Aries 1 -- "Warrior Spring"

Hi! This solar year, I've committed myself to writing and posting one short story during the Sun's journey through every 10 degrees of each tropical zodiac sign, beginning with the Sun's ingress into Aries on March 20, 2022. If you would like to know more about the heart of this project, where I come from, and how I hope to move forward, you can read more here.

Thank you for reading this first story of my decan crossing. This is a story for Aries 1--the first face of the cardinal fire sign. In the tarot tradition that I practice, this decan corresponds with the planet Mars, and with the Two of Wands.

With gratitude for the influence of the art of Pamela Colman Smith, the writing of Brenna Hayes, and the writing and teaching of T. Susan Chang.

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"Warrior Spring"

by Lois Mei-en Kwa

It is daunting enough to conquer a world, to emerge victorious from the past, to win over every challenger you will meet–these things would be exceedingly difficult to do even if you were not holding the Seed to your chest the entire time you go about the work of winning. This is not a choice a dryad makes, but a fact of life. Everyone is born clutching a perfectly clouded sea-glass globe to their body, and no one can remember a day they did not have to bear its fragile weight and protect it from the elements. The Seed’s clouded surface is thin as a leaf, cold, and brittle, seeming always to be on the very edge of shattering. 

    As a sapling, Warrior Number One had planned to transmute the green fire of her youth into a harvest of seamless conquering, emerging, and winning. Instead, almost every hour of every day of her adolescence was spent protecting her Seed from the world she carried it through. She bore herself in a manner best suited to defensive adaptation–upright and certain as a cliff face, but ready to bend and sway like a cattail at a moment’s notice. She passed the long, loamy, moonlit nights in vulnerable vigilance as she dozed, on her feet among a grove full of her siblings, and spent whole winters squatting with the Seed between her stoically rooted feet so that a harsh frost would not annihilate its contents. 

She faithfully did these things for the Seed despite not having any idea what its contents were. Some of the Mothers still held their own Seed close and guarded it as alertly as she did–but some of them carried no Seed at all. You would think every last one of them would be able to explain at length why this was the case, but when she asked one or another why they carried their Seed, or why their Seed was nowhere to be seen, she was greeted with silence. And when she asked the Mothers what it was, exactly, she had spent her life guarding, nobody would deliver an answer that felt remotely true. 

“Moths,” said one Mother.

“The secret to happiness,” deadpanned another.

Her third Mother twisted her thorny mouth completely shut and said nothing, then turned and loped off into the forest, out of which spiraled, like bursts of pollen, the laughter of tiny dryads splashing in the river.

When she asked her siblings what they suspected their Seeds contained, nobody could give her an answer that seemed remotely rational. 

“The secret to rebelling against the Mothers,” said one sibling.

“Moths,” whispered another.

A third sibling parted his mossy lips, which, to Warrior Number One’s horror, began to quiver. Her sibling proceeded to weep with loud catharsis, overcome by some profound emotion much more quickly than he could coherently express the answer he apparently held so dear. Warrior Number One quickly excused herself and jogged down to the shore to stare at the Edge Of The World.

Warrior Number One lived a full, vivid life, and she knew it. But day by day, an undeniable anticipation for a different kind of knowledge aggravated her like a thorn lodged behind her ear. She wanted, more than almost anything, to know–finally and irrevocably–what exactly the future held in store for her. She hungered for the arrival of the day of her Rite, when a Mother would reveal to her the mystery of her Seed. *    *    * Every Seed has two sides–the outer and the inner. 

On the outside, the Seed reflects the world it is borne through by its guardian. When she rests, the Seed’s surface shows the protective angles of her limbs that cradle it, and beyond, the curving horizon, backlit by fading sunlight as it falls from the Edge Of The World. When she charges into battle, the Seed contains the flashing images of the dryad’s enemies, their contorted faces, their loss, her triumph.

* * *

As the time of Warrior Number One’s Rite approached, she began to spend more of her daylight hours doing the nighttime work of dreaming. She dreamed of other lands–of entering another world and becoming the author of something completely new within it. She tried to ask herself what final form such a life would take, but couldn’t give herself an answer that felt whole. She did not know why, but she knew she hadn’t yet learned the language with which her future could be understood.

Inside the glassy, translucent shell of the Seed, a cloud of many colors slowly, almost imperceptibly, contracted and bloomed.

* * *

The inside of the Seed reflects nothing. The seeming safety of its enclosure is home to the engine of change, not its recipient.

Every dryad has been taught since saplinghood that the only thing in the world that reflects nothing is the dark.
Let us hypothesize that every Seed contains an untold multitude of seeds, just as every darkness bears within it an expanding universe of darknesses.

* * *

The dryads upheld a hierarchy, and Warrior Number One had been born at the top. This was a mere fact of life for her, and though some resented her for it, that, too, was a mere fact to live with, for many more exalted her existence than undermined it. Warrior Number One was beloved among her siblings, and the love she received galvanized her like a sunflower in a summer field, helped her grow ferociously competent and beautifully brave. Her heart sang with righteous passion when she surged into battle on behalf of the Mothers and her siblings, on behalf of the forest they defended from invaders, on behalf of her entitlement to claim what rock or cave she wished when traveling the outer bounds of the dryads’ land.

