andras

hat would you shed, if you could shed anything? Peel back the skin and see the blood and the bone and the muscle that makes up who you are, for better or worse? What would you cleanse?

Andras has never wondered.

He is painted red, like blood. What started as small circles and patterns became one glob of wet paint after the other, until he is red almost head to toe. He touches the brush to his knees and watches it soak into his coat. He drags it down and then up, red stocking that become a red vest that become a full-bodied statement. When he approaches the start line, he is the kind of mottled color that comes with paint that dries slowly, only a crack to show the black face beneath. The lighter color hugs his ribs in ways his natural one won't. It draws the eye to the sharp shoulders of his wings. For good measure, before he nods and departs, Andras splashes paint over the rim of his glasses, which stare back at him less like a mirror and more like circles of wood. He tucks them away, a pocket beneath one of the tables where no one will look.

He wonders, What do I look like, for perhaps the first time in his life.
The answer is nothing spectacular. The effect is dulled somewhat by the red-gray smear at his elbows and jaw where the skin rubs together. The dry bits are flaking because he cannot stand still. Later he will shed it in sheets like a snake: another metaphor on the heap of metaphors that unzip him, inch by inch, as the night wears on.

By the time the race is about to start he is breathing so quiet he is not getting enough air, sucking it silently through his nose and holding on. Around him it is almost bright enough to be day. There is music, and laughter, but instead of growing it becomes quieter as the night wears on and Denocte's citizens start to give him strange, inviting looks.

"Warden," someone asks him-- he doesn't know who, because he doesn't look; he is busy breathing quietly, and feeling his skin tighten where the paint has now dried. He wonders how they still know him. He suposes the tight line of his mouth and the audible sound of his teeth grinding against each other might give him away.

"Warden," they insist, now.
"What." He says, without looking. Without asking.
"What are you hoping to cleanse?"

It's a simple enough question, and an understandable one. It's not like his people know him well. When he is not holed away in the library he is leering through the streets with a snarl on his face. It is not exactly the picture of approachability. Sane men do not paint themselves red all over and call it art. Andras tilts one ear, nothing more, their way.

"I'm not here to cleanse anything. I'm just here to--" he pauses. Perhaps it says more than he can. "--race."

What are you hoping to cleanse? What would you shed, if you could shed anything. Andras thinks of Pilate, as Andras often does, chewing the inside of his cheek. He can't tell if he has any sins. He wonders if he can burn away someone else's.

The call goes out. The line starts to form. Andras stretches his wings to crack the paint.

THE MOON ROLLING IN HER / MOUTH, BURNING AWAY THE BLACKNESS. / COCOA EYES HALF-CLOSED. LIPS / PARTED. A SONG BUILDS IT BODY / WITHIN HER, A PSALM / NOT EVEN THE SNOW CAN SAY.
☼

❂ | ❂

Everything in the forest falls silent the moment it sees me.

Like birds that can sense when a storm is coming, so too do the trees know when a monster casts its shadow beside their’s. I can feel them whispering to each other, root to root and leaf to leaf.

I smile. And I think to myself, let them know that I am coming.

---

Every whispering branch and rustling leaf is holding its breath, while the forest sits in a darkness and blackness so thick she might reach out and cut through it with her horn. Somewhere there are bones, and blood, and animals hiding in their shallow graves (what is a den but a soon-to-be grave?) for the monsters to pass. And if it were any other night, Isolt would have gone looking for them.

If it were any other night she would be hunting, with only the sliver of a young moon to hang like a weight from her horn. She would be listening to the dead sob between the trees while she cuts away tree-limb after tree-limb with her blade and watches the wood cry in newly-budded leaves all around her. Over and over and over again until it becomes not spring in her forest, but the bare-branches and dead-hush of winter.

There are a thousand memories she could bleed from the forest without the moon to watch, of skeleton branches and golden saplings and monsters-that-were-made settling down to feast. And all it takes is one whisper of a new-spring coming awake for her to begin to wonder at all the ways in which she might bury it beneath rot and frost again. Wonder lives in her bloody gaze, a look that has never known how to be innocent, or soft, or holy.

But somewhere in the darkness lying ahead of her is her mother-unicorn, leaving a dead-path that calls her to come, come, come along.

Isolt is following a trail of rot so thin another unicorn (one without flowers wilting in her lungs and a horn that only sings when it is carving through bone) might never have noticed it. But Isolt has violence in her veins instead of moonlight, and a wolf pack yipping and slobbering in place of a heartbeat. So she turns into that trail, and leaves her risen things to crawl their own way free from their prisons. She follows it as it leaves the castle and weaves between the trees, holding her breath and her magic tightly as she stalks like a second shadow in Thana’s wake.

