Traces

Another excerpt from the first Imaggen book: Rose, while recovering from a fight with Quentin, goes looking for comfort in the form of photo albums. She finds Wilfy instead, and sees the old Imaggen properly for what’s probably the first time.

-

Rose couldn’t sleep at all, and her head hurt from the crying. She never slept well without Quentin sitting in the corner of the room anyway; the dark seemed strange without him there. Late that night when she was sure the house was quiet, she eased her door open and crept out into the living room. She stifled a gasp when she came upon Wilfy in one of the chairs. His hands were folded across his chest, his legs crossed, and if he’d been a Person Rose would swear he was asleep. But he wasn’t, of course, and the Imaggen’s eyes snapped open as soon as she entered. One eyebrow raised in silent question, but even in the dark she knew it was friendly.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “I just wanted to…” she gestured at the low bookcase on the other side of the room where they kept the dictionary, her old storybooks, and the photo albums. She felt a little embarrassed; she’d done this a hundred times before, and she was sure they all knew about it, but she’d never been caught in the act.

Wilfy’s dark eyes looked her over, and the wrinkles around them softened into something like a smile. “That was some fight this afternoon,” he offered.

Rose sighed. “He’s leaving.” The words still hurt to say. Wilfy didn’t look even a little surprised, but then he’d never expected much of Quentin, really.

Wilfy levered himself up in the chair a little and winced, like his bones were hurting. She wasn’t sure he even had bones. Rose watched him with concern—was he always like this at night, all tired and sore-looking, and she’d just never noticed?

“Did he say when?

She shook her head. “Doesn’t really help.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. His eyes flickered over to the bookshelf. “Don’t let me stop yeh.”

She went over and stood before the shelf for a moment, uncertain as always now that she was here. Finally, her fingers gravitated to the last album on the shelf, the big off-white one that was only half full. She hefted it off the shelf, its weight familiar under her arm. Rose had planned on taking it back to her room with her, but something about Wilfy sitting there all familiar and warm and somehow lonely made her sit by the window instead, where the moonlight was brightest. She sank onto the worn carpet and propped the album on her knees.

One by one, she traced the pictures tucked away here in rows beneath a plastic sheath. Whole pages she didn’t recognize at all—great aunts and uncles, grandparents that Uncle Mitch told stories about–but she didn’t pause to wonder at those tonight. She flipped through steadily until she came to her favorite page: the fourth to last. Her parents’ wedding. Uncle Mitch never talked about this. All she had were these pictures, silvered over with moonlight until they seemed like something from a story book.

There were suits and dresses and a tall white cake, and Uncle Mitch with a big smile next to her dad. She paused at the picture of her mom laughing, arms above her head as she threw her flower bouquet behind her. Rose saw herself in that picture, all grown and wrapped up in white lace and flowers. Her dad looked like Uncle Mitch, the same blue eyes and wispy hair. Here in her hands they were happy, still, walking arm-in-arm down the aisle or dancing with their Imaggen’s indicator lights on either side, never to be captured in photograph. Rose wished she remembered what they looked like—no picture could bring them back, not even Named.

She sat looking at the wedding for a while, playing the scenes together in her head, a well-visited dream of the sounds and sights between the pictures. She wished Uncle Mitch would talk about it. He missed them too, but he missed them differently. At least he had more than pictures.

Rose had to blink tears away as she turned to the final filled page of the album. There were only two pictures here. One of her mother, laughing again, lying on her back looking up at the camera. One hand rested on her rounded stomach, the other above her head. Rose liked this one the best: it was almost like having a picture of just the two of them, even if Rose wasn’t born until months later. She touched her mother’s face, just once, tracing her smile.

The last picture was of her parents and Uncle Mitch, sitting on some stone steps somewhere. Her parents’ arms were wrapped around each other, smiling at the camera. Uncle Mitch sat a little behind them, holding Rose as a little baby wrapped up in a pink blanket. He was looking down at her with the same smile she saw every morning, oblivious to the camera.

Rose stared at that picture, trying to remember being there, feeling that happy, until she fell asleep. Hours later she woke up, curled on the carpet with a blanket thrown over her. Wilfy was quiet and still in his chair, so she put the album back and shuffled off to her room, blanket still around her shoulders.

