She should have expected as much. Part of her did. She is not all fool, not all bleach-blonde ridiculousness. Things have changed. Of course they have; it’s the nature of the universe. Even Bexley cannot argue with the nature of the universe.
(Or at least, she can’t argue and win.)
(Or at least—she can’t argue and win yet.)
She should have expected as much. Part of her did. Part of her didn't, and this is the part making its appearance now, an untimely anxiety settled in her chest like a rock as she wonders what her world will look like now.
The Ieshans throw at least one party every year. Bexley has ducked into a few during her time in Solterra, and even the ones she’s missed out on attending made appearances in the back of her mind—the invitations shown coyly off in public as markers of station, then stories exchanged for weeks after with the same goal, their house’s name alone enough to sustain excitement. She’s spent enough time drinking and gossiping on their property to know how to navigate it alone, and more than once slipped into a curtsy in front of the princes, close enough to tease; and still, as Bexley comes up on the gates, a brief feeling of anxiety flashes through her, gnawing with dull teeth at the pit of her stomach.
Things have changed. Things have changed. Bexley draws a steely inhale as she walks in and reminds herself of this: things have changed, but it could be for the better.
Whoever was in charge of decorating the estate has outdone themselves. Bexley glances around the rooms and halls in muted admiration. Everywhere she looks there is something to be impressed by—a long, bare white oak tree strung with baubles, frosted in enchanted snow; wreaths of luscious dark-green holly leaves, studded with deep red berries; sharply sparkling chandeliers hang from the ceilings, cast the white halls and marble floors in shards of glittering light. The air is scented with pine and cider. A violin suite floats in from outdoors, sweet and melancholic: without thinking, Bexley drifts after it.
A few pairs of eyes follow her through the door. Their weight transforms her instantly from uncomfortable to at-home; if there is one thing Bexley has known all her life, it is the subtle, sparkling joy of being eyed up. (And besides—she knows she looks good. After returning from the island, cleanup was her first priority. She’s bathed the shine back into her coat, anointed herself at every pulse point with sweet-smelling oils; her hair is a long, rippling wave of platinum, coated in an extraterrestrial level of shine, and the necklace seated snugly against the curve of her throat has also been polished to gleaming.)
A few pairs of eyes follow her through the door, and Bexley grins, even without knowing one of them is Florentine.
☼ ISHAK ☼اسحاق "Well time has a way of throwing it all in your face / The past, she is haunted, the future is laced"
Ruth is lost.
You repeat in your mind that she is lost, not that you have lost her. You were against this plan from the start, against coming to this island of metamorphosis. You wish you had argued with her.
Ruth is gone, and you are in a maze of crystal. It is dreamlike; it is terrific and terrible. In a thousand glittering reflections, your face is reflected back upon itself. The wind whistles through the maze with the same sound of a blade released from its sheath.
Here and there, plants grow. You step carefully around them. You know some old rhymes: leaves of three, beware of me and suchlike, but there is no rhyme for this. Besides, watching your step means you look less at your reflection.
And there is so much of you to avoid looking at.
Here, in the glowing arc of a jagged spire clawing at the sky, you are a youth still. His eyes are bright, and the sands of the desert shift behind him. His mane is unbraided, hair falling every which way. Your mother is behind him, mirror unwrapped and resting against her legs — sea-cliffs and sea-shore reflected in it.
You shudder, and you look away.
There, in a squat crystal dusted with snow, your reflection watches you with dead eyes. He smiles at you, at once resigned and soft. He turns and walks away, and the sight of his torn flank and mangled body sickens you. You catch sight of the inside of his left leg, and there is no sun shining there. You are unsurprised.
You keep pushing forward because somewhere in this nightmare is Ruth.
Another you catches your eye. He smiles at you, bright and lively but something is not quite right with the image. There is something about his smile that you cannot place; it is not one you have felt on your face before. (There’s something disquieting about it.) He tosses his head, beckoning you to look past him.
You sway towards the crystal. It isn’t jagged but blade-edge-smooth. You look past him. Your old mentor is smiling widely as she walks up. She nuzzles his cheek affectionately and ruffles the hair where a braid has come undone. She looks so proud that it hurts. Then, she moves aside so you can see better past them. Then, your heart shatters out of your chest.
