The Fae do not learn their origin through stories. They learn of their beginning through dialogue, through question, through sound of two voices, frustrated together, that relief, when attained might fuel the child’s acquisition of majik. Fae take many shapes, but the force of life sustains them all the same: they cannot pass from waking time without the cruel strike of some other creature. They are timeless. Fae children learn of time when they have discovered three words. The words do not matter; only that they have grasped their meaning, the name of something other than themselves. Fae learn of the first language when they have asked and answered the names of most things around them. Then, and perhaps not even then, is a child ready to begin the study of the first language.
A dialogue may pass something like this. A father and daughter work together in the north of the fertile plains, early in the second age. She has just begun to ask why they speak the language they do. It is her father’s duty to open her education. So they begin.
“Do you see the horizon?” Father asks.
“Yes,” Daughter answers, “It lies where it always does.”
“Which is where?” Father asks. “And when?”
“It is all around us, and it is now.” Daughter answers serenely. This is an easy question.
“Is it also in the past?” Father asks.
“And the future.” Daughter answers. “Time always is.”
“Time is not always for everyone.” Father raises a hand. “This is the importance of beginnings and endings.”
“We begin,” Daughter frowns. “But I don’t see ending for us.”
“You cannot end yourself.” Father explains, “Any more than the sun can end you or the small organisms that sicken other beings. But you can end, and you will end. We will all end at some point.”
Daughter frowns. “Time doesn’t feel like that.”
“Time itself does not end.” Father is proud that Daughter can feel time through her bones this way. “Time continues and time always has been.”
“Like the horizon.” Daughter says dubiously.
“Yes.” Father gestures westward. “Time and the horizon are much the same. We perceive them, but they cannot come to us nor run from us in the way we can approach or disappear from other beings.”
“They simply are.”
“Indeed.”
“But aren’t we also?” Daughter struggles to understand.
“We are both more and less than time and horizon.” Father explains. “We are power incarnate, because we have begun, and we can end.”
Daughter does not say anything.
“Within us, we have the specificity of origin and the terrible understanding of the ending of things. We are finite, bounded, specific in a way that time is not.”
Daughter asks, “And what of other things?”
“Other things do not conceive of time this way.” Father plucks a leaf and a petal from a nearby rose. “These things have names, just as we do, names that embody what they are. Often they are hidden, and we do not own the pleasure of knowing them. But if we ask them of their holders, sometimes they will give them to us.”
Daughter brightens. “This is our language.”
“This is the first language.” Father corrects gently. “This is the language of all things, existence made into reality by mutual understanding of our sharing this place in time. These pieces now have new names.” Father hands Daughter the petal and leaf, “Because they have been separated from a whole of which they were a part. Previously, they had different names. Now that I have plucked them, they have origin as something new, and they have expectation of ending. This gives them a different name.”
Daughter’s eyes grow wide.
“It is in the pairing of origin and ending that living things harbor power that time does not have.” Father takes two more petals and lets them fly in the breeze. “It is a power that time does not inherently possess, but we must ask time to give us these names regardless. This is how we use majik.”
Daughter hops in excitement. Fae children are born with innate ability to do majik, but they, like anyone learning a skill, must be taught. This is the first lesson.
“We borrow names from time and change them, asking their owners to shift their own existences, creating origin and new endings. In this way, we can ask a branch to form a bow, by borrowing it from time, asking the branch to offer its name, change its name, and step into a new form. When the bow is created, it is no longer the branch, but because the branch has ended, the power of the branch now lies within the bow, which too, will end.”
Daughter struggles to comprehend this new and dangerous understanding of the world. “So all things that have form have endings?”
“Yes and no.” Father proffers his arm. “Can you feel the air?”
Daughter mirrors Father’s movements. “No.”
“But you know it is there. You can name it. You have just said its name.”
“Yes. Air.”
“But it holds no form.”
“Not that I can tell. But just because I cannot see its beginning and ending does not mean it does not own form.” Daughter frowns.
“Indeed, you are correct.” Father beams for a moment. “But some things that own form do so without endings that we can see. So we ask the names of what we can perceive, and this changes our relationship to it. I could ask the air to push over this bush here, but it will not be the air from the mountains in the east, even though all the air is the same and has the same name. Do you understand?”
Daughter thinks for a moment, then shakes her head sadly.
“Perhaps if I start at the beginning.” Father takes Daughter’s hand. “In the beginning, there was nothing except time, because time always is, even if it does not exist hand in hand with horizon. Time was, but nothing else was, so there was no name for time. Names require distance to use them. Names require relationship. So briefly, there was time, and then, and no one knows how this happened, there was space. Space did have a name, because time already was, and in the pairing, each could have a name the other could know and call.”
“So, space named time and time named space?” Daughter asks.
“Time and space simply had names.” Father tries to explain. “Neither borrowed a name, but because there were two existences now, each had a name around which the other could revolve. They did not name each other, but rather they simply, because they both existed, had names.”
Daughter makes a face. She does not understand, but she will not interrupt for additional questions on this front will not help her comprehension, and she knows this.
“Once time and space coexisted with names, the first language was born.” Father kneels down to look Daughter in the eye. “This is very important; this is the beginning of us and all things. With the names of time and space, all other things could grow names. Out of this relationship grew stars and suns and moons and this land, all which harbor names.”
“And majik?” Daughter asks hopefully.
“No.” Father shakes his head. “Majik is the force that runs between all things. The relationship between time and space that offered names, that created the first language. The first language, that which we speak, offers relationship to beings in existence, but it is not majik itself. It is a conduit of majik. Because we speak the language into its ownexistence, we too, Fae, are conduits of majik.”
Daughter remains quiet.
“The language stands away from time, time does not own it because time is its own entity. Time also has a name, but we do not know it in the way we know the names of flowers or earth or blood. Time is not like air, which is bounded by form, though we cannot perceive it. Time is outside of our understanding of existence, even as we work to understand the nuances of space.”
Daughter is nodding as though this makes perfect sense. “When we do majik then, we are speaking relationship into existence. We are naming potential from true things to become other true things.”
Father blinks. “Yes.”
“Ok.” Daughter says cheerfully. “I don’t think I am ready for majik yet.”
“No.” Her father replies proudly. “But you are well on your way.”
“Do we know our own names?” Daughter asks suddenly, as they are turning away from the western horizon.
“That is an intriguing question.” Father runs his fingers through his dusky hair. “The names of Fae are a conundrum we have not really been able to understand.”
“Why?” Asks Daughter.
“We shift.” Father shrugs. “We are not the same beings from moment to moment, even though we do not shift through time like flower petals or bears. In our existence as conduits for the relationship between space and time, we are wildly changing. To search for one’s name would require a stagnancy few are willing to attain. And even then, one’s name would change as soon as one practiced majik again.”
“Because majik alters a conduit whenever it is practiced.” Daughter says slowly. “So could a Fae simply not practice majik?”
Father shivers. “That is not something any of us have ever considered.” He tugs Daughter gently. “To do so would be to irreversibly change what Fae are.”
“Isn’t that what majik does to other things?” Daughter asks, more confused than ever.
“We do not seek our own names.” Father says firmly, as if this explains everything. “We seek the understanding of everything else.”
Feeling as though this were simply an answer that fathers give children who had outgrown their first lessons, Daughter did not press the issue, but she tucked away a curiosity for her own name. Someday, maybe she’d learn about the first language and the power of its finiteness and the miracle of its origin by herself. Maybe.
~.~
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