Do we know, or do we not, friend?
Both sides are framed by the reluctant hour
and chiseled on the faces of men.
✧
I
used to be a God.
The thought doesn’t come to me arrogantly; it doesn’t come to me with any emotion at all. I just remember, with a placid kind of dissonance, all that I had once been. I had never though the best years of my life would be my distant youth; I never thought all I would ever amount to had already transpired, and now—
Now what?
My stare across the city square of Delumine. It is brimming with pegasi and unicorns; merchants; scholars. The cool winter air does not seem to bother them, veiled as they are in wool scarves and blankets. It had been snowing. Now it is not. The sky is a solid grey, like one long sheet of metal—but that is the only thing that reminds me of home.
Maybe, I think, things would play out differently—if only I had joined a Court. But I had not. I was a roamer, a wanderer—and I continue on my way, through Delumine (where I had been investigating their black markets) and beyond, into the fields, into the forest.
I am through Illuster, and into the edge of the Viride. I can hear the Rapax but do not want to venture too near and so I decide to turn back the direction I had come, to the edge where the meadow meets the trees. Behind me, the forest stretches old and forlorn. I recognise it as something ancient, as something cursed, and that too reminds me of my homeland—
Those are the only similarities, however. Delumine seems soft where Oresziah was hard. The pegasi are an anomaly, as are the unicorns—on my island, no one had wings with which to fly, or a single spiraled horn. Everyone had been dual-horned, like bulls or oxen or antelope or stags, and everyone had used them as—
Even remembering makes my horns ache.
I had been a God, once—
Young, vivacious, and death could not touch me. I had been the harbinger of it, with a future gem-bright and certain. Don’t we all think our desires are fate?
Damascus meets me; he does not accompany me into cities for obvious reasons. But I feel his approach, low over the trees, and know he has been hunting to fill that insatiable appetite. When he lands in front of me, in the clearing, his jaws are blood-streaked and strung with flesh. When he lands, he breathes out harmless cyan vapour that dances into nearly incomprehensible shapes; a leopard that rises and twists into a butterfly, before dissipating.
He rumbles, “God’s die, too.”
And does not know his all-too-obvious passage through the sky had attracted attention...
He is a flash of shadow and gold in the crowd of Delumine. Just one look and she remembers him. One look upon the scythe of his black and gold-star horns and she is back before the statues with his quiet indifference and her confessions.
Wicked. Was what she has breathed out through her dark lips. Yet she went ever further and told him how she wished to banish her kind. It was a raw moment, shame filled her later, it still fills her now, but she cannot escape the truth of it. She despises herself, she despises all kelpies - even though she loves her sisters so deeply, so wholly. Sereia moves to him and her mind is full of tigers.
Tyger, tyger burning bright.
A poem she once read blooms into her mind. It is orange and full of fire. Her stride feels suddenly feline, suddenly more predatory than she has ever felt before. Her swan grace, her feline predation. It has been so long since she ate and she feels the prowling, howling hunger clawing at her empty stomach. Her kelpie gnaws upon her bones. Sereia ignores it. Make up hides her too-wide smile, still she pretends to not be the very creatures she swore she wanted banish.
In the forests of the night;
The swan-girl steps through the dark, ancient wood. Her skin is damp, so nearly dry, but just wet enough to turn her skin cool and soft as velvet. She drinks in the gold of him as she steps like molten gold, her blues a deep indigo in the shadows. He is looking out, as something else. Sereia edges closer and fools herself into thinking she does not stalk him. But her approach is silent, her slim legs stepping with hushed precision.
Sereia is nearly to him, when a wave of deepest darkness sweeps over her, over him. Her chin tips up to where a dragon swoops down out of the sky. It lands, with blood and gore hanging from its maw. She smells the metal, the violence. Her stomach turns. She should leave, but she has become reckless and desperate. Her yearning to be normal, just another land horse, runs deep as a river. Sorrow limns her in hazy summer light. She exhales a silver cloud that reaches for the leopard that leaps into a butterfly form.
Gods die too
The dragon says and Sereia gazes at it beneath the veil of her fringe. Slim and angular, underfed and wasting away, she steps toward her familiar stranger. The dragon’s words remind her of a man in Solterra, who accused her of eating gods. Yes she thinks, even gods die too.
