WHAT IF DEATH IS JUST ANOTHER
PAIR OF HANDCUFFS
PAIR OF HANDCUFFS
No sooner does Sterling speak than a quail erupts from the shallows of the lake, lurching into the fog with a shrill cry. Beside him, the unicorn startles at the sound, and Sterling feels himself tense in turn, his skin rippling. Then, for a heartbeat, there is silence again, thick and heavy, broken only by the distant whump, whump, whump of the quail’s wingbeats as it climbs the sky.
Sterling tracks its progress, something in his chest winding in taut. It seems like an omen, somehow: this bird, this lake, this stillness hovering over the world, the way the silence touches everything except for him. He has always done the wrong thing, he thinks, and he doesn’t understand it, how he can be so sure of himself and yet such a disappointment to others, how every gamble he takes always seems to end in loss.
But the unicorn says Life, her voice scarcely more than a breath of wind to stir the soft green tangle of the willow leaves. She turns to him, her shoulder ghosting against his, and Sterling almost feels bashful, like a boy caught handling a fine piece of china that his mother warned him not to touch (though the unicorn seems far from fragile, and the touch was not his own). She breathes his scent, and he breathes hers, dark earth and rugged mountains, blistering deserts and oceans impossibly deep, sunlight and the black vacuum between the stars.
She is not from here, he thinks, but she is not like him, either, come to Denocte by of way someplace else. She seems at once to be from everywhere, and from no real place at all.
But this is absurd, and Sterling shakes the thought aside, turning his attention instead to the question she has posed him, the same question he had asked. What does he see? He looks again at the deathly stillness of the lake, the dull gray sky. “Endings,” he says, remembering the wide golden plains of Austellus, the capital city with its palace built of white stone, the careless luxury of home and family and privilege. “But maybe beginnings, too.”
He turns back to the unicorn, to her measuring eye. “Do you believe it’s possible to start over?” he asks her. “To cut ties with the past, and become someone new?”
Sterling tracks its progress, something in his chest winding in taut. It seems like an omen, somehow: this bird, this lake, this stillness hovering over the world, the way the silence touches everything except for him. He has always done the wrong thing, he thinks, and he doesn’t understand it, how he can be so sure of himself and yet such a disappointment to others, how every gamble he takes always seems to end in loss.
But the unicorn says Life, her voice scarcely more than a breath of wind to stir the soft green tangle of the willow leaves. She turns to him, her shoulder ghosting against his, and Sterling almost feels bashful, like a boy caught handling a fine piece of china that his mother warned him not to touch (though the unicorn seems far from fragile, and the touch was not his own). She breathes his scent, and he breathes hers, dark earth and rugged mountains, blistering deserts and oceans impossibly deep, sunlight and the black vacuum between the stars.
She is not from here, he thinks, but she is not like him, either, come to Denocte by of way someplace else. She seems at once to be from everywhere, and from no real place at all.
But this is absurd, and Sterling shakes the thought aside, turning his attention instead to the question she has posed him, the same question he had asked. What does he see? He looks again at the deathly stillness of the lake, the dull gray sky. “Endings,” he says, remembering the wide golden plains of Austellus, the capital city with its palace built of white stone, the careless luxury of home and family and privilege. “But maybe beginnings, too.”
He turns back to the unicorn, to her measuring eye. “Do you believe it’s possible to start over?” he asks her. “To cut ties with the past, and become someone new?”
AND MAYBE GOD IS JUST A COP
THAT WE CAN FAST TALK
THAT WE CAN FAST TALK
@Thana <3
