[P] ghosts who still know how to sing

[Diana]

THE MOON ROLLING IN HER / MOUTH, BURNING AWAY THE BLACKNESS. / COCOA EYES HALF-CLOSED. LIPS / PARTED. A SONG BUILDS IT BODY / WITHIN HER, A PSALM / NOT EVEN THE SNOW CAN SAY.
☼

When I dance, I dance in the way that most people wish that they could fly – that is to say, as a weightless gesture.

It is early morning, and the sun hangs on the edge of the dunes like one half of a fat peach. For most of the day, the sand in Solterra is colored like burnished gold, but, on a morning like this - one with a pretty sunrise -, it gets just a little bit pinkish and almost-soft, even though it shouldn’t, because there’s nothing much soft about the Mors, or anything in it. Mornings like this almost trick me into feeling a bit soft, too, and that’s probably most of the reason why I go out looking for sandwyrms the moment that the sun is over the horizon, stepping over my brother’s sleeping form where he laid at my side and carefully sidestepping my mother’s bent tangle of blade-silver, muscular limbs so I don’t wake either of them.

(Ereshkigal cracks open one big, red-yellow eye to watch me go, and she makes sure I know it, but she doesn’t say a word to make me stop.)

I slip on my silks and go running across the sands.

Mother says that they hunt sandwyrms sometimes, in the court. Sandwyrms and teryrs. They’re both symbols of Solis, she says, and warriors like to prove their skill by hunting them down – it was how Maxence became sovereign, she says. (That teryr threw her into a rock and nearly split her skull open, but she doesn’t much like talking about it.) Sometimes they’re easy to find, especially if you don’t want to be found by them, but sometimes the hunters have to track them for weeks just to find the one. I don’t have an easy time believing all her stories, sometimes, and I’ll tell her that; and then she’ll shake her head, and she’ll remind me that not everyone has luck like me, much, she’ll say, as she’s sure they’d like to.

(I’m not sure that everyone would like to be confined to the desert – but I don’t say it, most of the time.)

I don’t know how long it takes me to find the sandwyrms, only that Mother hasn’t sent Eresh after me by then, and she wakes early every morning of her life. I only know that I see that tell-tale movement in the sand – like a rattlesnake, but below the surface, skidding out grains upon grains like waves lapping at the beach. Almost immediately, I feel my lips curl up in the self-satisfied sickle of a toothy grin, and I spring between them like a jackrabbit. It’s hard to say how many there are, when they’re swimming (because sandwyrms swim – at least I think so, even though Mother clucks her tongue at the technicalities, and Ambrose quietly disagrees, but I know what it means to be a sandwyrm better than either of them), but I know that there are a few. The wind has just gotten started over the dunes for the morning, the sing of it a little like the beating of a thousand little insect wings (a swarm of locusts, maybe), and it’s probably hot, but not hot like the desert can be. If I had to compare it to something, I’d say it feels the same way honey tastes.

I plant my hooves amidst all the sandwyrms, and I watch them draw patterns on the surface of the sand. I’m not sure what starts me dancing – I think it might be the way that I know they’re dancing below, even though my mother and my brother wouldn’t agree to that, either, but all of the sudden, I can’t stand still for the life of me. One hoof, and then another, and a twirl of hair and silk; and I’m sidestepping the beautiful labyrinth of the tracks they leave on the sand, skipping over their heads like I’m dancing on a grave, outstretching my wings to welcome the dawn with each arch of my neck and curve of my spine. None of it is formal, and none of it is learned – but I’ve mimicked the wind down to a work of art, and sometimes it seems to move with me, not the other way around. I don’t notice it, really, but I start humming a tune to match, and, even though I’m sure that I haven’t, because the only songs I’ve ever heard are the stories that my mother sings to Ambrose and I at night, it feels familiar as the blood in my veins, running right on through.

(Sometimes, when I get like this, I start wondering how much of my body – or my self - is my own.)

And then – then there is a brief, precious moment where I feel more whole than that half-peach sun in the sky, where there is only me, and my song, and the desert wind, and all the sandwyrms beneath my hooves, and the sand beneath me, one singular moment where I almost feel like as much of a girl as I know that I’m supposed to be.

