who would believe the fantastic
and terrible story of our survival?
The sun is down, early.
And he, above it, hung like a black candle in the dusky air, pressed between the red light of the horizon and the weight of a million far-off stars: something beautiful in its simplicity.
If Andras had been born a slug he would still remember flying; the air that gushes through him feels like it has been his forever. He has never been able to put a name to the strain of his existence but it feels a lot like opening your lungs and filling with too much oxygen. Dizzying. Terrifying. He is a balloon about to pop.
He has been buried in the Library, only ever at home among its knotted wood, in the company of its chattering staff. The small things are tired of Andras' glowering, of his smudged notes and his tactless slumbering, collapsed over books and cracked parchment far older than anything else he's seen. One or two of them had suggested (begged) that he go, for a night - abandon his obsessive reading and do literally anything that does not involve ripping volume after volume off the shelf in a desperate search for-- well, something. Andras cannot argue with an entire society and so he goes - packs his bags and flies South. It happens that Denocte is throwing a festival, one that celebrates their planet, plummeting into winter, and their dead, on a spiral through spacetime that he can only guess at.
The pegasus hopes that he'll find something here - anything, really. As long as it makes him feel alive. As long as he can feel anything but the bitter lump in his throat. If he must be gnashing teeth and bloody knuckles every other night of the year, perhaps he can have this one.
Oriens help him, he has become something hateful.
Andras banks eastward, chasing the gold-orange light of the markets in full celebration.
But he has always been hateful.
The little horse lands with a graceful whoosh and the clatter of hooves on pavement, scattering a small crowd before they find their way back to each other with more than a few dirty looks and curses, mumbled too quietly for Andras to hear. He has no ghosts to lay claim to; the empty space of him (and it is massive) does not echo some long gone thing -- if he were to miss anyone it would be his mother and he's sure, with an almost bitter sense of finality, that she is not here, among Novus' numbered dead.
"It is beautiful, though," he remarks to no one, rubbing his glasses on one inky shoulder before placing them on the bridge of his nose and tucking his wings neatly against his ribs. Even here he is pulsing with something he has no name for. He knows only that it is black and red and tastes like bile in his tongue. Even as Andras rounds one decorated corner after another--streets hung in gold and red, candles flickering weakly at the corner of every stall, some patrons intricately costumed--he is biting his tongue so hard he tastes blood.
He wonders if he will ever be big enough for his anger.
He wonders how anyone else survives like this.
(He does not know that most don't.)
When he landed she had been watching the crowd gathering around Raum's memorial. There had been dark thoughts running through her head. Things like: turn it to bone, or dust, or everything sharp and ugly. There were thoughts full of sorrow too and like rain those fell heavy and cold on her heart. And instead of making a hushed drumming sound it sounded like, traitor, over and over again, traitor.
Isra had hardly turned away before she felt the way the air pressed against her a little harder. A fire had crackled with the force of his arrival. Her first terrible thought had been that a crow had landed nearby (or perhaps a stallion crow-touched and stained). Isra turned to watch him push through her city and all her magic swelled and echoed in her ears like the sea.
Shhh. shhh. shhh. And below that there is still the drumming of sorrow and the slice of traitor.
She does not hear him say it's beautiful. All she hears is black.
So she follows him because she wants to do something terrible and he is moving quick enough that she has to focus on something other than rage. Turn after turn the fires grow further but it still feels like that memorial is nipping at her heels like one of her daughters' wolves. And oh she remembers how it feels to be chased, to be nothing more than a ghost running through a graveyard of soot (or to be nothing more than a girl in a world full of evil, selfish men).
But she remembers too that she's the darkest thing in the forest now.
He does not stop the way that she expected him to. None of the tables lure him closer, and the tiny dragons swooping low enough to knock his glasses loose do nothing to slow the way he walks like a metal horse made out of gears instead of blood. Isra wonders if she could change him. If she could change his skin to glass so that she might see the cogs turning, turning, turning endlessly inside him. It's that thought that makes her decide to stop him.
