Terror. The terror of finding oneself before a mountain to be scaled, a mountain the height of a dozen nations piled upon one another, end to end, boasting whole civilizations and waste lands between them, upon a slope rising unceasingly upward into the sky. The terror of looking upon the ocean stirred into a raging turmoil of violence. Terror at confronting the great secret of this world: that all things had endings, all things could be destroyed just as they had once, long ago, been built up. That terror swept through Melei, thrilled her.
That was when her name in this world, that other name, pierced up into her tongue, begging again to be spoken and seal itself upon her.
She bit her tongue, bit down into it so hard that it ached and bled a little. To say the name… to consign herself among the living shades… such a temptation…
The name fought relentlessly. It would be said, she realized, someday. She would come to live here, in this drowned city of humbling, awful beauty. It would be her home, someday, taking her into its brutal black arms like a lover would do, grinding its iciness against her shivering flesh.
Still she fought, clenching her teeth and grinding them together so violently that she felt they might break off in her mouth. She pushed herself upward, into the sky, letting go of the city even as she stared into the watery canal gridwork of its forgotten, worthless streets. She let herself ascend, into the foul clouds that were heavy with strange poisons, up into the cold nebulousness that lay beyond them, falling away from this awful and lovely world that was her constant obsession, this place of strange meanings and consequences and cruel finalities.
The city and all of its broken, awful grandeur blurred into a mere patch of indistinct darkness dotted with scattered open fires, blending into the surrounding darkness and becoming nothingness as she fell upward, outward; away from the world once again.
* * *
Melei’s eyes opened slowly as the sunrise just finished and serene Ulthar gradually stirred from its long nocturnal slumber. She slid her prodigious bedding aside, and took up her scribbling-notebook in one hand, searching for the words that would draw the magnificently drab colors across from that other world into hers.
A troupe of cats passed by her window, miaowing gleefully at one another, and she rose to peer out at them, as if to divine some portent from the colors of their coats; but they were a motley pack, impossible to read even for a girl as bright as Melei.
Waking, dreaming. She felt as if a woman torn between two lovers—one of them calm, and sweet, and still and good, and the other magnificent, stone-muscled and taciturn and bold enough to seize her and pull her close to him in the darkness of night.
She set the notebook down, ruminating. There was a choice coming. She would have to choose a name. Said she, in that world, “Melei,” then her dark lover would listen, and hear, and understand what her heart said. The delicious torture would end, and he would send her home… never to return. Yet said she that other name, that strange name that even now squirmed beneath her tongue, prickling her mouth and fighting to be pronounced in the sunny morning calm of Ulthar, then her dark lover would seize her, all at once, and carry her off into the delightful terror of the world of her dreams, leaving the streets of Ulthar forever empty of her.
She could feel the city’s ache, at the very thought of her leaving. The city’s ache, or perhaps it was her own.
No harm could come of writing the name, she decided. She had written it upon her own palm, in different scripts, one by one, and not a thing had happened save that she had dreamt of the other world sooner, and more fiercely, each time. She could write it upon a page, she was sure. It was not the same as saying it. She could still decide. Melei, or…
She took a quill, unlidded a jar of sepia ink, and touched the quill’s tip into the inky darkness. Without speaking—with her jaw locked firmly, to guard against accidental pronouncement—she touched the tip of the quill against the gently yellowed page. The dawn sunlight cast a shadow from the feather quill, throwing a line of gentle shading across the page and into her lap. She shut her eyes, and opened them, and shut them again, and once more opened them, so as to let the shadow find a place in her heart’s memory.
She realized, then, she was building up a storehouse of memories already. The faces of the swarthy guards. The troupes of cats mewing happily all around her. She had stopped hating Ulthar, wincing at the summery stink of the cat turds and grumbling at the foreign power that ruled the place. She had found the kind of love that wells up one when she abandons her lover for another, her world for another’s; that sort of love that is rooted in impossibility that cannot be prevented even by sorrow, even by fear, even by the movement of the shadow across a page as the sun slips up into the sky.
She did not write the name, but instead rose, scribbling-book still in hand, and went back to her window. The sweetest cottages of Ulthar lay just there, empty of terror but touching in their way, stirring memories of the games she had played in these dusty streets during what felt like another life. Laughter and the voices of children who had somehow become half-forgotten friends, folk whose faces that she had seen not once in ages and ages.
And Melei knew, then, that she would say the name. Perhaps not that night. Not so soon as that, she told herself. But she would say it, and go, and old Ulthar would continue on without her, as it had done before her birth, with its cats and gentle sunny days and whispering old women and men.
She filled a basin with warm water, and carried it to a high table in her room, her feet padding upon the wooden planks of the floor. Outside, a bird sang a snatch of birdsong she had heard dozens of times before, though she could not name what type of bird it was. She splashed the water on her face, delighting in its gentle warmth, steeling herself.
For there would be precious little warmth like this in the other world, in the arms of her dark dream lover.
And then she donned a bright and comfortable silk, light in shade to suit the warm day, and crossed the threshold of her home, going out into a street that smelled of blooming cherry flowers and apple orchards that had been planted by the Southerners. There, in the street, a trio of cats gazed up at her, curiously eyeing her approach with heads tilted one way or another. They seemed, like all cats in Ulthar, almost as if they wished to ask her something, or to dispense some holy secret to her, but if indeed this was so, they said nothing, their own jaws as firmly locked as hers had been minutes before.
An old man made his way down the street, comfortable and calm though his back was a little bent. He smiled at her, and a cock crowed in the distance, and Melei closed her eyes. And opened them again.
And closed them.
And opened them again, committing every breath of it, every shade and tiny noise and scent, to the strongest urn in the storehouse of her memory. The voices of children long gone echoed, now, within that storehouse, and the image of her mother baking sour bread, and the laughter of cats—for in Ulthar, by nights, cats do laugh, though only the most blessed ever hear it more than once—and the sunrises, the sunrises that had saddened her so often.
Perplexed, she went through the streets, dazed, eyes and heart drinking Ulthar in deeply and constantly until she was drunk with the place. It was her farewell kiss to the world of her birth, a kiss of the eyes upon the forehead. It was her last embrace of the little city, day-long as she wandered and rambled from shop to temple to the current doorsteps of present friends and the abandoned doorways of friends long-lost. She met those she had once loved, and said nothing of leave-taking, though she wondered if they could see it in her eyes. Yet she asked not a soul as she spoke to them of nothings, of needle work and gossip and of the latest news from other cities and lands. As she walked those quiet, calm streets, her footsteps tapping gently the beat of her last ballad to Ulthar, she realized she loved this city, loved it unceasingly and would do so evermore though she would not live here any longer.