It had been weeks, and she could still taste the water. The nasty grain of it, flat against her teeth and tongue, stinging at her nostrils, her throat, her eyes. She could still taste the mineral quality, so sharp, that it brought to mind pools of blood or sharpened, razor-edged metal. She smelt it. She smelt it far from the shore, she smelt it in her dreams.
It was a combination of rot and life rolled into salt, seaweed, sand, sun, angry, angry smells. Whenever Boudika believed she had at last escaped, at long last, it came back to her—in a slight catch of the breeze, the sweat from her very skin, or when she was on the brink of sleep, the scent rushed back, aggressive, sickening, overpowering.
Boudika could admit she had not been doing all in her power to dissuade the scent; it was her last attachment to a life she no longer lived, to a self she no longer identified with. And so with it came a certain comfortable—and malevolent—familiarity. It did not smell of the Terminus Sea off the Night Court coast. No. It was all violence and cliffs and pitch black sand, that she smelled. It was a land far away and not far enough; and it clung to her skin, her dreams, her very breath. A haunting. A soliloquy of poetic images; all belonging utterly to themselves, and no longer to her. An addictive nostalgia.
That is how she awoke, long before the sun would rise. With the taste fresh in her mouth. Storm water and salt dreams. It was a routine she had practiced many times since arriving at the Court—and so she stirred from her slumber and rose, creeping quietly from the court to the outer reaches of the territory, seeking solace.
The only thing, ironically, that allowed her to escape the torture of it was to exercise in the same fashion as her youth. Vigorously.
Boudika had been running since before the sun. Having awoken early that morning, sweat-soaked and fresh with the taste of the sea in her dream, she escaped to the prairie. There was nothing like it on her homeland; nothing remotely close to the vast hills and grasses, with the brilliant and brazen sky overhead. No. Her home was mountainous island terrain, rugged forests, and always the sea—beckoning, beckoning.
Out on the prairie, she could not smell the sea.
She pounded along the earth in the sweet darkness of pre-dawn. The stars illuminated her path, and the moon; and Boudika followed no path, save one—forward. Pushing, always forward, toward the mountain range. Her route skirted the strange maze and took her over hill after hill, always summiting, practically chasing the sunrise. Her new life of an entertainer could not give this sort of challenge to her; dancing and song did not accomplish the rigorous vindication of weakness that came from pure physical suffering. It did not surmount her limits, or challenge her to truly strive. This did. Her lungs burned fiercely; her muscles trembled with each limitless, leaping bound. So she ran; and she ran for hours.
Boudika was a god.
Far from the sea.
Watching the sun crest the horizon, turning the world bloody, as though the Novus gods were warring in the sky they all claimed—and then daylight, breaking across the Night Court violently, casting the prairie to shades of gold and enshrining Boudika in the same hue. At some point she had turned back toward the Court, despite her desire to go where she had not gone—the mountains had loomed large and foreboding before her, and she reached for them. But it was not for today.
She slowed from her ceaseless, mile-eating canter into a walk. The Court came into view once more. However, Boudika was lathered in sweat, and unprepared to journey back toward civilisation—there was a restlessness in her heart that warranted more, more, more, and yet she could not name it. So she turned away, back toward the proclaimed wilds—searching with her crimson eyes, wanting something she could neither find nor name.
A name whispered at her from her heart somewhere, almost like a prayer—Orestes, Orestes, Orestes? it said, with an infuriating question mark. And her mind answered, fierce logic: dead, dead, dead.
And then Boudika smelled the sea, and she was no longer so certain. But her ear flicked away the direction of her distant gaze—had she heard something? Was she no longer alone? The thought brought a nervous prick to her limbs and a flutter to her heart. She was in no state for company, with foam on her haunches and withers, her chest heaving in great breaths, her mind half-wild for something Boudika did not know.
Thana is not running through morning frost where the flowers sway weak stemmed and kissed gently by young winter. Her lungs are not heavy with exertion and there is nothing frothing sea-white and briny at her shoulders. Each step she makes is as steady as the last, like a stone rolling across flat-lands. Rolling, rolling onward with only the wind pushing it further towards some distant point it's eager to reach.
Thana is not running, but--
Death is running free in each hole where her hooves have sunk through the grass into the mud. Rot is dancing across the frost. Flowers bend as if snow has landed upon them each time her shadow makes a shape on the rolling hills. Time runs in patterns behind her, broken patterns that twirl around and around like broken spindles of a wheel. The frost melts and freezes, rocks turn to dust, flowers bloom and die.
