une wakes from a deep sleep with a slice of midday sun burning hot on his cheek.
He can’t remember the last time he had a day off. The last time he slept in past sunrise. In fact he had fallen into such a deep slumber that when he wakes it takes a moment to remember not just where he is but what and who.
He clings tightly to that brief sense of oblivion, that blissful clean slate, as the consciousness returns with all its baggage. For a moment he feels good.
Until he takes a step forward to get some water, and a sharp pain blooms in his left shoulder. He staggers forward and yelps loudly, spooking a black cat snoozing in the window who arches into wakefulness with a dirty glare at the stallion. “Oh yes,” he remembers. “Last I was brutally beaten. Nearly eaten alive by that maniac. Which means...” He glances at the sun’s place in the sky, feeling rapidly more awake by the second. “She’ll be fighting again soon.”
He grabs the small coin pouch on the table which holds half of his tournament consolation prize (the other half was carefully squirreled away in one of a dozen hidey holes he has across the city) and he hustles to the colosseum as quickly as his wounded shoulder allows.
-
It’s hot and dusty by the time he gets close to the arena, but that’s nothing new. The undercard match is just finishing up and the crowd is hungry for the main fight; the ground trembles with stomping hooves as the loser stumbles out of the ring and the winner parades around. They’re both colts, Solterran by the look of it, and Dune wonders if they’ve been taken in by the underground. It would make them as good as slaves, indebted to their fightmaster until they won an egregious amount of fights, or too broken to continue. It wasn’t the worst arrangement... they would at least always have food and shelter, and the hope of freedom. But it wasn't one Dune was ever much tempted by, even in the very depths of his desperation.
The bay makes his way over to the crowded line of tables that conveniently serves as both bar and an official voting booth. There are, of course, underground betting rings, but too much success there and you were more likely to get a knife in the skull than your winnings. In some cases it was better to pay some outlandish solterran tax than risk an angry mobster. He had decided this was one of those cases.
When Dune reaches the bartender, he pours the contents of his pouch on the table. He leans in and speaks quietly, still self-conscious of being heard in Solterra after a lifetime of muteness. “An ale, and the rest of it on the mare.” He waits patiently as the mare darts off with his coin and fills a cup with something that looks tepid and watery. Ambidextrous, while she filling the cup she tosses to him a small clay token with the amount of his bet scratched into its surface. He flips it over to see on the other side the stamp of a sandwyrm about to strike-- Amaunet’s symbol for this fight.
With drink in metaphorical hand, Dune wanders to the back of the very full stadium. He can’t even see the ring from here, but he’ll be able to tell what’s going on from the shouts of the crowd. Despite having a wonderful sleep last night, he's tired again. He's been mercilessly tired ever since his mediocre showing in the tournament. As he sips the uninspiring ale he finds himself swaying tiredly back and forth in the beautiful Solterran heat. Somewhere through the haze of fatigue he distantly recognizes a wet feeling in his shoulder-- the wound is beginning to bleed again, slowly soaking the bandage haphazardly applied a few days ago. A nuisance, but not a particular concern. At least not for now; he'll take care of it later, after Amaunet wins and his pockets are full.
☾
we look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we don't
know about
e returns with the winter, when ice chokes up the harbor and fog creeps up the streets.
He returns for her.
Guilt is not a feeling he takes to naturally - not he, creature of instinct and need, of hunger and survival. But he knows, he knows, that the way he left her was cruel, and wrong, and it is not what he had meant to happen. There is a new scar, carved by a sword, that travels a thin silver line from his shoulder to his throat. There is a new wariness, a new hostility, to the other horses he passes as he walks further into Denocte, with the bells of the harbor tolling ghostly in the mist.
He has always hated them, these land-horses, so graceless and obtuse. But he has never bled at their hands, not until the island, not until the pirate.
Tonight they avoid him, this ghost-grey unicorn who parts like the mist as though he’s born of it. He can feel their eyes on him, the draw that has always been between his kind and theirs; if he were hunting, he would smile. If he were hunting, he would catch their eye and beckon them closer, closer. But Amaroq is tracking something different, something made and not born. Something he owes, and regrets.
