I'm surviving now while Rome burns.
We're all just trying to be holy.
We're all just trying to be holy.
A
lways, always, there has always been a curtain between life and her enjoyment of it. Between those who exist and those who could reach through the veil. There is hardly an occasion that the phoenix can recall in which she has felt so wholly a part of the masses; welcome, equal, a part of them. No - it was never something to belong to the Tonnerre girl, not when she's been so ostracized from the start. All of her odd edges just don't fit into the puzzles around her. They're too sharp or too round, too hard or too soft, too cutting or too passive. Always, always, there is always too this or that, and Moira Tonnerre is never enough. Almost - almost - she could have been (would have been perhaps) for one man, but he was too busy swallowing the sea to catch her when she plummeted into its depths.
He left her, too.
Too much, not enough, too strange, too this, too that.
It bites her like the hoarfrost licking the Arma Mountains; it is the same frost that follows her soul through time and space, through house and home, demanding its pound of flesh no matter how far she runs. A Tonnerre will always return to ice and lightning. Moira is finding she now is more Tonnerre than ever having been before. It unnerves her, it delights her and makes her nauseas.
They are monsters.
Is she one, too?
She does not know. The phoenix sometimes will tell you yes, with honey eyes dark and wide and sad, unsurmountable loss and sorrow and pain glimmering along the corners, holding back bright tears that glisten along dark lashes. Other times, the phoenix will give you a secret little smile, and she will croon and she will sing and she will beg you pray tell her how one who seeks to heal and bring life into the dying could ever be just that?
But oh, oh! She does not know.
She does not know.
The thought howls around her, it is the breath of the wind along her ear, the grapple of unease along her spine, the sighing of pines that lean in closer on her trek ever Westward. Home? Her body questions. Once, it could have been. Once, when he still stood on the cliffside and she still wondered what it was like to fly. Only one of these things is still true, and how it breaks her and overtakes her. One by one, her feet still march on, her breaths are still pale clouds before her nose and then they are gone. Gone like him. Gone like a future that could have been and would never now be. Gone like a piece of her heart.
Sometimes, Moira is alright with this, but what bothers her is that she never knew that piece was missing until it had been too late. Without ever having known she was giving so much of herself to another, she'd let it happen anyway. Always, always, Moira is always so careful about who comes and goes through the doors of her life, through the emotions of hers that become so volatile when her interest is piqued and her mind set on another being. He slipped through the cracks of that door like sand in an hourglass - it only made sense that the sand, and time, would run out.
It is a tired woman that walks into Terrastella with a tiger by her side. The ghosts that they honor are nothing to the ghosts in her eyes, but she offers smiles to those who call her way. How many of Denocte walk these streets and celebrate?
None will compare to her cocoa-maker and sweet-bread baker. She knows this is to be true.
Weary feet lead her through bodies and stalls, through groves of people that sprout up alongside great boughs of trees; through side streets that are dark and those that are merry. Before her it all passes and nothing tries to pull her in and drown her. Perhaps nothing will ever drown her again. Red skin is a stain upon the ground, a splash of color in torchlight along houses, and she makes her way to the only place she ever knew to be numb.
Like a grave, it looms up dark and foreboding. Like a parade, people stream through the doors in lines unending. Within, candles are bright and sweet smells are plenty. Moira has only a small painting - the last she's done of him - and the fragments of her heart strewn in the stars that crown him King. She has only ever been a comet streaking through another's sky - perhaps she was their one wish, perhaps she left before they could ever finish. Better to leave first than be left second.
In she goes, the gaping building mouth swallowing her. Down its throat of halls she walks and walks, making herself smaller, tucking in, in, ever inward until she is only a reflection of the flame passing them all by. Tears and laughter are a trickling stream, smoothing over heartaches and sewing together scarecrow people: they are the aftermath of a silent and screaming devastation. Moira Tonnerre, like them all, was only ever a casualty of the war. There are others, she knows, who wear more sins and stains upon their skin than most. Theirs are the memories of battle and blood, of something broken they might never be set straight as a bone could be.
Tonight, she remembers them, too.
She is a ghost among ghosts, still alive but half dead, and in her halfling state does she find another ghost. There is smoke and fog, and it could just be a trick that glints silver in the room with velvet skin, but she is there whether she is real or not. In she goes, looking at the dancing flames in silence, Neerja is but a whisper of shadow behind her. No words are needed as she stares to the flame - she does not ask questions nor look upon the golden scars Seraphina has suffered, for scars have been her longest friend from the time she could walk. They are stories and they are memories and they are simply another part of the people who are not people, the patients who she stitches together into monsters again.
So she does not speak as she settles her little painting, the small fragments of herself and of him and of dreams that have been dashed against the rocks of reality, onto the window sill so that he is as silver as the woman that remembers before she can forget.
There will be a time for words, but this is not yet that time.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: i,,, wrote you a novel. I am so glad to write with you again !
