I learned I was impatient. The moment their sail disappeared below the horizon, I wanted them back. I quickly grew tired of being alone. I hated feeling like I was waiting for something to happen, something big and bad and dangerous. Something to justify how I stayed behind.
I learned I was not as independent as I wanted to believe. I learned my parent’s approval, once discarded with the roll of my eyes, meant more than I ever realized. And I realized exactly how much my sister’s companionship soothed my soul. Without them I felt so very small.
I learned countless other things about myself, things which I will not ruin by sharing. They were not all bad things, but I must admit--
I was very tired of growing up.
The funny thing is: the whole time they were gone, I never considered the possibility that they would not return. If I let myself think about that, even for a second, I would be ruined. Lost to despair. There were some bad thoughts, some really bad thoughts, which were the beginning of a downward spiral, and I knew this was one of those. But when the ship gently docked and I ran at full speed to meet it, all that pent up fear was unleashed with such force I thought I was going to vomit. What if they didn’t make it? What if they died, hundreds of miles from home? I don't even remember exactly how we parted ways, what my last words were. Whatever they were, they would not have been enough. They never could be.
I saw my mother jump overboard, all grace and fierce beauty pouring into the loving sea. My vision became blurry, my heart almost broke with fullness. I was so happy it hurt. A wild, beautiful kind of pain I could happily live inside forever. Still-- a panic was rising in me, barely contained. I needed to see my sister, or I was going to explode. My nervous energy was contagious and Furfur, pressed close to my side, began to howl. A heartbeat later, I raised my lips to the sky, inhaled deeply, and began to howl with him. It was, at the same time, a mourning and a summoning.
Come home, we sang
Come home, come home, come home
or we will burn
all the world
to ash
THE MOON NEEDS TIME TO BECOME FULL
@Avesta :D
06-04-2020, 11:46 PM - This post was last modified: 06-04-2020, 11:46 PM by Aspara
I am so used to sea-water that the air slipping around inside my lungs like oil feels of winter. It blossoms frost across my cells like roots, and dirt, and rocks broken down by eons. I can taste it between my teeth when I lick at the backs of them as a wolf does. My soul sighs at the taste in the way a poet sighs at the moon, or at a woman walking long-legged and fragile through a garden.
The wind billows through my mane, and my collar, and through the spectral fur of Foras. It whispers to me, calling me home like the forests and corpses call a wraith wolf home. I am wild with it when I hear the howl on the wind.
And it's not the come home, come home, come that we answer back as two wolves instead of a wolf and a unicorn. We bray at the ash, and the dust, and the devouring in the way a pack worships the moon. Our teeth flash like bone-white sickle moons beneath the darkness of our lips. Our bellies coo like a shoreline and our legs quiver with the need to run, and hunt, and conquer.
The belly of the ship groans as it sinks into the sand and I imagine us washing into the shore like a storm instead of wood. And I imagine my steps are thunder as I leap from the deck into the silt and muck and seawater. Foras lands beside me, graceful and eager as a young fox at the sight of his brother.
We lift our noses up and howl again and this time there is thunder in the sound of us. Our eyes flash black, and silver, and cosmic as we look again at the two pieces of our souls we had left behind. I wonder if Aspara can still see the war in me. I wonder if she can see the places were the sea has devoured my blood and bloated my heart.
I wonder if she can see the crown of death curling around my horn like a vine.
And I wonder if my kiss feels like frost or like fire as I press my lips to her cheek to muffle the howl that my lungs are still singing.
Oh gods, if you had anything at all to do with it, thank you for bringing them back.
Furfur was a shooting star, a milky pale streak launched with singleminded intent toward his brother. The boys were quickly jumping and wrestling and playing with such joy that my heart broke all over again for tearing them apart. Yet I did not have long to linger on my guilt before Avesta was pressed against me once again, and there was too much joy in my heart to leave room for any other emotion. “Sister.” Looking back, I am surprised and impressed by myself for not crying.
Of course there was something different about her. Something different about me, too. I expected no less, so I was not bothered, not a first, when her kiss felt like it did not know what it wanted to be. Like maybe love was a thing that could be outgrown, and we had both done an awful lot of growing.
(Love is not a thing that can be outgrown, I thought then and I think now-- but I am prone to self doubt, and I wonder sometimes, I wonder…)
“Tell me,” I breathed her in deep. The first inhales of someone almost drowned. And that is what it had felt like, at times, when she and the rest of our family was across the ocean. Like a slow drowning, very slow. To breathe once again was the most beautiful feeling in the world. “Tell me everything.”
