Lyra's Winston

Short fiction by Amy Marques

Amy Marques grew up between languages and cultures and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She penned three children’s books, barely-read medical papers, and numerous letters before turning to short fiction. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net 2023 by Streetcake: Experimental Writing Magazine and published in many journals including Star82 Review, Jellyfish Review, MoonPark Review, Flying South, and Sky Island Journal. You can find her at @amybookwhisper1 or read more of her words at amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.

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Lyra knew the rules. Reintegration must be treated like death. And, for all intents and purposes, that Lyra was dead to the world. Her horses had long been sold, her lasso hung unused in the abandoned barn that no longer belonged to her, and those who had known her – or thought they did – rarely remembered the cowgirl who had lived among them for so long. In time, even the dog would likely forget her altogether. 

Lyra knew the rules. She had made them. But she hadn’t understood the price. Not then.

In days gone by, her kind had freely roamed the earth and settled among the humans who had sought them out for their power and wisdom. Humankind recognized them as soothsayers and healers, sometimes elves or witches. They were revered. Then feared.

The world grew intolerant of magic, ungrateful for the gentle mercies her people afforded, cruel in its attacks. Her kind grew weary of strife and wished to leave in search of serenity. Lyra had been the strongest among them, the one who loved the earth best. When the elders suggested that maybe some should stay behind to serve humankind, Lyra was the only one to volunteer. 

They left: the dream-whisperers and kingmakers, the healers and the scholars, the gardeners and the dancers and the giants who held up the sky. All but Lyra. She slowly learned their skills and took on their forsaken roles and grew until she was larger than the giants and wiser than the scholars. 

Her roots sunk deep into the earth she loved, and as her destiny entwined with humankind, her bond with her own kind unraveled. She reminded herself that this was the home she had chosen, the mission she had volunteered for.

For a time, she retained her full form. But they could not understand or love her as such. Her vastness frightened the very people who needed her most. She strained to embrace the world and play all her roles from the shadows, showing only parts of herself at a time. Finally, she retreated to the woods and surrounded her home with enchantments that hid it from the world. She had heard of wisewomen who became multitudes. Lyra imagined she could do the same. 

It took seven full years, but finally, the spell was cast. From her vastness she made seven times seven human-sized portions of her soul: her selven.

At last, the seven-times-seven Lyras, each fully her, yet uniquely themselves, were ready to leave the woods. For seven hundred years, they walked the earth as women do. They nurtured children and made kings. They inspired wars and coaxed peace. They whispered reveries and shouted truths. They fed multitudes, moved mountains, and loved with enough strength to shift trajectories and shape destinies.

Meanwhile, Lyra waited, captive, in the woods. Diminished. Hollow. Alone.

Then, after seven centuries, the spell shifted; as Lyra had known it would, as she had planned it to. From then on, on the longest night of the year, every seven years, her fractured selven met for the sun to choose which was next to be reintegrated. Which was next to die. 

The ancient had spoken of it. It had been done before, but rarely. Those who fractured slowly returned into themselves until they were, once again, whole and free. What Lyra hadn’t known was that although they returned, the selvens remained themselves. Their loves and losses haunted her dreams and shaped her days.

• • •

Ten days ago, on the winter solstice, they had come from every corner of the earth, her selven had. They were as different from one another as the flowers that framed her cottage and the mushrooms she foraged for in her woods. They trickled in with song, with dance, with grumblings about the length of the trip, and with excited tales of how the lands had changed since their last gathering. 

Almost three hundred years had passed since the first septennial and now only seven selven remained outside of Lyra: the healer, the librarian, the tutor, the warrior, the artist, the child, and the cowgirl. 

“Where is the cowgirl?” the tutor asked, with the schoolmistress voice she’d perfected over centuries, the one that still made the child jump to attention in spite of herself. 

“There’s still time,” the artist said from where she lay in the grass, eyes shielded from the sun that was still high in the sky. “We don’t begin until sunset.”

The child went back to following the cardinals and brushing against branches covered in fresh snow. She stopped at the oldest of the pines and bent her head to nibble on the snowflakes. Even after centuries living among humans and watching them grieve when their young passed before their time, the selven child hardly expected to be the next to go. Children never do. 

