but you said, come here, my bird!
i will give you the dangerous black night
T
he dampened earth gave beneath his feet. Soft, loamy, particles of sand crunched and packed as he stood before the tide line, his eyes distant over the silhouette of what became of the island. Perhaps he should have been surprised of its changing, of its shifting, of the uncharacteristic softness of its new form: the rolling hills, the emerald greens, the jungle given way to the occasional pine and boulder, and more lifeless shapes in between. Instead, he was unsettled by the quiet. There was no hum today, no roaring of falling stars or the undulating echos of thunder from the deep. For long he stood at the shores of what was once the land bridge, contemplating the silence, until his skin shuddered of itself in ripples and static waves.
He meant to move against the shallows, but the shallows moved against him instead. There had been boats waiting at the shore, but he had despaired the last boat that carried him across the Terminus. It had little enjoyment to it – he would have rather swam, in retrospect, letting the brine crystallize in his mane and furs, feeling the current fight him like the furious beast that it is. It raised him now, though small whiteheads still brushed at his fetlocks and roared with disdain for its obedience. Each footstep was a damp clatter as if the ocean between the shore and the island was no more than a broad wet stone in which his reflection stored.
In it, his shadow had grown wild. For an entire season he had spent his vagrant life in the wilds on the brim of Denocte, in the woods between the lake and the mountains. It had been liberating, loosened from the sentry stalls and the battleground camps, Elysium chatter of hoarded gold and death in the prairie. His mane filled with burrs, his flesh with thorn-cuts, dandelion heads, pollen, his hair lengthened and sweeping in waves, dripping shadows that caressed the mirror-surface. With him no longer the smell of Night Market incense and Denoctian musk, but the smell of deep pine forests and cedar grain, of wind and earth and sky and ash, of lake water and meadow root, of stag leather and hare blood.
It was at the end of dusk when he first stepped into the world that was the island – and world indeed, for as many times as one may try to map it they would find that it stretched almost imperceptibly as they roamed, filled with notches and crooks and turns that wove and dove and upended. He did not doubt that the hills, were he to pass between them, would broaden and gape and route their valley into some treacherous gulley. The land pretended to be soft, but he knew better. (Were there not times in which rough things must pretend to be soft?)
There was little to be noted in the land of sculptures, except that when the wind settled and the calm fell in, therein became a stirring not unlike many voices at a whisper. He stopped then in a clearing surrounded by statues – some whole, some broken, one missing an ear and another with a cleft throat – and his ears flicked to gather the commune of sounds just barely comprehensible above the rustling of leaves.
And star and I and wind and deer,
Are in the dark together,—near,
Over and over again she tries to tell herself that the statues are not alive, or dead, or suffering. She tries to believe their stories are not laments, not prayers, not whispers of all the dreams dead in the belly of the stars that perhaps flow ever on like comets through their blood. Their shadows follow her, and their stories echo in her ears as if she’s pressed her ear into the waves of the shallow waters that brought her here.
Over and over she tries to tell herself to forget them, forget the way her flowers bloom in the cracks of their granite and river-stone teeth, forget that they move a little bit like risen when she turns her gaze to hill instead of rock.
You know you cannot forget.” Hati reminds her as he follows just as faithfully as the shadows, and stones, and her hound trailing his hip. Today he is another bit of woven together wishes-- one rabbit ear, one buffalo ear hidden in a thick patch of mossy hair. His stride is uneven on a stag’s leg, a hound’s paw, a rabbit’s soft hock, and a unicorn’s cloven hoof. Where the statues only whisper he echoes in the hills with a grotesque sound that she still calls poetry.
Danaë does not need to tell him that she knows. Her answer is in a look, a glimmer of blood in her eyes when she watches his antlers scrape against the gaping jaw of a looming statue that has yet to follow in her wake. But she is still trying to look only at her monster’s antlers and not at the way her flowers are becoming more and more of a suggestion of color in the dark stone mouth.
It is easier, in the end, to pretend that they are stone-- stone and nothing else.
By the time she finds the stallion her shadow has long belonged to the island, a hound, and a wendigo. It is not a unicorn’s shadow that stretches out ahead of her in the light. She tries not to read meaning in the shape of it, in the way it reaches with an antler to tap a greeting against the dark curl of his shadow brow. She hopes he might only see the curl of her neck, that way she slings it low as a fox at a wolf’s den to show (in the way of the wilds) that she has not come with her monster to devour up the island as Thana had.
She does not smile when she lifts her eyes up from the darkness of her borrowed shadow. Only the slow blink of her eyes, like a thing waking up, shows a flicker of something more than monster and unicorn. A whisper of movement, a wraith quiver of shadow, brings her closer to him and further and further into the promise of her shadow (just hers) touching his.
“You heard them too.” Like all unicorns she does not ask. It had been in the flicker of his ears that a sleeping bramblebear in her heart had noticed as she approached. There lingers in the glimmer of his gold, running like veins of a leaf through his skin, a promise of wild forest waits.