But that is not what she says when she slinks to Vercingtorix’s side, at once a rabbit and yet a cat. Her eyes are a lovely dark ochre. “What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” She whispers to the golden man the final lines of the first verse. As she does her eyes drink in the dragon. The sea-girl cannot help but think there are 3 predators here, but she keeps her secrets her own and tips her gaze up to peer upon her familiar stranger. Her lips are lovely, shadowed and sweet as they lie in a line like a bow.
Do we know, or do we not, friend?
Both sides are framed by the reluctant hour
and chiseled on the faces of men.
✧
S
he does not know the monster she incites with her poetry.
How could she? Why would I recognise it, a foreigner, from seas away? I close my eyes. There is a young man dancing behind them before firelight; tossing spiraled horns as aloud he cries the same chorus, drunken, elated. It is the closest I had ever come to kissing him, to reaching out and saying, I love you so fucking much I cannot stand it, you take the breath from me, you make me more than I am--
Bondike or Boudika, it did not matter. The tiger was in their rugged stripes and blood-bright eyes, in the fierceness of all that they were. And that was the poem--that was the poem written for them.
How could she know? There is a moment of distrust, of disbelief--she cannot understand, she cannot possibly conceive--
And when I open my eyes to examine her, it is with the sudden knowledge she does not understand the depth of her commentary. Perhaps she had thought it coy, or clever. The irony is simply a blade slipping through my breastbone, into my heart, stealing my breath. Somehow, I smile; and as I smile (another lie, another lie) Damascus laughs, a sound like the earth breaking. “How is it you knew I was a man of poetry?” There is nothing in my voice to betray the way my heart catches, still, in my throat. “A girl after my own heart.”
She is too thin, too veiled in something other. Her eyes hardly belong to a woman, but shine with the brightness of the sea, or a goddess. There is something in them I cannot trust but also cannot name. What word had she used, I wonder to myself. It is hard to remember, on the fringes of the time between when I had last seen her--but it comes upon me suddenly.
Wicked.
There is something wicked about her, now. But I suppose it is in me, too. Sometimes, I blame the dragon; but tonight I can only blame the poetry and the memories that shackle me, remembering once, having had the world--
Damascus laughs again, this time more deeply. He recognises something I do not, and I know this; but he does not reveal the knowledge to me. Too often, I have found the dragon to be uncannily observant; yet he is coy like a cat, and rarely divulges what he knows. He drops his great, snaking head down to rest it eye-to-eye with our new “guest.”
I wonder, briefly, how she had found me--if she had been looking. But decide against asking. “I will start a fire,” I suggest. “If you’d like, you are more than welcome to stay the night with us.”
The dragon laughs and Sereia wonders if the roar she hears from the earth is all just echo. She thinks, if she turns her gaze from him, she will see how the earth kneels for him. Trees bent low, stars pulling themselves loose out of the sky. For what else could stir them but the will of a god?
It was only a short while ago that she had asked her sister on a whim - a foolish, impulsive whim - what she thought dragons might taste like. That awful thought is still there, her kelpie feasting upon the delectable idea and finding it sweeter, sweeter each night her eyes close and her hunger begins to gnaw. Her familiar stranger is casting his eyes over the parts of her that are most angular. Sereia watches him and wonders what he thinks. Does he hear how her kelpie sings a siren song out from betwixt her ribs?
Her smile is small (and measured as always). He does not say the words for him, when she looks upon the dragon. Neither does she say it entirely for the dragon, Damascus. Her motives are purely selfish. She wonders if she might ever be able to see the beauty of a predator or in herself.
“I didn’t.” She says at last and strips her gilded gaze from where it burns upon the great dragon. She sets the sunlight of her eyes upon the man as gold as her. “But I am glad to hear you love words like I do. I pick up books in my wanderings.” When I explore boat wrecks at the bottom of the sea. Such honesty finds no place upon her deceptive tongue. She hates herself for it, even as she values her ability to lie. Sereia does not know, as she watches her familiar stranger, how he too is economical with his truths. They are more alike than just the gold of their bodies. They might be as horrified as each other to learn the sordid truths they keep hidden.
A girl after my own heart.
Sereia laughs.
And aches.
She is not as good as this stranger at concealing her heartbreak. Her self-loathing runs damagingly deep. She is cracked earth waiting for the rains of self-respect to come and give her life.
She aches.
She stops laughing that small sardonic laugh
Sereia does not think she could ever hold the heart of another. Never will she be worthy of that. When, oh when, did she take his flippant, passing comment and turn it into something so deep?