I had my own stories to tell and small tokens that I had saved from my travels to share with my sister. A sand dollar from my first encounter with the enchanting Sun King. A beautiful pair of earrings from a kind and (in recounting the tale I would blush)rather handsome yet unfortunately talkative boy I met at the market. A fallen leaf from a birch tree in Delumine that had spoken to me. A throwing knife from a badass woman that reminded me of our father. These items were deeply important to me, and the memories they invoked even moreso. But I was in no rush to share them, and I knew my humble, maybe even silly, stories ("his eyes were so blue") would pale in comparison to whatever Avesta had seen and done.
And more importantly... She was right there in front of me, alive, and that was all I had wanted since the moment she left, but once reunited I instantly felt greedy. I needed more. I had to know that she was not just alive but also well.
My wolf, our wolves, the feral winter-frost parts of our souls, tangle about each other and forget so easily the grit of sand between their teeth and caught between skin and fur. I wonder how it can be so easy, to go from furious howling to youthful yips, and never know the blackness of a lament between the two.
I wonder when I forgot how to press my cheek to my sister's and breath in stardust and frost instead of brine and salt. My throat grows fat with air and my tongue heavy with the weight of all the sounds, the words, the promises I have forgotten how to make. My lungs ache as I try and fail. I pull myself away from her and blink away the dark shadows of my inability to remember.
I do not notice as Foras's edges blur against his brothers as he starts to hang in that place between the real, death, and winter.
The roar of the sea echoes in my ears like I've pressed my ear into a hollow shell where something has died. My heart thrums, and purrs, and stumbles in my chest at the sound. And when I open my eyes I look only at my sister, at my soul, at a bit of root like our father. (I am smoke, and spectral, and black-death where a girl with dreams once lived).
I was dead.
Or is it I am?
I have forgotten.
Sand whispers at my ankles as I move towards the dunes blooming the last beach-flowers of the season. It sounds like links of chain woven into hair, or flesh, or satin (like it's not bloody in all my dreams). “Come away from the tide and I will tell you.” Everything but that, because I know the sea is still hungry. I know it plucked out names out from our mother's heart like offerings plucked out of a bouquet of sacrifices.
My soul, my innocence, was not enough to fill the sea.
I look back to see if she has followed (I know she did, she always does, she and I are tangled in a way deeper than the roots and magma in the center of the earth). Her shadow catches my gaze, black and golden-sand, and I try not to see blood and gore gathering in the edges of it like sun leaking though the night. I blink, and blink, and blink.
I tell myself I only see Aspara, our wolves, and nothing else.
“We freed them all.” My skin feels like winter when I press it back against her shoulder (now that the roaring sea is a whisper of nightmare instead of the deep of it). I try not to think of the cost when I paint patterns on her skin and pray that she will not ask me for more than that. “I wish I stayed here with you.” I say into her mane.
And it is the first lie I have ever told her (but I try to tell myself it's the truth).
They say it isn’t possible-- they say that I’ve made it up, took a thought and grew a memory from it-- but I remember my life before I was born. My world was defined by only three things: the darkness, the rhythmic beat of my mother’s heart, and my sister curled up next to me. I remember the pure, infinite contentment, back before I didn’t know how much more there was.
And when we were born into the storm, beneath the church-tree with its angry glass leaves (I would always think of them as angry, for in my earliest memories they are backlit by lightning), the world multiplied a thousandfold. There was so much light, and color, and scent.
I thought we would experience it all. But eventually I learned enough to realize I would never know the edge of the world. I realized that every new sight, every accomplishment, would unlock the opportunity for two more; the more I experienced, the more there was to experience. This was a good thing-- a great thing, or else life would be so small and boring. But it also filled me with despair to think of the impossibility of knowing and seeing and doing everything. It was the realization that I would never again be truly, completely, content.
Sometimes I think back to that time before we were born, and I long for that peaceful ignorance. I long for that sense of closeness, and that innocence.
Sometimes, remembering the way my mother’s heartbeat echoed around us almost makes me cry. I wanted to go back to that time, pause, stay there forever.
Instead, life had taken us so very far from each other. As my sister and I took a moment to watch our wolves wrestle, I wondered if they remembered their mother, and their siblings, and the clutches of death we-- Avesta-- saved them from. And in that moment I felt so full of love and relief and gratitude, it was a moment in time I will cherish for the rest of my life.
Why did we step away from the tide? I did not know, but as we walked inland I glanced behind me in search of anything nefarious in the ocean’s gentle, raspy dance. I saw nothing but the same water I always knew and loved, and I frowned. I did not understand. Worse-- I did not know how to ask. All I had to say was “why?” but for some reason that seemed impossible. Maybe I didn’t really want to know, not yet. So I just went along with it, and resolved to ponder this oddity later. Alone.