Above the sun is blooming over the night (not unlike the way she kills everything lovely). The silver light is fading and with it the way she can hide all the gauntness of her. The red morning sun is harsh and it makes her look like fresh blood rolling slowly over the dew and frost. Shadows pool like sea against the shoreline in the creases where her skin folds over bone. There is nothing beautiful about the beast of a unicorn walking through the dawn, nothing but solitude and some sense of 'other' that hangs around her like a noose.
Ahead she spots the mare, although it's that mantle of sweat and brine that makes her lift up her purple eyes and look. First she sees the horns, twin pillars of bones glinting in the light. Thana though sees not horns but a crown of bone blades, swords plucked free from evolution. She wonders why the magic gave her only one hollowed out crown that sings in the wind.
Do this mare's horns sing too? Could she tell her what the words are to that rush of blood and light-water song? Something besides death and rot blooms in her heart, something wild and fierce that reminds her of running. She wants to know what this mare knows of horns.
Thana moves closer once the mare stops. She cannot help the way her hooves are almost soundless. She moves like a shadow made of blood (like a body dragged through the grass in a mockery of life). There is in every inch of her a suggestion of something wild begging to be let loose. It's almost terrifying the way she walks, like a unicorn made instead of born.
She doesn't smile, but her lips quiver like a shield around her teeth as if she wants too. A hundred different words clang against her tongue. Each word stings more than the last until there is nothing but a thorn bush of words caught in the shield of her lips. At her back her blade taps, taps, taps against the grass like a heartbeat.
Tap, Tap, Tap.
“Why did you stop running?” She asks and each word matches the heartbeat tap of her bladed tail. Or is the beat of a storm gathering in the distance? Thana doesn't know that she sounds like a suggestion of violence that hasn't chosen which wind it wants to fly on.
She still likes to think she sounds like a unicorn.
So still, now. So quiet. The chill of the air had settled onto her flesh and it bit her to the quick, even through her heated hide; the violence of her action was reflected, now, by the violence of her inaction. The pain of it, the sweet pain of it; sharp and fierce, reminding her how alive she was, how far from death.
But the sweat, the froth against her lips—it too, tasted of salt, and Boudika now wondered if she were drowning, simply in a different way. Why had she not been lost at sea? The question arose, unbidden, as her breath fogged the winter air and her heart began to slow. She would have forced it aside, had she the time; but Boudika was no longer alone.
The prairie was too vast, too open, for her to be truly startled. Nevertheless, there was something about the approach of the other mare that frustrated Boudika first, and unnerved her the second. Boudika was no stranger to the supernatural; it had lived just outside her window, for as long as she had known, in the water horses as they sang to her in songs that promised beauty, and ended in death.
That was her first thought, when she turned her head in a gesture almost avian—assertive, quick, no-nonsense, and distinctly predatory. A slight narrowing of her crimson eyes. The unicorn was beautiful in a ghastly sort of way, like the imitation of beauty; a painting that existed as a work of art, but could never capture the vivaciousness of life. Boudika stood in stark contrast with still-heaving flanks and sweat-flecked skin. Her whole body steamed with heat and it rose into the air in the manifestation of small clouds.
The question seemed odd to Boudika; but everything about this land seemed odd. Her ears perked, and she shifted so as to face her new “companion”—and that word came unbidden, and unwelcome—directly. ”I stopped running, because—“ and she cut off, a shadow shifting across her face. Why had she stopped running? She had wanted to go forever, beyond the mountains, beyond the sea. She wanted to go—home? And the thought, in her mind, came as violently as retching. Boudika shoved it away, enraged.
Her tumultuous emotions did not show outside, however. What remained was a soldier’s perfect composure. ”I stopped running because I wasn’t going anywhere. I had to come back somewhere. And so I came back to my Court.” One fact, after the other, delivered with a military crispness. A stark professionalism that disguised the stream of I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I was running to the desert sea I was running to scream at the sky and damn the gods who cursed me I was running to run I was running until I couldn’t take it I was going I was running from the scent of an ocean I cannot reach, the scents of a stallion that has hexed me, the scents of a girl I am not and a life that is not mine and a lie, a lie, a lie, a lie— and then, the tap, tap, tap of the unicorn’s blade.
Boudika did not like this feeling, of being unhinged. She did not like it whatsoever. And so she forced herself to settle—she forced her breath to still and her heart to stop thundering. She forced herself to cut her nerves, to steel her focus, to look again at this strange mare. ”I don’t recognise you.” A statement, without a question. Boudika’s eyes settled unwaveringly upon the unicorn once more—they had been fluttering, distracted, with her thoughts—and evaluated what she saw.
