oh, whatever happened to the life I gave to you what will I do with it now?
Saphira stared out at the water. She wouldn’t have woken up today, given the choice. She’d crept down the cliffs from her perch mid-day, once the sun had become too hostile to sleep beneath. “...find myself a sea-cave,” she muttered, but it was still too cold to sleep underground. Every night on the cliff-top, she would bury the hot coals, and every evening she would kick up the fire again, threading bits of shell and seagrass for necklaces to enchant children and tourists. She thought they were ugly, but she hadn’t starved…not to death, at least.
Carefully, she picked her way down the shoreline, pausing only to nibble a reed or a bit of seagrass. Now, she stood, hooves sunken into the wet sand, legs dark and black and cold. She could feel the wind curl around them, sticking to them, trying to pull her along. She remained unmoving. She’d have looked a statue if not for her flanks trembling as she sobbed. Things had gotten better. Most mornings she didn’t wail at the sea to take her back. She thought she wouldn’t today, but then it was out - a raw, lonely scream. Something about wailing always made things worse. It wasn’t cathartic. It simply hurt. She coughed, and sobbed, and collapsed into the sand, the soft sea-foam washing her chest, trying to pull her along with the kelp and the rocks. “But you won’t take me back,” she whispered. She stretched out her neck to the horizon and screamed, “you’ll never take me back!” Saphira stared out at the waters, moving as always, unresponsive to her pleas. She laid her head down on the ground, whimpering as the stones and seaglass dug into her skin.
@Orestes || she's on the shores, somewhere near the dusk court ”who will grieve for this woman?“ does she not seem too insignificant for our concern?
03-12-2020, 06:52 PM - This post was last modified: 09-29-2020, 01:43 PM by Saphira
Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross
When Eve left the Garden did she glance over her shoulder and capture a last glimpse of what would never be hers again? When Icarus fell, did he laugh? Or did he scream, plummeting away from his joyous summit? Had the ascent, and the pinnacle, been worth the burning? What of Satan and his archangels? Better to reign in hell, than to serve in heaven? What of Achilles, and Patroclus? When Achilles’s pride had wrought the death of his friend, had he wished to sail home to Greece and forget all the glories of Troy, only to see one more glimpse of his companion’s smile? Did something in the hero Gilgamesh wilt the moment he learned of his own mortality?
These are the questions that plague Orestes as he stares out at a sea, trying to remember a song as if through a half-forgotten dream. The words do not come to him; nor does the rhythm. Instead, he knows he has forgotten it only because there is an aching absence in his chest, as if someone has cleaved from him not his flesh but the space within the breastbone that all men carry their innermost feelings, and thoughts, and wants. Those things too, seem far away and inaccessible. The expression on his face can only be defined as hungry—but beyond that, famished, as if he is a man without food, without water, starving on the shoreline.
He does not let the water touch him. He stares at it distrustful and uncertain. When the cry splits the air he thinks, for a moment, it is his own.
That is the song.
But you won’t take me back.
Those are the words.
You’ll never take me back!
That is the feeling of his ruinous heart.
Orestes begins to trot, slow-fast, then slow, slow, nearly frozen, when he sees her on the shoreline. He does not remember her. He does not remember much of anything, anymore. Only that when he wakes up with salt tears in his eyes, that salt once belonged to the sea.
His voice cracks. His voice doesn’t come out when he tries to speak; only a strangled sound.
seems like the other day my baby went away he went away ‘cross the sea
Saphira does not hear his approach over the sound of her own wailing, her pleas. She does not hear the strangled sound he makes, her one ear to the land, one to the sky and the surf.
“It won’t take me back, either.”
His voice does not make her skin crawl, not until she picks up her head and looks at him. There is something about the curve of his shoulder, his hip, even the bones beneath his face that feel as though she is remembering a recurring dream, once forgotten, and only recalled by dreaming it again. She does not stand right away, staring for a long moment before laying her head against the ground. Maybe he'll go away. She closes her eyes and sighs a shuddering sigh, tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, sand ground into the shedding whorls of her coat. She picks her head up again, and then the rest of her, head held low like a prowling wolf or a beaten one, hunched, hungry, alone.
She realizes that she does not know what to say to him.
There is a desperate urge, in the lonely and miserable heart, to have a stranger come along and ask what is wrong. This would be, undoubtedly, a fateful encounter, leading to an eternal friendship and the release of all miseries to the sea.
