everywhere kassandra ran
she found she was already there.
They say on this night the veil between life and death is thin.
His form shimmers in and out of its regular lines. The wavering light of the candles and bonfires is wreaking havoc on his solidity; he flickers from translucency to transparency every time the shadows shift. But all his freckles are in the right places. And the daring warmth of his ghostly eyes is like the living.
He tells her, in his warm, perfect voice: “They say on this night the veil between life and death is thin.” A grin punctuates his remark.
Bexley blinks and replies, with a kind of a snort, “Obviously.”
Smoke fills her lungs. It is scent-heavy with pine, pumpkin—the smell of curling, ashy edges of parchment. In the wild air, there is howling laughter and wailing strings making music that hurts like a scythe. And underneath it a gauze of white noise, overlapping waves of conversation, hoofbeats on stone. All of Denocte is uproarious. They go dancing in their fine silks; the bright white lines of their grin flash in the darkness. She envies them for celebrating. And still she cannot understand it, how they turn such blind eyes to life’s cruelties.
Light glints off the stained windows and pools over the cobblestones. And like her own kind of ghost, Bexley stands removed from it all, silent in a side street, her eyes turned down to the gravestone and not the figure that stands just behind it. Her heart pounds against her teeth. Blood buzzes in her ears. With some effort, she manages to close her eyes against the urge to watch. Against the sparks, and the torchlight, and the temptation that groans insistently at the pulse points in her neck.
If I look, he’ll leave.
If he can hear her, there’s no way to tell. He says nothing. She’s not sure he can. At least not anything original. They had all said the same thing—the priests, the prophets, the kids with the carving knives: The veil between life and death is thin. He could have picked it up from any one of them. He could have used their voices, even. Bexley is not sure that she would notice. It’s hard to remember, now, what he’s supposed to sound like. Or what he is supposed to be like. Not kind and not unkind, not perfect nor awful, not alive but not quite dead.
He glances up at her. It could be mournful; she’s not looking.
Underneath the pale script of his name on the gravestone, there is nothing. No flowers. No fruits. Candles, just a few, and all of them have never been burned. (She blows a little puff of fire toward the wicks and watches as they go up in perfect yellow flames, spinning thin smoke toward the sky.) No paintings, no champagne, no paper-wrapped packages. Nausea rises in her stomach, entwined with icy, acrid fear; she grits her teeth, forcing a breath, and does not look, don’t look, If I look, he’ll leave.
Out of the corner of her eye she can still see him. Broad-shouldered, wide-grinned, ebbing in and out of real visibility. The pretty, roguish gleam of his eyes. If I look—
“I miss you,” Bexley says abruptly. The words stilted with embarrassment. Disembodied. Who's talking, even? He gives her (or at least she thinks he does) a sheepish, pitying kind of look. A soft I know kind of look. A self-satisfied sure you do kind of look. Her whole face twists in self-hatred at the impression of it. Bitterness is a knife that punctures the curl of her lip.
“Fine,” she snaps, “I don’t.” Like a taut string her body vibrates in anger, right down to the bone.
The altar is still empty. But what is there left to give that he does not have of her already?
Not their child, not her heart, not a life to trade; not a country to betray, not a scar to be tattooed. And far too late for a wedding band.
With all the carefulness in the world, and for the first time she can ever remember, Solterra’s golden girl unlocks the golden chain around her neck.
And when it hits the grave, it makes much less sound then she thought it would.
i think you will
set yourself on fire
before you realise
even you cannot conquer the sun.
rebellion sits well
on you; like a red coat
or the gilt gold burnish of youth.
(i do not believe
we shall ever see how old age
looks on you.
you are breaking my heart)
This evening, Boudika’s heart is full.
She has never known peace. Not truly. Not until now. Her peace had always come in halves, impartial and cruel in the way it was just enough to let her hope, and dream, and want… but never enough to be tangible. It had always manifested as a near but distant future, obtainable and somehow, enigmatically, out of reach. It had been the capture of Orestes and the confession of her truth and her love to Vercingtorix. It had been becoming an entertainer in the Night Court, with Raum overshadowing her new home in ways she still has yet to fully comprehend.
