It seems to Michael like he closed his eyes to blink, and when he opened them again it was winter.
Where Michael grew up, it rained a lot. Winter was not so much thick pads of snow as it was a constant and dreary trickling from heavy, dark clouds. Here the sky is as white as the courts below and Michael is struggling to pull himself together in Isra’s absence, to dedicate himself to anything but waiting for her to come back home. It was not Michael, in the end, that was called to action (and probably with good reason) but he cannot help that he still feels restless even as his legs are heavier than his heart has ever been.
He has tried to write, carries with him a pen and scrawls bits and pieces here and there, now and then. He wants to be something he’s proud of. He wants to be anything at all.
The words do not come. He thinks of Isra and how she was a bubbling spring with words rising from her depths that she could barely contain, a balloon ready to pop.
Michael’s pool is still, his body unstirred even by the quiet chirping of the year’s last birds as they gather up their things and head out. He has stood here so long that snow is bunched in the valley of his back. He supposes that one must have genuine feelings to write. He supposes that the wide and hungry canyon into which all his attempts to reach anyone falls is eating him, too, from the inside out. He worries it’s going to be like this forever.
He swallows. He shakes, and the snow falls off him in wet clumps. Michael is fine. He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s doing fine.
A restless fury existed within her; a fury that seemed insurmountable at times, and docile at others. A candle-stick light that lit, occasionally, to a self-consuming inferno. Most nights, Boudika danced it away in a flurry of powerful limbs and glistening skin. She thought of the dances of her home-island, the thrum of hummed songs deep in throats and the darkness of the firelight as she was taught, as a mere girl—disguised as a boy—the art of the warrior dance which, when performed, was to demonstrate the complete and utter control of a true fighter, the a-a-a-ah-oh-ashahahah-oh-a-o-a-o-a-ashahahah-khash’ran-an-an-a-oh-a-oh-ah of drums and many voices, all together.
Yet that memory had been, somehow, defiled. Infiltrated. And now she remembered it with Orestes’ voice overlaying the scene, his seal-gray muzzle protruding into her own prison cell. Through the iron of the bars, even as they scalded him. The sharp slit of his nostrils, the reptilian, primordial glint of his eyes, and he whispered the words, a guttural hum, a-a-a-ah-oh-ashahahah-oh-a-o-a-o-a-ashahahah-khash’ran-an-an-a-oh-a-oh-ah with flashing, sharp teeth. When he had said it, the firelight was gone, replaced with the sense of the cool and crashing waves—of iron, burning, burning. When he said it, there was an aura of gravity not even her own people could conjure. ”Don’t you see, Copperhead?” he had whispered. ”Your people stole the words from us; you stole many things. Our dances among them.”
And now her memory involved a partner to those dances, an intricate crusade of in-and-out battling, feigned, between an equine and a shape-changer. Although the dances she performed as an entertainer of the Night Court were often borrowed from the cultures of Novus, Boudika always felt called back to the dances of her girl-hood—compelled, even.
These were the thoughts that occupied her upon her walk through the biting snow which, to Boudika, was yet another affront of a land that was not her land. It did not snow in Oresziah. It rained, and it rained often—but rarely snow, and the omen of it was often viewed as bad. But she trudged through, half-believing whatever ill-omen was deserved, if given. Her head was held lower than usual, her coat duller, somehow, in the soft winter light.
And then, from her peripheral, she saw a tawny form. Normally, Boudika would have continued; but there was something in the slant of the shoulder, the stance of the limbs, and Boudika felt as though she had stumbled upon an Atlas. A bearer of a great burden. Her head turned sharply, half-way to predatory—and then she forced herself to slow from the habit of intense reactions, intense decisions, and meander toward the stallion. Each step awkward, jerky, forced. Boudika cleared her throat awkwardly, and rather than ask what was wrong, asked the only thing she could think to ask. ”Why are you standing in the snow?”
Her tone came out sharply, the words forced and hurried.
