I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK

TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY

He meets Raum’s eyes, and he steadies.

For there he reads all the things that have come to be familiar to him in the past months, the only net he has left to hang onto as the flood that has become Novus tries its best to wash him away. In that fathomless blue there is power and righteousness and not a speck of fear or of doubt.

Still he is glad when the man turns his attention away again. And he looks back at the unicorn like a frail foal on the ground and wonders what the Ghost means by beyond your perception. As if these things were only illusions, as if they could not hurt you if only you told yourself they could not.

But Abel has seen the blood drawn from flowers that turned to barbed wire. He has seen the gold and the glitz - such wealth! made from bones and stones and dust! - and now it is a wary eye he casts on those spilling vines and petals. He swallows when they begin to buzz and swishes his tail uneasily against his haunches and watches Raum, wondering if his master’s mouth will become a lion’s again.

He hears the whine of the first hornet as it trembles into the air, but he does not see it, for Isra is rising.

The unicorn queen is rising and Abel wants to run away, to hide in the shadows like a boy too small for the fight in his alley. He is nothing, he has no magic, and here are these two giants in a cave too small, full of old and watching bones that are bones no longer but hornets, hornets that have all the anger and all the wisdom of holy bones and poisoned unicorns.

It is not a place for an orphan with nothing but a name.

A name not even spoken, not like the names of kings and queens like anchors - Isra, says Raum, and Raum, says Isra, and even as he shuffles toward the wall and kicks dust and swats his dark tail against the coming onslaught Abel is thinking of old stories of the gods. The way they chased each other through eternity, neither winning, neither yielding, neither mindful of the blood and broken things in their wake.

They were gods, after all. They could just repair them again. If it pleased them.

But nothing good ever came of the mortals who walked in their shadows.

Abel wishes he were a boy made of mud. Then the hornets would ignore him, would fly past with the hum of their wings and out into the world, where they might find other victims for their unnatural rage. But he is flesh and blood and bone and all his skin is quivering as he stomps and snaps and shivers, as he kicks cave-dust toward the altar like it might be enough to smother them, like the queen could not just turn the dust to something hurtful or lovely or both as easily as thinking.

As they sting him, as little bright sparks of maddening pain erupt like fireworks all along him, he stumbles toward the unicorn whose horn is lowered at Raum (as if anything could pierce the heart of a Ghost!) and he notices how their little bodies crawl all over her, too.

He wants to hiss or maybe to beg stop that, you will kill all three of us but he wonders as a madness of chaos and pain settles on him if that is not what she intends. And so he says nothing, only shuts his eyes tight and grits his teeth and stomps his hooves over and over, a dance upon the ivy-turned-to-insects, until the cave is full of a sound like mad drumming and the shivering, shallow breath of a boy trying to shut down his brain so that he might keep control of his body.

Eventually, he knows, the pain will be over. He will live or he will die but the pain will end, and he repeats it like a litany until it’s the only thing he knows.