There is something lonely about the lake, about the way it stretches from margin to margin within Sterling’s view, sleek and gray and quiet. The day is hazy, the afternoon sun lost inside a low layer of fog, and as he picks his way along the shoreline the stallion wonders what this place must look like under different weather. It requires little effort of imagination; from what he’s seen so far, Denocte is unfaltering in its beauty. Sterling does not doubt how the waters must roll and sparkle in the midday light, or glimmer smoothly with the reflection of the stars, like fireflies caught beneath a plane of glass.
But today there is no sun, no stars, no breeze to stir the trailing branches of the willow trees. The lake is still, and hot, and almost otherworldly.
Sterling likes it. After the dazzling press of the markets the night before, the music and the crowds and the dizzying array of wares, he is glad for the space and silence. For a long while he is content to simply walk the curve of the lake, the humid air closing in around him like a sweaty fist, the plash of his hooves in the shallow water the only sound—
—though he is not, he recognizes suddenly, alone. There is a mare, half-hidden between the willows; a unicorn, he realizes, as he draws nearer. She, too, is otherworldly, so still she might be a part of the tree herself, her horn a gleaming spike among the branches.
On a different day, in a different place, Sterling would not so much as pause to question whether he might be intruding. Here, he cannot help but feel a trespasser, noisy and piebald-bright and as much at odds with the scene as the unicorn seems to be a piece of it.
It is too late to turn away, however, without seeming strange, and so he steps up alongside her, the leaves of the willows gliding like the hands of ghosts across his withers and flanks. Her eyes, he sees now, are the violet-blue of a storm at night, and Sterling feels a shiver of electricity whisper along his spine.
“What is it that you see?” he asks her, and his words feel like buckshot in the still, hot air.
AND MAYBE GOD IS JUST A COP
THAT WE CAN FAST TALK
@nestle for whomever you like <3 was somewhat thinking of Thana, but realized it could apply to several of yours :)
09-24-2019, 12:24 PM - This post was last modified: 09-24-2019, 12:35 PM by Sterling
She does not think to miss the wind. It is the same way she does not think to miss the winter, or the ocean, or the silver-cool moonlight. Although maybe she does not think to miss anything because death does not lament. It only rejoices, in the black, it rejoices.
Thana does however, miss the silence when the stallion comes close enough that she can see the lines of white running along the curl of his rib-cage. Like scars, she thinks. The willow sighs a welcome to him in the same way it had to her. A brush of leaf across the dip of a spine, a whisper where the wind should have been instead. She does not wonder how it feels to him. But she does wonder (on a shallow inhale) if the roots are talking about the stallion who does not know how to be silent.
Now she always finds herself wondering what the trees say, and the rocks, and the rotting loam beneath her hooves.
She wishes she wouldn't.
When he comes closer still, her eyes ache with the need to turn away from the glass-water, and the quail moving whisper quick through the whippoorwills. The bird had been tracking something in the shadows between stalks that she hasn't been able to make out. Thana thought it was like watching something primordial, honest and raw. It made her feel like there was still water stretching out around her body in white sun-light. Like she was dripping molten stars instead of summer sweat and willow pollen.
His voice is sharp in the silence (a clumsy blade, lost and loose). The quail takes to the sky with a screech and Thana flinches as the sudden loss of all that silence, stillness and death.
She wishes he didn't.
“Life.” Her own voice is as rough and whisper-thin as the willow painting lines across their backs. It's the not-there wind on the rocks and the sound sunlight makes on still water. For once her horn does not howl in the air (like a thing scenting some bloody trail in the black forest) when she turns to face him. If her eyes spark it's only with distant lighting, bright but easy to miss.
Their shoulders brush softly, almost soft enough to be nothing more the way to things pass between each other in space-- close but not close enough. She inhales. He smells like bonfires and sweat and bodies that do not know how to be wild.
“What do you see?” Thana asks and she does not think to miss the wondering.
