Princess Nymeria

Photo by Alice Alinari on Unsplash

Nymeria was lithe of figure and enigmatic. Enigmatic to me, despite how hard I tried to understand her. Perhaps she did not seem that way to anyone else - perhaps they did not attempt to understand her the way I did. It has often seemed to me that the people in that place were content to stick labels on their fellows and leave it at that. There was little introspection, and no one wondered whether they'd made the right assessment. 

Perhaps nobody cared enough to do that for anyone else. Perhaps it wasn't right to care. I do not know. As the years pass, my understanding of that place diminishes rather than grows, and I too become content to stick labels and forget all about it.

Nymeria was light to me in a dark place. I loved her - I know that now. Perhaps I grew jealous - of her female friends, certainly. Male friends she had few. 

The Nymeria I saw was strong, even headstrong. She thought deeply, she liked her time alone, she always dreamed. The Nymeria I knew lived in a world much like my own - a world where Reality was warded away like evil. Perhaps it was. Perhaps Nymeria's reality was evil itself. 

She loved her parents. She desired the kind of relationship they had. She desired love and romance, she wanted the whole whirlwind. And I? I wanted those things for her. If anyone deserved their fairytale, that someone was Nym.

I say deserved, but I do not mean it because she was good. Perhaps Nym was never a very good person. I say so because she was the ideal princess locked in a tower. I say she deserved her fairytale because she seemed to fit so well into it. 

The Elders had a way of rearranging our things while we were gone. They'd move our beds around, deciding who got to sleep where, next to whom. It was their way of breaking up friendships they found undesirable, or of ensuring that no one got too comfortable. Maybe they wanted to remind those young girls, swiftly becoming women, that their place in the world was transient, forever dependent on the whims of others. That our place was to simply accept without comment, to obey, to agree. 

I must say the Elders did a very good job of it. 

I had learned not to expect much, but I was glad, very glad, when I found my bed next to Nymeria's. We laughed about it, wondering what it meant. As it turned out, the Elders were wrong to place such active metals next to each other. Sparks flew. Chemical reactions fizzed, then exploded. 

Or at least, that's how it happened inside my head.  

We became fast friends. I say friends, even though there was more to it than that, for me. Such things matter very little in the large scheme of things. Or perhaps they matter a lot. I am undecided. 

Nymeria loved the rain, just as I did. We loved to huddle down under the covers on rainy afternoons, evenings and nights. We told stories - stories we'd heard, movies we'd watched, the books we'd read, and the lives we'd led. Nym was fond of Ancinien movies - the melodrama, but especially the romance. She loved tall, dark, strong men who were forceful when they had to be, and soft when they were needed to be. She loved the poetry in their words, the poetry in those worlds. She told me all the stories she knew, and eventually I was no longer pretending to like them. You see, I loved the storyteller too much for it to be any other way. 

We spoke of our hopes for the future. We spoke of the shackles that bound us to that place. We spoke of our fears that the shackles would never fall away. We were determined to break them, and yet we feared that we wouldn't prove strong enough. 

Back then I assumed our minds worked as one, that our determination and our fears were equally balanced, riding in tandem. Looking back, I see I was wrong. I was always more determined, she was always more fearful. 

Nymeria spoke of her wonderment, that I would allow myself to be chained this way. Being who I was, having seen what I'd seen... how could I? "If I were you," she said, "I would long have broken these ropes and run." A strange phrase that, and it struck me even then. It doesn't translate as well from Eldarian, for it was a term that applied mainly to cows that broke free from their ropes and galloped away. 

An interesting metaphor, in hindsight. In Eldar, we expect our cows to be gentle, to be quiet. That we'd care for their needs, but demand much in return. That they must always serve without complaint. It probably isn't rare for a cow to break her bonds, but certainly an anomaly in the large scale of bovine matters. It meant something is wrong, for cows in their natural state did not do such things. 

That comment convinced me that within Nymeria a secret storm raged. Perhaps I was right, although recent events have forced me to reconsider. I thought, naively, that when the time came, she would snap her ropes and run. And in that, I was wrong. 

The Elders quickly came to view our friendship with distrust and discomfort. As with most of my friendships in that place, they sought to smother it. They'd always gone to great lengths to end my friendships, but I fear that they did not view any of those friendships as half as dangerous as the one Nymeria and I shared. 

The Chief Elder was shrewd indeed. She knew me well enough to understand that nothing would deter me from making the limited choices left to me. But she knew Nymeria even better - she had long been imprisoned there by then. She knew to appeal to her pride, her spirit of competition. I had scored marginally better than Nym on some test, and the Chief Elder mockingly took her to task, in public. We both saw through what she was doing, we laughed about it, and I believed that knowledge of her intentions would suffice in thwarting her plans. 

How wrong I was. How badly I underestimated the Chief Elder's knowledge and experience. Her plan worked to a T. Nymeria pulled away from me, and gradually I stopped trying to close the gap. 

As time passed, I convinced myself that it didn't matter, and towards the end of our imprisonment in that place, it was as though Nym and I barely knew each other. 

By then, I was beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The chains were falling away, and it was as though I could reach out and touch the walls, only to have them dissolve into smoke. In truth, that's all those walls had ever been - smoke and mirrors - but the prison inside our heads was as good as any prison of rock or stone or brick and mortar. 

Nymeria and the others were beginning to fade away. Within arm's length was a white charger, saddled and bridled and waiting for me. Without another thought spared for anyone else, I grabbed my horse and raced away. I didn't stop running, I didn't look back - not until I was thousands of miles away, completely out of everybody's reach. 

And that's when I found out that Nym's chains had merely been traded for another set. She had suffered the fate she and I had dreaded together. I had escaped, and perhaps she resented me for it. Her missives were brusque, and my queries were awkward. After the failure of the first try, I didn't bother again. 

My respite was brief, of course, as those reading this tale will undoubtedly know. Life crashed down on me with the strength of a million tidal waves, and I drowned for many years. It was as I was beginning to come up for air, as I was beginning to finally learn how to swim the currents, that I heard the news.

While I'd been fighting to survive, lightning had struck many thousands of miles away. The princess in the castle had lost her fight, and the evil of reality was devouring her whole. I felt rage at everything. At the world that seemed compelled to force a life of imprisonment on other people. A world that delighted in crushing the dreams of beautiful and enigmatic women. At myself, my inaction, my helplessness. Should I have tried harder? Fought harder? For her? She would only have pushed me away.

All my knowledge, all my strength and power - useless. Worthless, even. Though I had not known her for years now, I convinced myself that she was unhappy, because Nymeria as I knew her would have been unhappy. 

Months after Nym was irrevocably gone, I received confirmation that I had been right. In the end, she had loved, and she had lost. In the months leading up to the end, she had cried - not, I think, as much for the man she would lose as for the fight she had lost. 

In the end, she did not snap her bonds. She did not run. She stayed true to the chains her parents had bound upon her - chains her parents themselves had thrown away in their own turn. She found, I suppose, what peace she could find, what peace we all find as the flames consume our lands. In the end,  she was gone. 

And for that, I suppose I hated her. Perhaps I still do. Even as I continue to love the ideal of the Princess Nymeria, the girl she once was. 

I end this tale by speaking of the little flame I still guard. The flame of Hope, Hope that one day her words will prove prophetic. That one day she'll still snap those bonds, that one day she will return a Princess, the worse for calamity, but forged stronger by the flames.