caine

—
« last year we abstained »

n the span of an hour Caine has toasted to a jester, a beheaded marchioness, a puppeteer with three painted (living) marionettes tied to his strings, and a child moaning balefully beneath a floating white sheet, which he was later informed (kindly, by the child's grandmother) was a ghost. 

As for himself, he had dusted off his crow-feather mask, draped his cloak between his wings so that it covered the scars, and manipulated the amount of shadow leaking off of him so that everything below his withers became writhing, amorphous darkness. His hair he had left alone, a curtain of liquidy black, pulled sleepily over an eye.

When other party-goers politely inquired as to what he was, he politely inquired what they thought he was.

The answers were amusing and various, yet thematically similar: a raven, a dead raven, a magician, the Shadow Man, a (dark) faerie prince, the reaper. A girl with a lacey white mask over her eyes had nudged her younger brother, the one who had answered reaper, and whispered: "No reaper would look like him, Jem. If they did, then we would all be in trouble." The brother had scoffed; the girl's cheeks had pinked beneath her mask.

In response, he had bent down towards her and conjured a red butterfly to flutter past her nose. "It's precisely because we look like this that you should be troubled. Never trust too pretty a thing." He had said it joylessly, but all she'd heard was his words. Staring wide-eyed at the butterfly, rendered just as it had been in her dream, she had bowed quickly before dragging her brother after her back into the nebulous crowds.

He has somehow polished off only one glass of wine throughout these episodic encounters. The wine, fragrant and sweet, has done nothing but chew a hole into his chest. 

(A hole he is afraid to call longing.)

A floating fox-mask jostles roughly into Caine's wing, sending his glass shattering, and the smile he has been wearing like decoration stretches wan and thin, like taffy. He bends down and stares at the jagged glass pieces strewn across the cobblestones. 

He supposes he ought to discard of them.

Sighing, he shakes off his cloak, dispelling the shadows (the ones nearest to him shiver with the sudden cold) and sweeps the broken glass gingerly into it. He stands, wrapping the cloak with its heart of glass carefully into squares; he does not know what next to do. His lessons in etiquette had not been quite so conclusive. And night markets sold everything but bins for disposal.

So he moves to the fringes of the crowd, near the mouth of the city's walls, where cobblestone gave to rubble and soft swells of sand. 

It is faintly ridiculous, he knows, but he can think of no better solution than a burial.

caine

—
« this year we devour »

he steps so quietly—as if the star-blood in her veins ate every sound she made as she made it—that if she had not chosen to reveal herself to him through a warbling soft whisper, Caine would not have known, would never have known, that all this time she had been so close to him.

(Hearing her voice puts a piece back into the hole in his chest. But he will not know this until later.)

The cloak and the broken glass flop to the sand, besides a gentle swell of detritus he has already dug out. Caine turns to Warset slowly, like he is afraid of frightening her away. His breath streams out in white clouds.

Really, he is just trying to steady himself.

"Maybe. But they're eager to leave me, too," he says, unsure if he is making any sense. He feels as if, the moment she had entered his orbit, he had unknowingly stepped into a dream. And now the dream is growing sentient.

"They're not very fond of me." His eyes skim over the downward swell of her wings, midnight incarnate, yet softer than a dove's. There is something about the way she holds them that he has yet to see, yet to know he is waiting to see. "Though I like them enough." Caine's lips quirk a little, when he thinks about what he is saying. How he refers to his shadows as them.  

Quietly he continues his careful perusal of her, pausing at the diamond-and-ruby mask (strangely, he is disappointed. it casts her eyes in shadow.) and furrowing—though it is not visible beneath the cast of his own mask—when he sees the tears. Silver in the dawning night.

She steps closer, and he meets her halfway. The burial is temporarily (permanently) forgotten.

"Warset." It is then that Caine realises what about the way the shed-star holds her wings, the way she holds herself, he had been waiting to see.

(He is slow to see what he has never been taught.)

She has not reached for him.

So, hesitant, wary, Caine reaches for her.

"You are crying." His forehead brushes against her mask, scars to feathers to jewels. His voice is flat, almost forcibly so, as if he is afraid of upsetting her.

