kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
he bleeds not blood, but wanderlust.
It pours from her veins in vivid colors, as if it were a rainbow stuck inside her chest and not a heart, as if she were only comprised of other places, other lands, instead of organs, bones, muscle. Elliana is an accumulation of the world. She has heard the people of the world and she has heard their stories whispered in her ear at night in the dark. Elliana has heard so many stories and yet when she closes her eyes every night she only wishes to hear more. They have told her the stories of mountains they climbed, they have told her stories how evil is a strong force still in the world, they have told her stories of dragons, they have told her stories of water horses. Adventure, bravery, sorrow, cowardice. She hears story after story and wonders where hers fits in, or if she would be destined to walk among the pages, dancing on the words traced in ink, remembering them to one day speak them. To speak the stories of others that have lost their chance to tell them.
Those awestruck doe eyes gaze at the world of mirrors around her. They reflect back at her, showing her dark face looking back at her. There are two too-blue eyes on her face that look like her mother’s eyes, like the godmother she has never met, or the grandmother that sleeps six feet under. There is a heart on her brow, like her mother. The curious look to the crook of her smile is like her father, but the moon marking, her mother tells her it is Caligo’s marking. Elliana asked if any others had it. She said yes, but she did not say who and so Elli did not ask. That single pale leg, that reaches forward, sometimes Elliana dreams that it belongs to someone else. She thinks it must be a spirit, but they have never asked for it back and so she keeps it. She sees something else in herself too. Shadows. They pass over her face like a passing raincloud. She wants them to stay as much as she wants them to leave.
She walks still, watching her reflection break apart and form back together. She thinks she could walk through this place for eternity, just looking to her own reflection, discovering more pieces to it, finding more hidden secrets in every delicate curve of her face or tilt to her head.
And the mirrors here start to look a less like mirrors and more like clocks.
One year falls away and her limbs begin to lengthen buried in the snow.
Two years fall away and the roundness of her cheeks gives way to angles and planes.
Three years fall away and she is grown, a moonflower sits in her hair, her eyes are still blue.
The reflections following me, from dead star to dead star, are not shifting images of my own face looking back at me through the stage of my life. These reflections, my reflections because even dead they are still mine, do not speak but scream. The worms rotting in the graveyard of this place are surely trembling with the thunder of their bellowing rage and agony.
And I know I should feel compassion at the sight of them. I should be ashamed when I tilt my horn and scratch it against their eyes and warn them again, and again, and again, that they are still not good enough to kill me. Dead things, rotten-sea brides, girls with horns instead of crows only know how to conquer. Until the world is nothing more than bricks with which we build cities and sink the dead we are made to conquer.
So I carry on like the tide along the cliffs of my kills. I echo their roars until I sound like I am laughing as darkly as the trilling bone mirrors around me. They crash, and crash, and crash, against me and I do not erode because a jagged obsidian cliff does not give to a bit of weed.
But they catch in my sharp edges anyway and I try not to feel like piling up like stones instead of weeds and diamonds of brine.
When I come across the child (because she is a child in a way I was never allowed to be one when my mother took me to war) I have long grown tired of the roaring dead and the itch of my laughter on my lips. Everything becomes boring now, when you’re a dead thing, everything. And I wonder if she’ll be another bit of diamond brine or another brick in the city that I am building.
“Avesta.” I say. And I do not say I am, because I am too dead to lay claim to things as simple and brittle as the name of a once living girl who was named after the dream sea. I am dead and I am…
I am hungry.
My stomach roars like the dead against the forest of my ribcage. I wonder if she can hear it when I lay my horn across the eyes of her reflection. But I do not wonder at that soft hiss of pity in the shadow of my hunger. It is not as loud as the screams, and the hunger, and so I tell myself just as I always do:
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
he asked her mother one day why they all keep trying to forget the dead. We bury them, under mounds of dirt. We let them burn until they are ash. And still others are hidden away. Her mother told her that are deaths are painful, and when they are gone, that we try to immortalize them, to help ease the pain, to make them feel like they are still with us.
Elliana did not sleep that that night. She was awake, listening to the whispers and the shouts and the cries and the laughters. And stories, stories, stories. And she thought to herself they are still with us, but no one ever listens.
The dead were not gone.
She likes to pretend that they were born from the trees and the flora rather than bone and blood. She loves to think of everyone blooming like flowers, rising from the dirt and turning into something beautiful. She looks at the girl with pale blue eyes, silently asking if she were grown or was she born?
What flower are you, Avesta?
“I’m Elli—Elliana,” she says as she meets her own eyes in her reflection behind the unicorn. But it is broken as her horn comes to rest across her blue, blue, too blue eyes. Maybe someone else would run, maybe Elli would run too if she knew where she should go. But there are mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors. She has dreamed of mirror worlds and diving into them, but those are just dreams. If you jump inside a mirror in real life you do not travel to another world—they shatter, they break. And you along with it.
The unicorn looks young and old at the same time, Elli does not know enough about the world to place her. “Are you a kid?” She asks, stepping closer. “Are you?” She asks again, as if afraid she would not get an answer if not asked twice. So much more afraid of not finding answers than she would ever be of the monster that roves beneath her skin. Elli shifts from hoof to hoof, as if there were a dance inside her bones. “Avesta.”