And she has always known (always!) of the things that she does not need to ask a wild forest.
but you said, come here, my bird!
i will give you the dangerous black night
O
ne is beautiful. In the moonlight, it is painted metal-silver and sparks with the suggestion of a thousand stars, as if, etched in its grain, the granite may have been pulled from the night sky itself. It is smooth and unblemished save for the dust motes that settle idly in the glow of the moon. There is no warmth in her eyes. There is something like terror or despair or hatred or relief, like the expression of one who has lingered too long in the shadow of death and has seen its face – finally! Freed like a bluejay to flit and soar through the thick woods and on, on, into some unknown grey.
It does not occur to him at first that her eyes may have hardened then softened, then curiously changed again in the timid fraction of a second; that the rustling of leaves or the tousling of the grasses that sounded like syllables, words, screams, may have gathered her voice along the way.
It does not occur to him until one, the stallion with the cleft throat, his eyes once full of valor and whim, has closed the gape in his neck so that it resembles nothing wider than a crack and his eyes have rolled to Erasmus with a look of scrutiny or agitation. When he looks back to the stardust mare, there is nothing left for him in her eyes. But still the wind whispers.
The thing that becomes Erasmus (or the thing that is, that has become, it isn't certain yet, but the skin feels more like a cage every day) listens deeper, harder, to the unsettled grasses and the howling winds, to the moon-whispers and earth-rumblings and all in between. It yearns for a hymn, a prayer, a chord rung in the tune of a name it no longer remembers. A song of stones.
But they do not sing for him. Not yet.
The shadows that cling to him like webs shiver, crawling down his spine in rivulets, climbing up his flesh in waves. He listens, listens, but each time their words toe the line of coherence the wind steals them again. First a dull purr, then a sorrowful gasp, then the relentless wail. He waits. He waits. He waits for their words to come together like a smooth silver chain and not the gulping gulches of a babbling brook – a part of him, the deep, true part, still waits for them to sing.
“You heard them too.” her voice cuts through the wind, the whispers. He sees her in the corner of his eye: bone and marrow-spotted, a twisted shell of a scarlet horn, eyes that surge like oceans with secrets, with promise, with knowing. When he tilts his head to acknowledge her, he does not turn his back to the statue of the starshine mare. The spine curves with the movement, a small gesture of feline courtesy. She reminds him of something rushing through red-opal reeds between the hollow quartz trees of another world. It is comforting to him, though he doubts that it is comforting to many.
A slow nod, and his expression pulls together darkly, as though he's stunned by something trivial. His eyes gaze past the mare-statue, just past, to the darkening dimples in the hills that resemble eyes, mouths, listening ears. “I can not discern between a whisper, or a scream, or a laugh.” His voice is low, soft, so that he may still listen, achingly, waiting for clarity. “I do not know if they speak to us or each other.”
And star and I and wind and deer,
Are in the dark together,—near,
The silence, poured from a statue’s mouth, feels golden as it settles like a sentient thing between them. It devours their exhales and whets its teeth upon their inhales. She can feel it testing the space between her, and Hati, and the gilded stallion for flavor. It leans closer, so slowly that no truly living thing could tack its movement, to catch another breath, another bit of carbon in the air.
And for the first time Danaë discovers that her heart, her yearning soul, have in them the capability for avarice. She discovers, as he does not turn his back to the statue, that she wants to be the thing respected. Perhaps, she thinks, Isolt has the way of it-- to devour, and rend, and ruin, until there is nothing left in the world but fear. Isolt would run him through hip to apex until he was nothing more than a flag of surrender waving on her horn.
She steps closer, both a warning and a begging echo of prayer. His shadow dissolves her own when she steps close enough to rest her cheek upon the hard point of his hip. There is warmth there, a whisper of life, that sparks some distant and buried hunger in her heart. Hati sets to purring and the sound echoes through each of his out-of-place bones. This bison ear turns to wolf and his rabbit ear turns into a hound’s ear straining toward a creak in the forest. His nose feels like an entire universe as he lays it against her hip as a shadow of the way she touches the stallion.
Beneath that universe weight she whispers to the stallion’s bones. “Listen closer,” she prays to everything sleeping beneath his skin begging for a dream. Her horn blazes like the glimmering sword of a sun as it refracts in the light bouncing from a statue's eyes. “They are screaming for freedom, whispering the secrets of the gods, and laughing at the sight of us so small and fragile in their monolith shadows.” And when she lays her ear against his skin she can hear the echo of each of those like a mirror image stretched across the library well.
In her wake the flowers start to pour from the statue’s mouth like rabid froth. Each sounds, to her alone, like a tear falling to the belly of the valleys. She can hear wishes torn from hearts, wood wailing a sorrow, a river flowing silver and slick, in the fall of the petals. And even though part of her wants to ask him if he can hear the falling petal-tears, she only turns the ear against his hip into a touch of lips.
