“in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from another world:--”
Maybe I don't know what I am anymore.
The quartz moans underneath my hooves and it makes the sound I imagine a dead star makes crashing through a cloud. Everything in me aches at the sound of it, of quartz lamenting as it turns to brick. And everything in me trembles (everything but this skin I wear over the sharp edges of me) as the glitz around us turns to loam, and roots, and rust. I can taste it all on my tongue, the earth instead of the sea, war instead of sorrow. When I swallow it the only flavor I can pull loose is moonlight-- silver, cold, ivy moonlight. I miss the storm. I miss the violence. I miss-- oh! I miss the love.
But it doesn't hurt the way it should to pull away from her; it doesn't sting. My marrow doesn't start to rot, and my eyes don't pool with saltwater sorrow. My war, my war, my war, it's all I can feel when I pull away. And when I look at her, and the nothingness in her gaze, and the nothingness in her voice, my war reaches out to comfort me in the ways love never could. It's my freedom, my godhood, my salvation all at once and I can see it now when I look at Marisol, queen of her court across the shore.
“I should have known.” My voice sounds like a stone rolling downhill. I cannot stop it because I've been thinking those words (over and over like a pulse behind my eyes) since I saw her shudder like a lamb between my jaw. And I don't touch her again as she trembles, and melts, and looks like she wants to dissolve into the wind and blow away. I do nothing but look at her like an immortal, young god who has only now discovered the new current of her soul and her tumbling, jagged thoughts. “We don't see in the same colors anymore.”
Fable's shadow runs over us as he swoops from the castle to the sea. I close my eyes beneath the blackness of his form and I inhale sharply to feel the air beneath his wings and the fury in his throat. And of course, I think, Marisol could not love me if this is how it feels to fly above the forests and the tides. And of course, this form of mine cannot see the colors beyond the horizon. Of course. Of course. Of course.
“And maybe this is all for the best.” I want to tell her I'm leaving and that I'll look at the horizon sometimes and think of her. There is that goodbye in my eyes when I look at her with the feeling of flying still tumbling inside my crooked, racing soul. This is all I can give her, this last look with a goodbye flashing deep as the sea in my eyes. It's all I can bear.
And this time I do not walk from her. I run.
I run.
I run because my heart is not my soul.
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