He lights a fire and it beckons her in. Sereia edges toward it and feels the salt of her skin grow dry and coarse. Fire is her elemental enemy. Water is everything she should be glad to be and represents everything she longs not to be. So she edges closer to the flames, fascinated, adoring. It hurts her. She thanks it.
The dragon lowers its head and she does not flinch (as a good creature of prey would) when it watches her. Instead, curious, she reaches toward it. The blood, the flesh, it all still dangles wet and red between its teeth. She is a veloceraptor before a t-rex. She blinks slowly and sighs soft like a dream. Slowly she withdraws and licks her lips and pretends a part of her does not taste phantom blood. She pretends a part of her did not wish to draw a piece of tattered flesh out of his mouth and remind herself what fresh blood and meat tastes like.
It has been growing ever darker and the fire-shadows dance between the trees. “Tell me something about yourself that no one else knows.” She asks her familiar stranger and longs to press her cheek against his dragon’s. Her eyes are slow in the twilight as they blink up and down. Lazy lashes hang heavy over her golden eyes. “I bet you did not expect to share your fire and yourself with me tonight.”
It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor —from breast to knees—
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.
✧
T
hey are not the type of monsters written into poems, into stories. Damascus is not the dragon at the top of a tower, guarding the princess; he does not pillage cities or loot caravans, hoarding treasure so deep it becomes a sea of gold and gems.
No.
Damascus is a dragon made of the broken pieces of a man. He does not recognize predator and prey.
Damascus recognizes something deeper; more inherent.
Pain. The factor that governs the life of men just as stars govern the evolution of galaxies; growing, and dying, and consuming even as they become.
And Damascus’s eyes, the colors of black opals, gleam with an entirely different desire to taste, to consume.
A dragon from the pits of Tartarus hungers not just for flesh, but for futures. For the potential of being. For tomorrow, and the tomorrow after, and a field of forevers that cannot be reached. He consumes because he cannot exist without tragedy.
Are you a tragedy, Sereia?
What pain do you feel?
Damascus laughs again, seeing beyond her feminine face; oh, certainly, Damascus recognizes a predator where I do not. But I cannot read the Bond as easily as my companion does; and so I do not know where his hollow amusement stems. Only that he is laughing at me; only that he says, ominously and in my mind alone, something wicked this way comes.
How can a girl, quoting poetry from my past, be anything but sad? I shrug off Damascus’s warning and the dragon lays down, exhaling silver-white vapor that I recognize as euphoric. I try not to breathe it in; but the wind blows, and what was there is gone.
She shares something with Damascus that I do not understand; I wonder how she cannot flinch when he droops down to meet her eye. But I am busied by the business of starting a fire to keep the chill at bay; and soon the flames are licking up pieces of wood I had already collected. The evening darkens quickly after that, until—
Tell me something about yourself that no one else knows.
She surprises me; and in doing so, I am nearly enamored. How is it, this bone-thin girl can find a way to take me aback, with her forwardness, with her sudden and brazen demand?
Tell me something about yourself that no one else knows. Her voice is repeating, soft and sweet, in my mind. I gaze at her over the fledgling flames; they begin to crack and the heat rises in the air.
I bet you did not expect to share your fire and yourself with me tonight.
I smile a smile that does not quite reach my eyes; but the reflection of the flames within them makes up for that. I don’t answer for a very long time, watching the flames flicker, nearly entranced. What could I tell her, that no one else has ever been told?
I think unexpectedly of my recent conversations with Elena. I had mentioned Cillian, and Khier, and what they had meant to me. I had said that some children are better off without fathers, and implied that my child was. Perhaps I could tell Sereia now that I was most afraid of becoming mine but knew I already had.
That seems too brutal, too raw; too easily argued away, by someone kindhearted, someone good. I do not say it.
I remember, now, telling her that the only man I had ever loved had been killed by a water-horse.
That had been a lie. He hadn’t died.
I wish, sometimes, that her truth had killed her. I wish, sometimes, that she might have died before she had ever revealed it. I wonder how differently things might have played out.
These are too complicated; too muddled, in truths and in lies.
Finally, I decide. I say, “When I was a boy, I used to wake up before the sun. My father would be getting ready for his day of war. First, I would smell the oil he used for his leather gauntlets. Then, I would hear him begin to whet his gladius against the whetstone. I woke up every morning, and sometimes even crept from bed to peer down the long hallway to where he stood at the end, donning his armor and his red cloak, or stooped over that sword. He was so patient with his routine, nearly gentle. He treated each piece of equipment with such care and rhythm; the routine was a type of religion, I think, a type of prayer.”
