ome of the sculptures entombed in our halls had repulsed me as a child.
I remember one of them in particular. A De Clare original, cast in pearly alabaster—a life-sized rendition of a fair maiden gazing tearfully down at a lamb in her lap. At first glance, the lamb seems merely asleep. Yet a closer look, and the awkward angle of its neck reveals it to be broken, its head flopped lifelessly in the maiden's embrace.
Once, when I had passed it in the hall, I had tugged on Mother's hem to ask her what it all meant.
“Sacrifice,” she’d answered, without even looking at the sculpt. “The maiden is Solterra, and the lamb—well, that is you, Adonai. All of you.” Pilate had been swaddled by her breast; Hagar, on her back. Miriam had stood besides me as I'd stared hard at the maiden's remorseful face, though I do not remember if she'd been listening.
“All of us.” And then Mother had gestured grandly to herself, to the bowing servants, to the children stacked two by two at her side, before casting her luminous gold eyes at me. Expectant.
“Because the House of Ieshan sacrifices, so that Solterra may live forever Free,” I’d finished, in a proud, yet reservedly so, recitation. She’d smiled at me before caressing my cheek.
“Yes. That is why, my darlings, we are so loved.”
Sometimes, I forget how desperately I had loved her.
—✧—
There is a blank, powdered face peering down at me. I blink, forgetting momentarily where I am, until I spot my own surprised, ink-blue eyes staring back in a hundred refracted copies down this room of mirrored walls.
The living statues are so uncannily accurate in both their appearance and slow, methodical portrayals that for a heart-stopping, dreamlike moment I had thought the one before me the alabaster maiden, come to life at last to claim her sacrifice.
I would have said to her: A sick lamb is never brought to slaughter. Its diseased blood would surely sully the altar.
But in the face of this statue's stare I am silent, and this seems to be conversation enough. Hello, prince, she whispers to me. I almost think that I am imagining her lips moving; they barely do. A shiver trails ghostlike down my spine, yet I nod, my head bowed as if in prayer, and watch through my lashes as she reaches out a pale, polished limb, her manner smoothly lethargic, her smile like a flower blooming.
Father's wolf-fur cloak, knocked askew on my slippery shoulders, shudders as she slowly rights it.
A modest audience has gathered around us while she performs this. I recognize a few of the faces; others, merely blurs of color on a painter's palette. When the statue is done fixing my cloak I tease out a few harmonising chords from the gold lyre strapped to my side and they clap; the statue lowers herself into a graceful curtsy, and I echo her, sweeping by increments into a theatrical bow.
When our impromptu act ends, she drifts back to her marble pedestal and leaves me with the guests that choose to stay.
I offer a few of them personal tours. I take care to point out the De Clare originals; that our collection features works from across the four courts; that my favorite, is the center piece of this grand gallery.
And what piece of ours is more fitting?
Because the House of Ieshan sacrifices. I had known this as a child. All for the good of Solterra.
Yet my belief in this had died long ago with my mother.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space
And somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,
in their magnificence, of any weaknesss.
I am almost my old self, here, in these gilded halls.
It is not because I recognise the prosperity, or the culture. It is because my face feels supple in the lamplight, and the music evokes in me something of my past life; I feel more like my father’s son, here, exposed, before others of note. I feel like the man I was raised to be and that, in and of itself, puts me in a sour mood.
But the enigma of it is I cannot break free; no matter how desperate I become, I will always be the man my father raised. Rage will always come more easily than happiness; and even now the sound of music makes me think of useless frivolities, alongside entertainment, love, art, poetry. In this sense, I am surrounded by the very activities I had always been told to disdain—
This, I think, is no place for a captain.
This, I think, is far removed from my destiny. Why then do I feel a need to uphold the legacy of the Starks? Why do I dance when invited to, and listen politely about the statues, and admire from afar the fountains and tapestries?