It came out all wrong. Boudika had meant to say, how can I help you? That is not what she did say, however, and she merely stood by with an impassive face, accepting her mistake. This is why, she thought to herself, acidly, you don’t talk to people here. Because, Boudika knew.
“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”
Oh, Michael is an omen sewn into flesh and bone, some thing that walked out of a dream and watched as the world around him folded itself into a nightmare. Here he stands with snow thick in his mane, thick in his ragged winter coat, thick in its wind which blows through the caverns of his body and howls to him black stories of the north. If he were superstitious, if he had not lived far too long to believe in some greater force blowing ill will in his direction, he might take her omens to heart. What is another parable among the many?
The golden horse is watching her, meets her eyes even before she is on her way. A tremble rolls from the top of his head to the base of his tail. She walks like a creature posessed, some ancient thing birthed back into a world that she no longer relates to.
She walks like him.
Every year is a threshold and as it always must be, some things don't get to cross with him. Michael is looking at Boudika and seeing someone else; his insides sing to him dark songs about girls with skin made of bubbling poison and he could recall with perfect clarity every angle of her face but he can no longer put a name to it.
"I could ask you the same," he says, as if Michael were the type to throw up arms.
Them he smiles. The light of it spills from him as if he were a dam waiting to crack. The irony is that he feels like an emptied reservoir or perhaps the flooded lowlands left in its wake.
Still, he smiles. She does not say what she means and Michael is an ocean of things he was too cowardly to speak. "I don't like the city." Michael answers, but that isn't quite true. He loves the city. He loves to stroll its streets in early afternoon light when the shops are closed and the rest of the Court is just rousing from their homes.
It's just that, "Well-- I prefer to... freeze to death, I guess." Michael is still smiling but he is thinking death, death, death while he looks at her, while he remembers a toxic thing, while he feels for perhaps the first time just how cold he is, inside and out. He had not wanted the day to go like this.
@boudika
04-14-2019, 02:59 AM - This post was last modified: 04-14-2019, 03:34 AM by Michael
THERE IS A LION IN MY LIVING ROOM. I FEED IT RAW MEAT SO IT DOES NOT HURT ME. IT IS A STRANGE THING, TO NOURISH WHAT COULD KILL YOU, IN THE HOPES IT DOES NOT KILL YOU.
I could ask you the same. That is all it takes for Boudika’s resolve to crumble, weaker than a dandelion-wish against the world’s affronts. So much for being kind— her thoughts began to rage in defence, when he smiled, and Boudika felt guilted for that too. But there was something genuine about the smile, something that lit up the face of the golden stallion, as though it were all he had to give and he were glad to give it.
So Boudika stayed, uncertain words on her uncertain tongue. She had prepared to answer. ”I—“ and cut off as he spoke. Her ears flicked forward, and Boudika stepped nearer, banishing the snow from her back with a rapid series of muscular twitches. Her tail flicked. She listened, leonine, attentive, thankful for his words despite her rudeness. All at once—he revealed much, and nothing. Why did he not like the city? And then, ironically, he states the obvious—that nature in this weather was not necessarily preferable.
”Me either,” Boudika agrees, the difference being that for her it was true. Denocte was too foreign to ever be her home, when her heart had been raised elsewhere—but it did grant her security, and comfort, for which she was thankful. ”You look… pensive.”
Her speech, again, was inadequate. The statement could have sounded condescending. Boudika had never been skilled in small-talk—contrarily, she found herself terrible unprepared. She had always been the General’s “son”—and a world of military tactics was direct, uncompromising, certain. Too late, she realised she should smile back—and so she did, as briefly as light in a storm. His smile lasted longer, to the point she wondered if it had hurt him—something lay behind his eyes, or was it simply her imagination, putting it there? So she returned to her blatantly honest roots.
Boudika said the first thing on her mind. “I was shipwrecked somewhere outside of Solterra, quite some time ago. That’s how I got to Novus. But I can’t get rid of the smell of the sea…” Which was true, delivered with the same matter-of-fact logic as a thorn yanked from a palm. ”Even out here. Even in the snow, and especially in the city.”