She says, “Why would it, when it cares not for us?”
@Orestes ”who will grieve for this woman?“ does she not seem too insignificant for our concern?
03-13-2020, 12:10 PM - This post was last modified: 09-29-2020, 01:43 PM by Saphira
Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross
Why would it, when it cares not for us?
The question takes him by surprise. It is the question he has asked himself many times. It is the thing he had stayed awake wondering, when he should have been dealing with matters of his Court. There is no part of him prepared to defend against his own inner monologue turned back at him; he is not prepared to answer the question that keeps him restless, keeps him hungry. So at first he says nothing. At first he looks down at her, expression hard, as if with something like pity—or disgust—or the two combined.
It is her grief, he decides, that makes him so uncomfortable. It is the way he cannot answer with any truth, with any honesty. At last he says, “She cares, just not in the ways we want her to, or the ways that we can understand.” Orestes does not know why the words emerge defensive, but they do. Orestes does not know why he cannot look her in the eyes, but he can't.
Something nags at him. The same feeling returns: a song he cannot remember the words to, a song without rhythm, only the memory, only the knowledge that he should know it and somehow does not. Orestes swallows. He discovers it is quite difficult to look at her, anything about her at all, and he steps away, so he is facing not the stranger but the horizon, one hoof stretching haphazardly forward to dip into the sea.
Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea
She stares into his hardened gaze with all disgust, no pity for the delusional. He has come to her crying with his loneliness, his dry hooves, only to look down at her with that old-dream face.
When he speaks, her lip curls into a sneer, up, up, up, into a furious snarl. She laughs, once, like the cracking of a whip. He won’t meet her eyes. He won’t even stand too close, backing away, his hoof just touching the sea like it’s hot, even knowing that it lives in his heart. A fool. Saphira advances on him until they are nose to nose, standing in the water, back to the horizon. ”’She cares’,” she whines mockingly. ”You don’t believe that. Look me in the eyes and tell me she cares.” Her voice grows louder, as a wave or rolling thunder. ”If she cared, why would she leave us to die on the land, like mortals? Why would she-“
The whip cracks again, louder, only in her mind. She sees his face and knows who he looks like, sounds like, sounds exactly like and oh, how could she not have noticed before? The old-dream face, that’s what it is.
Her ears pin, but she stays where she is, close enough to rustle the hair on his chin with her breath.
It can’t be him, no, it isn’t, mustn’t be, but gods, don’t they look alike? Don’t they sound alike? Don’t they have gold burned into their flesh like some masterpiece of pain?
Oh, they do.
Her lips tremble and her brows knit together. She can’t say it, can she? He wouldn’t know. He can’t know. He’s just some idiot like her, body on land, soul lost at sea.
Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross
She cares. You don’t believe that. Look me in the eyes and tell me she cares. If she cared, why would she leave us to die on the land, like mortals? Why would she—
Whatever feeble optimism Orestes clung to about the sea, whatever misplaced romanticism he maintained about the mystic and beloved place of his forgotten birth—well, it is dashed by those words, as if upon paving stones. The words echo. Why would she leave us to die on the land, like mortals?
Orestes feels his own heart beat. He can hear the blood in ears and he can feel, in a way that unique to those who have lost their immortality, his own finite nature. He feels it in the way the breeze is too cold, the way there is nothing to comfort him against her dangerous, threatening proximity. Eye-to-eye, he notices the distinctive markings that he had not noticed before. Scar-like and silver, they hide within her half-winter coat, as if forgotten, as if hiding secretive and punitive.
There is a part of him that cows before him; yet it is small and overshadowed by the part of him that remembers being a prince, a king, now a Sovereign. Orestes’s lips peel back because he does know and her words have shaken loose something ancient within him.
“You’re right,” and Orestes’s voice is seething. If the sound were incarnated, transformed, it would be the Dead Sea on a raw-salt shore. “She has left us to die on the land.”
Orestes does not know why he says it, besides what he recollects from journals in looping handwriting, detailing a life that was once his but no longer feels like it. Yet the raw edge is still there, untouched and wounded. The raw edge is still exposed, fleshy, stinging.
She is salt in it. Unwritten, she remains a stranger; a stranger to him that is not a stranger at all, and by presence alone begins to tear bandages and sutures from half-healed wounds. Orestes pressed forward and in a gesture guileless and childlike, presses his nose against one silver tattoo, as if it did not so dangerously resemble his own.
