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homenecromancer · 1 year ago

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[This post is a reprint of an interview with NaRae Lee conducted at San Diego Comic Con 2009, by Deb Aoki for about.com. I have removed web links so that this post will hopefully appear in tags -- please click the source link if you want to click and see, like, archived versions of Yen Press's website.]

Interview: NaRae Lee

Manhwa artist for James Patterson's Maximum Ride

By Deb Aoki, About.com

To celebrate the first birthday of Yen Plus magazine, Yen Press invited Korean comics artist NaRae Lee as their special guest at San Diego Comic-Con 2009. Lee is the artist behind the graphic novel adaptation of James Patterson's bestselling Maximum Ride novels for young adults that is currently being serialized monthly in the pages of Yen Plus.

Discovered by Yen Press Senior Editor JuYoun Lee, NaRae was able to make her U.S. debut working on a series that already had legions of devoted fans. It's a lot to live up to, but NaRae proved to be up to the challenge by delivering artwork that looks remarkably polished for a relative newbie to the world of international manga publishing.

This visit to San Diego was NaRae's first visit to the United States, and unfortunately, the trip from Korea to Southern California wasn't an easy one for her. The effects of jet-lag took their toll on the petite yet hard-working artist, which forced Yen Press to cancel her first planned autograph session on Friday afternoon. NaRae did manage to make it to the convention center to meet her fans on Saturday afternoon, which is when I caught up with her to ask a few questions.

NaRae tends to draw herself as a pudgy, chibi character in her artist's notes in Yen Plus, but in reality, she's a slender, shy and soft-spoken young woman who seemed somewhat surprised to see the line of fans who came to meet her and get her autograph. Yen Press Senior Editor JuYoun Lee kindly translated our conversation.

Q: Welcome to San Diego Comic-Con. It's great to have you here.

NaRae Lee: I'm happy to be here too.

Q: Did you see anything in the Exhibit Hall that you thought was really exciting and cool?

NaRae Lee: I've been sick (since I got to San Diego from Korea), so this is actually the first time that I've been to the convention center.

Q: Ah, too bad. I hope you get to see more of it over the next two days. When you got the call to do Maximum Ride, had you heard of the books before?

NaRae Lee: I didn’t know about them at first.

Q: What were your impressions when you read the script? Did anything strike you in particular that made you think, 'Wow, I should work on this project?'

NaRae Lee: I liked the characters a lot. They each had their own distinctive characteristics and personalities, so that was the big appeal for me.

Q: Which is your favorite character to draw?

NaRae Lee: Character-wise, my favorite is Iggy, but when I'm drawing I enjoy drawing Max the most.

Q: Why is that?

NaRae Lee: The way I'm drawing the character is like a lot of my taste, so I likes how the eyes and the clothes she wears came out. I'm enjoying drawing her very much.

Q: I was really impressed when I first saw your art for Maximum Ride. It's very accomplished, very professional-looking, and it reads very nicely. Is this your first long series?

NaRae Lee: Thank you. Yes, it's my first major series.

Q: Has it been an adjustment creating a new chapter on a monthly schedule?

NaRae Lee: It’s been tough.

Q: Do you have time to do other things, like draw your own manga stories?

NaRae Lee: I also have my own story, a manga that is currently being published in a Korean anthology. That also has a monthly deadline. That one is fortunately only eight pages a month, but still, because I'm juggling the two deadlines I've been having a tough time.

Q: What is the title and what is it about?

NaRae Lee: It’s called Sweetie Milky Propose and it’s for younger girls. It’s like a comedy, also has a bit of a romance going on. It's about four fairies from Milkland coming into the human world to find their princess, who doesn’t know she is a princess. It's very funny.

Q: That sounds cute -- I hope to see it some time! So how did you and JuYoun (Lee, Senior Editor of Yen Press) find each other?

NaRae Lee: (turns to JuYoun) You would know better about that!

JuYoun Lee:Well, there is like an anthology that her school puts out. I saw her like short story there and I immediately liked her art style. I thought she would be perfect for Maximum Ride, so I contacted her.

Q: Ah wow, so straight from college. So how long have you been drawing manga?

NaRae Lee: I've been drawing since I was in like fourth or fifth grade in elementary school. I also went to an animation high school, not just college, so I've been drawing for a long time.