Again, Boudika was struck by the other. The supernatural. It came to her abruptly; the arrangement of parts, although perfectly proportional and belonging, seemed somehow different, somehow disarrayed. Yet Boudika did not know why; nor did she think on it long enough to believe that was truly what she saw. The sharp tail, the spiralled horn, it all reminded her, incredulously, of the water-horses. The shape-changers. The way looking at them, they were slick as oil, so likely to slip from one’s grasp in feathers, fur, claws, teeth, scales, flippers, skin. They could not keep a shape any more than the ocean could stay dry and so, that it what Boudika thought, as she wearily appraised the stranger.
A creature that could not keep a shape, with a strange and somehow offensive question, although the question itself could not be considered offensive. Merely the things it evoked. The things it made Boudika, herself, question.
This Thana understands-- the tilt of a head as predatory as a hawk, the way air moves through the nose in a beat as steady as the rotation of the moon. Each movement the mare makes speaks a language that comes easier to her than anything else in this strange place. She can understand all the signs that say I could kill you, and the sound each makes rings like a hallelujah in her chest.
There is a language in the way sweat is covering the mare in a fine frost (like mist on blood-red flower) that she wants to answer back in. Thana wants to drag her horn through that sweat and sea-foam. She wants to write words into her skin, words of war, of running, and words of purpose. The words, I understand you, are banging at her teeth like a shovel banging at a coffin.
Her hooves move closer because predators never just stare at each other over the throat of a kill. The frost glitters like a wealth on her blade when it curls around her legs. And where it rests a thin string of blood blooms just above her hoof, like a necklace of rubies that promises song if she were only to move just a little quicker or a little more elegantly. Thana wants to brush her nose against that sweat hiding in the hollows of the mare's brow and learn what secrets all that fury and froth holds. But she stops and only lifts her nose up like a small greeting between them (as if they are not two bears meeting in a field).
It says something, in a predatory way, that she tosses her horn towards the morning sun and not between them like a blade. The bloody sky shines in the slick, black curls of her horn. Thana could be painted by an artist instead of a beast in the moment, but she doesn't know it at all.
Thana thinks that the world always will paint her as a monster because it should, it should, it should.
Her eyes are hot on the mare, small suns of amethyst that do not waiver or turn to introspection. She doesn't want to look towards all the violent things running in her thoughts.“Is there anywhere you can't go when you run?” There is curiosity in her voice, a hint at all the not violent thoughts and wants running through her like wildfire. Thana does not understand that there are places that a mare who tilts her head like a hawk cannot go.
But she wants to understand. More than anything she wants to understand.
“You wouldn't.” She says because the finer parts of conversation are lost to her. The unicorn made for death understands the language of their horns and the hunger in their hearts better than words. But she tries when she moves her nose a little closer to the mare covered in sweat who moves like a wolf thinking it's a bird. “I've never been to your court before.” What she wants to say is – no one knows me, they only have memories of others that look like pieces of me. The thought is there though, in her gaze where the purple flashes black as the night sky.
In a blink the blackness is gone. She smiles but it looks like nothing more than a twist of her lips. She looks like another wolf who wants to be anything but a hunter. “I am Thana.” This time she doesn't tell the mare that her name means death, and magic, and war.
WE'RE ALL KILLERS. WE'VE ALL KILLED PARTS OF OURSELVES TO SURVIVE.
Boudika felt pulled by inherent urges; an instinctual surge of life which beat, heady and seductive, in her very blood. It called to her; urging her away from conversation, away from civilised talk, from contemplation. This, her blood said, was a time of change. A time of precipice, of exhaustion—her limbs felt the ghostly remembrance of movement, the tingle that began in her hooves and ended well into her body, her muscles aflame, her flanks twitching. Boudika could not stand still and her movement became increasingly unsettled; she paced a small circle as Thana neared, her leonine tail flagging the air in a bright, spinning whir of copper. Then Boudika would cease; she would force herself to stand with rigid military discipline after rigorous exercise, remembering a time whence she stood in ranks, and a sergeant's quick baton would smack the hock of some restless cadet. She had worked so hard to reach mindlessness, but it never lasted long enough.
Everything about Boudika was slipping; she was losing herself, her rigidity, her discipline, her motives. So she raised her head in greeting, so still, so still, and then one hoof struck restlessly at the snow-damp turf.
