he had been something before the fall; he had been flesh and blood
Maybe, I have always been this hungry. Maybe, the world and all that is within it has never been enough to satiate me. The wind is cool, almost refreshing, in my face; I close my eyes against it and focus on the stinging sensation of my own hair lashing at my cheeks. I do not want to take ownership of the decisions that have led me to this land; I do not want to acknowledge my own role in my condemnation.
I am in Dusk for Elena. I am there to inquire about the medical—or magical—potentials to undo what has been done.
I do not have much hope in her answer and for that reason I am no hurry to receive it.
Sereia did what she could, I suppose, to repair the wounds. My throat is bound tightly in cloth; my shoulder is packed with natural salves. They smell sweet and earthy, and this odor nearly disguises the newfound saltwater tang of my skin.
Yet, I do not want to think of Sereia. I do not even want to think of Elena and what she might do to heal me. I want to think of nothing, and that is how I find myself on Praistigia Cliffs with a drink in hand. I am a soldier, it seems; and I have by now visited Terrastella enough I am not entirely out of place, especially for a festival. I begin to drink to drown my hunger. I begin to drink, to soften my sharpness. I begin to drink because there is nothing left to do.
(I had sworn, once, to Bondike that we would never be our fathers; I had promised it; and he had agreed, it was because we would always have one another).
It was a fool’s promise.
Every man is alone; there is no one there when our desperation most seizes us, or it would not be desperation. There is no one to save us from ourselves, and the damage we might wreck.
I have always been this hungry, I think, with the wind in my face.
I have always needed the world to burn.
And finally, finally, the world has burned me back. I am left changed. I am left so damaged I do not know who I am. My new teeth fit strangely in my mouth. The more I drink, the less I know how to sheath them, the more I begin to bleed.
I am fully drunk by the time I step to the edge and think of how far I had once fallen—I am fully drunk, and swaying, beneath the stars when I ask myself,
How much further do I have to fall?
There is music and conversation behind me; but the edge lures me with a siren's song. I step through the tall grasses, drink in hand, until there is nothing but open space beneath my gaze. The ocean, I see her; and she roars.
Here, I am alone, on the edge, the taste of sugar and mint and blood in my mouth. Here, the conversation cannot reach me. It doesn't matter. Words could not fill me now.
(What I hate the most is the way that, even from the precipice, the sea calls me. And she is laughing; that steady, rhythmic pull and tug is bright and high and hopeful. She is laughing, because now I am hers. She is laughing, because revenge is the sweetest drink of all).
In this moment, I think there is nothing left.
I have spent a lifetime trying to fill my hollow pieces with other aims. With men, or with war.
Now, those hollow pieces are filled with everything I have ever hated. I finish the drink and, with ludicrous anger, throw it from the cliffside into the sea. It is a small, meaningless revolt.
Here you can praise the light, having so little of it: it's the death you carry in you, red and captured, that makes the world shine for you as it never did before. This is how you learn prayer. LOVE IS CHOOSING, the snake said. The kingdom of god is within you because you ate it. ☼
In all the deaths that I have nearly died, I have been drowning.
There were near-deaths before that, of course, death after death after death as a girl; I did not know what it meant to drown, then, so they could not feel like drowning. After that night in the maze, however, I realized that all of those deaths, too, felt like drowning. Sinking beneath black water. Being devoured, and cold, choked out of breath. Dying was always a kind of drowning – every death was like being pulled into the sea, and the truth of the matter was that every death was almost the same. They only differed in the weight of their consequences.
I tried to teach myself to swim for months after the incident in the maze. I failed. There is nothing more to be said.
I do not know what draws me to the cliffs. Perhaps it is the fatalism that I keep tucked away in my rib-bones, the one that I have promised to myself that I will never let out again, for my children’s sake. Perhaps it is the night air, the twang of salt that lingers in its aftertaste. Perhaps it is bred from some desire to be alone with the sea, which is so unlike the desert that I almost feel like I can escape it when I am close enough to the shore. I do not know. It does not matter.
What draws me to him is the scent of blood.
I pick my way across the black slags of the cliff, burnished silver like a blade in the moonlight. My hair coils around me, tangles with my legs; my hooves slip on the salt-slick stone, but I do not fear falling. (My magic is always there, held inches out of sight. It throbs in my chest, now, indistinguishable from the pule of my own heart. I think that I am finally at peace with it. It is a weapon, but I think that it is finally mine.) Alshamtueur clinks a metallic rhythm at my hip, and, as I draw closer and closer to the large, white-and-gold silhouette on the cliffs, I hear it sizzle and crackle.
