scream when captured, arch your back
let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
It is midday.let this whole town hear your knuckles crack
The sun falls in slanted gold shafts through the canopy and then the uneven paned window. The library is busy but quiet, as if often is: here there is a small family, a mother and her sun curled up with a thin, colorful book; here there are scholars bent like the branches of old trees over a long wood table, debating the finer points of old medicine and its merits (or lack thereof) in the current age; here there many lone bodies, pulling books from the shelves, carrying stacks as tall as their necks are long, spread out on pillows to turn pages as the day peaks, then begins its slow unwinding.
And, in the middle of it all, there is Andras, trying to breathe when his lungs are full of gunpowder and rage, when his gut is just bile and lightning. It does not come easy, he finds. Breathing, and especially breathing deep, is a learned skill, and one not taught to feral boys in the woods, or Wardens, or-- him.
Andras tries: in-- hold it-- out. What comes out is much more of a sigh than an untying of his knots. He wonders if he will ever exhale and not sound like he's dying. He wonders if the atlas, laid open on the table, ever feels quite as thick as it is, or as heavy. Does each carefully rendered page feel fully realized, each hatch mark perfectly placed to convey a message: you can know where you are.
Andras wonders if he knows where he is. Delumine, sure. The library, of course. But, existentially, he's not so sure. Andras wonders when he became the sort of person that wonders when he is used to being a verb and nothing more. For some reason the discovery is more unsettling than it should be. He clenches his teeth, and sucks in a breath, and it is not deep, or calm.
'Corrdelia,' someone greets her, though he doesn't know who, and the name sounds so familiar it drags him away from the table, tucking the atlas under one wing. When he sees her--gray as a winter evening except where she's black, jewelry rattling like a bag full of bones--he is more relieved than he should be. Corrdelia, of course. Corrdelia, who doesn't ask hard questions, who is strangely comforting, he thinks, because she makes him so very uneasy. This is his natural state. He is glad to find it again.
--until he sees Hāsta, or-- "Wow." --what might be Hāsta, if he squints. He looks from her, to Corr's face, and back. There is some disconnect in him, some sound like radio static, like his brain trying to catch up to his eyes.
He drops the book. It lands with a loud crash. Andras doesn't even notice. "What happened?" he starts, "Why is-- can I-- are you okay?" He tells himself to breathe. He does not breathe at all.
andras demyan
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