Q: So what is the curriculum like at an animation university? Is it like mostly animation classes or is it like animation and regular school subjects?

NaRae Lee: Well, the college I go to is a manga college and my high school specialized in animation. You can also major in manga at the animation high school as well.

Q: So now that you've devoted so much of your life to drawing, what do you think is your greatest strength as an artist and what is the hardest thing for you to do?

NaRae Lee: I can’t really pinpoint my strong point because I think I'm still a newbie. So maybe the fact that I have lots of possibilities in front of me might be my strongest point.

The toughest thing that I have to deal with as I draw Maximum Ride is that the story is set in the States and this is literally my first chance I've had to visit North America. Because I'm based in Korea, it's tough to find all the reference photos and trying to imagine like (the various locations described in the script) is going to look like. This has been the hardest thing.

Q: Have you met Mr. Patterson? Have you talked with him?

NaRae Lee: (shakes her head) Ah, no. Not yet.

Q: Ah, too bad. Maybe sometime on your next visit to the U.S. Okay, so I know your fans who are for your autograph session are eager to talk to you, but do you have a special message for the fans who couldn’t join you here today?

NaRae Lee: Thank you very much for reading the books.

#apparently about.com got bought out and um... well it doesn't exist anymore so i resurrected this interview from the archives #maximum ride #long post #marlowe max ride site #marlowe talks maximum ride

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ukdamo · 1 month ago

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In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.

June Jordan

honey people murder mercy U.S.A. the milkland turn to monsters teach to kill to violate pull down destroy the weakly freedom growing fruit from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip rape exacerbate despoil disfigure crazy running threat the deadly thrall appall belief dispel the wildlife burn the breast the onward tongue the outward hand deform the normal rainy riot sunshine shelter wreck of darkness derogate delimit blank explode deprive assassinate and batten up like bullets fatten up the raving greed reactivate a springtime terrorizing

death by men by more than you or I can

STOP

They sleep who know a regulated place or pulse or tide or changing sky according to some universal stage direction obvious like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning in between no next predictable except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal bleach the blacklong lunging ritual of fright insanity and more deplorable abortion more and more

#Martin Luther King #civil rights #violence #hate #history #june jordan #change #continuity #assassination #remembrance

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wawerrell · 2 years ago

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Thinking about MLK

In his sixth thesis on The Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin warns of violent conformists “overpowering” history and transforming it into yet another “tool of the ruling class”; the only successful historian, Benjamin prophesies, is that one “who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe” from such enemies. But the Martin Luther King, Jr. — murdered at the hands of a vicious white supremacist, a man who enacted the silent wish of so many — whom we resurrect on the third Monday in January each year is too often a tool of the very same interests he spoke against: those who would disenfranchise our neighbors and cordon off our democracy, those who dream of a government only big enough to take care of the wealthy. It is important to remember every day, but especially today, that King was not a carefully curated collection of politically palatable quotations, not an anodyne activist who spoke dreamingly of a colorblind America. King and his legacy do not belong to the conformists.

King was a radical.

In her elegy In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr, June Jordan makes the appropriately radical decision to abjure punctuation and traditional form; instead, her words slip, spill, and drip down the page:

honey people murder mercy U.S.A.

the milkland turn to monsters teach

to kill to violate pull down destroy

the weakly freedom growing fruit

from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip rape

exacerbate despoil disfigure

crazy running threat the

deadly thrall

appall belief dispel

the wildlife burn the breast

the onward tongue

the outward hand

deform the normal rainy

riot sunshine shelter wreck

of darkness derogate

delimit blank

explode deprive

assassinate and batten up

like bullets fatten up

the raving greed

reactivate a springtime

terrorizing

death by men by more

than you or I can

STOP

They sleep who know a regulated place

or pulse or tide or changing sky

according to some universal

stage direction obvious

like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning

in between no next predictable

except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal

bleach the blacklong lunging

ritual of fright insanity and more

deplorable abortion

more and

Blake wrote that “to create a little flower is the labour of ages,” but here, that labor is violently interrupted: Americans are taught to become monsters and to rip out the “freedom growing fruit” by the stem while it is weak, before it can ripen. In a perversion of growth, “rip” is permitted the fertile soil, light, and warmth to blossom into “rape” and “exacerbate.” The fruit is spoiled, humans are despoiled, and, as chaos and hatred rush exhaustingly rush down the stanzas, rest comes not for the wicked, but the privileged: those who know their place amid the universe’s “stage direction[s],” those for whom the world is rightside-up, those for whom a traffic stop is not a death sentence. All that is left, then, is a sleepless and never-ending “afternoon of mourning,” a dress rehearsal for death.

