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English
Series:
Part 1 of there's blood on the side of the mountain, there's writing all over the wall
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Focus on Female Characters, Female Characters Deserve Better
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Published:
2024-01-05
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2,176
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1/1
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when i'm dead and gone, will they sing about me?

Summary:

Dead and gone, will they scream my name?
___

Twenty things that the People come to know about Kiri te Suli Kireysi'ite.

Notes:

Title taken from the song Scream My Name by Tove Lo.

Work Text:

Her youthful appearance is not deceptive, but neither are the millennia gathered in her eyes. To look directly into them makes even Tsahìk three times her age feel unsteady for the briefest heartbeats, like children taking their first steps. Then she blinks, or they do, and they're looking at a young girl again, slim and fragile as a sapling, and nonetheless impossible to forget.

_________

Her mother is Palulukan Makto, her father (and later her younger sister) Toruk Makto, her brother the walking impossibility of a forest child turned Tulkun Makto. On first glance, she seems the odd one out, the only one who never made an impossible ride all her own.

Then you glimpse the waves of light caught up under her like wings, carrying her from body to body, mind to mind. Tsaheylu Makto, they call her, bond-rider, traveling the living web like thought made flesh, rising beyond simple threads of kuru to straddle an entire humming tapestry.

Abomination, some call it, and perhaps they're right. She flies anyway.

_________

Her fury, her heartbreak, the angsty moods every teenager enters, make the air around her crackle in the same way, sends her kuru sparking like an untamed flame and animals shuddering, trembling, ilu twisting frantically through the water. On the very worst days, the babies begin to cry in their parents' arms, and passing People feel spikes of pain through their heads, their own kuru shuddering in response.

On the very worst days, she flees, there is no better word for it. She runs, her ikran descends to greet her without her bothering to vocalize a summons, and then they're soaring off into the clouds together, electricity trailing off into a buzz that leaves the hair on everyone's necks standing up.

_________

She collects trinkets from her fallen enemies, little white rolls she lights in cooling embers, and little silver pipes from which she takes deep, sharp breaths. It's familiar, she'll say, with a shrug. Calms me down.

Her parents and other adults in her family make a constant, combined effort to wrest these objects from her possession, citing various threats to her health. Her siblings either assist in these efforts or help her hide them, depending on the complex web of debts and vendettas that all siblings recognize amidst themselves.

When the objects are found, she lets them be taken without too much fuss. Sooner or later, she'll find new ones, and there are always more bodies to search.

_________

Captured demons--the ones with Na'vi skin and human weapons, with grasping hands and hungry teeth--must be brought to her first. She will take what is needed from them, like any prey, and then they must be either killed or returned to their metal-eyed goddess, depending on the clan's opinion of their crimes.

The screams coming from whatever secluded place she takes them hang heavy in the air for days afterward, it seems. The lives saved with the knowledge she tears from demon brains cannot quite burn away the shadows in her eyes.

_________

She is, of course, a demon: just look at her hands, the five fingers jarring as a two-headed pa'li colt. She is, of course, a miracle: just look at what those hands can do, the way Eywa'eveng leaps to her command in the space between heartbeats.

Both of these things, of course, cannot be true in a sensible world. Both of these are, of course, are.

_________

Her story changes from mouth to mouth, and it will change in the generations to come, shifting through the mediums of speakers, weavers, painters, dancers, puppeteers, the lens of countless communities, countless lenses through which to view Eywa and her strangest creations.

One thing everyone can agree on is that there once upon time, was a woman who was of the Na'vi and not, who was alive and not, who was dead and not. A woman who is dead now, and yet has never died, will never die. A woman who was, like the daughter that is perhaps less a daughter and more the raw beating place behind a shed skin, a study in contradictions.

There was a woman, and now there is a girl, and with that girl comes splintered wood and red-watered dirt and electricity singing in the air, the ground trembling beneath carefully placed feet. You will feel her long before you See her, the storyteller tells the wide-eyed children. Like fingers walking up your spine.

_________

No matter how far she goes, and she goes very far, she never loses her Omatikaya accent. Even those who have never heard an Omatikaya speak recognize the way she carries her home on her tongue.

_________

Her flight visor is modified to block vision when properly lowered, her solution to the strange lights that Sky People sometimes flash when they suspect she has joined a battle, the ones that sends her plummeting into thrashing, helpless fits. Self-induced darkness doesn't seem to bother her, though, her vision skipping from body to body and mind to mind at the speed of light.

The original visor belonged to someone else, once upon a time. Someone she cared for very much--a beloved, mighty warrior.

_________

It's easy to mistake the occasional blankness on her face for incomprehension, uncaring. It's easy to mistake the odd, rapid twitching and weaving of her hands and ears and tail for flighty madness. People who have clan members like her, who are like her, usually know better than to make such mistakes, but it still happens.

No one can miss the way her eyes sharpen in the heat of a fight, though, whether in a gathering or on a battlefield. No one forgets the moment they realize what the twitching and weaving of her hands can really do, when properly motivated.

The longer the war goes on (and on and on) the fewer such mistakes are made.

_________

She will wear many different clothes, snow furs and desert layers, fine silks and practical wraps, the most precious ceremonial attire and the strangest Dreamwalker garb, but the one she always returns to is her dark green shawl, even when she grows tall enough it looks tiny on her shoulders, even when it is worn ragged from years of washing and carrying.