“I’m so proud of you. And Isra and Eik and Fable…” I don’t remember exactly when or why I had started calling my parents by their names. It started a little before they returned-- I felt I had grown up enough to recognize my parents were not omnipotent, and calling them by name was a pleasing reminder of that. With age came wisdom, of course, but they didn’t know everything. They were just as mortal as me (well-- at least that’s what I thought back then) and at the end of the day they had just as little clue as I did what the next day would bring.
I could sense, in the way she pressed her shoulder to mine, a question. Avesta did not beg, but in that gesture was coded the closest thing to it. My belly was an ocean, raging against the shore that caged it on all sides. In my chest was a wolf, and it bristled at the thought of whatever it could be that she saw, felt, did which could not be easily shared. I knew in my heart she would do anything I asked of her, tell me any truth. It just never occurred to me before there were things that if asked, could hurt. It was not a power I wanted. So I withheld, and pressed back into her with all the love I could muster.
“I wish I stayed.”
I drew away to look at her. It is a look of flat, quiet disbelief. Not offended, just… “oh really.” I didn’t believe her. Not because of the way she said the words, or because I didn’t want to believe her (I did), but because she was my sister, and though I might not always understand what went on inside her head or within her soul, I knew that if she stayed behind she would have been miserable. She was made of stronger, bolder, stanger stuff than me; if we were characters in a story, I would be the sentinel and she would be the heroine.
“I wish I went with you. I should have been there too.” But I did not regret the choice I had made, as much pain as it had brought to myself and others. I had to forcefully live without regret, or else I would be lost to it. It was hard, to wish I had gone with them but not regret staying. Always in my mind there was some kind of balancing act going on. "The boys are so big now." My attention had returned to the wolves as their joyful playing spun out to something more aggressive. Happy yips were interspersed with upset yelps-- teeth had grown sharper and jaws stronger since they last tumbled. "How tall do you think they'll get? What if they never stop growing?! They could be as big as Fable someday." I stepped back to stand shoulder to shoulder with my sister, and tried to soak in the indelible comfort of her touch.
Once I had not thought it strange, the way we speak in looks and minuscule shifts of our bodies. It had not seemed unnatural when my bones whispered to her soul and her soul had whispered to my bones. To me, it had seemed in all my miles of innocence, that the entire world spoke in the same language of us.
Didn't the glass leaves of the church-tree talk to the roots in bell-chime lashes of green, gold and red? Didn't the river talk to the shore in bubbling hisses almost too soft for my ears to hear?
Didn't the sunlit places of sea sing to the black depth in melodies and tomes of froth and scale?
Now I know better. I can still read her looks, the graceful perfect curl of her lips and the flutter of her lashes, as easy as I can breathe. But I have forgotten how to whisper back, how to sing back, how to do anything but smile like a tomb of bones and stone pretending to be pearl and flower. And I want to remember how, I want to shape our language into the story of how I'm paying for our mother's sins, how I'm caged so that she can have her freedom.
I want to tell her that I'm suffering. I want to tell her that I regret dying, that I regret snapping my jawbone open to welcome the sea god in.
But all those words, all those horrors, live only in my language and I do not know how to shape it into hers. I try though. “Tell me all the things you've done that I would be proud of.” I would dash myself on the cliffs to remember how this tongue of mine is supposed to work when she's pressed against me. My heart flutters in my chests like a sparrow with broken wings. It remembers.
“I certainly hope they never grow to Fable's size. A normal wolf size would be just enough.” It feels like a blessing to lean my shoulder against hers, to share just a bit of this ocean-stone weight I carry now. Does it feel like chains to her? Or does it feel like another whisper in that language I cannot recall.
When I whisper around a smile my teeth ache like jagged, hungry things ache. “I don't think Novus would survive the two of them if they never stopped growing.” My laughter is a frail and brittle thing, a winter-sea thing. But it is laughter and maybe to her that is all that matters.
But below that laughter, when I blink my eyes, I see Foras on the battle-field with blood dripping from his muzzle.
The way grief needs oxygen.
The way every once in a while,
it catches the light and starts smoking.
When I tried to think of what would make my sister proud, I was embarrassed to find that nothing immediately came to mind. There were so many treasured moments I had collected in her absence: meeting sun-king Orestes and our godfather Asterion, being gifted a sand dollar from the sun king, breaking into a secret garden in Denocte with Charlie, learning to throw knives with Castalla… but there was nothing that I felt particularly proud of. My life was just a series of events that happened to me; I was just along for the beautiful ride.
