Learn the New Light
by Samantha Garner | From Issue One (Fall 2025)
“Tabi tabo po, nuno.”
The ancient voice speaks a new name.
The name they gave me, strange names from Strangers come down from cold stars.
Cold machines, cold eyes as they pulled the land inside-out, land I was meant to protect in my youth, though an old man to their eyes.
When did it change? Who decided I would curse, spit, scratch, poison?
Meylupa said, black-feathered, make them ask permission of you.
Anitun Tabu said, storm-shrouded, punish them for trespass.
Do the Strangers ask permission still? Do they tell tales of this silent mound, the fearsome creature within? Or perhaps they have returned to the stars. I have not heard their voices in the untold cycles I spent drifting through memory and soil and root and dark. I heard little. I knew nothing of this land.
My land, at the foot of the fog wall Anitun Tabu created, the last barrier between my people and their oblivion, and I its guardian.
Guardian? Folly to call me one of the Awakened. I slumbered too long, sending my consciousness out through the cycles, trying to understand. I guarded nothing.
Could I have stood between the Awakened and the Strangers, soothed new hurts and new hates?
Could I have saved Anitun Tabu?
Could I have known, somehow, in my bravado, that she could die?
I close my eyes again, breathing with the soil, allowing her memory to fill me. Whisper of gentle rain, soil-scent. Fury of storm and wind and thunder. Playful breezes stirring a stillness I had thought I’d wanted.
I open my eyes. She breaks apart like smoke as my body forms to the empty space she leaves behind, the space closing around me now.
Comfort and rest and home.
Soil and root and quiet.
There is no heart left for me here.
And another has sensed my thoughts, his voice ancient and feather-black.
“Tabi tabo po, nuno.”
“Meylupa.”
My words come to me rasping harsh and broken and strained and grey. What have I become?
“Young one, it’s time to return.”
His voice resonates in the soil. The patience of hill and stone and sand and moss. I breathe in flint and smoke and bark, sour dust blown free. He contains his expansiveness in something so quotidian as black wings and black beak. Black eyes watch over us from the sky, from the trees, and now perched on top of my home. His visit should be an honour.
“I believe that is mine to determine, Dark One,” I murmur.
“Do you not feel what the land is asking of you?” His voice rumbles through the roots, thrums through my bones.
“What need could the land possibly have of me, after all I’ve failed to do?”
“And what is that, do you think?”
My legs twitch as irritation courses through me.
“You know very well what I speak of.”
My voice lashes from me and I flinch. I must be respectful, both of Meylupa’s honoured status as Eternal One and as friend of … her. The One who is gone.
Yet, the Dark One laughs. I sense the soil brighten momentarily.
“You are far too young to carry such guilt,” he says, “Do not presume so much of yourself. Do you honestly think you could have stopped those waves of Strangers all those cycles ago? Our knowledge of them was young, untrained. We did not know what they were capable of.”
I feel the soil flare with my anger.
“I failed in the one thing she asked of me.”
I close my eyes and return to the past. I feel her storm swirl around me in a long-ago sky, her affront, her plan.
The Strangers’ fear of the never-sun in our lands keeps them away, she’d said, but they adapt. You, young one, guard these border lands, the fog barrier of my making. I will take on their form and appeal to them as one of their own. I know some of them are not ignorant. Surely they cannot all be such fools. I will end this ridiculous fighting. But you must preserve the last peace we have left.
The fighting. The Strangers, their intent for what lies deep in the land, building their hard homes, crafting stone into humming metal that sickened my people. We wanted them only to pause and reflect and show caution in this land they knew not.
Some of us Awakened had learned their strange tongue. Some of the Strangers had approached us in curiosity and friendship. Yet they were too few. They could not stand up to those of their ilk wishing for battle. And so, battle we did. Anitun Tabu’s ire rose in equal measure to the Strangers’ ignorance. The cycles of fighting seemed never to end.
Until the Strangers killed her.
Meylupa’s voice pierces the now, “How many years, young one, will you turn in the river of memory, beating yourself against the stone of it?”
I stare hard at the rough ceiling above me, black with moss and time. I had almost recalled her, the form she’d taken to appear to the Strangers, in the way they called themselves.
Human.
“Until I am ready,” I snap, “Why have you disturbed me? Out of all Eternal Ones, you should most understand distance and solitude, its tender erosion of hurts.”
His frustration rumbles through the soil and stone, and for a moment I regret my insolence. Yet, we are not bound to each other. Our relationship is not like that of some Awakened and Eternal Ones, a true partnership of patience, understanding, time.
Of all Eternal Ones, he and Anitun Tabu had been the most curious about the Strangers when they arrived. Was it that curiosity that led to the attack? To her—
“Hear the land, then,” Meylupa says, “If you will not hear me.”
And though I am not bound to him, he is an Eternal One still, with all the liberties and powers afforded to him. Powers to halt my breath, to halt my words, to open my eyes, to open my ears.
And I feel, hear, smell, taste the fear in the land, rolling from it like smoke, like Anitun Tabu’s angry wind made manifest.
It gives me too close and ripping open and they come and why do you slumber and help and help and help.
Save us.
I feel time shake from my muscles and heart and mind. Meylupa sends my awareness into the soil, spreads it outwards like the roots themselves, so deep and true now.
Soil-taste, soil-breath, soil-story. I absorb it all. The land holds memory and I weave myself through the tales. I see my younger self pierced by grief and loss, retreating into my mound, safe and close. Closed. The bitter drip from far away, in the settlements of metal and grinding and noise and artifice the Strangers shape with their hands. They should grow instead. The land shows me cycles passing, grief of Strangers over their own battle-dead, grief staining their hearts to us, grief turning inward, grief turning downward into the land. Cycles passing for Strangers to regroup, to expand, to forget tenuous old alliances, to tell new stories.
