IF I WENT TO HELL WOULD I care, would it really be different from heaven? No / I don't know what I'm saying, these aren't my answers. / I don't care about being alive -☼
For what it is worth: she has to take her life in small victories, lately.
For what it is worth: she has not fallen apart entirely, yet, no matter how desperately she has longed to. (That is not an option, and she knows it.)
For what it is worth: she resents this situation. (She hopes that she does not resent the children growing inside of her.) Sometimes – most of the time – she resents the sun god for it. Sometimes she manages to settle her thoughts for long enough to remind herself that the divine is not always explicable, but the excuse feels less defensible every time she tries to force it down her own throat.
For what it is worth: she does not want to resent Solis. He is her longest and oldest companion, the only one who has always lingered at her side, however apathetic. But maybe that is delusion, too. She is sure that her prayers have meant nothing to him, that her begging has more often than not fallen upon deaf ears. And now – this. Sometimes, she wishes that he would appear before her, so she could plunge Alshamtueur into the gilded curve of his chest. (He would kill her for the transgression.) Sometimes, she only wants to beg for answers. Sometimes she wants to collapse to the ground before his statue and ask him why, why, why, to plead for him to give some greater meaning or name to her suffering.
She used to hope that there was a point to rampant cruelty, to thoughtless violence, to every lingering horror that she had experienced; she used to console herself by telling herself that there would be some end to it, that, eventually, she would wake up one morning and realize that all of her suffering had been in service of some higher purpose. It was naïve or arrogant or narcissistic or desperate, and she feels like a fool for ever having believed it now. There is only a greater purpose when it is given; only in songs, or in poems, or in fables.
She is simply unlucky; or inadequate. Not a victim entire, or the catalyst of her own destruction.
She lingers in the shallows, feeling comedic. Her stomach is swollen, and simply looking at the reflection of it in the water makes her want to shatter the clear surface like a mirror. (Sometimes she loathes herself less, and sometimes she can nearly accept it, though she can never understand it. She tells herself that she must keep that in mind; that she can’t go on breaking things, whether she means to or not.) Alshamtueur hangs at her side, omnipresent, sizzling lowly with urges that she wouldn’t dare put a name to; she has long grown incapable of fitting her armor, but it doesn’t matter. She is more than capable of protecting herself without it.
She is more than capable of protecting herself without moving a muscle, without ever raising her sword – though it is the most overtly violent part of her.
(More than usual, lately, Seraphina finds herself longing to have been something else. She longs to have lived a life as a scholar or a doctor instead of a soldier, a lifetime where she was allowed to hold a pen in the place of a flaming sword. She wishes that she had never been a queen; she wishes that she had never even been an emissary, no matter what it might have cost her. She wishes that she could remember her mother, that she had parents in the place of a violent warden, perhaps even that she had siblings. She wishes that she had been kinder, that she had realized that she was lonely years ago, that she had dodged the swing of that bear claw, like she had dodged a hundred thousand strikes before-
She used to think that her cold demeanor and apathy were useful.
Most of all, she longs to turn herself into a woman who would have been happy with this blessing; perhaps a woman who chose to have children, not a woman who was subject to the whims of a fickle god.
All of it is futile. She knows better than to entertain the thought.)
Ereshkigal has left her to her longing, though she can sense that she is not far, and, in the back of her head, she can hear a faint, terrible crunching. She must have gone back for that rotting gazelle they’d passed earlier; the thought is nearly nauseating, but she doesn’t flinch.
Instead – she pulls herself from the perfect blue of the water and onto the bank, the wet, metallic gleam of her coat like the glint of cold steel in the sun.
@syndicate|| for whomstever || alice notley, "fill out questionnaire for good" Sera||Eresh
they dredged icarus up from the sea today; wings bedraggled, tangled in the nets of those who tried to raise his body before. but he would not ascend; he learned his lesson.
I am there for a prince; not for her.
I am there for golden feathers and indigo eyes, and a softness that files my jagged edges into something smooth, into a shape I can weather. But when I see her, I gravitate toward the disaster I know we create by colliding. I ought to leave her alone; but when she sends the child away, she evokes my wicked curiosity. And, besides--my prince is occupied.
(That, in and of itself, incites a pang of jealousy I have no right feeling, but feel nonetheless, like a barb in the flesh).