In the city the fog mixes with the bonfire smoke, damp limbs crackling an ancient kind of music. In the city the buildings hem him in, more dangerous than the shining cliffs of icebergs. In the city he is not a king of anything, and he knows it, and the bones and shells wound in his hair chime of warning and loss.
He is looking for a flame in the shape of a woman. He is looking for Boudika, and he will find her if he has to hunt until summer.
Truth be told I don't mind
'Cause her hell's my paradise
She can crush every hope
Got her heels stompin' down my throat
W
hat does it mean, to be truly lonely?
Sometimes I think I know it: I will stand in the courtyard, surrounded by ginkgo fans and deep green monstera and paintbrushes and blocks of pigment and think I am lonely. I will look back at the tall windows, ridged in wrought iron and the bleak autumn sun and sigh to myself. How terrible my life is, how lonely: that I am one girl in a family of girls with gunmetal hearts and boys made of more venom than wine.
I will ache up at the windows, the cut of the roof, the pergola at the head of the path that leads to the groundskeeper's hut, and think, oh no, oh no, oh no.
But I am not lonely. Each corner of the estate is packed with servants at work, servants that turn their faces respectfully away from Pilate (but not their eyes) and Adonai. However distant they are, my siblings are packed together like spiteful sardines in a tin. Everywhere I go, even now, as sand turns to dry grass turns to the jagged rock of the mountains and then the cliffs, there are eyes on me, servants in tow.
I have never known what it's like, to be lonely. I think, existentially, I do not even feel it as much as I think. But still it is the only word that comes to mind when I send off the escort party with a smile and think to myself, I am something, and that something is lonely, I'm sure. It is so much worse, to know anyone would do anything, if only I asked.
It makes a girl not want to ask.
I come to Terrastella with the sun at its apex, glinting down on the cobblestone street. A late autumn rain has just blown through the region and the eaves and lanterns glitter with fat, heavy drops of dew. It is beautiful, in the way that the rare desert rain never quite is. Even our petrichor smells like sand and searing heat. Here it is cold, uncomfortably so, cold enough that I shiver as I step into an archway and out of the wind.
I am squinting when I see her, staring blankly in what I hope is a graceful sort of way, befitting an Ieshan. It is so cold I do not know if it quite hits the mark.
"Excuse me," I ask, touching her shoulder, jingling with gold while I do, "I am looking for a jeweler." 'I am looking,' I say, walking the line between overtly polite and covertly blunt. An implication that is not quite a question. A demand that is not quite a demand.
It would be so simple, to ask.
But I don't. I can't.
STILL, WHAT I WANT IN MY LIFE IS TO BE WILLING TO BE DAZZLED- to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
I have never, ever seen a city – before now.
There are buildings, in the Gold, scattered sporadically among the trees. Temples, and the occasional barracks, and some houses, though they aren’t really necessary. They are never too tall, and they are never too large; we wouldn’t dare to interrupt the trees, so we are limited in where and how we can build. They are always modest and rarely beautiful, even the temples. (I have been told that the temples of outsiders tend to be grander – that they use them to pay tribute to things called “gods.” We have no gods, and our temples are nothing more than housing for the priestesses and sites for the rituals.) The most splendid temple in the very deepest part of the woods, which houses the high priestess and the royal family, is still modest.
Every building that composes Terrastella’s capitol seems to me a thousand times more fantastic than anything from my homeland.
I know that I am coming up on the city when the dirt path that I have been following gives way to cobbled grey stone. It reminds me, somehow, of the sea, or the dark grey clouds that gather before what I now know is a storm. (Today, the sun is blinding bright; it helps to keep the chill at bay, to my relief. Winter has barely begun, and I have been assured that it will get much, much colder. I am beginning to think that I am ill-prepared for it.) It is wet – everything in Terrastella seems to be wet, most of the time – and coated with moss, in places, and I find it somehow charming. The paths at home are simple dirt, kneaded down and kept kempt by constant travel.
I practically prance onto the path, exaggerating my movements just to hear the way that my hooves clatter against the stone. The click is pleasant and rhythmic, and it puts a perpetual spring – nearly a dance – in my step.