Her eyes were on him, too heavy, too heavy—expressionless, the eyes of a statue, with words that did not quite fit. She glanced away after a long moment. ”Is it something like that, that drives you out here, too?” Perhaps it was his easy smile, that drove her to such honest speech. Perhaps it was her own desperation. The snow kept coming down and as Boudika narrowed her eyes at the horizon, she discovered that she could no longer see it—just white, white, white,
And she wondered. She wondered what that meant.
WE HAVE LIVED LIKE THIS, IT AND I, FOR SO MANY YEARS. SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED LIKE THIS. SOMETIMES I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS.
“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”
It has taken Michael this time, these months in the autumn of Denocte, this morning in the snow, to realize something he had found long ago but lost, somewhere along the way: none of us are doing alright.
He supposes it must be this way. Denocte is a kingdom perched on its own alarm bells, hanging itself on the ropes of vengeance or maybe just reclamation and each toll rolls out louder and louder within Michael until it is all he can hear or think. He does not know what he can do about their captured queen or the whispers of war on the mouths of the people. He knows what he wants to do and what he will do and they are not the same thing.
Michael is looking at her and he is thinking of singing blades and the thick mud in which his soul is sinking so yes, he is pensive. He is still smiling, the kind of effortless creasing of the corner of his mouth that seems at once impossible and self-sustaining. He is, certainly, the breaking dam. Michael says, “Something like that.” Michael doesn’t say, I feel like I’m dying. Michael doesn’t say, I wish that I were.
Speech is always inadequate. Every molecule in Michael’s body is inadequate. It was inadequate beneath the heavy weight of a crown under which prosper already bloomed and it is heavy now, in the cold and the snow and the thick, wet, gray sky closing in on them. Because of this he forgives her. Because he has had to forgive himself, he forgives her over and over and he will continue to forgive her until this and every other universe burns down to dust. This is a promise.
She smiles, then, and he feels something deep inside him start to shake. It is indefinite but it is warm, and so his does not fall, yet. It does not touch his eyes.
“Mmm,” he hums in agreement.
He knows.
The sea whispers. The sea wails. It is a never-ending song in the back of his ribcage and he suspects that to some extent it rings in every body. His is the cry of the summer sky and saltwater grass. His is the bed of cold sand and the shfff of crabs scrambling for cover. His is a relentless and ever-louder prayer to some deity with no name that lives at the bottom of the ocean.
Michael angles his head away from her and in the direction of the court, (his court, he reminds himself) and beyond it the tempestuous beaches.
He knows.
“Well,” he begins, and how do you tell someone that you don’t know why you’re anywhere? How do you look another thing in the eye and say to it: I am here because every other planet may have rotted away as I stood, I am here because I am an endless loop only now winding down toward its end, I am something far older than even I can any longer cope with understanding? “I don’t think so. It’s just… easier to breathe, I think. I have a lot to deal with, kind of in general.”
Michael draws in a breath. The chill of it stings his throat. The irony is not lost on him. He turns back to her only to see her gaze averted, pulled toward the horizon. There is mist in the mountains and in the space between them and in her eyes.
“You look pensive. Tell me what makes you the way that you are.”
04-25-2019, 10:09 PM - This post was last modified: 04-25-2019, 10:14 PM by Michael
THERE IS A LION IN MY LIVING ROOM. I FEED IT RAW MEAT SO IT DOES NOT HURT ME. IT IS A STRANGE THING, TO NOURISH WHAT COULD KILL YOU, IN THE HOPES IT DOES NOT KILL YOU.
Lives on top of lives, stacked like a deck of cards—that was the way of the world, with too many memories, too many sentiments and letters and passions, all complicated poetry, all haphazard and ugly, all thrown together in a wayward, anarchic fashion. All of this was said in the way his smile did not quite meet his eyes, and the way they strove toward conversation, with both too much and too little on their lips, both too much and too little in their hearts. What does it mean, Boudika wondered, desperately, submerged in loneliness. What does it mean, to connect?
