Shape Me Well

It was the strangeness of it all that caught my eye, and the knowing it was all for me. All done by a lone, mumbling man, bent near-double over the pottery wheel.

His foot pedaled fiercely, his hair fell ragged, he stared unblinking with hands a mess, as turn-by-turn he gave shape to the lump on the wheel before him. Spinning steadily and strong, those hands pulled the ruddy clay tall and hollow, shaping an offering urn for his Prince Divine. For me.

Kneeling across from him to watch his work, I could see my name in his heart, and stained on his hands. Leaning closer, I could hear my name in his words. My tale, as his people told it, repeated in prayer from mumbling lips:

The tale of a lonely Prince, eternal and grand, yet without a single thing to claim as his own. A Prince of no lands or waters. A Prince of no subjects. A Prince doomed to wander across empty sands. Until one day, there was rain.

Until one day he found himself in a flooded hollow between the dunes, drawn by the rainfall, drawn to the strange earth found beneath his feet. In reaching for this earth, the lonely Prince found it soft and easy to shape as he pleased, and found it baked hard if left under the sun. With this find, came the first of the Prince's grand ideas, and without thought to time or effort he bent himself towards its completion.

His first creations, his first subjects. Figures shaped in reflection of himself, as best he could tell from the receding waters of the hollow. Figures glazed in bronze shades and fired in the kiln of the desert, then carried in secret to the northern plains, where the breach of life had still hidden among the grasses. There in that land, before the other gods and their peoples could find and stop him, the lonely Prince saw his first creations breathe, and name him Divine. That is what they said.

This man, who believed I had formed his ancestors of clay and guided them to this day, continued his work as if a moment's pause might insult me. I watched him work with such focus and shook my head. I heard him start my tale again and I could not help but sigh. This tale of his was one I never lived, this thanks he offered was for a gift I had never granted. This man and all his people, mine by their choice, not once thinking I should be theirs. It was a strange sight, uncanny and upsetting, that brought me to reach out for the clay in his hands, wondering if perhaps I should simply...

"Do you know mine claim I sang them here?"

With a hand on my shoulder, a familiar face looked down at me with a smile. An old friend, an older foe, a young woman with eyes of every color and hair of feathered braids. She turned to watch the potter along with me. Just as curious, not nearly as confused, her voice like birdsong.

"Mine claim I wept the seas into being. Day and Night repeated, until at last, with no more tears to shed, I turned my grief into song, and in chorus did my people wake to my desire."

A tale more sad than my own, but telling her such only added life to her smile.

"Isn't it!" She laughed in earnest, skipping around my potter to place a feather in his hair. "I would have hated to live your tale as well, even if it brought me your strength, even if it left me your greater. No, I am thankful both our stories are only that. It thrills me enough to see my people don silks and feathers of every color, and dance to drum and song with smiles on their faces. I do not need the pain they say I lived through, so long as they keep singing!"

I blew the feather from my potter's hair with the softest breath, hardly noticed as he worked. His fingers were trembling as it was, strained from the effort to make this work his best. He needed no distraction from me, and certainly not from the Woman who might provoke him. I sent the feather to the winds with a scowl at its owner, who did naught but laugh at my behavior.

"I hear our brother in the north wove his people out of grasses," On and on without hesitation, she circled my potter and I with prancing steps, moving to a rhythm I couldn't hear. "Farther north still, I hear the people were hewn free from great trees, and did not your daughter chisel out her people from the caves of your own mountains?"

So our people say.

Clay and stone, wood and grass and song. Seafoam and animal bone, thornfruit, and a god's own corpse. Unlike the woman here, I didn't wander the lands and listen to these tales from different lands. Unlike this woman's people, me and mine did not collect the stories of others, to add to our own art. Still, what she said was not new to me, for all these stories could be found in a city as grand as this one. Here at the center of a dozen roads, in a great square where so many came to buy and sell and craft, a moment's stride could take you across the world, and hear all the stories in-between.

And still it was all so strange. These pasts of ours that had never been. Peoples who claimed this woman was my sister, who claimed we had another brother. Peoples who spoke of a daughter I had never raised, born of a wife I had never known. It was a strange, uncanny way to be, didn't she agree?

"No, not at all."

...What?

I stared at her in confusion, and in confusion she stared back. What? How was she confused when it was clear enough to me? There was no sense to these stories. There was no pride in a past that had never been, no good in being honored for actions that had never been taken. How could it not be strange? This uncanny state, this backwards thing. My people, and hers, and our brother's and my daughter's, each giving thanks and prayer to us when the reverse would be more proper. When those who have shaped us claim instead that we birthed them, how could that not be strange?

My sister giggled in response, then cried without tears, then laughed with her head thrown back to the skies. Fully at my expense, she laughed so loud and long I worried somehow our people might hear, and for a moment thought to shield my potter's ears from the din.

But then she laid a hand on my own, looking down at me with a smile, with eyes than shone in every color of my people.

"They are your people, aren't they brother?"

Of course.

"Do you cheer at their victories, grieve their losses, and agonize on your own over how to grant them greater lives?"

As if she didn't do the same. It was the least any of them could do for their own people.

"And your daughter, story or no you care for her more dearly than the rest of us, do you not? Her people are granted more favors from you than mine or our brother's, are they not?"

Daughter or no, the girl was precious, and her people deserving.

"Then what could possibly be strange?"

My answer did not come, and my sister knelt down to rest her head on my shoulder, watching my potter still at his work.

"I myself love backwards things. A song of victory before the battle starts, a dance of parting before a loved one passes. A child playing parent seems hardly strange to me. Do you not care for your makers as much as they care for you?"

Her feathers tickled my cheek as she rested there, and I thought of the times her people and mine had warred. Somewhere in the market my daughter's people were selling gems and casting bronze, and I recalled how they had wandered lost, generations past. I watched my potter nearing the end of his work, straining against fatigue to keep his focus, and wondered if his child my grow to be a potter too.

I looked down at my hands, ruddy and worn, cracked in webs from efforts real and invented. With my sister laughing lightly at my side, I reached out to my devoted potter, and with a gentle touch brushed the exhaustion from his eyes. He had done so well, and all for me. It felt wrong, if I let him falter at the end.