Short Story: Quetzal Feathers

[kasihya]

Or, why I should never try to write a story for Fiction Writing involving the characters I hold closest to my heart, because then I will stress myself to pieces trying to make everything perfect so that there's no way anyone can hate on my babies. (It's possibly totally weird that I call my characters my 'babies', because I don't think of them as children and I hate babies. (Except for Stormageddon.) I guess it demonstrates how important they are to me? I mean, they're real to me, like Dumbledore-in-your-head, 'Of course it's all taking place in your head Harry, but why on earth should that mean it isn't real?'-type real. On a psychoanalytical level, they represent a significant, closely-kept part of my psychology and how I think and why I think and what I think about. Also, every part of it is made up. It's all based heavily in reality, but it's not this current reality, so it's easier to dismiss, which would make me sad.

I need to develop a thicker skin, and I've come very far, and I'm fine with letting my professor read this, but if I have to show this to all of my classmates I'm gonna shit myself.

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Tanwen has been taught patience as part of her trade, and she's generally good at dealing with rude people. As the daughter of travelling coastal merchants, she understands that a great deal of human beings view her as someone upon whom they can tread without fear of consequences. As such, she is rather enjoying the marginally greater respect she is receiving as the newly-enthroned princess of Oboureon. The guards standing to the side, ready to throw from the palace anyone who doesn't show her the proper respect, also do a great deal to set her mind at ease.

Her husband, on the other hand, looks as though he is about to have a nervous breakdown. She asks a servant to go run to the kitchens and get him a tomato, while he deals with the complaints of another subject, this one an apparently distraught merchant. Other merchants, she has learned over the course of her life, tend to become distraught her vicinity as a matter of course. She'd rather hoped that they might have gotten used to her by now. Seeing Naike sputtering for words, she leans forward.

'Excuse me,' she says, cutting the man off mid-sentence. 'Excuse me.'

The merchant stops. 'Yes … your highness?'

Tanwen plows on, ignoring the contempt he puts into the last two words. 'Do you see my family in this court?'

He looks around, as though expecting a horde of foreigners to leap out of the red plaster walls.

'They are in the south,' she continues. 'They will remain in the south. There is no reason for my family to expand their routes north when there are respectable merchants like yourself filling the market. I will make a public announcement of it on the next holy day, since you are the fifteenth person to bring it to my attention in the last five days alone. Please assure yourself that your business is safe.' She smiles for good measure, ignoring his less-than-placated expression. 'Goodbye.'

'Goodbye, your highness. Thank you for your time.' The merchant folds his hands behind his back and bows, barely low enough to be considered polite. Tanwen watches him, heart pounding, until he has left the room.

'That was a less-than-elegant solution,' Naike observes, just as the servant comes running back with a decorated ceramic bowl containing half a dozen small tomatoes.

'Your highness,' he says, panting and kneeling.

The prince accepts the bowl, bemused, and places it on the arm of his throne. 'I don't believe I requested these,' he says. 'I don't even like tomatotes.' Tanwen gives the servant an apologetic look; he bows and returns to his post in the corner of the room.

A woman enters next, around the same age as Tanwen herself. Tanwen starts at her appearance: brightly colored clothing ill-suited for the tropical climate, and skin so white she could pass for a ghost. She walks with long, confident strides up to the two thrones and stops, just before she would have crossed the invisible line past which their guards would have moved to restrain her.

'Tanwen!' she cries, clapping her hands and laughing. 'Naike! You look so different. All … regal and, um. Stuff.'

Naike shoots Tanwen a quizzical look; she shrugs. 'Proper respect for the chosen ones of the gods,' she intones, 'would be apt.' The middle-class gypsy in her cringes at the formality, but if she doesn't keep absolutely everyone toeing the line, riots will be next. She's had enough chaos in her first eighteen years of life to last her for the next eighteen at least.

'Oh, right.' The woman giggles and bows. 'Sorry. I beg your leave to introduce myself.'

'Granted,' Naike says, sounding to Tanwen's ear on the verge of hysteria.

'Diana Richards,' says the woman. 'I'm here on behalf of … okay, this is ridiculous. This is going to sound insane, but bear with me for a moment here.'

'… 'Bear with you'?' Tanwen asks.

'Bear with me … um … okay. I guess Julian's babelfish thingamajig isn't working one hundred percent. All right then.' She fills her lungs, and Tanwen taps Naike's hand when she notices where his gaze has landed. 'I'm from your future. One of them, anyway, there are two … don't ask me. And in the future, we're … I don't know if I'd say we're friends, but we get along all right. And someone needed to come back and talk to you now, so you guys suggested that I come, and here I am.'

