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+---- Thread: [P] I know beginnings (/showthread.php?tid=4175)
I know beginnings - Marisol - 10-19-2019
"i know endings too,
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
It’s deep-dark, and beautiful, and the air is toothy and Marisol is alone, alone, alone in the hot-heavy and incredibly crowded aisles of the night markets as the world turns around her without ever inviting her in.
Underfoot, the cracks in the cobblestone are filled with thin veins of jewels in many colors. They twist and shimmer in the glaze of the bonfires that rise up overhead to towering, towering heights, greater than Marisol could ever feel comfortable with. Her skin is lacquered with the heat of it as the flames bear down from their stone prison. But no one else is bothered by it; they walk the streets like there’s nothing suffocating about the way bodies press in on every side, or how Denocte’s music swells until it’s ringing in her skull.
The sound of laughter ricochets through the alleys, and Marisols’ heart hurts, her head throbs, she snakes through the markets and tries to keep her head down against the crushing noise and heat and darkness. Denocte has never quite sat well with her. She is not made for happiness. Not made for the raucous parties and celebrations that dot the streets every night. Not made to be wild, nor lucky, nor joyful.
She tries not to think of how Isra is all these things and more; she tries not to think of what disaster it might spell, that they are so very different.
But with or without their differences, Isra is a queen, and Marisol is now, too, and there are… things to be discussed. Asterion’s disappearance. The missing relic. Whether the borders between their homes will be left open, and, if so, for how long. Gods, she has so many questions—what happened, how do you do it, what if I make a mistake, what if I fail, what if I fail?
Do you miss me?
“Speaking.”
Underfoot, the cracks in the cobblestone are filled with thin veins of jewels in many colors. They twist and shimmer in the glaze of the bonfires that rise up overhead to towering, towering heights, greater than Marisol could ever feel comfortable with. Her skin is lacquered with the heat of it as the flames bear down from their stone prison. But no one else is bothered by it; they walk the streets like there’s nothing suffocating about the way bodies press in on every side, or how Denocte’s music swells until it’s ringing in her skull.
The sound of laughter ricochets through the alleys, and Marisols’ heart hurts, her head throbs, she snakes through the markets and tries to keep her head down against the crushing noise and heat and darkness. Denocte has never quite sat well with her. She is not made for happiness. Not made for the raucous parties and celebrations that dot the streets every night. Not made to be wild, nor lucky, nor joyful.
She tries not to think of how Isra is all these things and more; she tries not to think of what disaster it might spell, that they are so very different.
But with or without their differences, Isra is a queen, and Marisol is now, too, and there are… things to be discussed. Asterion’s disappearance. The missing relic. Whether the borders between their homes will be left open, and, if so, for how long. Gods, she has so many questions—what happened, how do you do it, what if I make a mistake, what if I fail, what if I fail?
Do you miss me?
RE: I know beginnings - Isra - 10-26-2019
"We are a lost cause,
doomed before our inception.”
doomed before our inception.”
And she's there in the wild forest, their queen, pressing onward through the crowd like she's just a girl dancing by the water's edge with pearls around her throat. Like she's not a wolf walking through their mortal realm pretending not to be a god. Here, in this home, its easy to be nothing more than another body in the crowd, another girl longing for a secret touch.
Isra knows it's dangerous, all this wanting (and dreaming and aching). She knows it's slowly eating away at any soft edge or flower blossom left in her heart.
Later she'll tell herself she was about to leave, to find Eik and her wild children, to do anything but inch closer to the roaring fire. Later she'll tell herself it was only politics that made falter the moment she spotted Marisol walking tight as a blade though the crowd.
Later, later, later... she will know it was all a lie.
The sharp inhale of breath she takes has nothing to do with sorrow, only wanting, only hurting. Roses, thorny and bloody, replace all the stones at her hooves. When she moves it is almost quietly on that bed of roses that winds through the crowd all the way to Marisol. And when she's close enough to count the feathers of her wings, Isra can see the way the night and the fire is making all the space around the new queen lilac.