The tutor paced, impatient to begin. The artist napped in the fading sun while the healer, the librarian, and the warrior sat in companionable silence, backs against the west-facing cottage wall, watching the child’s exploration with varying combinations of amusement and longing. 

“I think tutor’s worried she’ll be next,” said the librarian. 

“We all are,” the healer replied after a pause of many heartbeats. But she kept her voice soft, barely a whisper, cushioning the blow. The healer didn’t ask, but she wondered if the warrior felt as she did, so tired some days that she almost wished to be the next to rest.

They spoke no more, only watched the sky shift from blue to pink to orange.

The cowgirl arrived at the gate just as the sun touched the horizon, but she wasn’t alone.

“The dog can’t come in,” Lyra said. The sanctuary had never been breached. Not before the fracture. Not in the seven hundred years and definitely not in any of the septennial gatherings since. No humans had ever entered her realm. Not ever.

“Winston isn’t human,” the cowgirl said, hand resting lightly on the dog’s head, still standing outside the gate, suggesting that if he weren’t welcome, she wasn’t welcome either. 

“He is other. He has no magic.”

You’d be surprised. The cowgirl didn’t say it out loud, but she didn’t have to. She was a part of Lyra, after all, if temporarily apart. When they were away, Lyra followed their lives as one might see in a fog. At times the mist lifted, and she saw patches of clarity. It was easier with the child who allowed her feelings to run the gamut, unguarded and intense. The others had grown more complex and, in learning to guard themselves from those around them, to shield others from their depths, they’d erected walls that even Lyra couldn’t always penetrate. But here, in their woods, close enough to touch, close enough to feel their heartbeats, Lyra could read their souls as her own. 

Lyra waited, impervious. Nothing from outside had ever been allowed in. Would ever be allowed in.

The cowgirl’s shoulders slumped, and she bent towards the dog, bidding him to stay. When he rested his face on his front paws, she scratched his ears, murmuring reassurances until he slept.

“Can’t he just stay here? Outside the gate? I can spellbind his sleep. He won’t be a bother,” she said. 

The six selven watched Lyra, wondering what she would say. They could feel it too: a tug. But selven knew not to love what they could not afford to lose. They were promised only seven years at a time. After centuries of loving those with lifespans shorter than their own, they were wary of causing pain in those they left behind. 

Lyra said nothing. Long ago she had taught them to come prepared. They knew the sunset on the shortest day of the seventh year heralded a new ending. There were no exceptions. No promises. They would spend the night telling tales of their lives and the sunrise would choose the next of the selven to die to her singularity. They could bring nothing with them. She never told them that their memories haunted her sleep.

The cowgirl selven lay on the ground next to the sleeping dog and whispered to him before gently conveying him back to the home they shared. Then, lips pressed tightly together, she came through the gate and joined her selven sisters in the garden just as the last of the sunlight faded on the horizon.

They had once been many, seven times seven, and the ritual storytelling had lasted through the long dark night. Now they were only seven and they had known each other for so long that they were rarely surprised—if occasionally disgusted or delighted—with the choices the others had made. Their time was spent sharing tales of the humans they had succored through the years.

They began with the child. Never mind that they all knew that she was not, in truth, younger than any of them; she looked like a child, so they found themselves forever treating her like one. Hers were tales of rain puddles and drawings in the clouds, but also of how the creases on a teacher’s forehead grew deeper and their eyes didn’t always match their smile. 

She told of the girl who hid in the alley on the nights her mother’s voice sounded sloppy, until the child selven guided a neighbor into taking her in. She told of the boy who was teased for his lisp until the child selven invited him to make music and they sang the lisp away. The child’s laughter made them all—even the cowgirl—smile.

In the early gatherings, they had feared the tales of the warrior, thinking hers would be the most difficult to bear. But in time, they learned that it was the small things told by the caregivers—the mother, the minister, the counselor, the healer—that haunted them even long after they’d passed from their lives and reintegrated back into Lyra.