It is a warning sign that I disregard.
It is him again. I am surprised; I am not surprised at all. Bandages are bound tight around the soft curve of his throat, and a thin trail of blood dribbles from his lips, darker than salt-water or tears; he smells of alcohol. I draw forward up the cliffside, closer and closer, until I am standing at his side, and I study his face again. There is no war-paint on him now, and the moonlight has desaturated the bright colors of his pelt. Even the green of his eyes seems duller than I remember.
I settle into place, turning my stare out to sea. The waves are black as the night sky, and they froth too much, too violently to reflect the stars. If I were younger, I would not have cared for the troubled look on his face, for the copper-scent of blood intermingled with the sticky-sweet scent of the flower drinks that they were serving at the parties; I would not have cared that he was in pain. I might have cared for the bleeding, but only as a matter of function – not for the cut. Not that it hurt.
(I don’t even know his name.)
But I am not younger, now. I am older, and I am someone else, and I have grown tired of seeing people in pain. I want to care, now. I want to.
My eyes settle on the bobbing line where the waves meet the night sky, and, when I speak, I do not care if my words are the right ones or not; I only think of the way that my voice sounds almost as steady and certain as it does when Ambrose or Diana comes to me with a scraped knee, and I find myself gently bandaging it up. “What’s wrong?”
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
11-09-2020, 08:14 PM - This post was last modified: 11-09-2020, 08:15 PM by Seraphina
he had been something before the fall; he had been flesh and blood
When I close my eyes, it nearly feels like falling. When I close my eyes, I could be anywhere, with just a moment of creativity. It is not so difficult to imagine me standing upon the precipice of a different cliff, on the eve of battle, somber and prepared. As a younger man, I had done that often—I had stood on the edge and imagined everything that might unfold in the sands beneath me.
Now, there is only the crash of water against rocks. Now, there is only what I know to be a certain kind of ending, a crossroads in my life—
I am aware I am not alone because I can smell her before I can see her. It is the hunger, I think, that makes the odor of warm flesh so evident; a bit like sweat, and sand, and the baking earth beneath a too-hot sun. She smells inexplicably of Solterra and it is the predator within me made ware of this; it is the predator within me that refuses to be caught unawares, that choruses in my stomach and my blood, that cries out for a salve to this insatiable hunger—
She is the last person I expect to find me; and in many ways, the last person I want to. The somberness of our last encounter remains fresh and distinctive in my mind; the way she reminded me so starkly of someone else, of someone’s name I do not want to give power to, not here, not now—
And, like that, like flint striking steel—I decide that she is the only person who should find me, because she reminds me of that someone else.
She stands, at first, in quiet. She does not offer anything except for her presence. The two of us face the sea, and I have at last opened my eyes. I regard her from the corner of them, briefly, before returning my attention to the thrashing water below.
What’s wrong?
I do not know how to answer, at first. Whatever I might say seems too large; and anyways, when I open my mouth to speak it at first seems too difficult to do so. She is not a woman I want to appear unintelligent in front of—and while I understand I owe her no explanation, there is a tangible relief to be asked.
“I—“ I begin. My voice is thick with alcohol, but not slurred. “I spent a lifetime hunting something…I have now become.”
I should have died.
“I didn’t.” I say this aloud, without meaning to, and quickly amend: “I should have died, and I didn’t. I was meant to die.”
I was meant to know nobility. I was meant to have my bones charred by a funeral pyre, my soul sent up to the heavens in billows of smoke. Instead, I am here, on a cliffside, pretending not to hear the way the sea sings or the way I hunger so viciously.
"I would have rather died, I think." At this, my voice is quiet. At this, I think of how my father once told me the only way for a warrior to end is gutted on a beach, a sword still within reach.
Here you can praise the light, having so little of it: it's the death you carry in you, red and captured, that makes the world shine for you as it never did before. This is how you learn prayer. LOVE IS CHOOSING, the snake said. The kingdom of god is within you because you ate it. ☼
I don’t remember when it happened. I don’t even remember how.