A bit of silk draped down across the alley turns to wood with knots of marble cut into it (some merchant had hung it there hoping it would add mystery to his part of the market. It did.) There is no way to go past it but back-- back to where Isra is waiting with the distant fires lighting a halo around the tip of her horn.
“Who are you?” She asks because she has to know. It's the same hungry way she needs to know if he's a crow pretending to be something else.
Lately it seems like she's always hungry and everything around her is rotten.
“They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.”
who would believe the fantastic
and terrible story of our survival?
Oh, he is rotten. Andras is flies and brown, sticky blood. He is soft fruit, black fruit, black like the void between stars. But he is not rotten how she thinks.
And if he is one long snarl then she is the teeth at his throat, gnashing and needy. If his is the song of survival then hers is the song of violence. If it has ever been used, just to survive, it has become something else entirely. It has become hungry. Deep and wide as the ocean. Sharp as the point of a pin.
He hates it.
Andras feels her, reaching out with her night-sky hands, molding the very earth that turns around him. It starts at the base of his tail and rolls up his spine in waves, pulse after pulse of something more than magic, something more than her pain or his. Something that is altogether another animal. Something knots in him that he cannot name, some faceless fear with a yawning canyon mouth and teeth as big as a house.
The ghosts are out. They are so much worse than your nightmares.
A bird in an alley, a black bird, and a cat meet in the dead of night. Ten feet ahead of him, Andras watches as Isra reaches out with her night-dark hands and her night-dark thought and the scarf laid overhead first whips like a snake, then coils into boards that clatter as they fall in a neat stack. Andras startles upward, as birds do, unfolding his wings and floating back on the rush of cold air and wheeling five feet off the ground.
Ah, and here is Isra, queen of Denocte. He has read about her.
She is as terrible and beautiful as he imagined.
Who are you, she asks, and he wonders why, even as his blood starts to sizzle, even as the crackling starts in his brain, the fizz and pop of oil bubbling below the surface. Later Andras may wonder why they'd throw a party at all, if their queen is so volatile, if she roars with the force of the gods. Later, he may wonder what they'd think, their gods, if they saw what she is up close. He does not think any of this now.
He thinks the thoughts of a trapped animal. Closed spaces. Teeth closed tight around his tongue, so tight it hurts. He thinks things like the gutteral moan of thunder and the lighthing that burns in him, brighter and brighter. He thinks that he may die if it does not leave him but it has nowhere else to go. Andras levels his gaze on Isra. It is unwavering and full of bile.
"Andras Demyan. From Delumine." He says, tense and forced. "I'm just here for the festival. I'd assume everyone is here for the festival."
He thinks, he can already taste the blood. He thinks, what he wouldn't give to sees himself trapped, angry, feral. Maybe from outside he does not look like he is eating himself alive.
Before now Isra had not known how it felt to be looked at like a monster. She's been looked at with love, with hate, with lust, with concern. Once she had even been looked at like she was a feast for a starving, evil heart. Each look she's ever known had made her feel like a ghost, or like something blooming beneath the endless sun.
She has never known a look like his, rotten and bile and so full of something dark enough that later she might call it heart. She wonders if this is how she looked when she tried to kill Raum, or when Raum turned his magic to look at Eik in the belly of a mountain.
And she wonders why she hasn't cracked the world open already if she knew how to sculpt her features into the look of rot and rage.
Perhaps on another night when all her edges weren't so cracked and bleeding she would have felt shame to have such a look turned at her. Or maybe she would have felt less like a queen and more like something ready to burn down the world just to taste soot and smoke. A hundred other nights would have been better to meet his man with his sharp eyes, and his sharp wings, who blends into the shadows as easy as breathing. Tonight all she can say, without a smile, is “I thought that once.” And maybe another night her voice would have been jasmine blossoms in the moonlight instead of all this rust trying to bloom.
She doesn't step closer, not when he has that look. Isra's learned enough about wolves to know when they are thinking about blood and thunder. Or maybe it's that her daughters look like this always, teeth tight around a secret they don't want to share. All she knows is that he looks like nothing soft, nothing for tall-trees and winding creeks.