Time to Leave

Things in Mill go wrong, and Rose finds herself on the brink of leaving the only home she’s ever known. The hardest part is getting out the front door, and out of bed. Just a short little excerpt.

-

“Rose. Rose. Come on, Rose girl, you need to wake up. It’s time to leave.”

Rose could barely lift her head from the pillow, it felt so heavy. She blinked and rubbed her hands over her eyes. It was still dark outside, and it felt like she’d only been asleep for a few minutes. “What? Wha’s wr-wr-wrong?” a huge yawn interrupted her. As her eyes cleared, she realized that Uncle Mitch, Quentin and Wilfy were all crowded into her room. Uncle Mitch’s hand was on her shoulder, gently shaking her awake. “What is it?”

“Time to get goin’, honey.” Her uncle’s eyes were dark, his face still in shadow because only the hall light was on. He was very still, and in that moment Rose wondered why she had never noticed how old he was. He seemed so fragile, almost hollow, sitting on the edge of her mattress in the dark. But his words weren’t making sense.

“Leave? Who’s leaving?”

“We are,” Quentin said from the foot of her bed. His voice was quiet, and very serious. Rose looked between them, and then over at Wilfy, who was standing in the door like he was keeping look-out. It was only then that she remembered. A heavy, sick feeling settled into her stomach and throbbed behind her eyes.

“Is your bag packed?” Her Imaggen’s voice was cold and clipped, as if speaking from a distance, or to someone else entirely. He seemed impossibly alien to her in that moment, standing in the stark shadows of her room. Had she ever known him? His eyes caught hers and his face softened into the one she loved for a second. “Get changed and come out,” he said more gently. “We need to be gone quick as we can.”

She nodded wearily. They filed out, Uncle Mitch scooping up her bag on the way. He hesitated at the door, and they shared a helpless look before he closed it and left her to get ready in the dark.

Out On the Porch

This Imaggen excerpt takes place fairly early on chronologically speaking, but it doesn’t appear until later in the books, so this is a bit of a sneak peak, really. This conversation between Quentin and Wilfy (one of many of its kind, clearly) takes place on the night that Quentin first comes to bond with his Person, Rose Sherbourne. It is worth noting that this night is also Rose’s third birthday, the day she moved in with Uncle Mitch and Wilfy, and the day that both of her parents died in an accident. In the meantime, the two Imaggens try to deal with the day’s events, and also each other.

-

When Quentin finally exited the house to find some perspective on the porch, he was unsurprised to find Wilfy there waiting for him. There was a long, tense silence while they observed each other carefully, cataloging the minute changes that only Imaggen eyes could notice. Some things hadn’t changed at all; Wilfy had the same hunched shoulders, the same hooked nose and sour expression. Especially, he had the same beady dark eyes that Quentin had always associated with him.

Their gazes locked and held far longer than strictly necessary in a silent battle of wills that was more habit than anything else. Finally, as if losing a staring contest, Quentin broke the connection and turned his eyes to the stars far above them. He put his hands in his pockets and watched the Queen’s Parade as the constellation started its slow turn from the far horizon.

Neither of them spoke, trying to wait the other out. There were certain aspects of their relationship that had stayed comfortingly the same.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Wilfy rasped at last. Quentin allowed himself a little smirk at his victory there, even if he had lost in the staring. Those formalities out of the way, he turned to look at Wilfy again, and this time he allowed himself to process the tired huskiness in the other Imaggen’s voice and the way his bony shoulders hunched even tighter than Quentin had remembered. The changes spoke of time and strain long endured. Another thing that never changed about Wilfy was the sardonic look he leveled at Quentin then, and the Imaggen realized that he was supposed to respond. He deliberately focused himself on the moment again.

“Shouldn’t I?” he asked with a sigh. He liberated a hand from its pocket and ran it through his hair. “No, I suppose not. Still, here I am!” He grinned madly, knowing even as he did that Wilfy would see that there was no humor in it. This was too serious for even Quentin to make light of it.

When the other Imaggen only answered with a stony stare, Quentin waved a dismissive hand and pivoted into an agitated pace that stopped abruptly when he reached the end of the porch. He stopped there and stared out at the dark landscape for a long moment, feeling Wilfy’s stare on his back. Eventually Quentin’s shoulders slumped, and he slowly shook his head. “I know, Wilfy. I know. This place is too small.”

