Dawn's Daughter

Dawn came, and it came upon the keeper of words.
She sat cross-legged on the dirt-swept ground.
The hollowed words lay all around her.
The dawn noticed her in particular. Her rays stroked her face, her hair and her skin.
It glinted off the silver there.
On every surface of the girl's body there were spirals, sweeping strokes and curves and intricate patterns. They were silver in the soft light of dawn, but under the moonlight they would be black as ink on the white parchment of her skin.
They were words.
One who has seen her for the first time may not have drawn this conclusion, mistaking them for merely tattoos or designs. But if one looked closer, one might catch the flash of a word in one's mind – flight or incursion or mellifluous...
For these were words so ancient they were to the earth as a redwood is to a seedling; they were as old as the ages and as young as the dawn, and they had existed for so long a time that nothing on earth bore evidence of them, not even a memory.
Except for the girl.
She leafed through the books lying around her.
Ever since she was born, ever since she began to know, she had always known this: there were five types of words in the world. Spoken words, written words, thought words, living words and dead words.
Spoken words were like the vapors of the earth; you spoke them, they danced for you and they weaved themselves into something that was almost tangible. Then they faded away, only fantasies and imaginings.
Written words were hollow husks, a parody of living words. They were words waiting for the life to be breathed into them, so that they could walk, talk and live. Meanwhile, they were lifeless words, bending to the wills of their masters, their makers and their keepers.
Thought words were words in the mind, not spoken, not written, but contained in the consciousness. They were the origin of all words – for all words come from the mind – but they were fleeting words, and no one thought much of them.
It took these three, the spoken and the written and the thought words, to make the living words. The living words that formed each object, each creature in the world around her, the living words that formed herself.
It took much less to turn the living words into the dead words.
She did not know a time when she did not know the words, when she did not love them.
She chose a word.
Fire.
She lifted it free from the parchment that kept it prisoner and kissed it gently.
'Fire, fire, fire.' She tasted the word in her mouth. It burnt her tongue. It burnt in her mind.
'You are a blaze, a flame, golden, crimson, glowing, burning. A conflagration, a spark, an ember, an inferno...…'
She breathed into the word fire life itself, the life that was in all the living words and the life that had seeped out of those words when they had become too brittle to contain it.
The very same life filled the word, and then fire was raining from the sky, thudding to the ground to recede into embers glowing red-hot and bathing everything in its awakened light. The girl was laughing, clapping her hands like a child. There were sparks in her hair. They did not burn her.
The dawn smiled. They were alike in this way, both the makers and givers of life.
She gathered the books up gently into her arms and walked away, her back to the dawn, her feet warmed by the embers littering the ground.


The sunset had arrived.
The night had descended.
And now the dawn had come.

We have seen the destroyer of words.
The child of words.
And the keeper of words.

Soon, by the twisted workings of fate, they shall be brought together.