I cross a hill – and then I can see the polished spire in the distance, gleaming in the sunlight. To me, it seems to reach up impossibly high. The rest of the citadel stretches out around it, and the city. I cannot make out many of the details of it, from such a distance, but I can tell that it is beautiful; the faint outlines of ornate carvings and stained-glass windows stick out to me even where I stand. I have to stand there, for a moment, my hooves frozen (and not from the chill) to the grey stones and my jaw likely hanging open with such exuberance that it likely looks unhinged. I can’t bring myself to move, and I blink a sudden scald of hot tears – made hotter still by the weather – out of my eyes.
I had heard about cities, on occasion, but never much. Just enough to know that they were “a collection of buildings,” which I could, most certainly, not imagine. It is less shocking than the ocean because I expect it, and it is less shocking than the sky because I have seen a building before, but it is no less overwhelming.
All of the parts of me that are frozen come rushing out at once, and I spring into a run – racing, as it were, towards the city gates.
The moments that follow pass in a teeth-jittering blur. The city is so much bigger up close; everything is so much bigger up close, and, even if I crane my neck, once I have drawn close enough to the city walls, I cannot see the top of the tower. I somehow manage to stammer my way into the city – the guards grin at my expression, and they ask me where I’m from, and if I’ve ever been somewhere like this before, even though I’m sure that they can tell I haven’t. I answer, but, as soon as I’m past the gate, I find that I can’t recall what I said. (It must have been a nervous mess; I would likely blush to recall it.)
The streets are crowded with early morning bustle. I dart among the figures, weaving my way through crowds wide-eyed and trying not to stumble over anyone (or be stumbled over myself) in the process, even as I want to stop and stare at everything I pass. I smell perfume, flowers, pastries, sea salt, woodfire, and a hundred things, easily, that I don’t recognize. I pass buildings with balconies where people are out at work, and buildings with glass walls in the front that display various wares, from beautiful clothing to jewels to weapons and armor – there are so many shops here, and so many things for sale. Street vendors tempt me with offers, and I am mostly clever enough to avoid them, but I trade a few of my feathers and a strand of my hair for a few golden trinkets with intricate designs, which I wind around one of my horns.
A magician preforms tricks on a street-corner, pulling paper dolls that dance as though they’re alive out of a hat; and maybe they are alive, or maybe they are just “alive” in the way that I was alive as a sword. It is so hard to tell. He catches my eye as I pass, and he winks, and I grin, tossing my head; my chestnut curls cascade down my neck, across my shoulders, tangle loosely about my legs. Oh, I have so much to do - my people are counting on me to find the heir, who could well be here, but my head and my heart are so full of something massive and overwhelming and near-bloom that I can barely even force myself to think about that now. I want to turn the city over and look at it from every angle, to pick apart each unwelcoming alleyway and dazzling shopfront, to stare at every mural I see painted on a wall until I have burned the image into my eyes enough for fifty more lifetimes.
I can never bring myself to stay still for long enough to do that, of course. I tell myself that I will have time for it later, even though I know that I won’t.
I duck – finally – into a relatively large building that I am told is a library. I don’t want to, although I am excited to see the collection; the temples held scrolls, but never many. I trot up the stairs and through the doors, and a smiling woman greets me at the desk. (I very nearly forget my manners and don’t greet her back, because I can see the books and scrolls behind her – and there are so many, more than I knew existed in the whole entire world. How could any one place hold so many tomes?)
The woman informs me that there are several more floors, and a basement. I can barely fathom it.
I step past the entryway, and into the shelves – and almost immediately I stop, my knees going weak, and I stare out at the rows upon rows of them, and all the treasures they hold within. “Oh,” I say, softly, mostly to myself; and I don’t even know where to start. (Probably, anything would work. I need to know if I can read the language, first, but I am hardly thinking of that now-)
@Liatris|| she'll have to see Dawn's library, sometime; her head will probably explode || "nocturne," cesare pavese "Speech!"
Has it been a year since I have been civilized and dawned upon my brow the crown of a princess instead one befitting a wolf? Has it been a year since I danced to music and pressed my silver-dusted shoulder into horse-flesh instead of predator fur?
Has it been longer than that? Less? Do I care?
Music is different here. It's deeper than the war-songs, slower, sunshine instead of blood-red. There is nothing of the soot and cedar poetry that I remember from Denocte. This is nothing like my mother's stories with meanings that I rarely care to unravel or grow cautious by. This is my father's music.
