Tales From When I Had A Face
A full color illustrated novel from the Fallen Cycle mythos
We Are All Just Costumes That Death Wears For A Season.
Written by James Curcio. Art by Chris DiSalvatore, P. Emerson Williams, Andu Abril, and James Curcio.
Help us complete Ayta’s journey!
Learn more about Tales From When I Had A Face here.
Sneak Peek of the Prologue, work in progress:
At this point it is probably useless to decorate the altars of my next life with masks.
No matter how many faces I have, there is no changing the fact I am me.
— Kobo Abe, The Face of Another
I once had a face. I can still picture it, if I try. Shaped like a perfect porcelain heart, but its surface always felt alien, a blank screen that anything could be projected upon — except for the eyes. Something haunted those slate mirrors, a terrible purpose that waited patiently to reveal itself.
It began with a knock on the door. Three stern knocks to be precise, like wood rapping against wood, though they seemed to ring out through the house like the tolling of a bronze bell at the beginning of a ritual, startling the world into silence.
From that silence emerged my Gran, a thing of legend, yet also a stooped old woman with a broken face and hair like roots. Her frail form was a tree trunk carved by vulture’s claws, remaining upright through sheer will, even as she shuffled through the coldest hell. Or so I now imagine her, and so she may as well have been.
My mother was surprised by her sudden arrival on that doorstep.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” was all she said. It had been decades since they’d last seen one another.
“Of course you weren’t,” Gran replied, eyeing me, as if her daughter weren’t there. “But you were expecting, and you didn’t even tell me. What a dear old burden I must seem to you, but look at her! So beautiful. That’s the face I’ve long dreamed.”
My mother’s hair was already prematurely run through with gray, as if time herself knew the secret we had not yet heard: in seven short years she and my Gran would both be gone. Inhaled by the air, though the faintest whiff of their presence remained. Every room of that house would be haunted by their absence, and this is what I feel when I first turn my thoughts towards them.
“I’m Ayta, and I’m seven!” I proclaimed. These were the first words I spoke to her.
Gran squinted down at me with her one good eye and chuckled. “I am Ayta also, little one. We share a name, and we share a single choice.”
Her eyes grew stern, and I felt like that gaze pierced flesh and bone. A moment later she cackled, which I found delightful at the time but anyone else would surely have found terrifying. “But look at you! So pretty. Seven is a very good number.”
With this rather cryptic proclamation, she shuffled in, never to leave alive. It was as if the four walls of our home became the four quadrants at her altar, and indeed, she always kept everything within their bounds in perfect alignment.
At the time, I felt lovely, like a fairy princess. Gran would tell me I was needed at the palace, and whisk me away! Did I not notice my mother standing in the foyer, weighed down by Gran’s pack? Or the look she wore, like a slowly crumbling levee had finally let loose a torrent.
Years later, I would realize the burden of expectation my mother felt; one she could never live up to, and never escape. She fled Siberia to live in New York, married an outsider, and yet still when she looked up toward the invisible stars at night, she must have seen a shadow with shoulders like fluttering feathers, and the very face she had gazed upon as a nursing infant, even then saying, “You shame me, my daughter.”
By birth alone, I have always been exactly what Gran wanted. Maybe my mother somehow knew before Gran’s arrival, when she chose my name. Chosen. Never knowing if you are gift or punishment. Your purpose prearranged.
I see my mother, now that all that remains of her is a small plot of land that the grass hardly grows upon, and a box, hidden in the earth. She tried to flee her mother’s legacy before it could crush any hope of having her own. Still it caught up to her.
May she find peace in forgetfulness. I may never escape the curse of remembrance.
Any story about me must also begin with Gran, as we share far more than our names. She was once pretty herself, though always harder and sharper than me. One fateful day she was split right down the middle, as if some force had divided the best and worst in her. I’m not just being poetic. Her sinister side was cracked charcoal, like a tree trunk blasted by a bolt of lightning, a final symbol of all the other scars written on her body.
She left a part of herself in that land beyond: a crumpled map of the vast and ancient future, which she made for me. Such circularity was her way of speaking, of being. In some ways, it became mine.
It’s a strange thing, coming into contact with a life long after the point it burned brightest; as if my own began when she arrived, a fresh candle waiting to carry her now failing light. Before, I only remember being alone, an only child in a house that always felt empty. Bare, pristine, lifeless. My mother filled the kitchen with portraits, pictures of people who only gathered awkwardly on holidays or at the back of Sears photo departments. I made stories of those stranger’s faces. Mother, Father, his family, his drinking buddies.
Those stories were a cut-paper puppet-theater performed for no one. Even as a little girl, I knew no life dwelled behind the eyes of the dolls whom I dutifully served tea. I was born into a time without a history. With Gran’s arrival, I was gifted not only with her presence, but also with the spirits she brought with her. The house came alive. The whole world came alive.
The only problem was that it came alive with the dead.