Why, I wonder, when I would rather the entire thing burn? I cannot look at the surrounding treasures without understanding, with a knowledge borne of experience, how quickly they would be pillaged if invaded. They had wanted me to be the captain to venture forward into other, into lands worthy of invasion, of conquering. They had wanted me to be the emissary of chaos, discord, war.
In another life—one, I think, where I had not loved my best friend with every part of me that was worthy, holy, redeemable—I might have been at the Ieshan party on a quite different note: as a conqueror. And even now, I cannot help but think about ripping the pretty pearls off the servant’s neck—
“Thank you,” I say, instead, as she whisks away a trey of silver and tinkling glasses full of ice and whiskey. The ice, I think, is a statement: who has ice in a desert? And I answer: Adonai’s family.
I sip the whiskey, but even the smell of it makes me think again of my father’s rage.
I am more alike him than I think.
But somehow, I find myself smiling as I drift through the crowd, waiting—
Waiting to find something, I suppose, worth my attention. There is someone--slipping just beyond that woman, and then a man wearing peacock feathers, and the angle of their face and the colour of their hair, something, something, engages me--
I slip past the same party-goers; further, and then I am grabbing a drink from another tray. I offer it, "Would you care to join me?" I ask.
when you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire.
I sit, still as a dead body, for the painters.
Still as a statue feels trite, considering Adonai’s place in the hall; considering the way his body has been locking up at joint after joint as the days pass on, and he looks less like a living boy, closer to a marionette. (Stiff. Dead-eyed. I worry about him. I want to give him my heart. And anyway—I feel more like a corpse than a piece of art. I know I was alive at one point and am no longer. I know that, at one point, my mother breathed life into me; and even if that breath is gone now, or muted, I had it, which is more than any statue can say.
My siblings can make themselves into a museum. I belong in the dirt.
Pilate has hired the best of the best. I am not, in any way, surprised. The best of the best just so happens to be this set of native Solterran triplets, who don’t seem to speak common, but giggle and speak to each other in a sleek, clicking tongue I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. The one working on me is tough-looking and rangy, all shiny-black with deep green eyes. I can feel her glancing at me every so often; her gaze is cutting and hot, and under the weight of it I almost shift and flinch, but I only blush, coloring the white parts of my face pale pink.
She sees this and grins, sharp, sly. But she won’t look at me head-on. She only glimpses at me, shyly, up from beneath her lashes. I understand that to talk to me—assuming she can—is a risk of its own. So I say nothing.
Around me the sky is dark, freckled with stars. When I breathe I taste a cold like mint. I have shed my usual adornments and shiver a little in the wind that rushes through the courtyard, but at least it makes me feel alive. I have no idea what she’s painting on me, and no idea how to ask. I only know that it takes effort not to flinch at the tickle of her paintbrush on my ribs. But still I’m curious what it’ll be, curious to know more than what colors she’s using and the shapes I feel on my skin, and so when I see Hagar walking past me—my darling little sister, the most magic of us all—I call out to her. (Sometimes I wonder how long it has been since I talked to someone not my siblings. And then I always realized I love them too much to care.)
OH, THIS URGE SERVES ME WELL compulsion, the universe contracts and folds in on itself / doe, wide-eyed disbelief / great divine mystery / elusive truth, disguised in the breeze / constantly changing, just to say the same thing
The air – feels wrong. No, maybe not wrong. Wrong is probably the wrong word. It’s right, but it wouldn’t be right anywhere else.
This island feels unnatural. I can’t tell if it feels unnatural in a way that is good or bad – I think it might be neither. I can feel it all the way down to my soul, which seems to shiver where it is nestled in my breast. It seems to burn.
I have lived and lived and lived again. Perhaps that is why the images in the mirrors do not frighten me at all.
From where I am standing, I can see my other two equine-selves on either side; the green knight, plain and pale, clothed in emerald armor, and the near-dead, like pale sun-rays, a sword at her hip. Beneath me is my own reflection - Nicnevin’s reflection. All of these faces are mine, or they were, but there is something alien about seeing the two dead ones staring at me, catching my eye just as I look into theirs.
