here are things Elena doesn't understand. She does not understand why her father made a deal with the winter devil. She doesn't understand how her mother had gotten sick, how it had taken her. She doesn't understand how Frostbane could kill her father so mercilessly. She doesn't understand how Tenebrae could break her heart.
The pain was extraordinary.
There are shards of glass buried in her chest, her lungs fill with water and her vision grows hazy. She realizes, that when she left him today, she would not see him again, he would not come back and find her. The next breath is excruciating, but she takes it, fills her lungs with air that did not want to either, the motion desperate and forced. She had been a fool. A fool to think he had wanted her for more than a night; a fool to think she was anything but a placeholder. Her heart had screamed at her in warning—had told her something was amiss and she had ignored it. She had dismissed her better judgment, told herself beautiful lies.
And look where it had gotten her.
She cant go home.
She could.
No, she argues with herself. She cant.
Something wild raged in her chest, but she turned from it. She felt its wild abandon, the sobs that made her throat raw—the hurt that ached, making her bones throb with its presence. She swallowed it down into her stomach.
Blue eyes point downwards and she sees er heart lay in a million pieces, thrown amongst the cage within her breast. She didn’t bother trying to put them back together. Love was not in her future and for some reason the gods found her unworthy of it. They had given her Aerwir, but they had forgotten her own passion for life. They had presented her with Tunnel, only to have him nearly kill her. They had offered her Tenebrae and then forced her to watch his heart close away. Love isn’t real. Perhaps it never existed to begin with and everyone was just fooling themselves with a made up emotion that could never be attained.
She watches it on the ground, watches it constrict with the want of her best friend, with the need to bury her head into her crimson mane and forget the rest of the world. She wants to cry to Lilli, to let her ease in the pain in the way that only Lilli can.
The only way that golden girl will take that heart back is if she can carve out that little cavern in her chest she had placed him in.
The sky is bleeding with the light of the stars tonight.
Her breath comes out in a puff of white.
It shines like ice crystals in the night.
The tide begins to roll in, it crawls up her legs like the cold hands of winter, and she remembers another night, on another beach, in another winter, with the The Taiga behind her, her shoulder pressed into the crimson one of her cousin. Funny then, how the water hadn't felt so cold.
hen he closes his eyes, it almost feels like home.
The sea wafts colder air against his face; the quiet dark seems in and of itself a kind of baptism, a kind of gentle drowning. Vercingtorix keeps his eyes closed against the brisk wind; it knots tangles in his mane and whips the fine hairs against the soft skin of his cheeks and eyelids. It nearly smells the same so far from the cities; the cold sea, with a humidity that stabs the nostrils, the season bringing with it frigid water and something almost akin to dormancy.
When he closes his eyes, he can pretend—for a transient moment—he is not so far from everything he has ever known. He can pretend it is the same ocean, with the same primordial magic (less like a magic and more like a whisper of what should be, what could be).
Vercingtorix opens his eyes.
The sand and sea-stones are not black, as in Oresziah. Beneath the night sky, they seem dull grey underfoot. He is a step away from the frigid surf as it licks up the shoreline; each push and pull of the sea draws it closer and every now and then the waves nearly touch his hooves. But it doesn’t, as if it knows—as if it knows he hates it.
“Some say that to move past pain, you must wallow first in suffering.”
Damascus emerges from the forest behind him, where the sand hems out into long grasses and then, eventually, soil and trees. The dragon parts them with a nearly quiet shiver of branches and leaves; there is a cracking, and Damascus steps from the foliage into the sand.
Vercingtorix recognises the note of sarcasm—barbed, bitter—in Damascus’s voice.
There is, too, a bit of blame.