---

@Aeneas || !!! || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
Speech

@

[Aeneas]

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life,
and beyond which life cannot rise

Beneath me, the Mors stretches insurmountable and endless. In comparison to this feat of nature, I have never been able to understand the admiration of the mountains, or even the sea. There is nothing so harsh, so unforgiving, so beautiful as the desert at dawn. I have been flying since before the sun was up, following a rumor—

Some say he was eaten by the desert, 

Some say all Solterrans end that way. 

I can envision it. I can imagine him just out of view; over the next dune, golden and soft, waiting for me. The sun, rising, only complete the image—my entire childhood was bathed in a replica of that soft, golden light. His light.

My father once told me the desert cannot help but get inside of anyone who crosses it. The sand sifts into every orifice; into ears and eyes; into mucus and phlegm; into hooves and hair; into mouths and noses. The longer you are there, the more the sand sticks; the more it becomes a way of life, a constant discomfort that at first is unbearable and then one day only an irritant. He told me that those who were born in the desert have it within them their entire lives—I tried to argue, father, I was born in Terrastella— but he would have none of it. It doesn’t matter. I see it in the way sometimes, at your most furious, you glow the color of a sunset on the Mors. 

Perhaps he planted the seed that would have me contemplating for the rest of my life what aspects of Solterra I inherited; were they the worst ones? The pride and the fury? The violence of the sun and the ruthlessness of the sand? I cannot help but think that must be it, or else I would not be flying so low over the dunes in pursuit of a feeble hope. 

I watch my shadow flit quickly over the crest of each dune, and then descend into the gully between. I attempt to focus on the visual over my internal thoughts; the visual is what I aspire to be. Strong, lithe, quick-flying. My childish down has at last been replaced by strong contour feathers—wings shaped like a falcon’s. Since I first flew—near the time of my father’s disappearance—I have scarcely stopped. It has become my obsession; and the obsession has leaned out my youthful softness into something stronger, less childish and more adolescent, a step closer to being something else—

(Someone, else).

I don’t see the girl, at first.

I see the telltale patterns of sandwyrms swimming beneath the sand. 

(And oh, perhaps I will come to understand our differences in this and this alone—I see them and do not marvel at them for the wild things they are, but for what their conquest would mean! Their dance is the dance that calls upon heroes to slay them, and nothing more—until, of course, I see the girl in their midst. It is her gold veining that catches my eye, and then I am enchanted).

It is the first time since he left that I do not think of my father.

It is the first time, brief and ephemeral, that the pain of my abandonment does not turn me radiant red with rage. It is the first time, in weeks, that my light flits from crimson to gold and then to ethereal silver—

I have never seen anything like it. I tip one wing and circle, maintaining the pattern with powerful strokes of my wings. I am marveling at how fearlessly she dances among them, as if their are not beasts underfoot; and the longer I watch, the more I recognize her dance compliments that of the sandwyrms below, so that she is never interfering with their pattern work beneath the sand, only adding to it’s complexity. I wonder, briefly, if I could be imagining it—but know my imagination could create no such image. A girl so wild. A girl so free. And before I can help myself, I am banking down on that desert wind; I follow just behind, above the sands, until I am darting alongside her to say, “How are you not afraid?!” 

Even hovering above the earth, flying small circles above her, I feel the telltale shock of adrenaline that comes from being so close to a thing that could, at any moment, decide to kill me—

My father’s words find me again, however. Once you cross the desert, it never leaves you— 

and the wind, too, is speaking to my wings—so that before I even recognize it, my flying has become a part of the dance, too. 


☾

@Diana"speaks" space for notes

[Diana]

THE MOON ROLLING IN HER / MOUTH, BURNING AWAY THE BLACKNESS. / COCOA EYES HALF-CLOSED. LIPS / PARTED. A SONG BUILDS IT BODY / WITHIN HER, A PSALM / NOT EVEN THE SNOW CAN SAY.
☼

One moment. Just one - that’s all I have before the spell breaks, and I am no longer the only thing in the world, one singular moving part in the system of some much broader organism. I am dancing, and I am right, and then there is the boy.