(And that, in and of itself, transforms me into something monstrous; into a man that I cannot take to Adonai, not tonight, not when I see the lyre strapped to his shoulders).
Instead, I take the wickedness I feel to Elena; instead, I delve through the crowd and find my way to her. The child, of course, is gone; and I cannot erase the image of them side-by-side from my mind, mother and daughter. They are like images of one another.
I wonder if it is a blessing, or a curse, that the child is so painfully Elena’s. I wonder if it is a blessing, or a curse, the father does not seem to hold much likeness at all, whoever he may be.
“Elena,” I greet her, with a warm familiarity. “This is the last place I would have expected to see you.” I have always been masterful with my tone, with my rhetoric: and even though I do not comment on the child explicitly, the awareness is there, a tense undercurrent to the comment itself. I did not expect to see you with a child, here.
If she were someone else, I might have asked her to dance. But I don’t. I simply regard her with quiet, knowing eyes. Then, I let a smile edge my mouth. I say, “I am here to impress a prince, but I am not sure how.”
The confession comes unbidden, but genuine. I shrug my shoulders, almost dismissively, almost as if it doesn’t matter--
And really, does it?
I look over the crowd, searching for the girl. But she is already gone. From here, I cannot see Adonai, either--and, despite the crowd, it is only Elena and I.
It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary
S
he would never regret Elliana, never. She loves her wholeheartedly. When she had been born, she had cried into her fuzzy neck, and never regretted her. She was a bright spot of joy. Beautiful and adventurous and so undeniably perfect.
So it has not crossed her mind that she would regret it. Even when she was alive with pain from the missing of him—the massive hole that he had left in the very center of her. “My little wildflower.” She had called her, and gathered her up, and cared for her, watched her little girl starting to bloom and loved her more and more and more. “By blood,” she had said kissing the top of her head. “And by bond,” she kissed her cheek. “We are bound.”
They go to the ocean today. Away from Terrastella, away from it all. “Nic and I are going to look at the tide pools, we are going to look for crabs,” Elliana says to her mother excitedly. Elena smiles and nods her way, a silent confirmation. There is always a twinge of worry when Elliana strays from her side, a little burr of sharp uncertainty when she wanders too close to the deep shadows beneath trees just out of her reach. She know of the things that live in the dark - not soft, beautiful things like Azrael, bathed in stars, sewn together by dreams. It is usually the broken that the dark is filled with. Those who find solace in an hour where unease creeps.
But she doesn't stray too far from her, not far enough that she couldn't reacher her daughter should something happen, and Nic was with her. So her expression stays soft and gentle, a tired smile stretched in velvet white across her lips. She is changing though, a weight in her expression that never used to be there - a weariness she felt in her bones. She feels like a slow wave as she walks down the beach, blue bruises in her eyes.
Here is the part of the story where Elena tells herself she is getting better—and she is starting to believe it. If only because it has yet to be tested.
She feels directionless, unsure of where to move to next. “Come on, Lilli,” she says. “Give me a sign.” Be my light in the dark.
Elena is still haunted by him, try as she may to forget. She is haunted.
By everything about him.
The way they danced when they first met, when he first touched her, so tenderly, and then so hungry later. How he had pressed promises into her skin and dreams into her heart. How she had built her hopes around him, somehow finding it in the shadows of the stallion.
She is haunted by his love. By the way that her world crashed around her when he left her, when truths came out. When truths stayed hidden.
She is haunted by his absence.
By his presence.
She is forever marked by his time in her life, forever changed.
So perhaps that is why mindless wandering took her here today. Perhaps the ghost of his scent dragged her to the edge of the ocean. Her stomach had grown and grown every day, when she left him, turning her normally lean figure round with the child she would never regret, would never take back. And now she look so much like that old Elena, slim once more, the pregnancy feels like a distant if not still pleasant memory. She looks different too, despite that same Elena smile. She wears motherhood well, it cannot be denied. She thinks this was all worth it, she never needed to see him again. A whole season had passed without word of him or Boudika for that matter. She had Elliana, she did not need Tenebrae.
Such thoughts break when she sees him.
Her face falls open, cracked wide with surprise and then grief and then a wave of emotion she cannot bear to confess. She almost staggers beneath the weight of it, but manages to stay upright.