The golden stallion turns from the sea. The dragon follows him along the edge of trees, using their darkness as a kind of camouflage. The aimlessness of his own direction unnerves Vercingtorix. In his entire life, he has never been aimless—he has never returned again and again to the sea, as if, as if—
it has an answer—
what kind of answer?—
Down the shoreline, he spots a silhouette. There is a moment when Vercingtorix and the dragon both pause—a moment when solitude seems favourable to any kind of interaction. But there is—there is an echoing nothingness inside, a desultory lack of direction.
“Well?” Damascus asks.
When he asks, it sounds like hunger given voice.
When he asks, it sounds like the echo into the abyss.
Vercingtorix does not answer—he only begins to walk toward the silhouette, pretending it is not the same aimless feeling that compelled him to stare out at the sea.
———
Time always seems to pass differently walking down a lone stretch of beach.
Perhaps it's the lull of the waves, hypnotic.
Perhaps its the strange middle-distance that erects itself on the horizon, as if—as if it does not end, not truly.
Either way, it feels like a lifetime until they are close enough to recognise the mare. And by then, it is too late to leave.
She is standing ankle-deep in the water. Vercingtorix recognises the despondent. Perhaps it is the ex-captain in him, the leader.
He stops a little ways off, close enough to speak but not close enough to threaten. He simply appraises her for a moment; the bitterness of their last conversation lays thick on his tongue.
Damascus, sensing the atmosphere, settles onto the still-warm sand besides Vercingtorix. He rests his head on his forelegs in a gesture nearly doglike, nearly unassuming.
In another life, he would have been standing there preparing for war.
In this one, he only says: “And what brings you here, besides the sea’s siren song?” It is a mock imitation of their first meeting. He adds, with careful contemplation: “Elena.”
§
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
here are ghosts in her and sorrow wedged like a stone in her chest as she tries to remain steadfast against him. she tries to focus on her own breathing, on the rapid tremble of her heart and the flutter of her pulse shaking in her veins. Her eyes close, just for a moment, a heartbeat in time, and she exhales shakily. That breath, her breath, it hitches in her throat as if stuck on a mountain, and she drops her eyes, tucking her chin close to the curve of her small chest so as to hide the pain that gathers there. She doesn't know why she does this, why she hides it, no one if here. Still, there was something about it that felt private. “Tenebrae,” she says, despite the fact that he is miles and miles away from her, maybe still standing against those ruins, holding pieces of her heart she left behind, lodging themselves within him like pieces of glass.
Remember me? She had asked him.
She has always been such a fool.
Stars sit above her, like sunken ships or fireflies, she cant decide. Too sad, too hopeful, they haven't made a word for the in between. That is what the stars are. The fact that they keep twinkling in their skies as if nothing has ever happened. Like no one has ever died, as if no hearts have ever broken, as if no one has ever had to raise a child alone. Maybe there are as much a fool as her. Or it could be that ignorance is bliss. But if that is the case, why did they have to shine so bright?
When the stallion finds her, she is still lost in her agony, drifting, sinking. She thinks the waves will pull it out, until it gets lost on the horizon. She doesn't turn when his eyes first find her. Doesn't turn when she can hear him walking. He is there in seemingly the time between two heartbeats. Elena was never one for needing comfort. She was meant to provide it, not demand it from others. She was meant to soothe wounds, not require that her own be stitched up. So she puts on a brave face when she looks back at him from her ocean podium she stands upon.
There is a sound on her lips, a hum, a whimper, not quite his name – though she had intended it to be. She’s wild and unsure and so confused, so confused it hurts to breathe because it can’t possibly be true. It can’t. Why did he have to be the one to find her? Anyone else but him, Moira, Lyr, Po, someone.
She’s so, so soft not, that the snow that will surely fall tonight is louder than what she can be right now.
“Torin,” She says it this time, can say it this time, so soft and quiet, in a voice like shattered silver despite the way she tries to be brave. A glance is stolen once more back at him, like she keeps expecting him to leave. She wants him to, she doesn’t, like sunken ships and fireflies.
