[P] from the landscape: a sense of scale

[Michael]

"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."

Michael wants to be a place of rest.
He knows he cannot, knows that shores built of jagged rock are nowhere for a ship to moor. But Michael wants to be sun-soaked sand and the breeze that blows off the ocean instead of the one that churns it up. He wants to be church bells and heart-ending hymns but he knows he is nothing but dirges and hands that pull bodies from the earth - dirty hands, coarse hands, hands that want to build but can only grip, tighter and tighter (as if that has ever saved anyone.)

So Michael goes to the mountain with a pen and paper. On a ridge he can see the coast: gulls keening and circling, waves rolling in from the deep, and between it and him there's a city on the hill, glinting in the late autumn sunlight, as if it had been there all along.

There is a fist around his heart when he sees it. Something that squeezes too hard and he doesn't know why. Michael pulls his scarf over his head like a hood, but it doesn't keep out the cold. Nothing ever quite keeps out the cold.

Michael wants Denocte to be a place of rest. He wants to love it like Isra loves it - and maybe he does except for the fist around his heart - but its streets are so full of music and its castle is so cool and dark and everywhere he goes there are ghosts, whistling in the empty space. Michael would not stay if Caligo herself had begged him, stretched down her night-sky hands and kissed him to sleep. He would not stay if the earth cracked open to bring him back. But he stays because Isra asked him to, and that's enough.

Another litany, a thing repeated ad nauseam - Michael is here on the mountain, staring down at Denocte, aware that there is so little rock between him and certain death - and there are footsteps at his back.

He turns only far enough to see her, scarf flapping against the gold of his cheeks. "Hey, stranger." he says to Isra. "I've been writing."