There is nothing like looking at them to know that I am not them. Not now. Not ever again. I’ve never mourned for it – but looking at them now, like walking corpses, I almost feel sorry for the ends of the lives they lived.
But only almost. It is the natural way; there is nothing else.
I am descending – ascending, moving in some direction that is near-incomprehensible because, wherever I look, there are mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors, reflecting the impossible, reflecting each other – deeper and deeper into a labyrinthian, unrecognizable expanse. In front of me the landscape opens up, and I can see a massive chunk of crystal which seems to be ripped directly out of another world; I stare into it and realize that I am staring into the great, autumnal expanse of my homeland, and there is a man with golden laurels twined into his hair (only gilded leaves – never a crown for you), working a blade across the bone-hilt of a sword. He scrawls designs in shallow divots; they unwind across the bleached ivory, forming the shapes of oak leaves and strangling vines, of firefly gleam and swirling wind. I walk towards the reflection, closer and closer and closer, until my muzzle is all but pressed to the surface – all but fogging up the glass.
Oh, old friend. I know you. I know parts of you; but I’ve nearly forgotten your face, and now, all but turned away from me, neck bent in work, gold leaf falling into your eyes – I still can’t see it.
I take a deep breath and press my nose to the crystal, and I find it warm and honey-scented – like home. The wind blows through autumnal branches, and I can almost hear it, I can almost remember it, but the sound never comes, and neither does the breeze in my hair. He looks up, slowly, his eyes a color I won’t remember as soon as I look away from him. He looks confused – there is no gleam of recognition in his gaze.
I smile, slowly, and I see his eyes widen.
I turn away.
I walk deeper and deeper into the mass of shards; my reflection is a vine ahead of me, or a lightning bug flying in the opposite direction, or an arrow buried in the shoulder of some warrior from outside of the woods. My mother is a forest cat in the branches of my father’s oak tree, looking down at me with hazy golden eyes, or, in a twirl – a refraction of light – she is herself, but her eyes are that same shade, still feline. Once I look over and my reflection is the same, but my sister, in her owl’s skin and feathers, looks back from where she has coiled her talons in my mane and rest on my neck.
(There are other versions of me, too. I don’t notice them – I don’t notice the ones that are run ragged, or bloody, the one that is teary-eyed where I am smiling. I am too distracted by the wonders to notice the shadows that the island is attempting to show me. All I know is that this place is beautiful and new and wild, so wholly wild, and I am determined to embrace it, just like I am determined to embrace every part - down to the cutting edge - of this new world.)
I breathe deep of winding air – which is cold and sharp, like the crystals, and tastes like something I am just beginning to recognize as winter – and keep walking.
open! ||very enamored w/ this prompt so all the kids have to do it||winding roads, family and friends "Speech!"
une was not pretty enough to work “the party of the season,” but they needed the help- almost the entire low quarter would be working that evening- and to Dune’s fundamental problem there were... solutions. It started with a bath. The water (so much water, he almost cried) was doused excessively with rose oil and ran from his skin a shade of brown so dark it looked black. Next came the hair. Two mares braided his mane and tail as it was wet, only to take out the painstaking braids once it had dried. For texture, they said, smiling at Dune’s reaction to this latest insanity.
Then there was the paint. Made with flecks of real gold, if the rumors were true- and he had no reason to doubt they were. A man applied it in swirls and spirals all across the left side of the bay’s body, the patterns overlapping in such a way they formed different shapes depending on where you stood. You might see figures dancing from one angle, suns and shooting stars from another. The right side of his body was left bare, an empty canvas to which the painting could be compared and marvelled at, for who would think such beauty could take form from something so ordinary?!
“Don’t sweat,” the painter said as he ushered Dune from the room with a heavy sigh.
“You realize we live in a desert--” he was on the verge of commenting when the door was promptly shut in his face.
Fast forward to that evening- no, it’s night, definitely night, the boy has just been so focused that time has slipped away when he wasn’t looking. The party is crowded, the music loud (and decent), and Dune is inevitably beginning to sweat as he sweeps back and forth dispensing drinks and collecting empty glasses.