Isra doesn't pause before steeping into that twilight space. Nor does she pause to think it's a terrible thing for her to do--- the way she traces the curl of Marisol's cheek with her lips. The only pause she takes is the one between her sharp inhale and when she says, “I missed you.”And like always, like forever, it comes out like a breathy prayer that a girl dancing by the the sea might whisper.
Again Isra thinks, there is a home here in the wild streets.
@
RE: I know beginnings - Marisol - 10-31-2019
"i know endings too,
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
There is a little murmur that goes up through the crowd, a faint shudder-ripple, as if of movement. Marisol stops; she blinks, her eyes drop to the cobblestone. It is turning dark, bloody red.
The air fills with the scent of roses, as if blossoms have been crushed on someone’s heel. Now the stones are thinning and rippling into a sea of velvet petals. Thorns surge from the wave of maroon, they scratch and prick her ankles, she thinks for a moment that all that red might be hers, her blood seeping out drop by drop, and with a sharp inhale Marisol turns her narrow, dark head.
Isra is standing very close to her in a space that rings of uncertainty.
Isra is standing with the flame-light golden around all her sharp edges, her face soft as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. Her horn is a sword in the half-darkness and her blue, blue scales the moody color of a shadowed mountain. Her eyes should be blue, under the bright hands of the bonfires, they reflect gold, like sunlight on an unbroken sea.
Marisol finds herself, as always, envious: when will she finally become beautiful?
Anyway, somehow, she swallows against the rough-edged salt in her throat and dips her head, even as Isra speaks, even as her heart pounds against her teeth. Nausea clamps in her stomach. When she looks up through those lashes to met Isra’s eyes, the gray there is dark, dark, dark. Like swirling whirlpools or cave-deep chasms. On anyone else it might be lust. On her it is only hungry.
“Isra,” she says, and with purpose falls silent before she can say anything in response to the I miss you. The lacking words ring in her ears until she can hear nothing else but the crackling of the bonfires and the sorrow-deep beat of her heart in her chest.
Silence.
Silence.
Finally she raises her head. The firelight plays tricks on her dark skin, on the shaper lines of her face and the steel-glint of her eyes. If she does still smell like salt, it is overwhelmed by the jasmine and embers that fill the air around them; but she is straight-backed and hard-shouldered and does not flinch against the cold darkness or the weight of Isra’s gaze on her body.
Marisol clears her throat. “I am Queen now.” Her voice does not tremble, her eyes do not falter. She stares at Isra with vitriol and unflinching nerve. “I imagined you would want to know.”
“Speaking.”
The air fills with the scent of roses, as if blossoms have been crushed on someone’s heel. Now the stones are thinning and rippling into a sea of velvet petals. Thorns surge from the wave of maroon, they scratch and prick her ankles, she thinks for a moment that all that red might be hers, her blood seeping out drop by drop, and with a sharp inhale Marisol turns her narrow, dark head.
Isra is standing very close to her in a space that rings of uncertainty.
Isra is standing with the flame-light golden around all her sharp edges, her face soft as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. Her horn is a sword in the half-darkness and her blue, blue scales the moody color of a shadowed mountain. Her eyes should be blue, under the bright hands of the bonfires, they reflect gold, like sunlight on an unbroken sea.
Marisol finds herself, as always, envious: when will she finally become beautiful?
Anyway, somehow, she swallows against the rough-edged salt in her throat and dips her head, even as Isra speaks, even as her heart pounds against her teeth. Nausea clamps in her stomach. When she looks up through those lashes to met Isra’s eyes, the gray there is dark, dark, dark. Like swirling whirlpools or cave-deep chasms. On anyone else it might be lust. On her it is only hungry.
“Isra,” she says, and with purpose falls silent before she can say anything in response to the I miss you. The lacking words ring in her ears until she can hear nothing else but the crackling of the bonfires and the sorrow-deep beat of her heart in her chest.
Silence.
Silence.
Finally she raises her head. The firelight plays tricks on her dark skin, on the shaper lines of her face and the steel-glint of her eyes. If she does still smell like salt, it is overwhelmed by the jasmine and embers that fill the air around them; but she is straight-backed and hard-shouldered and does not flinch against the cold darkness or the weight of Isra’s gaze on her body.
