The darkness of the forest, beneath the church-steeple pines, has never seemed like true darkness to her. In each shadow, and each shadow pressed upon a shadow, she can see a hundred colors laid down upon each other. She can see the faded rust of pine-needles, the violet darkened where a field mouse hurries past, the blue of a bruise where the light almost dapples the edges of a shadow tree. Between all the colors her white seems more like a scar in the forest that a color made from the very ichor of Viride.
Isolt had always been better suited to the forest-- more predator than lost ghost caught between roots and towering trunks.
Today her thoughts and all the sorrows of the buried Eira are hers and hers alone. She can feel each aching loss like a crack in her frail glass heart. Her stomach gnaws at itself like a sick fox when she feels all their hunger for leaf, and flower, verdant meadow grass. Each time she blinks the backs of her eyes flashes white, white, white with the memories of a child killed for land, greed, and power.
Danaë feels wrath then.
Her blood races faster than the Rapax with the fury of a hundred victims of a senseless war. The pace of her steps turns slower, more hunting wolf than doe galloping through the darkness in search of green. And in what light, what little light there is in the kaleidoscope darkness, makes the red of her eyes seem like fire instead of dried blood.
In her shadow a field mouse, one that had died in a late frost, rises from the dirt to dance around her hooves on paws of lichen. His eyes, bright and young poppy flowers, lift up to look at the curl of her stomach like she’s the moon fallen into the thick forest. The risen mouse’s war cry is almost nothing more than a shrill and painful bleat that Danaë can hardly hear in the echo of the child’s wrath.
She does not notice him, not until they turn together and her vision fractures into her-sight and the risen-sight as they both consider the crack, crack, crack of some not-ghost walking through their forest.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
He lies, limbs tangled in leaves and branches and dreams such terrible dreams. Within them a man carves for a girl and a boy at once so similar and yet so different. From a block of wood the man makes two small statues. Two identical cheetah kittens emerge from the block of stone. The work is long, the detail so careful. But when the cheetah cubs are made and one is passed to the girl who takes it and disappears, the other is passed to the boy. He clutches it tight, but in its grasp, the wood rots and splits and comes apart within his hold. The statue the colt holds cries out as it breaks. Its cry is the bleat of a lamb, the crying of fear and sorrow.
Leonidas startles from his dream, the cries turning to yowls as the dream lives on within his ears. He lies still, there in the silvered darkness where frost settles her white jewels upon the ground. There in the milky moonlight where mist hangs low and pregnant over the forest floor. It is all so still this night, where the boy lies, his gold muted into grey. He lies still, awake, thinking of the statue of the cheetah cub, until he hears its cry within his ears again and knows, then, that it was no dream.
The silent forest echoes with the low, bleat and the higher growl. The boy rises suddenly, for he knows the sound of his cheetah; the statue his father gave him, brought to life by a magic that turned wood into flesh and bone and muscle.
He trails through the woods, listening to the cries, until there at the bottom of a ravine, caught like a lamb in a bramble bush, a nearly grown cheetah lies. It watches Leonidas with golden eyes and its lips peel away from long canines. It thrashes where it lies but the grasping plants do not release it. They dig into the cubs open wounds and the creature hisses and spits, feral and frightened. From atop the ravine Leonidas watches his cub, wondering why his soul does not twist with recognising its familiar.
some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.
Today the air drifts in from the mountains. It pulls snow from the white caps with it and the flakes swirl down, light as dandelion seeds, to melt onto the verdant plane below. The wind carries, not just snow, but a boy too. He sweeps in, agile as a bird and light as a deer. The wild curls of his mane tangle ever more in the breeze, twining tighter around twigs and leaves.
The boy follows the swirling down draughts and dips to the open meadow. The mountains from which he came grow lilac in the background. They dominate the sky behind Leonidas and he lands like a phoenix - all warm golds and fiery copper.
Babbling water follows the meandering path of the creek. Leonidas wastes no time stepping into the water. He wades out, knowing the place he stops, where the water is strangely deeper and the trees rise taller beside the widening stream.
