Diary Entry

Describe the place you grew up.

Although I lived in a city, of sorts, I always felt as if the forest raised me. Saplings I met as a child soon outstripped me, but I always felt as if they were my brothers and sisters. Animals would continue about their business as I passed as easily and casually as their human counterparts did in the town - perhaps pausing a moment to look, but without skittishness or fear in them. The birds taught me how to weave, the ground animals how to hide and forage, the predators how to stalk and hunt. Now that I'm Queen, the connection seems even deeper. Even in the city, on manufactured streets and in carefully carved and constructed homes, I feel the breath of the forest - the in and out breath of life being created and life being destroyed.

I love the space of it.

In my home city, many people live close together, like an ant colony, and like an ant colony it grows thin at the borders where other things live. Having seen other cities, I know now that my people take care with how houses and land fit together - care that isn't taken other places - but as a child I knew nothing different and thought it a rather crass addition to the forest, creeping out like mossy layers of life. My home was in the center of that human colony, near to the Queen and her Court. The palace, as I suppose I should call it, was a lovely place. The ceilings were high, the hallways were broad, the windows were large with heavy shutters for storms and winter. Ornamentation was everywhere - stylized flowers and trees, small figures going about their vague business or pausing for a moment to be admired. One long hallway held portraits of all of the Queens of the Dea al Mon, another held statues, a third was filled with books whose shelves were interrupted here and there by cozy chairs and small side tables with lamps.

Now, walking through it, my home is both achingly familiar and tremulously alien to me. Sometimes I fancy that I can see through the paintings and tables to a time when here there was only bare land, or to a time when it was a small house that is now long lost within the depths of the palace. The present - the here and now - is transparent to time. I wonder if this is how the world seems to Jaenelle's papa - populated with the echoes of what had come before.


Gabrielle Dea al Mon
"The Black Jewels" trilogy; Misc. Books
WC: 429