The intimacy of it, the way she knows how he moves, the curve of his body, the wrapping of his shadows.
She doesn’t move but his name escapes her mouth, split apart with everything that rises in her, “Tenebrae.” Her throat closes and her velvet lips press shut, and she wonders at how after all this time the mere presence of him nearly manages to undo her. Her heart is a hammer tapping holes into her chest, her pulse the drum-beat to a song she has never heard before. Her eyes ache to settle against that beautiful shadow strewn face, ache to lose themselves in every hollow and angle and ridge of elegant bone, but she denies them for fear of what he might find in her eyes. She just blinks those too-blue eyes.
She is always the first to break before him.
She is always the first to crumble.
Maybe, in time, she will learn to live with it and not hate the way that her body betrays her, a slender golden leg lifting and threatening to carry herself closer to him before she firmly plants it again. But, for now, she only hates herself for the weakness that blossoms like a flower in her chest when she catches his eyes as she stands before him. The way that she immediately begins to tremble as the faultlines split her open.
So she swallows and tries again, desperately grabbing for any kind of strength. For any kind of armor.
She cannot survive him again, she thinks.
Not if she is vulnerable.
“Tenebrae.” This time she is able to feign almost indifference, almost able to pretend that she barely remembers the name. Like she hadn’t spent nights recreating the shape and feel of him. But she feels a fissure open up in her, threatening to tear her apart, and she knows that she can’t give in. She can’t be so weak in front of him again. She can’t. She can’t.
So she straightens, pulled on her mask, her features smooth and cold, her eyes glittering.
“I didn’t expect to see you here.”
A truth, one wrapped in a blanket of apathy. Her mask slips for just a second as she studies him, as she feels that dark and painful ache that grabs at her chest, but she pulls it on again, rolling a shoulder.
“I hope that you have been well. I was not aware there were monasteries on the beach.” While the apathy is rampant, there sits too, a measured ounce of animosity weighted in her words. “Must be a pleasant experience to both pray and sunbathe.”
WHY SHOULD MY SLEEPY HEART BE TAUGHT / TO WHISTLE MOCKING-BIRD REPLIES? ☙❧
It has been a long, long time since I have been below the ground. Maybe that is why, as I descend deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of caverns, I feel like I am growing sharper and sharper with each moment, less like a girl than a dull and rusty blade.
I didn’t rot, exactly. I don’t think that blades can rot, even if they are made of bone – but I did decay, and every tangled root that protrudes from the ceilings and the walls makes something inside of me stutter. Maybe it is the smell. Scents mean nothing to a sword, of course, but, to a girl, the smell of moist soil and earthworms and slow-moving rot is like the grave. I have been in it-
More times than I remember how to count, and I don’t really mind the idea of going back, to tell the truth. (I know that it will happen eventually; the certainty is nearly a comfort, by now.) What disconcerts me is the memory of decay, the memory of slowly slipping outside of my skin – and worse, abandonment. I do not like to remember my body swallowed by roots, the sense of earthworms and digging beetles crawling across my frame. I do not like to remember the cold, compressed darkness, or the creep of moss. It isn’t uncomfortable, exactly. I didn’t hate it, and I wasn’t afraid, because a sword cannot hate, and a sword is never afraid. It was more like, year after year, grappling with the inevitable. It was like laying your head down on the executioner’s block and then waiting for hundreds and hundreds of years – innumerable, probably – for the knife to come down on your neck. It was nearly peaceful. (I was allowed to be forgotten.) It also lasted too long.
That does not matter. I am a girl, and not a sword, and when I saw the gaping, dark hole in the earth, I could not help but be called down to where it leads.
When the mushrooms begin to appear alongside the path, I do not even realize that they are glowing. I am still near the mouth of the cave; I do not notice the light. It is only when I go deeper, when sunlight slips away entirely, that I realize that the path is lit on either side by thick patches of luminescent blue mushrooms. I have never seen anything like them before, even in the deepest and darkest parts of the Gold, and I spend a few moments too long with my nose to a patch of mushrooms, examining each mottled navy spot on their caps and only pulling away when the spores make me sneeze.