He looks made for war, or perhaps for stories of wars long forgotten except in the scars writing script across their sides. She thinks, am I not made for war too?, before she steps back.
Or maybe she only thought, I am war.
The boards turn back to silk that waves on what little wind is this deep into the markets. When it makes a sound she can still hear the shush of the distant ocean. And somewhere below the waves there is Fable circling the harbor like a shark. “Welcome then, Andras Demyan from Delumine.” She tries to smile but all that comes out is something weaker, like a lion trying to smile at a jackal-- all teeth.
Lantern light gathers on the tip of her horn and makes strange the hollow curl of bone (the only crown she ever wants to wear). At her hooves the stones start to glimmer and shine in short blades of diamond grass. “Perhaps next time you won't arrive by flying into a crowd like a crow.” She doesn't bother to hide the warning but when she smiles, really smiles this time, blooms of jasmine twist around her hooves.
“Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.”
who would believe the fantastic
and terrible story of our survival?
Thunder cracks in him, loud and deep, and all Andras can think is yes.
Andras in the belly of the beast, Andras in the rush of the storm and the wind in him is rising until all he can hear is its song - some blend of fear and bliss like the sting of broken skin and the chorus of breath hissed through teeth. If he is electricity than he is blue, bright and crackling. He wonders if she will unmake him, pull him apart thread by thread with her angry little hands. He wonders if she will be as savage as his racing heart. He hopes, he hopes, he hopes.
For a moment her howling magic touches the sword of his hot rage but Isra doesn't spike, or slice, or unmake him. Isra turns her grim face on his (manic, desperate) and sees into the pit of him, the black and the thunder and the white-hot fury, and if she undoes him at all it is by stepping backward and sucking all the air out of the pocket she left behind.
If only everyone were like her.
If only everyone were an engine that hums in tune with his, some bleak and hungry thing that they do not move as much as it moves them. He watches her through the flash of his lenses and he wonders what it's like, to come face to face with that part of yourself and call it off like a barking dog.
She welcomes him. For a brief second, he is quiet inside. For a blink Andras is hollow and when he laughs (nervous) it does not roar in him but bounces off the walls of his cavernous heart in a loop that goes on forever. "It's a pleasure," he says, fixing her with a sharp and unsettling expression.
"I wasn't going to walk all the way from Delumine," he mutters, "but--"
But, Isra is blooming in the orange glow of her market and Andras sees now that she is a unicorn with the sea in her throat and if she is a beast at all it is not her but whatever is in her (and can you separate those? Is she not just the sum of her parts? He doesn't know.) Each face of each delicate blade of diamond grass dances in the light of the thousands of candles, and his glasses reflect it back at them. He doesn't know if he's disappointed or relieved.
"And you're queen Isra, I assume." he says, not quieter but softer, more thoughtful. "Do you have time to give me a tour?"
How strange it is to look at him, with his nervous laughter and his black looks, and feel like we are something more than two horses passing in a dark alley. Now I can see it and name it for what it is, all this rage beneath our skin. It's hunger black and gnawing and ravenous with a belly as deep as the history of my court. When I step closer I pretend it's to see the reflection of my horn made strange in the shine of his glasses. Always I'm pretending now, acting like I'm not a god that wants to swallow up all this black in the world.
It's not why I moved closer.
I wanted to smell the forest on his skin. I wanted to see if I could pull the notes of ash and fury from the space between his feathers. I wanted, oh I wanted, to see if our beasts would growl at one another if we brushed skin to skin like leaves in the wild. Mine is silent though, drowned deep in the sea of motherhood and all this civility I'm smiling with. Maybe there should be a crown upon my brow now, maybe it would tame this thing in me faster than motherhood does.
He makes me think of a story when he laughs. And how long as it been since anything has reminded me of a legend? There is something of war in this eyes and the aftermath of it in the way his wings fold up like forgotten dreams. I almost wonder if he might be as dangerous as I am, but I know nothing is anymore. I wonder if I should step close enough for all our darkness to really touch.
Could the world even survive it?