But maybe, when the crowd ebbs and flows together in violence and sin, it belongs more to me than anyone else in the room. The notes of it run through my skin like fire and the gold and glitz reflect across my skin like I am glass instead of flesh, and bone, and blood. If I was not a wolf I would be blushing, or smiling, or batting my too-thick lashes like I know a secret no one else does. And despite the elegance of my collar I am a girl of flesh, and bone, and blood and all my pearls are black as the bottom of the sea.
Foras keeps close to my side with is feral gaze swinging back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. His eyes are too wild and too hungry tonight. I can see his jaw when he smiles as wolves do and the bones of his hock when I turn to look at him. The music reminds me that I should caution him, cool the itch in his skin telling him that this is not where he belongs.
There are always a million others things I should do but the ones that I choose to do.
My wolf and I turn into the crowd and and we do not dance even as we walk arrow straight though the press of dancing bodies. And here is another thing I should not do, but I do it anyway---
I whisper, wake up, wake up, wake up, and the instruments of the band start to flutter around the musicians like leaves in a storm. The musicians looked horrified when their song continues without the touch of their mortal skill.
It's then that I start to dance, laughing in a way that sounds more like a snarling wolf than a princess.
YOU KNOW HOW LIGHTNING NEVER LASTS LONG ENOUGH TO GET A GOOD LOOK AT IT? and your eyes do this thing, as if they could grow larger, widen out of your face, trying to see enough, longer, more --
It is dawn when I come creeping down to the shoreline.
The light cast on the sands – nearly reflected, in the many places where it holds shallow pools and skims of seawater – is pale peach and hazy, and much of the sky is still dark, though I cannot see it; my back is to the west, and my eyes are trained on that pastel brilliance to the east. The sun is jewel-bright, and, where it touches the water, it seems to ripple.
(I was told, after a few ill-advised attempts to look directly at it, that you shouldn’t. It was wise advice; and, fortunately, looking at the effect of the sun, rather than the sun itself, does very little to diminish its brilliance.)
It has grown cold in a way that I still struggle to comprehend. I knew about the seasons, technically – enough to know that my homeland exists in autumn and autumn alone. I am beginning to understand, however, that knowing something and experiencing it are two different things entirely.
I assumed that, in spite of its permanence, the autumn of the Wynding Gold was natural. It was startling enough to learn that it was unnatural for the weather and the temperature to remain unchanged at all times; a lukewarm heat that was never stifling, a pleasant breeze that was never too strong, sunlit dapples, filtered through the leaves, that only differed from day to day with the passage of time. This world is not the same. It changes with each moment that passes.
I have come to wonder, on occasion, if that is why outsiders value their lives so much. I know that, when I die, I will return again to home, and home will be just as it has always been – the people change, and the creatures of the wood change, but never too much. Never in a way that is unrecognizable.
When I look at the sea, it is never the same as I remember it.
My hooves slide on the salt-slick steps that lead down the cliffside; I take them too fast, as usual, and I nearly lose my balance, as usual. I am getting better at flying, but there is something about walking those ancient, worn, and likely dangerous stairs that appeals to me. I am not afraid of stumbling, though I usually do, at least a time or two. I have too much confidence in my wings for that.
The air smells saltier the closer I get to the ocean. It is far out, this morning; there are miles of sand between me and the water. It also smells profoundly of fish, a scent that I am only just beginning to recognize after spending a bit of time around Terrastella’s docks. I clamber out onto the sands, relishing the way that the wind picks up and tousles my hair, though I know that the tangles will be trouble to deal with later. The air still bites - my nose is still unaccustomed to the sting of salt and early-winter chill.
I am several steps into the sand when it hits me – really, really hits me – that I am experiencing my first winter. I can barely believe it. (It also barely feels like winter. I expected some major shift, like the difference between day and night, but it really feels no different from the day before.) I wonder what it will be like to see bare-branched trees and, if I’m lucky, snow. The very idea of snow is a mystery to me, like rain was only weeks ago; I hope I get to see it soon, even though I have been assured that it is very, very cold.
The notion gives me pause – but only for a moment, and then I am off again, bounding across the sand with the kind of vigor and relish that I’m sure I only possess because this body and mind are still rather young. I run with my wings outstretched, like I am about to jump into flight, and I consider it for a moment – the idea of finally daring to fly by the sea, in spite of the wind and the cold – but my (fleeting) attention is caught by a spiral of stones, dipped inward to collect saltwater. I slow, then finally stop at the mottled grey edges, tilting my head and staring down into the shallow pool.
