BEDE WROTE HOW A SPARROW FLEW from dark through a lighted meadhall into dark again. / Tiny wing of your lungs - each beat a breath.
If I am being honest – I am not sure that I should be leaving Terrastella yet.
Not alone, at least. That’s done little to prevent me from leaving regardless; I’ve been granted the honor of a sacred task, and I must find the heir, and I have no desire to waste time. Besides. This world is beautiful, if strange, and I have lived two lifetimes as a knight and trained all of this one. I am well-capable of defending myself, should it come to it.
(And – it is probably selfish to say it, but I’ve never truly stretched my wings before. There were always trees above my head, and I could never break through them. In this place, there is nothing but endless, endless open sky. In some ways, it is horrifyingly vast, but in others, I feel strangely free, though I am not at all sure from what.)
From above, this new world is far less overwhelming. I think that it is because I can’t see the details of it, only the broad strokes, so, like an unkempt blade, the edge is blunted. When I am on the ground, every unfamiliar thing bites. I get caught on every little detail like a rabbit in a snare – I agonize over every murky puddle and evergreen tree. From up here, I can recognize that ridge of black-grey stones off in the distance as a mountain, but it doesn’t invite the vacant stare I’m sure that I’d be giving it, were I on the ground. (I still cannot fathom the simple changes of terrain in this land; the way some stones reach towards the sky, and sometimes the earth dips into tunnels. The spaces underground, in particular, invite my curiosity, and something like horror. There is something alluring about the depth,; something horrifying about how it could swallow you whole.)
I land when there are no longer trees. Not for miles. I don’t know what to call this rolling expanse, but I know that it feels clear and visible in a way that is almost threatening. For the first few days, the sky was a novelty. Now that I am becoming used to it, I am not so sure that it doesn’t sometimes feel like more of a threat; in the forest, there were always places to hide, and that dull, reasonable voice in the back of my head that is still a knight likes to remind me that Novus is something quite different.
Hearing the voice and listening two it are two different things – even though, when I don’t, I usually find myself regretting it.
The grass is high, here. Higher than any grass I’ve ever seen before (I hope that it’s actually grass; it smells a bit like it, slightly sweet), and pale, more of a tan than a lush green or a gold or even a dying brown. I can’t help but grin a little at the way it tickles my stomach and the downy feathers at the base of my wings when I brush through it.
What pulled me down to the ground here in particular is the great, cascading mass of brown things on the hillside in front of me. I’ve never seen anything quite like them, and, even though the-voice-in-the-back-of-my-head keeps telling me not to get any closer, I do anyways, until I can get a good look at the one at the front of the group.
The creature is…bulky, and covered with shaggy curls of brown fur. Its back rises to a considerable hump before its short neck, and its face is surrounded what is almost a small mane of black curls, which rise from its skull like hair and drip from its chin like a beard. It has a set of short charcoal horns that curve backwards from above its ears, and its large, black eyes seem to carve hollows in its face. Its tail is wispy and short, and it lashes behind it irritably, as though to stir away flies.
I am striding through the tall grass towards the strange creature before I can think much of it, my wings snapping into position at my side. It raises its head, chewing on a mouthful of grass that’s halfway sticking out and staring me dead in the eyes, and I tilt my head at it just a bit, not quite sure what to think. (It doesn’t seem quite sure what to think of me, either.) I move closer and closer, bridging the space between us until I’m only a few feet away from it. It stops chewing and snorts at me.
It isn’t a horse. It’s barely even horse-like. I’ve been plenty of things that aren’t horses, but I don’t feel any sort of kinship with them now, and I didn’t feel any sort of kinship with horses when I was them. I just felt like what I was at the time, so I know better than to expect this creature to feel anything particular for me, even on the off chance that it was a horse at some point or another, in one life or the next. Of course, knowing that doesn’t stop me from getting a little too close.
The creature snorts again, pawing at the ground, and, before I can think about it, charges at me.
I whirl, catching a face-full of chestnut hair in my hurry to turn, and I take off sprinting, putting my legs (which are, in my youthful state, near-obnoxiously long) to good use. I don’t feel like the creature should be faster than me, but, even though I wouldn’t dare risk a look back, I feel like I can hear its lurching, heavy hoof-beats gaining on me. I remember my wings almost too late, spreading them out belatedly and leaping into the air rather gracelessly in my stumbling rush – not quite quick enough to avoid a toss of the creature’s head, which catches my right hindquarter up against its horn. It hurts, a little. Mostly stings. With adrenaline pumping through my veins and my heartbeat so loud that it nearly drowns out the wind, I barely notice.
I land on the next hillside over, which is apparently enough to dissuade the creature from following me again. My wings lower themselves to my sides again; I notice that I’m shaking, but moreso from exertion than from fear. There is a shallow gash on my leg, which is dripping more blood than I feel like it deserves, but I’ve had worse.
I’ve had much worse, as a knight on the battlefield, but now that I’m not running, it does sting awfully badly…
I straighten, trying to quell my trembling and steady my heartbeat, and stare suspiciously at the creature, which is making its way back to the group. I’d thought that it had wise-looking eyes, like one of the older priestesses, or the ancient and strange creatures that lived in the deepest parts of the forest. I shake my hair out of my face, gritting my teeth.
Evidently, if it was wise, it did not see fit to share its wisdom with me.
