Chương 8: Aisling

The day after that he watched over her as she woke, his bulky backpack hunching him even further towards the ground.

"Come," Solas grunted.

"We make up lost time." This time Solas took her directly inland away from the ocean - east. Now she found herself and her odious companion threading their way through the ruins of what must have been a village - and only recently destroyed. Smoke and ash still curled up from piles of logs which once might have been small houses.

"Nah, happened ages past," Solas said when Miriam mentioned it.

"But a village… well a village wants to be a village. All the hopes of the people what built it, the bonds of the people callin' it home… it's no small thing to scrub the earth clean of that. This rotten pit will smolder likely another two decades unless I miss my guess. And still as long as any live who remember it, you'll find an ember or two alighting the brush." He led them to a clearing in the rubble and cobbled together two stools from the charred wood around them.

They both sat, Miriam uneasy at how fragile the makeshift furniture felt on her backside. He brought out no wine or snacks this time, but instead unsheathed a large canvas from his backpack. It was an oil painting, but horrific in a way she had never seen before. The subject of the painting was what she assumed to be a Wisp - a spindly woman in a plain black frock, with limbs and neck just slightly too long, skin a pale blue and long tendrils arching languidly from silver eyebrows.

Her physical differences were not what made the painting so disturbing, however. Her fingers were captured raking out towards the viewer, as if to tear their way out of the canvas. The expression on her face was one of unabashed horror, the look of a woman just realizing she's falling to her death.

"Her name was Aisling." Solas's voice sounded wistful, sad - the only emotions she had ever seen from him that wasn't some degree of smug or bitter.

"We was friends since we were pups. I never knew why she liked me - I was the same shriveled, miserable hog I am now, just teakettle sized. She was the kindest soul I ever met - by Wisp standards anyway." He snorted at Miriam.

"You'd see her very differently, I'd wager." ✧✧✧ Aisling had been to Solas what an icy wind would have been to a man baking in the desert - entirely welcome, but utterly confusing. He had not been a pleasant child - few Wisps were, he claimed, with no small amount of cultural pride. Nor could Aisling be thought of as gentle or kind by any other creature in the Tír. When the other children would kick him for no other reason than to declare targets other than themselves, her foot met his back with just as much vigor.

The difference was that she would come find him afterwards, apply the cool healing mud from the swamp edge to his bruises and lecture him on being tougher. Once a group of children stole a wild frog he had found and were tossing it among themselves over his head - even for a Wisp he had always been diminutive - when she snatched the amphibian out of the air. With a cold look she had stomped it flat. Later she explained how he was doing this to himself. Don't give your love to such fragile things, she said.

Your heart needs armor. She then handed over a snapping turtle she had coaxed out of the swamp that afternoon. No one ever tried to lay a hand on that pet. She was the single soft spot in a hard, hard life. He was in love with her of course, but her lesson was too well-taught for him to fall for such a trap. She was far too fragile for him to tie his heart to. A lesson that proved itself later, two years into his time at the Academy.

His first two years at the prestigious school had been lonely and tough, but it was no different than what the previous seventy had brought him. Ostracized by peers of more well-regarded races, he hardened himself. Solas thought of himself as a foreign combatant behind enemy lines, and any social doors that were not already barred to him he made sure to slam shut as tightly as he could.

That changed when he made his way to a new craft shop in the city for ink - his regular supplier had gotten tired of the verbal barbs that made up Solas's casual chit chat and banned him from the store. There he saw a rarity working the counter - another Wisp! This new Wisp wasn't tall and fair like Fionn had been. He was only a head above Solas, and while he didn't seem quite as goblinesque, there was no denying his heritage in the patchy hair and gaunt cheekbones.

His name was Diarmuid, and he and Solas quickly bonded over their shared isolation and their homesickness. Diarmuid was only from two villages away from Solas's hometown. He wasn't a particularly talented fórsa manipulator, but he was a brilliant artist. There was no school like the Academy for the arts in this quarter of the ring, but he reasoned that arts were culture, and the Academy held many cultured people.

He would never build his fórsa up enough to travel to the inner rings to study, so he took a job in an art shop near the Academy. If he could not study his passion, he could at least be near it. Three or four months later was the Season of Frost, which was one of the rare holidays celebrated by the entire ring. Diarmuid's family has very vocally disowned him, so Solas invited him home with him, to suffer as only a big family of spiteful wretches can make one suffer. Unalone. That's when Diarmuid met Aisling.