No sooner does Sterling speak than a quail erupts from the shallows of the lake, lurching into the fog with a shrill cry. Beside him, the unicorn startles at the sound, and Sterling feels himself tense in turn, his skin rippling. Then, for a heartbeat, there is silence again, thick and heavy, broken only by the distant whump, whump, whump of the quail’s wingbeats as it climbs the sky.
Sterling tracks its progress, something in his chest winding in taut. It seems like an omen, somehow: this bird, this lake, this stillness hovering over the world, the way the silence touches everything except for him. He has always done the wrong thing, he thinks, and he doesn’t understand it, how he can be so sure of himself and yet such a disappointment to others, how every gamble he takes always seems to end in loss.
But the unicorn says Life, her voice scarcely more than a breath of wind to stir the soft green tangle of the willow leaves. She turns to him, her shoulder ghosting against his, and Sterling almost feels bashful, like a boy caught handling a fine piece of china that his mother warned him not to touch (though the unicorn seems far from fragile, and the touch was not his own). She breathes his scent, and he breathes hers, dark earth and rugged mountains, blistering deserts and oceans impossibly deep, sunlight and the black vacuum between the stars.
She is not from here, he thinks, but she is not like him, either, come to Denocte by of way someplace else. She seems at once to be from everywhere, and from no real place at all.
But this is absurd, and Sterling shakes the thought aside, turning his attention instead to the question she has posed him, the same question he had asked. What does he see? He looks again at the deathly stillness of the lake, the dull gray sky. “Endings,” he says, remembering the wide golden plains of Austellus, the capital city with its palace built of white stone, the careless luxury of home and family and privilege. “But maybe beginnings, too.”
He turns back to the unicorn, to her measuring eye. “Do you believe it’s possible to start over?” he asks her. “To cut ties with the past, and become someone new?”
If there is a memory in his voice she cannot hear it. There is only the brush of the willow at the edges of his voice like silk and the touch of smoke at the tips of his words as they curl up into the space between them as questions. She does not pause to wonder why he's asking anything of her. She is only thinking that he has. And if there is anything more to her thoughts about him it's gone the moment her skin quivers at the touch of the willow tree.
She is always thinking about endings but she doesn't tell him that when he turns to look at her with a look she's too wild to meet. Around her the grass starts to dry out until black veins are rising through the green leaves (as if her magic is eager to give away all the things Thana does not want to share). Her tail slicks though the marsh-grass until the heads of them are falling around their hocks like snow deciding to fall backwards. “Maybe.” She meant for it to come out like another whisper strained, but instead it falls from her lips like a rusty prayer-- all breathlessness and knots of wire forgotten for years.
Perhaps it's only the part of her that chaffs, and pulls, and frets at all the things she's longing for that answered him.
And when Thana lifts her gaze to look at him, to really look at him, she can see all the longing in her wild, unbroken heart looking back at her. It's shifted and strange and of a different color but it's there, like a song she's never forgotten the sound of (the howl of the wind, the roar of a beast, the dripping of sun-white water over her eyes). It's there and Thana strains towards it until their noses are closer than the roots and the dirt.
Another horse would call it an almost kiss. Thana only knows it's the way wolves pass in the woods, or the way birds share the same branch. It's understanding that needs no words and she does not pause to wonder if he understands the language of wild things in the thicket.
“I would become something new,” She can feel her own words falling back in waves of heat against the place where her lips are so close to his. The sun gathers on the tip of her horn like it's water instead of light (a halo she'll never see). Another leaf freckles with rot and death and age around her hooves (a halo of death that she'll always see).
And when she exhales the air in her lungs right into his it's with the sound of, “if I knew how.”
There is a moment—the briefest moment—where Sterling feels larger than himself. He is the quail, floating improbably high above the misty lake; he is the wind, filling the heavy wings of the quail. He is the sun, a distant, watery white eye, squinting down through its veil of fog at two horses, small and ordinary, standing in the shade of an ancient willow.
