I am the angels that hold and surround you, I am the demon you're afraid to need. I am the temple that will bless and feed you, I'm the religion keeping you in chains

It is late, when I pass beneath the arch that, when I built it, I did not know it would be my magnum opus. There is a storm building on the horizon like the storm in me. Dark, heavy clouds sitting in the in-between space between here and there, then and now. I can feel the way off thunder in my bones. Heat lightning streaks through the clouds, purple and red like bruises and blood.

There is no moon to paint a kaleidoscope of colors through the stained glass windows in the arch. There is no moon to laugh as she stares down at my back, retreating from the place I had come to call home. The windows are lightless tonight, and I am a void. The world is waiting, holding its breath. The storm will break. Sooner or later, it will break.

I ascend the mountainside, like I did once those years ago in that snowstorm, axe in hand. I climb, and climb, until I rise into cooler air. Until I am standing on a precipice, looking down on a world so small I could forget that it once housed something better in me. I cannot decide if I should be forgetting all of the things it made me, or remembering the things it changed in me.

My instincts sense it coming before I hear it—long before I see it—whatever is running, out there, in the rocks and the snow. Everything is slow, as I turn. As the takin stumbles and falls. I can feel its exhaustion. Nearby, a snow leopard screams.

As I make my way closer to the creature, I consider. It tries to stand and fails, though it does not look injured. Has it simply given up? My magic draws closer, weaving its way around the tired beast. Something carnal rears its head inside me, like a black wave crashing or a great maw yawning open. I could save its life. But I would be leaving the leopard to hunger. I stand there next to the takin for what feels like hours. I know its hunter will be here soon.

So I do what I should have done, everytime my loyalty to what I am was called into question.

I walk away.

My magic cleaves itself from the takin, which does not try to stand again. I go further around the mountain, deeper into its heart, its chill. My magic feels the moment the snow leopard gets its meal, like a source being depleted. Something inside me turns icy as the stones under my feet. I do not stop. I keep going, until I am no longer thinking about living or dying or the world behind me.

"Speaking."

I am the angels that hold and surround you, I am the demon you're afraid to need. I am the temple that will bless and feed you, I'm the religion keeping you in chains

The thunder reaches down inside my bones, eating up all the empty places and filling them with something else instead. The thunder sounds like the roar of the lioness in my veins, who stalks, and stalks, and stalks. She is hungry, and yearning. I have nothing to offer her, now. So I keep going.

I go up, and up, as the clouds come in and devour the sky. It feels like a metaphor. It feels like the sky is only everything I have been trying to push away, and yet it comes. Ruthlessly, unfailingly, even undesired, it comes.

Soon all will be pitched in darkness, and scoured by the storm.

The thunder bares its teeth again, and in front of me appears a man. Upon his back he wears the stars but his eyes are dark like the clouds. I stop, and he stops, and we are staring at each other in this clearing on the mountain with silence between us and something other inside us and the storm converging over us.

I think I almost recognize the sharp things he is trying to hide.

“Misfortunes are less sharp when shared with others,” I say somewhat cryptically. I don’t quite sound like myself. I am not sure if I am speaking of the storm that rumbles, and groans, and claws its way over our heads, or something else. “Still, I was not expecting the company,” and I do not know why I am here, in the cold and the snow.

The last time I climbed this mountain it was upon a path to a temple, which I left with no more answers to the questions I had than when I arrived. I prefer to think of the time in the storm, in the snow, and that bear. That bear with eyes like mine, that had not seen another winter. I had been different then, hadn’t I been?

"Speaking."