One summer, when Emily\u2019s eyes have gone all-over gold and she has been given over to the Keepers\u2019 House, she sits on the hillside with Eldri and his amazing rock-paper-scissors-playing robot Navvy Jim, and Eldri tells her stories of the beginning of the world.<\/p>\n
He tells her the story of Hans.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cA long time ago,\u201d Eldri says, \u201cwhen the world was chaos, and you could hardly stir a pot without a fiend arising from the turmoil or a horror clawing down to eat your face, there was a svart-elf named Hans, and his eyes were purest gold.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cReally? Like mine?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLike yours,\u201d Eldri says. \u201cOh, that wasn\u2019t totally unusual or anything. Any svart can \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
Here he ponders. He closes his eyes. He opens them. He stares at Emily and there is a ring of gold around his pupils, and then his eyes drink her in, they loom large around her, they hold her as if she floated between the Earth and the Moon.<\/p>\n
She giggles at this. She twists in her mind and writhes away and slips down to the ground, as if to land from flight on the wet grass of the night; shakes off the vision, and is staring at her godfather (whom she calls uncle, incorrectly) across the room again.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2014 but it\u2019s rare for it to be so complete, so unrelenting, so always-on. His mother knew he was something special, and his father drank a lot and rode around on underground dragons.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s poor parenting,\u201d Emily criticizes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a chaotic time,\u201d Eldri concedes. \u201cIn fairness, his mother only really managed three or four years with Hans herself before she flew away on a gigantic red bat.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWow,\u201d Emily says.<\/p>\n
She flits up to her feet. She hugs Navvy Jim, who looks at her in perplexity. Then she sits down again.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a svart-elf, of course,\u201d Eldri says, \u201cSo he could manage pretty well on his own, particularly with three or four full years of a mother\u2019s love. He went around doing this and that and finally realized, \u2018you know, this world\u2019s a pretty crazy place. It\u2019s just this sea of impressions that\u2019s constantly giving rise to abominations. But wouldn\u2019t it be better if things had reasons? If questions had answers? If you could look this way and that and everywhere there\u2019d be a reason why?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s silly,\u201d says Emily.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d Emily says, \u201cif things didn\u2019t have answers, how could he bother asking questions?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a good point,\u201d Eldri says, \u201cI suppose. I certainly don\u2019t think anything did<\/i> answer him, when he asked those questions. So there\u2019s that! . . . But there might have been a cave cucumber or something that he talked to. I don\u2019t know. The stories are kind of ambiguous when they\u2019re talking about stuff that\u2019s all the way back then. Maybe his Mum flew by on her bat, or his Dad had hiccupped out a boozelemental or something caparisoned in shell and trident that answered him when he asked; but if anything like that had happened, nobody\u2019s ever said to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMm,\u201d Emily says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo he built the world,\u201d Eldri says. \u201cHe tamed it. He stomped it flat, as it were, although I guess that technically he stomped it round.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was good work!\u201d Emily says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd there were still monsters,\u201d Eldri says. \u201cHorrors. Awful world-devouring things. They hung out around the edges of his construction. They were what was left over of the wild, you see. Gorgons, you know, and the nithrid, and drown\u00e9d Pepsi, and the like. You could even say \u2014 they were awful things, they were world-ending things, they were monsters, because <\/i>they were what was left over of the wild that came before. Because if they were the kinds of things what fit into the world Hans made, then they would have done; but instead, they didn\u2019t. So he locked them up, bound them, trapped them, killed them sometimes \u2014 though that was bad,\u201d he asides.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t?\u201d Emily says.<\/p>\n
Navvy Jim looks over. He says, softly, \u201cIt makes the world much less.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMm,\u201d Emily says. \u201cBut what if it were a hundred-handed monster that was always throwing rock, paper, and <\/i>scissors?\u201d<\/p>\n
Navvy Jim\u2019s eyes light with soft amusement. \u201cOr a young girl throwing \u2018whale?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily, who used to shake up the rules of rock-paper-scissors in just that exciting fashion, tightens her lips. That\u2019s a burn,<\/i> she admits.<\/p>\n
\u201cHans took,\u201d Eldri says, \u201ceverything that didn’t fit, and he caged it in the earth, or wrapped it around the stars, or wove it through the sky, or even tied it through itself. He set toads to glower at it, or turned it into gold; cut off a foot sometimes, taught stupid mind-devouring riddles to it, whatever. All day, all night, he was down there in the depths of the Earth, trying to pin down the chaos and make it bland. And he kept waiting for it to get easier, you know, particularly once you really had a world to live in, once you had your continents and your seas and even some kind of order to the underworld beneath; he kept waiting for stuff to settle down and for everything to just be<\/i> good<\/i>, but it didn\u2019t, it never did. He kept working on that until the very end; until the scissors fell.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily thinks about that.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the Keepers\u2019 House,\u201d she says, \u201cwe say \u2014 I mean, in our inside voices, but still \u2014 that Gotterdammerung will come.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat we can hold it at bay,\u201d Emily says. \u201cThat we can stand in creepy circles around people and push it back. But it\u2019ll still come. It\u2019s too late for anything else. The world\u2019ll burst.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d Eldri says, \u201cHans died.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe world can\u2019t burst,\u201d says Navvy Jim.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI won\u2019t allow it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a brave robot,\u201d says Eldri.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t stand in creepy circles around people,\u201d Emily says. \u201cYou\u2019re a rock-paper-scissors-playing robot.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI will have to stop the bursting of the world by playing rock-paper-scissors,\u201d Navvy Jim agrees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One summer, when Emily\u2019s eyes have gone all-over gold and she has been given over to the Keepers\u2019 House, she sits on the hillside with Eldri and his amazing rock-paper-scissors-playing robot Navvy Jim, and Eldri tells her stories of the beginning of the world. He tells her the story of Hans. \u201cA long time ago,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"series":[47],"class_list":["post-4832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chapter-0-prologue","series-the-storm-that-saw-itself"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/Navvy_Scissors_noBG.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4832"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6209,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4832\/revisions\/6209"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4832"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=4832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}