Marisol clears her throat. “I am Queen now.” Her voice does not tremble, her eyes do not falter. She stares at Isra with vitriol and unflinching nerve. “I imagined you would want to know.”
RE: I know beginnings - Isra - 11-10-2019
"seemed no longer love or anything happy
but a monster between them,
with each of them caught in a fist.”
but a monster between them,
with each of them caught in a fist.”
And maybe that's the true meaning of being a monster: drinking the sea with thorny chains and rotten roses tangling up my legs like roots.
When the silence goes on too long I almost want to pull the toll of it from her skin in kisses and teeth. I want to tell her that it doesn't have too be like this, like queens staring at each other with bloody lines carved into the sand between them. I want to tell her a hundred things but I understand too why she's like this. Of course I know it's my fault and as much as I hate her for it, for the way even looking at her with the thud-thud-thudding in my chest feels like the the worst thing I've ever done, I cannot help but look at what I've done.
It's like the way the sea can't stop looking at the shore even when it knows the rocks and the sand will never look quite the same every again. Over and over the sea looks, and tastes, and takes, and the shore is still dies in its beautiful way. I wonder if I've always loved the rot or if all the lash and chains of my old life made me love it so (or maybe it was death, or Raum, or suffering).
But looking at her reminds me that there are all these lines between us. Even though I do not want them to be they are bloody, and tainted, and too endless to be called straight. I pull back across that line she's swung between us like a metal chord begging for skin. My ears lash like a whip into my mane and I know the fires are still pooling golden in my eyes that are surely flashing something romantic as war at her. I'm not sure what look my lips are making but oh I hope it's not a sneer, I hope it's a scythe cold as frost and sharp as a snowflake. “I knew.” My words taste bitter, like fruit fallen too early from a tree and left to rot in the rain.
Part of me wants say that I'm sorry for the knowing, for not coming to see if she was doing well, for wiping the sadness from Eik's eyes instead of hers. It feels like swallowing a fiery blade when I don't. The words don't die like they should, only smolder. That bloody line between us yawns and shows me its teeth.
Somewhere a harp is playing, and I want to touch her hip like I did once. To show her that it's okay to feel something other than blackness, and sea-cold. I want to tell her that it doesn't have to be like this.
I want, I want, I want--
I pull back and all the roses at my feet turn to smoky quartz as gray as her eyes seem. When I inhale I try to make it look like I'm only pulling in jasmine air instead of pushing out a sob. “How is your court faring?” The words I want to say though, are not those, and I can feel them in the corners of my eyes like tears.
@
RE: I know beginnings - Marisol - 11-14-2019
"i know endings too,
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
I knew—
She knew and didn’t send a bird.
She knew, and she didn’t send a gift—she knew three of Marisol’s best people had fallen off the edge of the earth and did not come to visit, did not send a letter, did not even send a messenger in place of her remorse.
The edge of her vision becomes dark and blurry; bright, sharp heat burns against the inside of her chest and the curve of her nostrils; for a moment the world presses in so tight she can hardly breathe, can hardly hear for the rising pitch of ringing in her ears, and Marisol feels the world falling away in a pitch-dark whirlpool as she stands, cold and tense, in a square full of life she cannot begin to understand. The music is too loud now, too oppressive. It weighs down on her like duty, like diamonds, and with every passing second it knots her shoulders tighter.
The world is ringing, and ringing, and ringing—
She blinks, resurfaces, and all at once and everything is clear and loud again.
But it’s not any prettier. And she doesn’t feel any better.
Underfoot the ground shifts like so much sand, reverberates in an earthquake-song that crawls snakelike through Marisol’s bones, echos against her ribs. Cavernous. Empty, empty, empty. Every beat cracks her shell a little bit more; her gaze is starting to burn with the effort of holding back tears. Damn it. She blinks, hard and rapid, furious, and still salt is building in the corners of her mouth, brimming against her lashes, don’t cry—
A sharp inhale and she’s stoic again. Composed. Quiet. All the things a queen is supposed to be, all the things a Commander needs to be—she is strong again, so strong it makes her stiff and sharp.