    She fought for the love of others. She fought for the right to be herself. The Mothers had taught her that, just as when she wielded the twin wooden staves that were her weapons of birthright, it was dangerous to separate one from the other.
“But I’ve never even held both at the same time before,” she protested, gesturing–with great and cautious frustration–with the hand that clasped the Seed close to her body and had never, could never, let go.
Every time she raised this objection, the Mother before her turned away as if she had not spoken at all and went off to deliver yet another impossible lesson to another unsuspecting sibling.

* * *

She dreams of a seed that curves back under its shadow like a hook, its outer pod the glossy dark of a night sky shot through with thunder. If planted, this seed would split like a secret and send out the subtlest of tendrils that can climb every supportive surface they encounter. She hauls herself up the trellis, staves strapped behind her shoulders, following the story of these vines into a life shaped around intrigue and ascension. In this dream, power flows through her without limit or end. Power illuminates her body like lightning, chaining her to the earth.

* * *

Sometimes, fighting was warmaking, and she fought to defend herself against the domination of others, or she fought to dominate them, instead. When she did not fight alongside her comrades, she fought alone.

Sometimes, fighting was dancing, as when the winds howled down from the mountains behind The Edge Of The World, cold and commanding against her body, and she had to move with the winds, not against them, so that she might learn from the power it wielded without losing herself to its intensity.

Sometimes, fighting was caregiving, and she sparred with the greenest crop of warriors in the brightest field of wildflowers, and she struggled to find the better way than she had the day before to teach the children how to protect themselves in the wild exposure of the world. She taught them how to fight with one stave clutched in their dominant hand, and their Seed held close with the other.
Sometimes, fighting was fighting. There was a day, which was a day like many others, that her opponent, another dryad who had challenged her for ownership of her favorite creek for bathing, looked her straight in the eye and announced, “You think you’re special, don’t you.”

“Fuck you,” she said, and with her dominant hand brought one stave lashing out across the other’s neck, and shoved back with all her might.

* * *

She dreams of a seed with no symmetry. Every time she turns it over in her grasp, it shows her a different face in a different light. It offers her a sharp cliff-face–a bifurcated petal–a knot of wet sand–a perfect moon–
She dreams of the perfect impossibilities contained within a thousand faces, and she can see her own in every one.

* * *

The day of her Rite was a spring day like many others, clear and damp. A Mother came up to interrupt her sparring session and led her to the shore. The tide had begun to rise. They looked for moment at the bright horizon, the Edge Of The World. The Mother cleared her throat.

“You do not need to protect your Seed any longer,” she said. “You can, should you choose to. But it’s up to you.”

Warrior Number One waited expectantly, fixing hope on her face. But when it became apparent that the Mother had nothing more to say, a panicked dread rose quickly in her chest, and she blurted it:  “No, wait, there must be more.”

“There is not.”

“But what is so different about me that this is true now, when it was not before?”
“It is not about you. It is your life that is now different. Before, you had to protect the Seed. Now, you do not. It is simple.”

The mother stepped away, ready to move on, to do something else. Her panic intensified. She shouted, “Why should I believe you? What’s the point of this–what’s the point of you, of any of you, you Mothers who never even told me what to do?”
The Mother turned and looked at her with eyes as deep and brown as roots. She said, “The ones who raised you are the dryads who looked upon The Edge Of The World, and either stayed, or returned. No more. No less.” 

The Mother left and loped into the forest, where the shouts of sparring children percussed the heated morning like joyous spores.

The dryad cast her blurry gaze out over the ocean, towards the Edge Of The World. She turned the Seed over with both hands.

* * *

She dreams of a seed that, when soaked in the pure validation of unmitigated sunlight, can bloom into any shape, any future, any life that she could possibly desire.
She dreams that she could live every life she has ever dreamt of living.

She dreams, then wakes. The tide overtakes her from the inside-out. She weeps violently, heart pierced by loss, broken in the knowledge that it was a dream–nothing more, and nothing less.

* * *

The dryad made her choice, though doing so left her weak with fear and grief. She laid her staves behind a scrubby dune above the tide line and stumbled back to the shore, into the waves. The water surged up and slapped at her thighs. She dropped to her knees, closed her eyes, allowed the next wave to pull loose the flowers and lichen braided through her hair. The Seed began to soak. Soon, its surface softened between her fingers. One crushing wave after another came down upon her like a storm that would take her head from her shoulders, but it was the panic the dryad thought would drown her where she knelt. Dread flooded her every time she thought it:

I will never be able to keep it perfectly safe.

When she opened her hands, she let it go. It left her grasp, to sink or float or break all the way open in the mystery of the tide.
*    *    *

 

The dryad crawled on hands and knees up the shore to the dune where she had left her weapons. She crouched behind a little grassy overhang and began digging. She scraped and hauled and hollowed out a deep bed in the dirt and laid down in it, and after pulling as much earth as she could reach back into the bed to cover her body, she turned over and burrowed a little deeper, so she could not see the daylight when she closed her eyes. She cried herself to sleep. 

She woke the next day, restless and hot. The sun had been warming the soil in which she lay, which was dark from her tears the night before. She felt uncomfortably energized, prepared to leap forth. Even before she reached up to touch them, she could feel the bud-tipped shoots that had sprouted from her throat, chest, and belly, twining fiercely across her limbs, tracing strange pathways down her back. She knew without looking that these growths would be deeply green, and shot through with flashes of mysterious color, contracting and blooming from one day to the next. 

She sat up, breaking the surface at last. Heavy sheets of damp earth fell away from her body. She looked straight at the horizon and took in the sight of herself for the first time.