I can still see it. His face pinched in concentration, his eyes dark and almost tired. He looked boyish in these moments, younger than any other time I had seen him.
Then, I add: “But I never went to him. For years, I did this, every morning. I would watch from the end of the hallway and then disappear as soon as he moved to stand. We never even spoke of it, although I suspect he knew. Instead, he would fasten his baldric and leave, everything in place. The sun was still not up, and each morning I would lay back down to sleep, as if I’d never been awake at all.”
My voice is quiet, and lulling. The fire seduces everything into a soft rhythm. I glance at her above the flames, holding her eyes. I say, “I think about that often. Every morning, I would say, Today I will go to him, and I never did.”
I had not been aware of it as I spoke, but I realize now that Damascus had exhaled a lower potency illusion vapor. Around us swirl in dark violet colors the scene I had described; a boy and a father, separated by vast darkness and distance. A child who turns away. A father who does not meet the child’s eyes.
I snort at the theatrics, and Damascus exhales sharply, dissipating the vapor that had danced so elegantly before our eyes.
“Life is never as I have expected it,” I admit abruptly, in late response to her earlier comment. I say it mischievously, if not darkly. “It’s your turn,” I demand. “Tell me something you’ve never shared before.”
If nothing else, Sereia of Delumine is not uninteresting. And although Damascus is meant to be the beast that hungers, my expression is voracious.
(I do not consciously answer that question of myself, but I recognize on some level: I am desperate for this conversation. I am desperate for something of depth, of meaning, even knowing that there is nothing of meaning left in my life).
The narcissist in me wants to demand she analyze my story; I want to ask her what she thinks it means. I don't, because I already know. It shows in many ways I am a coward, I think. But more importantly, more significantly, it does not say the thing I wish I could, the truth that lays heavily upon me, unspoken: my father made me what I am.
Yet, if I had said that, it would have been shrugging the blame.
He is silent for so long that she thinks she might turn away and settle to sleep beside the fire that dances in his eyes. But it is exactly his eyes that stop her from doing so. They are dark and full of thought. The smile upon his lips is small and contemplative. It does not reach his eyes and the dark abysm that is there beneath the golden flames.
So she waits and lets the heat of the fire burn off what river water is left upon her body. Her body becomes dry and tight, the salt becoming rough, itchy. She should not like the fire, her body does not. But Sereia is a sum of parts. She is not just a body, she is animated by a soul and a heart. Her soul does not wish to be what she is and her heart is in love with her own self-hatred. They keep her in place. She does not even lean away from the heat, not even when her traitorous mind begins to fill itself with fantasies of cool sea waters.
At last he tells her a tale. It is full of sad, dark words told with a young voice that still remembers so vividly, as if he were still a child. But he is not and he never went to his father. Sereia holds his gaze when he turns to her. She lets the fire hiss between them. If she listened closely, she might hear how it hissed and crackled and laughed its ember warning at the golden man and his great dragon. She is a kelpie. How can you not see it? I see the way her skin dries and cracks, like a fish. How can you not? Wake up!
The fires warning spits between them and like him, it feels like an age passes before she speaks. “And why did you not go to him?” Sereia asks slow and small. She might as well have been whispering to the fire, for it holds every piece of her attention now.
The silence descends again, lazy and content as a cat. It curls between them as the night slumbers above, below, around and about. “I wish I could pull things, people, from my dreams.” Sereia whispers.
And that is all she says for it feels too desperately revealing, too utterly ridiculous, to tell him how in her dreams is the only person she can be near and not want to taste, to consume… She looks to the dragon and his bloody maw, full of meat. Her stomach clenches tight, agonizing. Control slips from her grasp as if her tether has become fine as silk, ready for breaking.
It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor —from breast to knees—
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.
✧
T
he fire fills our silences, so they stretch not uncomfortably; they are filled instead with the cackling laughter of the flames devouring wood, of light, of heat. I might recognize her drying skin, if I were to look more closely at her through the silken guise of smoke and flame. I might begin to recognize all the signs of predator, if she were not so far from the sea. As it were, I hear only her voice when she speaks at long last.
And why did you not go to him? Her voice hardly breaks the night air; it hardly rises above a whisper of flames, and nearly becomes it instead.