Ruth is dead. Her body lies against a wall, a bloody scalpel nearby. Her throat is slit, and her blood is flowing in impossible amounts, a river soaking all their hooves.
Your double presses his nose against the inside of the crystal, and you can almost hear him say, “It isn’t too late to collect, you know.”
You lash out at the crystal, a good strong kick, but not so hard as to shatter it. Somewhere, the real Ruth is in this godforsaken maze. You do not want to add “having to bandage you up” to her to-do list.
The sound of your hooves echoes around you. This island is exhausting. This island would drain even the gods.
Around this corner, there’s a you but gilded. There’s so much gold paint on him you are surprised he isn’t dripping, that it was possible at all for it to dry. He winks at you and cracks open a pomegranate, lifting the husk to shake seeds and pour juice into his mouth. He saunters off into the night. You hate him, this you with apparently more money than sense.
Crosswise of him, there is an opening in the row you have been trapped in. You take it, and though there is still a hundred, a thousand, yous in the prismatic grove, these seem less inclined to interact.
You’ve had enough.
“RUTH!” You yell out, hoping against hope that she can not just hear but find her way to you.
“Ruth, Ruth, Ruth…” the crystals echo back to you.
Directly in front of you winks yet another you. There is a snake twisting in the sands behind him, chasing a desert hare. He looks just like you, but the colors are all wrong. Everything is inverted, and when he points his muzzle at the path to your right, you take the left instead.
Damn it all. You want to go home.
@Ruth | so EXCITED to post this one | “big black car” - gregory alan isakov
I hate the city — I tell myself I hate the city. I hate that it always smells of piss and perfume, the tight walls barricading me in, how every step on the cobblestone roads echoes in my bones. I hate the people, and their worries that mean nothing to a god, their prayers that fall on empty ears.
But all those people, packed together like sheep to the slaughter —
they call to me.
And the magic in my blood calls them to come home, come home, come home to die.
A single tower pierces the sky like a spear, a statue of a rearing horse serving as the spearhead.
Even from here, Isolt can see Vespera’s colors, can see the way her head is tucked back against her shoulder. And the horses wandering the streets just below her watchful eye, going about their day without ever knowing of the danger that lurks just outside their city walls.
She tries, oh how she tries to see the beauty in it. And some part of her, the part that is not a monster trapped in a unicorn’s body, the part that remembers what it feels like to be born — that part of Isolt can see it. The way the light fractures into all their colors across her brow, the way the sunset is captured in swirls across her stony skin, the tender look of a mother looking over her flock of children that make up the city. Something in Vespera’s eyes makes her own soften, turn from blood-red to rubies frosted in the winter chill.
But the rest of her sees only the violence, and the tears dripping like blood down the goddess’ cheeks from all the prayers she could not answer.
And it makes her want to run, run, run straight to the citadel and tear the statue apart rib by rib. She wonders now, if destroying a god — or even the likeness of a god — would be the same as destroying their creations. If it would fill the aching inside of her, if sinking her teeth into stone and glass would soothe her hunger in a way the grass never has. Oh, the wondering alone gnaws at her now like a wolf, and every bit of her magic is coming alive inside of her and howling at the statue that has become her moon.
Her heart aches with every beat.
Her teeth ache when she clenches her jaw together like she’s chewing out the marrow of a femur.
Her magic aches when she does not move any closer to the city.
Everything in her is screaming and sobbing and singing at once, begs her to take, take, take and devour the court until only its bones are left gleaming as a reminder in the fading light. Her monster, her terrible, lovely monster sleeping in the pit of her stomach is twitching with dreams of the hunt.
And around her hooves, the first few blades of glass turn black and brittle. Her magic whispers home. This ring of death creeping out around her is home.
Isolt blinks slow and long and dreamlike. And when she opens her eyes their is a mare, winged and autumnal and marked like something belonging to the forest. And before she can begin to wonder why, Isolt is stepping forward to meet her, close enough to see each serrated edge of the leaf on her brow.