He’d say this is the worst job ever, but have you seen the poor fools who have to pretend to be statues? (gods, rich people are so weird) At least as a server he could move around at normal speed- in fact he moved quickly, because he wasn’t interested in conversations with most of these patrons. He had been instructed not just to serve but to entertain, to hold lovely and interesting conversations… but in front of anyone he didn’t like the look of, he pretended to be mute.
He’s standing toward the periphery, scanning for anyone in need of his services, when he spots a young mare who looks like she just fell from the sky. He felt the same way, too, when he first entered the Ieshan estate. Except his expression back then was probably painted more with disgust than awe.
Dune steps forward and draws the stranger’s attention with a soft “ahem.” When he catches her gaze, he smiles. A working smile- the polite warmth of it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. She seems nice and all, but he’s very nearly to the end of his shift and dead on his feet. “A drink, miss? Looks like you could use one.” A small tray floats between them, on it a collection of paper-thin goblets each filled with a different-colored liquid.
☾
we look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't
know about
this what death feels like? Perhaps it is the worry of some; that death is a void, a never ending loop. A soul’s insanity. But if my soul had somehow moved forward, I should have felt something. At least, that’s what I would have to assume. After all, even when making small journeys, just the right jolt to your corporeal form would cause some response, if not simply snap you back into place. But in all your planes you’ve felt the passage of time, and yet here, there is nothing. The idea was startling, but not necessarily upsetting. My intuition, my love for Gaia, they settled the rolling feeling in my abdomen. This place was some kind of in-between, of that I was sure. I seemed to step through endless stars, balancing on the unseen and my footing sure as could be in the vastness, always towards a soft glow on the horizon. Its distance from me changed imperceptibly, and it was this that sparked the thought that perhaps instead of lifting me to greater understanding, my earth mother had freed me from all earthly things. After all, I felt no pain, no hunger, no thirst, and no weariness to my bones. Perhaps this journey is to teach you patience, young one. Patience is key to fullness of understanding, and to a greater love of all things.
It was my distraction with this train of thought, almost like a meditation, that I failed to notice that I had been getting closer to my goal on the horizon. The soft light gradually filled the void space around me, populating it at first with sparse trees of coarse grey bark, tall as can be. As my steps took me further, the trees thickened, gaining individual personality, shape, varying hues of grey. Their branches twisted around each other like lovers, and I knew that in full splendor they were rich with leaves that would leave a thick canopy of shade, filtering a green dappled glow at mid-sun. There were remnants of bushes and foliage, curled upon themselves for the winter had settled a thick blanket of snow upon the land.
I had an urge to turn my head to look behind me, but I shook it with a twitch of my flank. I knew that the void would have faded with each step, and even if I had wanted to return to the in-between, I would be unable to. My audits flicked, listening to the silence of the forest around me, my pistons coming to a slow stop, reveling in the thick sound of days old snow crushed under-hoof. I had not realized how temperate the void space had been until I noticed the plume of warmth curling into the air from my nares as I breathed. My pelt twitched again, and the soft pressure of planes travel slowly faded, replaced by the brisk touch of the early morning atmosphere.
I saw to my left flank the sky fading to a soft lilac hue. That must be the east, and sunrise a short time away. Though the chill was beginning to seep into the silver I wore upon my neck, a small smile graced my lips. Sunrise and moonrise were perhaps my two favorite things to observe, and where better than a quiet forest muffled in snow?
It never failed to awe me how much snow could affect the environment around it. Not only could it dust any surface with glittering beauty, but it brought a stillness to the world wherever it went. Both in a literal and figurative sense. Snow, when either falling or when gathered in copious amounts did wonders to dampen sound. Some would say they could go mad surrounded by a snowy landscape, and I suppose that could be right. If the mind was unused to such measured stillness it could be rather unsettling. What sound was produced never traveled very far and always seemed just a touch warped, as if the snow itself wanted to hush your movements. And yet, there was a deep allure, a calm that brought troubled minds to seek beautiful spaces with thick blankets of it. I firmly believed that Gaia brought forth snow to provide others with a place of quiet contemplation. A place where they could whisper all their secrets and know they would be kept safe, and all their troubles would melt away with the coming dawn and that they would be free. What an exhilarating thought.
