timeline that may very well go on forever. But, I digress. Pan, you’re right, we have to destroy it.”
“The Ether?” Pippa asked. “I don’t understand. It’s a beautiful, wonderful place, why can’t we just bring people there, let them see it, feel it? Why destroy what is good because the majority has not known it?”
“They can’t know it. That’s not the way the Ether works. It is not a place for the living or the dead?”
“Then are we not living?” Pippa asked. “Are we not dead?”
“When you live forever you are neither,” Olwenn replied. “But place, the Land of the Fairies, the Human World, and the Ether, it was never the three. The missing three.” Olwenn looked at the three of them – Pippa, Eros, and Pan. The Queens did as well, so did Ruinae, as if it all dawned on them in the same moment. “When the world became unstable and I did not know why, after Ruinae had been caged and we did not remember him, I went looking for answers in those books your friends found.”
“Where did the books come from? Who wrote them?”
“A very good question, and I have no answer. But they existed and by then there had been so much time, I did not know that my sisters and I, the Morrigan, were the only ones to exist, to know…but someone else, something else knew. The author of those books still eludes me, but they contain such wisdom for those who can read them. I knew those books were true, even if I have never found their author. But they said there would be another three. The children of the Queens. And then I knew, as if it came to me in a dream, that the three would come from us. And I knew my sister must love Dion and so I made sure they got closer. My sister fell for the forest pan and then they had a child, and it was like a spell was broken and they did not love each other once the child came. It was as if their love had done its duty and went on its way. And then, I knew that I must love Dion as well.”
“What is so great about Dion? Weren’t there other pans to choose from?” Eros asked.
“Not a forest pan, not someone with so much…light.”
“Are you saying he came from the Ether?” Eros asked.
“I’m saying he was touched by the light,” Olwenn said. “And we needed to replace the forest pan, I knew that too. I did not know why; I only knew that it was needed, and I trusted that knowing. And I needed to get away from my sisters, we needed to break further than we had and so I left, well before Dion went renegade. I knew they must hate me; it was all a part of the plan; the books told me. They must look and not find. My departure would galvanize them, and they would seek answers. And so, I went to the Ether and there I saw the light and lived amongst it. It knew me and I knew it. I saw my sister come and take the light back with her. The light turned into a child, that which had been forever, part and parcel of that place, became a being so unlike anything. We were all one in that being’s eyes. She took the light, and it became a child, and I knew that it would love what I loved. I didn’t know what that meant or how complicated it would become, but I knew that.
“Then, a few years later, the books sent me away. I went to the Human World and was born a human woman with blond hair and blue eyes and a longing for California even though I lived in Upstate New York with my kooky artist older sister. And I loved her. I had a life and I lived it and did not know who I really was. I was drawn to California, just as Dion was. And we were drawn to each other —we knew not why. He knew what he was. He knew he was running. He knew that there was more, and he was looking for it. What he didn’t know was that he was a part of something bigger. My plan. I was the something more and he found me even as I stayed lost and oblivious. And so, we had a child, and you know the rest.”
“You’re saying that our existence, Eros and I…even Pan, was a part of a plan you concocted because of those books you read, the ones Phoebe and Vincent are deciphering?” Pippa asked.
“I was nothing until the Lady of the Lake took me,” Pan said. “Time and matter did not exist for me. There was only this constant burning, and it was good, and it was beautiful, but I did not know the beauty of complications, of love and heartache, until I was a pan. Until I took material form I was…nothing. And now I am everything and it’s because of you, Pippa, and your brother and our friends and the world that we built that has nothing to do with a cosmic universe that existed well before any of us knew what was going on.
“And strings were pulled, maybe with the best of intentions, but strings were pulled and what I know is that I want you. I want life. Whatever life we were living, whatever life we were going to have, I want that. I want to be what I was before all this. Dinner with Aunt Catty, high school History projects, laughing in bookstore cafes. That is what all of this is really about. I do not want to live forever in a glass jar for the sake of the universe!” Pan cried. With that the forest shook. The sky shattered above their heads like glass and the trees started to tumble.
Pan looked out. He raised his hands in the air. He took a deep breath and calmed himself down. The sky stopped its crash to the earth like broken glass and hovered over them, a suspended kaleidoscope of shards as the trees tumbled back into place.
“Mother are you telling me that you planned our conceptions, mine and Eros’, not to have children but for some larger purpose?” Pippa asked. This notion stung. She made eye contact with her brother, and he seemed hurt as well.
“I thought you loved me, Mother,” Eros said.
“I do love you,” Queen Mab called. “I was never in on whatever plan my sister concocted. To leave us! To disappear! To decide to engineer the conception of two children. Not even I am so cold.”
“And you didn’t think I should have a child of my own, Sister?” the Lady of the Lake asked. “Arthur would have loved a son.”
“It is not time for these questions,” Ruinae said. “I beg you to break me,” he said to Pan. Pan stepped back, surprised by this request. After everything, this was too much.
“How could I…why would I?” Pan asked.
Ruinae’s eyes went downcast. He flashed from man to monster to man again. With that a great roar came from above and Silenus flew down, followed by the snake Squalus and the demented satyr Argios. They gave a roar as the earth rumbled with their fall.
“They are mine and I made them,” he said to Pan. “They got too close to me. They wanted the power that bleeds from me. I sweat it out like a toxin and the closer they get, the closer anyone gets, the more I destroy. Why do you think they put me in a cage and let the world forget me? I was not made to be this…one…there is only One and it is not me and so I am begging you to break me. They will keep coming to me, I will continue to poison others until there is nothing left but those I’ve turned.”