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
When aether looks at the span of the great prairie through the eyes of an Erasmus that was, it does not just see his memories of the Wilds reflected back like a snowglobe in november. When that gold pupil rests on the dusty places between the brush, the grey-green, the gold-green, the browns and the wide blue above, it sees red as well. It sees three memories at once: what was, what is, what became. Indeed, Eluetheria glares back at him without much love in its heart, because it does not trust the way the wind breathes when it winds through the empty places of him. There are the images cast by the boy: The Wilds, vast and sprawling with a lack of saturation like ill earth. There are the images cast by the thing: The Wilds, vast and sprawling with a trail of bodies bloodied and crippled by a cruel, hapless predator. And there is the image what is: Eluetheria, vast and sprawling with life, with promise, no doubt boundless with the same presence of magic that he has sensed in every scrape of Novus he has touched yet.
Each one blends, but the recognition is nothing tragic or traumatic. If anything it is comforting, knowing that of all the shards and pieces of the Erasmus-That-Was that can't seem to fit and cut the thing that has become him with their jagged, misplaced edges, most seem to fit here. Not well. But when he thinks of how that Erasmus and this both realize that The Wilds held nothing of worth to them, it all fits just well enough. It thinks, it thinks, something of worth is here, though. If I wait, as most mortals wait, will something not come? Is that not their common adage, that good things come? But it is not familiar with waiting. It is familiar with the constant revolution of life, never ceasing, even past the end – it all continues on, on, on, an endlessly spiraling staircase.
Of all the grasses, dusts, flowers, antelope, bison, and even the framing of distant mountains that coexist in the blended realities of What-Was and What-Is in the Wilds and Novus, there is only one thing that is out of place. And it thinks, is this it? But it is not a meteor or a wild, galloping sun, though it eclipses as it passes overhead and his curiosity is piqued by the semblance. The shadow passes over him, a black hole suspended in a sea of dusty greens, and when the sun returns it sparks against the gold in his flesh like wildfire. In the distance, the asteroid sets – not with a crash of swallowing heat, but a plume of plains-dirt that are swept up beneath the gust of feathers, sifting out from the tall gold-green grasses that almost engulf the thing.
Erasmus does not move to greet it, though aether drifts from his pores toward it like shifting smoke, hovering questionably over his crown like a languishing snake in the hot sun. It stirs, it hums, and he hums with it in thought as he watches.
It knows the outline of bison because the Erasmus-That-Was had known their odd shapes in The Wilds. But they did not know them as bison, then. They were srreptu, the wise ones, and many of the clans regarded them as sacred beings who led to the finer parts of the great, deadened terra. Where they lingered, fresh green was always nearby. It knows they are more than the wise ones now. It knows they are not sacred, mythical creatures who to children seem like titans on the horizon at dusk, great lumbering things that always know when and where to move. It knows they are bison, and it knows that they are meat, flesh, bone. But it also knows, when it watches the asteroid – which, sheathing its wings reveals that it is not some divine asteroid at all but some odd flighted hybrid of his own fellow – approaches those bison, that it is doing it all wrong.
There were tales in the Wilds that elders told to children in firelight that the srreptu were once equines the same as they were, and there was once a great lake. But the lake was beginning to dry up, the plains becoming hotter because of sleeping dragons and their careless night-breaths. They knew that when the lake dried, it could mean death, as rain was scarce. So they decided they would drink, and drink, and drink, and drink, until almost all the lake was drained. And now they carry the water of that great lake on their backs, and the scalding, merciless heat of the Wilds no longer troubled them.
Erasmus had always thought it was a crock. But questioning the elders was useless, and often led to punishments. When the aether brought him to the library in Delumine, it had been one of the many questioned subjects it cared to explore. This was why it knew that approaching a buffalo the way she was, being the only solitary thing that lingered above the grasses and took sole view of its sideways gaze, was a terrible way to sneak on one. She was either a fool or a terrible predator, or a starving desperate one, or all one in the same. It heard the gruff warnings from others in the distance, and then a harsh huff from the one she gallivanted toward.
Then, the srreptu breaks.
There is a flurry of dust, fur, and feathers, and he watches its horns catch the flank of the mare before she flings herself into the air. The acrobatics are, though mesmerizing, brief and late – and when she perches nearby and Erasmus moves in her direction to examine her better, he sees a trickle from the pinched hole its horn had left. In the distance are low, heavy brays, and he does not entirely doubt that the sounds coming from the bison are not unlike laughter and small triumph. Erasmus does not laugh, though he feels the string of humor drawing in his throat and the line across his mouth, but it doesn't reach his eyes.
When he approaches her, it is mindfully, but he cannot help the way his gait is smooth and lacquered, it hitches here and there like an uncoordinated error, like he is still trying to remember all the ways in which he must be Erasmus. It is getting better all the time – and the movement is almost effortless, wraith-like, perhaps even more graceful than the Erasmus-That-Was could ever hope his posture to be. Despite its dignified appearance, there always lingers something feral in his outline and his eyes, and it does not know to disguise this. He is more disheveled than Erasmus could have ever wanted to be – but he has washed the blood and dirt from his coat, and most the knots have been broken from his mane. Still, the only gleam in his coat is the gold cracks when they catch the passing of sunlight, and they grin malevolently to her.