My pelt shivered once more, but less from the cold and more from excitement. My silver made a soft tinkling, as if fairies laughing with agreement, delighted by the thought. Something told me deep in my gut that I would be witnessing a most beautiful sunrise in a strange new land that could offer me the beginning of everything. The quiet determination that had settled in my gut flared with a bright new life. Gaia had brought me here to teach me all that I had asked of her, and much, much more.
”Shall we?” I breathed with merriment as I oriented towards the coming sunrise and set course for a clear view of what was sure to be a spectacular sight.
here lies a small building no more than ten paces from the bell tower in the low quarter, the old one that only chimes twice per day: sunrise and sunset. Perhaps it is overly generous to call it a building-- there are only three thin clay walls, and three quarters of a thatched roof. At night, and honestly most days, a patchwork screen is lowered to the street, to keep out the dust and riffraff. Looking at it you might think it would take just a small storm to collapse the structure, yet it has stood for years and years-- longer than anyone alive can remember. Building or hovel or whatever it is, it's there, day in and out, a tattered scrap of red and gold fabric hanging halfheartedly facing the street, above the missing wall.
It is the kind of place so brimming with things that the more you look, the more you see. There is a random collection of tables (each a different height, size, and shape) that fill the single room, and beat-up wooden shelves line the wall. The contents of the store are varied and… a certain kind of quaint. Near the front is a once-broken porcelain bowl, carefully pieced back together with some kind of golden glue, and an entire table is full of little animals and trees made of scrap metal and springs. Further back in the store, the items are less elaborate and in greater states of decay. One shelf is half full of bowls, each containing a different material-- pebbles, dried flowers, feathers, scraps of leather, it goes on and on. The other half is mostly broken things-- clocks that run fast or slow or not at all, a shatranj board with three missing people.
The shopkeep is only in about one day per week. Although, as you couldn't call it a building maybe you couldn't exactly call him a shopkeep. He lives here. Every morning he sweeps the floor and feeds the stray cats that come by. Every night he sleeps in the corner, the one beneath the broken roof where he can look to the stars before sleep gently (or, in some cases, violently) takes him. It is not technically his building/shed/structure, but it might as well be for all the pride and care with which he tends to it.
It’s a winter day when she comes in, and the early morning still has the bite of last night’s chill. He’s got his face lowered close to the table where a water clock lies in pieces, and one hundred percent of his attention is on carefully applying mortar to all the cracks and pressing the pieces back together, one by one. He wears a little frown as he works- a focus frown- or so he's been told. He's never aware of it happening, but more than one stranger has mentioned it- "do you know you frown when you're working?" He takes that to mean it's a bad habit, but he doesn't much care.
When Dune finally looks up he realizes there is a pretty girl looking back. He doesn’t say anything, just stands there with his brow raised in the obvious question- can I help you? If she were to glance past him she might notice a pile of rags on the ground behind the counter-- his bed-- and in it a little black cat curled up in a bit of sunlight that infiltrates the broken roof.
☾
And what on earth are dreams if not our only way of speaking?
Isn't it lovely, all alone?
