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+----- Thread: [P] the quiet grave (/showthread.php?tid=5678)
the quiet grave - Nicnevin - 10-23-2020
AS THOUGH SHE WERE SURPRISED, NOT THAT SHE HAD BEEN STRUCK BY AN ARROW, / BUT THAT IT WOULD HURT
☙❧
In my homeland, all things have a soul.
I don’t know if I believed it, before I died for the first time. Now, with the feather-light memory of dead bone carved into me permanently, I don’t think that I can forget it. Perhaps that is why it affects me so profoundly to step hoof onto the bridge. The moment that I do, I know, somewhere in my chest, that I am standing on bone, though I did not realize that the bridge was the curve of a ribcage the moment before – and, the moment that I know, I am suddenly unable to forget what it meant to be shaved down until I was nothing but bone, and, when bone, what it meant to be forgotten and to rot. The realization makes the air heavy. Heavy like the press of moss and soil, like the slither of a passing earthworm, like decay. I am only going down, and there is some great distance between myself and the roof of the cave.
I am not claustrophobic, but I feel – strange. Less like myself than like a sword, but not at all like the sharp edge. Only the carved hilt, maybe, or the blunt.
I press on, regardless.
What brought me here was mostly a whim. I think that I was looking for the mirrors – or, rather, what might be reflected in those mirrors, my faded half-memories made flesh and blood on the blurry canvas of their surface. The girl I’d met in the labyrinth of mirrors said that place was a graveyard, so I’d come back looking for graves, the engraving on tombstones I no longer remember how to find.
I didn’t find it. Instead, there was only the gaping mouth of the cave, which beckoned me down, down, down - and, although I knew it was foolish, I found myself doing just as it asked.
I might have turned back, when I felt bone, rather than polished gemstone, beneath my hooves. That would have been the more sensible thing to do. But when I found myself standing on the bridge, my eyes trained on the glimmering allure of the castle – and it was that glistening façade that suggested to me most of all that it was unspeakably dangerous or unspeakably awful, and that I should almost certainly turn back –, I found that I could not turn away. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried to pull back, I could only move forward.
I traced the curve of that gem-encrusted ribcage with the gentle reverence of the once-dead, and I dared not look down or think too deeply about what sort of creature might leave such a skeleton behind.
The city folds out in front of me, maze upon maze; from a distance, it reminds me incomprehensibly of what it is like to look at a rosebud unfurling.
I descend – ascend – into that labyrinth for some time.
--
I am staring at something that is nearly a work of art, nearly a statue, a ribcage unfurling to bone-bloom after wretched bone-bloom. It is at the centerpiece of a fountain run dry in the middle of an empty city square; it seems that it used to run, because there are the tell-tale marks of running water pale and blotched on the edges of the openings in the bone, but, for now, it is completely silent. I wonder how long it has been dry. (I wonder how long it has been here at all.) It looks – ancient, somehow. Long-abandoned, well-preserved, and ancient.
With no other obvious landmarks in sight, I edge closer to the fountain, my brows furrowing. As I draw closer and closer, something sticky-sweet, like fresh pollen, tickles my nose; and I eye those bone-flowers, not entirely sure what to make of them. They aren’t real. They’re carved. But they smell like flowers, not like rot and decay, not like the familiar must of bone- and I find myself wondering if they are carved at the core, if this isn’t some expression of a soul trapped beneath their white, time-pocked surface.
At any rate, I step back from them, nearly stumbling over the edge of the fountain in my hurry to draw away from the fountain, and the flowers.
I cannot say for sure if this place is all death – or if nothing within it is dead at all.
@Isolt || <3 || mary gordon, "joan of arc"
Speech
☙❧
In my homeland, all things have a soul.
I don’t know if I believed it, before I died for the first time. Now, with the feather-light memory of dead bone carved into me permanently, I don’t think that I can forget it. Perhaps that is why it affects me so profoundly to step hoof onto the bridge. The moment that I do, I know, somewhere in my chest, that I am standing on bone, though I did not realize that the bridge was the curve of a ribcage the moment before – and, the moment that I know, I am suddenly unable to forget what it meant to be shaved down until I was nothing but bone, and, when bone, what it meant to be forgotten and to rot. The realization makes the air heavy. Heavy like the press of moss and soil, like the slither of a passing earthworm, like decay. I am only going down, and there is some great distance between myself and the roof of the cave.
I am not claustrophobic, but I feel – strange. Less like myself than like a sword, but not at all like the sharp edge. Only the carved hilt, maybe, or the blunt.
I press on, regardless.
What brought me here was mostly a whim. I think that I was looking for the mirrors – or, rather, what might be reflected in those mirrors, my faded half-memories made flesh and blood on the blurry canvas of their surface. The girl I’d met in the labyrinth of mirrors said that place was a graveyard, so I’d come back looking for graves, the engraving on tombstones I no longer remember how to find.
