To Destroy is to De-Story

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.

– Maya Angelou

The Bad Guy in The Shadow of Malabron is Malabron himself, the Night King. He calls himself the Lord of Story, and believes he is the right and true ruler of the entire Realm. Malabron’s goal is to “eat” every story, so that only one story will remain: his own story, a nightmare of absolute power. If he succeeds in this he will obliterate the past, so that no one will even remember there were stories other than his. And he will destroy the future, so that no one will be able to imagine other possible stories that could be told, or lived.

While I was writing Shadow of Malabron, the word “destroy” often came up in scenes where the characters talk about Malabron’s threat to the Realm. I am a fast typer but not always accurate, and I often found myself typing the word “destroy” as “destory.” This annoyed me until I realized that this is exactly what tyrants do (in the real world as well as fantasy novels). When they set out to destroy opposition, or freedom, or independent thought, one of the things they go after is story. Take away someone’s story, or their ability to tell their story, and you take away much of who they are and their freedom to imagine that things could be different. This is truly to de-story someone.

A real-world example: the absolute control that North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-il holds over the media – newspapers, television, radio and the internet. The people of this country are prevented from reading or hearing stories other than the official ones that the government puts forth. On television they are fed a steady diet of reports about their wonderful leader and all of the wonderful things he has been doing for their country. Dissent is punished, so no one dares tell their own alternate story of how things really are in that country.

The people of North Korea are being systematically “de-storyed.”

Every government rules to some extent in similar ways, as do the giant corporations that want us all to buy the same products, that is, live the same story, a story that they impose on us rather than one we tell for ourselves. (Yes, there still are big bad giants in the world.)

Any kind of deliberate human destruction is also a destorying, in one way or another. When a forest is cleared, countless life “stories” of the creatures that live there may be lost. When a child soldier dies in war, his or her story is over before it has barely begun. 

De-storying imposes an absolute “The End” on stories that still might have grown in unexpected ways. Human beings are creatures that tell stories. We live and breathe stories. Truly we need them to survive. To be prevented from telling your story is, as Maya Angelou points out, a great agony. A killing silence.

So now when I type the word “destroy” and it comes out “destory,” I still correct it, but the mistake serves to remind me of the deep connection between destruction and the loss of story.

A Very Brief Tale

The time-eater smacked his lips.

"Those minutes and hours were delicious," he said, and lifted his empty plate.

"May I have seconds?"

Story, Time

Every story has its own time. I may not visit a particular story for many years, but when I do go back I usually find myself right back at the beginning, as if time has not passed there at all. Or if I left the story before it was over, I can usually find my way back to the place (or rather time) I left, and find myself right in the midst of the same events that were happening before.

And another curious thing is that a lot of time can go by in a story – hours, days, even years – but when I leave the story and return to my own world, I usually find that only a short time has passed. And this can happen even if I don’t visit the story itself in person. Even the spell of a good storyteller’s voice can work this strange magic.

The opposite can be true as well, although it has happened to only a few travelers I know: that one might spend only what seem a few brief moments or hours in a story and then return to one’s own world to discover that years have gone by.

Time can be strange and unpredictable within a story, too. It can slow down to a crawl, or stand still, or hours, days or years can be leapt over suddenly. One can find oneself going backwards in time, too, or catch glimpses of moments long past.  One might discover that there are many different kinds of time, and they are all ways of seeing, of being in the world.

Visiting the realm of Story can teach us a lot about time. Most of us live in a world where time is thought of as a commodity, a resource, a possession. We think of time as something we have a certain amount of, and that if we’re not careful our time can be taken away from us by others. We act as if time is something we can save, like money in a bank, and that we should never waste it. Michael Ende’s wise and lovely novel Momo describes what happens to the world when we think of time this way. We discover that we haven’t saved anything, that in fact we’ve lost something precious.

In our busy, measured, time-obsessed world, we imagine time goes in only one direction, toward the future, at a steady, ticking pace. And many of us believe that if we “spend” our time carefully now, and stick to a strict regimen of clocktime, we will earn a future in which we no longer have to keep track of the seconds and minutes and can just relax and enjoy our “free” time. But by then we might find that we’ve become so fixed in our idea of saving time that we can no longer just live it. We will have forgotten that time was always free, and never belonged to anyone.

As the narrator of Momo says, “Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.”

Kyning Rore

 

Kyning Rore is a university for mages, located on a small island off the eastern coast of the Perilous Realm, in the Sea of Mists.

The island was shaped by magecraft over many years into the likeness of a great spiraling seashell of white stone.  Within the seashell are the many classrooms, laboratories, libraries and dormitories of the university. The seashell can be seen for miles around, even at night or when the mists are thick upon the sea, for the stonework of the walls gives off a phosphorescent glow in the dark.

The mages who teach at Kyning Rore come from all over the realm, as do those who hope to become students. Anyone may apply to study at the Rore, and tuition and board are free, but of the many who come there to learn magecraft, most sail away soon after, having discovered that they have not the gifts or the dogged determination to carry on with a program of study that is rigorous, demanding, and sometimes leads to unpleasant revelations about oneself and one’s limitations.

Kyning Rore was once a remote, forbidding place where only the daring, hardy few came to learn the mage’s art. The food at the dining hall was meager, tasteless fare, and each student was assigned a small, sparsely furnished cell (there is no other word for these cold stone closets).  In winter these rooms could be bitterly cold. There have been many changes over the years, however, as the university became well-known for the quality of its instruction. More and more students flocked there, the food got better, the rooms more comfortable, and it has even been suggested that the curriculum is no longer as difficult or challenging as it once was, that students now come to the island not so much to learn the craft as to acquire the glittering reputation of having been a student at the Rore.

Many famous mages have trained at Kyning Rore, and unfortunately a few infamous ones as well, who took what they learned and used it to deceive and control others. A Master’s degree from Kyning Rore, they say, is no longer a guarantee that the mage who carries it still follows the mage’s oath to serve others and do no harm.

Yule

From the Old English word geol or geola, meaning “Christmas Day, Christmastide.” But this Old English word comes from jol, an Old Norse word for a feast (of the pagan variety). A similar word, giuli, referred to a two-month winter "season" that was roughly the same period as the December and January of the Romans. And the Old Norse word may have been a borrowing from an Old French word, jolif, meaning something nice, festive or … jolly. The word was revived in the 19^th century, to give a unique name to the tradition of a “Merry Old English” Christmas.


Yule is also a country in the Perilous Realm, far to the north, in the Snowlands. It is also called The Kingdom of the Fir Trees. It is said that a great loremaster lives there, who is known to ride about on a sleigh pulled by the great antlered deer called tarand, bringing gifts and good cheer to everyone, to help them through the long dark winter, which in that country is all year round. Yule is, in fact, the place where Christmas (and its ancient pagan forebears) lives on always. To live there you’d have to get used to a steady diet of plum pudding and wassail.

As I look out my window now, I see snow falling. Looks like it will fall all day. I can almost imagine I live in the land of Yule. Time to go make some wassail.