“I hurt me,” she says. It hurts to say it out loud, feels like glass in her chest, in her throat, in her mouth and she is choking on it. “And now I need to fix it,” she says and turns away from him, back out the sea, she forgets that she stands in. Her body feels like frost, it is something at least. She cant be Elena right now, doesn't feel like Elena. She can be frost instead. “I cant fix it,” she says, it is so quiet, like she doesn't want to hear it all. Eyes with blue that was stolen from a winter ocean turn to look at him. “And who are you today?” A small sniffle. “The wolf or the lion?”
Elena watches him, wondering if she looks more like the fawn or the lamb. Because in this moment—
Hearing the lie from another’s lips, repeated as if truth, is always a disembodied feeling. In that instance, she separates me from myself—I am no longer Vercingtorix, but someone other. I am a man she met on a cliffside in a storm; furious; full of salt and sea. And her voice is so soft, so delicate—I hear within it the hurt all of us bear, the fragility of love, of—
I hurt me, she confesses, and I wonder why she confesses. And now I need to fix it—I can’t fix it. And who are you today? The wolf or the lion?
I watch the decomposition.
I recognise it.
All the stories, the poets, they write of breaking. But as I stare at her raw sorrow, a piece of herself revealed, I think of decomposition. I think of a corpse on the beach side plucked apart by seagulls and other scavengers. I think of the way, at our cores, all of us will one day rot, fest, succumb to sepsis.
I am quiet for longer than is polite. I am quiet so long the rhythmic pulse of the sea nearly becomes my voice, my answer—it nearly lulls me back the direction I came, away from her, away from the rotting of her sorrow.
Instead, I answer. “You never asked for the rest of the fable,” I say at last. “I am neither. I am the hunter of the wolf, and the shepherd of the lamb.”
If you say a lie long enough, will it sound like truth? Or will it always feel like the last line of a play, as the curtains are called? Or will it always feel like a violin without an orchestra, crying up and out into the night until it is nothing but a wail?
There is a part of me that nearly feels sympathy. Sympathy in that I recognise this—I recognise this truth, this confession, but will not admit it. I hurt me.
Sometimes, I wonder, what if I had not betrayed her?
Sometimes, I ask myself, what if instead we had escaped, together? I had taken her to the furthest corner of our island and—
And then what?
I never get that far.
“Why can’t you fix it?” I eventually ask. And now, my voice is softer than I think it has ever been. I know why I cannot fix my faults, and it lies with the crux of the issue: I cannot fix myself.
But these are demons I have come to terms with. These are faults I have faced. It is true, I know, that I cannot look at happiness without a bone-deep sense of derision, of hatred. I cannot hear laughter without wanting to crush it out, or see beauty without thinking of what it would be like to burn it—
Everywhere, everywhere, there is happiness. There are people living out their dreams, fulfilling them—and this I find unbearable.
What I find relatable, understandable, empathetic… is tragedy. So I say, “Maybe it isn’t meant to be fixed? Maybe… whatever it is, can come back better this way.”
The hope is fragile and dove-winged.
It is a hope I can say for her, but cannot give myself.
§
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
ven in her worst nightmares, Elena does not hurt the ones she loves.
She heals them, she helps them, sometimes they are hurt and she cannot get to them, sometimes they are killed again and again, murder, illness, it doesn't matter anymore. Sometimes the world caves in on them, but never had Elena been the cause of pain, never had Elena been the one to bring the physical blow to them.
The golden girl wonders if outside of her dream world if she is also so free of such sins.
Tell me you love me,’ she had said to him.
And he did it, he did it.
He never should have.
Gods he never should have.
She is crumbling here beside the sea, her body is breaking into sand until she is nothing left, able to be pulled and pushed by the ocean, drowning. But can you drown if you don't exist? Elena wonders if you can still feel pain, if are just grains of sand, if you can still remember how much life had hurt, or if you only live by the tides and the waves. The tides and the waves. What a way to live.