I gasp - audibly, I’m sure, though the wind is quick to swallow my voice up.
A small, purple thing with lots of pointy edges is stuck to one of the walls. A gossamer blue thing, with numerous, moss-like tendrils drifts in the shallows. A fish with very long, sharp fins and stripes that remind me of a forest cat wriggles near the bottom of the pool, as though trying to dig through the stones. On a waving, green plant that extends to the surface, where it clumps up and bobs, numerous small creatures clutch the vine with their tails – their faces almost remind me of another horse.
I climb up on the edge of the pool, ignoring the way that my hooves slip unsteadily on the thoroughly sloshed surface, and I stare with amazement into the water. I’ve never seen any creatures like these before – I only recognize one of them as a fish, and, even in its case, I’m not sure about its nature.
I lean down until my nose is almost in the water, suddenly wishing that I could swim. The pool, of course, would not require any swimming to wade into (but it is terribly small, and I don’t want to bother all the little creatures within it), but, if there are this many strange things in one, small bit of ocean, I can hardly imagine how many things live inside of the rest of it.
(This may well be my only life spent outside of the Gold – I am beginning to wonder if I will have enough time in it to see everything I’d like. I never realized that the world was so big; the revelation is wonderful and overwhelming all at once.)
@Caspian || ya girl is rather close to taking an ill-advised tumble into a tide pool and possibly dying from lionfish-related complications...if the jelly doesn't get her first. | "ars poetica," sally ball "Speech!"
he Foster family is beautiful. Where no one is a criminal, no one is a failure, no one is needy, and no one is wrong. We are old money, back to the beginning of Terrastella when the first Foster pressed ink to parchment. We are old money with wide smiles, beautiful faces, and perfect teeth. Even then though, I cannot find an ounce of Foster in my smile. The Fosters are there in the hold of my shoulders, they are there in the directness of my gaze, they are even there in the grace of my steps, but I look at my smile, I only see a stranger residing in the muted curve of my cheeks.
Grandfather’s only failure in life, he says, was that he never had a son, but everything else, Foster through and through. Perfection. Really, it was no matter. All three of his daughters were tall, staggeringly beautiful, and blessed. They were cashmere cardigans, fine champagne, and grand parties. Lawrence was the first born grandson, and liable to inherit everything, sure, we all have our trust funds, which are to be obtained on our seventh birthday, but Lawrence would gain the house, the beach house, the library along with other distant Foster cousins. I am the youngest girl, I should be grateful if I inherit a copper coin after Grandfather finds himself six feet under.
I am a Foster. I often tell myself in times of doubt. I don’t entirely know what it means or understand it, but I think it is supposed to bring me a certain amount of comfort. I pretend that it does.
“Good Isabella, hold it steady, now let it go!” My archery teacher calls as I release my arrow. It flies straight across and hits just left of the bullseye. I narrow my brow, and the tiniest of scowls cross my lips, but it is enough for my instructor to notice. “Don’t give me that look, it was a good shot,’ she says and comes close to me, she moves to give me some sort of comfort, but the coldness of my eyes, like storm clouds passing over, stops her, she retreats. I think that best.
I could love my archery instructor, you know. Like really love, not like my cartography tutor whom I simply adore and admire enough that it becomes the type of love from a pupil to and elder. But my archery instructor, she is young, maybe close to Bennett’s age, and dreadfully attractive, and maybe I would even have a crush, maybe my spine would shiver whenever she comes close to me to help draw the string of my bow and assist in taking aim. As it is, she is far too close to my family, far, far too close. I see enough of them, hear enough about them, I do not need someone to look at me and instantly think of my mother, my grandfather. If someone wants to hold me, I want them to do it without any recognition. Too often I have been spurned by those too close to the Fosters.
So when she smiles at me, she receives nothing but an exhaustingly polite simper in return. “Good work today,” she says, handing me my arrows to put into my quiver. It is slung over my shoulder as I dip my head in goodbye. “I’ll be practicing before the next time you see me,” I say. She only laughs like she has never had life weigh her down. I don't wander too far onto the idea of it, I am too busy thinking maybe I can con Bennett into letting me shoot an apple off the top of his head.