“No place’d be big enough for your ilk,” Wilfy replied wryly, rather graciously ignoring Quentin’s deliberate use of his name. That was one allowance they’d generally granted back when they were still speaking to each other.

Quentin heard the slight mockery in his tone, but didn’t rise to it. Wilfy’s words were true enough to pause him for a moment. He felt the other Imaggen move to stand at his side, and the two of them looked out into the night from the edge of Mitch Sherbourne’s porch.

Wilfy broke the silence again, this time speaking quietly. “Girl’s been through a loop today. Mitch too.”

Quentin nodded slowly. “News has reached the Plain already. Lee and Anne Sherbourne—and their Imaggens, too.” The way he said this last made Wilfy look at him sharply. Quentin caught the glance and sighed again. “I felt it,” he admitted softly. “Most of us did that had met them. Just…gone. Without a trace, like they had never existed.”

“I felt it too,” Wilfy snapped irritably. Quentin didn’t doubt it—regardless of Wilfy’s diminished state, he had certainly come into contact with the missing Imaggens enough times to feel their presence disappear entirely. What’s more, he’d known the Sherbournes, and though he would never say it, Quentin accepted that Wilfy had more of a reason to mourn this night than most others.

Eventually, the other Imaggen let out a sigh of his own. “There’s trouble brewin’, isn’t there. Out there.” He nodded his head to encompass the World, from the low lights of the town all the way out to the shadowed horizon. “You’re a fool and no mistake, Quentin, but you don’t pop into the World for nothing.”

“No,” Quentin agreed quietly, not disputing the insult. “Not for nothing. For Rose.”

Wilfy watched him carefully. “She’s it, then. Your next mover and shaker?”

Quentin chuckled ruefully and shook his head. “I don’t know what she is. Or who. Except that she’s Rose, and right now she’s crying.” He turned now to look Wilfy directly in the eye, his expression deathly solemn. “There is trouble brewing. Bad trouble—maybe the worst we’ve ever had. But no one can see it. We can only feel it, guess at it, and that does us little good. And I find myself in Mill, of all places, where the town’s so small you can memorize it, Bound to a girl who just lost everything she ever knew! What do you think it means, Wilfy? Because I have absolutely no idea!” His voice had raised without him realizing it. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and deliberately turned away for a moment.

His companion let him compose himself. There was another long pause during which the stars coasted silently in their long arcs overhead.

“Lay low,” Wilfy finally advised, like Quentin had asked him. “Don’t show yourself. Keep the girl outta trouble, long as you can. Wouldn’t give Mitch your name either, if I were you.”

“He won’t like that much,” Quentin responded softly, knowing that he was agreeing to it anyway. “It won’t last forever.”

“Long as you can, then,” Wilfy amended. “No use stirring up trouble. I don’t want to see him mixed up in it.”

“He’s already mixed up in it,” Quentin replied with resignation. “As soon as you see that girl smile, you get mixed up in it, like it or not.” He turned to enter the house again.

“You gonna tell her?”

The question made Quentin pause halfway through the door. He thought for a moment. “…No,” he said at last. “No. No use stirring up trouble.”

Wilfy snorted at hearing his own words put back to him. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

“There’s a time for everything, Wilfy,” Quentin snapped. He instantly softened. “But it’s not here. Not yet.”

Wilfy’s eyes hardened and narrowed. “What happens when the time does come, eh? What happens to this family then? What happens to Rose?”

Quentin couldn’t answer that, and so he didn’t. He went back inside and shut the door firmly behind him, as if to keep Wilfy’s words outside, away from the sleeping Persons within.

Dealing in Middles

Another Imaggen excerpt. Wilfy and Quentin are both Imaggen (Imaginary Beings) and both of them love the Sherbournes. Other than that, they don’t agree on much. They’ve known each other just a bit too long to ever really get along. The following conversation is one of my favorite of theirs so far. Lots of backstory in this, but it’s enjoyable without it.

–

“There are days, Wilfy, when I absolutely do not understand the World.”

“There are more days than less when I don’t understand one thing that comes out of that gab of yours,” Wilfy retorted cheerily. He was feeling fairly benevolent to the World at large just now, and Quentin in particular, so he leaned back on the stone wall and watched the other Imaggen pace back and forth across the rocks.