Then he is himself again, and he does not feel ordinary at all, not with the unicorn looking at him like the answer to a question he no longer remembers asking. He had thought she had looked at him before, but he understands now that that had been no more a look than a blade of grass was a savanna, or a drop of rain a raging sea. This time, when she turns her purple eyes to his, he feels a lurch like thunder in his chest. Everything about her is strange, and wild, and as foreign as the stars—and yet there is something about her that breathes familiar, something soft and tentative that whispers home.
Her nose trembles against his, her breath little more than a flutter of warmth. Sterling shivers. His own breath is slow, shallow, kept even only by an effort of will. When she speaks, he feels the promise in her words, the certainty—
—and the desperation, the air rushing out of a balloon, the unspoken plea. “If I knew how,” she says, and the words are a part of him, he is breathing them in; they are his own words, as surely as if he’d spoken them himself.
There is a sudden glint of brightness, a glare that he feels the urge to turn toward rather than look away. Sterling blinks, and her horn gleams into view, gnarled as the branch of an old tree, gilded by the sun that has slipped unexpectedly free of its murky cover. For a heartbeat he sees her, again, as something entirely apart from himself: a creature woven into the tapestry of earth and lake and sky, more alike to the quail and the willow than to one such as he.
Only then does he notice the grass, the way it blackens around her hooves, the way the blade of her tail slices absently through the rushes, a death as delicate as snowfall. He should feel afraid, Sterling thinks, but it is a distant thought. He thinks only that there is something lovely about it: the black lines etched through the green leaves, like veins spreading inside of lungs; the soft, downy patter of the marsh grass.
All this in the space of a breath—he has scarcely pulled away from her, an inch, maybe two, but all at once the distance seems unconscionable. Hesitantly, the air drawing in like a wish between his teeth and tongue, he rests his cheek against hers. I would not change you, he thinks, but it does not seem the right thing to say. “Perhaps it can be learned,” he offers instead. The willow traces its arcane patterns along his spine. “I’ve never tried before.”
There are so many things, suddenly, that he wants to ask her: Who were you, before? and What brought you here? He doesn’t know her, doesn’t know why he feels this unlikely kinship with her, but he is reluctant to let it go. Finally, his voice half-playful, half-entreating her to pretend with him that anything is possible, he asks: “Who do you want to become?”
They way he says learned makes it sound like something simple, something as easy to understand as the way her heart pushes rot and death through her veins. Or maybe he's only saying it like a prayer to a new-god, one full of only hope instead of greed, or love instead of wrath. Perhaps she's only grasping on to the sound of it, the way he makes it seem so simple, in the only way she knows how to hold onto anything-- by teeth and throat, blood and bone.
Thana holds on with her gaze until she wonders if he can feel the layers of them peeling back to reveal all the cracked, hollow and wanting holes in themselves. Do I look like the moon in the twilight fog? She wants to breathe the question into him until she can see whatever it is that he can see reflected back to her in the eyes. But all she can see is the same thing looking back. There is no answer to the wanting in her.
Nor is there all the stories of the trees waiting golden and petaled on his tongue.
She closes her eyes, hard, until she can see lighting racing across the black like a flock of birds heading towards the desert in the midnight snow. She counts each of his breaths against her face, and the way she can feel blood rushing beneath his skin (is it reaching for the death rushing below hers?). She gives him some of her weight, just enough to feel the rot of her, the way it's so much heavier than life is.
It's only when he might bear it, all this aching, pressing against his skin that she speaks again. “And when you learn it, will you tell me?” She does not ask if, there is no space in her darkness for if, no crack in the bones filling the space between her wicked horn and her wicked tail that if might rest in (if only for a little while). She is all hard edges, all promises that when he learns it she might pluck him open to discover the way.
And still, still, still---
She wants to ask him if she looks like the moon in the twilight fog.
But Thana has never been asked what she wants and it makes her inhale sharply. The air feels like needles in her throat and the fog pools in her lungs like sludge. She trembles like a lion dreaming of running lambs, like everything in her body is trying fiercely to come out. Her magic sighs in her blood like it's reminding her that she's bone and black magic, rot and mold. “I would become anything.” She says.
Then because she's a unicorn, “I want to be everything.”
And if the magic in the center of her had a face it would have smiled.