My family believes my archery lessons to be longer than they really are, afterwards I like to go to this pond just outside the city and feed the ducks the bread from our kitchen before wandering back home. One of the servants, who looks young, maybe my age, hands some to me. I pull the bread apart into tiny pieces and I start to feed them, watching as they each approach and grab the piece before the other ones do, before looking at me expectantly, to toss them more. I have hardly the option to not oblige them. Pull. Toss. Grab. Look. And the pattern repeats itself like madness on a loop.
code by rallidae
picture colored by Elidhu
@Maybird
if he's a serial killer, then what's the worst that could happen to a girl that's already hurt?
✧
T
o cure Rook, I will have to go to Delumine.
I still remember the stories he'd told me about his court. About the boys and girls who grew up reading so many books that they became scholars, men and women who dedicated their entire lives to books, to reading and writing and praying to Oriens for more when they ran out of them. (I'd asked him if he was one, to which he'd grinned with all his teeth and said, proudly, that he was on his way to becoming one.)
In particular, though, I remember the Library. (Capitalised—when I had drawn it out on the sand with a stick he'd reached over and added one more line to the l, before plucking a flower from my braid and dotting the i with a petal.) He'd regaled me of the Library's wonders—how it was the best one there was, how it attracted scholars from all over, how it was grown out of a forest of trees and was always expanding because of it. How once he'd entered it as a child barely taller than his diplomat father's knees, he'd never wanted to leave.
I remember furrowing my brow and asking him why, then, was he here with me, deep in the swamps, if he loved this Library of his so much.
I remember blinking too fast when he'd looked at me through his lashes, smiled like a cat, and drew his shoulders up in a shrug both elegant and coy.
Rook looks at me now, his eyes milky with malice, and drags his antlers down the bumps of my spine.
You should guard your thoughts better, Daisybird. They always leak through to me. I level a tired glare towards him and flip my mask all the way over my head. Do you miss me as I was? he asks, his laugh dark and airless in my head.
I don't. I think, Maybird Maybird, that I'm so much better this way.
I feel his eyes in my back like two bright thorns as I push him aside and walk forwards, into a copse of white birch. "Isn't it great," I say, loud enough that a flock of starlings burst out of the viney undergrowth, "that I don't care what you think?"
Through my mask, the world is all shadows.
✦
« r »| @Nicnevin | Nic you are not ready to meet both Bird and Rook
They're always too loose no matter how hard I pull, and the songbird feathers and daisy flowers I string into them fall out with every step I take. Rook says I shed a trail of feathers behind me, like a cat who has just killed a bird.
And then he laughs at the irony, a hollow, keening giggle. I know he thinks of himself as the cat.
But today, I am determined to get it right. Maybe it's because it's been over a moon since I left the swamplands behind me and resolved never to go back—maybe it's because, no matter what I do, my chest always hurts when I think of Ma, alone, frantic, sad. Elder promised she would watch over her. Though Elder appears unreliable because of her childish faces, I know that she isn't, really, and that there is no one else (I know of) who can keep a promise as well as Elder.
She'd promised to herself that one day, death would to bow her. Elder's promises, you see, are always kept.
Today, I will braid butterfly wings into my hair. Fourteen, for each piece of Ma's soul.
I glance down at the mossy log I am perched upon and count out the butterflies I have already caught. Five of them flap their jewel-blue wings lazily in the sun, their stomachs growing fat with the honey water I have diluted and poured carefully into a leaf as large as a bowl.
It had been difficult to get the honey. I'd had to beg Rook to sniff out a hive with that nose of his (sharper than any bear's) and then, when I'd caught up to him, he'd set the hive upon me.
It is getting annoying being at the end of Rook's jokes.
He never harms me much, less than he'd like to, I'm sure, but the bees' stingers had hurt and I'd wasted an hour of daylight picking them off of me as Rook gallivanted away into the darker parts of the forest, his moon-white antlers sticking out like bones from skin in the underbrush. I don't know where he is now; secretly, a dark part of my heart wishes that he won't come back, until the guilt washes over me like a gale force tide and I have to shove my face into the moss to keep myself from retching.
