THEY STOOD UP STRAIGHT AND PURE ON THE STALK, GRIPPING THE DARK LIKE PROPHETS
AND HOWLING COLOSSAL INTIMACIES
FROM THE BACK OF THEIR FUSED THROATS
AND HOWLING COLOSSAL INTIMACIES
FROM THE BACK OF THEIR FUSED THROATS
❀
Bexley is not quite sure what brings her to the island except that there is nothing left to do. She has watched the sky in Denocte turn from blue to pink to purple what feels like millions of times; still her dreams are these horrible, violent things that drain her more than they let her rest, and no manner of drugs or therapy has fixed her yet. The dreams would be incredible if they weren’t so terrifying — resplendent with pools of blue blood and incandescent fire, tattooed with the memory of death. Even when awake, they follow her as a hungry dog would: snarling, growling, slobbering as it trails a few steps behind, never tiring, never fading. There is never a moment where it does not haunt her.His name has faded from her brain a little. Only because she forces it to - because she is tired of crying more than she is tired of not seeing him. There is some power in the strength of her will. Far and away the only power she has left.
She had seen the initial explosion from a high room in Denocte’s citadel. Over the ocean a blossom of black fire had risen high in the sky before flaring outwards, and she had watched it with huge, watery eyes, the acrid scent of the smoke clawing at her lungs even from miles away. Her heart had stopped completely in her chest, and she had gone flying down the steps like a bat out of hell. The citizens in the Denoctian market had been still as statues when she pushed through them, their heads turned to the sky, eyes like glass marbles reflecting the explosion. Totally catatonic. Not a single one had talked or moved. They were frozen perfectly still like the victims of Medusa — it was a ghost town, a Greek garden. But there had been no time. No time to stop, no time to ask. Just the terrible non-beat of her pulse dragging her toward the catastrophe like a dog on a leash.
She only vaguely remembers the journey there. By the time she reached the island the wall of ivy had already fallen apart, the bridge stretching openly over the ocean in a simple invitation, come. And she did. Come she did, and so had hundreds of others, swarming the leg of black lava like bugs on bad fruit. Murmurs passed through the crowd in ripples as they poured from every corner of Novus into the water and the white sand beaches. And though Bexley wasn’t sure what she’d expected, it wasn’t this — not Paradise — because the people of Novus didn’t deserve it.
Not when one of their own had killed Acton. Not when they stood silently and let Raum drain the life from Solterra. Not when each one of them, clawing their way toward the isles, was hiding the same horrible, self-centered sickness in their hearts, a sickness with teeth and claws and a lust for blood.
Anyway.
It could be summer, though she knows it isn’t. It’s hot. The sun casts its white shadow from overhead and bleaches the sand like a perfectly cleaned bone. Heat simmers over the bright-blue water and makes a mirage on the flat planes of the island; Bexley is boiling hot by the time she shoulders her way from the beach into the cool shelter of the jungle, the warmth coating her in a wild, incandescent glimmer. She is a shining bauble in the warm dark of the forest. Overhead, birds twitter and sing brightly. The howl of something feline that Bexley does not recognize caterwauls from various places deep in the trees. Fruits she has never has seen, never even heard of, hang ripe and dark from the bent boughs of trees. And though it is beautiful — the songs, the bright light, the lush green leaves — something deep in her chest still begs to be listened to when it says turn around, turn around.
Bexley does not listen. She never does.