There's a reason I don't leave Denocte. Okay, maybe several reasons. For one, it's more comfortable. Especially compared to living in a desert (I don't understand how anyone can live in those conditions). Also while I don't know every single Court member, I recognize most of them. I also know pretty much every inch of the land and every alleyway of the markets so it makes getting around much easier. As soon as I leave the gate, it's like a foreign world to me. The last time I did, I met some psycho on the island so that was it for me.
Or so I thought.
For whatever reason, I'm drawn to the mountains where they say others pray (and sometimes speak) to the deities. I had been told that the journey is difficult, but I had shrugged it off thinking I'd be fine. Well, I'm not fine but I've gone too far to turn back now.
The path up is certainly difficult. I can feel the air thinning and the ground looks so far down from up here. I wish I had wings so I didn't have to worry about this so much, but at this point, I'm too stubborn to not finish the trek. I don't need a rumor to go around that I'm weak and couldn't make it. The several stones that come loose beneath me aren't doing much to keep me calm and neither is the snow covering everything.
When I do finally make it to the top, it's pretty I guess. It looks like everything had been carved out of the mountain itself and it's like nothing I've ever seen. The stone columns loom above me and my hoofsteps echo as I take my first steps inside.
I'm not really sure what to do at this point because it just feels empty besides the moon above. It washes the stone in its moonlight, making it all look almost ethereal. I know that many come up here to worship, pray, ask for guidance, etc. Me, I guess I don't know why I came here. I just felt compelled to.
So I walk to the center and take a seat, looking at everything around me. This place looks ancient with all the overgrown plants and moss covering the pillars. There must've been countless others who made this same journey up here so I almost feel out of place. I've never been a particularly spiritual individual. I've just had some moments where they've felt like encounters with Caligo, or close enough.
"Uh, hi," I say, clearing my throat. My voice also echoes off the walls and I don't really like it. "Caligo." As if "she" didn't already know I was talking to her, but just in case I guess. This feels too awkward.
"It's me…" I trail off and question if this is even worth doing. I'm not expecting her ghost to manifest in front of me and talk back. In fact, I'm not really expecting anything from this. Maybe it'll just be good to say that I bothered to come up here and do this, even if I don't entirely believe in the point of it.
"I don't really know what to say, just… maybe some pointers would be nice. You know, like you usually do. Or I guess it's more like you throw me in situations I hate." I think to the colt I saved from frostbite and that feeling burning into me like she was watching to make sure I followed through. Then that same thing happened when Bram was getting attacked by that gryphon. "You know I'm still bitter you paired me with a wolf of all things." I can't help but laugh. My need for revenge against wolves is long gone, but for a while it was a struggle having my bonded be the very creature I grew up hating for decades.
"Would've been nice to get a warning light that Al'Zahra was a waste of time though…" I grit my teeth. I don't know if many believe the deities have a hand in a lot of this stuff, but the bitterness is strong. I will always have a hole in my heart from loving such a woman. More strongly, I hate myself for letting me be so vulnerable. Of course I had my heart broken, I fell way too hard for her.
And now I have Maeve.
My daughter. I love her so much, even if it doesn't always seem like it. I know without Al'Zahra, she wouldn't be here.
I sigh.
"If you are listening, or are there, I don't know. Just…" I feel so silly talking to the air and shadows, but I can feel desperation setting in as I think about all the dangers in this world. "Help me protect Maeve, okay? Give me the strength or whatever. She… means a lot to me."
And that's when I hear the steps of another, but all I see is a silhouette. I narrow my eyes and try not to get too ahead of myself. It simply can't be Caligo. It's impossible.
I'LL TAKE IT, THE TREE SEEMS TO SAY a new, slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm.
It snowed last a few days ago, and the heat – and bright sunlight – that came by in the storm’s wake have successfully melted all of the residue. When Septimus wakes in the morning, he wakes with intent. (It is so rare, lately, for there to be much direction to his cheerful wandering. He still needs to fix his magic, to regain his ancient powers and become what he should be, not the mortal shell; but the concern is slow, and he is so easily distracted, and he has such a poor grasp of time.) It is still dark when he rises, stretches out his wings, and leaves through the gates of the capital city. He could have flown, if he’d wanted to arrive in the stretch of meadow he’d left off at last evening more quickly, but he walks instead, enjoys the feel of the sun rising slowly and the meadow coming to light with daybreak.