It is true, she never heard the end of the fable. Because in the end, the fawn had kissed the wold, and the lamb had lay with the lion. “And what do you do to the saved fawn and the found lamb?” She asks him and there is a tightness in her throat and tears that balance on eyelashes as she tries to smile faintly in response. “What do you do with me now?” She has to know.
She cannot bear to say what happened. Almost chokes on the thought of it. Elena breathes, breathes, and she breathes, except there is only water in her lungs and shadows battering down all the wall she had tried to build. She just shakes her head as her throat runs ragged with effort to keep from breaking down entirely in front of him.
Out here it smells like black tea, salt air, cold, snow.
If it were possible, would the stallion think less of her if he knew just how difficult it was to keep breathing?
Poor sad, pathetic Elena. Broken again.
She chokes back a sob that threatens to claw up her throat when she thinks of how many times she has been found like this—broken and battered. How many times can she fall apart before it becomes her fault? How many times can she crumble to dust before it’s her own hand that has done the damage?
She doesn’t have the answers. Doesn’t want to figure out the answers. She wants to sink into memories. She wants to be young again, hopeful again. She can feel it now. Sleeping beside her parents, her mother wrapped around her.
Tenebrae creeps into her mind for just a moment, again. His lips feverish and his eyes full of passion and her heart erupting in her chest. It is a hint of warmth that burns the edges, nearly breathes life into her, but she drops the memory—watches as it flows, as it sinks, further and further down until it is gone again.
“Okay,” is all she finally says, although she isn’t even sure what she is responding to.
She turns her head and looks at him with those too blue eyes, doing her best to focus on breathing, despite the cold rising up her legs.
“Okay.”
No more tears fall, and she can’t decide if that’s better or worse.
nd what do you do to the saved fawn and the found lamb?
Is now the time, Elena, to tell you that to bless my mother’s pregnancy, my father slit a white lamb’s throat over her swollen belly?
It was to ask the Old Gods for a boy; to beg them for the right to sire a son. And it worked.
But I know it is not the time. It will never be the time, to explain what cannot be understood by those who have not lived it. “Whatever needs doing.” I answer, intentionally vague. For the better of the flock, there must occasionally be a culling of the fold.
But that, is not, what this is about. The analogy fails at a simple point of friction: she is not lamb, she is not a fawn.
What do you do with me now?
“I listen,” Vercingtorix offers, quietly. There is a moment, briefly, when she reminds him of his youngest sister, Laoise. Her first husband had died in the war, and she had refused to take on a second. There was something in her many women in Oresziah had not had for their husbands, and it was love.
I have seen the way sorrow guts a man—it is different, I think, seeing it in a woman. And that is why, I think of Laoise, and how her eyes went dead when I told her Darra had been killed. But the difference is not so large, it seems. There are many ways to suffer for love. Elena takes several long breaths; until I do not believe she will add anything, or elaborate upon her tragedy. At last:
I’m pregnant.
She is looking at me, again, instead of deep into the sea; with eyes hollowed out. She does not look like the first time I had met her, full and brimming with emotion; this is colder, singular, a feeling so great it encompasses everything.
“And why does this hurt you?” I ask. My voice is soft. My voice is patient—and Damascus, too, sighs in the night. His heart is made up of all my tragedies, and in some ways it has made him empathetic. There is a moment between my speaking and the silence after, I wonder—
Would it comfort her to know that, when my heart was broken, I did not eat for four days? I had stayed locked away; my father came and visited often, in those days, to say you did the right thing. He meant by turning her in. He meant by waiting until her father, the General, died—and it would be no dishonour upon him to reveal her, Boudika, the Betrayer.
Would it comfort her to know that, when I ask myself about love, I know I will never love again? It is not apathy; it is because I had found my soul-mate, the one destined for me.
I think of my son, too, and how when Cillian had told me she was pregnant, I told her it could not be mine.
