I felt myself a pure part of the abyss / I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind.
I love spring. I know it as soon as I see it—as soon as I woke up this morning, looked outside and saw the sunlight streaming in through the window, bright as beaten gold.
Below me, the fields of Susurro roll out to the horizon. I can’t hear it, but I know a breeze is rushing through, because I see the long tawny grass swaying in the wind, rippling smooth as waves and flashing light-dark, light-dark as it rolls. But it’s not all gold now, the way it was last week. Now the grass is speckled with bright flowers, tulips blooming in pink and red and purple, so vibrant I feel like I’m buzzing when I look at them, swaying in clumps of acrylic color.
I gasp when I see them, pressing my forehead to the window so I can look closer. No, I’m not imagining things: seemingly overnight, my home has turned into a fairytale. The sky is a clear and perfect blue. The field is a patchwork of flowers, so lush I can’t help but think Delumine’s king helped work on it, using his magic to pull up bloom after bloom from the ground. From here they are as small as bugs, but I see many of my homeland’s people wandering the festival, filling their baskets with tulips, tumbling through the fields; and as I watch the scene play out, my heart grows light and warm.
I am… happy. Giddy, even.
Where’s Aeneas? Our room is empty. I can hear the silence, settling over me like a warm blanket in the dusty sunlight. He must be gone on some adventure already; I glower at his messy bed, offended that he dared to run off without me.
But there’s no time to waste. The day is half-gone (Mother might scream if she knew how late I woke up today). Snow-white hair streaming loose behind me, I blow out of the bedroom and go racing down the stairs: so fast that the cook going up chastises me for it, so fast that I hear a screech when I hit the floor and go darting off to find him. I want to go way up to the top of the castle, stand on the parapet and look at the flowers with him; I want to do the things normal kids do.
The darkness drops again; but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This world is one of serene darkness.
I am nearly fooled into believing it is the end; that this is the after of all life had been, cool and noiseless, a comforting pressure all around me. I believe, when I regain consciousness, that death is not unkind—and my eternity could remain in this secluded alcove of time, in this comforting bed of forever. There are no thoughts here; no feelings. There is only darkness and pressure.
This epilogue cannot remain so quiet, so still, so comfortable.
There is always an undercurrent to life; the threads beneath the turbulent surface of what could have been and what should have been, versos what is. The things that were said or done or acted upon that prevented one result; or cemented another.
These threads are woven into lies and secrets, promises and happenstance. Sometimes, they are woven into fate. More often, the knots are somehow self-made—they are what occur when one lives too long in their own intentions and recognizes at the end, their suffering had been at the fault of their own hubris.
I realize this when I open my eyes.
Above me, sunlight pierces the surface of the sea. The light descends in a prism; refracted; glancing. I could still believe this was death if it were not for the way that the light moves, undulating with the movements of the water it pierces.
The silence is the water. My lungs are full of it. But there is no burning, no breathlessness; I inhale and feel the stretch of flesh over my ribs, the expansion of water pulled into my lungs, and somehow, somehow, it feels natural if not for the sharp stinging at my throat.
I am afraid.
It is a different kind of fear than I have ever felt before. It strikes me to the core. My mind is clouded with it; and might have remained that way, if not for the hunger that spears me next.
It is like a hunger I have known before.
It is as if it encompasses all of me, all of what I am, as if the “I” is separated into need.
I might have groaned—I don’t know. But when I shake my head in anguish, ripping open a line of scabs down my throat, the smell of my own blood in the water makes me salivate.
I might have screamed—I don’t know. But when my ears pop and I hear the ocean singing, it doesn’t seem to matter if I made a sound or not.
I do not know how much time passes before she returns to me. I rest, still, at the bottom of the sea where I first sunk; my wounds are nursed by the salt-sea and my turning. Yet, I am nothing but pain and hunger. I am not rational enough to understand this, however; what I understand is the hunger within me and the disjointed concept of what I have become.
When she descends from that prism of light, angelic with her grace and beauty, it is not to find me dead.
It is to find me ravenous. I am still and crouched; a coiling and uncoiling of powerful new muscles; of a hunger that she knows intimately. My eyes are closed. My death is a feigned (and this, later, I might laugh bitterly at—I, too, am surprised).
But for now I am not me. No. I am need, kept in a primordial, instinctual body. No. I am hunger, and angst, and the opening of an abyss.