The water leaves him, carrying with it dust and dirt and all the kinds of things that wild-wood boys find pressed into their skin at the end of the day. He bathes. And at one blink he is a boy and at the next a forest king with his brace of antlers a gleaming crown atop his head. The vines, the wild flowers and the tangling leaves are all earthen jewels and decorations to his crown. The boy is nearly a man and the two combine as a gleam shimmers in his eye as he stills… still as a stag. A solitary ear twists toward the bank. His moment of quiet, rapt attention is gone as he continues bathing, water sluicing from his wings that dip below the water. Unwise, he thinks, briefly, when his end has come to watch him from atop the bank.
His head turns at last, aquiline eyes, gold as the sun, catching her like talons. “You are too early, Little Death. I think you will only be disappointed by me.”
think I am in love with the forest because it is not the sea.
When I go to sleep, I must listen the sea as it breaks upon the rocks outside my bedroom window. I dream of it, each night, as the white stallion and I stroll down the long black stretch of sand. I awake to the crash-and-lull of the same waves day after day after day.
Perhaps its the monotony of my life that breaks me; the morning breakfast; the classes; the quiet of Terrastella; my visit with the monks when they tell me, so quietly, that I must continue my meditations or else risk something terrible.
And today—it is not often, but today—these things accumulate into the unbearable. I do not intend to leave. But when I begin to fly, I do not stop until I cannot hear the sea.
And then, I keep going.
I go until the fields give way to sporadic trees; and then those trees become a forest.
The Viride.
I look it up in books, again and again. I admire it from afar in the gilded pages of Novus: A History, or a chronicle of the Eira fables. I study it, obsessively, on the map in the citadel war-room that stretches the entire floor. I remember, of course, the actuality; how it night it becomes a frightful place and as a boy I might’ve died there, if not for—
If not for fate, or destiny, or a girl named Isolt.
I visit a different forest, today. When I land amid a small clearing—one nearly obscured by towering, formidable trees—the birds are alight with life and the grass underfoot is vivacious. It crushes beneath my hooves, and the air is perfumed by the distinctive odor.
The winter hunger is gone, replaced by late spring’s warmth and blooms. I walk through the clearing, into the trees, and soon find myself devoured by the depth of the forest. I know I should remember my fear, how quickly I became lost… but I no longer feel so helpless, so haphazard. My wings are strong, now, and where I walk I illuminate the darkness with my own ethereal glow.
After a while, I stop; and I stop because carved into the wooden face of an ancient oak, the branches gnarled out around me, is a deity I do not at first recognize. I close my eyes. The energy of everything, the threads that weave this place together, is nearly overwhelming.
I am praying, when she finds me.
The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves.
eyes that fire and sword have seen
and horror in the halls of stone
For once, Jahin wanders aimlessly.
The weekend marketplace is a blaze of color and movement, although the vendor turnout is fewer than usual. The lack of a sovereign is bad for business, apparently. Regardless, there are still those who have set up shop, their booth tents swaying in the hot midmorning breeze. Jahin looks out of place with his spear shouldered and sober expression, but then that is nothing new. He is accustomed to the curious glances, how their eyes linger on his scars and his fading Davke tattoos but he does feel considerably more like the bull in the china shop than usual.
He wanders the aisles, glancing over the different wares. Sahar is curled on his back, hissing and spitting her tongue excitedly as she takes in the bright colors and beautiful bobbles that are sold. She has a taste for the expensive things, his Sahar. Jahin isn’t looking for anything in particular this morning, despite the wares that are pushed into his way as he passes through. Throwing knives, baskets, ornate jewelry, supple velvet cloaks.
There is nothing for him here. He’s a simple creature, needing little more than what he carries with him. Despite his disinterest in the actual goods displayed by the vendors, he finds that he is actually enjoying himself. The constant hum of conversation and the smell of baked goods is pleasant and relaxing. The sun feels warm on his back.