It is still pre-dawn. The horizon is a blush of peach and gold, barely extending her tender fingers into the navy darkness of night. The light isn’t much, but it is enough to begin working, even with frost clinging to the plants like spiderwebs, even though there is a thin gauze of fog as far as the eye can see, even though – or especially because – he is still half-asleep and the snap of cold and movement is only just beginning to stir him into proper wakefulness. He shakes his head, wraps his wings about him like a thick coat, and pulls out the notebook that he has been working in – one with a newer cover, stamped with intricate flowers and roiling masses of ivy. He has only had it for a few years, but there are added, yellowed pages and many, many tabs of notes sticking out of its body. He eyes it for a moment, from above, unsuccessfully swallowing down a yawn, and he finally finds the tab that is the soft dawn-red of the court’s colors. He flips the book open to the tab, and then he finds another tab within the section, this one pale green, and then, in the green section, he finds a white tab. Novus Flora / Delumine / Illuster Meadow / Winter. His cataloguing system is not fancy, but that makes it all the easier to find his place when he is forced to wake early – or in the middle of the night.
Realistically, there are only so many plants that grow in the cold of winter. He knows this without requiring confirmation. The lion’s share of trouble will be the spring, though he is only about halfway through the meadow and he has already found more than he expected. Septimus skims over the pages, re-familiarizing himself with the winter flora that he has already sketched and noted – only half of them have their names written, the result of numerous (but not yet enough) conversations with the locals -, then turns to the first empty page.
He dips his head low to the meadow – disturbed, here and there, by gusts of wind that send the dry grass bobbing like waves on the sea – and begins to search for the next plant to add to his catalog.
@Andras|| welp, beetles aren't in season, but plants........ "Speech!"
and a softness came from the starlight
and filled me full to the bone
When Aeneas wakes up in the middle of the night, it is because the storm has passed and the energy of it has charged him like a battery. He leaves his rumpled sheets and sneaks to the window; drawing the thick curtains aside. The Prince stares out at the Terrastellan countryside, shrouded in snow.
From the vantage of the citadel where they live, he can see across the entirety of Sussoro Fields and into the brimming trees of Tinea Swamp. It is all white, white, white. He has never seen so much snow, despite being born in winter; this is the largest storm of his life, thus far. The moon is half-full above the fields; shaped like a winking eye, and the stars a plethora of silver dust thrown in fistfuls across the black expanse of sky.
Aeneas leaves his room, quietly; he tries not to wake his sister, but knows his energy is radiant. It fills the room, nearly humming. His skin glows bright and when he steps out into the unlit corridor beyond, he becomes his own lantern.
The young boy walks through hallways full of tapestries; he passes by a statue of Vespera and bows his head reverently, wondering if in the land of the gods she sleeps. He pauses for a moment and asks her, in his head, if the night makes her feel shy, too.
Aeneas doesn’t expect an answer, though, and continues on. The sound of his hooves is repressed by the thick wool rug beneath them. He finds his way deeper and deeper into the citadel, until he stands in a moonlit window overlooking the city of Terrastella.
There is something magical about it, all shrouded in snow and starlight. He doesn’t think he has ever seen something so beautiful.
FROM THE LANDSCAPE: A SENSE OF SCALE from the dead: a sense of scale
Winter has come; crushed the leaves from the branches. Septimus could mind, and sometimes he almost does – it is harder to find things to study in the cold, when so much is dead or slumbering. Still. He appreciates the thin, early-morning sheen of frost on the dry grass, the chunks of ice frozen over in the few, slow, rock-shielded eddies in the Rapax, the blank stillness of receding patches of snow, largely undisturbed from a recent fall but already melting. A cardinal inhabits the dark, sleeping skeleton of a tree on the opposite side of the river, red as a splash of blood.
(Every natural phenomenon – even a cold, culling one – has its place. The feathers on his wings ruffle, like a bird’s, and he presses them tight against his sides to block out the cold.)