It was a completely Person-like action that Quentin had always used when he was agitated. Wilfy thought it probably came from Quentin’s first Person, back at the beginning. That kind of thing happened a lot, especially back in the early days; for all the talk about Persons taking on characteristics of their Imaggen, the reverse was just as often true. In any case, it was hard to say with Quentin, because he never talked about his first Bond—not once in all the Person centuries that Wilfy had known him. Wilfy had been there just for the very end, so he understood why. Understood better than most, probably.

Some hurts ran deep—too deep to be healed or patched or touched by time. Seeing that pain in the back of Quentin’s eyes or hearing it in the edges of his voice on days like this was one of the few things that Wilfy grudgingly respected in him.

“No, I mean it!” Quentin insisted, oblivious to Wilfy’s scrutiny. “They’re so obsessed with beginnings here. And endings, for that matter! They spend so much time looking back, looking forward, that they forget to look straight in front of them and end up tripping on the moment they’re actually living in.”

Wilfy settled more comfortably on the stone, willing to indulge the other Imaggen for a minute or two. When Quentin had paced in silence for several moments, Wilfy prompted him. “They’re bound by time, you know. Of course they want to see both ends of it.”

Usually, mentioning time was a guaranteed way to get Quentin’s ego going. It was a mark of his apparent seriousness that he instead turned to look at Wilfy with sober, piercing awareness in his blue eyes. “We are all to a one of us bound by time, Wilfy,” he said softly. “If there is anything I’ve learned in all this stretch of existing, it’s that. Everything begins and ends, and wonders in the in-between.”

Wilfy’s creased brow raised a bit in surprise—a gesture he knew had come from Mitch. “Well, you’re certainly digging ‘neath the happy-textured surface today. What good’s a story if you only get the middle, but not either end?”

“Most good stories start in the middle,” Quentin retorted with a dismissive wave of his hand, pointedly ignoring Wilfy’s sarcasm. He finally halted his ceaseless pacing. His form seemed to be tightly reigned momentum, pivoted on this little patch of rock as he gazed up at the sky like he was seeing through it into the Expanse. The thought made Wilfy uneasy, for no reason he could place.

Quentin’s face was thoughtful, still turned determinedly upwards, as he continued. “I was there at the beginning,” he said absently, almost to himself. Wilfy knew he looked interested, and he couldn’t even summon up a scowl when Quentin glanced over with a grin and caught him paying attention. There were times when even Wilfy forgot that Quentin was the older of the two of them, when he believed Quentin’s more youthful appearance instead of history.

Quentin continued on with a small shrug that moved the smile from his voice. “Well, close enough to make little difference, at least. I saw the first Persons when they came down from the mountains. I helped Lyser chart stars in the Expanse. I saw Yanna walk along the shore and leave flowers in her wake, and I made her laugh, back when she still smiled. I can remember when the continents cracked apart and the Empty Shell swallowed up the east.” He waved his hand again. “Well, you know. You were there for some of it.”

“Enough to know you were a miscreant, even then.” Neither of them said the obvious—that Quentin had helped crack the World in pieces, not just observed it. Wilfy had stood with the others on the slopes of the eastern mountains and stared as the vast desert bled across the horizon, but Quentin had come out of the middle of the desolation, quieter and more reckless than before. It had been his initiation and his breaking from the other Greats, both at once.

It occurred to Wilfy that to Quentin, maybe beginnings and endings were the same. And both of them were far too important to him to ever get looked at straight. Quentin dealt in middles to avoid thinking about both ends.

So be it. In some ways, history or not, Wilfy thought Quentin was still too young to understand. He’d learn, eventually. Wilfy intended to remain silent, but Quentin watched him expectantly, waiting for the wisdom he’d once doled out to anyone who’d listen. Things had changed—he didn’t have much wisdom left, not for years.

Wilfy sighed and stood, shaking his head in resignation. “For someone so obsessed with time,” he said with wry sympathy, “you really have no idea what it’s actually for.”

Quentin’s baffled expression was the most enjoyable thing he’d seen all day. With a little grin hovering in his narrowed eyes, Wilfy left the Trickster of the Imaggen to his frantic pacing underneath the clear sky.