This time, it is split: half fear and half the need to be steady, steady, steady.

Long ago, he had read about a prince who had wished upon a star. After he had finished with the book he had walked uncertainly to his window, peeled back the curtains, and looked for the brightest star in the sky. Then, he had looked to the one right below it, the one that was dimmer and smaller, because the brightest one (Polaris) belonged to the prince, and he was not one.

'Do you really grant their wishes?' he'd asked it, skeptically. It had felt faintly ridiculous. He had been an un-childlike child. 'I would grow tired of it. Is that why I was not born a star, but a boy who was not even given a name?'

Does Warset shudder at mortality? Does one who was once a star, the most holy and detached of vessels, despair at such an existence?

He shivers when his shadow cloak glides along his neck on its way to Warset's side. The glass shards it had left behind when Caine's telekinesis had shaken them out glint darkly at him from the sand, vaguely accusatory.

"When mortals cry," he says, "we like to wipe our tears away with something soft. Like a sleeve, or the edge of a cloak." The shadow cloak, shimmering faintly, gorged with shadows, and soft as a moth's wing, hovers docilely next to her.

Waiting. 

He does not ask her why she is crying. Perhaps she does not know, herself. 

caine

—
« without guilt »

aine has always wondered what it feels like to cry.

Does it feel like relief? Like metaphorical weight off a metaphorical chest?

(Anguish plus pain with an aftertaste of fury. When he had been very, very young, and as empty inside as a bell, Agenor had filled him up with equations. Happiness and anticipation equals optimism. Repeat after me. Anger and helplessness equals despair. Look at your book, you are not looking. Pain and joy equals—

"Love."

"Good. But you must be faster.")

Or is it a bucket of water tossed over a field of dancing flames? Like putting something out. Like putting something dangerous, out.

He looks at Warset, his thoughts bottled up and tangled, and wonders which one she'd choose.

“I do not know how to think of darkness that way. Darkness has only ever been a thing to shine against as we twisted lines of pale light through it to form the constellations between us.”

Everything she says sounds like music. Like reeds blowing in the wind, or of sparrows bursting into flight, or of rain softening into mist. There is something melancholic and echoic about it, something not-quite-mortal, that Caine wants to grasp gently by the wings and admire, and it would not struggle, and he would bring it softly up to the window and look at how the sunlight gilded it. 

And then he would let it go, because he only took when he was told to, and he had never been taught how to be selfish. 

“When you put it that way,” he says, his lips tugging up in a half-formed smile, “I feel a little jealous.” He pauses, his teeth biting down on his tongue, as he struggles to convey how exactly he is jealous. 

How does he tell her he has only ever been the dark?

How does he tell her that his shadows were so cold when he was already frigid to the touch, like a corpse; that every time they left him they took so much of his heat that he was afraid, irrationally afraid, that he would never gain any of it back? 

He doesn't say anything. Instead, he slumps forwards and buries his head against her neck, the wine making everything heavy, his skin so cold against hers he thinks (too late) that it must be fairly unpleasant. “It must have been warm, as a star,” Caine whispers, his breath hot, his voice muffled.

“Mortals are foolish things,” she says, suddenly, and his mouth quirks. How like a star she sounds, then; how glad he is that he is holding her now, that she is warm, that she is there, so he knows she has not left when he had been hesitating. “We are, aren't we.” His mask digs into his cheek. He wants to tear it off. “Troublesome and foolish.”

When she speaks again he lifts his head, his hair catching on the edge of his mask and hers, and considers the weight of her question. His cloak still floats obedient as a hound besides her; it had not budged, when he had. But now there is something cutting to her voice—no longer reeds, or sparrows, or rain, but glass.

Is that what it felt like to cry? Did it cut, like broken glass?

“I wouldn't know,” he begins slowly. “I have never cried.” Caine doesn't mean for it to sound like a confession; yet around her, everything always ended up being one. “But... I assume it does. Some mortal children, when they hurt themselves, cry and cry until their mothers come over and press their lips to their wounds. They don't do anything else, but the child—they stop crying.” 

