♛
Her sleep had been troubled.
She had drifted in and out of consciousness nightmare-ridden and sweat-soaked, a fisher boat caught on a furious sea. A series of dreams — rare as they were to visit, whenever they did they did so with feverish delight, as startling and disjointed as the Weaver’s crudely told (sang, more like) tales — dragged her under the waves, gasping, reeling. She didn’t remember all of them, only two.
A white falcon ripping into the chest of a glass eyed canary, whose pale throat still trembled with elegiac song. The blood had turned her stomach, and though in the edges of her wandering psyche Aghavni had known that the white falcon was Nestor, and that Nestor would never hurt her, the canary’s eyes — dying and horrifically beautiful in their glazed black finality — had sickened her. And then the dream had sputtered (her head coming up for air) until she had drowned again, only this time instead of a canary it was a woman — her mother, she’d realized much later — and instead of a white falcon it was a mass of faceless bodies hurling spears and flames and fury at her small, bloodsoaked back. A hall lined with mirrors, her mother’s sweet laughter. Spools and spools of emerald silk.
Aghavni had jerked awake to the sound of her own coughing, violent and heaving, ash coating her lungs like powdered hemlock.
She doesn’t remember how she had made her way down to the moonlit shore.
One moment she had been in her room, pacing like a chained starling (couldn’t fly away for the winter, trapped and alone and frightened and doomed), her steel-lined folding fan snapping open and shut, open and shut. The silk rustled like the hush, hush of reeds in summer.
The moon had risen, round as those little white cakes they served in the Lounge whenever a crate of them arrived from her father’s shipping ports, to its midnight throne. Still early by the Scarab’s accounts, but after penning the letter to her father and, with Charon’s approval, locking the wings of the beetle,
(The little sign out front read:
Closed for imminent disaster. None will be served tonight.)
she had drifted into a fitful sleep. And by the time Aghavni had come to, she had found herself ankle deep in seawater.
Her hair, unbound, spills from her neck and billows in the wind like snapping sails. It takes her a minute, almost two, before three observations line themselves up like stowaways on a plank.
One: the dawning sky is as clear as seaglass.
Two: it no longer smells of burning.
Three: there is a bridge made of still-cooling lava stretched over the sea, and it is leading to the end of the world.
Aghavni thinks she is still dreaming when she steps cautiously, ballerina light, onto the tarlike, oozing rock. It simmers and hisses underhoof, the spilled guts of an earth dwelling beast.
It is only when the girl is halfway across the bridge and sees something shift in the churning waters below, the glint of a scale or whisper of a fin, that she accepts with eerie calm that she is not, in fact, dreaming. The monsters in her dreams are never so coy.
But she is not in the business of abandoning things unfinished. Her hooves, small and built high instead of wide, wobble precariously in the lava rock’s uneven ridges. Seaspray tosses flecks of white into her eyes, and though the bridge radiates with a molten heat, steaming away the cold, Aghavni cannot stop the tremors running like lightning through her bones.
It is a long time before she reaches the end.
But when she steps off the rock Aghavni knows that the wall of living green — ivy, the kind that climbs and smothers — is not the end. Only an obstacle, like the gates guarding hell. (Feeling silly, she scans right and left for signs of a Cerberus. In her sleepwalking stupor she had neglected to bring a blade, and she is not yet deft enough in steel fan-throwing to take much comfort in the fan tucked in the nest of her hair.)
“Theófos.” It takes every last drop of resolve in her body to stop herself from scrambling backwards into the sea, or forwards into the ivy. Gasping, she shields her eyes from the burst of light.
Something — someone — materializes in the glow. A tiger, Aghavni thinks in a cold sweat, when she makes out the glint of tiger orange and the dark of tiger stripes, but the shape is not right.
She places the ax before she places the woman. Transfixed, she watches as the blade swings down in a beautiful arc to hack at the wall.
“Is there something behind it?” Her voice carries through the dark, braver than she feels. “This is not the end, is it.”