Heart made of glass, my mind of stone
I
am well acquainted with love. The kind that twists you up inside and leaves you bruised. Powerful and dangerous, it feels as if your very life is at risk of shattering into a million pieces. And, yet, when I was with him - he made everything whole. Glorious pain was how I would describe my brief stint with love. In all my inexperience, he took me to places I'd never known to exist. All without a single touch, kiss, or embrace. Was my naivety truly so blinding? One thousand times I should have walked away, turned my back on him, and my infatuation. Yet, I didn't. I allowed myself to be shaped and made into a version of myself I had desperately longed for. Perhaps my husband's death had been mercy. Truly, only death itself could be powerful enough to wake me from my dream. With eyes wide open, I knew now of things I had pushed violently away. The love I'd wanted, would never be - not in that life or any other. You should be dead, my thoughts remind me. Yes, I agree - I should be dead. The cold breath of fear billows at the back of my neck. The prospect of my execution had not frightened me during my extended stay in The Tower. Rather, in various moments of absolute clarity, I was granted a surreal peace. While my many other sister-wives wept and begged for mercy, I had remained perfectly quiet. Leaves crunched beneath my hooves, cutting into my thoughts. Pausing, I lifted a cloven hoof to study the brittle piece of nature destroyed by my carelessness. Brown and dead I tilted my head as if to see it better. It could have been there with me, I think. Strewn from one corner of the unswept floor to the other - mixed with torn pieces of parchment with faded writing on its surface. I would have read it, or attempted to. Hungrily devouring each word as if it held the secret to my escape. It never would, though its reminder of life comforted as a mother's lullaby might. Novus was my home now, it seemed. Leaf forgotten I lowered my hoof back down and continued down the path. I was uncertain as to where it would lead, but it didn't matter. Luvena had seen me safely delivered to civilization - however different that might seem to me. With nowhere else to go, I had followed the sickly mare to a place she fondly named Swamp. Just as much as the ice and snow had been a novelty, so did this place prove to be. I couldn't say which I preferred. It was warmer here, I noted - and I was no longer alone. Both points an improvement to my previous situation. Rounding a corner, I found myself stopped by the unhospitable edges of a watery bank. Everything here is painted in tones of earthly brown and muddied green. Dusk, Luvena had tried to explain. Though it continued to be a somewhat complicated concept, I felt as if I was beginning to understand. Terrastella, as she'd also called it, was a massive place with land that changed more frequently than one might be able to recall. There was a great love for it, that much I could tell - but I was not yet certain if I belonged. Everywhere I'd ever been had a purpose and a plan. My body not my own, I'd never been given the chance to decide whether I liked one place or the next. This time, there was no other influence but my own to consider. Freedom was both an exciting and frightening concept. Regularly I reminded myself that Luvena was no more than a temporary guardian. She had no interest in controlling me or telling me which path I should take. I was free to come and go as I pleased. Venturing closer to the water's edge I peered down at my reflection. The mare that stared back at me was as unfamiliar a face as any. Too mature - too tired, and lacking in the innocence that should have lingered in her young face. The finery that clung to her seemed as out of place there as I felt. Gold riches and useless trinkets. I would trade them all in if I could. Exhaling long and slow, I peeled away from the bank and settled under the shelter of a mangrove. Hopeless, I was completely hopeless.
The way grief needs oxygen.
The way every once in a while,
it catches the light and starts smoking.
I could not stay away from the island. And I didn’t want to, not even after last time. It captivated me, as all wild things did. So when the seasons changed and the snow began to fall and whispers began to spread like wildfire through the court, I knew it was time to return. I had to see the landscape of stars-turned-glass for myself, and seek whatever answers (or what mysteries) might be found in the island’s new form.
We turned West, my wolf and I, and we began to walk through the slowly-falling snow.
My first thought upon seeing the island reborn was that it was beautiful. But it was always beautiful, in some way or another. That day it was beautiful in a way that suggested dark secrets hidden just beneath the soil. Some wickedness or sacrifice, some terrible price paid for the pristine beauty of all that wondrous glass.
I became uncomfortable when I walked deeper into the island’s embrace and was met with visions of myself. I didn’t much like my reflection-- I could never match the girl in the mirror with myself, and I hated that she is what everyone else saw. In short, I did not identify with my reflection, and so it was deeply unnerving to look at myself.
