m o i r a
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.
When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.
I
n her dreams he stands, tall and dark and beautiful. As distant as the skies she loves so dearly, has come to cherish, to almost worship. Oh, but to bring her to her knees would take more than the might of the gods, more than sinning lips and serpentine smiles. Yet he stands there, a god, a mortal, a lover, an enemy, a friend. Distant and near, just out of reach and meant to be sought after, a longing cry upon lips sewn shut. Moira cannot reach him here, not when she dreams, not when those dreams let monsters loose upon her mind. They prowl and plunder and ravage the holy temples built to pray in, to sing in, to praise in, to sin in. Claw marks are left on doors where blood does not coat the entrance. Through it all he is distant. Through it all the starry-eyed man, the unsure, wavering child, stares and stares and stares.
There is not a light in those eyes that shine so brightly down upon her. It bathes the streets in colors of red. Red, for love and anger; red, for blood and birth; red, for redemption and pain. She walks down corridors where beasts prowl, feels their skin brush against her skin, lets them paint her in their black and blue and purple. Here, terror still dwells, a merry warm bed for its head every day and horrors awaiting it at night. In these forsaken halls, she hears screams and sees ghosts. There are no fires to burn the nightmares away. No gods will descend and strike those sins from her past.
In these halls, Moira is her own god.
Sweat stripes her skin, drips down her neck like it would in jungles where Neerja once moved so freely. Iron and metal coat her tongue (is it hers or another's?), and it never really goes away. Maybe her childhood will never leave her, for there in those once-empty rooms she sees feathers fall in piles of flame. She sees chains upon the walls and a sea of tears that others have forgotten. But she remembers.
She can never forget.
There, in a courtyard as she travels out into another winding way, by a pond they hold her under. Did it really ever happen? Or was it something else horrible and cruel that she's painted over to make it more bearable? It doesn't matter as she passes like a reaper, shredded soul dripping behind her as the only cloak she wears. Under this starlight, under that distant star's downward gaze, she might as well be naked, laid bare with her sins and transgressions. For a healer's hands are never clean. Constellations light the way to doors and rooms that are not there when she is awake. Lanterns with willo' the wisps trapped light rooms and she watches as a young girl - a small reflection of who she once was: scared, alone, so very eager to please and so distant from life - takes the life of some unknown aunt or uncle or cousin without batting an eye. Just a bit of nightshade mixed into a broth, just a bit of poison masked so sweetly that they smile as she says goodbye. The girl does not look back as she leaves, but Moira does now. Her own family's wailing is a ghost among the maze.
There were so many lost then that she did not care to know.
How many more will be lost, she wonders, before all of Denocte and all of Novus is covered in blood? In her maze of horrors, in her corridors of pain, she cannot find it within herself to wince, to back away from the fountains that spring up about her, that rain not water but fat, sanguine drops. Like the bruises left by beasts of her own imagination, this streaks her and stains her, too. And it blends so easily into her sunset skin as though her ancestors knew she would be born a sinner and colored in in hubris and suffering.
She does not mind the way it lines her face, it's only a new lipstick on her lips after all.
Gates loom, larger than before, opening slowly into a world of darkness. The phoenix cannot fly, but she goes into the unknown, into the void. And when she opens her eyes, she finds stone streets beneath her feet, she finds a beast of orange and black and white and stripes stalking her, and she finds her court - broken and bleeding and putting itself back together with everything they have - in their beds as she last was.
Golden eyes merely blink, and blink, and blink again for good measure. "So we rise again from ashes and dust," she murmurs up to the midnight sky. And still, that star who can only watch as she turns to stone beneath his light, beneath his touch, is nowhere to be found. The Tonnerre girl can feel the fractures splinter just a fraction more within. Shuttering eyes turn to the mountains where her own wild heart found Neerja's, and it is there her feet begin to take her, it is there her shattering heart demands to go again to find a temple of moonlight and dreams.
tagging | "speaks" | notes: open for any ! a strange dream, and a visit to discover our mountain temple