“I can’t,” the cowgirl said when it was her turn to share. “I did nothing.”

“That’s not true,” Lyra said. “I watched. Tell us the story of the woman you found half buried in the snow.”

“That was Winston,” the cowgirl said, and she blew into her hands as she had watched humans do. Her hands still smelled of Winston, so she kept them there, cupping her nose and mouth, breathing in comfort.

“But you led her to shelter,” Lyra coaxed.

“Winston did it. I was just there.”

Quiet blanketed them as the lightest dusting of snow decorated their lashes and their hair. The selven sat, inured to the elements, attuned to beauty, comfortable even in the freezing temperature. Here, in the sanctuary, snow couldn’t dim the glow of the fire and flowers bloomed at will. They sat as they had so many times before, in intimate silence, until stories of Winston spilled out of the cowgirl. 

Selven knew to cut ties and close circles before each seventh year neared its end. The cowgirl had always started by letting go of the horses. She’d left Ginger, the oldest, at the barn where the old vet housed the animals under his care. That’s where she had met Winston. 

He’d been little more than a puppy then: a little bundle of black and white, with the one tan dropped ear. He’d gazed at her in adoration with the one blue and the other brown eye, as she’d brushed down Ginger’s coat for what she hoped wasn’t the last time. When she was done, she sat on the hard floor and he moved closer, tail wagging, front paws moving onto her lap as she scratched his chin and told him what a handsome boy he was. He’d bounced after her when she left the barn and she’d laughed at his eagerness. 

“Stay!” the cowgirl told the dog. But he didn’t, even though she knew he’d understood her. She was skilled in husbandry and care of animals that humans had long domesticated. She spoke their language as her own and they understood her soul. He knew what she wanted of him, and he would have done anything she asked. Everything she asked. Everything but let her go on without him.

As dawn broke after the longest night of another seventh year, the sun kissed each of the selven faces in turn before shining its full force on the cowgirl, coating her in light even as she whispered, “Please, no… Winston… I promised…”

For the first time, Lyra sobbed as a selven reintegrated. She felt the cowgirl’s heartbreak take over her whole self, engulfing her in sorrow. She hadn’t felt such pain even when she had been whole. The cowgirl’s grief inundated her, shattering the deepest recesses of her soul, until the only clear thought in her mind was that she had broken her promise to Winston, and that neither of them would ever recover. 

Stay. Sleep. I’ll see you again soon.

• • •

At first, the dog had only come to her in dreams. But night after night the vision strengthened even as Winston grew feebler. His longing pulled at her, called to her, and reminded her of promises she had made. Or that part of her had made. 

Now he haunted even her waking hours: Winston lying in front of the old fireless hearth, barely moving. Tail still, fur dull, eyes closed. She would have thought him dead, but the rise and fall of shallow breaths was evidence that he held on, patiently waiting, heart steady, trusting her to come back.

On this new year’s morning, light danced through the lace curtains and played on the cottage walls in an unwelcome reminder that not everything shared in her grief. The sun had made its choice and it felt no remorse. 

She wrapped her blanket around herself and closed her eyes, telling herself to breathe, to stop resisting dawn’s invitation, to catalogue the sounds of the morning: the windchimes, the chirp of the birds who visited the feeder, the gurgle of the creek, the bark—

Lyra rushed out the door.

There, at the gate where the cowgirl in Lyra had lain beside him and whispered promises of reunion, sat Winston. His coat had lost its shine and he was skin and bone, but his tail twirled, and his one blue and one brown eye gazed at Lyra—all of the selven in Lyra—as adoringly as before. Lyra had never felt so thoroughly loved.

Behind him, at the edge of the wood, the six remaining selven stood side by side.

"We thought you might change your mind," the child said, nodding at the dog.

The others said nothing, just stood watching to see what Lyra would choose to do. 

Lyra’s unshod feet barely touched the ground as she approached the gate that opened only on the longest night of every seventh year. Only to her selven. Only to herself. 

After a nod of gratitude to the selven who had broken her rules and returned past the solstice, she opened the gate and let her loving dog in. 

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