For the first time in her life, her city whispers to her: you are safe.
But in Boudika’s mind, there is a toll. A payment to be made. She is her city’s Champion of Community, and the more she contemplates it the more it necessitates her service. Community. Boudika, wandering the streets of the fall celebrations, admiring the city of tents outside of Denocte, finds herself wondering at that word. Community. Does that exist solely within the walls of Denocte, or beyond? Does it exist only between the living, or also with the dead?
Around her neck there are wreaths and wreaths of fall-time flowers. Boudika had found them in the markets, being sold by a young girl with skin like ivory and eyes that were black, black, black. The girl had said, they are for the dead.
Boudika has been wandering, searching for names that have been unattended, unremembered. She searches for those who grieve alone. And she places the wreaths with them, one by one, until there is only one wreath left. The flowers are orange, and vibrant gold, and a purple so deep it looks black.
That is how she finds Bexley Briar. With a wreath of flowers the colour of her dead lover.
Boudika stands far behind the alleyway, in the soft swathe of darkness. The moonstones of the streets do not seem as bright tonight, as vibrant, and the joyous laughter that infects Denocte does not reach this quiet place. The girl places a golden necklace on the earth, but the ground still looks bare.
After a long moment of contemplation, Boudika approaches. She stands a little ways off, so as to not intrude on the golden woman’s grief. At last:
“I have flowers, if you want them.” As she says it, it strikes her, Orestes has no place of remembrance. No shrine, or altar, or name engraved on stone. Only the place he has etched in her heart. Her mouth opens to say more—to say, I know what it is like to grieve alone but she does not.
everywhere kassandra ran
she found she was already there.
Once, on the mountains—
Once, when the mountains were frigid with god-magic and carpeted in changing leaves, he had said, in a voice sore with something like love: I knew the letter was fake cause it had the word sorry in it. And she had laughed.
But how sorry she is now. How really, truly sorry.
Sorry she couldn’t keep him alive, and sorry that she still is. Sorry the world is still turning without him. Sorry that there is nothing left of her to give, and that his group of ragtag Crows has gone, and that while he rots in the ground, Denocte still sings and dances on top of his grave, as if it has not noticed his disappearance at all.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Once, when the mountains were frigid with god-magic and carpeted in changing leaves, he had said, in a voice sore with something like love: Are you tempting me up here so you can use me as a sacrifice? And she had not laughed.
Because she knew the universe, watchful and heinous, would make good on whatever fucked-up promise it overheard, and all the sorries festering in her stomach and crawling out of her nose, all the sorries in the world didn’t (wouldn’t) mean a thing in the face of the snarling, rabid, petty bitch called providence.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, and when the voice sounds behind her all those sorries explode at once.
Something like hunger gnashes at her. It tears apart the ribbons of her muscles and it sinks its teeth into every cell in her body and suddenly she is shaking with unfettered rage, kicking like a kid held underwater, and though at first she manages not to turn, she simply cannot keep it from happening: the thin, hot stream of molten gold that pours from her nostrils to splatter against the gravestone.
She turns, and is beautiful, is always. Feral, as always. When her eyes meet Boudika’s they are clear and dark. But the lines of her face are cold and unimpressed, flat, even, and when she speaks it is like a queen’s voice, an order: “I don’t."
i think you will
set yourself on fire
before you realise
even you cannot conquer the sun.
rebellion sits well
on you; like a red coat
or the gilt gold burnish of youth.
(i do not believe
we shall ever see how old age
looks on you.
you are breaking my heart)
There is both an austerity and heaviness within the alcove, as though a great storm rests just overhead. A palpable tension exists, and Boudika finds herself waiting, nearly with bated breath, as though rain is about to fall… The mare dubbed Copperhead thinks, then, that grief comes in waves.
It drowns. It saves.
It rages, and strains, and goes dormant for a time. It can twist, and gnarl, and corrupt. It can transform things once beautiful into what is hideous, and unrecognisable. Boudika has known many widows and widowers; she has known friends slain and, more tragic still, those maimed, those who have allowed their grief to become a maelstrom in their gut, corrupting them. She thinks of the scent of liquor her father always seemed to carry; she thinks of the one time she asked, “What did mother look like?” and how he had snarled and sobbed at once, had screamed, “Never ask me that! You do not ask about her!”