When he reaches her, the aether falls to his own shadow – it hangs beneath his mane, tangles behind him like nestling vipers, coiling in the hollows of his muscle, waiting, waiting. He does not know how to greet women who un-gracefully bother bison, but he does know that she escaped without much injury, so his grin unwinds to say, "well done," but it is without sarcasm or cruelty. Only the low, hollow drawl of his voice, not too warm and not too cold. But then he sees the blood trickling down her thigh, and o, the hunger starts. His fangs knit against his lips, his tongue dryly rolled in his mouth. "You've been cut." he states casually, absently, and with a deep inhale looks back to her eyes (as is proper, he learned, if not a little unnerving for others).
BEDE WROTE HOW A SPARROW FLEW from dark through a lighted meadhall into dark again. / Tiny wing of your lungs - each beat a breath.
I am not lucky enough to have been alone. (Humiliating. My endeavors in this new land have been consistently humiliating, I think – but just as exhilarating.)
A man enters my vision. He must have been here – or nearby – all along, but I have only just noticed him. (Like the shadow beneath the oak tree; present, but unnoticed in favor of the golden leaves and gnarled bark.) He is dark all over, and dangerous likely, and somehow there is a look to him that is familiar to me, though it should not be. (Some pale, ephemeral grasp of recognition. I couldn’t tell you why.) He is handsome, probably, and particularly in the way that his frame is cut open by veins of rippling gold.
He moves like a cat, I decide. That is the closest image that I can bring to mind: a cat in the bush, but maybe not quite a cat. Maybe a knight-that-was-a-cat, or a cat-that-was-a-knight. You always carry a bit of yourself with you, from life to life, even if you can’t see it yourself. Well done, he says, and I expect it to feel a tempestuous flush of anger; it would have been better than what I actually feel, which is a red-hot blush of shame, right from my nose down to my hooves. (I feel, frankly, cooked.) If he sounded properly sarcastic, like his comment seems to imply, I might have been angry, but he doesn’t. There isn’t a hint of anything at all in his voice. It isn’t comforting, and it isn’t cruel; it isn’t soothing, and it isn’t frigid. I don’t sense any judgement in it, either, which I find comforting, but something about the lukewarm character of it all makes me want to shiver. I am not sure what I see when I look at him, and I am not sure what I hear when I hear his voice. You’ve been cut, he says, then, and I follow his eyes down to the gash on my leg, biting my tongue to keep myself from wincing at the reminder.
I finally conclude that I don’t know what I see when I look at him. Something – more or less than himself, somewhat. I have not had the talent for a priestess in any of my lifetimes; they say that they can look into you and see your soul from the inside out, painted with every single life that you have lived. Of course, I do not have the sight to see, so I can never confirm the veracity of such a statement, but I like to believe that they are telling the truth. At least: I have never doubted it. The priestesses have not been wrong about me in any of my lives. Surely, there is a reason for it. “It seems,” I say, with measured caution – as his eyes flick back up to my own, fathomlessly dark in a way that has nothing to do with their color, and somehow only halfway present (it unnerves me, but not enough to silence me), “that I have.” It is a shallow wound, at least. The kind that will itch when it scabs over, but little else. What were you trying to do? he asks. I am ashamed to admit that, until he asks the question, I haven’t considered the answer at all.
If I were to approach some forest creature – an elk, or a big cat – I would expect it to startle, or, worse, to show its teeth. Why would I expect anything different from the creatures of this land, creatures that I know nothing of at all? I wanted to understand, I think.
In the back of my mind, the man wreathed in laurels laughs at me, and I can’t help but think, oh, you would. He says that he wishes that he had one thousandth of my foolish bravery; I tell him that I am no fool, though sometimes I understand why he thinks of me that way.
Oh, old friend. If you only knew.
I wonder, sometimes, what became of you. My foolish bravery took me long – so long – before I could ever learn the answer. (But sometimes, I think that I remember your grasp on my bone, on the carving knife (the wet press of your tears against that pale ivory) – painting spirals and tumbling leaves into the heart of me. I do not know what I looked like as a sword, but I am sure that you made me uselessly pretty.) “I-“ I halfway stammer, stumbling over my own words, “I don’t know, to be honest.” I shouldn’t be surprised by this turn of events; if I were at home, I like to think that I would no better than to just approach some strange creature on a whim. I think that there should have been a reason for it – I was sure that there was a reason for it at the time. Now, it just feels ridiculous. “Do you ever just…feel drawn to something? I suppose that I was curious. I thought that I might…” I trail off, my mouth dry. I wonder if I what comes next will make me sound crazy. After all, I know nothing at all about those creatures on the other hill. “…learn something from them.”
When it tried its best to impale me, it seemed like a brute animal, as I have come to know them. But there was a moment before that – a precious moment where I looked into those ink-dark eyes and thought that I could almost understand them.
I think that it is a consequence of rebirth that I am always looking for understanding, impossible as I know it may be. I am no longer a sword, and I feel no kinship with the swing of a blade; I no longer know how to sing like metal sings, or how to dance like the autumn wind. I remember it, of course. I remember – not everything, but the feeling of it.
I remember it, but it doesn’t feel the same. I recall it through water – from the bottom of a pool, staring up at the maybe-blue of the sky (or, more likely, a crown of yellow-gold leaves) through the ripples.