When she is near enough for me to hear the way her body moves the water—a shushing, a shushing—my eyes reopen (pupils blown wide, irises vividly bright) and I lash out with teeth grown as wicked and sharp as a shark’s.
n the edge of the meadows where the grass turns gently to sand, then waves, then an endless ocean, Ipomoea can still see the stars.
The smoke is thinner over here, the wind sweeping it back towards the fires and the forests (and there is a moment when he looks back and sees the glow of them that his heart beats a little bit faster, and he cannot stop asking the tangled map of roots beneath his hooves if the hunger of the flames has stopped being satiated by their offerings yet. And each time, he is relieved when he feels the grass press against his ankles and whisper no. All is yet well.) And when he tilts his head back and sees the stars, and he hears the laughter and cheering in the distance, and he smells the salt of the sea washing the smoke from his face —
it feels like Denocte.
Ipomoea has always felt like his home was both nowhere and everywhere, never in any one place but rather a feeling. He had always thought it was because he was an orphan, because he had been born into a place that neither loved him nor pretended to. The desert was no place for a sick child; the Davke were no place for a boy who would rather plant a garden than water the earth with blood.
But now that he is watching two pieces of his heart meet as if for the first time, as if he is separate from it all, he recognizes that this has only ever been an excuse.
Even when his heart should be singing, and he should be laughing and dancing and looking for hidden messages in the flames, still he leaves them all behind (he is always leaving, he sees that now.) Even when his city is opening up their home still he is looking for it elsewhere. And he can feel every contradiction on his skin tonight, the way he is both smoke and char, sharp and soft, a shadow and a silver-bright flower; a king who feels like he has no home. Ipomoea listens to the waves and he is wondering how many other worlds are out there, and how many of them might feel like home for a day.
He does not know how long he stands there for before the shoregrass presses against him and whispers she is here. And he does not have to ask them who? when he feels the heat of her hooves against the sandy shore.
“Morrighan,” he says quietly, without taking his eyes off of the stars overhead. “You’re a ways from the bonfires.” And he wonders, when he feels her settle beside him, if she has come to the sea for the same reason as he —
It is not the sun-eye, or the grotesque rib-bridge, or the shops filled with horror-wealth, that draws Amaunet deep into the belly of the Island. She does not froth and foam at the promise of monsters, and treasure, and a terrible crown to lay upon her brow. Her wings do not carry her across the bridge, so lightly that her hooves do not touch the star-ashes and the muck of organs laid out in the sun, for any purpose but one of selfishness.
There is a rumor of the magic in star-bones that might be bent into a weapon. A legend long forgotten in the dusty tomes hidden deep in father’s library that has only now, when the world was first torn asunder, been brought to light. What started as a rumor, a mere whispering of what if when she laid her head down to dream, as turned into an inferno.
And Amaunet, like a starving hound at the belly of a kill, soon found the whisper turned into a bellow.
The screaming store, and the wailing store, and the one with gold enough to burn her eyes with the glimmer of it, do not turn her from her purpose. She walks through the spirals with all the determination of a sun-blooded thing caught in an endless night (she does not know how to do anything but go on, go on, go on, until the sun rises through the dark again). Her heavy gaze settles one everything all at once and yet it lingers on nothing. Garnets, and emeralds, and bones that should be silent that clack instead as she passes, do not hold her attention.
Amaunet does not relent, does not stop wondering what if, until the castle doors wave in the formless wind. It’s only there that she pauses, waiting until each eye has beheld the determination in her gaze and the dark monster that looks at their own bodiless monsters like a dragon come to call the coyotes to heel. And she’s about to brush her wings over the hundred eyes, and push the hundred lashes down into slumber with her wings, when the sound of another hoof falls too close for comfort behind her.
She had been too focused to hear him, too determined to worry about the wants of men.
And it’s only now that she appraises him, feeling the glimmer of recognition but not bothering to name it, as she steps back down the stairs toward him. Her wings snap out in a warning and her head lifts in the same furious challenge she greets the sun with each day. “What have you come for?" She asks.
Because if he’s come for the bones to be welded into weapons she will kill him where he stands.
—
« when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos »
D
eep in the belly of the cosmos there are gryphons with wings dusted in twilight wishes instead of snow. On their heads there was a dusting of light instead of fur, blackholes instead of black spots. Warset remembers, in brief flashes that blind like lightning in the night, the feel of their wings against her own and the feel of their teeth as they groomed star-blood and space gore from her skin.