But I remember again that shroud of motherhood and peace that should be tucked tightly around my violence. Peace, the world even sounds brittle when I think it, like thin glass trying to hold Fable back from the sea. “But--” There is a smile on my face, I hope, when I echo him. And in my eyes there is a knowing that seems to say beneath an ear titled back towards the fires, I dare you.
Maybe he's brave enough to look at the sea in my chest, and the war in the curl of my neck, and the moon-fire in my eyes, and tell me all the reasons why.
My blackness purrs beneath my skin like a young lion testing out the sharpness of its teeth. It wants me to tell him that he's right, that I'm the queen who went to war and learned all the ways in which a man can be a coward. But I only smile dip my horn like a bloody sword dipping through a pool of water (as if it's not only washing off the blood). The times when I would have run from a look like his, from a man with softened war carved into his skin, seem more like a dream each day.
How was I ever not this fearsome thing, this creature made to create and conquer? How was I ever a ghost?
I brush past him to the place where the silk is waving again in the heavy air like silk should. It feels like a touch across my spine, like one of Eik's kissed laced with clover and lilac. I do not need to pretend at the softness of my smile then (or the quick taming of my beast of rage). “I have all the time in the world.” I say the words like I'm giving him the greatest secret there is-- how to take time, and time, and time, like a thief.
“What would you like to see first?” The diamond grass waivers between the edges of my faint shadow. Diamond becomes copper and steel and stone black as his skin. It looks sharp and full of deadly promise.
I do not wonder if he's brave enough to cross it.
“ but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness,”
"All you want to do is dance out of your skin into another song not quite about heroes, but still a song where you can lift your spear and say 'yes' as it flashes."
There is a moment where Andras entirely forgets to breathe, when this queen, this deity, is looking him dead in the eye and he can see for a single, shining moment that her heart tells her yes like his does and in a perfect mirror it also turns to no the longer she looks. If he swallows hard it is only after she turns to go, and if he has to take a moment to catch his breath it is buried in another nervous laugh.
He doesn't know if he's dangerous.
He doesn't know if he wants to be.
(He probably is. He probably does.)
"Great." Andras says, a word soaked in something unfamiliar, something that gathers in the walls as they move, first Isra and then Andras winding their way out of the alley and melting into the streets of Denocte. He thinks if she wanted she could turn them to salt, unravel the world molecule by molecule, picking at each and every corner until it is a series of threads laid out like a map or a war or a rope. And it both scares and delights him that he can't tell if she would turn the thread to a tapestry or a rope with which to hang her demons.
Can she feel him, staring at her? His eyes haven't left her back, her ankles, the trail of sharp edges she leaves in her wake. On step, and the copper bends under the smooth curve of his hooves. Another, and Andras is aware that they brush his ankles, laughing against his skin with the tinny voice of something bad, and hungry -- and he has to stop himself from climbing whole into their mouths, has to turn his mind away from the sting of broken skin and the hot prick of pain he feels when he steps wrong. It makes his head feel fuzzy and he doesn't stop to wonder why.
"I don't know," he answers after they have passed through the threshold, Andras lifting the fabric with one wing as he passes beneath it. He is still staring at her, at her ringing chain, at the strange curl of her horn.
He thinks he might find her beautiful, the way gods are beautiful, the way bruises are beautiful, the way one of her blades glides against the skin of his ankle and a drop or two of blood blooms against the black. "I want to see something interesting."
His beast hums along with hers but it is gnashing its teeth, and it is pressed up against the bars, begging. "How did you do that?"
There are a hundred different eyes on me as I walk back into the crowd. They all feel more like touches than looks, more like knives and nothing at all like kisses. I know I should wonder what they all think of me, the citizens of my court, I know I should worry. But, here I am with an electric boy at my back and a thousand lines of war painting the same maps across our skin. And I don't worry the way I should.
Later tonight I will, but not now with the copper bending beneath our hooves and the fire-heat cooling from our skin. Now I will only take each of those sharp stares and let them remind me of all the things I must do (because if I don't there is no one else who will). Maybe he can see it in the echo of my hooves on copper-- a million small, holy goodbyes.