No, there isn’t the boy. There’s a bit less than the boy, in fact; there is the dark shadow of him on the sand, but not the boy himself. I see the image of his wings impressed on the ground below, overlapping with the lines that the sandwyrms are drawing ever-so-carefully in the sand, and it fills me with a quiet annoyance, but I don’t dare look up. If I ignore him, he might still go away, and that would be in everyone’s best interest, his most of all.

(People have caught me out dancing, a time or two. Dancing, or running with jackals, or hiding beneath the wings of teryrs. Most of the time, it ends with someone’s blood stained on the sand, one mass of entrails or another. I’m never actually grateful for the intervention, and they never think to ask.)

I hear him spiral down, regardless, and repress a sigh. He’s interrupting the wind, like that, and it’s all I can do not to lose the rhythm of my dance, even as he settles into spiraling nearly close enough to touch, so close that his hooves nearly stroke the surface of the sand. How are you not afraid? I raise my chin and look up at him through the dark shadow of my veil. A twitch of ice-blue eyes in a statue face, barely interested and entirely unmoved. He is the color of charcoal, like my mother’s face, with hair that is just as white – grey-eyed and dappled, with bright red designs painted beneath his eyes, on his forelegs, on the hook-curve of his wings. There isn’t much about him that interests me, barring those red marks. My gaze fixates momentarily on the sun rising into place on his wing, and then, fickle as a gust of wind, it dances away, and I focus on the dunes again.

For a long moment, I’m perfectly silent. Even my song has gone still as a corpse in my mouth, dried up on my tongue.

I don’t think I would have answered him, if it weren’t for the fact that he starts dancing, too. I’m not sure that he knows it any more than a bird does, when they decide to fly with the current instead of fighting against it, but he’s dancing regardless; each falcon-flap of his wings beats in perfect rhythm with my quick strides over the sand, the undulation of the beasts below. It’s not enough, not really - not enough to understand a thing. Else, he wouldn’t be asking that kind of question, and he wouldn’t have that kind of look on his face.

It’s more than usual, though, and I tell myself that’s probably enough. I toss my head back, blue eyes rolling white in their sockets. “Nobody would be scared,” I say, finally, “of something you know won’t hurt you.”

There is a disturbance in the sand right at my side, a bit like a ripple on the surface of the oasis, like something rising. I notice it, but not enough to spare it anything more than a passing glance – less still to flinch away from it, even though I know what will surely follow. There is the faintest indentation of diamond-shaped scales just beneath the surface, like an imprint in metal, and then there are the scales entire, wrapped taut around a torso that is all-muscle and as broad as an old tree. For a moment, the arch of one serpentine spine creeps from the sand, shedding rose-gold flakes like a second skin; and I move in ever so close, just close enough for the undulating side of the great wyrm to brush my flank before it disappears beneath the sand again. Feather-light; almost gentle, like a first kiss with a lover. I sigh out, through my teeth, and I let my eyes fall shut, and I try not to think too much about the interrupting boy or the way that pretty sunrises make me feel a little bit too soft for comfort.

I’m still dancing, even blind – even with nothing to guide the quick pace of my hooves over the dunes but the low rhythm of the sandwyrms below and the press of wind against my ears, which is, in itself, enough to know just how to move.

---

@Aeneas || <3 || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
Speech

@

[Aeneas]

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life,
and beyond which life cannot rise

She cares no more for me than the desert does; strangely, I do not find myself surprised or insulted. I expect nothing else, from one who dances among the dunes as if she belongs to them, as if she is the mortal extension to them—

(And watching her, I cannot help but think she cannot possibly be mortal; not in the way that I am, and have always been, mortal—with a mortal’s fear, and a mortal’s aging, and a mortal’s bird-quick beating blood that dances to a crescendo rhythm at the spectacular sight).

She does not answer me at first; but that, in and of itself, is more of an answer than he words become. I see it—I see it in the way that she does not subtract from the wyrms beneath the sand. Not once do her hooves cross their patterns; not once does she disturb their intricate movements. Instead, she weaves among them; natural; deft; without care—

That isn’t right. 