The Omatikaya gave it to my bloodmother, she tells the curious. And she passed it on to me. And that is all she needs to say.

_________

Her most constant companion is perhaps her strangest one: a Sky Boy, growing into a Sky Man, as much as the Sky People ever grow. A little, golden-brown figure, Na'vi clothes with a rifle on his back, a silvery-white scar gleaming across his chest like the mark from a ceremonial death.

Trotting at her side, two steps for every one of hers, or walking with her slowly on the days when her mind wanders, and she with it. Calming her during her fits or sitting with her in her long silence, small hands weaving fine little braids through her hair.

Rumors travel on the boy's heels, whispers of a demon son, demon mate, levels of perversion and infection that boggle the mind. Kireysi'ite must know, and her ears certainly twitch when the whispers travel by, but her fingers stay firmly wrapped around his, anyway.

_________

Her loyalty to the Sully-Tsakha family is legendary, and theirs to her is just as fierce, little manners of blood aside. Lo'ak te Suli Tsyeyk'itan bickers with her like no one else does, but he is always close by when she calls for him. When Tuktirey te Suli Neytiri'ite is old enough for the battlefield, she follows her sister to war without flinching, guns and knives glinting in her hands.

One can detect ripples of tension between her and her parents, her grandmother, as if none of them are ever quite sure who is the child and who is the adult. They are as determined to protect her as she is to protect them, all of them, with the same fierceness a descendant uses to shield her legacy, that a mother uses to protect her children. 

_________

She carries a fine little scar across her throat, pale against deep blue skin, small and delicate as a long-remembered kiss. A gift from an old friend, she says.

_________

The demons fear her, and they all should. There are those are who think that the Na'vi should, too, those who don't know what to think about the bodies they see torn up with jagged animal teeth or plants sprouting from the inside out, who sees demons with blood running from their eyes and kuru, screaming and thrashing at the ground, clawing out their own guts with shaking hands.

The idea of so much power concentrated in a single being is terrifying, and often she seems more frightened than anyone else, her hands trembling as she washes the blood away after the battle. But then she raises her head, eyes hard, back straight, shouldering her duty like an Olo'eyktan's mantle.

It is better to have such a force (the power, and the girl who carries it) on their side than fighting alongside the enemy. On this, all can agree.

_________

Sometimes, her Na'vi is strange, almost formal, calling to mind the over-precise sounds of a Dreamwalker poking her way through the language. Sometimes, she speaks it as if born to it, as if she has never known anything else.

Sometimes, the only thing that soothes her is the collection of "samples" from nearby plants, murmuring to herself in strange tongues as she works. She'll rest her head against a trunk or leaf as if listening to the plants themselves, lips moving in time with their song, and the golden-haired boy or one of her other kin will sit with her until her eyes clear again.

(Sometimes, her Na'vi is butchered, and her voice drips rotten honey, and her kin must be found, fast. I fought with a monster once, she'll explain later. The kind that's got a poison touch).

_________

She's a talented healer--the root of her skills are Omatikaya mixed with Sky People remedies, but she learns other tricks of the trade fast, learns where to find the best of everything almost as well as the healers who've worked there all their lives. Her touch is gentle, and she knows when her patient is hurting before they do, it seems.

But she will never be a Tsahìk, not when it means binding herself so tightly to the customs of a single clan, not when her path weaves so far back and forth across Eywa'eveng's skin, not with a damaged human muntxatan, not with a war that calls her on and on. Her destiny is so much larger, so much more narrow, than that.

She says it doesn't bother her, giving up this role that she spent most of her child studying for, planning for. She says.

_________

It's easy to be confused, the first time she steps into the center of a war council. Someone so young, such a stranger in most of the lands she finds herself, a girl who does little to hide her fragility or strangeness, a shadow usually hovering over the shoulder of her more legendary parents, her brasher brother. It seems, at first, like a mistake.

Then she speaks, the plants themselves seem to stiffen at attention, the animals go still, and even those who will argue with her cannot help but at least listen. Even those who will argue know this is not a mistake, not at all.

_________

She has survived so much; the very existence is in denial of every rule about both Na'vi and Sky People have created about their living and their dead. She escaped the hands and bullets of the Demon Olo'eyktan and his men, she escaped raging fires and deep waters and the shadows lurking in the depths of her own brain, she has flown through battle after battle and come home dripping red with the blood of her foes.

Everyone knows, of course, that the worst is yet to come for all of them, that survival is always a tricky thing when demons are falling from above to destroy all you hold dear. Everyone knows that war comes with terrible loss, and the fear of what will happen if Eywa loses Her blood daughter like this.

So no one asks, yet, can you die? Will you, ever? They doubt she knows the answer, either way.

_________

She grew up under the shadow of old wars, her adolescence bloomed in the fire of new ones, and she wages one now, a planet-spanning battle against invasion. There are many stories like hers among the Na'vi she meets, and more like them every day.

One day, they'll be stories and nothing more, she promises. Our monsters will go back into the shadows where they belong. She says it so certainly it's hard not to believe; if she carries any doubts of her own, she keeps them hidden.