Darkness like absence—so utterly without, it is asphyxiating. It crowns her in a terminal judgment—thorns and all—and each slow, drag-toed step she takes proves she has been sentenced to go on. Proffered life when she is not sure she wants it. Is not sure she has space for in it in the weeds of her darkened garden—a flower in a place of sunless bramble and the haunting slip of empty, unfamiliar visitors, passing by and picking each petal down to the white bone.
Darkness like, did anything ever exist there before?
Darkness like, can anything ever exist there again?
The wind passes by her in long, lethe exhales. It purls as it does, rustling the scant leaves and needles of healthy trees; plucking the limber, naked limbs of the dead. It carries the scent of autumn—earthy rot, things breaking down and settling; and the swill of swampy redolence, mud and a sticky, sucking kind of musk. With each enervated press of her hoof, the green-brown mud envelops her to the knees, seizing her with damp, tight hands. Pulling.
Pulling downwards.
She finds the insistence alluring. That she can imagine, just as well, her body taken by the morass—given freely to a swam-god, many-headed and lichen-pelted, and if it were kinder than her own gods, perhaps it would take her gently into its muddied elysium. Perhaps it would pull her down and cover her over and the rest would be an insensate process of breaking down.
Settling.
So what compels her to lift, to labour until the viscous moorings tauten and snap and set her free with a sickening kind of reluctance? What urges her, unseeing and unfeeling and unknowing, on a path that promises other-than—other than death, other than settling and breaking down and loosing the mortal coil? The thing that blooms, soft and wan but ever-so on the horizon of her darkness, her absence, her nothing and her without—that thing, like hope but bigger. Like knowing there is light, even if it can’t be seen; that there is sun, even if the clouds have gathered like wet, woollen blankets over the sky, and none of its radiance can reach her. Like know there and wolves in the woods, but finding the courage to fight them.
Like remembering that something existed there before.
That it was a meadow of wildflowers, sun-kissed and honeyed.
That is was perfect, even if only for a few fleeting days as it teetered on the edge of oblivion.
A bird calls overhead. Shrill and shrieking. One small, fluted ear tilts, languidly, in its direction. Measures it. Finds it wanting. Finds it unfamiliar. But rather than gut her all over again, she simply moves on, thrusting with soft, onerous grunts as she feels her way from one mound of semi-firm ground to the next. Coming to rest where the mossy earth gives only slightly, with a flush of dirty water pooling around her toes, as she leans against the rough, grey bark of a tree.
She has always been comfortable in her darkness. Knew it as she knew the lines of her own sturdy, northern body. Was made in it—made to its specifications, because it was her toll; payment exacted for the honour of walking through history, not as through mud, but as through thin air.
But this isn’t her darkness.
This is like knowing there is light. And a sun. And a fight.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Today she wants to be any where besides the ocean. Which is so unlike her. Elena loves her seaside home, the way she can smell the ocean spray the moment she steps outside her door. But today, today Elena does not think she can bare to look out and across the water and see the nothing but endless blue sprawled out before her like a wide and gaping chasm. She submerges herself in the hospital. There are those who stay there, the long term patients, who Elena treats, who Elena laughs with, who she has seen cry when they thought she wasn't looking. There is an older woman who has been in the hospital since Elena first came here, Elena wants to bring her something. A flower, a small gesture, but one she would appreciate all the same. She exits the hospital and makes her way to the swamp. A flower for hope maybe she would find her. Even if hope was gone from the woman’s eyes.
Hope was foolish and fragile, but it spread faster than fire.
And sometimes—hope—was the only safety rope thrown in an ocean of misery.
Fire.
She thinks about that dream she had so long ago, that she had gone to the peak to pray about. When Terrastella had burned, and sometimes she still thinks she sees flames flittering between the trees and smoke rising in the air. But she blinks and then they are gone. There is not a single ember left behind.
There is a sense of dread in the pit of her soul. It feels like shadow birds that had tried to block her path in the woods. She shouldn't feel like this, not when she was loved by a man, a man that had danced with her, a man that had promised to remember her. But this dread, this warning, sits over her skin like silk.
She wonders what her life might have been like if she had stayed in Windskeep, fallen in love with a solider like so many of the other girls did. Had waited for him when he went to war, had children, had written love letters that he would look at before he went into battle. She wonders if she had chosen that life, if fate had led her there, if it would have been easier. She shies away from those thoughts though, feeling those ancient fissures yawning like mouths on the surface of her heart. Elena is a dangerous dreamer, because as often as dreams of the mast capture her, so too do dreams of all the possibilities.
She sighs, the sound of broken glass. Those pale blue eyes swim over the swamp, despite it being late autumn, there were still flowers in the humid environment. That is when she spots another, another she did not recognize. It was not common that outsiders found their way to swamp. Still, Elena does not shy away from her, she believes all are welcome and will continue to be welcomed in Dusk. A half smile turns the corner of her lips as the palomino walks towards her. Those blue eyes are bright like the autumn sky. “Hello,” she says almost too quietly, as if afraid she would disturb the water. “Are you lost?” She asks as a chill of empathy washes over her spine. Something of her past sparks in Elena’s gaze as the medic finds her eyes.
