What was catastrophe?

That was the word, on the lips of Denocte’s residents, screamed and whispered and shared with the feverish, possessed nature of the afraid. There’s been a catastrophe. A disaster. A calamity. The synonyms streamed in, torrid in a way unique to fear; heavy, and heated, and ardent in the way only the doomed are ardent. Her reactions were subpar, in comparison. The fear and eyes, white at the rims, was met with Boudika’s polite dispassion. That is horrible, she would repeat, again and again, to those who told her, to those dancers in her guild that fluttered like peacocks and birds of paradise, chattering the hot gossip and their hot despair. She heard the rumours in the streets, in the guild, everywhere she went—and each story was different. 

But Boudika was not a peacock. Boudika was not a bird of paradise. And so, on the third day, she ventured toward the coastline. She had refused to visit the shore after her encounter with the water horse, not trusting herself to the beautiful, and horrendous, melody of the waves. But Boudika could shun the sea no longer; she had to feast her eyes upon it, she had to know what this catastrophe was. 

Some days ago, upon the beach, her eyes had feasted upon it. At first, it appeared an affront to nature; but simultaneously, it was nature. The volcano had existed upon the horizon, billowing ash, made bright only where the flesh of the beast ran with magma. Dark with ash, the sky seemed more like the land, as though two parallel worlds were stacked one on top of the other. What few creatures remained, days after the eruption, continued to scramble toward higher ground. 

Now, the volcano was absent. Nothing was left of it, she heard, except for a pathway of hardened lava—made strange. It was marked by arcane symbols, the threat of deep sea-creatures, bizarre fruits, and more—or so she heard. The oddity of the story peaked her curiosity more than the volcano had and so, Boudika’s second odyssey to the sea had begun, to witness for herself the strange tales of the Night Courts residents.

The sight of the pathway dropped her stomach, as though she were falling from some great height. Her heart was in her throat, not with fear, no—but with the primordial sense of wrongness the sight evoked, which was borderline disgust. Her father had once showed her one of the small, dark vipers that existed on her island—but it had been malformed, hatched with two heads. What should have made it twice as deadly, instead, made it cumbersome and sad. Where one head would pull, the other would pull harder in the other direction, until it gave way. Although the of the path was drastically different, it evoked the same sensation—and she could not look away.

Boudika did not dare venture out to sea; she stood there for a day, and listened to the stories of others as they reemerged from their journey. But she could not trust this strange magic; even more, she could not trust herself.

That was the more terrifying of the two, certainly.

Once, she stepped a few yards out along the cracked lava path and froze. What if she heard the call somewhere near the alleged ivy wall? What if the sea sensed her trepid, wanting heart and pulled her down beneath the waves? What if somewhere the calls of ghostly water horses sounded? There were too many dangers, and staring out a the vastness of the ocean with something foreign and magical staring back, Boudika no longer knew what to believe. Within her existed a high keening, the song of a lonely and desolate species; it was a cry she could not dare utter, knowing with the whole of herself it would go unanswered. 

Or maybe, it won't. And that why she retreated back to the relative safety of the sand, where she stood as the sun ran it's normal track across the sky. 

The wind whipped at her face, the tide came in and out, and the beach remained a strange animation of its former self. The birds had returned, and fish splashed in the shallow waves--but there was something inherently wrong in the shadow of the pathway. The wrongness returned her mind to the question that had been haunting her since the volcano: what was catastrophe? Her thoughts filled with the fire in Denocte, with a herd of water horses charging down a village street, teeth gnashing at a young girl’s face. Boudika saw blood on cobblestones; trident tips gleaming in sunlight; her father burning on a pyre. Boudika saw a scar, twisted bright and pink around a flank and a limp that would last forever; she saw Orestes before she knew him as Orestes, only the Prince of a Thousand Tides, standing alone when she overcame him. Boudika saw him in a prison cell; she saw him burning in iron chains; she saw his head sinking below the waves.

Perhaps catastrophe was being the last of something.

Perhaps catastrophe was extinction.

She had asked Orestes once, what weighed on him most, during their shared days of prison. What did it mean, she had wondered, to be one of the last of his kind? “There was only so much I could do to fix it, to repair the damage; when I was born, I was the last of the Reincarnates. I was the last Prince of my people, and I am not only their Prince, but their Memory. So I knew. I already knew, our fate. I already hold the memories and fears of those of us who have been enslaved or destroyed. And there were so few of us. I was the last hope, which will always be the greatest privilege of my life… but being the last hope also means you are charged with the greatest despair.”

The sun was setting, now. And the sky horizon looked like a smiling throat, cut by sharp teeth, bleeding across the waters.

It was only then that Boudika turned from the beach, her mind a chaotic jumble of images, of violence, of shadows. 

This was not a catastrophe, she had decided. Whatever it was. An apocalypse was systematic, genocidal--or if not that, then anarchic and absolute. An apocalypse may come for some of them; for most of them; but she had resolved herself, it would not come for her. And how are you so certain? She asked herself, in a dark and bitter voice.

Somewhere along the way, she had a debt to pay. And perhaps the only way to pay it was to suffer. 

It was only then, when the sky had gone dark, that Boudika left the beach and the bridge. She knew taking it would lead her no where. she knew taking it would mean she would never return. 

TO TEAR IT FROM MY VEINS UNTIL I BLEED SILVER AND GOLD, UNTIL I CAN FEEL SOMETHING AGAIN, LET'S CARVE OUR NAMES IN A HEART ON THE IVORY PILLARS OF HISTORY. MAYBE ONE DAY THEY'LL CHANT OUR NAMES. MAYBE ONE DAY THEY'LL PAINT US INTO CONSTELLATIONS AND NAME GALAXIES AFTER US. MAYBE WE TOO SHALL BE ETERNAL.