Tanwen blinks. 'I don't follow,' she says, struggling to keep her voice free of obvious disdain for this lunatic. 'In this 'future', do we all dress like … that?' Her hand sweeps up and down to incorporate the stranger's tightly-cut shirt and dull blue pants.

Diana looks down at herself. 'No, that's just me. You wear these beautiful dresses still, though they're not quite as pretty as that one, and Naike, you wear these weird Japanese outfits, I don't even know where you got them from to be honest.' She stops, appearing to listen to something near the ceiling. Tanwen resists the urge to look up as well, and motions to one of the guards to remove the strange babbling woman.

'Don't you dare,' says Diana, pointing at the guard. He contionues to advance, hefting his spear meaningfully. 'Naike told me your first reaction, would be to throw me out.' She grins at the prince, who looks startled. 'See, I know you, or I'm going to. And I really, really need to ask you for a favor. I just messed with quantum physics to come ask you, it's that dire.'

'Aisa!' Tanwen snaps her fingers; the guard takes hold of Diana's arms and begins to lead her out by force.

'No, wait! Dammit, you know how in movies the main character tells someone something really personal in order to convince them that they're related or really them from the future or whatever … oh wait, no you don't, because you're freaking Mayans and movies don't get invented for another seventeen hundred years.' Diana tugs futilely against the guard's grip, as Tanwen attempts to exchange nervous glances with her oblivious husband. 'Stop it! [insert some movie cliché secret that only a close friend would know] I really need to borrow your headdress so that we can recreate the human race!'

'Aisa? Bring her back for a moment?' Tanwen says over the woman's shouting. She shuts her eyes and promises her ancestors that she will communicate with them more frequently if they will just stop throwing strange things at her for more than eight days at a time.

'You need to recreate the human race with my headdress?' she asks, when Diana is back within speaking range.

'Both of yours would be best.' Diana nods. 'It would take forever to explain, but we're … I think … oh, no, I'm not supposed to mention that.' Her pale cheeks turn pink.

'What are you not supposed to mention?' asks Naike, voice rising in pitch.

'Nothing!'

'Wherever you may come from, while you are here, we are the highest authority,' Tanwen says. 'What do you want, and why?' Temper, she must keep her temper in check.

'You're going to try to kill me when I get back,' says Diana. 'You won't be able to, but you'll try. The world ended,' she continues in a rush. 'Like it was supposed to. All prophecies everywhere came true, yadda yadda, no one left standing except the chosen twelve, right?'

'We have that history,' says Naike. 'That the world is destroyed, and remade by those the gods have spared.' The way he says it, Tanwen can picture him sitting in the palace's library, poring over the appropriate book - she imagines it thick and crumpled around the edges - with wide eyes and a ribbon holding his hair out of his face, so overawed he's forgotten he should have been asleep hours ago.

'Uh, yeah,' says Diana. 'That's us. You two, and one of your servants, and me, and eight other people you haven't met yet and hopefully won't this time around. We're trying to get people started again, but if we left it up to you two to repopulate, the whole world would just be inbred, so we're trying to make - hey, don’t look at me like that, you were five months pregnant two minutes ago - dammit, why didn't we send someone else to do this. I'm worse than Hagrid.' She sighs and stares straight ahead for a moment, eyes unfocused.

This time, Tanwen tries very, very hard not to meet Naike's eyes. Or to look anywhere, really. 'And so you need our headdresses … for what? Supposing this isn't just a monstrous insult against our honors. Aisa, let her go.' The guard, looking almost reluctant, releases the foreigner.

'To make people, like from clay and stuff. We need something from everyone's time to make the spell work, something important - don't ask, really, I can't blab about this because I don't know how it works - and Julian was convinced that if we went back to talk to ourselves, we'd explode the universe or something. He reads too much sci-fi, but he's the physicist. So here I am. Just give me two seconds with them? Or maybe even just some feathers. Literally, that's all it'll take I think.' She bows at the waist until she nearly pitches forwards.

'Just a feather?' That sounds less insane, and more like an actual spell, based on Tanwen's limited knowledge of how magic functions. Against her better judgment, she might actually be considering this, if only because, aside from this woman being a god from the future as she says, she can see little other way for her to have come. Nothing about her is like anything Tanwen has ever seen. 'I accept your request, with caution, but on the condition that you allow us to accompany you to your destination.' Naike gives her a curious look. 'I want to understand what happens in my own palace,' she says defensively.