I walk for some time. I do not know how long – I am so far from the sun that it is hard to tell. Eventually, the cavern pools out around a great, underground lake, which is illuminated by something like jagged blue crystals protruding from its bottom. Everywhere I look is blue. The water is too blue, and so are the walls, and the shadows dancing along them. I cannot help but wander closer to the edge of the lake; I wonder if anything is living down here. Surely, there is something-
Eyeless fish and bone-white salamanders. A little flicker of silver, like something buried in the bottom of the pool-
I lean over too far.
I lean over too far, and suddenly the world tips over, and I am looking at nothing but cold water. My wings snap out, but their valiant effort to support me is futile; I go crashing into the lake with a cataclysmic splash and a shriek that I barely hear echo through the caverns before my ears are submerged.
@Sayyida|| she's, uhm, hmm. not very observant. || elinor wylie, "the falcon" Speech
inter had her bony fingers wrapped tightly around the lands of Novus. Although I had been referring to this land of many wonders as my home for such a short while, I could tell that this was only the start of the peak of this frozen season. It would be a few months at least until the thick coat covering my body could be shed and the world could begin it's rebirth.
I had left my place of birth to search for a land that would be able to educate me further in the arts of medicine. Although I was considered quite talented in my homeland, even I wasn't too proud to admit that the skills learned from the elder medics there were primitive at best. I could easily inform you which herb could solve ailments, and I could stop you from bleeding out on my floor if that were the case. But I feared my skills reached a fairly abrupt end after that. This was made quite clear as I watched my father slowly and painfully die from the wound festering in his shoulder. A brisk breeze wove it's way through my heavy winter coat, shaking me free of the memories of the past.
While I used the memories in order to remind myself why I was subjecting myself to living in a place crawling with other beings rather than happily living alongside my mother and younger siblings, I still disliked dwelling on the thoughts when there was so much to learn still. Though I had found myself in the lands of Novus roughly a week ago, I still hadn't ran into any of the natives here. I still hadn't braved traveling any closer to the different "courts" of these lands. The solitude was nice in my snow blanketed plain land, but I knew that the time was growing closer that I should venture out of my self-isolation and seek out those who I could benefit from.
A cloud of steam billowed before me as I sighed and shook the snow from my coat. Long, lean limbs stretched before stepping out from under the small cove of trees I had been standing under. Perhaps if I attempted to make myself more...noticeable, rather than clearly separating myself from the world, someone from these lands would come along and teach me the ropes with these different courts. Then I could make a decision to immerse myself into this strange population. speech
« r » | « image » | tag; @Aghavni & @Seraphina | words;411 | notes:I am sorry, I am so rusty. It'll get better I promise
knew what I wanted and I was not afraid to take it.
Well, not entirely afraid. I could not deny that there was something about that russet haired desert woman that left me with strange feelings and confused emotions. I have been thinking of her, often enough, I like to imagine she is wearing that head piece that I picked out for her. I imagine she catches glimpses of herself in the mirror and looks upon that head piece with remembrance, and imagines that I am there beside her. But I fear, not that she looks upon that headpiece in disdain, but that she looks at it and thinks nothing of me at all. Or, worse yet, she has taken that headpiece and placed it in the bottom of her jewelry box and its sits there even now, collecting dust. Each little piece of dust just a reminder that I am nothing more than a speck on her life.
Still.
She invited me to her party. Maybe she does not expect me to be just one speck, but two. I do not normally attend parties where I am not required. But here I am, standing outside the entrance of her home, here I am walking through the gates, and here I am walking through the doors.
I find her at her booth, there is a crowd gathered around, and maybe it speaks to my boldness around her, or my own entitlement, but I skip past the line and I am beside her in a heartbeat. “Truth or dare?” I say when I reach her side. “If you say truth I will ask if you are glad I came,” I say with something of a simper on my lips. “If you say dare—then I will dare you to show me just how glad you are that I’m here.” And that simper grows into a smirk. Steel grey finds her eyes of amber, and I try to hold her there, knowing that in holding a snake in such a way, I am promised to be bit.
“I hope that was worth it,” Heartfire had once said to her when she had thrown herself to her possible death in front of a man she had never met before. Elena had stared up at her from the pit she had fallen in with her own reckless nature. And despite herself, she had smiled. Was it worth it?