The reflections on the island were easier to handle because they weren’t all me. I mean, it was my reflection but… always a little older, always a little different. Some versions of me were crying, some were laughing. Some just stared, dead-eyed, lost in a sorrow so deep they were no longer present. In some I held a bow, others an axe or a paintbrush or herbs. Sometimes I was a dancer, draped in sheer white silk, diamonds woven in my long mane. Furfur was always present in some form another, and as I started to suspect the reflections were all different branches from the tree that was my life, I took great comfort in his presence, dark-eyed and wary and the only constant in a sea of change.
I stepped forward, the ocean-weathered glass under my feet protesting with a crunch, and somehow I found myself before a massive mirror. My reflection in it was familiar. It was just me, as I was in that moment, surrounded by a hundred different versions of myself. Suddenly a girl stepped forward in the glass. Red as blood, white as bone.
As I looked upon the glass my face grew older. At first it was exhilarating to see my foal-softness melt into something harder, fiercer. My cheekbones grew sharp as knives and my eyes deep and knowing as rivers. Even my horn grew longer in slow spirals, a corkscrew digging ever deeper into the sky. Then my edges began to soften once more. Wrinkles creased around my eyes, my back began to bow with the weight of years, and the color slowly faded from my mane.
All this time the girl in the mirror watched me unchanging. As my gaze met her in the glass she tilted her head, and at the same time there was a subtle movement of red in my periphery. Behind me. I processed this all with a speed that seemed like honey dripping (in reality it must have only a second or two) then whirled around with a startled shriek, head lowered to point my twisted horn to hers. A unicorn’s greeting.
A unicorn’s warning.
I relaxed slightly a moment later, seeing she was not about to attack. “Gods, you startled me.” I shook my head with a laugh, feeling foolish. I once would have used the word scared, but I didn’t feel fear much anymore. Still I was still on edge, defensive. “Did you… see?” I gestured at the mirror, where my body was now slumped on the ground, wheatgrass and sunflowers sprouting through my ribcage. It was... personal.
I hoped she hadn't seen.
The way my grief will die with me.
The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers.
A S P A R A
@Isolt (@Danaë welcome too! totally up to nes/sid <3 I didn't write her in but you can just have her pop up at spook aspara)
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
A
ndras is a creature of habit.
Every day he wakes and walks through the library. Every day the same walls, the same railing, the same endless shelves of books and lanterns. Every day door frames twisted into the wood itself, windows that are drafty but in what seems to be an intentional way.
Every day Andras looks out the window, at the woods, now covered in newly fallen snow (and enough of it to stick to the carpet of pine needles and crumpled fern), and Andras thinks nothing. There is always that single, beautiful moment of absolute emptiness that he drinks like he's a parched man in the desert. Andras takes that moment into the woods with him, toward the city.
Every day the city and his stillness dissolving and falling through the cracks in his hands. Every day the curved streets, the tall arches of the capitol, and Court building that Andras looks balefully at for a moment before wandering to some book store or another. He realizes the irony in his going to book stores when he lives in the library. Andras is a creature of habit.
Today is not like every day. Today Andras wakes, strolls the library, stares out the window, and walks to the city, but when he arrives just around noon and he is staring toward the heart of the Court, something unexpected stirs in him. There is not much to do, without-- well, the unending nightmare of the past year-- just his manic research, the enormous trial of wrestling his magic into something like order so it does not one day splatter him on the wall, and think, and think, and think.
Andras does not like thinking. Andras is too full of bombs to look any of them in the eye. If Andras thinks anything, regularly, it is that as long as he can't see the shrinking fuses they might as well not be there at all.
--But, in spite of his desperate attempts, he has been thinking. Something has been growing in him. It is missing them: the people, the purpose, everything. And, it is is this distinct hole that he feels that brings him to the garden: each hedge capped with snow, still surprisingly vibrant considering the season. We probably have the king to thank for that, I think.
When they do find each other, either by circumstance or divine intervention or a sprinkling of both, Andras looks at Ipomoea for longer than he should, searching for what to say. What does one say? "Good morning, sir." is what he decides, nodding curtly, face drawn into the typical grim lines. "I came to see how you've been."