@Erasmus || a slightly more philosophical nic post. "Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
08-02-2020, 10:16 PM - This post was last modified: 08-02-2020, 10:26 PM by Nicnevin
The Aether, as much as it was an it, had never considered itself as an extent being confined by an it. It had always been undefined, intangible, a force among the cosmos that was as complicated as it was simple – it had been the breath of wind upon the reeds, the ribs of deathly spires reaching for uncharted heavens, the acrid nature of properties too otherworldly to put into earthly terms. It had been the magma center of warm planets, the icy hades of cold planets, the grumbling cores of stars, the silence of space in between. Each passing particle of dust, each unnamed god, each vein of life and death and all that existed once flowed through the same channel that was aether – that was it. But never, never had it been categorized as such a small organism as an it or a he or an Erasmus. Therefore it struggles in the lining of horseflesh and bones, writhing in marrow, splintering thoughts, reflections that glint like mirrors in the dark of what-was, what-will-be, and what is no more.
Erasmus is no longer the boy, the vessel, that dreaming and sad thing that hungers and hungers but never knows what it is he truly wants. That boy who looks to the stars and thinks that his mother's tales meant that he was some blissful demigod, destined for greatness bounded by the heavens. That he is Achilles, or Orpheus, or Theseus, and his victories that amounted during his short time in Novus had not done anything to alleviate those childish assumptions. That Erasmus is no more than filament in the bulb – a resting encyclopedia that the aether calls upon when it knows no better, an open book of mortal knowledge laid before a savage which dreams of sophistication. It does not wonder if that is what she sees, though it does notice that she looks for something in the eyes of What-Was, as if there was something there that caught her eye for the slightest of moments and she is trying to see it again, yearning for that glimpse, that movement in the dark.
Aether is that movement in the dark. Aether is the ghost in the machine. At its core thrums only curiosity, violence, and things that it can only translate as hunger.
It doesn't tell her that. There is no need. There is no fear when she searches – even if she finds it, those coils glistening from black lakes, those gilded cosmic waves of lurching terror, eldritch shadows stretching beneath the moonlight – and no fury either that she dares, there is only cold complacency, allowing himself to be analyzed and analyzed again if she must. It almost teases, whispering in the bones of what-was, find me, then. But in time she relents, and it cannot tell if it is with satisfaction or wonder or even disdain, but she confronts him now as the Erasmus-That-Was, and not what waits beneath the surface.
It hears the discrepancies when she speaks – like she is backpedaling over the grassy knoll, recounting her less than graceful encounter with the bison in the field. The bull stands there still, lifting his head every once in a while, munching alfalfa and witchgrass that falls from its mouth in silver-green hairs, to be sure that the winged thing that challenged it still stood at a distance. She stammers, stutters, and, regaining her footing, returns his question with one of her own. Did you ever just feel drawn to something? The aether laughs cryptically, no more than a shudder in his flesh when it creeps up his throat like blood and is swallowed back down, down, heat in his core. Drawn to things. Like dying suns, like crumbling planets, like scattered moons, like gravity, like – like – Learn something from them.
Erasmus looks back to the buffalo bull, and it has by now semi-turned its back to them, seemingly satisfied that she did not return to tempt its temper further. It thinks of the thing that sits in the register of the photographic memory for What-Was, the srreptu. Those great, hulking, ugly, wise sages with the waters of a Great Lake on their back, divine things that held the knowledge of the deep earth readily supplied in their spines like an acid drip memory. The boy's mind had always devised them to be a crock, and while the aether did not entirely understand the depth of the word, it touched to the surface of what it meant – a lie, a fanciful untruth, things that old men told children to make it seem as though they sat at the center of everything, a store and wealth of infinite, old knowledge.
Not unlike the srreptu.
"They do not speak your language." he says, absentmindedly, watching the bull graze through the golden-grass that undulates dreamily in the breeze. It does not hitch itself when it says your, forgetting that awful truth that aether is still confined within an it, that it is not some disembodied thing that speaks in the wind and the waters and the clouds and the trees. That it does not grow roots into the center of this planet, tunneling and voracious, and spring from it the fruits of new things: new hymns, new beings, new gods. That it does not reach into the cosmos and strangle their stars, making new moons in the eye of their sun. "They speak the language of this earth, only, without words. And they share secrets only with one another." his voice is distant, pondering, unwavering, a call from some forgotten nether that croons across eons and finds her now. Do you see it yet?
When it returns its eyes to her, they are desolate hollows that birth the cold moons in their center, and it is hard to tell which part of him truly looks at her. It too learns, and aches to learn, aches to understand the why - because they are things that it could not have ever comprehended, separated from them by millions of galaxies and rifts whose chance had only found his once. In there, it was not a he or a she or an it or even a they. It was all, and now it is miniscule, and it searches for an answer of how miniscule, and an even more terrifying question: how may it grow beyond those limits? It doesn't know what it wants beyond this. It only knows that Erasmus's last thought before he gave himself to the aether was hunger.
It, unknowingly, conflates many emotions therefore with the single solitary feeling: hunger.
It does not tell her this, either. In fact, it tells her nothing.
When it sees the trouble in her face, it grins. It is amiable, balanced, and its shadows do not border the terrifying when he looks to her. In fact, it may be the very first genuine grin that the aether has ever manufactured on the borrowed face of Erasmus. If it knew any better, it may have been proud. Or starving. In the corner of its eyes, it still remembers that blood drips from her wound, and it is clotting. Wasting. But he remembers the way he had seen her overhead – some soaring comet, some flailing asteroid, wondering if time had lent him some secret of Novus, some stone he did not yet overturn. He would ignore her cut, no matter how it prickled at the back of his skull. But if it was revealed that she held the secret in her blood, so he would drink it in. "You are not... from here, are you?" his tone bears a nod to the prairies that surround them, but for a moment, it seems deeper than that.
