Defining words...

"Because not all weakness has to be weakness.  Weakness, strength, power, failure—they're just words, and we can define what the words mean if we have the will or the courage." ~Michelle Sagara, Cast in Courtlight, Ch. 21

I was reading in my beloved series, thinking about how the more slowly and carefully I read, the more gems I find, like this one.

But before I ponder defining words, I wanted to mention a bit I read last night, for it reminds me of this bit in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series.  I just started the third book in The Chronicles of Elantra, Cast in Secret.  Okay, well, I am mostly through this book.  But there is this part that brings me such ... joy ... that I find myself rushing ahead to get to that bit and then reading it a few times before moving on to the next part of the story.

In this book, Kaylin is brought to the royal library for the first time, to a room at the back of the archives.  What is interesting about the library is that it is the hoard of a dragon who is called The Arkon (I disremember his name at this point).  You see, Elantra is the hoard of the emperor and so it is a bit unique to have another dragon claim something within another's hoard as his own.  In fact, there is this funny but serious line in one of the first books about entire wars being fought over how the dragons defined the word mine, ultimately finding a definition, in a way in which they could co-exist.

So, Kaylin is in the library, with the two dragons she knows at this point, Tiamaris, who has worked with her in short capacity as a Hawk, an officer of the law, and Sanabalis, who has agreed to be her magic teacher (something she doesn't want, but the emperor does).  What she is about to learn is that the bracelet/manacle that she wears that inhibits her magic came from this archive.  Lord Sanabalis brought Kaylin there to talk about the marks on her body for the first time, to try and explain a bit of their history.

They enter one room of the archives, and Kaylin spots a statute of a Barrani (I think of them sort of like elves) who is marked as she is.  By this point, Kaylin knows she is called the Chosen because she is marked, but she doesn't really know what that means.  So, they talk a little about him and the marks.  I am always rushing through this part.

Then, they enter the second room.  In the dark and dusty place, there is a skeleton who is wearing jewelry that matches the manacle.  But as she approaches the skeleton, Kaylin sees something that the dragons do not.  She sees a giant blue stone hanging on a chain around his neck.  And then the skeleton begins to speak.

Ah!  I am getting all ... joyous ... just thinking about it!

In short, the skeleton is a dragon who died in his human form, forever denied the winds of eternity because of that.  He died protecting his hoard, which is the stone pendant. Only the pendant is actually a word, a True Word.  Water.  His hoard really was the duty to protect it, to seek nothing else as his duty, to not use its power until the time it is needed.

Tiamaris and Sanabalis are horrified to discover that the man is a dragon and is thus trapped.  Tiamaris turns away and Sanabalis bows his head.  Kaylin, well, Kaylin talks with the skeleton, to hear his story.

He says that he called and she, moved by more than she understands, answers that she was late in coming, but she's here now.  He says that he failed in his duty, but she says that he was faithful even in death and, thus, did not fail.  She offers to take his duty, not for herself, but to find someone who will honor it as he has.  After he passes it to her, Kaylin tells the rest of his story.  With the power of the marks on her skin, which are a mixture of True Words and True Names, she tells of his courage in staying the course until the end, being trapped in his form, until such a time when someone came who could take his burden and free him.  In speaking the end of his story, Kaylin is writing it.  One of the marks lifts off her skin and fills the trapped dragon and frees him.  As she finishes speaking, wind wraps around Kaylin and her dragon companions as the light that had been filling the skeleton transforms into the wings of a dragon and the bones become a fine ash.  The dragon's cry of freedom, his shout of joy, permeates all of Elantra.

SIGH.

I like that Kaylin frees the dragon and I like that she does so by writing the true end of his story, by not having his story end in the library, but in what transpires between them.  I like the compassion of the dragons is revealed.  I like that the outcome is joy.

It is just so ... emotional.

In one of Jordan's books, a character is able to restore two of her sisters-by-choice who had been severed from the one power.  It is really like restoring life to them, in a way, and it is just as joyous.  I always rush ahead when I am nearing that scene.  In fact, I have been known to pick up that book and flip to that scene just for the ... joy.

I would like to figure out how to mark the Kindle version of Cast in Secret so I could do the same.

Anyway, back to what Kaylin said in the previous book, Cast in Courtlight:

"Because not all weakness has to be weakness.  Weakness, strength, power, failure—they're just words, and we can define what the words mean if we have the will or the courage." ~Michelle Sagara, Cast in Courtlight, Ch. 21

When I think of the entire series, what Kaylin is saying here is not about True Words, for she ultimately learn that they are ... fixed.  You cannot change their meaning.  Even here, I do not think that Kaylin is speaking of changing the meaning of weakness, strength, power, or failure so much as she is saying that we can change how we look at them.

"We are judged by our successes," he said, brushing the hair from her eyes.  "We all expect that.  But we are also judged by our failures, noble or ignoble.  Success and failure are two edges of the same blade, two sides of the same coin.  To fear the one is to forever deny the possibility of the other." ~Michelle Sagara, Cast in Courtlight, ch. 19

This earlier scene comes to mind because Severn, Kaylin's beat partner, is often one who speaks to her of changing what words mean.  Here, he is asking her not only to risk failure, but to change how she sees failure.  Failure is not always a bad thing.  I like his descriptors:  noble failure, ignoble failure.