It is an extreme reaction. I've never really had one before, and so I still have trouble controlling it.
But there are now seven butterflies sipping at honey water in the leaf and I smile a little at how successfully my trap has proven itself. Ma had taught it to me; how butterflies loved honey water, she'd sang, filling up the cracked marble birdbath behind our house with it every morning, killing ants off of the sides every night.
With my telekinesis I gently lift up the first blue butterfly and it wiggles a little in the air, distraught at being torn away from its meal. When really, it should be focusing on me. I feel a bit sorry, when I tear off its wings and let its sliver of a body flutter down to the forest floor, until I remind myself that it is only a butterfly and that I have doomed far bigger things than that.
It is a comforting thought until it isn't.
When I am done I admire my reflection in the mirror-like surface of the honey water, checking for stray hairs (nodding when I find none) before pulling my mask halfway over my head and dusting off the metallic blue powder sprinkling my legs. Tentatively I test my connection to Rook—Where are you? I'm leaving the clearing.—and sigh when it is swallowed by silence.
Unsurprising. He is probably off stalking a rabbit, or painting his mouth red with berries. Sometimes, when he is feeling kind, he brings a handful back for me.
But this morning he set off a hive on me and I am still too angry about it to go looking for him between the shadows of the trees.
So I set off in the opposite direction and hope that wherever I end up, there will at least be berries to eat.
Standing there, killing time
Can't commit to anything but a crime
Peter's on vacation, an open invitation
Animals, evidence
Pearly gates look more like a picket fence
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow in the morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. - T.S. Elliot, “The Waste Land”
The thing that is Erasmus dreams.
The dream is at first a black net sprawled with dripping starlight – each one counts and recounts the next, falling away from a thin line that stretches on and on. It is nothing, it is a wound in nothing, and then it is, as all things are: it comes closer, edging, tiptoeing the strand of reality that winds a chain of universes. There is more outside of it, something incomprehensible, just as it would be for a fish to breach the silver lining of the only thing it has ever known, hook in cheek, gone unto some separate hell that burns and screams and suffocates. But Erasmus does not dream of that outer glass – he doesn't even tap its surface, content with the careening heat of meteors and stars and the great, unending blackness in which no sound breaks.
It is easy to become lost here, here in that net. It is easy to suspend oneself to the feeling of simultaneous knowing and unknowing, that ecstasy of realizing that you are no longer one small drop in an ocean but you are the ocean itself. And here it rains and rains, but you are always whole.
Erasmus, or the thing that is, does not ever lose itself in this consuming Beyond. It knows that the line is not some two-dimensional spectacle dripping starlight – it knows that it is not some bucket overflowing with life and sense. It knows that his back is against that silver lining between realities, and what is before him is a Dawn. It does not look like the dawns on novus, or the dawns a fish sees when sunlight treads refracted beams over the murky shadow in which sharks wade. It is a dawn of time and space in a universe that can only ever be understood by a thing that has existed inside of it. That starlight is not dripping downward but outward and forward, and before one – one who has not dreamed of beginnings, only ends – knows it, they are engulfed by all of it.
Maybe to one it would seem a nightmare. Maybe they would open their mouth to scream and scream, and no matter what resounded in their head they would never hear their echo – because the density of space swallows their breath and voice. It is soundless. Seemingly endless. (But we know better.) Speaking into its depths is even worse than screaming your frustrations into the pillow, because at least the pillow only muffles the sound, not silencing it, and maybe now you realize that comfort did not come just from expelling the tightness of rage in your lungs but also hearing the voice that erupts and knowing that you are there. Space does not provide that mercy. There is only insanity or clarity in it, and the line between them is thinner than the glass between realities.
Maybe, when one sees the totality of the universe rushing them, they do not feel as though they are becoming smaller, smaller, smaller. Maybe they do not see the terror in once being broader than those bright bulbs of whirling gases and now being as small as a speck of dust in their eye. Maybe one sees beauty, epiphanous and relieving, as the milky way which was once before you a toy racetrack of cosmic bodies is now a vast sea of blinking, infinite celestial lights that begin to resemble fireflies caught in a jar. Maybe it is valid to wonder which are true and which are reflections, bumping restlessly against the glass.
