before the war.
before we had to
kiss Troy out of each other’s
teeth, we were a paradise.
you were the only one I kneeled before.
you make the warrior in me tired.
—
"Show me why you led me here."
Boudika stares. There is the sea and the moon and the waves that whisper to her, as they always have, shush, shush, shush. There are stars above them and the strange, otherworldly colour of his skin—he looks, she realises for the first time, like all the predatory sea-things she has ever known. He is dark above and light below, so as to be hidden by the light above or the depth beneath. He must be invisible in the water, she thinks, and as she thinks it his horn points toward her chest and her blood screams alive, alive, alive.
The mare does not know how to show him. She cannot tell him. There are no words. Just this:
There is a girl standing on a beach thinking about what it feels like to kill a soul. She is remembering choking the surf with bodies that, in death, were dusted with gold. She is thinking of when they first encountered one another on the Night Court coast, and she had thought, the only thing I fear is the sea. The truth of that is lost, sinking somewhere with all her other fears, because everything has led to this.
This.
This.
This.
Boudika finds herself frustrated with all the things words cannot say. She is incapable of putting the images in his mind that swell in hers, like so many furious mosaics. A father pushing his child into the sea as though the water is an altar for a sacrificial lamb, telling her stay, stay, and the way the Khashran storm like so many ghosts from the depths of the dark. One surges forward and he is the colour of old bone and ink-slick from the sea. His teeth are a shark’s and he smells like the sea does on a fetid day. He does not Take her, although he drops his jaws in their half-shape next to her ear and sings a song she will never forget.
A golden boy with a spear who says, “We’ll come back with our shields or on them, eh, Bondike?” And it is an old saying, an old phrase, from when their people were seafaring, conquering vikings rather than refugees on an island that did not want them. It was the first day they went to war and they came back blooded and some of them did not come back at all. The image of him is so clear, in her mind, of his eyes the colour of the sea when it is pierced by the sun, and she loves him so much in that moment she almost feels the sentiment come back to her—
And Orestes with gold paint burning his flesh, gold everywhere, in strange and morbid artistic detail. There are suns swirling on his head and neck and shoulders, and dust down his seal-speckled back. She smells the way it burns but he does not flinch, he does not show his pain, and when they lead them through the old streets of her city she thinks of how hard it is to die a hero’s death, nearly alone, the last of a breed.
Boudika cannot express any of those things.
There are not words for them, the way they exist within her like ghosts, those stories of her past. Her suffering is unpoetic; it is her life that has led her here, the urge to run and be and fight. She has not spoken or moved for far too long. They have remained locked in a strange stalemate, their bodies hot but cooling, and she thinks of when they first met and her heart bloomed with all the hope and dread that comes with such beautiful, terrible creatures. For a moment, she is fiercely in love with their silence, and fiercely afraid of breaking it. There is a knowing in each of them, an inevitability, and perhaps there was always an inevitability. There has been, since she was born and she stared into the sea and thought, how beautiful it is.
“Because,” and she chooses her words carefully, slowly. Her voice is quiet, as quiet as the shush, shush, shush of the waves. She cannot bear to break the silence with anything less than the most meaningful, and she cannot convey the profound in the way it is meant to be conveyed. She can only say: “It is not good to be alone.” And they are his words returned to him. His admission, shared. As she says it, she thinks of Orestes: the last prince, the cursed son, the bearer of the unbearable.
Amaroq is also the last.
But he does not have to be.
Boudika is alone.
But she does not have to be.
Her eyes hold his for another long moment. Steady.
Steady.
The white flag is raised—and she surrenders to the thing she has fought her entire life.
Boudika turns from him and, one step at a time, moves into the sea. It licks at her ankles, and her knees, and then her chest. It is cold and the salt prickles her flesh. But there is that shush, shush, shush and somewhere, she knows, there is singing. Boudika waits. She waits, an ear cocked toward him, to be guided home.
@Boudika "speaks"
Boudika stares. There is the sea and the moon and the waves that whisper to her, as they always have, shush, shush, shush. There are stars above them and the strange, otherworldly colour of his skin—he looks, she realises for the first time, like all the predatory sea-things she has ever known. He is dark above and light below, so as to be hidden by the light above or the depth beneath. He must be invisible in the water, she thinks, and as she thinks it his horn points toward her chest and her blood screams alive, alive, alive.
The mare does not know how to show him. She cannot tell him. There are no words. Just this:
There is a girl standing on a beach thinking about what it feels like to kill a soul. She is remembering choking the surf with bodies that, in death, were dusted with gold. She is thinking of when they first encountered one another on the Night Court coast, and she had thought, the only thing I fear is the sea. The truth of that is lost, sinking somewhere with all her other fears, because everything has led to this.
This.
This.
This.
Boudika finds herself frustrated with all the things words cannot say. She is incapable of putting the images in his mind that swell in hers, like so many furious mosaics. A father pushing his child into the sea as though the water is an altar for a sacrificial lamb, telling her stay, stay, and the way the Khashran storm like so many ghosts from the depths of the dark. One surges forward and he is the colour of old bone and ink-slick from the sea. His teeth are a shark’s and he smells like the sea does on a fetid day. He does not Take her, although he drops his jaws in their half-shape next to her ear and sings a song she will never forget.
A golden boy with a spear who says, “We’ll come back with our shields or on them, eh, Bondike?” And it is an old saying, an old phrase, from when their people were seafaring, conquering vikings rather than refugees on an island that did not want them. It was the first day they went to war and they came back blooded and some of them did not come back at all. The image of him is so clear, in her mind, of his eyes the colour of the sea when it is pierced by the sun, and she loves him so much in that moment she almost feels the sentiment come back to her—
And Orestes with gold paint burning his flesh, gold everywhere, in strange and morbid artistic detail. There are suns swirling on his head and neck and shoulders, and dust down his seal-speckled back. She smells the way it burns but he does not flinch, he does not show his pain, and when they lead them through the old streets of her city she thinks of how hard it is to die a hero’s death, nearly alone, the last of a breed.
Boudika cannot express any of those things.
There are not words for them, the way they exist within her like ghosts, those stories of her past. Her suffering is unpoetic; it is her life that has led her here, the urge to run and be and fight. She has not spoken or moved for far too long. They have remained locked in a strange stalemate, their bodies hot but cooling, and she thinks of when they first met and her heart bloomed with all the hope and dread that comes with such beautiful, terrible creatures. For a moment, she is fiercely in love with their silence, and fiercely afraid of breaking it. There is a knowing in each of them, an inevitability, and perhaps there was always an inevitability. There has been, since she was born and she stared into the sea and thought, how beautiful it is.
“Because,” and she chooses her words carefully, slowly. Her voice is quiet, as quiet as the shush, shush, shush of the waves. She cannot bear to break the silence with anything less than the most meaningful, and she cannot convey the profound in the way it is meant to be conveyed. She can only say: “It is not good to be alone.” And they are his words returned to him. His admission, shared. As she says it, she thinks of Orestes: the last prince, the cursed son, the bearer of the unbearable.
Amaroq is also the last.
But he does not have to be.
Boudika is alone.
But she does not have to be.
Her eyes hold his for another long moment. Steady.
Steady.
The white flag is raised—and she surrenders to the thing she has fought her entire life.
Boudika turns from him and, one step at a time, moves into the sea. It licks at her ankles, and her knees, and then her chest. It is cold and the salt prickles her flesh. But there is that shush, shush, shush and somewhere, she knows, there is singing. Boudika waits. She waits, an ear cocked toward him, to be guided home.
@Boudika "speaks"
@Amaroq