And that is when she realizes: this woman was blind.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
Vestigial, like the phantom thrum of an amputated heartbeat. She can feel him by her side, towering and beautiful in all his brokenness. More beautiful because of it. Her cynosure, that thing that first dawned in her darkness like an inchoate star, marking itself on the uncharted maps of her unmoored mind. He had been her first landmark, and she had kept him as her compass rose all these years, following and followed by him—tethered to the redemption they had sown into one another. They had been, time and time again, drawn through strange veils of separation, weaving in and out of time for each other. Sometimes, she feels the warmth of him, the touch like a reminder of her newly independent spirit and how he vowed to watch over it. Just as she’d fight his wolves if she could.
And sometimes, she feels him, too. Tiny and perfect, the boy that came to her like a brilliant galaxy, and then left her like a graveyard of disparate, star-shed, all too quickly. He remains, still, slipping through her grasp like a shade, a silhouetted tattoo against that dying, colourless world. Against her burdened soul, like newly inked and tender skin. He is her fire. He is her dream come alive and repeated across the strange, black cartography she must create for herself in her mind. He is the shadow of himself splayed across the bulging, rough bark of trees; he is reflected back in the muddy water she treads knee-deep through.
She doesn’t need to see, to see him.
To see both of them, as indelible as her gods’ brand.
Edda, too, had considered what it might be like had she never strayed from her Path. Had she remained beholden to the ancient and foretold duty—the endless, purposeful march through time, from boneyard, ruin and ancestral tomb. Alone; left small gifts and offerings at family shrines, but watched through cracked shutters and doorways. She was never meant for any of this. For love, for motherhood—and maybe that is why it keeps rebuking her. Maybe it is punishment, for the purloined pleasures and for defying an order higher than even her gods.
She hears the sucking give of mud and murky water, her ear tilting in the direction, followed wearily by her senseless, clouded gaze. ‘Hello.’ It occurs to her that she could continue on without a word. That she could make off as a ghost in the bog and continue upon her tireless search without having to engage. And it is tempting. As tempting as it is to consign herself to the earth. But she shifts from the tree, taking her weight back into her sore legs and faces the woman.
‘Are you lost?’
Desperately.
The once-skald inclines her head, mud speckled up to her chin amongst her dark freckled markings. She would smile, laugh even, if she had it in her. Instead, her brows crease together and she sighs softly, her voice eking out, hoarse and dry—and she hadn’t even realized how hungry and thirsty she has become. “Not ‒ exactly.” There is a mighty weight on her tongue, exhaustion and frustration. She could never stop looking for him. Could never stop trying.
But she was so deeply sick of having to.
“I am looking for someone ‒ I’m afraid it is true, I do not know where I am…” she had come to learn that it didn’t matter. Every single step is a link, a gesture of faith.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
For all of her traveling and changing of homes, Elena has never considered herself a vagabond, not truly. She was born and raised to be rooted into a kingdom of some sort. To serve a home and its people. To look to those same people like family, to form relationships For all her wandering, Elena has not a drop of wanderlust in her blood. She dreamed of facing down dragons, but only if after the flame she could retreat to the safety of her home. She has imagined herself conquering the tallest of mountains, only if she can fall into the arms of her family when she sees where the horizon ends. And now, she pictures herself sailing out across the ocean she has come to love so much, if only because she knows how sweet it would be for her feet to land upon Terrastella’s sandy shore when it was all over.
Sunlight reaches through the trees in a hazy glow. Her smile is faint, but it is there (only because she tries so hard to make it so) as she looks at the woman. “Hello.” She says softly, brokenly, her voice shallower than a whisper. Her blue eyes bruise as she looks at her. And then she turns around.
She had heard once, that when you drown, you hear music. When she looks into the blind woman’s eyes, she thinks she hears chimes, and wonders for a moment if you can drown on dry land. Because she can feel something like panic in her throat. She doesn't like the feeling of everything tumbling out of her control.
‘You can make a wish.’ Said a boy, with a lantern. She looks at the girl now and thinks she wasted it on such a foolish thing.
‘I love you.’ He had told her.
Maybe she should have wished for something more eternal instead.
Her delicate face deepens with sympathy. Not for her blindness, but for her loneliness. The palomino sinks into her emotions. They aren't happy, not what she would like, but feeling someone else’s loneliness, sorrow, it is so much better than her own and Elena can walk into someone’s emotions as easily as walking through a front door. It is by all means an invasion of privacy, but Elena needs this, Gods she needs this. Anything but the way her own heart throbs, bruising her ribs with every pulse. She can feel them crack and splinter, she wonders how she keeps from bleeding from the inside out.
A miracle maybe.
Just like her wish, she might have used that miracle for something else if she had known.
Slender frame moves closer to the woman as she talks, those golden legs taking a step, loud enough to she knows that she moves, so the blind woman is able to keep track of her. Silver blue eyes remember with an empathetic ache of what it was like once, in the dark.
“I’m sorry.” She sounds like wildflowers and rain. She knows what it is like to be somewhere between found and lost. Elena would much rather be a girl without a map, alone in the woods, than one with, but no idea of which way to start.
Elena moves closer until she could reach out if she wanted to, but she does not. “Please, let me help you,” she says, even if it is for her own selfish reason, even if it is because she remembers how no one had helped her.
Even if she never would have taken it even if she was offered it.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
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