And she had said, it can be no one else’s.
I swallow now; and breathe away my tragedies with the ease of years of practice.
I know it would comfort her for me to say, I hurt myself before, too. I betrayed the one I loved, abandoned a child, I—
There is a long list, of transgressions against myself.
“You’ve lost someone.” I say, rather than reveal them. The observation is a quiet certainty.
§
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
nce upon a time, once upon a night, Elena had fallen for him. Tumbled head first into the madness of love and feelings that set her heart skywards. She had tried to take hold of those shadows, wrapping it in her hands even when it disappeared as easily as smoke. She had never known it was possible for a heart to break in half, but she is learning. She tries to hold that heart of hers in one piece, but it just keeps shattering in her tired hands.
She is a shell, she thinks. She was once full of love and laughter—a depthless well. She has found the bottom.
“You are in my soul.” He told her.
And then he pushed her away.
Elena learned that you can live without your soul.
More than anyone right now, she wants her mom. It is a childish want, to return home and let her mother make it better, to soothe her aches, and tell her that everything will be okay. That she will be okay. She doesn't want him, doesn't want the horned boy and his scars and the way he looks at her like an injured animal, doesn't want his listening ears. She wants someone who will wrap her inside them and keep out all of the shadows. All of them. Every single one.
The pain that splits across her chest is intolerable. It feels like fire, and drowning, all at once, and she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do with it. She had gone from feeling so full and calm, to whatever turmoil this is, a temple of confusion an hurt. Whatever they had had with each other, she had held onto it like a rope pulling her to salvation. She only realized it was barbed wire once it was ripped from her hands, leaving them ragged and bloody.
Her pulse trips, her heart stammers, and she is, miraculously, able to keep her expression neutral. “It’s okay,” she whispers, although it’s not. None of this is okay.
She finds his gaze, and holds it. Tries to anyway.
And why does this hurt her?
She feels a blade buried in her belly and it causes agony to spread through her even further as a mother’s rage builds in her throat. It’s enough for her to tremble with her anger, blue eyes growing wide, they ice over like the first winter’s day.
She wants to sink into this anguish. She wants to cradle this hurt and let it seep into her breast, but she forces herself to stand instead of crumble. Despite the way it is like a punch to the gut and she feels dizzy with the disappointment, with the regret, with the pained way that her heart threatens to punch clean through her chest.
Finally, she does the only thing she knows how: she builds a wall around her agony.
“I lost…” She chokes down his name; stops herself from calling it out.
She feels the earth spin under her and she just waits for his name to pass from her lips and back inside her heart. “Yes, I lost someone.” She says like a prayer, as if admitting it could bring him back. “I cant tell him, he has his faith,” she says. “And now I have his child,” she admits. “I told him I would keep his secrets, I promised.” She is looking at him with those blue eyes, still refusing to leave that cold water because maybe it will freeze her heart solid. “I really hate promises, you know.”
And it is that admission that is enough to push her from the water. Elena goes close to him, closer than she ever has before. Her head presses into his shoulder, tucking a final tear in the crease of it. “Let’s never promise each other anything,” she says to him, isn't looking at him anymore, is pressed into his skin that somehow feels warm if only maybe because she is so cold. “Okay?” She wants to say promise me, but she is so tired of them. “You can lie to me,” she says and she is surprised by how easy it is to say it, to want it. “Just never promise me anything—and I will do the same.”
t’s okay, Elena says, in a way that makes it clear to me nothing will ever be “okay” again. Her eyes tumble to mine like a cartwheeling gull; they hold, and fall, and hold, and fall. I do not turn away, although there is a part of me that wishes to. Damascus’s presence is large in my mind, a pressing shadow against the peripheral of my psyche; the feeling of the abyss that is the dragon’s soul, and mind, and Bond. He says, to me and me alone, you have lived this moment and I have, a hundred times.