Change was something forced upon Boudika, unbidden, as change so often is. It was something, however, she had yet to accept; and the never-ending presence of salt in her life was only an eerie reminder and now, this stranger, another. Boudika’s people were two-horned or elaborately antlered, with whip-like tails that ended only in bright plumes of hair. Her people were two-toned, or three-toned, as she was, with brilliant and brazen markings and eyes like pooled blood. No wonder she felt so predatory, so on edge; no wonder., as her eyes turned the bladed tail of the unicorn. Boudika was a monster-hunter, and had she not been led to believe that anyone who was not her people was a monster? Had she not been constantly confronted by the oddities of this Court, this Novus? There was something in the other mare’s eyes—her stillness provoked concern, but not only concern. There was a quickness, a sharp thoughtfulness, that suggested to Boudika there was more in the mare’s mind than she expressed.
Thana was intense, and her demeanour mimicked Boudika’s thudding heart; perhaps they knew one another on some inherent, intrinsic level. Perhaps they spoke a language shared between beasts, outcasts, foreigners—the language among wolves and wolves alone, or the snarls of lions among lions. Those knowing, heated eyes—they flayed Boudika to the bone. The earnest, prodding questions. ”I cannot go where I would like to,” Boudika answered, noncommittally… and then reassessed, adding in a heavy tone, ”I came from somewhere far across the sea, and I cannot run there.” The statement in and of itself condemned her. I cannot run there Boudika said, and cliffs flashed in her mind’s eye—cliffs, winding roads, treacherous beaches. It had been true enough in statement and in fact, at her homeland.
Her eyes cut back toward the other mare, focusing—she was not of the Night Court, as Boudika had thought, and she wondered if that meant she ought to do something? But it was not her duty, Boudika believed. After all, she was only a dancer. Her mouth felt dry, her muscles exhausted. Why ought she care if this mare was not of the Court? “I am Boudika.” Each of them offered a piece of themselves; a name, spoken with implications beyond the conversation, with weight beyond words. Vercingetorix had once told Boudika, as they had walked through Oresziah’s main city, that there was no changing nature. He had pointed out the differences between themselves and the merchants, with their hard, clever, goat-like eyes as they haggled for wares and bartered for exchanges. They have hard lives, sure, Vercingetorix had said softly, his lips at her ear. But they don’t move like we do.
The thought came back to Boudika with startling clarity. They do not move like we do. And this mare, she moved as Boudika moved, and spoke as Boudika spoke, and the overall feeling was rather ethereal. Perhaps it only means we are both hollow. But Boudika could not decide how to ask such a question, or even affirm that it was true—perhaps it was her mind, playing with her, making Boudika see slights that were not there. Finally, as the silence grew long and awkward, Boudika spoke again. “Where do you come from?” It was clear she did not mean the other mare’s court. Boudika could no longer stay still, and she began to pace a wide circle around her companion, one hoof and then another dragging through the snow in exaggerated lethargy.
WE'VE ALL GOT BLOOD ON OUR HANDS. SOMETHING SOMEWHERE HAD TO DIE SO WE COULD STAY ALIVE.
That single restless hoof, although it makes hardly a sound in the snow damp dirt, rings in her like a single siren, lighthouse call. All her bones ache with the sound of it. Her blood slows to the speed of clay running through her veins until it grows hard in her organs. The cavern of her ribs echoes with that sound as if there now waits between them a wolf baying at the moon.
“There are ships here.” Thana wonders if she's supposed to smile sadly and say that she understands what it's like to look at the yawning, hungry sea and know that it wants to eat. But all she knows is that she has seen ships from the cliffs. They looked like small ants crawling across a mirror too afraid to look down at their own bellies. She doesn't know how it feels to try and tame the sea and call it bravery, or purpose, or adventure.
There is enough of all those things rattling at the marrow in her bones to last her a lifetime. She's dead enough without the weight of the dark deep dragging all her dreams down into the blackness.
“But do you really want to go back where you came from?” Thana shivers at the thought. A memory flashes across her mind. Everything is too white and too bright and she blinks because she's afraid that all that endlessness is shining through her eyes (like a mirror on which ants crawl). She's afraid that there are monsters lingering across her gaze, and fronds glittering rusty underneath a storm of winter lightning.
Thana blinks and her eyes feel dry beneath her aching eyelids.
She knows then, staring at the mare coated in sweat and brine, that she would rather die than go back to the white plague that made her. There is no sea she wants to tame but her own dream sea full of gemstone eyed bears and trees that bloom rubies.
When the other mare starts to pace the space between them feels almost thinner and unweighted. Thana does not move to follow. She only watches each step she takes like a lion watches a running antelope. Her tail twitches like a snake and when she lifts it the hair parts around the blade like a crown made of life. The skin across her hips quivers like a jaguar quivering in the leaves of a jungle storm. The need to run burns through the clay in her veins and turns it to acid. She swallows it down.