They spotted her from the window of the tailor shop at which she was apprenticed. Solas had smiled at seeing his childhood friend again. They had parted on what to others would have seemed to be indifferent terms, quick farewells while passing in the the street, but she had slipped him a cotton handkerchief with his initial embroidered on it - her first project completed as an apprentice. That had been nearly a year ago.

Solas had looked up at Diarmuid to point her out to him, but his friend had already noticed Aisling. Diarmuid's eyes were hard and lean, his mouth twitched up in a greedful smile, his right hand clenched. Against his better judgement Solas introduced the pair. Within two weeks Diarmuid and Aisling were inseparable. He brought her to Solas's family Frost Feast, where Solas saw him kiss her under the first snowfall of the year.

Aisling invited him to walk the woods, something she and Solas used to do to get away from other people. Three weeks after they met, Diarmuid revealed he wanted to ask her to move to the city to be with him. Plenty of tailors around the Academy, he'd sneered. All those fancy muckity-mucks have to have their fancy clothes. As one of those Academy muckity-mucks Solas scoffed at the idea, but agreed it was true. They would depart from the Golden Swamp in only another three weeks. Not much time for Aisling to decide.

A week after that Diarmuid stopped bringing Aisling around. Solas didn't see her at the tailor shop and within a few days an "Apprentice Wanted" sign appeared in the window. Diarmuid kept up his walks in the woods, though he left alone and returned alone. Unable to shake his dread Solas followed one day, weaving his Mind fórsa to go unnoticed by Diarmuid, even though he was gasping and tromping loudly through the high snow, a much worse impediment for him than for his friend.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Diarmuid stopped in a small clearing about a hundred feet from the main walking path. He knelt down and felt the dirt with his slim, gray figures and snorted. From the cleared areas in the rested snow, this was not the first time he had stopped there. In front of him was a messy rectangle of dirt that held only a light dusting - it had been dug recently. Suddenly Diarmuid noticed Solas - he was too shocked to keep up his Mind fórsa.

She was going to come to the city, he spat. But she was ungrateful. Wouldn't stop talking about how much she was looking forward to being able to visit with you more often. Over and over. Barely talked about us, what we would do together. What she'd be able to do with me. All possible because I was going to let her stay at my place. Me. Mine! That was… disrespectful. With that Diarmuid stalked back down the trail, without another glance at Solas. ✧✧✧"What?" Miriam had resolved never to engage with Solas's tales.

He had said she needed to identify with him for the Reel to work and she was determined not to by any means she could. However strange and off-putting Solas's worldview was, this threatened to garner her sympathy. Solas raised an eyebrow.

"Solas was unclear?"

"He just… murdered the woman you loved and then just… justified it to your face? Even in this place, that can't be normal. Please tell me that is not normal." He shrugged.

"Wisps are Wisps, my love. Like the Night Shoals which sneak up on us each evening, we are ever-changing. Morality twists on the head of a copper and any given day could fall to either side." Miriam shook her head.

"You never make any sense. Why would anyone even fall in love with someone who killed their pet? How could you call her kind? Which side of the coin is that morality? Is any of this even true?" Solas laughed, a loud bark that echoed in the ruins of the village.

"True! Yes, all of it true! Long and fascinating is the life of Solas. And Aisling killed my frog, but she helped me understand the same truth escaping you now. Every Wisp must learn."

"What truth? A better pet is one that bites and has armor? I can't say I've ever felt much affection from a snapping turtle."

"That is the truth!" Solas peered into her eyes.

"A Wisp who relies on softness dies in the swamp. I took comfort in the company of that frog, but the snapping turtle had no comfort to offer me. The children who killed my pet saw that there was something in me that could be destroyed, so they destroyed it. As Diarmuid destroyed Aisling."

"And Wisps destroy anything they can?" Solas shook his head.

"No, love. The world destroys everything it can. We just live a little closer to the ground." Miriam sat in silence for a moment, the Wisp's cynical view of the world rattling in her head. She had lived long enough to know what he was saying was true - the end of everything was always going to be destruction. That was evident in the swamp's Blight nature she had rejected - it was a fundamental force of life and no amount of ideals would change that.

And as much as she would have liked to think she had lived her life as a moral person, she hadn't. Not always at least. Maybe everyone was as changeable as the Wisps were. Just less honest about it.

"What about justice?" Miriam asked, her voice a little harder.

"Is that too much to ask for a Wisp like your friend?" Solas smirked.