BEDE WROTE HOW A SPARROW FLEW from dark through a lighted meadhall into dark again. / Tiny wing of your lungs - each beat a breath.
I don’t know how I expect him to react to my words. I think that they sound very foolish, but I do mean them – I am simply not sure that their sincerity matters. At any rate, his eyes are not on me, and that prevents my mortification from overwhelming me entirely. In fact – I look away from him, tracing his stare down, down, down until I find the strange, horned thing that he is watching. I recognize it, and, although I cannot see the gleam of my own blood on its horn from this distance, I know that it is there.
When he speaks, his voice is distant. Airy. I almost miss it – but my head snaps up, and my eyes swivel to stare at him again. They do not speak your language, he says, They speak the language of this earth, only, without words. and they share secrets only with one another.
Your language. Your language. The wind is reduced to a distant echo. For a moment, I am simply frozen in place, rolling his words around inside of my head. He still isn’t looking at me; he is looking at the creature that gored me as it grazes amiably in the shallow valley below. I tilt my head at him, slowly, and, when his gaze does returns to me, he might find that I have the look of someone hovering on the verge of some great precipice, some understanding – about to fall off the edge and crash on the jagged rocks below. Whatever man this is, or boy this is, or creature this is (it is so hard to say; my understanding of this world is so fragile), I am abruptly sure that he is not a newborn soul.
And his stare - his stare is a question that I don’t know the answer to. “You’re right,” I say, slowly, because of course he is, “but I forget, sometimes.” Maybe often, now. I think that I forget myself and my own limitations more with each passing life; I become a little bit less of the creature that I am meant to be and a bit more of a composition of all the parts of all the other lives I have lived. I am myself, but sometimes I forget what it means to be myself.
But I have never been one of them. Their language is unknown and unknowable to me; even if I could recall all the strange languages that I have known, the ones that my clumsy tongue and teeth can no longer pronounce, I could never speak to them. There is a gaping chasm between us, and wanting to bridge it is not enough to bring me to the other side. “But you…” I say, suddenly, my head still cocked at that half-angle, like a dog, “do you speak their language?” I wonder. I don’t know, but he speaks so strangely that I think he might. If I had to describe it like anything, I would say that he resembles those strange, ancient spirit-things that live in the deepest, darkest depths of the Gold. We avoid them, most often, on principle; they are dangerous, and they will lead you astray if you let them.
Sometimes they would come to us, clothed in horseflesh. We could tell – we could always tell –, but we never spoke a word of it, because it was too dangerous to let them know that we knew. Sometimes they would lead people out into the woods, guised as a pretty girl with bright eyes or a handsome, virtuous young gentleman; sometimes the people that they lured out would come back, but they would return changed, as though they were another person entirely, save for the character of their skin. Sometimes they would never return at all.
They met, I know, a horrible fate. The priestesses call it an undeath. I try my best not to think of it.
Now, this man, this thing – I do not know what he is, but I do know that we are not the same. That always begs caution, but I have not been very cautious lately.
As my mind stammers and stumbles over my own intentions, I see his lips curve up and into a grin. It is not a dangerous smile, nor a smile-that-is-not-a-smile, which I would have expected; no, the gesture is bizarrely genuine. When he speaks, it draws me out of my troubled ramblings. You are not…from here, are you?
What he says, I think, is: you aren’t from this prairie, are you?
What he means, I know, is: you aren’t from this land (or world, maybe; I am not so sure of where Novus is, compared to my home), are you?
I consider, for a moment. Even hesitate. I should not speak too much of the Gold to outsiders, especially strange ones; we are in danger enough without more of them knowing of it than do already. The priestesses told me that much, as though I did not know; so long as they fail to understand the nature of death and rebirth, they will always pursue their misguided ambitions of immortality. I might have questioned this, in my first life, but, at the time, I did not understand death, either – I grieved without understanding.
Now, I am far past that.
But – if I speak to this man-boy-creature, and I tell him the truth of things, I have the strange feeling that he might understand it. Maybe it is the way that his soul is too big for his skin; how it leaks out his edges.
(Maybe it is telling a fox about a henhouse.) “No, I’m not,” I say, slowly. “I’m from a land far, far away from here – a forest where nothing changes, where nothing that dies stays dead forever.” Of course – I think that is everywhere. I cannot imagine a death that is permanent, a black and empty void that could swallow you up forever. Where would you go? I cannot accept that your soul might simply end, be snuffed out like the flaming end of a candle. (Even a flame has a soul, after all.)
I look at him. I have not forgotten his words – how he called our language mine, not his. “And you…you aren’t from here either, are you?”
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
There are times in which, like watching refractions belt over the water, the aether cannot understand its point of being, its point of flesh, its point in time – where in examining those waves, frothing and churning and overturned in the depths of the limitless blue, it loses itself to ponder urchins and sharks. It might run its soft tongue along sharpened teeth, or feel the way the cool water smooths over seal-velvet flesh, and dream of the darkness that exists in the nightmare and memory of the Terminus leagues. There are no stars there – no suns, no planets, no seeming unfettered skies to back to, to swell against, to taste and taste again, to create within and without and to dream... perhaps this is another dream in itself. It, Erasmus, the srreptu, the curious girl and her strategic gaze.