It is perhaps one of the most careful, articulate things I have ever seen, this dance with the sandwyrms. It fascinates me; it fascinates me to the point that even my fear seems subdued, and I cannot wrench my eyes away. She is not wrong to assume that my contribution to this dance is instinctual; that it is my wings responding to the current of the hot air and the track of her own movements across the desert.

Nobody would be scared of something you know won’t hurt you. 

I am struck, suddenly, by a very childish desire to make her like me. I think it is because she is so statuesque—so other, and belonging to a thing I love but do not possess. (And that, too, is the flaw of me—I think as men ought to, as men are raised to, not like my father but like the Commander of the Halcyon, as a matter of practicalities). Yes, I think. There is a part of me that wishes to possess this magic but knows that I cannot; and the next best thing is to earn the admiration of the one who does. 

I am more shocked at my own thoughts than by the rising sandwyrm; she does not flinch from the serpentine arch as it rises terribly, awe-inspiringly, from the sands. Where she moves to brush it gently, I ride the sudden influx of hot air the beast releases from the sands; up, up, on the thin current, and then down in a cloud of rose-gold scales. I watch her, still; the softness she takes on in appreciation to the creature, a softness she does not take on toward me. I think I recognize it, if in partialities; it is how I had looked at Ariel, before he had disappeared. It is how I had nestled beneath his great chin, between his powerful limbs, and rested as quietly as a babe in a nursing bed—he would never have hurt me, despite all the terrible power of his claws and teeth and burning skin. 

There is something about her wildness, too, that reminds me of the girl in the Delumine woods—and her dark wildness, and the way I had felt afraid then. I had though to myself I would never feel fear like that—and now, watching this brazen girl, I cannot help but decide my only option is to not feel my fear. It is easier said than done, with the rapid beating of my heart and the trembling of my limbs. Yet, I steady my breathing—I steady my breathing, and continue my flight upon the currents. The sun is rising in earnest, now—the pinks and oranges of the sunrise are giving way to the solid gold of Solis at the horizon. 

I am different, here, than in Terrastella. I am not so quiet. I am not so secretive. Perhaps that is what emboldens me to drop carefully onto the sands beside her. I do not speak, because of the hard flash of annoyance—I even ensure to keep distance from her, so as to not interrupt her dancing. But then I quietly mimic and, with tremendous care, begin to replicate the dance. 

I know, however, that will not be enough—and so I let go of another breath, and all my thoughts, and move along the twisting patterns of the sandwyrms, letting them guide me as the hot currents of the air had only moments ago. When I do not think, it is not so different. When I do not think, I wonder if this is not the best way to get lost. 

(And maybe, maybe, that gives me a bit of peace—imagining my father, dancing with teryrs at the edge of the world). 


☾

@Diana"speaks" space for notes

[Diana]

THE MOON ROLLING IN HER / MOUTH, BURNING AWAY THE BLACKNESS. / COCOA EYES HALF-CLOSED. LIPS / PARTED. A SONG BUILDS IT BODY / WITHIN HER, A PSALM / NOT EVEN THE SNOW CAN SAY.
☼

When his hooves touch down on the sand, I prepare myself - unflinchingly - for a sudden emergence of jaws. Sharp teeth the size and shape of backwards-curved daggers. I prepare myself for entrails drawn across the sand, for those sun-painted feathers on his wings to be strung across the dune like a falcon butchered mid-flight. My eyes are closed. I hear his steps on the sand with nothing more than a backwards twitch of my two-tone ears, and I never spare a glance at him over my shoulder.

I think that I can tell, at first, that he is trying. It is because of the sound of his hooves on the sand - the way that they are almost-stumbling, a mimic that cannot quite keep up. My lashes flutter, and my eyes spring open, and I continue my dance without any indication, but for the twitch of my ears, that I have noticed him at all. (If I strayed close to him, kept pace with him, perhaps I would be deterrent enough against the wyrms if they happened to notice him. But - if he wants to put himself in their mouth, impress himself right between their jaws, that is his prerogative and his foolish courage, not my own. And - if Mother is to be believed, hard lessons are the ones that stick the most, like desert bramble caught in your coat.) His rhythm disturbs me like a wind blown the wrong way, ruffling my coat where it should smooth it down, until it doesn’t.