I don’t think that there was a moment where I thought, all at once, that I was tired of – all of this. If anything, it was closer to a collection of moments, a cycle of one thing after another, one jabbing pain shifted into another into another. I carried ghosts. (I still do.) I couldn’t think of anything but all the ways I’d failed, and all the ways that I was failing in thinking so constantly of failure; and nothing much seemed to matter, but everything mattered too much. He brought me so low that there was nothing left to abandon or to save, you know? Him and him and him and him and him…
I couldn’t think of anything but that. When the children came – I still do not like to think of how I came to have them -, I told myself that I would live for him. I told myself that I would persist because I had to, because they needed me. (I have always been best at that. I have lived my life for Solterra, after all; nothing but Solterra, nothing.) And I would jolt into waking almost every night (and I think that I still do), and I would learn not to wake them, and I would do my best to love them, even though I could have sworn that I’d forgotten how to, or that I’d never loved anything the right way before, genuinely. I wanted to die. (Sometimes I think that I still do. Sometimes it is irrational, the smallest thing, and then I will find myself spiraling again, before I remind myself that I am being foolish, and terrible.) I don’t want to feel that way forever. I want to sleep through entire nights, and I want to love something without a single obligation to do it, and I want to remember what it means to be happy. I don’t think that I’ve felt that way in a very, very long time.
I wanted it for obligation, first. I wanted it when I saw the sun gleam off all the bits of Diana that are gold, when Ambrose first pressed himself into my side the day he was born. I wanted it because I wanted the best for them, and I know that I am not the best that they could have. I still want that for them; I still want to be better for them.
I would like to be better for myself, too. I think that I have finally realized that living for the dead is a useless endeavor; I do not think that it means anything to them, though I know that I cannot forgive myself. Still. I want to be better.
I do not look at him, but I listen. I listen when he speaks of becoming something else, and I listen to him when he says that he should have died, that he would rather have died. I listen to him, and I swallow a sigh like the ocean wind, and I listen and listen without saying a single word.
I wonder how much of my life I spent feeling the same way.
I don’t want to be her anymore. I don’t want to be like that anymore, or ever again – and I think that the one relief of all of this, of my disappearing, of the slipping away, of my death, of the crown fallen from my head, is that I don’t have to be her any longer. I don’t belong to anyone anymore. I can choose.
I do not know him. I do not even know his name.
I take a deep breath of the sea, and I roll my words over in my mouth. I am not sure that they are what he will want to hear. (I do not know if I would have wanted to hear them, when I was brought so low.) Still – I am trying, I am trying to be honest, and it would feel wrong to try to speak to him superficially. “No,” I decide, finally, my voice low and quiet over the rushing lull of the waves, “you shouldn’t have died. I felt the same way for a…long time, but there is no such thing as should have died – you either live or you die. There is nothing else but that.” I could tell him what happened to me. I could tell him how my death was unworthy, how it made way for a monster, how I nearly died unburned and forgotten; I could tell him of my shame, and I could tell him how it ached, but I don’t want to make any part of this about me. “I won’t tell you that you survived for a reason. I don’t believe in things like fate anymore – not in higher purpose, not that we suffer as a part of a greater plan. But I do know that we choose what we do with every terrible thing. What matters is the choosing.” I look at him again, finally, raising my chin in some quiet mimic of the dignity I used to maintain as a queen. I used to beg for my pain to feel like it had purpose, for there to be some reason why I suffered and why so many people suffered because of me.
I think that I know better now.
I am still looking at him – right in the eyes - when I say, “You’ve changed. Maybe you’ve even changed for the worse…but you still choose what you become.”
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
he had been something before the fall; he had been flesh and blood
I have always lost myself in others. I have always turned to them when I could no longer tolerate myself. With this bitter, sharp thought Adonai’s mind comes to mind—and then a long list of others. There is Cillian, and Dagda, and all of those from before.
(Or should I call them after? Because there had been Bondike, and then there had been after).
My sense of purpose had always stemmed from my duty; and my identity had been tied to that, too. Without my sense of duty, without that purpose, I have been nothing for a very long time. Perhaps this had simply been the final—nearly merciful—cut.
Now, I have no purpose and no self.
Now, everything I have ever understood is irrevocably changed.
I know I will drive myself mad to continue down this path of thought. And, besides, my drunkenness makes it difficult to focus on such concrete concepts. Instead, I focus on the feeling; the feeling that wells inside of me as angrily as the sea in a storm. I feel it rut at the edges of my soul; it fills my eyes and my mind and my body, until I am nothing, nothing, nothing.
The universe must be laughing.