And Boudika never asked again.
It is a similar thing that happens now. The golden mare trembles like a grove of aspens, but Boudika is not so naive as to mistake it for weakness or fatigue. There is a tension that bespeaks of rage, rage, rage—the sort of limitless blackness that opens up as a chasm where a heart should be and demands something fill it, and that something can be anything.
Boudika is not expecting the stream of gold that leaks, like ichor, from the stranger’s nostrils. “I don’t.” And Boudika is faced by the woman who streams gold from her orifices and shakes as though fighting off a transformation. Another woman may have taken that as as sign to leave but Boudika stands for a moment longer.
Her soul is echoing, echoing, echoing.
A part of her feels an anger, sharp and strange and betrayed. And she thinks I would like to feel so fiercely. Everything she has felt strikes her hard, yes, but Boudika compartmentalises; she hides it; the tears never come and the anger is released only in private. How much does it take, to love someone to the point that your body leaks the sun?
Boudika wonders if the other is a goddess, lost. She tips her head and drops the flowers to the ground where they tumble and bruise. The air is filled with their tender scent, and somewhere far away a child laughs.
“I am angry too.” She thinks of the moment she first fell in love and knew it was a love that would always, forever, be damned. Boudika does not try to console. “And sad.”
The name strikes her now, as it hadn’t before. Acton.
She cannot stop the question from coming, and when it does come, it is bitter.
“Do you wish he hadn’t been a hero? That he would have stayed?” Then, her voice sounds strange: “I think I would have wished that.” Boudika admits something of herself then, something deep and dark and selfish, and she is not ashamed. She wonders, if she had had a choice, if she would have chosen Orestes had lived instead of herself. If she would have traded something for him, something invaluable, her life or another's.
Yes, she thinks. If I could bring him back, I would sacrifice something that great.
But was that not the paradox?
Did the best not die young, brave and glorious and unable to be saved? Boudika turns her face away, expecting anger, expecting frustration or rage, and she wants it. She wants it.
The fullness of her heart is replaced by knowledge of an absence.
everywhere kassandra ran
she found she was already there.
The woman does not leave.
And Bexley’s disgust-anger builds in her like the rolling waves of so much salt, and the gold burns a track down her lips; as she gazes down at the gravestone, all the atoms of her body beg please, please, please, and are rewarded with absolutely nothing. There is no ghost. There is no kingdom to be conquered. The stranger’s presence still lingers, dark and rusty at the edges of her gaze. Her chest still throbs in dull pain. With a ragged breath she closes her eyes—
Far away there is the small, pretty sound of someone young laughing, and a soft, brief whisper of petals as they touch the cobblestone.
I am angry too. And sad.
She closes her eyes—
I was sacrificed for the good of the earth—
I was sacrificed for the good of the world, Bexley, you know that. Loving life is pitiful. Still, here you are. But, listen, sweet girl, death is assured to all those born, and birth assured to all the dead; when you get here I promise I’ll give you a good tour—
I was killed so you could live, Bexley, even if it looks a little wrong, even if it felt a little staged. There’s only so much to be done about. There’s only so far you can get with a mark like Cain’s. I know it’s been a while. But Aunt and Uncle are here and that kid with the club foot and the ear-wings you always cared so much about, and there’s someone new who says he knows you—
When you come to visit—well, I hope it’s not soon—
She spits a slash of gold onto the cobblestone, where it sizzles and dies. There is a pounding kind of pain just underneath her temples.
“Yes,” Bexley says. Her pulse slips. Her eyes are grey-dulled, transparent like a bad heartbeat. The air is thick with the smell of gilded blood and shed petals, and for a moment she does not move, does not breathe, does not do anything at all. Pain sears the inside of her chest as deftly as a sword-edge and each breath is filtered too-thin through grit teeth and oh, what is this, who is she who stands here and wallows in her grief instead of bleeding it out like the stuck pig it is?
