"It’s blue," he said.
The woman shook her head. "Green," she said. "The color is green." She put the card down on the table and stood. She walked to the window. The room was a circular white drum, taller than it was wide. One window, one door.
The boy couldn’t remember having been outside the room, though that couldn’t be right. His memory was broken, the fragments tailing off into darkness.
"Some languages don’t have different words for blue and green," the woman said. "In some languages, they’re the same."
"What does that mean?"
The woman turned toward him. "It means you’re getting worse."
"Worse how?"
She did not answer him. Instead she stayed with him for an hour and helped him with his eyes. She walked around the room and named things. "Door," she said. "Door." And he understood and remembered.
Floor, walls, ceiling, table, chair.
She named all these things.
"And you," the child said. "What name do you go by?"
The woman took a seat across from him at the table. She had pale blond hair. Her eyes, in the perfect armatures of their porcelain sockets, were blue, he decided. Or they were green. "That’s easy," she said from behind her mask. "I’m the one who isn’t you."
When it was time to sleep, she touched a panel on the wall and a bed slid out from the flat surface. She tucked him in and pulled the blankets up to his chin. The blankets were cool against his skin. "Tell me a story," the child said.
"What story?"
He tried to remember a story. Any story that she might have told him in the past, but nothing came.
"I can’t think of any," he said.
"Do you remember your name?"
He thought for a moment. "You told me that you were the one who wasn’t me."
"Yes," she said. "That’s who I am, but what about you? Do you remember your name?"
He thought for a while. "No."
The woman nodded. "Then I’ll tell you the story of the queen," she said.
"What queen?"
"She the Unnamed," the woman said. "It’s your favorite."
She touched the wall by the bed. The lights dimmed.
"Close your eyes," she said.
And so he did.
Then she cleared her throat and began to recite the story—line after line, in a slow, steady rhythm, starting at the beginning.
After a while, he began to cry.
Upload protocol. Arbitration ()
Story sixteen: contents = [She the Unnamed] />
Function/Query : Who wrote the story? {
/File response : (She) wrote it. {
Function/Query : What do you mean, she wrote it. That isn’t possible. {
/File response : Narratives are vital to understanding the world. Experience without narrative isn’t consciousness. {
And so it was written.
In a time before history, in a place beyond maps, there was once a queen, she the unnamed, who dared defy her liege husband.
She was beautiful and young, with tresses of gold. Forced to marry a king she did not love, she bore him a son out of royal duty—a child healthy, and strong, and dearly loved.
Over the following years, unease crept into the queen’s heart as she noted the king’s cruelties, his obsession for magics. Gradually, as she learned the true measure of the man who wore the crown, she came to fear the influence that he might have on the child. For this reason she risked everything, summoned her most trusted confidants, and sent the boy into secret hiding, to live among the priests of the valley where the king could never find him.
The king was enraged. Never had he been defied.
"You will not darken this boy’s heart," she told the king when he confronted her. "Our son is safe, in a place where you cannot change him."
Such was the king’s fury at this betrayal that upon his throne he declared his queen an abhorrence, and he stripped her name from every book and every tongue. None could say her name nor remember it, and she was expunged from history in all ways but one. The deepest temporal magic was invoked, a sorcery beyond reach of all but the blackest rage—and the woman was condemned to give birth again and again to the self-same child whom the king had lost.
The queen had expected death, or banishment, but not this.
And so through magic she gave birth to an immaculate child. And for three years the new child would grow—first crawling, then walking—a strapping boy at his mother’s side, until the king would come to the tower cell and take the child on the high stone. "Do you regret?" He would ask his queen.
"Yes," she’d sob, while the guards gripped her arms.
The king would hold the child high and say, "This is because of your mother." And then slice the child’s throat.
The mother would scream and cry, and through a chaste, dark magic conceive again, and for nine months carry, and for one day labor, and for three years love a new child, raised again in the tower cell. A boy sweet and kind with eyes of blue.
Until the king would again return and ask the mother, "Do you regret?"
"Yes, please spare him," she’d cry, groveling at his feet. "I regret."
The king would hold his son high and say, "This is because of your mother." And then slice his tender throat.
Again and again the pattern repeated, son after son, as the mother screamed and tore at her hair.
Against such years could hells be measured.
The mother tried refusing her child when he was born, hoping that would save him. "This child means nothing to me," she said.
And the king responded, "This is because of your mother," and wet his blade anew.
"Do you know why I wait three years?" he asked her once as she crouched beside a body small and pale. He touched her hair tenderly. "It is so you’ll know the child understands."
And so it continued.
A dozen sons, then a score, until the people throughout the land called the king heir-killer, and still he continued to destroy his children. Sons who were loved. Sons who were ignored. A score of sons, then a hundred. Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.
Until the mother woke one day from a nightmare, for all her dreams were nightmares, and with her hand clutching her abdomen, felt a child quicken in her womb, and knew suddenly what she had to do. And soon it came to pass that she bore a son, and for one full year loved him, and for a second year plotted, and for a third year whispered, shaping a young heart for a monstrous task. She darkened his heart as no mother ever dreamed. She darkened him beyond anything the king could have done.
And in time the king finally came to the high tower and lifted his son high and asked, "Do you regret?"
She responded, "I regret that I was born, and every moment after."
The king smiled and said, "This is because of your mother."
He raised his knife to the child’s throat, but the three-year-old twisted and turned, like his mother had shown him, and drove a needle-thin blade into his father’s eye.
The king screamed, and fell from the tower, and died then slowly in a spreading pool of blood, while the boy’s laughter rang out.