There are nights where it is on the cliff-side, before the Last Prince and I tumble from the precipice.
Some days, it is when Bondike confessed, My father hid me, with magic, with sins. I am… my name is Boudika. It means victory.
Other times, it is when my father comes excitedly, offering me the position to captain an entire ship, to take voyages beyond Oresziah, to wage war elsewhere. And in these memories, there is always a red stallion in the background, always rumpled sheets, always the taste of soured alcohol--
I lost… Yes, I lost someone.
I cannot help but listen now. I cannot help but stand transfixed before this baptism of pain, the unbecoming of someone into someone else. I know this will change her for life, this confession, this realisation. There is a taste like salt in my mouth. I want to say, I have lost someone, as well. I have lost someone, and it was all my fault, and there is nothing I can do to change it--
Give me sympathy, please.
Please, listen.
I have to confess. I have to apologise.
I did a terrible thing, to someone I loved, to someone I loved more than anything. Please, listen.
I can help you. I know how it feels to be lost, and to be alone.
But my mouth is sealed; the words lost.
They belong to a piece of my soul that stitched together my Frankenstein dragon, built up of all my sins and shortcomings and tragedies. They belong to a piece of me, young and naive and childish, that will never have the power to speak again.
And for this reason, I listen. I listen and smother the compassion I ought to feel, the compassion I feel now only in shadows and rivulets.
I told him I would keep his secrets, she says.
I promised, she says.
The words pale in comparison to her actions. Her eyes are fixed upon me with the fierceness, now, of her own lies. The lies she tells herself; the acknowledgement, the coming to terms. Elena’s step towards me is like a glacier cracking. I think I should turn away, rather than stand in resolute, empathetic silence--I think I should turn from the gesture, that I should shun it, and instead I close my eyes when it comes. She is warm, and soft, and fragile. She reminds me again of Laoise. She reminds me too, of Boudika, when I had seen her in the prison--
“I hate promises, too.” I say, in a nearly silent confession. I am stiff and unyielding against her; but then I soften, abruptly, almost awkwardly. I pull her into the nook beneath my chin, offering solace. “There is nothing to be done for the past,” I say, more to myself than to her. “But if I have learned anything, it is that these moments dictate everything about the future--and you seem to have… you seem to have come to terms with something, and that is the most a person can do, to move forward.”
Have you come to terms with it, Vercingtorix? Damascus’s voice is thunder in my mind.
His wings crack out behind me; a vicious snap of membranous flesh against the air. In a tremendous coiling of muscle, the dragon launches himself from the beach and into the air, with a desolate screech. Have you?
Then we are alone on the beach. She is small and golden and sad, and I say, “That means, Elena, you don’t promise me anything either.”
And add:
“I have no secrets to ask you to keep. No faith to shelter within. And if a lie is easier than the truth? Tell it to me.” I am looking into the sea when I say it.
Always, into the sea.
§
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
ieces of her past life—of her past self—lay scattered.
In Beqanna there is a girl of crimson, with blue eyes like summer’s sky. She is beautiful and graceful and everything Elena is not. In Woodlands, there is a many of obsidian and alabaster who waits with heavy brown eyes for her to become the woman he always wanted the little girl he had known to be, he would be waiting for eternity. In Paraiso there is a guardian of brandished gold who holds his head proud and sees her mother and father when she looks down at her. In Windskeep there is a woman, an ageless woman who was infinitely kind and loving who could see none of her mistakes even when they shined so bright in Elena’s eyes. Somewhere—somewhere—there is a man with shadows who clutches to her heart in a way she cannot name.
And in Dusk, there are countless faces who Elena has promised to serve.
And here, on this beach, there is only herself, has always been only herself. It is here the remaining pieces of herself crumble away into sand.
Her heart cannot decide on an emotion when she looks at him. When her blue eyes (Elena would say blue like summer skies, he may say they are blue like the sea) meet his own. She looks behind him, across the beach and hopes against hope Ten is not nearby. That he is doing something else—avoiding her, perhaps—anything but close enough to overhear this.
