She dreams that the world belongs to her. No, that’s not right, she thinks, the world’s been entrusted to me.
She doesn’t rule so much as collaborate.
She doesn’t demand obedience from her subjects so much as receive it freely.
Even now, after all of these years (years of endless analyzations and attempts at recollection) she doesn’t know how it came about. She doesn’t know how she has become a healer and a protector, all-powerful and wholly revered. As Jaide walks through the hot Jungle, she decides that it’s how it’s always been. She thinks that maybe she’s just forgotten, that the years without aging have left her without a bookmark to mark progression in the story of her life.
It’s possible, of course, considering she is unchanged herself. She’s still a young girl on the cusp of becoming a woman physically. She still wears her speckled coat of blue, still peers out at the world with wide, silver eyes like moons. Her mind is sharp and her heart open – in every other way, however, Jaide is not herself anymore. She can do things she can’t explain; she can perform impossible feats and also incredibly ordinary ones all at once. Sometimes her will dictates it (she’d bent a circle of young kapok trees so that their canopies intertwined, making a rising platform as they grew for the monkeys to cavort around on). But other times, the impossible occurs without her intending it. She’s had the thought every time it happens, of course, but it is a deep and buried thought, not meant to be unleashed from its locked place. It happens anyway, unwittingly. Sometimes it seems as if the world itself is made just for her, the way it bends to her will.
The Jungle is her first and foremost Domain. She takes care of it first because it has always done the same for her. It had raised her all those years ago (how many now? she always wonders and never knows) with her father away in the Tundra and her mother an old, old woman. “You are beautiful and I will help you,” she tells the sick and diseased plants and animals. She kisses their roots and brows and makes them better, every one she finds (and she finds them all, because this is her world and it’s what she wants more than anything, to help). “Your life has meaning and I want to learn from it, from you,” she croons to the predated animals she finds languishing after a hunt. She lets the predators feed – they’ve earned it and have to live themselves – but she steps in when they’ve finished. In her perfect universe, everyone lives. She creates new life in the glassy, faded eyes of a brocket deer poached by a jaguar. She stirs the limbs and lungs of an unlucky tapir squeezed by an anaconda. She heals all who need it and spares none, from the broken-winged eagle to the damaged roots of the walking palm.
Life blossoms all around her, and it is good for a long while.
The blue girl borrows their skins, sometimes. She becomes the pygmy tyrant, flitting through the branches, overseeing the growth and checking for signs of parasites or disease in her trees. It’s fun but also infinitely useful to be so quick and tiny. She drinks in the oxygen as a dart frog through her skin, making certain it is as clean as it can be. And she slips into the water as a river dolphin, her skin pink and her eyes beady black. Jaide tests the water as a dolphin (its pH and temperature analyzed as feeling either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to the playful cetacean’s instincts) but moreso, she revels in its body. She rejoices in the way that she seems to fly under the water, makes friends with the other dolphins who only see her as in equal in this form. Not like the goddess she actually is. Not like the creator she never asked to be, but is.
She works hard to maintain her own paradise, but she finds that it isn’t work. Not really.
The young mare giggles as a spider monkey leaps upon her back and tugs playfully at her mane. Soon after, its little fingers weave the strands with more care. It pats her neck with a nimble hand in a few moments, and she knows this means she is sporting yet another plait, courtesy of the Amazon’s stylist. She’s had many such monkey-stylists, but this one is her favorite. He’s grey-brown with a white mask and the smallest, most curious gaze she’s seen. His tail bends at an awkward angle (she’d named him Crook at first sight) and though she knew she could fix it, Jaide didn’t interfere. Crook has always seemed happy and healthy enough – it isn’t her desire to change aesthetics, unlike her fashion-forward primate friend. Now, he jumps off of her and away with an overly dramatic shriek, running for the dark forest beyond. The monkey looks back once, waggling his eyebrows and baring his teeth before disappearing into the undergrowth.