“Let’s walk and talk. I’m too excited to see you to stand still.” Indeed if her shoulder wasn’t pressed to mine I’d be prancing in place, not just in excitement but anxiety too-- but she didn’t need to know that. Instead I leaned into her touch, and garnered what I could from what went unspoken. The press of her flesh had always told me more than words… even the not-telling was telling, strange as it sounds.
I knew there were things that were hard to talk about. Trust me, I knew. And the knowing made it that much harder to ask. What I could not say I pressed silently into her skin with my teeth, grooming her like we used too, plaiting questions into her mane like I once did prayers. “What really happened there? What happened to you?
… What can I do?”
Later, long after the sun had set, I would slip out into the night and press my cheek to the side of the boat that carried my family across the sea and back again. I would wait patiently for its stories to come to me, for I was not yet strong enough to pull what I wanted from it with my magic. I had to stand there for a long time, letting the stories flow like water. And (funny enough) mostly the ship wanted to tell me about water, for it was very much in love. Occasionally it would mention the terrors I was listening for, but never directly: blooms of crimson in the sea, the wet thump of a body against the grain of the wood, the tides shifting slightly every time someone drowned, their lungs filling with seawater.
But that would all come later. In that moment she took my stilted small talk and ran with it and I tried to remember how weightless we once were. Splashing in the lake, tearing up the mountain. Our horns tap-taping messages no one else would every understand. Our own language. Conversations just as silly as what if our dogs never stopped growing. I smiled. Her laugh was not the same, but that was okay. I think. We had both grown so much. I truly believed we had all the time in the world to grow back together. “It would be terrifying, wouldn’t it.” There was a wicked glee in the statement, although at heart I was in complete agreement with my sister. Our wolves were menacing enough as it was.
And finally, as we began to walk in a meandering path toward home-- which, to be honest, I felt odd even calling home. So much had changed-- I began to tell her all the things I’ve done that would make her proud. There were not great acts of heroism or bravery, but perhaps enough small sparks, gathered together, would become a bright light. Mostly I just wanted to feel close to her again, and filling her in was the logical first step. “So a few months back I caught a thief in the night markets. He was just a boy, hardly older than us, and he tried to trick me with magic…”
We talked and talked and talked. The afternoon faded to evening to night to early morning, peachy-pink and beautifully fragile. And as I began to fall asleep, no longer able to resist the heavy pull of my eyelids, I think I began to really understand that old adage, and for the first time see it in a positive light: the more things change, the more things stay the same.
The way my grief will die with me.
The way it will cleave and grow
like antlers.
A S P A R A
@Avesta closing this here but I am always always up for more twin threads <3
Mother told us a story once, on a night just as moon-bright and star-glitzed as all the others, about a door carved into the side of the mountain. I remember her talking about that doorway and how it was so strangely shaped, so incorporeal, that no creature could fold down its flesh and bones into the right shape to fit through. She had told us how it was a trick of the gods, a curse that was coated in the gold-leaf of a story and a magical doorway into a place that no one could understand.
This, this homecoming with my sister's shoulders and our wolves and our different stories, feels like looking at that doorway. I feel like I am trying to whittle my bones down like I might whittle a sparrow with my horn. My skin itches like I am tearing it off with teeth inside of saltwater or magic. My lungs feel heavy as two stones caught in the belly of hawk. I am falling, and stumbling, and breaking my bones, to fit through that cursed doorway in the mountains.
And I am not made for the earth, and stone, and mud thick enough to devour.
I am the winter-sea, and brine, and rotten ships buried fat with treasure hiding in the belly of the ocean. I am the doorway instead of the thing begging entrance and magic. I am a million different things that I was not born to be.
But I am still a twin. My heart still trembles in my chest with love (although the tremble and the sigh of it is weaker than it once was). My horn still tangles in my sisters mane like she's wood holding a sparrow inside. My breath still makes dragon smoke with hers as our words tangle and rise, rise, rise like lions and eagles into the noon-sun.
In her voice, her stories, I am reborn as much as a dead thing can be born, or rise, or do anything but rot. I shed my hunger for hope, and my silence and wave-froth for tea and spun sugar. For her, only for her, do I become a civilized thing with smiles instead of a snarls.
And when our voices, our stories, waiver off into slumber and dream, I fall into the dream-sea. But all I see is black speckled with crystals of salt instead of stars.
I don't think I'll ever see the stars behind my eyes again.