And yet inside all she wants to do is say please, and please again; all she wants to do is fall into Isra’s arm; all she does is want, want, want, and it will never be enough, will it? But now is not the time to think of it. Now is not the time to show weakness. If she plays her cards right, this meeting will be only political. If she can keep her act together, Isra will never have to know about the thing inside her that keens, pathetic as a dog, for a thing it can never have in good conscience.
“Well enough.” Mari’s voice is rough and low, something like strained but not quite. Her pulse trembles bright and loose. With every blink of those thick, dark lashes, with every second that she meets Isra’s bright-blue eyes, her conviction wavers.
How am I so weak, she thinks, and a moment later—around her, how could anyone not be?
“I…” The word is clipped so early it’s almost inaudible; Marisol ducks her head close to her chest. Despite her best efforts her voice is starting to tremble. The emotion swims as close to the surface as a salmon does in a river; it is as raw and disheartening as a newly opened wound. She inhales so deep it burns. “I—I’ve—I’ve missed you.”
And the admission of it sinks in her stomach like a boulder.
RE: I know beginnings - Isra - 12-08-2019
“Promise me you'll never forget me
because if I thought you would,
I'd never leave.”
because if I thought you would,
I'd never leave.”
I want to paint those words across her throat when she inhales sharply. I want to pull the air from her lungs. I want--
When she says well enough I know the look I make is wavering and reading. How long have I understood that well enough us nothing more than an iron gate? It seems like I've known that gate all my life and only just now realized that it's a garden blooming with diamonds, and moon-petals, and jasmine waiting on the other side. I wonder if Marisol knows about the garden; I wonder if she knows about the gate and how it loves to lie as much as it longs for the truth.
The queen in me knows I should ask if she knows. This should be about insuring that all the wounds I healed with Asterion can remain whole. I should be worried about our borders, and our ports, and the merchants yelling out around us. What I should do is turn the quartz to cobble-stone, lead her to the ports to showcase all the things that Denocte might offer to her new crown. I should--
Marisol tucks her head to her chest. I am lost, lost, lost.
Instead I cross this wasteland of smokey quartz like a god walking across her newborn world. My hooves sound hollow, like I'm only a ghost instead of a thing made of flesh and bone and want. I do not pause to think of any of the things I need to be. I only know that there is this moment, her with her wavering breath and her tucked head. I only know that there will be so few of these moments, if any, left in this life for us. So I grab it between my teeth and pull. It doesn't feel like roots, it feels like an anchor, like holding a boat still in a storm knowing that the sea is going to take it no matter how hard I hold on. I try anyway.
I push my nose against hers in a touch that begs her to look up, up, up. I want her to see the fire halos all around us. I want her to see the constellations of diamond that are running wild through the quartz. There's a crack running across my heart with blood leaking out that I want her to see. “You should know...” I press our cheeks together even though I know that touch won't line our cracks up in just the right way. I inhale her. I pause.
This isn't like when my hollow soul found Eik. It's not like becoming, like flying, like imploding and making a new universe. It's not the forever of gods.
This is like remembering for the first time that I was mortal once. It's like being a slave and discovering that the moonlight hits the top of your pillow every night. I feel like my old skin, my old body, my old heart is trying to hold on to just a small piece of the new one. It reminds me of how sweet goodbyes are, how they ferment on the tongue with a hundred heavy flavors all at once.
I trace my nose across her cheek, her throat, the coldness below her eyes, before I continue. “that my heart has always loved you.” There's more I should say, but I've always been terrible at should. I'm too full of feeling and fire and wanting. How can anyone who is two bodies, two lives, two dreams be anything but pieces fitting poorly together? How can I be anything but a broken goodbye?
But I try not to think about that as I watch the pulse flutter behind her cheek. I try not to think anything at all as I wait.
And wait.
And wait.
@
RE: I know beginnings - Marisol - 01-03-2020
"i know endings too,
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
There is no room for this anymore, whatever this is. And Marisol knows it like she knows death is coming for her, with eager black eyes and a flat, pretty smile: she knows that every passing second they stand here just talking is one more second she and Isra won’t get to kiss.
