Excerpt: Adhemlenei: Sword's Innocence

Prologue

It was night when the angels came, when the angels came to see the new thing on the earth.
It lay, a still form on the ground between the half-grown pine trees, half-clothed in white.
The angels were still and watched.
The being opened its eyes and looked up at the stars. It laughed in wonder and delight as they spun overhead, thick brilliant clusters of jewels scattered across the night sky. Then it was silent in contemplative rest.
It seemed years before the elf moved again, and perhaps it was. Time had stopped.
But, at last, the elf stretched out its arms and looked at its hands, and then its feet. It raised its hands to its face and felt its features, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and its long hair. It made a few happy sounding nonsense sounds with its mouth, and then crawled off along the grey mossy ground.
The angels followed silently, invisibly.
The elf came to a small cliff. It paused at the edge, unsure of what to do. It strained its young eyes to see what lay below, and the cliff appeared manageable to it. It sat on the edge and reached downwards with a pale foot. Hard rock met its probe, and it gently shifted weight down and began again.
It reached the bottom of the cliff and found a sandy beach. The sand quickly grew damp, and then wet, as the elf walked forward upright on its feet, unsteadily, but confidently. Water touched its toes, and then it walked straight forward into the tiny lake in the hollow of the land
There it stood, with the stars overhead reflected in the water, and it laughed and laughed again, dancing with its arms and upper body, rejoicing in the new world around it.
The angels came to the edge of the water and waited, unilluminated, but visible.
The elf turned and saw them, and laughed, making more nonsense sounds in its mouth, reaching out its arms to them in greeting.

The elf fell into a deep sleep after that first meeting, dreaming as if she were awake. She dreamed the stars spun by unendingly, ignorant of the sun or the moon. The angels came to her dream and taught her.
She strung together a language in her dreams, finding words for the stars and the trees and the lake and the smell of cool moss and the wind on her face, words for the joy of her heart and for her being and for her identity. She called herself a kalla, and her name La. The angels took up this language when they spoke to her, delighting in it as she did. There were seventeen angels with her, seven great angels and ten ‘ordinary’ angels. Of them all, she spoke most with the captain and the messenger, and indeed in later days these two were the ones who most spoke with people on the earth. They were among the oldest, though they were not the eldest – that one had left their number long ago.
They taught her about the trees and the earth and the sky, and about the Lord God who had made the jewel-like earth, and she listened and thought this over in her innocent way.

Many years the elf spent in deep sleep, her body sustained by the angels while they developed her mind.
Then, one day, La awoke in the real world and saw the moon rising above the trees. The messenger angel was at her side, silent, as she took it in. He was there to tell her what it was when she felt the need to ask. La sang softly as the blotched silver sphere rose effortlessly across the sky.
A bare few hours later, and the eastern sky grew light. La, startled, overwhelmed, raced to the top of a tree and watched as the sky changed colours, going from midnight blue to blue to pale blue to pink to gold. As the sun peered over the edge of the horizon, the angels burst into song like trombones and flutes and choirs of voices.
“That is the sun, little one,” the captain of the angels said to La, beside him. La had no words to say.

One night, the herald of the angels came swiftly to the captain and said: “We have found more kalmaei!” That was the name La had given to her shape.
“Lead on!” was the captain’s only reply.
La ran through the trees to keep up with the tall angels. They finally stopped at the edge of a shallow dell in the forest.
The dell was covered in hundreds of still figures, lying in undisturbed sleep. La crept quietly through the first few.
“There are so many,” she said. “How many does it take to make a people?”
“One person can be a people,” said the messenger behind her. “And a thousand thousand cannot, if they do not agree on what is worthy of love.”
“All things are worthy of love,” said the captain. “Remember that, even though there will come to you people who argue otherwise. Remember that.”
“Do you wish to serve these people as their ruler and guide under God?” asked the angels together.
La thought. “No. I would rather they chose their own guide. I will teach them what you have taught me, and if they wish me to do more, then I... I do not know. I will decide if they ask me.”
“They are waking,” said the angels. “Fare you well, Zela.”
“Zela?” asked the elf. “Who is Zela?”
The other elves began to stir, and Zela found herself asking empty air. The angels were gone, but now the people, the children of the earth, had come.