This high in the Arma Mountains it is already winter. Snow dusts the peaks and doesn’t melt in the places where the shadows are long and the winds cold. The aspens are a dying flame, rusty red on their way to brown and gone. Between their pale slim trunks there is a line of tracks, and where the tracks cross the patches of snow they bloom scarlet with blood.
August isn’t going to die. That’s what he tells himself, at least, though the ravens that circle overhead clearly disagree; every time they call to each other in their hoarse voices his ears turn back and he bares his teeth. If he could fly, he would catch them and pluck their pinion feathers away. They’re calling the wolves to him, he knows, and every other predator with ears to hear and a belly that wants filling (and who in these mountains isn’t hungry for something?)
The palomino stumbles and rights himself with a hiss of pain. I am not going to die. Not here in these godforsaken mountains, and not from something so stupid as a snow griffin. He has to pause for a moment to breathe between clenched teeth before continuing on; the days are short, and the sky is already bruising with the threat of evening. His sword, still bloody, bumps against his side when he moves again. It’s reassuring, even if he’s not sure he’s strong enough to swing it again.
The adrenaline is beginning to wear off, and pain is eager to take its place. He needs a willow tree, or the witch’s hut. There are claw marks scoring his shoulders and haunches, all still weeping blood; there is a sizable chunk of skin missing from his foreleg, and while (thank Caligo) it has missed anything as vital as a ligament or artery it will not stop bleeding, no matter how much moss he presses to it. At least the griffin is dead.
When he looks back over his shoulder his heart sinks. He’s barely made it half a mile - he can still see the top of the copse of trees where he was attacked. He needs to wash the blood off so he’s not advertising what a walking feast he is. He needs to get to a lower altitude, maybe Vitreus Lake, where someone stands a chance of finding him.
Instead he finds himself sagging against a tree, painting for air, leaving scarlet smeared against its bark. I am not going to die. Instead he staggers on a few more feeble steps, light-headed and faint. I am not going to die. Maybe if he just could lie down for a minute - the snow would feel so good against his skin -
Overhead, the ravens scream again, and the stallion’s head jerks up. He continues walking, only it is more of a stumble. I am not going to die. But even in his head, the words sound unconvinced.
we drink the poison our minds pour for us and wonder why we feel so sick
Isra caught between tooth and horn “Hear those bells ringing deep in the soul.”
When did we start to find salvation in living as the wild things live?
My steps blend in with the doe's steps, my howl with the wraith wolves' howl, my rage with the snow griffin's driven deep into the barren mountains by the festivals of the mortals. I run with them as another shadow, another thing of flesh and bone driven by a hunger that nothing seems to soothe. All the things running in my blood (magic, salt-water, and motherhood) have made me as implacable as the moonlight when it's full on a clear night.
When did I start to settle into this world beyond civilization where I am the only thing that knows how brittle and frail poetry has become? Is it the aftereffects of the war, or the way that I don't know how to bend my thoughts and love into the shape of peace? Is it something deeper, something wrong with all the pieces that have melded together to create me?
Hurry. Fable's bellowing worry (a bugle roar to everyone else but me) cuts through the thoughts of my mind. I come to at the touch of his mind, discovering myself running with a family as mountain lions at the heels of a stag. The ground turns to diamonds around us as fear (fear of myself, my magic, the way the sea has made a monster of me) runs through my body quicker than the air pulling in and out of my lungs. I stumble as I often do now, the rocks echoing down the mountain side as I follow Fable's shadow towards whatever it is that is making his heart stutter in worry and ocean water start to drip from his jaw like a twisted form of tears. I do not ask him what it is.
He is one of the last things left in this world that I trust.
The stallion at first, is nothing more than a jagged spot of gold in a sea of white. He reminds me of a starfish caught in a tidal wave with no hope of finding stand or stone. He reminds me of Acton, of Lysander, of El Toro with the bloody art painted around his hooves and smeared like runes across the trees.
I close my eyes.
I inhale.
One. I am watching my first friend in this world bleed out upon my throat.
I exhale.
Two. I am telling a story to a stallion that I could have loved in another live. I am watching him leave.
My heart stutters in my chest.
Three. Counting does nothing for me now. When did that happen? When did I forget?
“Stop.” I can hear the hush, hush, hush of the sea in my voice as I approach him. It's impossible now but I try to gentle my steps, bank the war in my gaze, tuck the scars of my body into the shadows were the snow-brightness will not turn them stark and grotesques. I try to become doe instead of wolf, blackbird instead of eagle.
I try to be soft. “Moving so much will only quicken your way to death.” If my horn is glimmering in the light like a sword I try not to notice the silver-sheen of it reflecting across the hollow planes of my face. I smile and it feels so strange to turn the dead leaves and the dead plants beneath the snow to healing blossoms as I follow him?
When did I start living as a wild thing instead of a empathetic heart struggling not to become the monster she must become to save the world from the darkest of the other monsters?
The bellow of a dragon pierces his consciousness only dimly, like a roll of distant thunder, something he can ignore. That’s good, since otherwise it would certainly mean death. While August, if the choice were up to him, would prefer to be eaten by a dragon than a pack of scavenging coyotes and the ravens overhead, he would really like to not be eaten at all.
Should have thought of that before. Amaunet was right - he is a fool, a fool, a fool. He’s known it for a while now, though he’s not sure when it started. Was idiocy something you could catch like a sickness? Had he picked it up at sea? It was definitely not before that, when his life had been a choreographed chaos, a dance to which he knew all the steps. Lately he just keeps plunging further into the dark. He’s played enough games of chance to know that smacking into a wall was only a statistical probability.
His steps are slowing, but he hasn’t realized it yet. Each one urges another rivulet of blood down his foreleg, a bright river. His breath is harsh, but he focuses on it and the trees in the distance (too far, too far) instead of things like dragon roars.
So when she calls out Stop the first time he doesn’t hear, and when he does hear he dismisses it as his imagination, which is blossoming into something truly creative as his cells and nerves all panic. It’s not until she appears before him like an apparition that he does stop, and blinks against the way sunlight reflects off the snow and makes her horn and scales glitter.
He really only hears the word death.“I’m not sure there’s a way to slow it,” he says, still cavalier, and if he had hands one of his palms would be leaving a bloody smear on the pommel of his sword. August sways and rights himself without quite noticing. Instead he’s squinting at the unicorn, wondering if he’s feverish, conjuring illusions, making his imagination bring him a hero.
“Hey,” he says, and almost laughs. “Aren’t you Isra?” And then, as if in a bow to the fabled queen, he sinks to his knees in the snow.
we drink the poison our minds pour for us and wonder why we feel so sick