She runs to the sea because it is where she feels alive, stands on the rocky shore like she is perched on eternity. Snow blankets down, cold, and it coats her skin like scales of ice. Night fell in Terrastella, and the whole world seemed to become varying shades of inky black, fading into pale silvers as the moon washed down across the land. Her golden coat seems almost insignificant under twilight as opposed to the daytime sunshine. She knows behind the clouds, far above in the sky, there were stars everywhere. Pinpricks of flickering gem-bright colors you could make out the longer you stared, but looked plain and cold and silver at a glance. She closes her eyes, wishes those clouds away and she fills the sky with them as far as she could see. They are stunning. She wonders if there were ever once a time when everyone was not enthralled by the starlight. She wonders how long ago it was. Maybe at the beginning, way beginning, when darkness still swallowed the world.
She is dreaming of people far away. Of Lilli and her blue eyes, of her mother and what she would have thought seeing her own smile reflect in that of her granddaughter’s. Of her grandmother, who sits in Windskeep, alone, but not quite. She dreams of her godfather, and whether he still holds that kingdom up with both hands, or if he has learned to let go for the sake of his family.
Elena is still dreaming of them, shivering, standing beside the water, not far from her home. She should go back inside. If Elli woke she would be worried, she would go find Nic in the spare bedroom and awaken the young solider and both would be out here and freezing, slipping in the snow. This was no place for children. It was no time for children.
She is thinking of a star man, who she likes to imagine was not born, but shed from the night sky. Her own piece, her own star, made just for her. It is a selfish thought, but one she thinks all the same. Even if she shouldn’t, but Elena, lately has been doing so many things she shouldn't do. She continues to stand in the cold, so close to the sea that it sings icicles into her lungs with every breath. She should be going back to bed, back to her daughter, to Nic. She should be going back. But she looks to the sea and to winter and those blue eyes burn like glaciers.
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "the absent woman / the transparent woman / the absinthe woman / the woman absorbed, the woman under tyranny / the contemporary woman / the mocking woman / the artist dreaming inside her house."
I left the hospital early today.
I left the hospital early today, and I spent what felt like an hour attempting to scrub all the scent of it off my coat; the blood, and the sick, and the cleaning fluids. I don’t know if it worked or not. I feel like I can still smell it – I feel like I can still taste it on my tongue, as though I never actually left. If there is one thing that I can say about my work, it is that it follows me home like a starving dog after scraps.
I left the hospital early today because I needed to search for herbs in Terrastella, and it is a decent walk between the Day Court and the swamps of Terrastella. Ishak grumbled about it a bit, but he followed me in the end, as always – he phrased it as a failure to comprehend why I was tasked with the grunt work of collecting herbs, but I know that the truth of the matter is that he doesn’t like leaving the desert during the winter. (He has never built up any tolerance for the cold.) Nearly as soon as dawn broke over the edge of the horizon, we were off across the Mors, towards the Eleutheria; it is almost pointlessly dangerous to cross the mountains during the winter, and Ishak has already complained enough about our seasonal pilgrimage to Veneror.
It is mid-afternoon when we finally arrive in Terrastella, and that means that we will be staying the night in the court. (I had already expected that, but Ishak does look unhappy about it; I suppose he’s finally decided that he prefers my family to the cold.) I make for the swamp almost immediately. Even in the winter, there are certain rare, hardy herbs growing within it, if you are willing to brave the murky, muddy, and often fog-covered heart of it to find them. I am, fortunately – or unfortunately, if you believe my guard -, not easily cowed. When I proceed down the narrow, winding, Ilati-worn paths that run through the wooded depths of the swamp like a spiral of ants, it is without caution or hesitation.
(If part of that is because I know that Ishak will keep me from getting lost, that is beside the point.)
When I finally settle to collect a patch of wild ginger roots I’ve found growing around the trunk of a half-decayed tree, I am largely alone. Ishak is – somewhere. Close enough to hear me if I scream, at any rate. (There are stories of creatures that live in Terrastella that can kill you before you even have the chance to react, but I have never been whimsical enough to believe them.) I scrape at the muddy earth with my hooves; in the wet soil, it is enough to uncover the pale shape of the roots, which I pull out by my teeth. They don’t smell like the hospital. Out here, I can nearly forget the scent of antiseptic – and maybe that is why I always volunteer to collect herbs, even though I don’t need to.