When her gaze comes back to the horned boy in front of her, she just sighs.
“I don’t know what to do,” she chokes out. “I can’t seem to do anything right anymore.” She can taste his salt in her mouth when she talks. She cannot tell what emotions come from him, he hides it too well, it only prickles her skin like ocean mist. She can feel sorrow, betrayal, victory and then it evaporates into nothing. She knows then, that she is not the only one to have lost someone. There are many of them, scattered about Novus, like grains of sand trapped in her blonde hair that she will find in the morning, making her remember it was not a dream.
And into his shoulder, when she folds against him, she leaves grains of sand, like sea salt kisses against his skin. I hate promises too. And she smiles against him, a gesture he may feel against the strength of his shoulder, a gesture he may be numb to, but she smiles regardless. Elena always managed to burn like sunshine, even when the day was done, even when her own dark cloud hums with lightning over her. He pulls her closer and it causes the last of those tears to fall, one final one. She feels it tip from blue eyes, roll down that sharp cheek bone and down to her lips, where she can taste it on her tongue. It doesn't taste like her own, but equal parts him and her. It is bitter. It is sweet. It is sad. It is promising. It would be promising if they were capable of giving them to one another.
Elena moves away as the dragon’s wings snap in the night, but she is not frightened. He would not hurt her. She is not a lamb, she is not a fawn. He is no lion, he is no wolf. They are an ocean and a storm. Apart from one another, they grow, but always turning to face one another with a look of knowing, a look of understanding. “I will give you no promises,” she says and her heart remains uncrossed and she does not hope to die.
And if a lie is easier than the truth—
“I love you,” she says staring up at him before she buries herself once more into his chest. “You are in my soul.” She holds him, lets him hold her, they look like lovers but they each know the truth, it is seen in the bruises of his eyes, it is seen in the splintering of Elena’s heart. “Your turn,” she says, refusing to leave the space she finds so close to the heart in his chest. She pretends she isn't pretending that his hear is someone else’s.
She cant remember how long she stands there, but it is long enough that her body weeps for the comfort of her court, for the familiarity of her cliffside, for the constant of healing. Wordlessly, she pulls away only looking at him when she has started to make the walk down the beach back to home. “I will ask you to promise me something someday, Torin—don’t you give it to me.”
Her promise to the man of shadows rattles around her ankles like shackles, but at least to one man, she is not a prisoner.
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
I don’t know what to do.
I can’t seem to do anything right anymore. Her words are my broken mantra, placed at her lips. Her words are the truths I have already learned, have already accepted. Why else do bad things? Why else allow my mortality to slip, thread by thread, until the entire tapestry of it had unravelled? I close my eyes, and… Try to be anywhere else, for just a moment. I do not confess such things often, and this contemplation will never pass my lips: she is stronger than me. I cannot imagine this golden girl becoming immoral, or callous. I cannot imagine the way this pain will cause her steady descent into apathy. It is this that reminds me I am alone in what I am. Strangely, Damascus’s absence seems more aching, more judgemental, than his presence. I can feel the void of our Bond, the giant questions looming between my sins and I, but I fear reckoning with them.
Instead, I focus on this: the salt, the sand, the sea.
Always, the trinity of my religion, my demons and my gods.
I will give you no promises. Good. And then: I love you. You are in my soul.
The baptism of pain is complete. The lies are upon her lips. Your turn, she adds.
Oh, Elena.
Do you know the secret to lies? The way to tell them like promises, like truth? I know she doesn’t; I know because of the slight quiver, the too-tense resolve. My smile is sad, but languid. My smile is slow, but genuine. The trick is to create a fantasy. To step directly into a storybook of your own making, to pretend that the lie you tell, is the truth. And so when she asks, I step into the story: I know she is not thinking of me, and I do not give her the courtesy of thinking of her.