I’m disappointed. You’re a Briar. Sister, you are not built for love; you know better—
“You are not wrong to wish that. Copperhead.” Bexley rolls her head to meet the stranger’s gaze. And now her voice is a little softer, a little less okay, a little less accusatory: and it clacks against her teeth in a most trembling pulse that tastes like rosemary, like soot and crystal, and her nostrils are saturated by gold and the old-smell of his long rotted skin. Resin. Jasmine. Blood-warmth.
There is no accusation in it. Just the simple fact. Copperhead.
And then she says, in a tenor wracked by struggle: “But he was not a hero.”
Just arrogant. Just impulsive. Just this, just perfect, just pretty, bright-eyed evil, and if only the heroes died young then even he had to admit he could not be correctly marked to die for that, in the name of a goodness he did not commit.
“I only loved him,” she says. Her voice is ice-hard. “That does not make anyone good.”
In the story of Patroclus no one survives, not even Achilles who was nearly a god. Patroclus resemble him; they wore the same armor. Always in these friendships one serves the other, one is less than the other: the hierarchy is always apparent, though the legends cannot be trusted--their source is the survivor, the one who has been abandoned. What were the Greek ships on fire compared to this loss? In his tent, Achilles grieved with his whole being and the gods saw he was a man already dead, a victim of the part that loved, the part that was mortal.
There is something complicated building within Boudika; it is something as knotted, as uncertain, as roots must look beneath a forest. She feels it pushing through her, digging deep. She feels the way it is something that drains her. There are tangles and knots and the feeling of not enough and she knows that if she traced the threads of that feeling, they would lead back to three people, all of them dead or as good as dead. Her father. Orestes. Vercingtorix.
Even before Boudika asks it, she knows it is a mistake. It is a question from a younger, more naive version of herself.
Do you wish he hadn’t been a hero?
There are no heroes, and Boudika recognises the empty resonance in her soul as anger, as burning as the gold the stranger spits onto the cobblestones. She has no right to steal a stranger’s grief and let it become rage; but somehow it burns in her like embers, and she listens to the other woman. You are not wrong to wish that, Copperhead. The alias is like an accusation, but softer, sweeter. It was the name she had danced under, before she became one of Isra’s Champions, before she tried to become someone that is enough. In this moment, Boudika does not know why she wants so desperately to reach Bexley; nor can she identify why she feels anger, soft and sweet and poisonous, fill her heart and mind.
She thinks of how Orestes was the closet man she had ever known to a hero; she thinks of how he was everything and more, more, more, but perhaps it was easier for him because he may have well been a god. And, besides—he had always been portrayed the monster, and Vercingtorix the saviour. Her people sang a different story than the one she remembers now and, perhaps, the only reason she remembers it differently is because the way she suffers for the sins of her forefathers, and theirs. It is history that wrote the heroes, nothing else, and she almost says as much. But she does not--not yet--because she has seen the darker forms Isra’s magic takes, and does that not have a little to do with the tragedy that is Acton? Is that not why Boudika loves it?
There must always be a scapegoat, she thinks.
But he was not a hero.
No.
Perhaps not.
The golden mare turns her eyes to Boudika at last, and they are a battle in and of themselves. Blood gone bad. Cold, grey ice on the verge of melting.
“You’re right.”God-girl, you are right. “But being a hero doesn’t have to make someone good. That isn’t how history remembers it, anyways.” Boudika steps forward just enough that the flowers are crushed underfoot; forgotten. She says, “He will always be the man who saved Denocte’s Queen. Haven’t you heard the story of Achilles and Hektor?” There is nothing but candlelight, the distant noise of a crowd, the way the fire dances in their eyes. It is not hard to imagine battle, and blood, and grief. Her mind is still alight with the image of Bexley's gold-spit and the way it was, for a moment, ferociously bright. It is dead now.
“Achilles gave up everything in his life for the promise of honour and glory in the greatest war of his time. His best friend sacrificed himself to save their people, because Achilles refused to fight on an account for being dishonoured by their commander—but then Achilles returns to battle to avenge him, and kills the most prestigious man among their enemies, Hektor. Hektor is by far the better man. A defender of city and state… but Achilles is the one hailed as a hero, because their people win the war, because Hektor’s are slain one by one." It is a story her father told her, always with elation, always with passion, as if Achilles were truly heroic. As if he were not a coward, in his own way. As if it were not Patroclus who had been the hero, or Hektor.
