“Break the shell,” Shame says to me.
“What?” I say.
“Break out of your shell.” He sits across from me, and as suddenly as that we’re somewhere-in-particular, with a fire on one side and a narrow low table between us, scarlet light and shades of honey-brown wood. His fingers are loosely laced together, hanging between his knees, and he’s leaning toward me.
The look on his face reminds me of the name the Emperor gave him later, when he stepped down from Shame’s active duties and became its elder. Mercy. A gentleness, but with a terrible strength behind it.
“You are looking for Ereseya’s story,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“And that is the problem.” He waits, and when I don’t figure it out, he says, “You’re looking for her story. As if this is a thing to be told the way you perceive stories are supposed to be told. But Ereseya was not a writer, nor an artist. She was—”
“A poet,” I mutter, and if I had ears I’d be flattening them. “Don’t tell me it’s an entire book of poetry.”
“Is it?” he says.
“It’s how she’d tell it,” I say.
“You’re still assuming it has to be structured like a narrative,” he says. “Why are you assuming this? Wasn’t one of the reasons you began these experiments in publishing that you no longer had to cleave to methods that did not serve your purposes?”
“My purpose is to tell a story!” I exclaim.
“Your purpose,” Kor-the-priest says, “is to make art.”
I lean back and fold my arms, frowning.
“Let Ereseya’s book be free of the limitations you’re putting on it,” he says. “Stop thinking of it as a biography. The Aphorisms was not a biography of Farren, and yet it was effective.”
“Yes,” and now my frown is more contemplation than grumpiness.
“Break the shell,” Kor says. “Ereseya would. Ereseya did.”
I think about that, and he lets me. He’s always been good at that, giving people space to work out ideas. At last, I say, “I’m not sure how to do this anymore.”
“Now, at last, you have a hope of beginning,” he says, and touches my shoulder, familial, before he goes.