Today, I linger especially on a single line from the poem, a chasmically tragic sentiment: “no next predictable / except for wild reversal.” The only constant, Jordan writes, is vertiginous upheaval: the likelihood that one might, one April night, speak out about the dignity of labor and, the next day, bleed out on a motel balcony. But Jordan reminds us that these are, to misquote Hamlet, “the slings and arrows” not of outrageous fortune but of daily life.

Just a few days before King was shot and killed, the April issue of Esquire hit newsstands. For the cover, Carl Fischer, with direction from George Lois, styled and photographed Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian:

Here, before the assassination, those “slings and arrows” are literalized. Reactionary racial, religious, and political abuses — pro-Black, Islam, and Vietnam — penetrate the heavyweight; his face, not so much a rictus of agony as it is a plea, fades backward into the horizontal plane. Just as those arrows converge on their target, tools of violence and destruction intersecting with Black flesh, so, too, does this photograph represent a convergence of identities and discrimination.

“I am reaching for the words to describe the difference between a common identity that has been imposed,” Jordan, who was a bisexual, writes in Report from the Bahamas, “and the individual identity any one of us will choose, once she gains that chance.” Those dual, dueling identities strike at the heart of Jordan’s works, of life in the liminal space between harmony and honesty, between fidelity and conformity — a pained existence that Walt Whitman, in an early “Calamus” poem, describes as finding a balance between the true “soul” and “the life that exhibits itself” — and are made manifest in this magazine cover.

St. Sebastian — whose feast day is this Friday — has long been considered a gay saint. While Freudian critics and readers might find this genesis primarily in the role penetration plays in St. Sebastian’s martyrdom, more basically St. Sebastian was a man with a secret: he was, behind closed doors and despite the wishes of his employer, his colleagues, his friends, and his neighbors, someone or something different, a worshipper of Jesus Christ. Upon turning away from “the life that exhibits itself” and revealing his “soul,” so to speak, St. Sebastian was tortured, suffered, and then was killed. One might see this affinity in Oscar Wilde’s pseudonym, “Mr. Sebastian Melmoth,” and throughout the oeuvre of, to name a few, Marsden Hartley, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, whose piece Where is Your Rupture? is below.

Like King, Jordan recognizes that, despite so many of the oppressed’s sharing a common enemy, too many toil in solitude rather than in solidarity: “As long as there are [queer] Americans who view sexuality as the first and last defining facet of their existence, and who, therefore, do not defend immigrants against the savagery of xenophobic hatred, as long as there are [queer] Americans who view sexuality as the first and last defining fact of their lives, then for that long I am not one with you and you are not one with me.”

Benjamin closes his sixth thesis by writing that “this enemy [who would conquer and coopt the dead] has not ceased to be victorious.” If there is a colorblind aspect of King’s dream for America, it is colorblind only insofar as it is a vision of harmonious collaboration in dismantling oppression: the only way to defeat the enemy is through intersectional solidarity.

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mongoose-bite · 6 years ago

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What We Owe the Dead

Also on Dreamwidth.

Mordella had never met General Sherwood, so the news of his death disheartened her but little more. She didn't seriously consider the possibility she might later meet his corpse. What were the odds?

It was well that she didn't, for the night was gloomy enough as Mordella and the other soldiers of Quezzine tactfully kept to their barracks and listened to the funeral bells and distant dirges of the locals mourning one of their greatest warriors. Mordella and her comrades were valued allies and uninvited guests both, and they knew it was wise to leave the locals to their rituals. Instead Mordella ran a whetstone over her blade and wondered once again if she'd made a mistake.

Perhaps they'd all made a mistake in leaving the bright skies and salted stone cities of Quezzine to help the pale-faced milklanders fight their own ancestors in this damp and dreary land. But the deserts would not keep out an army that had no need of sleep, food or water, and if the Merry Kingdoms of the milklanders were overrun, Quezzine would eventually fall as well.

Mordella heard the next morning that no one had managed to retrieve the general's corpse. Now it joined the ranks of those who stood against them.

They did not burn the dead in the Merry Kingdoms, did not set them free from their bones to fly with the smoke that spiralled up into those bright skies Mordella missed so. Even now the Merry Kingdoms' beloved dead besieged the living they did not burn them. They killed them twice and set them in the earth like they had always done.

Mordella realised she was so angry she was gripping her sword hard enough to turn her knuckles pale, and she forced her hand to relax. She'd have plenty of opportunity to work off her anger soon enough.

The next day Mordella donned her armour and the soldiers of Quezzine joined the local armies leaving the shelter of the city walls once more and striking out into abandoned farmlands and deserted townships. Mordella had been very young when she'd chosen the life of a soldier and had trained for years to fight the living, so she found most of the dead no challenge. Their fingernails clawed uselessly at the plates on her armour and their teeth grated harmlessly against the chain beneath.

Only the fallen soldiers posed a real threat. The dead remembered their professions and they wielded their weapons with all the skill they’d had in life, only now they felt no pain or fear.

Each day the living would fight until sunset and then retreat, the eyes of the dead glowing softly in the dark beyond the torchlight, forever marching forward across the ground the living had clawed back during the day.

Once more within the walls of the city, Mordella made her way back to the barracks, tired and sweaty, her shield on her back and her helmet dangling from her fingers as she relished the chill of the evening air on her face. She wondered if she'd spend the rest of her life doing this, beating back the tide of dead. There was nothing to stop her from going home but her own determination to finish a task once started. She hated to give up.

Not everyone shared her persistence; several of the soldiers she’d marched here with had already turned their backs on the Merry Kingdoms and started the long journey back to the deserts of Quezzine. They’d grown sick of the taste of the water here, sick of the pallid sunlight and the grudging gratitude of the locals, who knew they were being judged by those who burned their dead.

Mordella had only been here six months, although she could feel her sense of time sliding away from her with every long, monotonous day. I'll give it a year, she told herself, a year to see if I'm wasting time better spent fortifying our homeland, and letting the milklanders reap what they have sown.

So every day she donned her armour and waded out to harvest the dead. General Sherwood was replaced by another man, and the war continued.

Several weeks after Sherwood's death Mordella found herself marching under grey skies, her polished armour gleaming dully in the low light. She'd reached a picturesque village that had sustained heavy catapult fire in the retreat, the thatched roofs crushed inwards, the structures burnt out where hearth fires had run amok in the chaos. It was nearly two years ago now that the living had ceded this land to the dead and the ruins were peaceful and overgrown, the fields dotted with bramble and wild flowers and weeds. Mordella missed the desert, but she had to admit the Merry Kingdoms had their own charms.

Mordella's company hadn't seen that many dead this morning, and they’d made good progress. Spirits were high, given the circumstances. A bit of sun and it would be perfect, Mordella thought, sticking her head into a ruined farmhouse and waving to let her partner doing the same on the other side of the grassy street know it was clear.

She was looking forward to securing the village and stopping for a meal when she caught the flash of armour over by a temple still standing intact near the village, its weathered stone walls encircled by one of the cemeteries that dotted the Merry Kingdoms. Mordella recognised most of the Merry Kingdoms colours by now, and was reassured to have reinforcements in the vicinity, although they seemed focused on patrolling the temple grounds.

She watched them for a few moments more, wondering if she should hail them, and then their commander exited the temple and the words dried in her mouth. For as he turned she recognised the crest on his shield, although she had never met the man who bore it.

Not while he’d lived, at least.

The air left her lungs in a rush of fear as she froze, half hidden by the ruined hut she'd just searched and she squeezed down the desire to shout a warning. Think, she told herself, her teeth gritted as she stared at the armoured figure surveying the graveyard. General Sherwood's corpse hadn't seen her yet. He'd lost his helmet at some point, and his head and neck were exposed. A single well-placed strike could put him to rest permanently.

I'll run after one strike, she told herself. She couldn't hope to fight his dead subordinates, but she was fast and young, and had already convinced herself to move. Her boots left deep prints in the soft earth as she ran over rumpled, empty graves, weaving around the headstones, her gaze fixed on the back of General Sherwood's head, willing him not to turn, not to hear her until it was too late.

She drew her sword back and braced herself, half convinced victory was assured when the dead general ducked and spun, raising his shield just as she brought her blade down. The impact jarred her whole arm, and the sound of steel on steel rang out through the cemetery. Mordella raised her own shield and stumbled to the side, belatedly yelling a warning and hoping someone living heard it.

Sherwood lowered his shield slightly and she finally saw his face. He was watching her, his eyes alight with charnel fire, his skin so pale in death it was almost blue. Now he faced her she saw the wound that had killed him, a great hole in his chest, and she guessed a spear had punched right beneath his breastplate and up into his lungs. He’d scrubbed the blood off his armour since.

She lashed out again before he could strike, hoping to keep him on the defensive, but she couldn’t afford to duel him as he deflected again. Already the other dead were converging, not just on her but moving to block her escape route back to the village and the other soldiers.

“Help me!” she screamed as she stared through the slits in her helmet into Sherwood’s burning eyes. Surely someone would hear her. To the skies with it; if she was going to die—and she was probably going to die—he was going down with her. She could only hope someone would burn her corpse.

She attacked again and he parried. Death had not slowed him as far as she could tell, and they circled each other, shields raised, stomping the lush grass flat. He didn’t attack her and Mordella didn’t wait to find out why, feinting and engaging his sword before trying to knock him off balance with her shield. He was half a head taller and probably stronger than she was, so she waited for him to push her back, braced for it, and when he did she yielded smoothly, spinning and bringing her elbow up into his face.

His head snapped back, and she pushed her advantage, her sword ringing off his armour as she tried to keep him off-balance, hoping to force an opening for a more lethal strike. Movement caught the corner of her eye and as she turned one of the other dead soldiers stepped up, sword raised high above his head, and she stared up at the arc of glinting steel as it descended on her helmet.

Mordella cringed, her eyes closing despite herself as she braced for the blow that could well end her. The sound of steel on steel rang in her ears, but there was no pain, no impact.

Mordella opened her eyes. Sherwood’s sword was right in front of her face, the blade blocking the one aimed at her head, Sherwood himself at her shoulder.

“Enough,” Sherwood said. He was right next to her, watching her. “No more fighting.”

He spoke. The dead never spoke.

Mordella ducked out of the way and darted back, holding her sword before her, more fearful than before. What could be going on? She glanced around quickly, sizing up the impossible odds. The other dead soldiers were obeying the order and didn’t approach her, but they still barred her escape.

“What’s your name, soldier?” Sherwood asked.

“Why do you care?” she asked. “Just get it over with.” She didn't like being toyed with like this.

“Ah, one of the fighters from Quezzine. The ones who burn their dead.” His voice had a strange hollow quality, and he spoke without evident emotion. He was holding his sword down by his side, but she knew she couldn’t reach him before he raised it.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“An end to this war. What I always wanted. What I died for.”

“How is that possible?”

“There is a way. It might be negotiated, but the living must talk to the dead. You must help me. Take me to the city so I may speak with the war council.”

Mordella's arm was getting tired holding her sword before her but she didn't lower it, frowning as she tried to work out if it was some sort of trick. The dead did not negotiate.

“I need to know more,” she said finally. “I may only be a soldier, Sir, but I can't risk taking your word. The dead have wanted only to kill the living.”

“Not only,” he said. “But yes. You have life that I do not and I desire it, even though I know I cannot possess it, only extinguish it. That is our anguish. But when we are apart from the living, it subsides. We may even find peace in place far enough away.”

“Where? What place?”

“That must be negotiated. Our own kingdom, our own country. We don't need farmland, or water. Give us one of your many deserts, put a wall around us, and let us leave each other in peace.”

He fell silent, and Mordella watched him through the slits in her helmet, wanting to believe it was all that simple.

“You'll all just walk away? Can you prove that?”

Sherwood glanced at the other dead soldiers. “Two miles south, quick march. Go.”

Without a sound they lowered their weapons and started walking away. Mordella turned to watch them go, but none of them looked at her. She breathed a little easier now. If nothing else, the odds had been evened.

“Do you trust me now?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she replied, looking him in the eye. “Put down your weapon.”

