Of Crows and Angels

Ah... she's all I can think about.
She's thin and dark and I get the feeling that she knows something that I don't. It ticks me off. But nobody's ever made a girl talk by asking her a question, so I work my way around it. Why are you so mysterious, my little crow? I'll find it out eventually.
She gets up early in the morning. She goes to sleep while there's still light and she rises at the first signs of dawn. She usually sits on the fountain in the morning, greeting everyone who goes by to have breakfast at the mulberry tree. For most Hoodians, that is the only occasion on which they speak to her.
Lonely. She's lonely, I can see that. But it's on purpose. She pushes people away, she pushes me away, in a subtle indirect way that only a girl can muster. She towers over people that make her angry, far enough not to touch, close enough to discourage any attempt to touch. She avoids people that she dislikes. What she does to people she likes I don't really know, because she doesn't seem to like anyone.
A crow; a little, frail crow that flaps its wings and flies away before you can touch her.
Oh there's one sort of beings she likes. She likes birds. She always stares at them until they fly away. The few times I caught her in the morning because I was going home from a really long party, I saw her standing over bird nests, counting the eggs. A strange habit if you ask me. But she's really into it.
I try to talk to her on every occasion I get. I talk about the weather. About the latest news, about the scandals and gossip and the games that have just become popular. She has a way to make me talk endlessly and not say a word herself besides the occasional “Really?” and “That's interesting.” It... yeah... it may be one of the reasons why I like her. When I talk, everyone wants to say something of theirs own here and there, but she's content just listening to my babbling and I kinda enjoy that.
Once I brought her a portion of a splendid lunch I made. She tried refusing it many, hey many times, but finally she had to accept it. Ey little crow girl, I saw how your eyes lit up then. You chomped the food down as fast as you dared and you loved it, even though you tried to hide it.
She never refused to eat my cooking since and I'm really proud of that accomplishment. A few times I got her to eat with the entire family. I wondered if Gome would make her talk, with that annoying habit of asking so many questions and expecting immediate and precise answers. To my surprise she sat at the opposite end of the table, next to Arig. I hadn't been aware that she knew the boy but apparently she did and she had a way around him that convinced me they were friends.
What do you know, life is full of surprises.
I asked Arig after that first dinner, do you know her? And he said yes, she comes to the Garden regularly. But she doesn't talk, she just sits and listens and she seems happy with that. Even though her appearance startles him, especially the black eyes, he tolerates her company and she asks for nothing more.
It was funny, you know. Eventually Arig came to me, wide-eyed and nervous. He told me that the crow girl was trying to study the flower tongue. But she couldn't ever learn it, he knew that. She didn't have the gift. What was he to do? He couldn't act as a teacher. He would hate to act as a teacher, for he didn't like the girl and the sadness and anger and despair she kept inside. I was intrigued and eventually I got him to tell me: The girl had a secret, a big and angry secret, and she wanted to share it with the flowers. How can you know this, I asked, but he just shrugged my hands off and paced around the room. I don't like her, he said finally, and I don't want my flowers to know the secret she's hiding. It would poison them.
I soothed him: She couldn't learn the flower tongue by herself. And Arig had no obligation to teach her. In fact, I forbid him from teaching her because she could as well share her secret in common tongue and she didn't have to resort to such ways.
In my mind I was doubting my decision. The flower tongue was hard but I believed that she could learn it in a few decades if she had Arig's help. Then she would tell her secret to the flowers and Arig would pass that secret on to me. A long and hard way, but I'd know the secret in the end.
But that was unacceptable. My children came first before anything else and Arig was loathe to even talk to her, let alone teach her anything. I had to rely on myself in gleaning that little crow's secret.

Ah... she's all I can think about.
They call her an angel. When I saw her first, I, too, was tempted to think that. She is bright, not only in body but also in aura, and I get the feeling that every time of the day, she knows what to do. That she knows what's best. It fascinates me.
I saw her wandering alone on her second morning. I approached her, probed her. “Console a lost soul?” I said. I wonder which one of us was to be consoled.
She bristled like a cat. For three hundred years, I had been the only girl on the Neverhood. I had grown used to the company of boys. I had forgotten that a certain rivalry existed between girls, a continuous tension that teetered on the edge between pleasant and unpleasant.
It surprised me so much that I drew back and sent her to sleep in the Castle, even though I had been toying with the idea to invite her over.
It's so strange. Compared to me she's blind. I know what's coming. She does not. She can not. So how can be so sure of herself? How can she face the future with such adamant belief in herself and her boys?
I've seen the way she treats Hoborg. Like a worried man. Like her equal. She always offers her help, lends him her strength, she strokes his upper arm and tells him not to be so tense.
Tense?!
Anyone else would say that's rubbish, Hoborg isn't tense, he's perfectly at ease. He holds himself like that because he's royalty, it belongs to his position and he likes that position, he was born for it.
Yet she disregards that and sees him as a mere man who has a great, crushing responsibility.
Through her eyes I've begun to see Hoborg in a different light. As someone not subjugating but afraid. As someone not tyrannising but trying to avoid a disaster. Oh of course I always understood his reasoning: they were created to live in ignorance, you cannot tell them what you see. But through Klaya's eyes I began to see him in a more compassionate light. And with that my burden became lighter.
I have so much to learn from her. Follow her example. Yes, she's cocky. Yes, she's nasty and proud, but she's also kind and helpful and I want... I want to get to know her...
So I let her talk. I listen to her for hours, trying to fish out little bits of that wisdom she has so effortlessly adopted. Trying to see the world through her eyes, which are blind.
Which, for a moment, is a wonderful change.
Then I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling in my quickly darkening room, and I feel the shadows creep upon me again. Who said that it was wrong to hope? But that flickering light fades as I descend into a deep sleep: and in my sleep, I know and I see everything.
I'm black and she's white.
I'm hopeless and she's a living promise of hope.
I know what will truly happen and she has no idea.
Yet... Yet somehow it's me who feels blind in her company. 'Seek your tao', well, even though she doesn't know what it means, she has found it. The way to live. The meaning of life. The inner light, where I see only darkness.
Perhaps that's why I've taken such interest in her.
Krlesh says that I'm in love with her. To that I always reply that I love him more than her, and mock him that she should be jealous. He admits that he is.
My dear Krlesh, who holds pieces of the truth and tries his best to live with them. To live kindly, but true to himself.
Me, who has the whole truth and completely fails to live happily with it.
And Klaya, who knows nothing and who is carefully, carefully kept in the dark, but somehow makes better of her life than the two of us combined.
Ah, I'd say ignorance is bliss, but that sounds too condescending. In this world. But my sister is not like the others, who were created to live in ignorance – she has her eyes opened to see and she has her heart opened to feel.
Ah... yes. That is why she fascinates me so. Her heart is open to feel. And I nurse a daring thought – that one day I could look inside this heart and see what's reflected in it.


     

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