When she asks him if he speaks their language – it is as if the thing knows and brays in response, though Erasmus's eyes watch it move off into the other huddled forms, watch it chase flies with a swing of its head and the tight flick of its tail. Watch smaller forms, even less graceful than the titans around it, fall away to the center of their ring. Erasmus considers this, their economy, seeming uncomplicated ebb and flow of life captured in the bed of the plains. What did she see? What did she intend to see, with the naked eye, or with the imaginative pickings of an assumptive mind?
The thing that becomes Erasmus does not know what it is. It is equine flesh, hot and thrumming now with the freshness and vigor of the aether that has consumed – or otherwise, has been consumed. But there is more. It does not know how it is different from srreptu, or sky-girls, or suns, or stars, or wolves, or sharks. It knows that it is separated by bone and skin and the musculature that divines it some odd mechanism of four legs and two horns and a tail that flows, as if part of the breeze, with luxuriant tendrils of night-dark indigo and gold. On his shoulders, a beehive of a mind.
Did he speak their language?
“No.” he answers simply, though there is a hint of confusion in his voice when he says this; the aether doesn't know it, doesn't understand the inflection of not knowing because it should know. It, this thing that has birthed and carved and devoured and destroyed planets, stars, an entire solar system collapsed into the sore eye of a black hole. This thing that should not exist as anything smaller than a god, or the very concept of one, as true gods, like nature itself, do not have measure. Why does it not know their language? Why do they not speak to the creatures like Erasmus?
The srreptu keep the timeless waters of wisdom on their shoulders, a burden we may never carry. They are miserable things because they know the heart of this world, they know its faults and frivolities, they do not share but with the wolves and the jackals and the wildcats who have grown maddened with hunger for more. We do not eat them. Bothersome. We do not eat them because we, too, may go mad. Limits on the limitless.
To Erasmus, to the aether, to what becomes and has become, they are no more than meat. And if meat could speak to him the way those dying lights in the eyes of previous creatures have, he doubted they held any more wisdom. They did not speak because they were not like them. Not like Erasmus, or Nicnevin, or the rest of the Novusians. Superiority, perhaps. There may have been a time when the aether could speak to them, but it may not be in this same place and time. The world had a pattern to it, as all worlds did – there was nothing created out of coincidence. Only situations, the implementations of a terroir, and the convergence that bore its hybrid material. Survival was always necessary, and there were more than two sides, predator and prey.
To the fortunes of those that the thing that becomes Erasmus has met, it has not ventured to wonder where its place in this terroir is. To commit to ultimate motive. Predator. Were not others like Erasmus also as carnivorous, as adaptable, as lusting?
A flicker of the question is posed, when the mare responds to his assumption and provides her own. Indeed, a part of him intended the possibility that she was from nowhere near a place like the Plains or the Wilds (which still blended in front of him like a mirage, or a dream, or that convergence we considered once before) and her confirmation does not lead to a further suspicion as to what would follow the Aether's – what planet, what system, what plane, what dimension. He is satisfied, left to wonder of an overgrown forest in which death cannot exist – and the image is not so far-fetched, that death cannot touch a realm of life. He does not question it. Nothing truly dies, does it? Things are only decadent and reborn, like a cathedral formed from the bones of a leviathan, or meteors from the cold skin of planets, or soils that churn with the minerals from the long “dead”. Death, or what is understood as the concept of death, begets life.
Maybe Novus is different.
Erasmus thinks of the things rotting in the forgotten caverns dug in the foothills of the Veneror mountains. Will anything come of them?
And then, you aren't from here either, are you? Then it is pulled from the cold dregs of the Denoctian catacombs, the skulls and bones which grin from beneath the leather-taut thin flesh of what-once-was. What metamorphosis happens there, ungraved, unearthed. Dust on the marble floors. Then he is in the bloodied battlefields of the Wilds, and then in the nesting grounds of srreptu, somewhere between. And then, above, far beyond the light of the sun, he is in an empty notch at some far corner of the next galaxy, where space dust does not remember what once existed. But it expands. He feels it in the edges of his stolen skin. If he could just reach it –
Erasmus swings his eyes from the sky to Nicnevin, and a grin returns to his features. This time, not quite so genuine, but not violent or feral or unkind. It simply is, as most things are. An easy thing that treads softly along the lines of his lips, but fails to smother the light of dying celestial bodies that glimmer in the far-reaches of his gaze. He blinks them away and, “Walk with me? I'm not sure where to. I find myself burdened by a many un-knowings, lately.” And before she can answer, before he can even finish the sentence, he is moving away from the bison yards behind them. Moving into the dried fields of wheat and withered heads of poppies, coneflowers, low growing aster, and the butterfly-swarmed graying milkweeds.
It makes up for the empty space between her question and his answer. Because the aether does not know which response is appropriate – did she ask Erasmus? Or did she ask the aether? But in a moment, he deduced that she must certainly be asking the Erasmus-that-was, as it was skin worn and presented like a war trophy. Like furs. Like sheepskin. “They call it The Wilds.” The aether thought it supposed the textbook definition of Wild was apt to describe the unfurling fields of dying grasses and grain, and the rocky encampments of beasts that warred only because they could. Perhaps if they drank from that great, ancient lake of wisdom, they would have known that the aether was as close to their gods as their gods could ever dream of being. Perhaps they wouldn't have warred with each other, bloodying the fields for scraps of wheat and short-lived greens. Perhaps they would have known that the prairie rolling into desolate desert was the lap of an altar, and the woods they grew so terrified of, its waiting chalice.
Perhaps they would have sought to murder Erasmus sooner.