"Justice is inevitable, if you wait long enough. Just don't expect it any time soon." ✧✧✧ In another story Solas would have sworn revenge. In another story he would have brought the facts of Aisling's killer to light and ensured she got justice. In another story…. well. This wasn't another story. Solas went back to the Academy with Diarmuid and pretended nothing had changed. He drank with his best friend's killer, talked about art and music, groused about this or that annoyance at the Academy.

But every day, the more Solas tried to pretend nothing was any different, the more he saw changes in Diarmuid. His eyes took on a manic aspect, darting left to right with a constant shudder. His lips grew dry and parched and he developed a tendency to gape open-mouthed at the world around him, as if straining to hear something far off. He burned all his art before letting Solas take so much as a glance. One week Diarmuid disappeared without a word.

Solas didn't think much of it at first - it wasn't the first time he had gone off on his own for mysterious reasons. But as time wore on he began to worry about his one remaining friend. Solas decided to poke around at Diarmuid's loft above the art shop to see if there was any sign of him. It was late at night, and Solas's deft fingers made short work of the locks. Diarmuid was there. Strewn around him was the body of Aisling, dirty, decaying… and in pieces. Oh thank the gods you're here! Diarmuid said.

I'm afraid I have made a terrible mistake, my friend. In a moment of anger I destroyed that which I should have cultivated. But you can help me fix it! Only you can! Solas saw the body. He saw the grinder. The mortar, the pestle. The dyes. The slathered canvas. He knew what Diarmuid was trying to do. He decided to help. The mind is not some ethereal thing, Solas told Diarmuid as they began to process the body. It's of the body, and the body holds all its secrets.

The fórsa that makes up the mind is no different than that which makes up the body. It could not all be used. Diarmuid presented a host of paint canisters to Solas and he tested them with his fórsa. Only one in ten carried the right ingredients, but one in ten was enough. It took weeks of sleepless nights, but one night the painting finally spoke. In another story the painting would have begged for death, a trapped soul totally at the whims of the monster that killed it.

But in the Golden Swamp life is not so cheap that anyone would turn their nose up at it, no matter what form it took. Its first words: My heroes! For a time Solas felt better than he ever had. He had completed a masterwork of Mind fórsa - not one he could ever show his professors, unfortunately. His dead friend was alive again, sort of. And he hadn't had to distance himself from his only other friend, who had murdered her.

He visited Aisling every day, full of things he hadn't been able to talk with her about when she had been dead. At first Diarmuid seemed to revel in Solas's doting on Aisling - the way he might have felt about a collector who cooed over one of his other paintings. Solas began to get the feeling that he was overstaying his welcome, so he tried to cut his visits down to once or twice a week. Then, one day he noticed something different.

Her eyes were always too far apart, Diarmuid proclaimed, showcasing his latest work. He had altered the image, placing Aisling's eyes closer to the bridge of her nose. Solas didn't agree, but he didn't have the eye of an artist. He did notice that the painting was blinking more, and harder, as if her eyes pained her now. That was the beginning of Diarmuid's revisions. This is a masterwork, our masterwork! He exclaimed. We should make sure it's perfect! More perfect than real life could be! A longer nose.

Slimmer neck. Fuller features in a better dress. Soon he realized a method in which he could paint different attitudes - what had been combative and challenging became submissive and demure. Her keen wit dulled to pleasant platitudes. She gained an accent he thought attractive. Solas realized he was watching an asymptote in action - a goal Diarmuid had which could never be reached, and would always retreat from him before he finished. The connection between the painting and the Mind began to break down.

So much of the Mind is the image of Self, and the painting no longer resembled the woman it had been made from. The painting moved less and less. Spoke infrequently and often in pain. Frustrated, Diarmuid blamed his failure on Solas. Clearly there had been a flaw in his fórsa manipulation. His masterwork was ruined. One evening he tossed the painting into the back alley of the art shop and washed his hands of it entirely. The painting never moved again. ✧✧✧"And what is the lesson here?" Solas smirked at Miriam.

Miriam could only stare for a moment, horrified.

"People aren't objects to be fought over or thrown away?"

"Gods no!" Solas barked a laugh.

"The lesson is that the good things in life are only possible with persistence! Had Diarmuid waited but one more year I would have honed my skills enough to bend the Mind of this painting to match the vision he had. Perfection! Within his grasp! But he was too small-minded." Miriam gaped. Solas laughed again.

"Alas, not to be. Killed him shortly after this - unrelated argument. And as much of a knob he could be, I've never met another artist with skill enough to finish his work." With that Solas packed away the painting again and picked up the Reel. There was even less fluid inside this time, which made him furious. He dragged her by the chain nearly all the way back to his cabin, snarling and snapping with every step.