It also calls to mind what the Integrated Medicine Specialist said to me a few months ago, a quite comment that I have been long pondering.  "Be careful how you define "healthy."  You see, I was telling her about this really great article encouraging chronically ill folk not to compare themselves to Healthy Me.  What Dr. LaSalle was saying is that I can still look at Healthy Me, Healthy Myrtle, because although the Dysautonomia has been making me progressively worse, I have gained such ground in what I think about myself (micro steps forward), managing my symptoms, managing my emotions, and being courageous and vulnerable.

I wrote about the article before, when I read it.  Although I find it strangely difficult to track down specific posts I've penned on my own blog!  I wrote about it, almost excited to step away from Healthy Me, as if she'll never be here.  That's right if you are specifically talking about only physically Healthy Me.  There is ever so much more to the word "health" than the physicality of the body.

I think, too, about this conversation with the dragon Lord Sanabalis and Kaylin:


     "Mortals, however, have learned to love the dark, to love ignorance."
     "That's a bit harsh," she said, substituting her first reaction with a swiftness that would have impressed Severn, had he been there.
     "Is is?  You are mortal.  By definition, Kaylin, you will all die, no matter what you do.  There is no precaution you can take that will save eternity for you.  Death is the road you will walk, from the moment you first breathe.  It surrounds the fabric of your living.  You are always saying goodbye.
     "My kind, and the Barrani, have oft overlooked the important of life to the mortals because it is so very brief, and because so little is lost—in our eyes.  A handful of years.  If I chose to sleep, I might have missed the whole of your life—and it seems long to you, even though you are young.
     "But there is an urgency about mortality that creates wonder, that heightens both joy and fear.  To my eyes, you live an eternity in such a short span."  ~ Michelle Sagara, Cast in Secret, Ch. 8

Lord Sanabalis was acknowledging that Kaylin was chasing how he looked at mortals.

In the second book, at its end, Kaylin is trying to find the words (so as not to offend him) to show the Barrani Lord of the West March that there is room in his stiff, dispassionate, immortal existence to define words as more than what he has become mored to over the centuries.  That idea of change, of seeing outside your own existence and preconceptions mired within, extends across the rest of the books to Kaylin's interactions with the dragons and is reflected back to herself as she continually confronts her shame and her desire to keep much of her life hidden.

To me, the work of Dr. Brené Brown, all those years of research, of data collection, collation, and categorizing, has helped me to become open to the possibility of redefining the word "shame."  For one, it has become mored in me, now, that shame is external, not internal.  Just understanding that facet of its nature leaves me, very privately, shouting with the joy of freedom.

     Teyaragon, eldest of his line, gave over the gathering and the hunt, and retreated from the skies and their freedom when he was but eight hundred years old in the reckoning of his kind."  Her legs and her arms were burning, and she could hear the words on her skin, because they were so like the ones she was speaking, for a moment, they might have been the same thing.
     "A duty was placed upon his kind and he chose to bear it alone, and he faced the heart of the Water, bearing only its name, and when the Water was awake, he fought its coming, and he perished in the fight.
     "But he fought for long enough, and with all of his power—which was great, even reckoned among his kin—that his people had time to take to the skies, where they could without deserting their hoard.  And the Water, in the end, found nothing to sustain it, and it died, upon the land, as Teyaragon himself had died.
     "But he kept his oath and he fulfilled his duty, even in death, trapped and lessened by the form he had been forced to take to bear this sigil.  And in time, when his ancient enemy began to stir, he came from the edge of death to greet the Chosen, come at last to his call."
     The light in his eyes was fading, but it was still pure gold.  Kaylin wanted to look away.  She could't bear to to see empty sockets there.  She felt the weight of the pendant as he dropped it, at last, around her neck.
     But she hadn't finished yet.
     "And without his burden, having fulfilled all duty beyond even the expectation of those who placed the geas upon him, he was free at last to return to his rightful form."  And she gestured, and her hands flew up, palms out, and the words surged through her.  She heard the snap of the thin wood as her hair streamed free, and strands of it stood on end, as if she was a lightening rod.
     "The winds which had waited for millennia gathered, even in the darkness of his tomb, and they whispered his name, and he heard it."
     Light flared around him; light that was bright, but pale now, not blue and not orange but not quite blinding white.  Where the light he had somehow summoned in death has been amber and man shaped, the light that took him now was larger in every possible way.  It spread through the darkness like fire, consuming it.  Wings of light passed through the walls and tongues of white flame left his jaw as his face elongated.
     And there was a wind in the closed chambers; heavy, brittle pieces of parchment fluttered by, swirling up toward the ceiling and the far walls.
     "And the winds carried him aloft, to the open skies."
     The light began to climb; the wings were flapping.  She could feel the gale, and stood in the center of it, unharmed.  Unmoved.
     He roared in triumph and in joy, and the whole palace must have skated with the sound of it; had it been no more than a whisper, she though they must feel it anyway, because of what it contained.
     "Go, " she whispered. "I give you back your name, and your death, and your freedom."
     And rising from her—from within her—was a single bright sigil too complicated to memorize, too significant to ever forget.  ~Michelle Sagara, Cast in Secret, Ch. 11