31_days | [Nov 13th] [original] Stories

Title: Stories
Day/Theme: 13. times change
Series: My oiriginal post-apocalyptic-steampunk'ish-vampire story
Character/Pairing: Edith Scwartz
Rating: G

The world was different, once, long ago. She had never seen it, not having been born until much later. Well, not overly much later, but enough that the signs of what life had once been were by then mere ghosts in the shadows, exciting tales passed on one generation to the next. Tales full of awe and inexplicable things. Things that just were, but which nobody could explain. Some could not even say the words of some things. Mother had said that right after the Shift, some had spoken of things that they had used every day of their lives, but had danced around the knowledge, the words which would have unlocked memory, having simply... forgotten. But some things still lived on in stories, some told by humans who were more resistant to the Great Forgetting, some by magical mythical beings who had never been that much affected any way.

Stories...

She had heard some. Some from her mother, some from Sybil, who had once been like a second mother to her until she had betrayed them all and been the death of Aamu. The veracity of Sybil's stories she had begun to doubt, even when she knew, somewhere really deep down, that the woman would have not lied all the time.

In her travels, she heard even more. Hushed stories around camp fires of the night many generations ago when the earth itself had groaned, the oceans rebelled and humanity sobbed to the heavens in unison.

The night they lost their memories and opened their eyes into a world which was theirs yet wasn't. Into a world where there were things that you thought that you should know how to use, or at least what they were, but could not. She had seen some of these remnants of an age gone by. Her mother had sometimes picked up things and explained. And she had understood, for a moment. Then, after, she had known that her mother had told her something... but for the life in her could not remember one single thing about it.

Mother was always so sad when that happened. After a while, as she got a little bit older, Edith stopped telling mother about the fact that she forgot. In time, mother told her less and less. Of things. But she wove stories, and such stories they were. And the stories she did not forget. The words made their way deep deep inside of her, settling in her very soul, embroidered there into the cloth of her personal history as pretty patterns made of words and narratives.

It made mother so happy to hear that she remembered the stories. Words had power in them, väki, as mother called it. She said that it was something that could not be erased, no matter how powerful you were, how dark magics you controlled. Words remained. Words were power.

After mother was gone, burned by the unforgiving sun, weakened by the utterance of her christened name, Edith realized how much of an awesome and terrible power words really wielded.

And her own magic, well, that was another story of its own all together.