"Not unlike this place." And then, almost dismissively, "Why did you leave your forest? Is there something you search for, here, in Novus?" The sparse arrays of coneflower and gold-grass tumble dry beneath his footfalls. But his eyes are on the sky again, and the silhouetted peaks of the Veneror. On and on his mind tumbles like the dreary heads of the coneflower.
BEDE WROTE HOW A SPARROW FLEW from dark through a lighted meadhall into dark again. / Tiny wing of your lungs - each beat a breath.
No, he tells me, but not without a hint of confusion that I barely notice for the disappointment that wells up in me immediately at his response. Really, I should have expected it. Even in my homeland, where we so often become the creatures that drift among the leaves and the underbrush, we never retain the ability to speak to them when we no longer wear their skins. Still – what I know of magic is here is that it is something different from what magic was like in my homeland, and I thought, for a moment…
It wasn’t worth thinking of. He is silent for what feels like a while, and then he turns to me with a grin that means nothing at all, and says, Walk with me? I'm not sure where to. I find myself burdened by a many un-knowings, lately. He walks without waiting for me to answer, strides out into the fields, a darkness about the pale-golden strands of glass and autumn’s last blush of flowers; and I find myself following in his wake without even thinking about it. “Believe you me,” I say, “I understand that completely.” I’ve felt, for my past several lifetimes, like I know quite a lot about the world and the way that it moves – shouldn’t I understand its nature, having been so many different things? But the only thing that I have learned, having spent so little time in Novus, is that all my knowledge amounts to nothing at all when juxtaposed against the vastness of the universe. I didn’t know that there was so much of it left outside of the Gold. I suppose that I was wrong; I have been wrong about a lot of things, lately.
I don’t think that I know where I’m going. I’d like to be going anywhere at all.
He tells me that he is from a place called the wilds. I nod; I think that it is strange, by the naming conventions that I have seen outsiders use for their nations, but I’m sure, too, that it is no stranger in title than the Wynding Gold. What kind of place would it have to be, to garner such a name? He doesn’t speak much of it; and what he does is dismissive, and it tells me nothing at all. (I wonder if he meant it that way, or if he simply considers it to be of so little significance.) My ears swivel to face him, and I tilt my head, pulling strands of chestnut hair out of my face. “The wilds,” I repeat, “Were they like – the plain? Or like Novus?” Not, I suppose, that I know much of either.
He asks me why I left my forest. There is an impulse to say nothing at all; there always is. Outsiders have stolen our heir once, and I am never sure how much I can trust them with knowledge of their existence. Regardless, there is only so much you can gather from a scant admittance of who I am searching for – it is not the same as describing the sigil, or why our people are so utterly dependent on the heir, why my people’s fate – continuation or ruination – is a matter entirely of whether or not I can bring them home. “There is someone I’m searching for,” I admit, my voice softening with something like reluctance, “but I’m not sure who. I only know that they are the heir to my kingdom’s throne, and I must bring them home.”Whatever the cost may be goes unspoken, but I can hear the dark undertones of it in my voice, like a current running below the surface of a river.
Before I was made my king’s Green Knight, I was sent to see the High Priestess. She was older than either of us, and wiser by measures than me, and, when I stepped into the temple, she was standing at the altar, lighting candles, her coat painted a thousand colors by the light of the stained-glass windows. She turned to me, slowly, and she looked at me with an expression that was nearly vicious. “Do you know,” she said, with a voice like the edge of a knife, “what the role of the Green Knight is?” I was not naïve; I knew that I had stepped into a test the moment that I opened the doors of the temple.
I swallowed, but I could not get rid of the sudden dryness that had taken root in my throat. “The Green Knight,” I said, very carefully, though I was practically reciting the description from memory, “is the sword and the shield of the sovereign. They should be absolutely loyal, and-“
She cut me off, her eyes narrowing to serpentine slits. “What need does the sovereign have for an absolutely loyal vassal?” I gritted my jaw, shifting my weight; she was right, of course. The sovereign could demand absolute loyalty from anyone, and it would not matter if they were absolutely loyal or not. “What need does the sovereign have for a sword, or for a shield? I think, my dear, that you have severely misunderstood the nature of this relationship.” Despite her gentle wording, there was nothing tender in her tone. I remained rooted to the spot, unwilling to back away, but unsure of what to say.
Finally, I licked my lips, and I asked, “What is the role of the Green Knight, then?” That was the first time I saw her smile – it spread across her lips like a flower in bloom, but it was somehow terrible. She gave a soft sigh, and she looked at me with something that was almost pity, but the pity you have for a lamb with a knife to its throat. Not a pity that means salvation. Not a pity that will change a thing. “It is the job of the Green Knight,” she says, “to die.”
So what my destiny means is: bring the heir home, or die trying. If you do not die trying, become the heir’s knight, when they ascend the throne, and die for them if it ever becomes necessary, and all the names of long-dead Green Knights listed on pages and pages and pages of a thick tome of obituaries they keep in the temple suggest that it will become necessary. Maybe not soon. Maybe you will fool yourself into thinking that you are safe. (I served at my king’s side for years, before I was struck down.) You will always be wrong. You will never be safe, especially not on the battlefield, no matter how experienced you are.
However you die – it will always be bent-double, choking on your own blood.
The priestess strode down from the altar, carrying an emerald blade, and she thrust it out to me, the blade only inches from my skin. It was not the same as being knighted – it was some twisted mockery of the ceremony, even. “Do you think that you can do it?”