She remembers their names in a language this form, these dark and fragile lips and these bone teeth made for grass and root, cannot form. Even in her thoughts she cannot form them. But she tries anyway, as she wanders the pathways to the alpine zone of the mountains. Over and over again she tries-- until the air grows thin enough to choke, and suffocate with miles and miles of horizon spread out before her.
And what some see as the suffering of the form, of lung and heart and courage, she sees as the vicious hope of coming home.
Her wings sprinkle remnants of star-dust and leopard fur to the wind brushing spring-chill against her cheeks. Here in the noon-time, where she can feel the blinding brightness of the sun but not feel it (it’s too carried away by the coming storm winds to reach her), her entire body aches for flight, and fury, and a way to climb high enough that her weak mortal form turns to ice, and frost, and dust around her star-bones.
Every inch of her begs for a flight that she denies it. Not yet, she says to the star-marrow and the star-soul, not yet, not yet, not yet. They whisper back, as things caught in the net of a girl whisper, but soon. Warset, even with thoughts of a black stallion and dune-dust stallion, cannot find it in her fresh-from captivity heart the will to deny them.
Perhaps it’s what has her standing on the apex of the mountain where the air is icy enough to turn her light to sludge and her organs to glaciers. Perhaps it’s all those whispers of soon, that make her smile at the snow gryphon when he lands at her side with a mouth full of snarling hunger.
And perhaps it’s the wanting of freedom that has her turning to the mare in the distance with a look that says join me, instead of save me.
For the vultures, the winter in the desert had not been kind. Horses did not stray into the Mors as they did in the summer when the desert did not plummet into freezing temperatures. The peace, or at least the illusion of peace, had mortals lingering in the city instead of the wilds. And those that did stray into the desert did so in packs of horses formed like wolves instead of herds.
Now that the spring has come, they are each gaunt in starving in a way that the mother’s could not explain away to their starving chicks. Territory has become a brutal and violent endeavor that has each turkey vulture lording over their meger kills like lions and gods instead of birds. Any fight, now, ends in death with insides and feathers strewn across the sand.
As the days, and the nights carry on, more and more tumbleweeds of carnage blow and billow across the lands.
Last night a dawn citizen did not return from a foolish foray into the desert. The colt’s mother had come to Thana for help-- because it is fear that causes one to seek a fearful thing, a terrible thing, to chase back the monster that suddenly seems so new and strange. Far better, Thana had thought as she watched the mother crumble to tears at her knees, the monster in your city than the ones outside it.
And so, in the mad moonlight on the desert that is both unlike the forest’s and so very like it, Thana finds herself wandering the Mors once more. At her side Eligos walks, with a wound she had cut into him as a lure, dripping golden ichor into the holes left behind in the wake of them. The tumbleweeds of carnage fester in her wake as she uses magic to beckon the swirling flock of vultures closer, and closer, and closer to the promise of a feast.
It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
Last night they (for they are always a they) had lingered in the castle after the moon fell instead of in the garden. The old castle-keeper had promised a story by the rolling inferno of a fire in the library and Danaë, who often listened to him tell her how to grow a garden instead of kill it, had settled down eagerly to hear the tale of the monster in the woods that came before mother.
Once there were more monsters in the woods than horses, back when the trails were thick with vine instead of pathways worn down by the careless mortals. Here she had given him a look, as if to say you are a mortal old man, but he quieted her with that strange look of otherness that quelled her where mortals never could.
The castle-keeper carried on.
In the darkest part of the wood there lived the Bramblebears. Years ago they lived not as solitary bears do but in a pack and when they hunted the entire forest took up singing a knell for anything they set their hunger at. Nothing survived their hunger when it roused to a fever pitch when the winter faded. There had been more to the story of course, but Danaë had stopped listening there: the entire forest took up singing
The entire forest took up singing.
It is the song she’s looking for when she strays from the mortal-path, to the stag-path, to the wolf-path, to the nothing-path. She’s listening for it when the willow turns to oak, the oak to pine, and the pine to knotted winter-dead trees she has no name for. In the silence she listens for the weeping of the pine and the lament of the rabbits-- for any hint of the song that echoes in her bones: a knell, a death knell, over and over again until she’s started to wonder if it’s the only song her blood will ever sing.
When the first note of the song echoes in her blood, a sonnet of blood and bones begging for root and vine, she’s looking to her sister for direction. Isolt has always been the one made for the hunt. She knows she’s made for whatever happens after they’ve laid their teeth at a tender throat and drank. Her magic, her life, comes quickly on the heels of death or it comes not at all. And she’s waiting for death (for Isolt) to lead her to the life where the song is telling them to go.