Like a lion cub learning to hunt by batting at its mother’s tail, so Isolt becomes a daughter-unicorn wrapped in almost-innocence. Shadows gather between the curls of her horn and in the gaunt hollows of her cheeks as she tucks her head and leads the way with that spiral of bone and blood. Mold glimmers dark and fermented against her lips.

All the while that death-knell trembles below her skin, begging to be set free. Still her blood and magic burn in her veins in a way that makes her want to scream, and sob, and sing into the darkness of decay pressing in around them.

And Isolt does not try to hide the ache of her teeth, of her hunger, as she trails after her mother-monster.

n my homeland, there are only two holidays. 

There is the Summer and the Winter Solstices, when we give offerings to the Old Gods. Lambs and doves; but mostly, Souls. 

I am reminded by this, above the laughter of children and the sweet words of lovers. I am reminded of this, by the smell of smoke and springtime. 

 A wide circular stone altar remains atop the cliffside closest to the village of Oresziah; the old church is built behind it, with stained glass enchanted to weather any storm, no matter how terrible. The church is wrought of old ships, brought by our ancestors when they were first stranded on Oresziah by magic. 

This is where I Bound the Souls of the last Khashran. It had been Bondike and I, shoulder-to-shoulder. I had to lean my weight into him in order to remain steady, as my fall from the cliffside had only been a handful of days before. 

The Last Prince of the Khashran, the Prince of a Thousand Tides, of the Lost People—he knelt in copper chains at the center of the axial stone circle, and we carried bowls of the paint used for Binding. The priests did not tell us what it was made of; only that it was sacred. The rumor was that it was the ichor of our oldest god, the one who died so that men might live—

I only knew that it burned, and smelled of horsehair on the fire. I only knew the sound it made when I pressed it carefully to the dark brow of Orestes, the Last Prince, and listened to him scream as I painted a sun between his eyes. 

It was the Winter Solstice; the holiday when our Souls are closet to the sky, and closest to the earth, and wily enough that they might escape. Legend has it that for a man to Bind another’s Soul, they must lose a piece of themself. The legends say that at Winter Solstice, the line between is thinner; our ability to err much larger.

I am reminded of it because of the bonfires and the way they seem to burn every color except for the color fires ought to be.

I am staring into the flames as the race begins somewhere in the middle-distance; a young child is leaping over a smaller fire, silhouetted so that they are faceless, nameless, and it is not so difficult to imagine them as myself, a lifetime ago.

I am reminded of the Solstice, because when your Soul breaks it feels like fire from within, like an ember lodged in your chest, like—

Like a burning, and then the absence of heat, the sudden snubbing of an ember.

And, anyways, I am thinking of it because—the air feels magical. The air feels thin. Perhaps it is the cool remainder of spring, the essence that says, winter was not so long ago.

I walk beyond the bonfires, to the edge of the trees. There is something there—

Another festivity.

Somewhere, a musician is singing. Their call is low in the night, almost somber; but they speak of growing, and being. There are more children, rushing between the trees as they sing in the nighttime wind. There are lanterns hung on posts; I walk down a long aisle of grass and leaves, overgrown. On the edge, toward the meadow where the fires are, there are buckets of paint and jewels that wink even in the dark. The fire of the lantern dances across them; there are couples here, painting one another; children playing games; and the poet continues to sing of an epic ballad. 

A story befitting those gods of the springs,

What does that even mean?

But before I can think better of it, I am delving into the paints and the jewels, and am decorating myself the only way I know how—

In red paint. 

Red brighter than red. Red like copper. Gleaming, and metallic, and ember-bright. First: twisting copper rosettes, all down the gold of my neck, and the rosettes bleed into spindles like roots that entwine my front legs; it does not take long for the spindles at my shoulders to become the old symbols of my homeland, symbols of elms and arrows, broad strokes and narrower ones—

The chaos of growing, and relenting; the light snubbed from the sky by a too-thick canopy of copper paint—and then, the undulating of gold-red-white, a combination of colors like the mottled light that shifts through the forest of becoming things—

War paint, I remind myself. I cannot finish it, myself. I glance around, unhurriedly, and begin to wait—until at last I see someone who does not appear so occupied, and approach. They look alone, like me—waiting. 

“I can’t do the last part myself,” I say, quietly. “It’s bad luck, you see.” 

My voice is quiet, and dark, made huskier by the lanterns, by the paint, by the chorus of poetry. 

I ask: “Could you help me?” 

I want to close my eyes, but—

I know what I will see if I do.

My warpaint, staring back. A brilliant copper sun, a sigil at my brow. 

To Bind a Soul, you must sacrifice a piece of your own. 

I had given the Last Prince my Mark.