“She would do it because we are unworthy.”
It is the only answer Orestes, once the Keeper of Souls, has left.
”You’re right. She has left us to die on the land.”
Somehow, it is not the answer Saphira wants to hear. Somehow, she wanted to be proven wrong. She wanted him to say, “You are wrong, and here is why, and maybe she will take us back one day because she loves us,” but he doesn’t, and the sea has still not taken them back, and maybe never loved them to begin with. (Though she knows, in her heart, that you cannot be one with the sea without love and violence in equal shares.) Her lids drop low, tired, and she sighs.
He presses his nose to hers.
”She would do it because we are unworthy.”
Saphira pushes into him, just enough to feel held. Her loneliness in the wake of exile is overpowering, and he is too familiar for her not to want this. ”Perhaps she is unworthy, if she would abandon her people,” she murmurs. Seaweed tangles around a hoof and stays there, the surf pulling against it before heading back to deeper waters, then, pushing forward again, trying to bring it to dry land. Saphira picks up her hoof and allows it to float away with the tide. She looks up at his old-dream face with her lost-gem eyes and says, ”Tell me your name.”
Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross
If there is one thing that has never been in his nature, it is rage. It does not come easily to Orestes; or at least, it never has. Perhaps she is unworthy, if she would abandon her people. He wants to say you’re right. He wants to use the words to take up a new mantle, furious and—
Perhaps he will. Orestes clenches his teeth but it is not her, no, it is not her, it is the fact when she presses into him and he drops his head to offer an embrace, he knows he has done this same thing before, at a different time. Orestes knows they have been here before, simply not here.
Orestes’s eyes follow the seaweed being tugged by the surf, being held by her hoof. She releases it and he finds the act painfully merciful considering their line of conversation. She demands, tell me your name and Orestes’s mouth feels full of salt, full of cotton, full of things that would make it impossible to speak. She is staring into his face and he is staring into hers and he knows but doesn’t know, he remembers but cannot remember and at last, heavily, he says, “Orestes.”
And in saying it, it has never sounded feeble. So not enough. A man’s name, that’s all. The name of a man.
He was meant to be more.
Orestes knows it.
And he knows he never became it;
and that is why he can remember the press of her body and how it fit when he embraced her, but he cannot remember why he knows.
She remembers, too. The way he holds his head, his neck to hers, the way they fit together like- like- like puzzle pieces, though something, something is missing and she almost knows what it is but it wouldn’t make sense, doesn’t make sense and he looks into her eyes and he says, like a thousand-pound weight dropping in quicksand,
”Orestes.”
Saphira stares at him. She stares for a long time and she thinks, and thinks more, but mostly her mind hums with white noise and the whip crack! Crack! Crack! Of her reality falling apart and she says, ”No. No. No, don’t…don’t say that.”Don’t do this to me. She shakes her head and keeps shaking it, her whole expression twisted into a frown as she stares and keeps staring and saying, ”No, no, no,” because it doesn’t make sense and it makes so much sense, it finally makes sense, but everything she built herself upon since his death would have to crumble away to nothing, and Saphira isn’t ready to start over, not again.
Her sapphire eyes are blue and damp and gray storm clouds roil overhead and she says, ”That can’t be true. Take it back,” but it’s the truth, she knows it in his eyes and his warmth and his voice and his tattoos and she tries to scream ”Take it back!” but it’s just a sob this time, hoarse and strangled as his.
Into this wild Abyss/ The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave--/ Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/ Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/ Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,--/ Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend/ Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,/ Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith/ He had to cross
No. No. No, don’t… don’t say that.
He should be surprised.
He isn’t.
In everything that has happened, Orestes still has a very firm grasp on fate. There is a part of him that expects a lifetime of punishment for his lifetimes of failures. There is a part of him that understands he will forever bear the burdens of Atlas—
if only Atlas were a man.
Orestes steps back and does not meet her eyes, this harbinger of his, this beloved and forgotten piece of his life. He understands but doesn’t. He knows but doesn’t. At last he says, “I can’t take it back. I’m sorry. I wish I could.” And, at that, at the idea I wish I could, Orestes’s voice strikes like a flint.
At last Orestes raises his eyes. It is what he has been preparing to say for a year; it is the one thing he had hoped he would never have to say, because it isn’t enough. “I’m what’s left of him, anyway—and… I’m sorry.” Orestes’s voice cracks on the apology. He says, in a voice ravaged with everything he cannot express, “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