Hurry, her blood is telling her in a voice that sounds so very like the castle-keeper, the pack has slumbered for long enough..
Posted by: Pan - 11-04-2020, 08:32 AM - Forum: Archives
- Replies (6)
Pan
Pan was off and running through another festival, dancing through the meadow with his basket in hand, picking the most beautiful flowers he could find. Around his neck, an otter draped like a cape, chittering happily as he lounged in the dappled spring sunlight, braiding little bits of blossom into Pan’s long cream-hued mane. The boy laughed merrily as he waved to strangers and friends alike, taking great joy in the company of others, and greater joy in the fact that winter snows had melted at long last.
He weaves in and out of the Terrestellan’s planted rows of flowers, retrieving some wild plants along with his bouquet, venturing further than he probably should into the field. There was just too much to see, he decided, wanting to know everything there was to know about the foreign land. His curiosity edged ahead of him as he brushed through tall grasses, weaving his way to a tall bunch of Wraithgrass with interest – for the plant was nearly as tall as he was, and looked to be furry to the touch.
No one was around the boy to warn him as he reached out to touch it, leaping back as trichomes stung him at the site and he released a howl of confused pain. He stumbles away from the grass, the stinging lingering as muscles began to bunch around the place where he had touched the grass. They roiled and twisted, seeming to contract and release at random, the pain of it rendering him unable to walk as he stumbles toward a clearing in the trees.
Tears sting at his eyes as his stomach begins to churn, almost as if he had eaten something which made him sick, but there seemed to be no relief in sight. Oliver… find… help…. Pan whimpered as he curled his body into itself, closing his eyes tightly to avoid the flash of colors which edged at his vision, even as the world seemed to roar around him. With a chirrup of concern, the otter scampered away, eager to find help for his scaled friend from anyone who might be able to shed some light on his strange predicament.
he was a victim of the of the part that loved, the part that was mortal
I wish she had looked betrayed.
That is what haunts me the most; the almost serene acceptance. I had not been there when she had been arrested, but I heard, later, through the streets. Our friends would not stop for days. “They said that she only nodded when they came knocking on the door, after her father’s funeral. They said that she went without any kind of struggle at all, almost as if she had been waiting for them.”
There had never been much gossip on Oresziah. Boudika the Betrayer had been the first large scandal in our lifetimes. I could not escape whispers of her arrest, of the way she had gone so quietly—
(I think a part of me had hoped, desperately hoped, that she would have fought: that they would have killed her on spot).
(It would have saved me the trials; the confessions; the telling and retelling of how she had confessed her love for me and, in the same breath, shared her lifelong secret).
How terribly brave, Vercingtorix.
How terribly brave, to enforce the standard of the people. How terribly brave, to turn in one you held in such esteem. How terribly brave, to sentence your companion to death.
Those were things the people said, too.
I am dreaming of the staircase.
The prison, built into the cliffside, had to be descended via a treacherous staircase. Half was built into the prison itself; but pieces of it were exposed to the elements, to the wind and the rain and the sea. The descent always felt as if one were descending into the mouth of Death, the Old God least spoken of on Oresziah.
I am dreaming of the staircase and the last time I saw her.
I am dreaming of the way the wind howled in my ears; voracious as a winter wolf in the last leg of the season, gaunt with hunger. It filled me up with emptiness, with the contradiction of being full of nothing. The dream is half memory and half imagined.
In it, I fall to my knees before her and cry out for forgiveness.
(I didn’t: in reality I stood before her and said nothing. In reality, I had stood there and attempted to ingrain each feature of her face to memory; each delicate arch; each sharp angle; the redness of her face; the crimson of her eyes, like blood, like a bleeding sunset. In reality, I thought in cruel repetition: betrayer, betrayer, betrayer).
But in the dream, my face is full of tears.
It was me, I say.
I was the betrayer, not you.
But she turns away and looks out the sea. When I blink, she has already become salt and sand.
——
Somewhere outside of my body I become aware of a useless string of facts.
The air is humid and cool. I can taste metal on my tongue.
My head pounds with the beat of unheard drums. (I realize, after a moment, it is my own thundering heartbeat).
I can smell the sea. My old leg injury is aching with particular fierceness.
My eyes are closed; but I am aware of a wood floor beneath me, and the rustling of fabric in a breeze. There is a part of me that does not want to open them, in fear of where I am, in fear of what I might see; it is almost easier to remain in the darkness, with my aching head, the smell of the sea.