Unicorns have never known how to bend, and fold, and gentle the tips of their horns into the shape of gentleness. She is soft where I am hard, stuttering where I have only ever been a knife fast and slick into butter-soft skin. In her eyes, both those on her face and those flickering like dying stars at the point of my horn, I can see all the things that I saw roving through the hospitals of war like a wolf through the rabbit thicket.
I do not know how to be like this, how to smile instead of gnash my teeth at the begging pulse beneath her neck. If I have ever known it I have forgotten it somewhere around my first and second step beyond the church-tree.
Hollowed is the sound of my steps as I move close enough to shift my horn from one face to the other. I wonder if she will hear the warning or if she will see it. Or will she be like a dreaming lamb curled up in the snake pit? “If I was a kid I am no longer one.” And for a moment I wonder at the strangeness by which she must see the world. I did not think it possible to look at my legs, and my made-in-war sinew, and think that I am anything resembling childhood.
I want to ask her pulse, do I look gentle?
Part of me thinks I should tear out her eye for the insult alone.
But maybe she’ll learn a lesson when I move around her, side to side and hip to hip. Maybe she’ll see the warning when I curl my neck above her own and press down. Maybe she’ll learn all the ways the world devours gentle little things (and all the way that it hardly ever spits them back out).
“When you speak it should be with certainty.” I can feel the hair protecting her ears when I whisper into them. “The world devours uncertain things.” My tail lashes at her side, gentle enough to only sting if it falls against innocent skin, just like one of the whips my mother taught me how to wield. Perhaps I should be crueler to teach her well enough that she will remember even when she closes her eyes to die.
I am hungry enough to be very, very cruel.
“And you might call me the world, little Elliana.” In my smile, when I lift my neck from her own, there is a mouthful of aching, hollow teeth. But I did not tear out her eye, and perhaps that is the only kind thing I have done in so very long.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
E
lliana is no lamb.
That role belongs solely to her mother.
But neither has she ever been a wolf or a snake, she is a ghost of them, all of them, flittering in and out and around all that is in existence. “You had to be, once,” she says, not believing everyone is or was a child. She knows in the forests of Dawn things are are not born but made. She knows out in the oceans that things are made there too. All the most beautiful, wild, captivating things are made and not born. This is why she keeps picking up a paintbrush, pushing it over canvas, thinking she can make things too, because Elliana was born and not made. Born of love, born of hunger. Of sunlight and shadows.
She knows better than most that children are not gentle. She has seen them gnash their teeth at death as it drags them under, has seen them fight hard, so hard to stay alive. And then in death they fight harder still. There are still those who are quiet in death, who watch the living pass by with wide, expectant, curious eyes, but they are not gentle. Thoughtful, inquisitive: yes, but far from gentle.
There is a chill that Avesta casts down Elli’s spine, like a wave washing over shore. It tells her everything she needs to know, as her hair stands straight, and a familiar warmth creeps up her legs. She knows, oh the little bridge knows. You should know too Avesta, about that bridge. You walked across it once, even if it was flooded, you walked across all the same.
There are so devastatingly close, and she should be fearful, but fear is really just a shield to protect you from death. Elli was born from the dead, they put air into her lungs and opened her eyelids. They stirred her limbs and beat against her heart. Everyone is scared of death, but Elli has never had a reason to be. Not when it encompasses everything she knows.
Speak with certainty.
“You are dead.”
The world devours uncertain things.
“At least, I think you are supposed to be.”
Her neck lifts away and where she should feel cool without her skin against her own, Elliana feels only a rush of warmth, as if her very touched had chilled her blood. “If you are the world,” she says and turns her blue eyes back to the mirror. “Then show me how it devours.”
Children do not know how to be good at living. They do not see the world in more than bits and pieces all haloed in the rose-gold of innocence. They do not, even if they think it, know how to be anything but lambs. I can see childhood in each curl of her skin, in each awkward angle of her body that only hints instead of promises. Only a child would see the wrongness of my smile, of my etierity, and ask for a thing that I must struggle not to give.
It would be easy to free her spine from her neck, her eyes from their holes, her heart from the tender cage of her youth. It would be easier for her to die than it had been for me. If I laid my teeth against her throat, instead of where I am thinking about laying them, I would be kind.
My first bite would be my last. I do not make children suffer, only fools made not born, only stallions who think they can bleed arrogance and nothing else.
But my kindness does not mean I will spare her. I am not my mother, or my father, or my sister. I am the sea full of riptides and a million sharks circling, and circling, and circling. Just because she is a child does not mean I will muzzle myself and pretend I am something I am not.
I circle her again like the sharks had circled my war-torn corpse when my mother tossed me into the sea. There is a memory in my blood of how they move, how I should move, and I can feel salt behind my eyes when I blink away the feeling of brine filling up my lungs. The blood in my veins feels sluggish, a mire begging for rain, when my circle starts to get smaller and smaller.
The instincts the sea had buried in my once-dreaming soul scream to me: prey, prey, prey. They are telling me that I am not moving fast enough, that I am being too kind, too much a unicorn instead of a tidal wave. I have no choice (I never will again) but to listen.
“Do I feel dead?” And that is all the warning she will get before I lunge towards her in a move to lay my teeth against the hard ridge of her withers. My only goal is a little blood and to let her knees feel how hard the world can be.
When will others learn that they must ask things of me if they want to learn an answer instead of suffering it?