Stories of the nuno sa punso, land-guardian, fearsome poisoner—dead and gone and done.
Cycles pass and Strangers learn to not ask permission. Strangers forget the warning of the stones they pull from the land. Strangers forge the stone into the sickening metal. And in this sickness there is silence. My people, Awakened, stay away. They hide.
Those Strangers who remember our old alliances die. Their stories die.
In their place, Strange eyes draw closer, turning to my lands, the barrier of fog now weakening in the absence of Anitun Tabu.
I stretch, feeling time shake from my bones, feeling the rot that has taken root.
“It is because of me,” I say.
Meylupa’s presence shifts. I feel him withdraw my awareness from the land, drawing away like water in a drying stream. The echoes of save us save us save us fade.
“I did not even attempt to guard this land,” I continue, “And now the Strangers plan expansion. They fear these lands no longer. In my grief I have failed us all.”
“Can you recall the dance of the wind across your skin?” Meylupa asks.
I close my eyes and try to feel it, smoke-soft and shifting, but I feel only stone and soil.
This space has become too small.
The concept of outside begins to thrum around me, curling around my weakened body and filling my weary bones.
The soil responds, humming in tune, sending its energy into my heart.
I want to float backwards in memory, back to her.
Save us.
I sigh. I place my hands to the wall of the mound for the first time in thousands of cycles, and I push.
The sun is as it has always been, hanging low and dimly orange in the sky, fixed, unmoving, all-seeing. It watches me place my bare feet on the soil and breathe deeply of the new light.
To the south, the lake glimmers in front of me, the shoreline covered with long red moss, the mounds and hillocks smooth and gently rising and growing with dark purple flowers. The air crackles slightly as faint-grey Yatis appears over the horizon, marking the beginning of another cycle. Silent planet across cold stars, our companion reliable and remote. The Strangers had tried it first, the land-memory recalls, but found its climate unsuitable. I used to look upon Yatis with gratitude before the Strangers came. Gratitude is now stained with envy.
“The land welcomes your return.”
Meylupa’s voice is, for a moment, too loud. My hearing is scraped raw by the sounds of the open world.
I stand silent, remembering. I am returned to this land yet I do not feel welcomed. I await the sting of guilt to follow. It does not come.
The land is not here to forgive me. I am not here to ask its forgiveness.
“I am guardian, returned.”
“And you are needed. Your story must return to the world. Our last chance.”
A soft breeze plays on the end of my beard, dances through the gaps in the rough cloth that hangs from my shoulders and waist.
Anitun Tabu?
“It’s not her,” Meylupa says, “Not fully.”
Shakily I turn to look up at him.
“Why do you not take on your true form?” I ask his folded black wings, his black beak, his two birdlike black eyes, “I am not afraid.”
“Not for your sake do I retain my bird shape, but theirs.” He shuffles his body around, digging his claws into the mound as he points his beak in the distance.
I lean on the mound for support as my legs recall movement. Together the Dark One and I gaze at the vague outlines, the long, low curved silvery shape in the distance.
“The Strangers have come here, to the edges of their world,” I say. “While I slumbered, mourning, they sprouted in my lands.”
The wind responds, sending echoes of Anitun Tabu’s ancient affront.
The soil responds, sending fear and warning. But something else.
“Yet they are not quite like other Strangers,” Meylupa says.
A breeze sends my gaze west of the settlement, where the sky fades from pale orange to a darker near-purple. Beyond, the never-sun, the stars that brought the Strangers.
Above the shifting wall of fog.
“And Anitun Tabu is not fully gone from us,” Meylupa says.
I stare at him, the land shimmering knowledge around me I cannot yet grasp, “How is it possible?” I ask, “I saw her die.”
“You saw her body die, young one. Yet Anitun Tabu isn’t simply the Eternal One of wind and rain. She’s shaped by those things she creates. It’s a partnership with the world honed by cycles uncountable. The memory of her is retained in the skies. In the fog barrier. And another, younger than you, newer to this new world, with new ideas to reshape the old.”
I look again at the Stranger settlement in the distance and finally my senses attune fully to the land. It tells me of those living within it, tells me of their old familiarity.
“The Strangers living there,” I say, “They are descended from those who first came to us in cooperation and partnership.”
Meylupa dips his head in confirmation, though I do not need it. I know it to be true. Yet, why are they here, so close to the fog barrier, so close to Awakened territory of cold and snow and never-sun? There is no metal in these lands. There is nothing here but me.
And as Yatis rises in the sky I see a Stranger-form coalesce against the vague outlines of the settlement. I feel fear, and something else.
An unusual familiarity, swirling like a dying wind.
“In the land I hear my ancestors,” I say, “I feel their memories. I no longer want to be alone.”
“So you rejoin your community, then?” Meylupa asks, a teasing tone sparkling his rough voice.
“Such as it is. I do not recall the rhythm of it, yet I will try. I will protect this land.”
I watch the Stranger approach. The memory-breeze of Anitun Tabu carries a voice to us that is rain-whisper, storm-fury, life expanding in the dark.
“Tabi tabo po, nuno.”
Samantha Garner’s debut novel The Quiet is Loud was shortlisted for the 2022 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. A Canadian of Filipino-Finnish background, her character-driven fantasy and science-fiction novels explore identity and belonging. She’s inspired by history, mythology, folklore, and narrative video game worlds. Find her online at samanthagarner.ca or @SamanthaKGarner.