“In some versions the friend, Patroclus, is Achilles’ lover.” Her mouth moves as if to smile; instead, she grimaces. “The tragedy is the story belongs to the survivors, not the dead. Maybe in that way we’re already dead in our grief. We’re already twisting the thing into fable… and the greater tragedy of that, is really, no one survives. Some of us just have to bear the grief a little longer.”
It could have been condescending. It might have seemed that way. But Boudika’s voice is not consoling; it is not light, or comforting. No. Her voice is the sound of whispers at a funeral pyre. It is the sound of the look in Bexley’s eyes.
It is the memory of black cliffs and two bodies entangled as they fell.
It is the way they sounded already-dead when they hit the water.
It is the way that sometimes she wishes they had been.
It is the way she remembers prison, with a little love.
It is the way she still dreams of running on the black beach.
Boudika sometimes does not know which one she loved more; Orestes or Vercingtorix. Sometimes she does not know which one she resents more, for leaving her, for abandoning her, for letting her live. It takes her this long to realise her anger is not at Bexley. Her anger is for the fact she never had a funeral for either; there was never an opportunity for goodbye.
There was always just the feeling of a heart breaking.
@Bexley | "speaks" | notes: i still have no idea what's happening in this thread LOL
everywhere kassandra ran
she found she was already there.
She has never been a patient girl.
And now her patience is running out. By nature Bexley is capricious; it is the only natural result of a childhood unmarked by poverty, loss, or unfulfilled desire. Change takes her, and that’s fine. Want fuels her, and that’s fine. She has never had to wait for anything, nor has she ever been made to do something (except, perhaps, grieving) she did not want to.
So the fact that this girl is still here—this girl who thinks she knows everything, who talks as though she is supposed to be Bexley’s guardian angel—is beginning to fray her nerves.
There is the crunching of flowers. There is a closing of distance as the dancer steps forward. And now the heat in Bexley’s cheeks rises until it hits a fever pitch, and her blue eyes almost glow: she is seething, seething, seething, it is the only thing she knows how to do—rage and refuse, refuse everything—Acton’s death, Boudika’s advice, the knowledge that she is alone, now, and does not belong here or in Solterra or anywhere else in the world.
You are right.
Of course I am right, Bexley wants to say; is righteousness not hereditary?
Her mouth is hot, and dripping, dripping, dripping gold. It burns a strange circle around the line of her gums. It fills her nose with the smell of her magic, something like ash and jasmine that she has begun to associate with nausea as much as with power. How has the world gone so dark—? She is bristling, now, trying to light up the night, or maybe it is just subliminal. A thing she cannot stop, like the blood she can feel pulsing in her ears, or her heart pounding in her chest, or the part of her that wants to kill, or die, or maybe both.
Her stomach turns. Vinegar, acid, rises to the back of her throat. Bexley meets Boudika’s eyes unflinchingly, almost without blinking: she is a statue now, like Solis waiting at the top of the mountain or standing, shrouded in stilled fire, inside Solterra’s chapels.
Boudika is speaking, and speaking, and speaking. Only half of it registers.
Bexley’s lips curl. It is a smirk, almost, but—dead, and ugly. Impatient.
It is strange a girl-soldier feels the need to talk so much.
His shade is gone, now, the shimmering suggestion of it absorbed into the dark of night around them. And she is not sad, anymore. Only angry. Only awful. A lazy swish of the white tail; Bexley steps forward until she is nearly level with Boudika, and smiles at her—faint, dry. Disinterested.
“When I was told of you,” she says, almost musing, “I was given the impression our meeting would be interesting.”
The air between them vibrates. The world is still. So still. Bexley tilts her head like a dog; her gaze is blackened, unamused. “Yet you speak an infinite deal of nothing.“ Her lip curls. A frozen snarl. “Your stories, Boudika, are spectacular only to the uneducated. I am not an audience they will impress.”
And she leaves and leaves and leaves. Like a ghost.
