THINGS FALL APART; THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD
Boudika was wrong.
A god sounds nothing like chaos. She thinks again that they must be the antithesis of the noise; their voice must be the tremble of everything right before it breaks. Boudika would pray, if she had the words, if she had the thoughts, as the magic island begins to rot and she hears the way a god would speak in the abrupt, silent anarchy right before the detonation.
The island’s disintegration is a fever dream. It is fire, brimstone, saltwater and falling sky. It is a writhing, twisting anger; a Timelessness that wilts, and decays, and grows again. The relic exists as a planet would; it is the center of all gravity; the focus of all force. The noise fills her ears, her mind, and she is nothing but an extension of the anarchy. Boudika is a pawn; a creature of happenstance, and fate.
The center cannot hold. Neither can she.
The utter knowledge of her own mortality is hard and bounding in her chest.
Boudika leaps over an opening rift, the sand sucking at her feet. She nearly touches a hanging gold leaf where it rests, as though unaffected by all the chaos. At the last moment, Boudika twists away, as the leaf were poisonous. The only answer to movement is more movement, as the shards of sky strike her flesh and open small cuts across her brow, her flank, her withers—
She thinks of—
—breaking the surface of the water and gasping for air—
Her body is—
Lunging over another rift, her hindquarters nearly sliding into it. Only sheer determination allows her to rise above the toppling, sinking, draining sand. Move—
She thinks of—
—the first time a Khashran gnashed it’s teeth against her flank and she turned, trident caught in the flesh of the dead, weaponless and alone. She was going to die—and then, and then Vercingtorix struck out with a fishing spear and the Khashran spat blood in her face—
There is a snake-thing.
A magic snake-thing, growing in front of her. Writhing and furious. A dying god-thing. It faces the onslaught of the remaining islanders; and is it not already gone? Is it not as ephemeral as the rest of them? Boudika does not know what is real anymore.
But Boudika is not afraid. She feels the weight of her trident. She lopes forward, gaining momentum—
—her father’s funeral pyre. The smell of burnt flesh and charred wood. His full dress uniform is nearly indistinguishable in the smoke and flame, but it exists, a ghostly carcass of steel and gold that is red, red, red within the flames. A guidon snaps in the cliff-wind and somewhere, somewhere, a Khashran is keening out at sea—
All destruction smells the same.
Sun-hot, seething. There is something sweet in the crushed trees.
Fear is like copper.
Always like copper.
What favour would you ask a god?
There is another quicksand pit. She cannot see through the sky that continues to fall, sun-bright and glistening. Sweat drips into her eyes; or does it drip from them, salt-tears, stinging at the cuts on her face? The shattering world is reflected in a thousand of those shards and everything is colour, and noise, and the sharp sting of so many bees. Boudika leaps over the rift, and her trident is raised now toward the almost-snake, the rotting magic, the guardian of the gift. The tip glistens gold. It cuts through the falling shards, arrow-sharp and arrow-straight, and Boudika’s body mimics its line of flight. Everything, or nothing.
Somewhere she thinks a god must be talking.
Beyond the chaos, perhaps on some hidden cove untouched by the falling magic.
Perhaps Tempus sits waiting for one of them.
She cannot imagine his face; or at least she thinks she can’t, and then in her mind it becomes the face of every man she’s ever loved.
Yes. Somewhere he is watching, he is asking, he is laughing—
Is it worth it?
Is my favour worth it?
And in their finite mortality they reach toward the immortal, the timeless, grappling through magic and monsters and the essence of a fever dream, and Boudika strains for the unobtainable, for the opportunity to turn it all back to a simpler time.
She waits. Endlessly—the seconds stretch on as if they are eternity, that trident poised, her supple body lunging.
She reaches.
Somewhere there must be a quiet beach.
And the gods must be holding their breath.
Boudika chooses option two if this isn't too late... it's 12:34 o:
