Dreadful Necessity Governs All Things

It is said the poet Areio started a war in six strokes of her pen.

That is not true: it was three.

I know this because Areio—Whose-Verse-Scorched-The-Earth, may she be honored now and forever—was both mentor and lover, and we debated many times in bed over the definition of a 'stroke'. She won more often than not, and thus I attest her claims.

The empire of Evenu sent a message housed in illustrious script and surrounded by a moat of meaning deep enough to drown us. After a decade of subtle aggressions, His Imperial Majesty's patience for peace—unconditional surrender—had reached its limit, and his proclamation was such:

There is no place the sun touches I do not possess. If you have chosen darkness, you will be extinguished in kind.

Perhaps that does not appear masterful in a scholar's shorthand, but in our true runes it held the divine weight of a guiding star, eternal and implacable: a light that conquers while in truth long dead.

It must have taken seasons to translate imperial letters into a runecoil; or perhaps, they forced one of our poets to do the work for them. To ply our own tongue against us speaks to violence, as if our resistance arose from a child's misunderstanding of tone.

The beauty of the coil is that alignment changes meaning—lines of connection fuse words into bastions of metaphor calling on our oldest stories. That is why the Evenusi loathe us. We are not satisfied with singular definitions; we lay with contradiction and treasure the overlap they share. What darkness they accuse us of is but the diversity of nature.

Areio's reply was thus:

She severed the sigil of I/Empire from the message with a single stroke, then drew a new line between the cusp of sun and the curve of darkness. The final movement was a fearsome scrawl, obliterating any notion of possession from the claim before her.

It translated simply: THE SUN HAS SET.

Of course, every war begins with a poet.

You think of soldiers, but soldiers are symptoms and not the cause. Name a viceroy or sovereign, and I shall point to the young mind behind him, an artist crafting turns of phrase to suit their master's ambitions. War fills our heads with blades and bullets, but before steel and lead, there is always breath and ink.

A poet sings of glory one evening, and by morning forges cough with smoke, shaping weapons to carve ideals into reality. A poet writes to her noble lover, and that noble's husband sees the verse; he plots the poet's murder, and her martyrdom sparks conflict that slaughters generations.

Yet banning poetry is no key to peace. A poem is but a path of influence, and like all paths can turn to destructive ends. One may as well forbid the tide, for poems enter and leave the soul in similar accordance with their own rhythm. They transform the heart, even if they never leave one's lips.

Except these poems are a lesson half-learned. We have started countless wars, yet I cannot name one that our work has ended.

Here I confess that Areio did not begin the war that birthed her name of honor. Rather, the imperial poets did.

Because ours was not the first nation they swallowed, and when victors find their hungers unsated, they turn to the pen. They drown their atrocities in prose and smother them in paper. They write heart-stirring poems to teach our youth that war is the only way, luring them with verse like songbirds to a barbed net.

They must justify their victory and the source of their power, time and again. They are desperate to be seen, smashing the mirrors of others until they are the only ones reflected. And they succeed, because we fear to interrupt their words, no matter how destructive.

Of course we protest. We write new lyrics for new philosophies. We soothe warriors with song when they come home shattered, or whisper last hymns over the ashes that return in their place. We demand better futures in infinite structures, both classic and experimental.

Yet none of that stopped Evenusi soldiers from dragging Areio—Whose-Verse-Scorched-The-Earth, I loved her so much—by her hair from the house we shared, breaking her hands, and cutting off her head.

If my poem of grief had any effect, it was only to amuse them.

Thus the only path ahead is a new medium: not in means, but material.

This poem is written through the body. Imagine the arrangement of your limbs before a cavalcade of horsemen ten thousand astride, blood-frothed and trample-eager. You cannot stand aside, because the weapons in their hands are elegies for our children, our sick, our poor.

You must hold the poem in your flesh because they will take everything else from you. Food. Clothes. Dignity. If they take your flesh too, you must bury it in your bones. You must learn couplets in other tongues, for the allies we need will spring from every shadow the Emperor has yet to claim. Some will even rise from the empire itself, for a nation bound by violence can never march in unison.

Memorize the meter of their epics, for the poems passed from mouth to mouth are the first to fall. Find euphony in their laughter, their tears, the moments of silence we learn to share. A litany can live on in each of us, if we wish it.

I hear what others say of me: "Look at Elash Se, sharp-boned and born with nothing, neither man nor woman. What do they know?"

You need not listen nor obey, for I am a poet and not a conqueror.

But I say this: the truth of the world will only change if we change first.

That, and I am Elash Se no longer. I am Elash Who-Wove-the-Myth, the myth that sustained unity when our spirits threatened to fail. The historian, the mourner, the lover who will one day join Areio in the world beyond worlds.

A poem has yet to end a war—but I intend to write the first.

© 2020 Rien Gray

About the Author

Rien Gray is a queer, nonbinary author living in Ireland. Their comfort  zone is dark romance and exploring trauma recovery in fiction, owing to  personal experiences with C-PTSD. They have an upcoming F/NB romantic  suspense novella with NineStar Press in 2021, and can be found on twitter @RienGray.