The feeling of shrinking through the understanding of space must be something that takes utmost competency, because it is difficult to explain. None have ever known the feeling of diminishing, because we have ever only known growing, but the pain is similar. In here, it is easy to forget that it is a dream, but once one does – the pain is nonexistent, a shot of morphine, a fever frenzy of hallucinated euphoria. Until then it is ache that persists in bones, in flesh, in hairs; every fiber whipped, every molecule subjected to the claustrophobic woe, every other atom blinked from existence.
One may think, the only thing worse is the feeling of meteoric descent.
It starts when one skids past the last breath of light shewn by a distant, final sun – a dying thing. It is beet red and sore, glimmering like a fading beacon, like a lighthouse on a faraway hill: SOS, SOS, SOS. It swells, it breathes! A heavy, labored gesture of a death spiral, its poisoned core rattling, throbbing. The fires of its surface are nearly extinguished, each one rising and falling and sputtering out, reaching restlessly to grasp the meteors that pass, tonguing planets that scorch black with its touch. Some stars collide against it, but even they have forgotten how to scream.
And before you have time to gather your thoughts, you are plummeting, a sensation of being plucked by your shoulders from the revolving, cannibalistic star system. It is a graceless feeling, the backwards fall into this alien earth – it is hot, it is pain, anguish, that feeling when you miss a step and stumble dumbly into the dark and your breath hitches in your throat and your heart rises to meet it and feels as though it may burst. You can wait for the ground to embrace you harshly, maybe wait for your bones to break and splinter, or your skin to blacken with the torrent that surrounds you. But all there is to greet you is the likeness of a marsh on a hazy morning that gathers you softly in its lap – but it isn't morning here, is it? It isn't Novus that reminds you of its soft pastures of green, and it isn't a Tarastellan bog that shrouds you in lofty canopies of bird calls and precarious shadows. This stretch of terra is tree-less, bird-less, there are only grasses that reach yards until the end of the plateau you stand on, blades of grass that look sharp as razors when you tousle them. Though you can see when you are close enough to them that they are silver, they take on a pinkish hue in the light of that dying sun. It paints all in faint shades of red, and deeper quarters throw shadows blacker than night.
The plateau you have been deposited on does not stand more than twenty feet from the ground below, and its top spans a kilometre in each direction. If you clamber to its edge, you'll find that the silver grasses extend as far as you can see – until they disappear into a maroon dust or fog at the horizon. All throughout are red rivers or creeks or ponds, stringing on like veins through the pinkish-silver witch grass. But there is no sound of water, nor is there any sign of bubbling or gushing in those tributaries, and it becomes a question of whether it is water at all or something that resembles water. The more you stare, the more it may seem that the latter is most true. In fact, there are no sounds here. It is dead quiet, as if the world (and everything in, out, and about it) is holding its breath. But if you are to speak, dear sleepwalker, you'll find relief that your voice returns to you, as well as the awful realization that it echoes on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on...
If you're paying attention, you can even catch the moment a meteor – or a moon – or even a small planet – hurdles toward the sphere whose plateau you stand on and disappears beneath its horizon. Perhaps you'll make quite a few observations. Perhaps you will notice that the red sun draws a shadow over another smaller but equally sore star, and that they revolve around one another with such a tension that it seems one may draw the other at any moment. Or you will notice that these suns move faster than the sun that casts its loving gaze over the earth you know – terrifyingly so, prowling like a predator circling prey, watching like a scorned god pitying a poor sacrifice. There is no morning, yes, but in its unnerving revolution there is also no definable noon, afternoon, or night. You may notice that you are light here, almost light as a feather – and it is a wonder that if you were to drop from the plateau, you may fall just as weightlessly upon the silver-pink grasses below with nary a labor. But what waits there? Those grasses are taller, and while there is no wind, something moves them. Perhaps you will notice that you feel watched, though none stand with you, and it is uncertain if the feeling comes from that sore thumb of a stunted sun or shadows in deep gulleys below or things that move the grasses or even each blade of grass themselves.
And then, something sprouts from the grass at your feet – something that slicks across your ankle and coils softly just above your hoof before slipping back into the ground with a quiet, damp click. A snake? A worm? A tentacle? A tongue?
That's when the hum begins. It is everywhere. It is constant. It is maddening. But isn't it comforting, to finally hear a noise besides your own voice?