Tepid daylight streams through the bare branches, dappling the forest floor in early-morning gold. His breath still streams out white; it is not as cold today as it has been, but it is still cold, though it does not much bite. He disturbs each undisturbed patch of snow, leaves deliberate hoofprints in it, plucks a few bright red wintergreen berries – careful to avoid holly, which is altogether more common, though not out in the woods – and pops them into his mouth, pauses here and there to half-sketch some utterly mundane sight and then, feeling uninspired, returns his quill and whichever leather-bound notebook he pulled out to his back with almost too much delicacy for their well-worn forms, leaving the sketches unfinished. It’s a lovely morning, but it isn’t anything exciting, and Septimus-
Well. There is a reason why he spends so much time on the island. Certainly, he can just as easily find himself entranced by a colony of ants or a flock of common sparrows as he can become enamored by the strange, wild magic that inhabits the strangest regions of Novus, but it is rare for any one thing to hold his attention for long. There is a reason why he is a perpetual traveler, always in motion – he hasn’t even set down a proper home in Delumine, though, by now, he has spent years in Novus.
(He should probably, he thinks, do that. Sometimes he wonders if he will ever make it home; sometimes he wonders if he will die here. Never for long, because he knows that he could find his way out if he really wanted to, to a place where the parts of his blood that sing immortal and faewild start to hum again. He is just fascinated by this strange land, fascinated by how it swallowed up those fiercest parts of him, effectively blunted his teeth.)
(But sometimes he misses his siblings. The younger ones, particularly. His mother. He wonders if she has had more children, while he was gone. Probably. She is always enamored with one creature or another. He wonders if he gets it from her.)
He finally emerges from where he has woven near the edge of the trees to stand in a crop of dry roots and snow that borders the bank. One fell; the trunk hangs over the water, a convenient (but precarious, and dripping with ice) passage from one side to the next. It is utterly unnecessary for him, but somehow deliberate. He wonders if someone in Delumine had meant to make a bridge of it.
That is irrelevant, though. He looks down into the water, then out at the rocks, and finally settles on the bank, pulling a notebook – the one with maps; he checks twice to be sure – from his satchel and flipping it open to reveal his developing cartography. He notes down the log with a horizontal slash, then scribbles a careful, messy note in the margins.
No use in being neat in his own notebooks, he supposes.
@Elliana|| me, rapidly shedding my emo skin: science man I owe you my life "Speech!"
I do not know many things. Least of all my own tendency to see stars and think first of dying.
Once, her hooves sunk into the sand when she walked on the beach. Now, out of habit – learned behavior, cultivated over months of work as a revolutionary, traveler, desert ghost -, her hooves hover a few inches above the sandbank. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, nowadays; she seems to feel like less and less a part of it all the time, like she is watching it slip away from her like sand carried out by the tides. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, and, by extension, a difference to how she inhabits her own skin. Her body hasn’t felt like something that belongs to her in a long, long time.
(It makes her unchanged appearance somehow grotesque. (She resents mirrors, or water clear enough to reflect; she often finds them shattered in her wake, or muddied and disturbed.) Save for the golden scar ripped across her cheek, she looks the same as she did in her youth, as a queen – but when she moves, she does not move the same way at all, and, though she is not sure what you might find if you look at her too closely, she is sure that it is something darker than any darkness she used to possess.)
It is cold on the coast, during the winter – colder still for the wind, which buffets her, but does not seem to disturb her trailing white hair, which rushes and dances behind her in the opposite direction entirely of each passing gust. Her telekinesis has become more unhinged, lately, and, paradoxically, far stronger. She does not want to think of the implications; she is trying not to think of the implications. She does not want to think of a lot of things, all of those responsibilities and people that she knows that she is running from, but she is doing a poor job of thinking of anything else. She is not even sure that she is willing to admit that she is alive. Most of the time, she doesn’t feel like she woke up, after he killed her – most of the time she feels like she shouldn’t have woken up. (It is hardly fair to the dead.)
Ereshkigal trails behind her in lazy spirals, a dark speck against a tumultuous and grey sky. Occasionally, she dips down low over the sea, talons outstretched, and catches the squirming, silver shape of a fish; the demon is always ravenous. Seraphina’s gaze is turned out towards the waves, which are especially choppy and foam-strewn, suggestive of a coming storm. She is not sure what draws her out to the coast so often nowadays, though, if she had to guess, she would guess that it is some misguided fatalism. To Seraphina, drowning is a very particular kind of death. She remembers her delusions of being swallowed by great waves of black water as she was bleeding out just as sharply as she remembers the flowers, and the moon; and sometimes she still wakes up at night drowning, her mouth choked with water, unsure if she is on the Steppe or in a maze that no longer exists.