Death blooms out around her to wither every hardy blade of grass that has not bowed before the blade of winter. “I come from magic.” This Thana says because it feels less sharp than saying, I come from everything broken. The words are duller than the way she wants to say, I am made from broken things. Giving a half truth to Boudika, who cocks her head like a hawk, feels like taking a life she never wanted to destroy.
But, Thana is a monster (no matter how she wants to be anything but) and monsters are made to destroy.
“Will you show me your city?” The beast swimming through all the acid of her asks. Her lips mold like hot clay before the will of it and her eyelids still ache, as do each of her bones.
YOU’RE ALL BRONZE AND BITE. ALL VENOM AND FISTFIGHT. YOU’RE THE DAWN THAT RISES BLOODY AND WRECKS SHIPS IN ITS WAKE, BUT YOU’RE A SIREN, TOO, SOMEWHERE IN THE ACHING HEART OF YOU.
There was no denying the tension stretched taunt between them, the manifestation of something predatory, something wild. Boudika had found herself wondering in life, more than once, what would become of them all if the strange shackles of society were removed. If the boundaries were destroyed, the pressure alleviated, the stupor social expectations replaced with vivid authenticity—what would become of them? What sort of wild would be released, dangerous and primordial? This was the thing that had existed so freely among the Khashran, who wore every sentiment on their sleeves, who sought a full life with a mouthful of fangs, the beauties and the horrors of it all.
It was what Boudika loved of them and she thought, between her and the strange unicorn, existed a similar tension beneath the surface. The difference, however, was the existence of the boundaries, the pressure, the social stupor. And so, Boudika repeated, quietly, ”There are ships here.” She did not confess her fears, she did not confess her weaknesses—but she hoped the reiteration said enough. Even as she spoke, in her minds eye, she imagined the journey home, only to discover it was no longer the semi-magical, perpetually dark place of her childhood. The wild had been brought in, the Khashran enslaved. They cast out nets to fish freely in the sea, and children swam in the coves as they had never done, in the history of her people. In doing so, they changed everything she had known. In doing so, they sealed her fate.
Boudika could not avoid answering a question so direct, however, and her crimson eyes settled on Thana the way muddied water settles. Slowly, with both growing intensity and clarity. “No. There is no longer anything for me there. The people I loved are gone, and the sea is tamed.” To say it aloud felt strange—to think, the untameable object of her youth had been brought to heel. To admit it, as one confessed their sins. It is all my fault. “I can’t go back. It no longer exists as it used to. So I am here, in a land I have not yet learned to love." Boudika shook her head, as though to shake the very concept from her mind—but it remained, ever persistent, ever there. The place she had loved, so violently, did not exist. It had taken her far too long, and an entire continent, for her to realise what had made it worthy of that sentiment—that it had been, and always would be, the island's depraved nature to condemn and conserve. To remove its ability to condemn was to play god—and that is exactly what her people had done.
Thana’s eyes followed Boudika—followed, and followed, and there was something in them that reminded her of the deep water.
I come from magic.
Boudika felt a breathlessness at the admission, but she was not surprised. The statement merely begged the question—what kind of magic. From the beautifully wrought form of the mare, Boudika could already deduce it had been magic both great and terrible. Her mind drew similarities between this strange, scythed equine and the Khashran—she wanted to ask, does the song of it sing in your bones, as the sea did theirs? Does it call you to act, as though compelled, and fill your dreams with abandon you cannot control? She did not ask, however. Merely continued her pacing, the lethargic flick of her leonine tail—her ears, however, remained attuned to Thana even when her body did not appear to be.
This, this was Boudika’s most severe weakness. Her curiosity. Her desire to understand. Her people were conquerors; destroyers; tamers; hunters. Boudika was all of these things, but invested herself to the art of the cruel hunt. She loved it, and in loving it, she loved the monsters she had hunted with an intimacy no lover could ever know. At last, she had identified the tension as it grew, and grew, and grew. Thana was a monster, an indiscernible creature of magic, something Boudika could never understand. And, as a monster-hunter, Boudika loved her for it.
”Yes.” Boudika’s answer came as quickly as the question had been asked, as though she had been waiting for it. In truth, the response was impulsive, and so were her next actions—Boudika abruptly stopped her pacing, and tore away from the ruby-adorned mare, lunging into a gallop toward the city. Boudika only hoped Thana followed—she did not turn to look.
THICKET OF VIOLET THORN. OYSTER PEARL GONE ROGUE. ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS DANCE OUT OF YOUR SKIN INTO ANOTHER SONG NOT QUIET ABOUT HEROES, BUT STILL A SONG WHERE YOU CAN LIFT THE SPEAR AND SAY YES AS IT FLASHES IN THE SUN.