I am always between one sterile birdcage and another.
@Saphira || our first thread.....in Thirty years... || anne waldman, "fast talking woman"
This darkness is thicker than darkness should be.
It coagulates like blood, and warms like wine, and is harsh bitterness instead of snow-flake sweetness. It lingers on my lips like threads of wire woven between the flesh and whiskers.
I cannot sing here. The words gather on my tongue. My throat is raw with the scratch of moth wings, and butterfly wings, and wasp stingers. My song, my words, my language, flutters in my form like magma dances beneath the brightness of a star. Each time, each time, every time, I try to open my mouth the wire threads grow thorns (and more thorns, and more thorns) until I am dripping silver rain.
My silver, my blood, the weak dregs of my light, do not brighten the darkness as they should. Nothing grows where they fall. There are no horses, no foals, no mountain peaks tickling my belly, no crowns rising on sunflower stalks to fall upon my brow.
The darkness reigns.
And if I am flying in it, another stitched together thing in the darkness, it is a movement that has no direction but agony. Somewhere a leopard is snarling, and wailing, and picking clean the bones of her future kills. I know she is there, my heart knows she is, but I cannot hear the wonder of her roars and taste the iron on the wind running through the ribcage of her kill.
I wonder if she is woven shut with wire and caught in a net of blackness as I am..
I wonder.
My feathers do not sing as I move though the darkness (am I moving? am I? am I? am I?). Perhaps there was always a wish in my belly weighing me down like a stone blotting out a pillar of flame. Perhaps this darkness, the one that is not mine, is the wish.
Maybe I have to find the golden language of that wish.
And so I look for gold in the coagulated blackness with my throat that is raw with a song I cannot sing. I look.
And I look.
And I look.
And I look.
And.
I.
Look.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
YOU WATCH YOURSELF. you watch the watcher too - / a ghostly figure on the garden wall. / and one of you is her, and one is you, / if either one of you exists at all.☙❧
Were it any other time of the year, I think that the fields would have likely been beautiful.
As things are: the grass is dead and mostly browned. Thin and brittle and bobbing in the wind, like a second and golden sea. It’s pretty in its own way, but I’d like to see it green, like I’ve been told that it is in the spring – I’ve never seen a spring before, or green more than the last vestiges that remain as autumn ends, and almost nothing is green at home unless we make it so. It’s cold, but not as cold as it has been, and the heavy snows (I remember the first one I saw; I could hardly wrap my mind around the concept) have given away to frost again, like winter is slipping away to autumn again. Logically, I know that winter is slipping to spring – but I don’t know what spring is, so I can only think of it as another kind of autumn.
I’ve been here for months, and I still haven’t found the heir. I try not to be troubled by it – I try not to feel my heart in my throat every time I think that I see the sigil on some passing stranger, only to inevitably be disappointed when the mark is somehow wrong. Sometimes I think that I should tell someone why the heir is so important, why I need to find them so urgently; it might help me organize people to search, or something like it. But try as I might, I can’t quite bring myself to tell anyone the truth of the heir, or the truth of our rulers. The outsiders have stolen them away from us already – I am not sure what they might do if even more of them knew what they could do.
I’m not in the fields to search for the heir, though. (I’d be better off searching for them in the courts I haven’t visited yet – namely, Dawn and Night.) I’m here to search for someone else entirely.
Elena’s girl reminds me of something I only hazily remember. I had a younger sister in my second life, though I never felt quite so close to her as my elder sister in my first; but watching her grow up before my eyes reminds me of things that I’d thought I’d forgotten. I watch her, and I feel strange. I’ve only been in this world for a moment, particularly compared to how long I have lived, but I have known the girl for her entire life. (I – assume that her soul is newborn, anyways.) We have no innate relation – only one borne from the kindness of strangers. I don’t know how to feel about that, exactly. No one is quite a stranger at home.
I find her in the fields, a splash of snowy white and tawny, like owl’s feathers – like my long-dead elder sister – against the pale gold strands. A smile spreads unthinkingly across my lips, because I’ve brought something with me. I don’t think that she is much the type for it, but it will be good for a girl of her age to learn how to use. “Elliana?” I approach her, my gift nestled beneath the soft curve of my wing – hidden, for now, from sight. “I have something for you.”