Needless to say – she has long given up ambitions of learning to swim.
She is picking her way across a black and rocky stretch of beach when the winds shift, bringing with them the abrupt revelation that she is not alone. The realization is not alarming; she recognizes him, though, until she turns her head to look back at him over the curve of her shoulder, she doubts her senses, but there he is, in the flesh. “I thought,” she says, slowly – her voice raised above the howl of the wind, “that you’d left, Asterion.” She suspects he could say the same of her. (Disappeared, dead, swallowed by the dunes; in any case, lost.)
Perhaps that is why she speaks with no condemnation. Her voice is subdued, and, though her tone is inscrutable (if vaguely, strangely empathetic), it lacks any pretense of the mechanical apathy she used to hold up like a shield.
(Rather than the steel she is meant to be, she more often feels that she acts the part of a gaping wound.)
tags | @Asterion notes | sad immortals that ran away from their lives meetup? I wrote this in the middle of the night yesterday & I keep noticing Problems, please forgive me for any incoherence
Posted by: Andras - 08-16-2020, 12:47 AM - Forum: Archives
- No Replies
AND I KNOW THAT ROME WASN'T BURNT IN A DAY
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
H
e sees Zayir from across the room-- Andras is a few drinks in and still feebly clinging, with hands that slip and shake, to the insistence that he does not want to be here, though contrary evidence is stacked so high it dwarfs even this glittering desert mansion. The more he opens his mouth the more fuel gets added to that fire.
He does want to be here. He has so many reasons. Pilate. His fickle and, frankly, strained acquaintance with Adonai. The dark room in the library that's waiting for his return, with snow pushed up against the outside walls, and frost on the windows, and a single candle to stave off the dark.
Andras would never say he feels cold. He would never say he feels so separate, but it is becoming impossible to ignore-- at least, according to the drink Pilate pushes his way to start the night, and that Andras' remarkably low tolerance still hasn't quite chased out of his system,, much to his dismay.
--No, he thinks, that's not it either. The problem is not that he's so hollow. The problem-- the big, looming teeth waiting to snap him up at his first wrong move-- is that, right now, he isn't. Somehow that's so much worse than the alternative.
Nevertheless, Andras sees Zayir from across the room, all white and red and gold, and he thinks of blood, and pain, and sand. Andras sees Zayir and something sparks in him, either camaraderie or respect or a small twinge of fear or all three at once. Andras sees Zayir through the film of intoxication and wanders his way over, touching the man's shoulder with the tip of one night-dark wing.
"You certainly look better than when I last saw you," he says, grinning. "Must be time for another round."
Andras folds his wing back alongside his ribs, tucked carefully into place. "I'll settle for a conversation if I have to, I guess."
The first time, I had not known to expect her. My dream had been full of faces and hers had only been one among the many, King Zolin's preening golden presence leaching away all of her luminance, my siblings' sneering mouths taking so cannily after her that I quickly lost the ability to pick her apart. When Mernatius took form from a pile of golden sand and I saw that his shadow was winged, my mother disappeared completely.
Blue butterfly wings sprouted from Mernatius' back. I pushed past the others and when I reached him he laughed when he saw the way I wore my shock. “Why are you surprised, Adonai?” he said to me. “I have always had them. You have just never bothered to look.” His words shattered me. I fell before him, my knees bloodying the ground, and clutched desperately at his beautiful wings, begging him not to leave, telling him that I was sorry, until the sight of his crooked smile sickened me and I looked down in defeat.
When I looked up again his wings were no longer wings but real butterflies, hundreds of them, crawling like maggots over his eyeless corpse.
“Adonai.” I did not look at her though I knew it was my mother, my beautiful mother, with Pilate’s eyes and Pilate’s scales and a robe of gold silk so fine it slipped away like water when I reached out to touch it.
“My beloved prince.” Her eyes were just like Pilate’s. When she had made him, shaped him from desert sand dampened by her own blood, she had plucked out her eyes to give to him and filled her empty sockets with amber. In the dream, I had been sure of this.