I am long in my answer, before I say: “The reason we rarely face the things we fear.” I pause again; this hesitation comes from a refraining, a desire not to share. I cannot help it, however, when I add: “And that is because we recognize them. I never approached because in all the ways that mattered, I was not staring down a darkened hall at my father. I was staring down a darkened hall at myself, as I would become.”
I do not expect what she admits; and I suppose that is one of the reasons I do not mind sharing my fire with her, tonight. Despite her belief the comment is overly revealing, I do not understand it—perhaps because I do not dream. “Do you mean you would create these people, these things, from your dreams—? Who would you make?”
Damascus’s eyes have not left her, but I do not find this atypical. The great dragon licks his chops; a sound guttural, disgusting, slick flesh against hard teeth. It feels, strangely, as if we are building toward something; as if our confessions are fuel to add to the flames, or the rising crescendo pitch of a song I cannot hear. The tension that exists right before a beginning, right before the arrow is notched, the sword is swung, the words are said aloud.
(What I do not consider is how all of those things can, dually, represent an ending).
Sereia lets the fall of her forelock obscure the curve of her mouth. Too long, too wide as it is. She listens to him, but her eyes are upon the flames and the darkness they fend off with their merry leaping. The air is full of the stranger’s murmurs and the crackling of the fire.
He talks of fear. He talks of becoming the thing you fear… The water-girl does not lift her gaze from those hot flames. Her skin is parched, it pulls tighter across her bones, even more than normal. She knows all too well of what he speaks, she just wishes that she might have had that vision of what she was. Unlike him, it was not a case of becoming. From the moment she was born Sereia has been a monster. In the womb she was already a beast.
There are no words she can offer him. No answer for what he has said. Rather, the kelpie just sits with his words and drowns deep in her own sorrow. Deeper and deeper until it is not water that drowns her, but grief as thick and heavy and rough as sand.
What would she make from her dreams? Is there anything she would pull out. Yes, that is why she revealed that small secret. The small one that was the key to the secret that would undo her - her greatest secret of all. How could she tell this stranger of Dune and why she wants to pull him from her dream is because he is the only one she can get close to. The only one who does not smell alive and sweet and ripe to taste.
Sereia swallows down the desire that rises within her. “I would bring out someone who is different. Easier to be around than other people.” And that is all she gives him. Now is no longer the time for more words. She dares not give him the chance to ask her anything more lest she be exposed, less he learn what he really sits beside. Repulsion blooms within her stomach. It makes her ill.
With a smile upon her lips she stands. And whispers small and fragile, “Thank you for the company and the fire. I should go but I shall look out for you again.” Sereia is not a kelpie then, but a dove, a swallow startled, swirling, escaping. She flees, but not like she is running. Her escape is slow, deliberate. She abandons the man and his dragon beside their fire and slinks into the darkness. Running, running, until her blood is a roar within her veins, until the burn of hunger and want are smothered down to mere embers.
It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor —from breast to knees—
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.
✧
T
here is a chance that if I was not the sort of man I was—self-absorbed, inwardly focused—I might have noticed her change of disposition. But I am a certain type of man; the kind that speaks without listening, who demands companionship and yet possesses no empathy. I speak of fear because she asked. I speak of fear—and my father—because I am the man he raised.
And anyways, we fall victims to the curse of humanity. The darkness between us spreads vast and impenetrable. The night obscures our secrets. It hides from her the clouding of my eyes; the way that as I stare into flames I remember the long hallway and the dark silhouette of my father, waiting. He must have known I watched him—he must have known. The question she does not ask, I ask myself: why did he not close the distance between us?
If I had the answer, it might not be so difficult for me to close the distance between Sereia and I in this very moment. I would bring out someone who is different. Easier to be around than other people. Sereia delivers the admission tensely, almost curtly; there appears to be more depth beneath the words, but she does not share it, and I do not further inquire. I only regard her above the flames.
I want to tell her, that is a dream. Those people do not exist. And then I remember Bondike, and the ease between us, and for the first time I close my eyes.
Thank you for the company and the fire. I should go but I shall look out for you again.
When she leaves, I do not open them. No, I do not open them again until the images behind my eyes abate. Someone who is different, she had said, and I had not known what she meant. I only knew the truth as it applies to me; just as she only knew fear as it applies to her.
The night goes on with only Damascus and I, and eventually I sleep. When the sun rises the fire is all burnt out and it occurs to me, not for the first time, I belong to nothing in this vast country.
