[P] I know beginnings

[Marisol]

"i know endings too,
and life-in-death,
and something else
I'd rather not recall
just now."

Marisol’s heart is pounding in her throat, and with every painful heartbeat it breaks more and more and more until she cannot feel anything but pangs of cold and numbness. All the little, sharp-edged pieces are scattered around her chest and the cage of her now-weak ribs: they are smaller, harsher and more invisible than glass, and with every passing breath a new shard lodges itself in her lungs.

She can smell her own blood. It is rife on her breath as she gasps for cold air, flooding out of her as easily as funeral tears. It smells wrong. Sour. Rotten. Like someone has put a tap into the vein of a dead thing instead of a maple tree. 

Or maybe it’s just the weakness inherently attached to the idea of it—bleeding, physically or otherwise—that rubs her the wrong way. Maybe it is not the smell of that spoiled blood, but the accompanying persistent, unforgivable reminder of vulnerability that makes Mari curl her lip and and clench her jaw.

Everything in her shakes with the effort of staying together. The threads that knot one bone to the next are falling apart, crumbling to dust. Her muscles are unspooling like ribbons. The longer she stands here, in this place that is not home, meeting the eyes of someone she cannot love, the weaker she feels, and then there is a blink and a swirling, roaring, overwhelming movement, like the earth is rotating at twice the right speed—

And then it stops.

Marisol’s head is chiming. Her teeth are knocking together. There is no light left but the faint blue glow of Isra’s scales, calling to her like the bottom of the ocean does: soft and dark and so, so deep.

The world is quiet now. All of it is in the raw. Whoever was in charge of making it look pretty (was it them?) has failed; everything has been stripped down to the bare essentials. Rock. Light.

Blood. Body. 

There is nothing left but the hard, insistent pound of her heart; the sound of Isra’s voice ringing through the air like a bell; and the rush of blood, identical to the sound of waves on the cliffs tumbling over one another, crashing and dying and rising again. Marisol thinks:

I am going to crash and die and rise again.

Marisol thinks: 

I have no other choice.

She swallows and tastes blood, tastes iron, tastes salt. Tastes dying. Tastes the ocean, when she was dragged down into it and forgot how to breathe, when the world shrank down to a pinpoint: a bloodthirsty contracted pupil. A set of sharp teeth. A sharp, fearful feeling between sleeping and really sleeping, forever. 

It is a pinpoint that she realizes, with a horrible start, Isra doesn’t know about. This pinpoint is the one thing in the world Marisol knows more about than she does.  (And duty, maybe.) (The Commander is becoming bitter once again.)

Isra is speaking. She must be. Her lips are moving.  Marisol watches carefully, trying to make it out, but they are too far apart; she can’t hear whatever it is the god-queen is saying. Can’t read the movements of her lips. A chasm is forming (or is deepening) between them. When Mari looks down, she thinks she might throw up.

For the first time in her life she is afraid of heights. For the first time in her life she has completely forgotten she even has wings.

“Isra.” Marisol says it in a voice that breaks and breaks again. She says it with eyes that are brimming with tears and a mouth that is suddenly dried out by salt. She says it not like a queen, or a warrior, or a Commander or even a person but like an animal: a raw, keening, wanting sound shattered by the weight of wanting and the pull of an apology she doesn’t understand how to word. 

She says it like she is still in love. Breaking or broken or both: “Isra, I still love—“

But Isra is gone. Without a goodbye. Without a kiss, a touch, a nod, she is gone, not walking but running, fleeing a thing Marisol, in stark comparison, is still trying to catch and snap the neck of.

Isra is gone. Without an explanation, an address, a message of forgiveness. Isra is gone and she has left nothing. 

Marisol’s heart has turned to dust. She is breathing it in, though she doesn’t want to, because there is no other way.

Isra is gone. You did not ever love me, the Commander realizes. She hopes dazedly that the sound of her sudden understanding will follow the queen, will reach her and strangle her, wherever she is going.

And then Marisol is gone, too.

“Speaking.”

credits