“You are dying,” she told me. I shrugged, before wetting my lips and saying slowly, “I wish to join you. Do you miss me?” She said nothing. Mother had intruded in my dream when I had not known to expect her, so she was still just like I remembered her: Enchantress Keturah of House Ieshan, sometimes my mother, sometimes a stranger.
“You are dying.”
—
I am dying. I collapse against my bedpost and the marble tiles are so cold they burn my skin like iron. Quickly enough, however, the nightshade enters my bloodstream and the contortions begin. Yet I have prepared for this; I bite down on the wooden rod in my mouth and when I catch reflections of myself in the tiles my eyes are black holes.
I admire them for as long as I am able.
I am writhing on the ground but I have locked my door and stuffed my bedsheets into the cracks against it and the floor so that no one will hear and no one will come. My eyes are black holes and my room has cracked perfectly into two and I can hear my pulse as it throbs and throbs and throbs in my head. It is not long before I begin gasping for air but this is not new either; it is the hemlock, and though I feel like I cannot breathe, and perhaps I really cannot breathe, I am comforted by the thought (that repeats in my head first in B minor and then in A major) that I have done this to myself.
That I am only dying but not dead. That I have been dying for so long that it has become the only way I know how to live.
I close my eyes and when I open them again my mother is lying on her side besides me. She wears no gold robe but one of lavender chiffon, a fabric that does not escape my touch. She is in lavender instead of gold because I have learned to expect her coming, and to prepare her accordingly for the visit.
“Adonai.” Her voice is softer; she cannot hiss when her tongue is no longer a snake's. I roll over to gaze carefully into her eyes. They are not pieces of amber gazing back but her own, fluid and bright. In my dream, she has not given her eyes to Pilate. After me and Miriam, she made no more. Me and Miriam were enough. I hold half of her heart, and my beloved sister, the other half.
“Why do you poison yourself so?”
“It is only a sliver of nightshade and hemlock. I will not die. Tomorrow will be milkweed, and a week after that some yew mixed into my breakfast.” I laugh. She laughs with me, yet when she strokes my cheek, her eyes are dark with concern.
“Or you could just tell someone. Miriam. Ruth. One of them will listen.” My dream mother knows of my siblings, but she had not made them.
“I—can't. I cannot make them think badly of him. He is still my brother.”
“You do not need to lie to me, Adonai. I will not think less of you.”
“Fine. You know me too well.” I pick myself up from the floor and pace over to my bed. My eyes are wild and knife-blade-silver. “Pilate may not think through his actions, but I do. If I tell the others of my suspicions, Mother, they will start picking sides, and then so will the servants, until even the gardeners begin to draw lots. I give it a day before all of Solterra hears of how ours is a House divided. Of how a brother tried to kill a brother.”
“Forget the alliances we'll lose. The Hajakhas are still weak, and the Azhades too enamoured with their markets to care. They are only collateral. What is important is what the court will think of me. Perhaps in the beginning, they will feel horror. Perhaps for a day after, they will feign sympathy. But after a week? A month? Bards will begin to sing of how foolish I was, to be betrayed by my own brother! I was head of house. I had all the cards in my favor. Ruth befriended her own assassin. So how could I have missed it?” Mother sits up and her dress splays over her like a pale lotus flower.
“It will not be like that. You are thinking too much, my son.”
“I assure you, Mother, that I am not. I may yet gain my place in court again someday, but even if I do I will never be as I was, if they know how I fell so ill.”
“You do not recover from such disgrace. I think—dying is easier.”
When I am finished pacing I look at my mother again and she is crying. I walk to her. I sink back down to the floor, and when she holds me against her I memorise the sight of her tears rolling down her scaled cheeks.
—
I am alerted of the new doctor from Terrastella mere moments before she is allowed into my room. I am still not fully recovered from the poisons I ingested yesterday, but—what difference does it make?
I lay back down in my bed and stare up at the ceiling.
In my mouth, I still taste the sugary sweetness of atropa belladonna.
oh mother i'm scared to die
where, where do my good deeds lie
Things have changed.
A single tower pierces the sky like a spear, a statue of a rearing horse serving as the spearhead. 