No. You shouldn’t have died. I felt the same way for a… long time, but there is no such thing as should have died—you either live or you die. There is nothing else but that.
How can she understand? My eyes snap toward her and my expression is venomous; it is the expression of a viper, of a rattlesnake, of a cobra. Detached, and cold; nearly reptilian. How could she know, what it meant to become the thing you had hunted, had spent a lifetime trying to destroy? How could she know what it felt to touch the gates of death and then walk back, unharmed? Anyone else, anyone else would say be grateful, be hopeful, I had my life!
But this wasn’t my fucking life.
I won’t tell you that you survive for a reason. I don’t believe in things like fate anymore—not in higher purpose, not that we suffer as a part of a greater plan. But I do know that we choose what we do with every terrible thing. What matters is the choosing. And what choice is there?
Even now with my bloodshot eyes and the taste of whiskey on my tongue, I can smell her.
Even now, with the sea and the festival, I can smell her.
Perhaps, to some, this would be a small detail. But to me it no longer is. I can smell the Solterran sun on her, and the sands; I can smell desert sage and clean sweat. But more importantly—most importantly—I smell her as a predator smells prey. As a creature of flesh as blood. As something to be devoured. And although I do not act on it—do not even think of acting on it—the hunger is there. And, even without the hunger, now there exists a subconscious awareness of the life around me; a constant sharpening; a need for the sea; a need to consume.
She does not look away from me, however. No matter the coldness of my disposition. No matter the strange, uncontrollable twitching at the edge of my too-long mouth.
“There is no changing this.” I answer, but then I am quiet. Her words are difficult to digest; and I am desperate for them, in my own way. I am desperate for someone to look me in the eyes and to say what she has said; to remind me there is a choice. “The problem is the becoming—I was changed. I can’t go back, I don’t even know how to go forward.”
I don’t know what else to be, if not the man I was before. There had never been a choice in who I was; how can there be a choice now?
Here you can praise the light, having so little of it: it's the death you carry in you, red and captured, that makes the world shine for you as it never did before. This is how you learn prayer. LOVE IS CHOOSING, the snake said. The kingdom of god is within you because you ate it. ☼
I watch him the entire time.
I watch every twitch of his expression, of his lips; I watch the cold, reptilian glare of his eyes, and, somehow, I find myself coming to a decision. Even when he is done speaking, I do not look away from his face.
I am silent. There is nothing but the waves on the shore, the whispering rush of wind. Then my expression shifts ever so slightly, jaw setting, and I find myself saying: “No, there isn’t.” “As a girl, I was…taken.” I breathe in, sharply, but, when I continue, my voice is perfectly even, as though I am disaffected by the story that I am beginning to tell. “They put a collar around my throat. Chained me. Taught me to fight. The man who made me a soldier – he had this magic. It allowed him to reach into your mind and pull things out, if he didn’t like them. Memories. Thoughts. Feelings. By the time he was done with me, I had lost my name, and all the time I’d had before. I didn’t even care about the collar. They made sure that they were uncomfortable, you know? But I’d forgotten how to feel it, or I thought that it didn’t matter – or that it was right.”
The strangest thing is, I think, that I’ve nearly forgotten the viceroy, now. It’s only his eyes that linger, those empty pits of molten gold. I still see them, sometimes, in my nightmares. I wonder if there will ever be a day when they are gone, too. “He tortured me, and I rewarded him by killing for him. I rewarded him by doing just as he asked. I think that some part of me knew that it was wrong all along. It just didn’t matter.” It didn’t matter. And – for years and years, it didn’t. I didn’t care who lived or died. I cared for no one and nothing but a Solterra that didn’t exist. “I know that I killed good men, fighting in an unjust war. I served a monstrous regime, one hell-bent on conquest and genocide, one that never should have existed. People were starving in the streets, and I would follow him into the palaces and the manors of the noblemen, and I would see…their gold and their silks and their satins, their beautiful artwork, and the concubines.” The words come out of my mouth strangely languid, though not entirely void of passion; occasionally, my voice dips in carefully-contained anger, or disappointment, or something of the kind, but I keep them steady.