She had drifted in and out of consciousness nightmare-ridden and sweat-soaked, a fisher boat caught on a furious sea. A series of dreams — rare as they were to visit, whenever they did they did so with feverish delight, as startling and disjointed as the Weaver’s crudely told (sang, more like) tales — dragged her under the waves, gasping, reeling. She didn’t remember all of them, only two.
A white falcon ripping into the chest of a glass eyed canary, whose pale throat still trembled with elegiac song. The blood had turned her stomach, and though in the edges of her wandering psyche Aghavni had known that the white falcon was Nestor, and that Nestor would never hurt her, the canary’s eyes — dying and horrifically beautiful in their glazed black finality — had sickened her. And then the dream had sputtered (her head coming up for air) until she had drowned again, only this time instead of a canary it was a woman — her mother, she’d realized much later — and instead of a white falcon it was a mass of faceless bodies hurling spears and flames and fury at her small, bloodsoaked back. A hall lined with mirrors, her mother’s sweet laughter. Spools and spools of emerald silk.
Aghavni had jerked awake to the sound of her own coughing, violent and heaving, ash coating her lungs like powdered hemlock.
She doesn’t remember how she had made her way down to the moonlit shore.
One moment she had been in her room, pacing like a chained starling (couldn’t fly away for the winter, trapped and alone and frightened and doomed), her steel-lined folding fan snapping open and shut, open and shut. The silk rustled like the hush, hush of reeds in summer.
The moon had risen, round as those little white cakes they served in the Lounge whenever a crate of them arrived from her father’s shipping ports, to its midnight throne. Still early by the Scarab’s accounts, but after penning the letter to her father and, with Charon’s approval, locking the wings of the beetle,
(The little sign out front read:
Closed for imminent disaster. None will be served tonight.)
she had drifted into a fitful sleep. And by the time Aghavni had come to, she had found herself ankle deep in seawater.
Her hair, unbound, spills from her neck and billows in the wind like snapping sails. It takes her a minute, almost two, before three observations line themselves up like stowaways on a plank.
One: the dawning sky is as clear as seaglass.
Two: it no longer smells of burning.
Three: there is a bridge made of still-cooling lava stretched over the sea, and it is leading to the end of the world.
Aghavni thinks she is still dreaming when she steps cautiously, ballerina light, onto the tarlike, oozing rock. It simmers and hisses underhoof, the spilled guts of an earth dwelling beast.
It is only when the girl is halfway across the bridge and sees something shift in the churning waters below, the glint of a scale or whisper of a fin, that she accepts with eerie calm that she is not, in fact, dreaming. The monsters in her dreams are never so coy.
But she is not in the business of abandoning things unfinished. Her hooves, small and built high instead of wide, wobble precariously in the lava rock’s uneven ridges. Seaspray tosses flecks of white into her eyes, and though the bridge radiates with a molten heat, steaming away the cold, Aghavni cannot stop the tremors running like lightning through her bones.
It is a long time before she reaches the end.
But when she steps off the rock Aghavni knows that the wall of living green — ivy, the kind that climbs and smothers — is not the end. Only an obstacle, like the gates guarding hell. (Feeling silly, she scans right and left for signs of a Cerberus. In her sleepwalking stupor she had neglected to bring a blade, and she is not yet deft enough in steel fan-throwing to take much comfort in the fan tucked in the nest of her hair.)
“Theófos.” It takes every last drop of resolve in her body to stop herself from scrambling backwards into the sea, or forwards into the ivy. Gasping, she shields her eyes from the burst of light.
Something — someone — materializes in the glow. A tiger, Aghavni thinks in a cold sweat, when she makes out the glint of tiger orange and the dark of tiger stripes, but the shape is not right.
She places the ax before she places the woman. Transfixed, she watches as the blade swings down in a beautiful arc to hack at the wall.
“Is there something behind it?” Her voice carries through the dark, braver than she feels. “This is not the end, is it.”
STAFF EDIT***
@aghavni has rolled a 4, and has been awarded +100 signos!/blockquote>
