BETTER THE WIND, THE SEA, THE SALT
than this, this, this
than this, this, this
The sun refuses to set. It hangs suspended upon the horizon, almost kissing the sea, and the world becomes red as war, as blood, as love, as hate, as a sun that refuses to set. Is it three days? Or is it more? Is it a week, a month, a year? Is it seconds, or an eternity? But the answer is there. An eternity of a sun loosing its track in the sky. Sometimes, it is drawn back--forcefully, angrily--and then it hinges, swings, a pendulum that no one notices. Because it does not set. It remains upon the border of one land and the next with a growing weight, a growing severity. The sky seems heavy. The heavens seem leaden. And the wavering hues of the everlasting sunset are transient, shifting, reds and oranges and yellows until they burn the eyes, and ache with all the uncertainty of a question gone unanswered, or a promise unkept. Yes. It begins to hurt to see. The light is a throbbing light, a pulsating light, that screams do not look do not look do not look I am not supposed to be here like this, I am not supposed to be suspended in time—
Time. Time. Time is still.
Boudika wanders in the stagnant light and she is the colour of blood spurting from an arterial vein. She is life’s blood, pouring out, a crimson that is insulting. It waxes over her. Becomes her. Transforms her. She feels like a monster, like she is bathed in something putrid, decaying. And inside, there is a dog gnawing on her heart, or a bird, tap-tap-tapping against her aorta. A murmur within, a missing beat, something off-rhythm, irregular, unhealthy. Out of sync. She feels out of breath as she walks, too full of mortality, and her mind turns on itself with a certain savagery. You don’t know what it feels like to have a heart gnawed on, her thoughts sneer. It was true. But I’ve seen enough corpses to guess.
Or so she thinks. And the sun aches in the sky. Boudika does not know when she finds it; but she happens upon a black cove, down beneath the jungle, and feels compelled to venture down. The descent to the sand is dangerous, twisting, from a jagged cliffside that leaks vermillion sickly, weakly. There is no life on the cliffside. There is no life on the beach, when she reaches it, and the dark sand shifts underfoot and the ocean is placid nearby. Nearly serene. Nearly peaceful. If Boudika did not know only putrid water could be so still, so untouched, so lifeless.
But Boudika is not alone. A haflinger with glassy wings moves busily about the sand, across the cove. Boudika begins to walk, and walk, and it feels like ages until she reaches the mare with feathers that reflect the bleeding light.
She is an old mare, grizzled, with eyes that are also like glass. Opaque? Seeing? Boudika cannot tell. She asks, “What are you doing?” And the woman shifts a pile of bones with her telekinetic magic. Boudika’s voice breaks the silence that has stretched since the sun stopped. She cringes. The haflinger with glass wings does not break her concentration; she tosses the bones, and Boudika sees a pointed skull, a fragment of broad teeth, some sort of femur, a broken horn, a number of sapphire scales—
“Reading your future,” the aged mare remarks, at last. And the silence breaks again when the bones clatter, singing one upon the other. Boudika is briefly, unreasonably, reminded of dancing. The crack of the finale, of her hooves upon cobblestones. A resounding finality.
”What do you read?" Her voice sounds a little like that, too.
The fortune teller makes a noncommittal sound. “There is a cave beneath the cliffside. You should go inside, and then I will tell you.”
Boudika moves wearily past the woman, towards the cliffs she mentioned. They jut like tusks, or fangs. The light bleeds over them. Boudika feels like a sacrifice. She feels like the chains are looming about her wrists, her ankles, her neck. Her throat constricts with the memory of bondage, of imprisonment. And still: she ventures along the water-line, she ventures where the oceans lays stagnant and too-bright against her hooves, and she finds the cavern yawning at the base of the cliffs. In a normal sea, it would have been unreachable for the waves crashing against the jagged rocks. But for these tranquil waters, this sick sea, it was eerily accessible. The crimson mare walks through the knee-deep water, weaving among the teeth-like rocks. Her flank brushes one, and she feels the pricking sting of blood against her flesh. Boudika stands at the mouth, staring into the deep, and the stories of disappearances enter her mind in a rush. She is silhouetted by the bloody sky. She is inseparable from it, and from the darkness that beckons her forward.
It is an aching darkness. An answer to her aching heart. A tap-tap-tapping against her aorta. A need to know—what is within?
So she steps inside, and the air is ancient. Bioluminescence blooms abruptly at her feet and that, too, is red. The walls are painted with old words and farther she ventures, and farther, until at the back of the cave she discovers as a skeleton and a ship. The skeleton’s horns are Boudika’s horns. The ship, torn asunder, is nothing save frayed old fabric and rotting planks. There is nothing alive in the cave, except for her. There is no answer in the cave, except for the pulsating bioluminescence and the staring eyes of the skull that looks too much and not enough like her own skull. She does not know how long she stares into those gaping eyes. She does not know how long she stands, swaying and exhausted, in the darkness. It is long enough to see pinpricks of light behind her eyes, to imagine the sound of waves outside, to think: just a few more seconds, and I will go outside, and everything up to this point will have been a dream… I will be home again—it will all be the same again—
Boudika reemerges an indefinite amount of time later. Days later. Years later. She feels old when the sun kisses her flesh, and somehow the sky is blue, somehow she knows that no time has passed at all. The sun is still there. The mare is still there, playing with her bones. ”What did you find?” she asks as Boudika passes, her flank still bleeding, her skin pricking with salt water.
”The future." The words are angry. But Boudika knows the answer is wrong as soon as she confesses it. She corrects herself. ”No. The past." And the grizzled mare makes a noncommittal noise, once again, and Boudika is infuriated—she wheels about, to snarl, to snap the air, to demand some answer that is more satisfying—
And the woman is gone, and her words are drifting without a breeze, they are drifting and they are not real, and the sun is too hot, and too bright. “Change is the only future. Change or die.”
Looking him in the eyes always felt like falling. It always felt like she became submerged, when the caught them just right, and they became vibrant with every colour that has ever existed within the water of the sea. The pure blue of the Aegean, or the dark cold of the pacific, the green of algae-covered coves, the splitting amber of a sea during sunrise. It was before their death sentence. They were waiting to be dragged into the streets, where it poured rain. They had replaced the chains on their backs, on their necks, and Boudika could smell his flesh where it burnt against the metal. But he stared at her steadily, and his breath just barely brushed against her neck through the bars of their cells. “I have been forced to bare the most unbearable of burdens,” he told her. “I have been forced to endure the unendurable. I am the last of my kind, the keeper of their souls, and I have failed them. But it wasn’t my fault. It was fate; the gods had already weighed our scales. When I look at you, though, I feel like there is a future… somehow… somewhere…"
And she didn’t understand, until he said: “Because it is in your nature, Copperhead. It is in your nature to survive. You are the sea and you are flame and you are both a dancer and a warrior. You are the general's son and your city's betrayed daughter. You are everything that my people love, and everything they fear. And you are everything your own people love, and everything they fear. You are the best and worst of all of us, and today, when they send us to sea, when they sentence us to die... It is not in your nature, to die like this.”
Boudika is alone on the black beach. She settles in the sand, and looks out toward the horizon, wondering if it is too late to ask a favour of a god. There is a sinking ship in her unrhythmic heart, and for all of her dancing, all of her ferocity, she cannot think of a single song. To endure the unendurable and this, yes this, seems unendurable.
@Boudika "speaks" not sure how this post happened... BUT HERE IS A MONSTER OF ONE <3
STAFF EDIT***
@boudika has rolled a 4! She has been awarded +200 signos.