As he turns to exit the marketplace, perhaps to go out on patrol or something more suited to his station, a booth unexpectedly catches his eye. The booth itself is rather plain in decor, nothing but the shabby tent overhead to keep the sun from beating down on the vendor owner’s back. There, carefully arranged on a plain wooden table are intricately handcrafted journals, bound in ornately carved leather. He stares, transfixed. A young child can read better than him and he can hardly write his own name, but Jahin gazes at the blank pages wistfully nonetheless.
J A H I N look at last on meadows green
and trees and hills they long have known
This close to the jewels and paints strewn haphazardly across the meadow they seem brighter than the stars. The part of me that is still my mother’s daughter draws constellation lines between the ember-bright shards of color in the dark. A dragon lays waste to a field of wheat. Below him a wolf snarls at the head of a man with his mouth gap-jawed so that he might swallow him whole. In each line I draw, in the story that fills my head, there is so much violence in that there is no room for a happy ending.
I don’t think I’d want one anyway.
When I move deeper into this strange cacophony of art-not-yet-made all those stories move with me. They are still moving with me when I take a brush and dip it in blood-red paint. For a moment I consider painting my body in the marks of war and death. I imagine drawing a wound across my throat, a smear of someone’s death below my eyes, or a gaping hole right above where my heart is.
But when I turn, when I see her, I stop thinking about painting myself with remembered wounds of war. And I do not ask for permission, I am no chivalrous thing, before I draw a bloody and secret star across her cheek. The color turns her to a creature gilded in gold to one gilded in bloody promise.
Red turns her into a creature, a girl, a thing that just might be able to keep up with me.
“I thought about you,” I draw a bloody line across my cheek to mirror the star on hers, “when I went to war." Another line joins the first and still, when I look at her, all the blood-red seems pale against the white.
am too young to want to escape my body. But I do. Oh, I do.
It comes from the dreaming. It comes from the deja vu that strikes me unexpectedly in my waking days. When I visit the docks and hear the wet slush of a fishing net dropped to the deck, or the sound of sails catching wind.
It comes from not knowing where my father went, and from knowing too well what it sounds like for my mother to muffle her tears. I don’t speak of him, anymore. I’ve found it easier to pretend he never existed; that I was simply a child of Vespera and, well—
It is easier that way. That cool detachment.
(I can’t feign it at night, when I am alone; I can’t feign it when I am staring out my window toward the star-freckled sky).
But I can feign it now. I can feign it now as I slip out the back of the citadel to a narrow game trail. It is overgrown with ivy and other foliage. At this season, it bursts with greenery. I read about spring, in winter, as a boy. But I had never understood it until now, on the edge of summer. The birds are singing and the sea is warm enough to swim in; but I am not leaving the citadel to swim.
I skip down the narrow trail and then, when the rocks crumble from beneath my feet, I take flight.
I am too young to want to escape my body. But I do. Oh, I do.
One day, it might drive me to drink or to gamble or to fight. One day I might drive me to women or to dares or to unclimbable ventures. But today, today—it only makes me kiss the sky.
I bank off the cliff, fighting the coastal breeze; I skim over the top of waves and then ascend, up, up, until the ocean bleeds back into land. The earth beneath me seems as brutal as the feelings in my chest; the breaks are just as jagged, just as severe. I go from the sea to the cliffs to the fields where the tulips open beneath me in a blush of color.
I land there, I think, because it is beautiful. In my mind I plan to pick tulips for Elli—and then think better of it, worrying that, perhaps, she might be saddened by their lives cut short. I feel lost as soon as my hooves hit the earth. Around me there are couples and pairs and I am alone. I wander off to the edge, where the tulips bleed back into grass, and that is where I see her.
“Danaë,” I greet and already I am not myself. Already, I am Terrastella’s prince, and my voice is warm. “Are you alone?”