I didn’t find it. Instead, there was only the gaping mouth of the cave, which beckoned me down, down, down - and, although I knew it was foolish, I found myself doing just as it asked.
I might have turned back, when I felt bone, rather than polished gemstone, beneath my hooves. That would have been the more sensible thing to do. But when I found myself standing on the bridge, my eyes trained on the glimmering allure of the castle – and it was that glistening façade that suggested to me most of all that it was unspeakably dangerous or unspeakably awful, and that I should almost certainly turn back –, I found that I could not turn away. No matter what I did, no matter how I tried to pull back, I could only move forward.
I traced the curve of that gem-encrusted ribcage with the gentle reverence of the once-dead, and I dared not look down or think too deeply about what sort of creature might leave such a skeleton behind.
The city folds out in front of me, maze upon maze; from a distance, it reminds me incomprehensibly of what it is like to look at a rosebud unfurling.
I descend – ascend – into that labyrinth for some time.
--
I am staring at something that is nearly a work of art, nearly a statue, a ribcage unfurling to bone-bloom after wretched bone-bloom. It is at the centerpiece of a fountain run dry in the middle of an empty city square; it seems that it used to run, because there are the tell-tale marks of running water pale and blotched on the edges of the openings in the bone, but, for now, it is completely silent. I wonder how long it has been dry. (I wonder how long it has been here at all.) It looks – ancient, somehow. Long-abandoned, well-preserved, and ancient.
With no other obvious landmarks in sight, I edge closer to the fountain, my brows furrowing. As I draw closer and closer, something sticky-sweet, like fresh pollen, tickles my nose; and I eye those bone-flowers, not entirely sure what to make of them. They aren’t real. They’re carved. But they smell like flowers, not like rot and decay, not like the familiar must of bone- and I find myself wondering if they are carved at the core, if this isn’t some expression of a soul trapped beneath their white, time-pocked surface.
At any rate, I step back from them, nearly stumbling over the edge of the fountain in my hurry to draw away from the fountain, and the flowers.
I cannot say for sure if this place is all death – or if nothing within it is dead at all.
@Isolt || <3 || mary gordon, "joan of arc"
Speech
RE: the quiet grave - Isolt - 10-30-2020
the beauty of winter captures my soul
If my sister were here, she would be growing flowers from the bones of this ribcage-bridge. She would make it a garden of death, and color, and beauty, and we would dance together in it.
But she is not here. And I am staring at these bones, and I am trying, I am trying so hard — and nothing comes. Nothing answers me. Only a speck of rot creeps further up the curve of the rib, and it cracks beneath the weight of it.
But she is not here. And I am staring at these bones, and I am trying, I am trying so hard — and nothing comes. Nothing answers me. Only a speck of rot creeps further up the curve of the rib, and it cracks beneath the weight of it.
S
omewhere, she knows, her twin is carving out her agony from a god’s vein. And her mother-monster is rediscovering her violence, while her father tries to forget his, and all of them are following the god-blood rivers running to the same point. But she is not.
She is climbing, running up when all the rivers are running down, and she does not think to look at that point where they all converge somewhere at the bottom. She does not think to find her family waiting there for her. She does not think of anything at all.
She is only feeling the way the bones beneath her hooves are calling out to the bones beneath her skin (or is it the other way around?), the way each step echoes in the dark pit of her belly. And she is feeling the wind-that-does-not-blow sit stale and stagnant against her cheek like a kiss, the weight of all that dead-air pressing in against her as she climbs. And every time the walls pulse and weep more of that silver blood-water, she feels her own heart leaping to beat in time with it.
Isolt does not know how she finds the courtyard with the carved-bone flowers. She thinks maybe they had called her here, or that maybe the island had listened to the hungry cry of her magic and made this place for her and for her alone. Or maybe she had been following the pegasus marked like the forest here — because when she crosses the threshold and listens to her tail blade tap, tap, tapping out a song on the bone floors, she is there, waiting.
And everything in her, every bit of her hunger from before that had begged her to carve that leaf from her brow and hang it from the winter-bare branches, all of it starts to gnash its teeth at the sight of her standing there.
For a long, trembling moment, she says nothing. She does nothing. She stands at the corner of the fountain and waits to feel seen, but by the girl or by the flowers she is not sure. Long seconds tick by, and her tail aches to count them out along the curved throat of the fountain, but she doesn’t.
It is not until Nicnevin meets her gaze, red to bloody red, that she steps forward. Her blade scratches a line down the side of the fountain.
“Oh,” she breathes, when she steps forward to take the place the other girl had abandoned. “They are beautiful.” She traces the petals with her horn, and this time — this time! — she does not see the black specks of disease creeping along their edges.
It settles something in her bones that she had not realized was aching.