To Mordella's surprise Sherwood thrust his sword into the earth without argument. He took his hand off the hilt and stepped back from it.

She had a good chance of killing him now if she wanted and she had no doubt he knew it too as he waited calmly for her response.

She lowered her sword and took a deep breath.

“This is madness.”

“What's your name?” he asked again.

“Mordella, Sir.”

“I hope one day you are honoured for your bravery.”

Mordella shook her head. Honours were the furthest thing from her mind. She was more concerned about surviving the day. She thought about rejoining her company, how she might convince the commander of this plan, and she looked at Sherwood's battered armour and glowing eyes and knew how fearful of him everyone was going to be. She was still frightened herself but growing less so as he kept whatever impulses normally drove the dead in check.

“We'll go directly,” she said. “The more people we have to try and convince, the more likely someone will just kill you. And I'm not letting you pick that sword up again.”

He didn't object.

At first she made him walk ahead of her so she could watch him, and when he suggested they avoid the roads she agreed. After a while she put her sword away so she could eat what food she had in her pack, chewing the hard bread and salted fish slowly, making it last.

“Do you want some?” she asked eventually, feeling it was impolite not to offer. Sherwood had said nothing the entire time, plodding along ahead of her like a beast.

“No. Thank you.”

Occasionally the dead would find them and stumble out of the undergrowth at her, and Sherwood would roar at them like they were raw recruits and order them to turn back. To Mordella's surprise most of them did.

“I just need to remind them who they were,” he said.

It didn't always work, and Sherwood watched dispassionately as Mordella defended herself. He offered to help, but she declined. There was little he could do without a weapon anyway. When they saw living forces, they detoured around them.

“What's it like, being dead?” Mordella asked. She was walking alongside him now, because if she didn't he kept pulling ahead and she'd have to call him back. She'd been marching for hours and couldn't match the tireless pace of the dead.

“Do you find it cold here in the Merry Kingdoms?” he asked.

“Yes.” She still dreaded the arrival of winter.

“Imagine the coldest you have ever been and the blood of the living is the only heat in the world, it's food to a starving man, water to one dying of thirst. Only distance makes the desire lessen.”

“It sounds horrible.”

“It is.”

Mordella was glad that her ancestors were smoke, glad that she too would be free to join them in the wind.

“Why are you different from the others?” Mordella said.

“I'm not. I just imagine there is another way to end this war and that is enough.”

The walls of the city gradually heaved themselves up over the horizon as the sun settled lower in the sky. Mordella forced herself to move faster. Even with Sherwood's help she couldn't imagine lasting a night out here, not once the dead started to gather. The army was retreating again too, long lines of armoured men and women winding their way back to safety.

“They're going to see you and think I'm dead too,” Mordella said. She lifted her hands and pulled off her helmet, feeling unhappily exposed without it as she shook her braids out over her shoulders. “Hold this,” she said, shoving the helmet into Sherwood's hands and drawing her sword.

She stepped in front of him, her shield slightly raised.

“Here we go.”

She led him back onto the main road before the city, walking through the dust left hanging in the still evening air by the retreating soldiers. Over the fields behind them, she could see the dull points of light that indicated the eyes of the dead closing in.

On the walls above archers waited, keen to pick off a few dozen dead before it grew too dark to aim properly. Mordella gazed up at them and then turned her attention the gates, guards standing ready to close them as the last of the living made their way inside.

“Courage,” Sherwood said softly at her back. She risked a glance over her shoulder at him. In the thickening twilight his eyes were glowing brightly.

“Hold the gates!” Mordella shouted. She kept walking and flinched as an arrow landed in the dust by her feet. “Hold your fire. I live.”

She halted before the gates, only a few feet away from safety as the gate guards levelled their spears at her and her companion.

“General Sherwood is here to negotiate on behalf of the dead,” she said clearly. “He is unarmed and he wishes for an end to this war.”

Don't we all, surely?

There was shuffling and murmuring among the soldiers and Mordella was aware of fast, staggering footfalls behind her as the dead sensed an opening in the city's defences and started closing the gap.

“Let us in,” she pleaded. She heard Sherwood turning to face the horde, and the whistle of arrows flying overhead, the thud of them impacting.

“I will harm no one,” Sherwood said, and the crowd gasped as he spoke. “I swear it.”