I think, for a moment, that he is dancing properly, the only way that he should. The only way that I know how. (To put me in a crowded ballroom and ask me to dance would be akin to caging a tiger and asking her to do the same. You’d make a fool of yourself and the cat.) It is only then that my lips slip open again, and I begin to sing in my mother tongue, caught halfway between Solterran and the cadence of the wind on the dunes. What matters isn’t what they mean - it’s how they sound. Mother only sings stories. I try, sometimes, to mimic her, and I’ve gotten good at it - songbird, she calls me, warbird, songbird, habibi -, but what I always want to sing is less of the story and more of something beneath it. Not the story; not the queens and the heroes and the kings and the villains, but the landscape, the dunes drenched red with blood or gold as newly-spun silk. The story is always-

The sun is rising.
 
My hooves skid to a stop at the crest of a dune, sending up an arcing spray of sand, and there is a moment where I am perfectly still, save for the way that the wind disturbs my trailing hair and silken veils. I watch the trailing shape of the sandwyrms trace their way through the desert like the stroke of fingerbones, rising and falling over dune after dune until they finally disappear into the sun. It is only then that my head turns, slowly, to face the boy. He is older than me, surely. (He doesn’t feel it, but nothing ever does. It is that part of me, I think, that something-else where girlhood should be, that makes me feel so - strange whenever someone speaks to me. I think that the sun god must surely have plucked some part of me from the desert. There was some part of me that existed before me, the part that will never quite be mine.)

I feel the sunlight on my back, soft burning gold of a halo wrapped around the curve of my neck. I would always rather be facing it than I would have my back to it, as though it will take me back if I dare to look away for too long, but now I watch the boy with all the carnivorous patience of a lurking sandwyrm. (That is to say, none at all.) I have not spent much time with other children, save for my brother, and, much as Ambrose would rather think otherwise, he is just as strange as I am. I never know what to say to them.

That is one thing I have inherited from my mother instead of the desert wind - I never know what to say, or how to find the right words to say it.

“So, little falcon,” I say, my gaze flicking the length of his - markedly smaller - frame languidly, like the sharp and hungry-eyed stare of some great, lounging cat, “who is it that you claim to be?”

I could ask his name.

(That is probably the last thing that I’m interested in.)

---

@Aeneas || I have no explanation for this but that she is a Weird Little Girl. || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
Speech

@

[Aeneas]

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life,
and beyond which life cannot rise

My entire life, up until this point, has been a compiled list of practicalities. The careful classroom lectures and the even more carefully practiced meditation, pushed upon me by Vespera’s monks. You must control your emotions, prince, and through your emotions your magic. If you do not, you will hurt someone. I remember between flitting blurs of my wings and hers beyond the first time I burned Gunhilde in a childish fit; the lash of raw energy, formed like a whip in my rage. She had cried, after—and my father had scolded me with calm patience, and said, I know it is difficult to try and control a thing you cannot yet understand—

Outside of that, those careful lectures and more careful meditations, I have spent innumerable hours admiring the Halcyon’s deft flight from afar—memorizing their strategic formations and their flight patterns, as if through memory and study alone I might become them. I had watched my mother apply her warpaint with bright, eager eyes—and tried to ignore the whispers of others my age who accused me of faking my god-given marks, as if stealing the valor of the Halcyon soldiers—

For once, however, the responsibilities are shed from my shoulders. For once, however, I am nothing but this moment and these deliberate movements—and then even the deliberation abandons me, and the dance becomes something both similar and unrecognizable from my meditation. I am my breath, and my heartbeat, and the sand underfoot—I am the hot wind against my wings, and the rising of a sandwyrm’s spine just beneath the surface of the sand—the sudden elation of fear that vanishes as Diana’s words repeat themselves, unbidden, in my mind. Nobody would be scared of something you know won’t hurt you. In this instance, I know, with a confidence uncommon in me—

And then she is stopping in front of me, an abrupt and nearly unnatural halt to her dance. I throw up my wings to avoid colliding; and with practiced grace, I descend half the dune with the hot, rising current of air to push me off. I circle back to land beside her, marveling at the patterns of the sandwyrms as they continue their dance. 