I did not know who could answer easily if someone asked them to die. I did not know what trained knight would rise the ranks without thinking, sometimes, of dying. I did not hesitate when I answered, “Yes,” and this seemed to please her, though her stare was still cutting and half-skeptical, and it would take some time for her to warm to me.
She settled, then, and sheathed the sword. “Consider it your oath to me, then,” she said, “and never forget it, no matter how much he would like you to.”
To tell you the truth – as I was dying, a blade slipped between my ribs as easy as carving meat, I didn’t forget it. “And you,” I say, and force all my thoughts of the past down somewhere deep inside of me, where they won’t itch, “why did you leave your wilds?” There must have been a reason for it – and I really am curious, though part of me is asking as a distraction from thought of heirs or kings, or of Green Knights, or of Priestesses.
Lingering too long on a half-remembered past will do me little good in the present.
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
Before she speaks, the aether is diving through fragments of time and place again – each step lacquered with the mindfulness of the movement, but the mind hitched to a where, roving over bloodsoaked plains and shuddering woodlands that scream, that scream, and the night bending to kiss the dry and unholy grounds with star-fire. The crater where once the pool of wisdom stead, a puddle of blood and mud. Were it the cries of srreptu that echoed that night over the emptiness, peeled from the foothills and the pines? And the ocean, forever hungry, roaring over the howling gales, muffling the song of a dying era?
The wilds, the wilds, the wilds. She yearns for more and he does not fault her, he is not some clandestine guard of his own secrets by necessity but habit. The wilds were, in truth, not as interesting as what some would regard the vast variety of Novus – the silvery sentinel peaks of the Arma Mountains, the rolling meadows, green foothills, the cultured halls of grand and ancient cities. To the aether, all creation was an anomaly worth observance – the Wilds were beautiful in their own way, in the way that each biome has its own peculiar details few cared to immerse themselves in. But they certainly were nothing like that web of existence it was once a part of, from the fiber of things like grasses to the pulse of creatures that soared through its bitter air. Every molecule, every cell, divided and consumed by the essence of what bore the Aether unto all.
It was not a part of this world. Novus, and the Wilds, were a reminder.
“Like and... not like. Far, flat dry plains and sparse grasses for as far as the eye can see. Moreso a desert, gray-brown sands and grit. Few hardy plants. Mountains are a faint shadow on the southeast horizon, woodlands to the west. There were no cities, only vagrant camps.” There is nothing now, he ceases to continue, but bones and blood and tattered fabric, and the wind that howls on, on, and on, and the wild things left to scavenge. A subtle grin crawls to his features as hunger stirs fondly, remembering the thrill and consumption of appetite. When he looks back to her, he wonders what she would think if she visited the Wilds, if she witnessed what the aether had left in its wake. Those who lived there were troubled, their lives empty, children dying in the heat of the blistering sun and the desolation of drought and famine. Now they were liberated. Would she see this, she, who believes that death is not finite?
But she does not see him when he looks to her, for her eyes are marked on the distance, somewhere far beyond the plains before them. He wondered what she had seen then, before – there is someone i'm searching for, but i'm not sure who. An heir to a kingdom, lost in the civilized wilderness of Novus. Spoken like a legacy of oaths, a promise, or a curse. She is gone again from them then, her mind left to wander elsewhere, but Erasmus does not ask to pry on those private sectors of memory or contemplation. What does not make sense then is the combination of not knowing who and yet knowing that it is an heir, a simultaneous knowing and un-knowing that riddles itself, and the chore itself then seems counter-intuitive. Is it not possible then that she come across this heir in passing, perhaps even striking a conversation, sharing a meal, a room, a road?
Before he asks, her curiosity rises again and she returns, lively as before. Why did you leave the wilds? It thinks back to the remains of the wilds, the dry air silent and still, bodies lifeless and strewn. One hunger satisfied, another anew. It thinks to the boy, or the memories of the boy, floundering over the waves of the Terminus sea and dragged to shore by a woman in a cowl and a smile like starlight, or like a setting sun. “I am not sure yet.” he answers, drawn aside still in thought, dreaming of devouring stars and meteors and seawater and flesh. For purpose. It is a helpless thing, and it distills something unsettling when it reaches desperately for an answer to a thousand of its own questions.
Did it begin with the aether, or with the boy?
The boy, tumbling over downed trees, the sound of his dying mother's screams echoing wildly in his ears, peering desperately over a loathing ocean, gasping for air in its depths, choking on sand and water on the shores of Novus. For a purpose. Was it not? The boy supposed once that Caligo had saved him from an oceanic grave, dragging him to the shore of Denocte. He supposed once that he was the child of a god, child of a grand purpose. Was he right? Or was he simply a vessel for the aether to consume and devise, to ruin and devour? What was the purpose left for the Aether then, when it had only known destruction and absolution? When carving the belly of a galaxy, it dreamed of creation, was it so unlike death?
When Erasmus stops and looks back to Nicnevin, it is not with the eyes of a boy that is the son of a god and a doting martyr mother. It is a gaze full of starlight and galactic dust, of beginnings and endings, of dying suns and sparking meteors tearing through the black stretch of soundless night. “I served my purpose there, and I was drawn here. But I do not know why.” Godless eyes. They reflect her, reptilian. Something darkens, then wanes, flickering in and out. Hunger stirs silently.
“How will you know,” his voice rolls like dark clouds and thunder, calm before the rain and wind. “How will you know when you meet the heir?”