One more second they fail to remain in love. One more second her heart twists like something wild caught in a sawtooth trap. One less second left to be alive. She is hurting in the way of a wounded animal. Every muscle is coiled as if to pounce, every heartbeat rougher and deeper and louder than the last, and then she cannot hear anything (anything) but the rush of blood in her ears and the undulating noise of the market, half music and half cacophony.
Isra’s eyes, in the dim-dark, are jewels. Polished rocks of sapphire. Like the ground under her feet, how she turns it from cobblestone to smokey quartz with just a blink, just a breath: that kind of bright, magic gemstone, a specimen from way below the surface of the earth.
Marisol swallows. Her throat is painfully, desert-air dry. Her mouth tastes like salt and iron, a nasty, earthy funk that sits like silt in the line of her gums, under her tongue, sliding all the way back until it seems to rust any part of her that is capable of speaking. And then she can only stare. Wide grey eyes, mouth just-open, everything in her crushed until it is bleeding something worse than blood. Colder. More crippling.
You should know, the Night queen starts, and Marisol thinks with some regret: I know absolutely nothing.
Nothing at all.
Not even the things I should.
She is trying to think of something to say. Anything. Picking her brain, trying and scraping the bottom of the barrel. There are infinite things Mari could respond; all of them are completely useless. It makes her feel awful. Stupid, inferior. Speechless. Stunned into silence like she is nothing more than a child, struggling under the weight of her heart, swollen heavy like cement, suddenly growing black with rot.
Her pulse is at once too slow and too fast. Too hard and too faint. She feels nauseated, light-headed. The blood is rippling in her head, beating and undulating, like so many uncontrolled waves.
Then—Isra is touching her.
Shock.
Nose to nose, cheek to cheek, warmth unspooling from her skin like inside her ribs there is a fire burning and beating, fighting to escape. And Marisol shudders as if she is a creature made of ice finally learning how to melt: her skin thrills, tightens, some part of her begins to understand what it means to fall apart.
“Has,” Marisol repeats softly. It sounds foreign, sharp and hard in her mouth. Cutting the soft corners of her lips. Has. And the word rings in her ears, in her head, like a bell; it rings in her bones, in the hollow of her chest, against her teeth an up into her jaw. “Not will.”
She already knows there is no good answer.
RE: I know beginnings - Isra - 01-07-2020
“in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--”
Maybe I don't know what I am anymore.
The quartz moans underneath my hooves and it makes the sound I imagine a dead star makes crashing through a cloud. Everything in me aches at the sound of it, of quartz lamenting as it turns to brick. And everything in me trembles (everything but this skin I wear over the sharp edges of me) as the glitz around us turns to loam, and roots, and rust. I can taste it all on my tongue, the earth instead of the sea, war instead of sorrow. When I swallow it the only flavor I can pull loose is moonlight-- silver, cold, ivy moonlight. I miss the storm. I miss the violence. I miss-- oh! I miss the love.
But it doesn't hurt the way it should to pull away from her; it doesn't sting. My marrow doesn't start to rot, and my eyes don't pool with saltwater sorrow. My war, my war, my war, it's all I can feel when I pull away. And when I look at her, and the nothingness in her gaze, and the nothingness in her voice, my war reaches out to comfort me in the ways love never could. It's my freedom, my godhood, my salvation all at once and I can see it now when I look at Marisol, queen of her court across the shore.
“I should have known.” My voice sounds like a stone rolling downhill. I cannot stop it because I've been thinking those words (over and over like a pulse behind my eyes) since I saw her shudder like a lamb between my jaw. And I don't touch her again as she trembles, and melts, and looks like she wants to dissolve into the wind and blow away. I do nothing but look at her like an immortal, young god who has only now discovered the new current of her soul and her tumbling, jagged thoughts. “We don't see in the same colors anymore.”
Fable's shadow runs over us as he swoops from the castle to the sea. I close my eyes beneath the blackness of his form and I inhale sharply to feel the air beneath his wings and the fury in his throat. And of course, I think, Marisol could not love me if this is how it feels to fly above the forests and the tides. And of course, this form of mine cannot see the colors beyond the horizon. Of course. Of course. Of course.
“And maybe this is all for the best.” I want to tell her I'm leaving and that I'll look at the horizon sometimes and think of her. There is that goodbye in my eyes when I look at her with the feeling of flying still tumbling inside my crooked, racing soul. This is all I can give her, this last look with a goodbye flashing deep as the sea in my eyes. It's all I can bear.
