A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
Abel was not made to talk morality with unicorn queens.
He is not a clever man; he can answer her questions no better than Job could answer God’s. He can only stand and shake and wish he was in his humble home with his kind mother and his foolish dreaming father and that they could all die together and not alone.
There are none of these things he can say. Her words sound like weapons drawn and sharp; Abel knows the tones a voice takes before a fist follows.
He was not made to look a dragon in the eye and he cannot do it now; amid all the other changes the garden undertakes the one that makes him shiver and shake is the shadow that falls over it from the mighty spread of wings. When the dragon lands behind its queen, so big he can feel its breath and hear each inhale he trembles like a leaf dying, like a leaf dead, like a leaf falling from the tree. He remembers another dragon flying over, and watching the smoke rise up from the pass like a black offering to every god, and in his head it seems he can hear his mother screaming as she burns.
Abel can’t believe in just monsters.
There is no part of him that isn’t expecting to die then. Even when she says “but I am not Raum he waits stiff-necked for her to remake him into something, to turn him to bones or dust or food for the beast behind her. His breaths sear his lungs with each inhale as though they know they are the last and they, too, are punishing him for it.
It isn’t until she says run that he opens his eyes. Around them is a garden, as beautiful as the first that was ever made; there are fat bees humming and the smell of ripe fruit. There is wheat that dances golden in the breeze. And there is the unicorn who he can barely stand to turn his gaze to and the dragon that he can’t. Abel listens and his heart is beating, thrashing, a caught bird in his chest that wants him to obey. What else is he good for, but running? But surviving? But slipping away like a rat into the next black alley that will have him?
When he nods it takes all the bravery he has.
Abel does not want to take her gold. It might burn him, it might melt into his skin and scald him and whisper sinner as it breaks him down to bones and teeth. But he needs lodging, and food, and passage on a ship, and there is gold or there is thievery, and both are unbearable.
As soon as he hefts it (so heavy, this gold-from-stones) the dragon roars and the trees shake the same way Abel does and it is like an earthquake, that sound, like a tsunami, like something that could break him apart into a hundred pieces like scattered shells upon a beach.
Abel runs but it still feels like dying.
@Isra
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