Perhaps she already knows. Perhaps that is why there is an ounce of truth, a softness to the word love. But when I draw away, it is to force her to look at me, to retreat from the false warmth of intimacy; it is not as if I am pretending to be a lover, it is as if I am. I draw her chin up, up, up to look at me; and softly brush the remnants of the tears in her eyes.
“I love you, too. You are more than in my soul.” I have learned sometimes it is the unstated that leaves the most impression: what can be more than a soul? the statement suggests. A life, I think. Because when I confess those words, I am not confessing them to Elena and her sad blue eyes: I am thinking instead of crimson tides, of a chestnut mane in the surf, of striped haunches, and running, and running, and running. I am thinking of long black beaches, and the smell of an infirmary, and burying my face into that hair just once, just once, to say, You are more than my companion.
That is the closest to confessing love I ever truly got; and all those emotions swarm now, into my lie, into my confession, because behind my eyes rests the silhouette of the one person I can never confess my love to, the one person who has taken all that I am and gnarled it up. Perhaps it is what Elena deserves to hear, however; perhaps she deserves a man to flay his soul open for her, and reciprocate what she had offered, the whole of herself. Perhaps she deserves to see just a flash of truth in my sentiment, a truth not for her but for someone else entirely, and then--
It is gone.
The rawness, the lie that sounds more like truth than falsity. The genuine, tortured expression I wore, like a lover who held his fading love. It is gone, behind the sliding curtain of my memories. It is Elena I look at now; it is Elena who turns away, and gives me the permission I need to be myself, gnarled and loveless. I will ask you to promise me something, someday, Torin. Don’t give it to me. The storybook is closed; the lie transformed to truth. I smile again, but it is my smile, devoid of sentiments, hardlined and blade-like. “That is an easier thing to ask,” I admit, softly. I have long-since fallen out of the business of giving. I have long-since only began to take, and so--it does not seem so wrong to promise that, to promise not to give.
I turn from her. I do not watch her steady journey back to Terrastella, or wonder what strength (or lack thereof) our encounter may have given her. I do not think about these things, because I do not care. But I do think about the sentiments the encounter dredged up. Damascus finds me again, and together we haphazardly walk to within seeing-distance of the cliffs.
They are too lightly coloured, I think, to remind me of home. The beaches are not long and straight and narrow; they are not black. They are sand, or stone, or the edge of the continent giving way to the sea abruptly, with roots jutting out from the edges of the land. Elena reminds me of this, as well. She is too lightly coloured to remind me of home; she might feel of sand and smell of the sea, but there is an otherness to her that separates her from all I have ever known, all I have ever cared about.
I do not sleep that night. I think of Bondike, when we had been preparing to graduate the academy, dressed in our finest regalia. He had been so handsome, I remember, with that close-cropped mane and those spiraled horns adorned in gold garnish. He had laughed, you are lucky you do not have to bother much with our paint and I had said, I wish I had to. I had often felt separate from my peers, which he had known. He had drawn the metallic paint out and on my inner ankle had drawn a secret mark, above my one gold hoof. I hadn’t looked at it then, but after--after the graduation ceremony, after we had left and gone to our separate homes, I had paid closer mind--
It had been a symbol for marriage, I remember. I had thought it charismatic and bold then, a testament to the wild undercurrent of our shared attraction. I had thought it was a sudden surfacing of old nostalgia for when we had been younger, and our only cares had been for one another, from sheltering each other from the burdens of our fathers--
Now, I know differently.
Now, I know it had meant everything, and so had his careful whisper when he’d said, at the end of the ceremony:
Vercingtorix,
Promise me something.
Promise me you will never let me become someone I am not. Promise me you will never watch as I allow the politics of our world to consume me, as they did my father. Please--you know me better than anyone.
Promise me, you’ll help me stay true to who that is.
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