In my mind’s eye, I am thinking of those golden eyes, cold and dead as twin marbles. I don’t mention that detail. “I didn’t kill him – that was someone else. I never even fought back.” Here is where I inhale again, the sound somehow rattling, and here is where I reach the worst part of the story, because there was no one there to mitigate it, to make me someone else. “And then I – became something else. I was a slave, and then I was a queen. I was not much good at it, although I thought that I could make things better, and I was struck down by a man who took my kingdom, and he was…no different from the king that I had served as a child. It was like dying. I was sure that I would die, but he was the sadistic kind – left me to bleed out instead of finishing the job. I was saved by coincidence.” My lips twitch into something that is the echo, I think, of a cynical smile, and it is only here that there is a quiet edge of pain in my voice, though I try my hardest to suppress it. “I fought back, that time. It wasn’t enough. He did die, eventually, but it took…so long, and he did so much damage in the meantime. Everything that I had worked to create was reduced to dust.”
Well – Solterra had been rebuilt from her ashes again, now. But everything I had worked for, everything I had tried to create, everything that I had poured my life into for years…it was gone. I was dead, and it was gone. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. It wasn’t even that I died unmourned, that no one cared for my passing. The worst of it- “If anything in the world were fair, I would have died when he struck me down. Other people died for my failure, instead.”
The words hang in the air between us – clinical and sharp and plain as a knife. I can’t embellish them. I can’t make them better. I tried. I used to try.
I will have to live with that forever; and that is the more selfish crime.
I look at the odd twitch of his too-long mouth, the contours of his face, the tips of his horns. “There is nothing you can do about what has already been done to you. The past is immutable. There is no denying that change.” I keep my eyes locked on his, unrelenting. “You will never be the same, and maybe that means that you will never be yourself again. But you – you can still choose what happens to you now.”
It is only then that I look away, back out towards the black, rippling mass of the sea. “You don’t have to know how to go forward yet. You'll have time enough to figure it out…and sometimes it is a long, vicious process.”
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
he had been something before the fall; he had been flesh and blood
Her eyes will not leave me. They remain transfixed; attentive; bordering just beyond polite intrigue into something deeper, more intense. She does not seem like the type of woman capable of half-measures, of indifferences. All, or nothing. This clearly isn’t nothing.
And so, I listen. I listen to her. From how she speaks, I do not think she can be much older than me, or not older at all. It is difficult to tell in Novus, a land of magic and immortals. But still, I listen. As a girl, I was… taken.
I wonder if it is cathartic, to share a story of one’s own life when someone else suffers the story of their life. I listen. I listen, but it is different. She tells me a story of war. It is a story that has been told many times and will be told many times again. Of children, suffering the sins of that war.
I listen, but I do not look at her. I look at the sea, and in my mind’s eye I create a map of her scars.
Each one, earned for some atrocity. Each one, given to her through abuse. But she and I, we are different. I can hear the regret in her voice. When I look at her, there is a somberness to my expression; a depth that is as cruel and dark as the sea.
There are some things in my life I regret. But the war, the killing, is not one of them. Men will always wage war. They will always need it—and the difference here is she speaks of something done to her, something of which she had no control. She speaks of wanting to die, but—
“You never became the thing you wanted to kill,” I respond. It is now that I look at her, and not the sea. It is now that I level her with my too-clear eyes despite the whisky on my breath. “Even when others died for you—even then… you were never the man you wanted to kill.”
My lip twitches again. There is something rising within me, something that is volatile; I recognize it all too well and it is almost a relief when it comes. The man within me that roils like a beast; the man that bares his teeth and laughs and refuses to be loved. (There is a part of me that cannot help but wonder if this happened because I had grown soft—that this fate befell me not because it was destiny, but because it was punishment. I had become soft. Elena, she had made soft. Elliana, soft. Adonai, soft). “I hope you found that cathartic,” I say, wryly.
Then: I laugh. The sound lacks mirth. It is cutting, too-loud. I laugh, and laugh, and laugh. “Do you think any of us get to choose, what happens after?” My eyes are narrowed. “There’s two choices. Live, or die. That’s it. But I have watched myself become the very thing I spent a lifetime killing. There is no choice, no. We never choose what happens to us.”
I have already thought of how, in life’s own way, this must be my penance. The sea would not let me die; she was not done with me, not yet. I have already thought of how this is for a lifetime of judgement, of malice, and then; I remember I am only one son of the island. I remember that what happens to me is irrelevant, in the grand scheme of everything else. I have no destiny that matters.
I am only a man turned into a monster. I am only more alone than I have ever been. And she stands besides me with the nerve to tell me a story of honor, of duty, of sacrifice. (There had never been any of those virtues, not in my story). “You became a queen,” I say, sourly. “I became the damned.”
