Of the many unexpected things he’s learned, this is the most recent: when the world starts to lose its color, you don't always notice.
Solterra had lost its color. He could not say where it started. The eyes? It’s what the crows go for first, and perhaps this scavenger affliction worked the same strategy as its feathered cousin. So the colors left– eyes to cheeks to bellies to hooves. Surely the city was next. Upon first glance, it was easy to see Solterra as colorless to begin with, save for every shade of sand. But first glance was deceptive. There were streaks of colors in the sandstone walls- not just the trademark browns and tans but yellows, reds, pinks. In the spring, cacti bloomed in every shade imaginable, some of the flowers so tiny and delicate you would not even notice them unless you walked with your nose to the ground.
All of those beautiful nuances, faded to shades of grey and white. With time, even the sunset lost its vibrancy.
Solterra had lost its color and Eik was so infatuated with vengeance that he hadn't even noticed. He couldn't notice, if truth be told– it would be too deep a blow to an already very delicate conscious. Solterra had lost its color but (she’s here, she’s here) it doesn’t matter now. He paints the sky in a flurry of magic, unseen to the rest of the poor world. His love, his rage, his knowing and unknowing, streaks of color beyond the eye’s imagination. He lights up the sky and she paints the earth with gemstones and water and life– life! In the heart of this place grown barren, strange flowers bloom from soil long gone fallow and fruit trees burst from the sand.
And when they touch,
the colors bleed back into the world. The streets flicker to life (slowly at first, like a fire learning its hunger) in shades of copper, sand, rose, rust. The sky turns a shade of blue that is as close to infinity as a color can get-- when he looks at it, he thinks of what it means to have a soul.
And he wonders– is anger something that lives in the soul? Or does it make its home elsewhere?
Right now the anger seems to live in his blood like a poison that even the sweet-sharp hiss of her voice does not remedy. No his blood sings. No, I am not wrong. I am not wrong to be here. No I am not wrong to love you. No you don’t belong here. Not now. Not now.
Not now.
He is comforted by the anger, the argument. It reassures him he isn’t something she dreamed up. He has agency. And maybe he’s not a home but a grave.
Maybe we could say the same for her.
Oh it doesn’t matter anyway. Home or grave or man or ghost, anger or fear, soul or no. Their story was written long ago. It had simply been sitting (waiting) beneath snow and soil, in suspense for the right actors to take the stage.
“A home,” he echoes. His voice cracks open, a dried out riverbed. It was all the heat, and the thirst, and the rage that still simmers like a caged animal. Why couldn’t their home be on the mountaintop, or the snowy field among the dreaming bison? He doesn’t ask her, aloud or in magic. It’s a stupid, childish question, and he feeds it to the fire of his anger.
At the corner of the next street, a vine sprouts from a desiccated pot of soil. It quickly creeps its green way up and across the crumbling wall of an abandoned storefront, and as the lovers draw near five huge white blooms explode in a veritable bounty of petals and perfume. He stops walking. “Isra,” he rumbles, frustrated, hot breath fanning across her cheek.
(what are you doing to me? he asked her once– didn’t he ask her that once? He can’t remember what she said– he understood it in the moment, but he never really understood. How could anyone follow someone else into a fire? How does logic dissolve around them, around her, like cobblestones turning to lilies?
Who and what are we without reality to tether us?)
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Don’t– she said, the last time he said sorry. He couldn’t, not then and not now, and as he speaks his tongue is hot with defiance. Sorrow is so very much a part of him and he could not erase it, not even for love. “I didn’t want you to see” me “Solterra like this.” his bony hip leans into her full one. A literally starving man, that’s what time made of him. It was supposed to be fixed by now, he was supposed to have fixed it, and all he did was circle closer and closer to death.
"It was killing me, to be apart from you" his body whispers to hers. For every bit of him that yearns to drive her away, there is an equal and opposite force that wants to beg of her- never leave me alone again.
with words of water, fire, air, and earth
we invent the garden of glances
@Isra
Time makes fools of us all