A cold stab of uncertainty slices her gut at this brief show of aggression. Such instances have become increasingly common as of late, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. Why aren’t the animals completely, totally, overwhelmingly happy? Hasn’t she given them everything; hasn’t she given herself – body and soul - and her powers all for them? She shakes her head, trying to think of something. She racks her brains, searches her mind, and comes up with nothing. Oh! But there was that thing, that one tiny incident…
Its eyes were soft and round and irresistible. The baby capybara drew her in, but it also drew in a hungry jaguar. She should have left it alone; she should have let the predator hunt like she always did. The baby was made wrong, though, it didn’t have a chance. Its back legs twisted underneath of it so that it only bleated as the cat approached, and could not run away. Jaide thought quickly, and in a breath, she stole the wings from a macaw and gifted them to the young rodent. She knew the consequences of her actions (she knew that she’d doomed a bird for a baby capybara) but it had worked. In another breath, she created a breeze that lifted the animal up up and up, away from the snapping jaws of the jaguar.
It wasn’t right, and a small part of the utopia she’d built crumbled out from under her feet that day. She’d felt the shifting of the earth then but had ignored it at first. Only now, staring at the empty space where the spider monkey had been only a moment ago, did she wonder. The roan steps into the forest with slightly less confidence than she’d had before her realization. And as soon as her hoof sinks into the damp earth, she knows she had been right.
The birds wheel angrily above her head, a tornado of blue and red and gold spinning towards her. One falls in the middle of the vortex, a dropping anchor that lands with a sickening thud. She rushes forward, but hope dies in her chest when she sees its twisted neck and its lack of wings. Monkeys and apes tear from the dense underbrush, waging a new war with each other. Their muscles ripple under their pelts and the aggressive language of their bodies says that it will not be an easily decided battle. Some pull the parrots from the sky, ripping them apart in pre-war hostility. They climb the fort she had built for them, use the platform of kapok trees to wreak more havoc on her paradise. The apes press forward first and gain the higher reaches. One reaches down to catch at an advancing monkey. Its strong arm grasps the smaller primate and it squeezes. Jaide sees its eyes bulge, sees the life fading too fast, too fast, too fast for her to do anything. She sees the tail go limb and sees that it’s not a perfectly straight tail to begin with…
Jaide begins to run even as the animals see her. A sob catches in her throat, an unspoken plea for them to stop. She does stop then, remembers suddenly that she is their goddess. And though she’s been benevolent and removed as much as possible thus far, she has the power within her to be otherwise. STOP, she thinks and maybe says (though upon recollection, she can’t remember). But it falls on deaf ears. A jaguar jumps in front of her on the path. Saliva drips from its jaws. She should be safe in the light of day (should be safe for being their queen, but that seems not to matter now) but its posture says differently. It says that she is its intended prey. A burning smell fills her nostrils, and she wonders if it is what impending death smells like.
The jaguar leaps and when she tries to move away, it tears her throat out.
She dies. I loved them all. I did my best, she thinks in the space of oblivion.
She dies but she comes back to life, it seems. Her eyes open but already she knows she is looking at a different world. It smells the same, though. She expects her neck to burn with pain, but instead, the land around her is aflame. Wood that has been soaked with daily rainfall somehow catches. How, when I’ve been so careful? How, when I’ve pulled clouds over the forest, when I’ve monitored it all? Jaide has no time to ponder, because the fire will soon overtake her. She sees her Sisters – Sisters she hasn’t seen in eons – fleeing the jungle and she follows just behind. They thread expertly through the jutting roots, leaving the only home they know. Suddenly, a loud crack sounds ahead. A kapok tree splinters and falls, crushing a paint mare she’d known since she was a child. There’s no time to stop, but as she passes, the mare heaves out a final, smoky breath before she stills.
An engulfed vine falls across her back, scorching it before she can escape the rainforest. She bucks it off, but not before it leaves a blistering line in its wake. The Amazons die all around her (a howler monkey yodels as its hair is singed off, an anaconda crisps like a line of lit gunpowder as she runs by) and she cries as she leaves her homeland long behind. She ascends a mountain outside of the kingdom, climbs it without the company of the other women she’d followed. They had taken a different path and she’d lost them. She imagines they are below now, realizing the mistake of their choice. She wonders where her mother is, wonders if her father is safe in the frozen Tundra caves. It’s doubtful, because there is smoke and ash as far as she can see. For Beqanna burns everywhere but right here. Flames lick every one of the kingdoms, every herdland and place between. She watches the world die and she cries for the victims. From the fire ants to the Sisterhood, she cries for them all.
Jaide
girl of fire and ice