Oh, it had been a long time since she had been called companion. Love was not something she thought necessary; her spartan lifestyle, prior Novus, had never given her a taste for luxury or comfort. What it had given her, however, was a need for camaraderie, a need for brotherhood. Once, she had been animated by the vivacious striving toward life through constant, inescapable contest—they were competitive, vivacious bodies, always present, always surging forward with an eager appetite, larger than life, an ardor exalted by a culture which esteemed those who reached the summit, who dominated, who became.
Denocte did not demand such extremity—it was too close to the stars, and the night, making the people harder to grasp—the loneliness, then, was greater, and sometimes darker. It wrung from her words rather than fierce action; it suggested conversation instead of shared suffering which, to her, meant the foundation of brotherhood.
But perhaps there was shared suffering here.
These were all contemplations that passed with riotous, raucous swiftness. The chill met her flesh, then her bones. Boudika followed his gaze from her far-off white horizon, back from whence she came, toward the strange Court. Easier to breathe. Boudika thought so, too—but that word, that word… to breathe. The opposite came unbidden. To drown. Perhaps he knew. Perhaps he knew, what it was like to drown not only in the sea, but in the people of a strange place.
You look pensive. Tell me what makes you the way you are. Among her people, honesty had been the only way, as blatant and harsh as nature herself. Boudika turned, now, her crimson gaze unto him—and fixed it there, as she did when she focused on something, utterly.
She recognized another Atlas, when she saw him—she recognized the burden of a world in the gaze of someone bone-weary. How many world’s had been abandoned for Novus’ shores? How many lives forsaken for the Courts of the warring, timeless land of celestial gods? Many. Her world was different than his, she was certain, but a burden was a burden—and the heaviness weighed the same. The snow had begun to fall harder, more viciously, and the wind stung at her face. Boudika smiled now, a genuine smile.
Something about his disposition made her believe he would care to hear.
So she told him.
”I was a General’s daughter in a world where only sons could achieve greatness. I killed my mother in childbirth; and our people consider that a curse, so I was never touched, and my father disguised me with magic as a boy.” Boudika shrugged one, supple shoulder. Her leonine tail lashed. ”I grew up in a military academy and learned to hunt monsters—without ever realising we were the monsters, not the hunters, and I captured the Prince of a Thousand Tides. I learned to hate, to fight, to wage war because I had been born on a side of war. I Bound the Prince, a creature of a thousand shapes, to one body and one Soul. Then I fell in love, with a boy, who was my companion… and he betrayed me, to my people, who betrayed me to the sea.” Her head cocked in a way that was avian; a way that was predatory, foreign to an equine, and yet… graceful, graceless. Boudika snorted, and her breath fogged.
”I was imprisoned with the Prince of a Thousand Tides, a water-horse, a shape-changer, now only an equine. And he renamed me, and taught me all of the beautiful things about his people, about himself, a creature as old as the sea… and he gave me forgiveness I had not deserved, from a Prince who I had been raised to hate… But we were sentenced to death by sinking ship, bound in iron. And... instead of dying… I awoke here. Now I dance, and can’t stand the sight of blood.” There were truths and half-truths; her memories made elaborate, larger than her life now, and all of it sounded fable-like.
It was the first time she had said it aloud; it, at once, felt sacred and sinful.
Boudika’s vulnerability vanished as she turned her steely eyes away from Michael, back toward the horizon. She had to squint, now, as the snow cluttered her lashes. ”And you, kind stranger? What is your burden?”
There was no other word to describe the weight, which forced them to brave this weather, shoulders hunched and smiles distant from their eyes.
WE HAVE LIVED LIKE THIS, IT AND I, FOR SO MANY YEARS. SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED LIKE THIS. SOMETIMES I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS.