Maybe his hooves are walking across my city in notes of the same song.
(maybe it's not my city anymore)
Etiquette demands that I slow down when he starts to talk. I don't. There is only a flash of a smile over my shoulder to show that I'm listening to him at all. It's a look I never used to understand: slyness, happiness, joy, a little monstrous. Caligo looked like that once, when I met her beneath the wings of thunder-birds. It's no wonder now why I didn't trust her then. Even then I knew that whatever part of her that was all god was all terrible.
I let his question hang in the silence between our goodbye steps just long enough to gather weight. I laugh. “Better keep up then.” Kicking my hooves up into a run is so much easier now than it used to be. Suffering has made me strong, rage stronger. I let my laughter echo to lead him onward and for the first time I leave no trail in my wake to show him the way. Overhead Fable joins us, blotting out the moonlight for a moment as he flies towards his favorite spire on our castle.
I run, and run, and run until I'm at the great marble, wood and gemstone doors of home. My lungs are hardly aching in my chest; I could have run for hours. The autumn breeze cools whatever sweat has gathered on my skin and just when I feel like I might shiver I hear him behind me. There is a heat in my gaze when I look at him, like a dog that has discovered the wonder of running with wolves and lions. I feel wild, and feral, and I know that look is on my face again. The otherness, I can feel it dragging at my shoulders like wings.
The doors moan as push through them. I lead him towards the library. A fire is burning low enough to be almost considered dead. The pillow are where I left them (and what I left them as). I don't wonder if he'll see the single chain-mail one tucked beneath the others, and I don't wonder if he'll notice how it's rusted instead of polished.
On a red silk pillow my journal flutters open.
I don't wonder if he'll notice that either. He will.
“Find out for yourself.” I answer his question finally and I know it's the same way any god answers a prayer. Nothing is free. By blood, and scar, and suffering I learned that. And I hope he can learn everything I learned from the sea without having to die. I hope it so hard that it's almost a prayer.
Even when I close the door behind me I don't stop hoping.
“It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.”
"All you want to do is dance out of your skin into another song not quite about heroes, but still a song where you can lift your spear and say 'yes' as it flashes."
Andras follows, as Andras will. He does not look out into the crowd and he does not raise his proud black head to see Denocte alight, Denocte by the warmth of a much friendlier fire than it had known. There is mumbling about them, at their backs, and a gasp here or there, but Andras pays no attention to any of it.
He didn't really come to see Denocte at all, did he?
Andras does lift his head when she speaks, accompanied by the clatter of hooves on cobblestone. He came here to see her, he thinks. And there she goes.
Jaw clenched, Andras unfolds his wings and lurches forward, gliding after her in the shadow of her dragon (and there is that feeling again, a salivating at the thought of danger, a salivating at the thought of pain) with his wings night-dark against the yellow glow of the city. He doesn't know if he's forgotten her warning, or if he is just far enough overhead that he does not scatter her civilians. He does not know if he wants her to notice. Either way, she doesn't.
Isra wheels to a stop at the door to her castle, tall and dark and glittering. Seconds later Andras lands at her heels with his head low, already adjusting his glasses as she heaves open the door and it roars like the beast that she is - something too powerful, something that does not belong. He follows in silence, through the foyer, down a corridor, through another tall archway that opens to the library.
It is the first time Andras starts to feel homesick for Delumine in a way that is not his black hatred feeling less severe in the shade of its tall trees.
Find out for yourself, says Isra, less a suggestion and more of a command, and Andras nods silently. Behind him there is the telltale flutter of pages blown open by the wind (but he is not stupid enough to think it is the wind that does it) and Andras looks back at it.
"Thank you," he breathes, casting a sidelong glance over his shoulder, but Isra is already gone, back to her festival, back to her city, back to the demons that sing at her from the alter. Andras does not pause to worry about her, even as he settles down in her pile of pillows, unceremoniously flicking the rusty chainmail one out of his way. He stares for a long moment at the journal, laying open and wanting in the cold light of the moon.