And this time I do not walk from her. I run.
I run.
I run because my heart is not my soul.
@
RE: I know beginnings - Marisol - 01-08-2020
"i know endings too,
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."
Marisol’s heart is pounding in her throat, and with every painful heartbeat it breaks more and more and more until she cannot feel anything but pangs of cold and numbness. All the little, sharp-edged pieces are scattered around her chest and the cage of her now-weak ribs: they are smaller, harsher and more invisible than glass, and with every passing breath a new shard lodges itself in her lungs.
She can smell her own blood. It is rife on her breath as she gasps for cold air, flooding out of her as easily as funeral tears. It smells wrong. Sour. Rotten. Like someone has put a tap into the vein of a dead thing instead of a maple tree.
Or maybe it’s just the weakness inherently attached to the idea of it—bleeding, physically or otherwise—that rubs her the wrong way. Maybe it is not the smell of that spoiled blood, but the accompanying persistent, unforgivable reminder of vulnerability that makes Mari curl her lip and and clench her jaw.
Everything in her shakes with the effort of staying together. The threads that knot one bone to the next are falling apart, crumbling to dust. Her muscles are unspooling like ribbons. The longer she stands here, in this place that is not home, meeting the eyes of someone she cannot love, the weaker she feels, and then there is a blink and a swirling, roaring, overwhelming movement, like the earth is rotating at twice the right speed—
And then it stops.
Marisol’s head is chiming. Her teeth are knocking together. There is no light left but the faint blue glow of Isra’s scales, calling to her like the bottom of the ocean does: soft and dark and so, so deep.
The world is quiet now. All of it is in the raw. Whoever was in charge of making it look pretty (was it them?) has failed; everything has been stripped down to the bare essentials. Rock. Light.
Blood. Body.
There is nothing left but the hard, insistent pound of her heart; the sound of Isra’s voice ringing through the air like a bell; and the rush of blood, identical to the sound of waves on the cliffs tumbling over one another, crashing and dying and rising again. Marisol thinks:
I am going to crash and die and rise again.
Marisol thinks:
I have no other choice.
She swallows and tastes blood, tastes iron, tastes salt. Tastes dying. Tastes the ocean, when she was dragged down into it and forgot how to breathe, when the world shrank down to a pinpoint: a bloodthirsty contracted pupil. A set of sharp teeth. A sharp, fearful feeling between sleeping and really sleeping, forever.
It is a pinpoint that she realizes, with a horrible start, Isra doesn’t know about. This pinpoint is the one thing in the world Marisol knows more about than she does. (And duty, maybe.) (The Commander is becoming bitter once again.)
Isra is speaking. She must be. Her lips are moving. Marisol watches carefully, trying to make it out, but they are too far apart; she can’t hear whatever it is the god-queen is saying. Can’t read the movements of her lips. A chasm is forming (or is deepening) between them. When Mari looks down, she thinks she might throw up.
For the first time in her life she is afraid of heights. For the first time in her life she has completely forgotten she even has wings.
“Isra.” Marisol says it in a voice that breaks and breaks again. She says it with eyes that are brimming with tears and a mouth that is suddenly dried out by salt. She says it not like a queen, or a warrior, or a Commander or even a person but like an animal: a raw, keening, wanting sound shattered by the weight of wanting and the pull of an apology she doesn’t understand how to word.
She says it like she is still in love. Breaking or broken or both: “Isra, I still love—“
But Isra is gone. Without a goodbye. Without a kiss, a touch, a nod, she is gone, not walking but running, fleeing a thing Marisol, in stark comparison, is still trying to catch and snap the neck of.
Isra is gone. Without an explanation, an address, a message of forgiveness. Isra is gone and she has left nothing.
Marisol’s heart has turned to dust. She is breathing it in, though she doesn’t want to, because there is no other way.
Isra is gone. You did not ever love me, the Commander realizes. She hopes dazedly that the sound of her sudden understanding will follow the queen, will reach her and strangle her, wherever she is going.
And then Marisol is gone, too.