Diana straightens and beams. 'Awesome! I knew you'd see it my way. Let's go.' She grabs them both by the hand; Naike protests, and wriggles away.

'It would be indelicate to touch the chosen of the gods without permission,' Tanwen says, extracting her hand as well. Diana has the grace to look embarrassed, at least, though she definitely skips as she leaves the receiving room of the palace.

Their destination, as it turns out, is in the smaller antechamber just down the corridor; specifically, the corner containing a partially completed mural of the World Tree. It isn't much, just a long, dark shadow that seems to hover in the air a hand's breadth away from the wall. Diana leads them to the shadow. 'Feathers please, Your Graces.'

Tanwen hesitates a moment before reaching up and removing three iridescent green feathers. Next to her, Naike does the same, and Tanwen is grateful for the emptiness of the room because this just isn't dignified.

'Your headdress, it's out of order now,' Naike says, tapping the side of his head to indicate where. He watches her fumble around for a moment, before brushing her hands out of the way and rearranging them himself.

'Thank you,' she says, bowing.

Diana stands clutching the feathers, looking between them with pursed lips. 'Just out of curiosity, when am I? I mean, how long since you got kinged?'

'One hundred seven days,'Naike says without hesitation. Tanwen stares at him. 'It was three days after our wedding,' he explains. As if that helps; this man, Tanwen thinks, seems so vague and perpetually dazed, but he can remember how many days it's been since their wedding at the drop of a hat. She isn't sure whether to be amused, or touched, or possibly horrified.

'That explains a lot. You poor souls, I can't even imagine.' Diana waves her handful of feathers at them, giggling, and vanishes into the shadow against the wall without further ado. Tanwen jumps.

'Two seconds, she said.' Naike touches the shadow with the tips of his fingers, but fails to penetrate the surface. They can, however, hear voices, as though from behind a door.

'Got 'em. Good grief, those headdress things look silly,' says Diana.

'Have you seen the clothing you're wearing lately,' says another voice, low and male. The question is followed by a smack.

'It took less time than I expected,' they hear, and to Tanwen the floor seems to pitch forward, because that's her voice, coming through the shadow. The strange woman had told them the truth.

'Yeah, you were more of a pushover then than you are now,' says Diana. 'You both looked exhausted, by the way.'

'Thank the gods.' Naike. Tanwen glances next to her and sees his expression grow, not shocked, but thoughtful.

'Thank us.' The first male voice again. 'Don't be rude, go give them thanks as well.'

And a moment later, Diana reemerges, a lunatic grin on her face. 'Success!' she crows. 'Now we may repeople the earth!'

Tanwen tries to process the fragment of conversation to which she was just party. 'This future,' she says, head swimming, 'It's not going to happen to me me, is it? It's another version of me.' Because if so, the hell is she staying here. If she only has a certain amount of time left before the end, she is not going to spend it trying to be noble and good and doing the Right Thing. She is going to spend it in the south, with her parents and siblings and cousins, wreaking political havoc.

Diana bits her lip. 'Nuh - ye - mhmm … You know what? We'll go with no, that's close enough.'

'And in your future, are we … is it happy?' asks Naike, twisting his hair around his fingers.

'The world ended, everyone you love is either dead or incommunicado, and you're stuck at eighteen forever … what do you think?' Diana shrugs. 'It's fine. Go rule your fiefdom or whatever you call it and stop being so awkward around each other. It's just weird. And on behalf of the other future's human race, thank you.' She bows, spins on her heel, and ducks back into the shadow. A moment later, it vanishes with a pop, and the prince and princess of Oboureon are left alone in the antechamber.

''Incommunicado'?' Naike taps a finger against his mouth, frowning.

'That was the only part that failed to make sense to you?' Tanwen raises her eyebrows.

'It is the only part that I have any hope of understanding.' He executes a short bow. 'Shall we return to business now, and discuss this later?'

Tanwen imagine spending the next three hours until sunset arguing with and placating her many irate new subjects; the thought makes her consider going on a murderous rampage. 'I think not. I'm exercising my powers as ruler of this duchy and deferring duties until tomorrow.' She leaves the antechamber and walks past the reception room towards the stairs. She hears Naike's footsteps behind her; a moment later, he taps her shoulder.

'I believe … correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe I should thank you,' he says. 'For the tomatoes. Maybe cocoa next time.'

Tanwen bites back a smile. 'Of course.'

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Written in 2 days, edited in another 2. I'll report back later on how this goes over ...