Mortals are foolish things. “The wound stops hurting. Strange, is it not? Yet I think this—” he nudges the cloak, the velvet like water beneath his nose, “—is supposed to feel like that. Things do not feel any less. But we like to believe that they do.”

We. Because even if she wasn't before, Warset was a mortal now. 

And, foolish as he has always thought them, foolish as they so often are, Caine has never wanted to be anything else.

When he offers her the cloak again, he doesn't hesitate. It presses against her eyes and he says to her, very softly: “I will call them for you. The shadows. If you'd like me to.”

caine

—
« which is also an art »

hen he had learned that she was a star, Caine had spent many evenings in Solterra’s palatial archives breathing in old smoke and dusting off new ash from books that had survived three reckonings.

Some had crumbled to pieces when he'd eased them out from the scarred shelves. Some were simply shrunken covers, the leather curling under flames while its insides burned. Most of the books that remained were damaged in some vital way, torn or burned or simply neglected. What he'd felt for them was almost grief.

But a Solterran library couldn't possibly have contained the knowledge Caine sought. Among the most eminent of what he'd found had been star charts stamped with the crest of House Nazaret, the ancient mapmakers of the solar court. They had been detailed yet scientific, sheets and sheets of calculations and constellations and dry, scholarly commentary. He'd inspected them before coughing out lungfuls of dust and sliding the scrolls back into their shelves. What he'd wanted was intrigue. What he'd wanted were stories.

Myths, folklore, flowery personal accounts. ‘Shed Star’ printed in bold calligraphy on an ancient scroll that unraveled into so many heartstopping secrets that it could only be destroyed, or stuffed in a shadowy eave to be forgotten, after he'd finished with it.

Yet if such knowledge existed it had not survived the fires, or it had never entered Solterra at all. In the dust and the dark, with only a candle for company, Caine had penned his questions with a feather plucked from his own wing and folded the pieces of parchment into stars. Tossed the stars into the air and caught them. His hair spilled like ink as he lay sprawled across the floor.

Had there been any like her before? Toss. How could stars fall from the sky? Toss. Was she immortal? Could she die like he would, one day? Toss. Catch. Toss. 

Was she truly like the angels of his own divine myths? At this the paper star had hovered in the air, his eyes slitting as he gazed at it, before—down it fell, to the earthen floor.

Angel. In the days and nights Caine has not seen the shed-star, he has taken a liking to calling her that. A whisper slid quickly over the tongue. 

* * *
Caine holds a star in his arms and she is impossibly fragile, impossibly beautiful, impossible. As the star etches words like constellations into his skin, he tells himself that he needs to know nothing else but that she exists.

He tells himself that this is enough.

“The darkness was never warm,” Warset whispers. Caine shudders as she curls ever further into him. Electricity jitters down his spine and with a sudden, militaristic harshness he concludes that he is very, very drunk. He must be, or else he would not be thinking things like I don't want to ever leave and then believing gravely that he means it.

He doesn't. He doesn't. He repeats this to himself while Warset breathes words into his skin and because he is drunk, impossibly so, none of his words sink in while all of hers do.

Down to the bone.

“But I was warm enough, bright enough, that neither the darkness nor I ever froze or burned out.” Caine laughs softly into her hair. “You are.” He doesn’t quite finish. He can't figure out how to say it. So he only adjusts his wings to allow her to press herself neater against him (an action allowed because he is drunk) and lets air hiss out through his nose. You are very warm, Warset. So much so that I can almost forget the cold.

So much so—the paper star crashes to the floor—that surely, he cannot make her cold.

She listens to his story, of mothers and crying children, in wavering silence. He watches as she considers it. He watches as her eyes blink liquid and slow. Somewhere in between, as if he is sleepwalking, Caine pulls away. His heart is starting to tap out a rhythm that climbs faster and faster, horribly erratic, like a bird dashing itself to death against a cage. He is too afraid to name it; to give something a name is to give it life.

(Pain plus joy equals—)

As his ankles sink into sand, as he stumbles gracefully backwards, he catches sight of how silver her eyes are in the night and he thinks he wants to—

Her lips press softly against his cheek and want becomes surprise becomes sudden, caustic pain, a knife slash to the throat. He grows utterly still. A clock winding down, Caine thinks, half in desperation and half in madness-inducing-elation. He has pulled away yet she has followed, like a duckling or a bright-eyed doe, and as Caine thinks this his mouth quirks and his eyes blink, two pale moons waning to dark, mechanical reactions he tells himself, until her lips glide up to where tears would gather if he could cry.