I do not break her silence; even if I wanted to, I doubt that I could. I am too enchanted by the beasts as they follow the rising sun and disappear—my body is warm with the dance, my wings fatigued in a way that feels fresh, and new, like a growing thing. I feel her gaze on me; but I do not turn to meet it, not yet, because—

Well, the peace I had felt is gone as abruptly as it had appeared. 

I cannot look at the rising sun and think of anything except for my father and the stories he used to tell, of the sea, of stars, of old nature gods. I cannot look at the rising sun and not think of the mark at his brow, radiant as a sunrise even in the dark. 

(I cannot look at the rising sun and help but half-remember the dream of my life, the dream that visits me, of the white stallion on the black beach and the way that, sometimes, the sun comes up through the mist—) 

So, little falcon. I had almost forgotten I was not alone. 

I turn to her with none of the confidence from before. 

But I like to be called little falcon; and the fondness for the term evokes a slight, self-conscious smile at the edge of my mouth. I do not know how to answer her question, at first. 

I want to say Only Aeneas, but feel as if that is not what she is asking. 

And so I say the only other thing that sounds true. “A chimera.” 

Pieces of a multitude. Belonging to none. Dusk, and Day. The boldness of the dance; the secrecy of my spoken confession. I already feel uncomfortable in this skin, and this life—and I know the journey was for nothing, in that I could not find my father hidden among the dunes—

But perhaps, not for nothing. 

I glance at her, and think she appears to be a statue under the harsh light of Solis’ gaze. I wonder if she looks like a statue int he quiet of Vespera, or the softness of Caligo. I nearly ask; but don’t. Her eyes are hard blue; her horns spiraled and gold. She does not look like a girl, although logic suggests she cannot be much younger than myself. 

“My father—he was covered in gold, too. He told me once, when I asked why he had chosen to mark himself in such a way, that where he is from it is a way to bind a Soul. Soldiers painted him in something like gold, until it set in his skin, and made his Soul too heavy to leave his body.” I don’t know why I say it; I am embarrassed, immediately, by the confession. I amend, awkwardly, my words falling over themselves: “I do not mean to say that happened to you—no, you seem all Soul.” 

I should have stopped at the story about my father. He is still too fresh on my mind. He is still too close to my heart, and my sadness—the air around me cracks with sudden, chaotic energy. The aura I had held, light silver, turns as bright red as arterial spray. I clear my throat. “And who do you claim to be?” I return her own question, albeit much more lamely. I do not look at her fully; not in the way she looks at me, as unabashed as a tigress. I glance at her from the sides of my eyes, and look instead into the endless desert. 


☾

@Diana"speaks" space for notes

[Diana]

THE MOON ROLLING IN HER / MOUTH, BURNING AWAY THE BLACKNESS. / COCOA EYES HALF-CLOSED. LIPS / PARTED. A SONG BUILDS IT BODY / WITHIN HER, A PSALM / NOT EVEN THE SNOW CAN SAY.
☼

I think that I know, even before he pauses, that he will not know how to answer my clumsy question. I think that I can guess it from the way that he stumbles to a halt behind me; but I give him the time that he needs, and I study his features while he thinks of his response. The faint grin that pulls at the edges of his mouth when I call him a little falcon. The furrow of his brow. Uncertainty, perhaps a bit of embarrassment-

I spend most of my days with Mother and Ambrose and Ereshkigal for company; I have not met many other people before, up-close. I still haven’t decided what I think of him, but that he can dance properly, and that is admirable enough to make me dedicate careful examination to memorizing the shape of his face, the curve of his ears, the way that his snowy-white hair falls between his grey eyes.

A chimera.

