The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar Page B

happy—for she was now free from the spell of the Dead King her brother—the goddess crowned her deliverer with a garland of straw. A symbol of marriage ever after. She kissed him on the mouth: “a breath of incense,” says the Book. From their union came a line of kings.
    Yet this was not the only line to descend from Avalei, Ripener of the Grain. For in the form of a deer, running wild through the Iavain, she had been stung by Karos, the God of Plague, in the form of a fly (hence one of her names: Velkosri , the “Plague Lily”). The site of the sting swelled for eight months, and when it burst, a pair of twins leapt out, creaking to the sky with slobbering blue lips. They were winged and horned, and spoke no human tongue. They were the first Drevedi, blood drinkers and flesh eaters of the woods.
    And so, as the shepherds of the Valley, a rough people who had all but forgotten the gods, were united under a divine line of kings, a menace brooded and multiplied in the forest. This mystery, writes Fanlewas, expresses the essential duality of Avalei, the goddess of love and death. “In her white form,” he explains, “she is snow and mourning: she gives birth to monsters, children of Karos whose color is white. In her red form—the red of her blood, when she is slain by Hernas—she gives birth to kings and roses.” Imrodias prefers to view the Drevedi as a type of warning, even a prophecy of the war that would be waged by the offspring of Hernas. “For that war is known as the War of the Tongues; and the primary characteristic of the Drevedi is that they cannot speak.”
    Whatever our interpretation, certain facts remain: that the people of Hernas, who called themselves Laths (from the ancient lak-thet , “vine grower”), sought forcibly to unite themselves with the Kestenyi and Nains, their neighbors to the east and northeast, who spoke languages related to their own; that their justification was their common ancestry, and the favor shown the Laths, through Hernas, by the goddess; that the ensuing War of the Tongues was the longest and bloodiest in our history; and that it was effectively ended by the Drevedi.
    “They appeared in the western sky like a storm of claws,” writes Von.
    “The first to die in their clutches,” Besra adds, “was Natho of Ildei. Seated on a saddlebird, his bow drawn to shoot down at the ground—where he thought his most dangerous enemy to be—he was torn from the saddle and devoured face first, as if in a diabolical mockery of the act of love, by an ogress of piercing beauty.”
    “Like blue leaves of a murderous autumn,” writes Hailoth.
    “The earth is poisoned now,” writes an early, anonymous contributor to the Dreved Histories . “We all go about in white cloaks. My heart is sore: a bruised and seedless fruit. And a salt wind blows endlessly in the empty streets.”
    The Dreved Histories , perhaps the most painful chronicle ever written, gathers accounts of the reign of these monsters, who, not satisfied with anthropophagy, put on clothes, established themselves in palaces, and married the sons and daughters of noble houses. The Histories also tell of the eventual human rebellion, the fall of the vampires (who were variously burned, drowned, and battered to death with bricks), and their reemergence here and there in the coming centuries, in the form of horned or curiously insect-like children. As recently as the reign of Varon the Petulant, a boy with horns was executed at Ambrelhu. But the era of Dreved domination is, happily, long over. Iloki, or “saddlebirds”—once the war steeds of noble Laths—are kept in the palace, but never ridden. We will have no winged lords.
    “The project undertaken in the War of the Tongues,” writes Imrodias, “a project of unity (and there is, surely, no greater or wiser aspiration), was interrupted by the accursed Drevedi, but not abandoned. In the course of time, it would be completed, and called Olondria.”
    This expresses a