His skin is too hot for him to wear. It is the liquor. (It is not the liquor.) It is a mechanical reaction. (It is a reaction. He doesn't know what to do with those.)

“You're trying to soothe me when you're the one in need of it.” His words catch in a breathy laugh. There is a heartbreak and a heartmend in it, all at once. Angel, angel—but he cannot quite say it. “You are too much,” he utters instead, his voice dying so the rest of him can start again.

Above them, red clouds mix with blue sky until a lavender dusk settles softly over their backs, like airy silk. The sun slides down into a bed of stars. Her mask has fallen away, giving company to the broken glass; she does not seem to miss it. He doesn’t, either.

If black feathers begin to tremble and shrivel from her wings, Caine does not notice it. If his cloak floats quietly down to the sand, its very presence forgotten, he spares no more than a glance to it. It is only the bloody glare of her ruby moon as he touches his mouth to her neck, so that she will not see the heat climbing up his. It is only her smile, a pure creature, burning down worlds in the fracturing light.

It is only the grudging, sober way he murmurs, “I think I am at my limit,” before clutching her tighter to him than he ever did before.

caine

—
« Red crosses on wooden doors / And if you float you burn
Loose talk around tables / Abandon all reason
Avoid all eye contact / Do not react
Shoot the messengers »


t happens slowly.

Slowly enough, at least, for Caine to blink—and blink again—and when that doesn’t seem to clear away the illusion staring him full in the face (for it cannot be reality—an illusionist doubts first his magic for going rogue, and then his eyes for going mad), he takes a shuddering step back, and then another, until his hooves crush shards of glass to powder and her wail sunders the newborn night to pieces.

He is both drunk and painfully, painfully sober. It is possible to be both, he tells himself hypnotically. It is more possible, at least, then what is happening to her.

He had been holding a star in his arms and then he hadn’t. She is there in front of him until she isn’t.

She is writhing, and the sight is short of demonic.

When Warset’s bones begin to crack apart like twigs, the first growl slipping in torment past her bloodying lips, Caine begins to shudder. He cannot go to her. He is rooted in place, shadows solidifying to bedrock. He wants to move but he cannot.

His face is a mask of shock, petrified into rigid horror.

This is his fault. 

“War—” he stutters, before his throat closes around the end of her name. It tastes like acid in his mouth and though he has spoken it only once before, how quickly he has lost the privilege. His teeth bite down on his tongue as he tries to decline what he knows to be true. From the day he had awoken wrapped in bandages and a magic that refused to be anything but red, Caine had suspected. 

No. He had more than suspected. He had known.

It is not unconceivable for unnaturally gained illusion magic such as his, when corrupted, to reach into the head of another and plant images that then turn horrifically real. The nightmare is no longer contained. It is no longer sight and smell and the longing dream of a touch. It is flesh and bone and blood. It is real.

It is his fault. 

Caine's mouth opens and shuts, nothing coming out, nothing going in. He tries to move, to help, to run, but his legs are dead trees, dead limbs, dead. There is a shrieking in his ear and he cannot tell if it is her or his madness. His wing skates against her contorting shoulder, the skin as hot as a flame, and he recoils as if burned. He thinks he hears the star whisper “I am—” but it is lost in the torrent of wails clawing out of her lips and he can do nothing for her but turn himself inside out, rooting desperately for the source of this malevolent magic. 

But there is nothing where there ought to be something, and in his panic, his eyes have turned the red of fresh blood and the night a darker, more gruesome shade. He has lost control of his magic. There cannot be another reason. Stars do not turn to beasts; but boys with cursed blood can.

“I—” Caine says, unable to get anything else out because his voice is shaking, and she is shaking, and when he blinks again there is nothing left of her but a pile of smoking black feathers and the snarling white teeth of a leopard blacker than the sky.

And then it—she—is gone.

He does not stop shaking until the first blush of dawn.