My lips hook up like the blade of a sickle, only half-amused. A chimera. I suppose that makes two of us – but I wear mine more obviously, more inescapably, in the canvas of mismatched obsidian and marble that compose my skin. (Sometimes, I look at my reflection, and I nearly feel like all the gold is there to keep me together.) I don’t say a word to his admission, only smile that harsh-edged smile, and I try to decide what parts of him are chimera.

(Maybe, I think, it is in the way that I felt him shift – again. The way that he was dancing with me like a falcon, like he should, and the way that now he is like this, awkward and lanky and halfway-ashamed. A boy, not a bird. Maybe he’s caught between them. I can understand that more than I would ever admit.)

(Here’s a secret: sometimes I want to be a girl, just a girl, so bad that it burns.)

His eyes trip over me, clumsy and uncertain. He can’t seem to look at me straight; and I, like any good carnivore, can’t quite bring myself to look away, even or especially at his obvious discomfort. He tells me an anecdote about his father. (I do not think about how I have no father of my own, though I struggle to think of where I should settle the story inside of my chest. There is only Mother, and then there is Solis, the perpetual absentee, and neither of them are a father to me, but I think that a father, surely, would be a different presence than Mother, even if she is unfeminine – almost unwoman - in most every conceivable way.) That he was marked with gold, too, but he chose it – he had it done to him. It was to keep his Soul in. And then he backtracks, stammering over him own words, voice half a stutter. I do not mean to say that happened to you—no, you seem all Soul.

All Soul. Perhaps that is what makes me speak, the idea that I could be all Soul, not all-

“I wear,” I say, very slowly, “my mother’s scars. She was nearly struck down, once, and the woman who saved her filled in her wounds with gold. They’re too bright, almost. She can’t forget them.” And then my head inclines, almost jackal-like, certainly not with the face or the eyes or the mouth of a girl. “I think that it is not so different.” I know that my mother hates those scars. She has plenty of them, but the ones on her cheek – those are the worst. Every time she looks at her own face, I think that she sees them over again, and she remembers how she was given them. Still. I would rather think of the gold that veins my body as hers than I would consider it some extension of Solis. If it were, if it were-

(I might be golden all the way through. Not just on the edges.)

(There is something palpable in the air between us. A sort of crackling. It is there and gone before I can catch it, but it does make my ears twitch upright and my eyes narrow by fractions, though only for a second. There is something half-familiar to it, almost a pull, almost a pressure-)

He turns my question back on my unwilling ears, though his voice is softer, quieter, in all ways and manners less certain. I should have expected it, but I still have to consider my answer. The truth of the matter is that, most days, I am not entirely sure what I am. I know that I was created, not quite born. I know that girls should not bleed gold or cry gold, and I know that they should not dance with sandwyrms and sleep with rattlesnakes. I know that the sun god has impressed himself into every little piece of me like a brand, that there is always something building inside of me like a swell, moving towards a fever pitch; that I should not be able to sing to the cadence of the wind.

The most honest way of putting it is probably: a broken-off chip of sun.

But – the boy doesn’t know me, not yet. He doesn’t know what Mother knows, and what Ereshkigal knows, and what Ambrose knows, and what every other creature in this desert – and the desert itself – knows, innately. He doesn’t know all the ways that I was carved where a proper girl would have been conceived. He doesn’t know that I wake up at night, sometimes, an antsy jerk in my legs and something wild in my eyes, sure that I have a bit of sunlight stuck in my chest where most girls have a heart. He doesn’t know any of that, and, because he doesn’t-

“A bit of desert wind,” I say, and I mostly mean it. I mean it. I mean it – in all of the ways that the desert wind is free and unbending, in all the ways that it dances across the dunes. This is when I pause, returning to my study of his features, and I say, almost unthinkingly, almost absently, "Maybe you need to be the wind, too."

Because no one else has danced with me, but he did. Because he is better as a falcon than a boy. (Because, though I would not admit it, I am chimera, too; and that small similarity is enough to make me like him more than I normally like people who are not Mother, or Ambrose, or Ereshkigal.)

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@Aeneas || <3 || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
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