In her kiss, as she presses in until her shadow is indiscernible from his, she asks, “If you could whisper as they do, what would you say?” And still against her hip, in an echo of her touch to mortal skin, she can feel the vibration of Hati’s purr as if he’s nothing more another statue in this world of hill and stone.
but you said, come here, my bird!
i will give you the dangerous black night
M
oonlight spools between them, carrying with it silvery dust motes that glint, hovering, and drift in the breath of a breeze. A curious hill nudges a swallow from its nose. Erasmus does not unravel like the passage of stars or a valley of bluebells when she rests her soft cheek against the rough tilt of his hip. He does not split against the sharpness of her horn as it tills a line through the plush of his coat – and his blood, rising like a rose garden in the golden dawn, does not bloom with it. He wonders then, pondering the way the horn spirals hollow and cold, as though something should fit inside it, why she should feel his warmth and not delve.
He would, he thinks. If he bore a horn that threatened the heavens, sharp and hollow and hungry as hers, he thinks that he may carve its hunger in every thing that is whole.
“Listen closer,” she says like frost over a field, and the shadow behind her (one that looks like everything but her) ripples, and a light catches hotly in the space of that horn. Aether shudders, unraveling from his pores like glimmering smoke – unfurling with feline languor over her form that at once seems so delicate and so great, hanging shadows from that burning light. She speaks not to Erasmus – it knows, it knows – she speaks to it, to what becomes, what has became, and what has yet to be. To the void within what flesh dares to contain, to what is trapped in the cage of bones and flesh and the rapacious famine that stirs there.
Listen, listen, but not from her, these ugly and grand voices exclaim, echoing softly beneath the timbre of a breeze, listen. The stone-souls agree and whisper, some with desperation and others with anguish, and a few with hatred burning idly. “They are screaming for freedom, whispering the secrets of the gods, and laughing at the sight of us so small and fragile in their monolith shadows.” The warmth of her horn threatens to burn a hole in him, and that unwinding row of roses writhe in a note of acceptance. He would let her, if it meant pulling him from aching bones and the torment of skins, undo what he has wrought. Undo Erasmus, the thing that was.
His eyes return to the statues, leering and hovering like guillotines, like a circlet of wolves and salivating jowls, the dark pits of their eyes gleaming soundly from eon-gone reaches of some hellish by. The green hills are moaning with the wind, and roaring like the ocean. It wants.
Dahlia-black and lily red pours from the stone-throat, each turned to a pallor when they are struck by the stern light of the moon – a bruised silver, the rush of of a churning stream belly-up with the howls of aching lore. When the pool of them store flaking petals at his feet, they feel more like crypt flowers than of offerings, pale and sorrowful, a fragrance that is metallic and spiced. Each one is a secret. Each one a lament.
The girl turns, and the heat and sharpness of her horn scrapes the valley of his back like raking teeth. His own fangs knit, tongue pressed between the hollows. Aether dances along her throat, along the tender spots, the thin spots, the pulsing spots. Does she know? Do they tell her? “If you could whisper as they do, what would you say?” she asks, like a tiger in a dream with hot-white mirror eyes. The red reeds bow from her in what is left of a dead planet in his mind, and he knows what rests in them.
It is him. It has always been him. Before Erasmus. Before the Wilds. Before the hunger.
Harvest moon eyes look to the statues and their flower-choked mouths, and one thinks of being the flower and the stone and the howling wind and the rolling hills and the frothing water. Of when he was not an it but an everything, the creatures and the soils and the suns and the moons, the darkness cloying the crevices between like a coarse tongue nestled between bone teeth. When he was not only the nameless, faceless gods but also every breath that held a power like prayer, every ache in every bone and every pulse in every world. His teeth grit. His eyes are scythes, cutting those red, red reeds with the glow of a dying sun.
"I was not always confined." he whispers like a willow-breeze, full of secrets and myths and pathos, glaring at the mare-statue with a coat of stars, "I was... more." The aether retracts and refracts, breaking like wisping tendrils of green-black flametongue - they build at the base of the statue like a pyre, nestle in every crack and granite pore. They pull and push. The statue groans a mouse-whistle tune, like some small thing inside it is breaking. Its eyes are wide bulbs, its teeth bone white gates. A caricature of pain, or despair, or fear. He is not satisfied. When Danaë presses harder into him, he presses harder into the dry veins of the statue. It cracks along a rib, dust expelled into the lunar glow.
"I would sing. I would sing of gods who bled, of heresy and the power that lies in the bones of ancient things. I would sing of the death of the deathless, of the end of worlds and things that have yet to come." Stop, he hears it, the softness of a whisper ushered between the howlings. He does not stop. Another crack. Do you not want freedom? I do, I do, he whispers back to her in a growl, in the weight of his eyes that hunger and reave.
"I would scream into the night, into the forests, into the ocean that roars with a tumult only the soul may ever know – I would thunder into the sky black as pitch, my voice sailing like a sparrow over the howling winds." Shards splinter, dust sprays, aether pulling hot granite veins over the pale surface. Stop! it wails. Enough! it sighs. "I would not whisper." His voice does not shake with anger. It is resolute, full, hungry. He does not stop.
