I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.
God is dead.
Bexley has never been a pious girl. No more than anything needed to keep her from ostracization. But God is dead and she feels it like a bullet feels the barrel of a gun. And -
A girl told her. In the markets. Yesterday. Or the day before?
Anyway it had been recent. Anyway she hadn’t expected it. Anyway, she had been perfectly fine searching the stalls for scythes, drowning in cinnamon a little worried but not more than normal, given the present climate, and the girl had come up to her, and Bexley could remember thinking she was a little too young to be out on her own but had especially pretty, dark eyes. Not thinking anything of her except that she might also be in want of a weapon. But she had paused, strangely, like she was on the edge of something, a sentence, or a warning, before meeting Bexley’s eyes. Quiet and uncertain as a feather floating through air. And she had said “_____ is dead. Do you know?”
The name did not quite make sense to her. Like the girl had spoken it in a language from a foreign island. Or replaced it with a completely black noise, impossible though that was, a noise that meant nothing but dark and dark and more dark. It was incomprehensible. Even Delphic. She could not even be sure the word that the girl had said was made of letters and not numbers, or glyphs. Bexley heard ______ and could not really process it, even when the girl repeated it, because it both was and wasn’t a name, and was and wasn’t a prayer, and even if she was saying the name Bexley thought she might be saying, it couldn’t possibly be true, because she had just seen him - she had just seen him.
She wouldn’t have even believed it, if not for the next thing the girl said, which was “I’m sorry.”
That she understood.
Bexley had opened her mouth, she remembered it, feeling salt flood her tongue, and her throat close, and did not even know what she could possibly say except that she had to say something, only then she blinked and it was gone, it being everything, all gone, and she was standing somewhere else entirely, in a slightly different variation of the universe, and the girl had disappeared, and the stalls, and the scimitars, and could not remember how she had gotten there, or when, and knew nothing except that God was dead and that the moon was now shining overhead. Starlight poured into the streets. And the Citadel rose up in front of her too tall, like a bird almost taking flight. She had not been here just a second ago, she had been all the way on other side of the city, and would have thought it was a dream except for the way she recognized the scattered film of moonlight webbing the cobblestone.
And it was fall - right? - and she would have been cold, she knew, if she could feel anything at all, but the wind is buffeting the shadow at the end of the street, not her, and the silver is streaming onto the girl far, far away, not her, and she does not feel anything at all, only watches. And watches. Sandstone buildings tower around them. Solterran flags, mottled now by dirt and ash, flutter pathetically in the meek wind. It is utterly silent except for Bexley’s pulse beating against the inside of her head and the soft whoosh of air passing through the open windows of the apartments. And this girl, the foreign body, the utter stranger, wearing her skin and her scar and her necklace, looks at her and disappears around a corner and Bexley wants to follow but she -
Blinks, and here she is. In a night again, though it can’t possibly be the same one. The endless miles of the Mors stretch out around her in peaks and troughs to the edge of the world. The moon has waxed into an improbably fat first quarter.
_____ is dead, she says out loud. The stars sneer overhead. They drape the desert in shadow.
It would not matter so much if she had not been much more pious than expected, if she had not loved him, if they had made any sense together at all - then they could have died happy, if that was a way to die at all - and yet there is not a tombstone in the world engraved DIED HAPPY.
So the scar on her cheek becomes a kind of gift. It pulses, like a heartbeat, against the bone-white skin. And it is so awfully and so his and so awfully real that she feels one of her knees give out (sweet irony!) and nearly crashes to the sand, but something in her, the iron spine, the bird bones, keeps everything upright except the tears that start to spill onto the sand at her feet.
Bexley begins to realize she has never really been angry before.
Not like this. Not like forgetting how to stand. Not like a rage so pure she cannot even feel it, only knows it lingers in her bloodstream because it is the force that propels her forward, not her muscles, not her nerves, not even her consciousness has control of her steps anymore, it is a river-clear stream of anger and despair that sends her slinking across the desert like a cat with those wide, dark eyes and skin buzzing with glitter.
She does not know where he is. If he is even here, or waiting where her feet take her too. But the cats in the empty markets see it, and the little desert lizards, and the carrion birds:
Bexley Briar, repeating like a litany, _____ is dead, ______ is dead.