The gate commander looked unhappy to be forced into such a position but after an excruciating dozen moments of indecision she gestured for the guards to step aside.

Mordella turned and grabbed the back of Sherwood's armour and yanked him through as the mechanism rumbled and the gates thudded closed in the faces of the dead as Sherwood stumbled into the world of the living once more.

Mordella blinked, dazzled in the blazing torchlight, her eyes having adjusted to the dusk.

“Well done,” Sherwood said. He handed her helmet back to her and she tucked it under her arm. “I wish to see the war council,” he said more loudly. If he was tempted to run amok with so many living clustered around him he didn't show it.

“Good luck,” Mordella called, as Sherwood was escorted away.

Several months later, Mordella went in search of Sherwood. He was never hard to find; they’d given him quarters, as requested, as far away from the temptations of the living as possible and unless he was needed for something specific he stayed there.

They’d offered Mordella her own quarters too, as befitting a hero who facilitated the end of the war. Eventually she’d accepted the offer.

The guards didn’t stop her as she made her way towards the keep where Sherwood existed. Everyone recognised her and even now milklanders occasionally approached her in the street to offer her thanks, or flowers.

She tried to keep off the streets.

Once the negotiations had begun in earnest there was little for the soldiers to do. The sorties outside the walls stopped and once the treaty had been signed the dead started walking away as promised.

It was as simple as that. Once Sherwood told the dead of the stretch of salt marsh and moor and cold desert far to the east they'd been given they’d started leaving. Several nations had agreed to relinquish the land, and Sherwood promised the dead would begin building a wall as soon as they arrived. They had nothing else to do with their time.

Mordella wondered what would happen behind that wall. An empty eternity awaited them. Would they build houses, continue a kind of half life bereft of eating or drinking or aging, or something stranger? She’d find out one day, she supposed bitterly.

Maybe they’d make Sherwood their king, should they feel the need for one. Sherwood himself would leave soon, or so she’d heard, and she wanted to speak with him while she had the chance although it wasn't his future that concerned her. They’d met a few times since the day she escorted him inside the walls, but always in public at official events. He never showed any emotion upon seeing her or anyone else. The Merry Kingdoms would have welcomed their hero back despite the hole in his chest and treated him as one of their own again if he’d let them.

Mordella knocked at the heavy wooden door at the base of the keep. There were a couple of guards posted some distance away to observe the entrance, but they merely nodded respectfully as she walked past.

Mordella heard a window above her open, and Sherwood leaned out to see who was calling upon him.

“Come up,” he said, and shut it again.

Sherwood's room was little more than a cell, bereft of creature comforts. He had a large desk covered in maps and papers, a view of the city and little else. He looked no different than she remembered, even wearing the same battered armour he'd died in.

“Mordella,” he said, inclining his head. “I was wondering if you would visit. I hear the soldiers of Quezzine are leaving soon and I’m sure you miss your home.”

“I’m not going back,” Mordella said. “What’s waiting for me there?”

“A hero’s welcome? Your courage helped bring peace to the entire world after all.”

“We no longer burn our dead!” she snarled. “The treaty forbids it and we signed it because we were given no alternative if we wanted to end the war.”

Sherwood didn’t argue with her. The dead collectively demanded the living let them travel freely to their new kingdom, and there were no dead of Quezzine to speak against it, for they were already smoke.

And the living? They understood. They understood everything and treated Mordella with a bland civility, like nothing had ever happened, and it hurt more than any cruelty would have. She couldn’t bear the thought of returning home to see their dead walking across the desert.

“I’m sure the Merry Kingdoms will-”

“I’m going with you,” she said. “Well, after you.”

She stepped right up to him, meeting his burning gaze boldly. She was asking permission, but she wasn’t sure if she’d heed him if he denied it.

“Only the dead may enter our walls,” he said.

“I don't intend to go any further than your border. I will walk your wall. And if any of you try to return, I will see them burn.”

For the first time she saw his expression change, an emotion tightening his face, deepening the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, his eyes flickering like distant lightning.

“Then perhaps we shall meet again,” he said, his pale hand resting briefly on her shoulder.

She realised then it was hope she had offered him, a pathway through her steel to the sky.

#crunchy's stories #short story #fantasy #original fiction

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