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I open my mouth, but I can’t understand what he said, so I close it again.
“This happens,” he says more to himself than to me, “when people cannot behave. And they never behave. So it always happens. I don’t know why I bother, really.”
“What are you?”
“You could say I’m the creative director,” he says. “Of you know, Earth. I’m also, I suppose, technically speaking, your father.”
With those words, I forget about everything which has happened before this moment. My entire life, I have wondered who my father was. I was told he came from another tribe on the other side of the mountain. I took that to mean that he was from the hunting tribe around Hyrrm’s back. But perhaps that’s not what that meant at all.
“You… are my father.” I say it flatly, because it is not a question. I can see my eyes in his eyes. My hair in his hair. We have the same chin. Though thankfully, not the same beard. In an instant, I make sense.
I was not fathered by someone in another tribe. I was fathered by a… whatever this is.
“I am.. hey!”
His exclamation is prompted by the fact that I just picked up a heavy ceramic something and threw it at him. It shatters against the far cave wall, unbecoming whatever it was, and turning into a scatter of shards.
“What did you do that for?”
“You…” I seethe. “Are my father.”
“Oh, I see the confusion,” he says. “Yes, I am your father but in the same way as I am the father of the turtles and the beetroots and the blackbirds and…”
“You’re lying. You’re my father. You are the one who begat me.”
“If that means you’re going to throw things at me, then no,” he says. “You have to be more careful here. These aren’t objects. They’re decorative concepts. You just broke the concept of shame. You know that? I’m going to have to remake it before all the humans start going around naked and fucking each other even more than they already do.”
This creature is claiming that he is a deity, but I have seen the power of the future, and that seems to me to be what he has. I do not see bird, or root in him. But I do see myself reflected in him, and along with my features, I feel his negligence.
I wondered, when I was small, where my father was. Why he did not rescue me. I cried some nights, because the others all knew who their father was–Trelok– and I did not. I thought I had forgotten that pain, but seeing my face in his brings all that pain surging to the fore.
“You left me there to be tortured,” I say. “You left me to be outcast in a world where being outcast means death. Why?”
“You’ve learned a little about time,” he says. “You guess.”
“Because it had to be that way? Because it already had been that way?”
“It did.”
“Why do you have goat legs?” I change the subject. There are a million questions to ask, and I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about time, and the inevitability of everything.
“Oh, these?” He looks down at his legs. “I like them. Also, I am a faun. Quite a special faun actually. King of the fauns, if you stand on ceremony. Which makes you…” he looks at me suggestively, as if he expects me to finish the sentence.
“Dead?”
“I don’t feel as though you’re following the thread of this conversation, but I suppose you’re new. You need time to settle down. You’re actually the youngest of thirteen daughters of mine. You can meet your sisters soon.”
I have a family down here. Or up here. But I feel like it is more down than any other direction. Earth was a middle place. This is not an improvement on it.
“You’re a princess, Tres,” he says. “And as soon as you lose connection to the flesh you inhabited in the human life, you will see that for yourself.”
“Lose connection?”
“You’re still technically dying,” he says. “That beast of yours is attempting to save you.”
“He is? He is!” I beam. “He will save me. Vulcan will never fail me.”
“Well. We will see about that.”
“What happened? Did Hyrrm claim me? Did Trelok kill me?” My memories of the end are non-existent.
“You cast magic too powerful for you, fell back and hit your head on a rock. Pretty standard human death, aside from the magic,” he says without concern.
I curse. I did not expect to be confronted with my father, let alone discover that he is a faun. My tribe speaks of many different beasts, half-natural, half-supernatural. We know that the world we see is not all there is. I have been accused of unnatural origins many times in my life, but I never suspected that the rumors were true.