(It is easy to be anywhere I wish, with these useless facts).
But then, I do open my eyes.
The cottage is small and unfamiliar; but in its unfamiliarity it reminds me sharply of someone I know. My legs are curled gracelessly beneath me; I begin to rise, but when I do so my stomach pitches like a boat in a storm. I think better of it and run my tongue over my teeth, trying to clear the metallic taste from my mouth. I am not successful. I hear, outside, the deep rumbling of Damascus’s breathing and remember through, as one remembers something that might have been a dream, the castle and the monster and the breaking window.
It occurs to me, at once, where Damascus had taken us. My voice, when I speak, cracks. “Elena?” I am not panicked, I am not afraid: but when I speak, I can only remember the eyes in the darkness, monstrous and cold.
If there is one thing I could change, I think, it would be the way that she had turned away from me when I spoke into the prison.
Boudika?
It had been the only time I said her real name aloud.
But she had turned her face away, toward the slatted window of her cell, the one that overlooked the slate gray sea.
Now, I snap my head toward the rustling fabric: the curtains are flowing in the breeze. Outside, I can see a storm out at sea. It is in the far distant, with soundless lightening and white-capped waves. Damascus's scythe-like tail gleams in the surreal light. It feels as if we have been taken from one nightmare to another and the effects of his yellow vapor continue to fog my mind.
you, like Rome, were built on ashes, and you, like a phoenix, know how to rise and resurrect
◦ ☄ ◦
All that she is and all that she was and all that she knows have faded into hour after hour of counting stars with Michael beside her. His smile is slow and soft and sweet, a bandage to the weeping wound that is her heart. Day by day, he pulls her nearer, wrapping Moira Tonnerre about his little finger with all the ease of a skilled weaver. Perhaps he has ensorcelled her, spelling her into the easy bliss that it is to be beside him. After all, Michael is like sunlight, and as a sunflower she turns her face toward him even when her eyes are closed.
She’s taken to trying new teas he brews up, hunting down flowers when he feels that the city is too much, or pulling salt from the sea to rim cups and giggle when he puts his lips on them anyway.
They are, she is quite certain, absolutely ridiculous at the worst of times and utterly foolish at the best. But the Tonnerre girl has given herself over to those gentle smiles and the way it is easy to love him as it is easy to love an innocent child who has spilled no blood and knows so little.
But Michael knows much. He knows when Moira leaves to spend the day with Elena, when Elli comes over and it is time to paint and tell tales the whole night through without the interruption of silly boys who would only drive her wild or distract her completely. Other times, he knows when to bring little treats to the girls as they talk, and offer to walk with them as they stroll through the many beautiful parks within the city that smile with the taste of spring.
Tonight, Moira longs for the delicate brush of gold along her side, but there is one she longs for almost as much. A dear friend who fled from her upon that beach. He left with so little a whisper, but she saw the determination in Tenebrae then that his fate would be his own choosing and not that of some proclaimed god on high. All she could do was watch as he walked away, and then she walked away, too.
That night had been cold and lonely as she’d roamed the beach. No longer is Moira Tonnerre a waif of a thing, a ghost in her own halls to frighten those who work there all hours of the day from certain halls or the kitchen lest they fear she would take no food again and fall into a fit of sadness that would hollow her cheeks and carve her ribs in stark contrast no matter the dim light. Not at all.
Filling back into her skin, she has settled as an old house settles when the new family moves in after years of putting up with them stomping up and down the stairways. She has settled into court once more where she dances with the lords who visit and smiles with the ladies. The Emissary is quick to offer treats and learn of the other courts, venturing into others from time to time, but no grand pilgrimage has yet been planned.
Soon, she hopes.
Tonight, there are other plans in her mercurial heart that she thinks of. Moira is the smoke from incense burning as she moves through her world and into that of the markets. Past them, further. At the edge of the city she waits and waits. Ten should be arriving anytime, an escort in tow to be his eyes.
She’d sent a messenger to him, requesting his presence once more in the City and refusing to take no for an answer. They needed to talk, and more than that she needed to see how he fares following...well, everything he’s been through.
So the phoenix perches on the precipice of her city, ever watchful and patient and entirely too excited with anticipation only building and building as some great pressure waiting to explode. Soon. Everything would be fine soon.
It has to be, doesn’t it?
@Tenebrae | "Speaking." | !!! we meet again, my dear friend <3