She is older than before; she looks older than me. But I am not like some. I understand the magic of these lands, and the magic of growing. I know, without asking, that we are both winter born and will be until we die. "It seems odd you're here. Can't you grow all the flowers you want?" I ask it a little wryly, with a curling to the edge of my mouth.
the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
In
the middle of the night, when the moon was high enough that her window could not hold it, she had awoken with the taste of brine in her teeth. The roar of the sea had rung in her ears louder than it had when she pressed her ear to a shell on the library’s mantle. Her thoughts, as she blinks and blinks and blinks to shake them loose, are full of white dolphin curling sea-froth and gulls screaming along the horizon.
When she thinks of it, as she untangles herself from her sister, she begins to feel like a thing as brutal and wanting as a hurricane tide. She does not linger and wait for the feeling to settle, she starts to run.
And runs, and runs, and runs.
All the way to the sea she runs. The dawn is a pale speck of light on the horizon, a smear of rose-gold and lilac purple, by the time she walks. Down in the belly of the cliff and shore the tide has rolled out far enough that there are miles of sand begging her closer. A gull screams loud enough that her lungs sutter at the wanting in the sound of it.
The gull dives towards the sea and so does Danaë. Rocks tumble down the cliffs as she races to the shoreline. Each of her steps is as reckless as only an immortal can be, as deer-agile as a unicorn, a full of sonnet as a rose unfurling for the first time. Here, as the sand tugs at her weight, she feels like a wild thing in a way that has nothing at all do with the forest.
She cannot see a single tower of an oak to blot out the rising of the sun. And she wonders, for the first time, why her city watches the run rise through the forest and over their gardens instead of by the sea.
Across the horizon the rose-gold turns to just-gold, the lilac to royal, and the gull is joined by his flock. The sun edges up, a fat and round crown, and Danaë only shits her gaze over it quickly as a hummingbird as the gulls start to pick from the dying, forgotten creatures left behind by the shore. She watches them feast and that wild feeling, that hurricane tide of brutality, rises.
And just like she had run it rises, and rises, and rises.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
you wanted to live forever, but didn't you realize? you had to die to be truly immortalized
Vercingtorix stands, watching.
He finds himself in Terrastella again. It is a land he frequents more and more regularly, it seems. He would not say it is because of any particular connections, but in denying the fact he knows there is a lie. There is Elena who, against reason, has become his sole friend.
He thinks, however, it is because out of the entirety of Novus, Terrastella reminds him most of home. He walks through the knee-high grasses, allowing the wind to batter him. This late in spring, the air feels too hot, more like summer.
Vercingtorix can see Damascus flying in the middle distance. They have not been speaking, much—perhaps because Vercingtorix blames him for the incident involving Sereia. Damascus should have been there. He should have felt it. He should have saved him—or else, what is the point of having a Bonded?
From this far away, he cannot deny the majesty of the dragon. He strikes a massive, imposing silhouette on the clear horizon. With such a cloudless day, Damascus is in fact the only thing on the horizon. Vercingtorix walks to the cliffside and lets the wind from the sea block out everything else. It fills his ears and numbs his skin; and when he turns to see someone else standing there, he is not surprised.
He stands on the surface of the bridge, on the stone that is not stone but the monstrous spine of something that once breathe as he breathes now.
There is sunshine beating down where there should not be, a kind of false-light that is nothing like the daylight that saw him step into the cavern. From here he can’t hear the wailing, or the singing, or the sound of wind-chimes in the shops; he can’t hear anything at all but the wind, and the sound of water far, far below the bridge (or is it above?).
Martell is only an animal, only a man, and he does not want to go on. There is nothing in particular he fears, but every instinct in him is screaming for him to turn, to flee, to not look again on this city except, shivering, in nightmares.
But Novus is a mad country, with queens who possess too much power, the kind of power that could build just such a place. And there is such a dream-like quality to the city, to the bridge, to the caves and the false-light (a fever-dream) that a part of him already believes that if he would be to die here, it would not be a true death at all.
The unicorn walks on, leaving the creaking ribcage of the bridge behind him, and into the city.
