“Oh how wrong we were to think immortality meant never dying"
I do not enjoy this new desert-prince. I know I should be welcoming, or kind, or anything but a monster gnashing my teeth at him and wondering what's beneath all his gold. There is a sea in his eyes, I can see it looking at him. But it seems too bright, too shallow, like it's golden water at the desert shore instead of the deep black sea that is mine. Maybe there would be a current between us, a tide twisting together the shallow and the black, if he came to me at any other time.
Tonight in the center-of-the-maze, in my-garden-of-golden-death, in my Eden, I am breaking. I am breaking. And I know I am going to reshape all the pieces of myself. But first they are going to break into sharp arrows and shot straight into the black space between the stars.
Of course I'm going to reshape myself. I've always been a survivor.
I even tried dying once. I tried to open up my teeth and pull the salt-water in. My legs tangled in sea-weed and my belly brushed against the sand like a garden. I tried so hard to die.
Here I am. Raum is dead by way of a cowards death, and here I am. War has come and gone. It showed me this hollow hole inside myself, a hole big enough to fit the hole world in it and still not be full. It showed me that I don't need to like men with the sea in their gazes and looks that promise they know something about holes bigger than the world.
He doesn't. How could he?
“There could be a hundred paths to lead me back if I wanted to go.” The terrible part of me wants to laugh at him. Like a man with the sea in his eyes could be the one to lead me home. I need scars and gray skin. I need Eik. And I still need to shatter and explode like a dying star dreaming of being a universe in the decay of death. But I only smile a bitter look when he looks at me with a dove in his gaze. I can almost see it beating down-white wings against the concave curl of his lungs, like he's only glass covering this shell of hope that he can change anything in the world.
I can though. I know I can. I can change it all.
In the end I say nothing as he walks away. I only tilt a ear to listen to the way my pathway cracks like glass underneath his weight. Maybe I should turn it to grass, or sand, or anything less sharp.
Maybe I should....
I don't.
Fable's wind brush the hair back from the eyes when he swoops low over the maze. He's always so quick to find me when the beast I'm learning to be starts to crawl out of my mortal skin. The air tastes like salt when I inhale. Dragon wings beat against the curl of my lungs, and my spine, and everything trying to hold the dangerous parts of me inside where it can't bring the world to its knees.
I walk deeper into the maze. I can hear Orestes hooves on the stones even now. Glass and diamonds. Sharp and lovely—like me. My garden shines in the same way around me, all tips pointed to the sky as if the metals flowers know that somewhere the gods are watching. I hope they are. I hope they all are.
The center is just like I remember it. Here the flowers are golden and sprinkled with black like ash pretending to the snow. Acton My heart shatters on the name and my lips ache like I've said his name instead of thought it. Even now when I close my eyes I can feel the cool kiss of blood on my cheeks and on the ring of scars around my throat. I wish trying to save me had been one of his illusions, I wish he had let me die.
It wasn't so bad when I tried to pull the sea in.
I think I'm crying when the first pieces of me start to shoot into the sky. I might be screaming too, or maybe it's only Fable I hear keening into the night, or a wolf. More pieces of me fly off towards the moon. Around me I can feel the earth shivering like it's begging me on bent, bloody knees to change it.
And I let it. Beg, I say, beg.
My garden curls in towards me and the gold presses against my spine like a hundred small, hungry kisses. I should be bleeding, I should be dead with all this metal folding around me like a rib-cage around its heart. But I'm not and I tuck that away with another screaming howl.
Because this is how I will survive.
@orestes