I spent much of the rest of my childhood like a dutiful housecat, perched at her side, in that room she had selected as her living charnel house. She didn’t believe in using the thermostat in winter, or air conditioning in the summer. She fought my parents ceaselessly about it. This was the one case where I sided with them. I would groan and sigh, or ask her, “Must an Oyun freeze to death to gain wisdom?”
Gran would wrap herself in a blanket, and click her teeth in jest at my softness.
If a stranger asked, I would say we were Russian, even though this is hardly true no matter whose story you believe. But Stalin’s Purge would later line-edit so many people from the record of history, and Gran’s happened to be among them. One by one, and in groups of five or ten or a hundred, they were chopped away with bold sweeps of his red pen. Survival became her vengeance.
These were my mother’s stories, with names as foreign to me as Gran’s. In a tone that would brook no argument, when mother began to speak of history, Gran would cut her off with something acerbic and mysterious.
I would come to learn from her that we Aytas were both refugees from a land beyond time. There, she found her mate amongst the Feyn, guardian spirits who tend the passages to and from that liminal land. She told me I was Karlu-chatil: not wholly of either world.
When I explained this to my mother, she shook her head in exasperation.
“That is all nonsense,” she said, “I never knew my father, but I’m pretty sure he was one of the soldiers, not the ‘Raven-wanderer’, or whatever it is she calls him.”
Then she shook her head again, and frowned. Her voice trembled. “It doesn’t matter. Your Gran tells tall tales. You mustn’t take her seriously, Ayta. Not if you want to have a future at all. America has so much to offer, but you have to work for it.”
On this much, all our stories agree: Gran was born long ago to a revered lineage, and so all of her living relatives were hunted down and slaughtered by the Red Army. They hung the head Shaman out of a helicopter by his ankle. “See if you can climb a ladder into the heavens now,” they chuckled, but he remained silent as he fell to the earth and burst open like a flower, in fields speckled with a fresh carpet of white and purple.
Later, his body fed the black vultures as the rest of his people watched, their faces scrubbed clean of expression by terror. He would not be the birds’ final meal that day.
She would shriek in her bed at night and gnash her teeth red with blood. On one such night, as I lay beside her and waited for her breathing to regain the even measure of sleep, she spoke, though her eyes remained closed. She said only, “a price must be paid.”
Such malice was in her voice it rattled around my head and wouldn’t let me sleep for nights. It wasn’t actually clear to me for whom she bore this malice, because she made it quite clear how she felt about the world my mother lived in. I found myself reminded that what lurked in her shadow was something harder to get my hands around: thorns, brambles and razor wire wrapped around a rib cage fragile as glass. Thankfully, I thought, those barbs were not for me. I didn’t yet understand how a blood debt hangs over every one of our heads, guilty and innocent alike, biding time to exact its price. A land remembers all that has passed with the help of the Oyun, and the Feyn they entreat, for the land is all that has happened there, and all that will.
Gran had worn a graveyard on the inside of her coat. She could have fallen asleep in the arms of a yew tree, and never awakened. That’s what I would have done. But she was chiseled granite. She vanished before her pursuers like a chunk of that stone dropped in turbulent waters, unharmed, but hidden.
I can see her clearly in my mind, as if those nights, decades past, are playing out in this very moment — running for a clearing, a desolate field with a lone pine tree at its center. Looking up to the sky to see me, her granddaughter, who will one day carry her fire, her light. A being bearing the same name. In me, that fire would one day burn all the brighter.
This cycle is how magic works. The pain of broken ribs suddenly didn’t seem so bad. She would have her revenge, a razor edge, not honed but sheared from a blunt whole in one single stroke, like an obsidian blade.
She roved inland into the vast taiga, and into the rumors of the people that ventured into those woods. Mothers would tell their daughters of the wild woman who dwelt there still. Some said she lived in a cottage at the mouth of a dark valley, sustained on maiden flesh. Others said she was given a second birth with the bears, amongst their bones in the warm womb of their burrow. Many nights I too have awakened to the low rasping of breath, and the musty scent of the forest.
The truth is occluded, but only in part, and history and legend are always mixed in the memory of a people. Nowhere was this so true as in the Second World once known as Alterran.
Gran told me that all stories are true, if you know what to look for.
“Even the ones with fairy princesses?” I had asked.
“Especially those,” she replied. “Just wait until you hear tell of Elena. She was that precisely… She, like you, was given certain gifts, yes.”
You’re crazy if you think it all happened exactly as the tales tell, but myths also have a truth of a sort. Growing up with such stories, you might understand why I have always lived half in the world she revealed to me, of birds that spoke with the long-dead voices of the past, and half here, in this city that will never find redemption.
Both realities are given to their own peculiar fantasies. To an Oyun, truth is plural, absurd, and ultimately unknowable. The known and unknown, the lived and recollected, exist in a constant dance of opposites that in the final reckoning comes out zero.
These two worlds fought for the creative rights to my future. One would need to die.
How she remained alive through the long winter, I can’t say. She never spoke about it — I only knew what I did at that point from fragments my mother had told me, and usually in passing ways, like, “I know it’s crazy to freeze like this, but you have to understand what Gran endured…” Then she would fall short, having no desire to return to that hungry, unmarked pit. I imagined them standing there, the ghosts of the world that would have been. A whole world consumed, leaving no choice but flight into the arms of America.
To Gran, this flight seemed an insult. What a disappointment it was when the daughter she bore — my mother — wanted only to escape to electric lights and talking wires, a world seemingly safe from the one she claimed to have entered, full of magic and apocalypse. But then Gran would tell me about where I really came from.
“We now live in a land with its own ghosts,” she said at one such time, fireflies flickering in the saturate dark of night. “They are no concern of ours. Their fate is already written. You must listen to all I have to say, though it’ll take me very long to teach you to understand and one day ascend the spiral of the seasons. You will have a proper teacher, as I never had in your grandfather. This way you can enter the Feyn before you’ve grown hard and brittle, as I have…”
I took her literally, as only a child can. She seemed surprised at the gradual betrayal of her body. I wonder if in her dreams she was still twenty-one, sharp and taciturn as arctic wind. The woman she had been in the stories she told me. Ayta, but not yet Gran.
The river of time flows without end or memory, changing and changing again. We lean forward in our expectations for the future, meanwhile everything we value vanishes out from under us. Did my life even happen at all? Or was it just another story?
Maybe it’s better to enter my story instead with Gran’s exit, right at the place and time a single flower petal was held gently between her thumb and forefinger. I was fourteen then, seven years after her unexpected arrival. I was too afraid to touch her face and know with absolute finality that she was gone.
Nearly a hundred years old, it’s not like her death was exactly a surprise. And yet, it was. The shallow gasp of her breath had stopped. An aura of silence seemed to spread throughout the room, and it continued to expand, a final exhalation that encompassed a universe, and never again.
Her flowers — hyssop and rose, all dried and dying themselves — fell from her now-limp hand. Along with these, an envelope, containing a note and the old iron key to the box she kept under her altar. Inside the box were four charred sticks, four bones nicked with Tovag runes, twelve stones, and, if she was to be believed, the Chronicle of the Feyn, many of its pages ornately adorned with illustrations and writing which I recognized as her own hand.
A book holds many meanings, and the uncertainty of meaning — whether a blank page or a passage not yet properly understood, and the blessed misunderstandings that can arise from it — can be the most important thing in the world. This was perhaps the first thing she taught me, and it was the last that I was to learn.
Her note to me was also of great import — a magic spell, you might say. When it first spilled from her hand, I understood none of this, and its contents seemed like nonsense, a mere piece of paper amongst petals fluttering to the floor, like moth wings in firelight.
Do not cry. My drum still beats in that dark, steady as a heart, as I wait for us to be rejoined beneath this world.
When you were born, the Void was given a new shape.
It was given my name.
But it did not yet know itself…
— Gran
I stood beside her body and stared out the window. The starlight was cool. I felt her standing there with me still. Then the light seemed to fade, and so did she. I folded the letter shut, and my heart folded with it. I looked again out that window and then there was only me.
I thought then that I was a story that made her past worth having lived through, the promise of a future she had been denied. I think now of how she began this tale for me, as profound and nonsensical as ever, “Understand, there is something new in the world with each passing generation: a new story. The only force in the universe that can outrun death! But it works a kind of magic, different in every mind it comes to inhabit. Deceitful spirits persist in the shape of letters, in the whisper of words. Look beyond them, little Ayta, and see those who have already fallen crest yonder hill, a long line of them marching forward and backward through time.”
“It is the task of the Oyun to bear the stories of the dead and the never-born. Whoever speaks Feyn words continues the Cycle: summer to fall, fall to winter, winter to spring. This tale I have to tell is of how my journey began, and how it will be concluded in you. We who dwell in the dark leave the question of reality to you who yet live.”
She spoke certain words with such force — ancestors, remembered, incantation — that I thought we might hear her from beyond the grave. Maybe you will hear her through me, but the way is long and perilous. She used to say, “The world is losing its great readers, its great listeners and seers, one at a time. Have patience and listen a while before you claim that this strange old woman speaks foolish nonsense.”
Sure enough, she never spoke nonsense, though she did have a flair for the dramatic, her stories full of enigmas and florid prose. In the end I was the only one who truly listened.
Now I ask the same of you, my grandfather. You, who listen to so many lost souls, you most of all should understand the difficulty in recounting a life, now that it has ended. Her story was told in pieces, over the course of seven years. But you bid me to tell you everything, even the portents of a madwoman, and so I will try to piece it together, as well as memory allows…
I stand before you at the gate between this world and the next, and I tell you this is my tale and mine alone, for soon none other will remember it.
Begun in 2013, this seven year art-ritual explores the sense of perpetual loss of self and community that seem so endemic in modern life, the repression and dissociation of trauma, and how all of that can catalyze the nightmares we’ve recorded in history books.
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For more myths based in the Fallen Cycle transmedia universe, or the full credits for this project, visit our website.
