Walking into the island is like walking into death. First, through the fog, a fog that stings just as nettles do. It burns but does not burn too terribly, just enough to irritate, just enough to cause doubt. Just enough to remind the passerby that yes, they are mortal, and the due of mortality is pain.
Lyr is familiar with such strange oddities. He ventures to the island—the island, now full of stars—because he believes he has brought something back from his travels, something he may never escape. The magic of the far North. Could the ends of the world reach Novus, too? Perhaps the end merely necessitates the falling away of many, individual pieces and—perhaps his realm, his country, is the next fragment to fall into the desolate after that is not death in a true sense, but instead the land of fallen gods.
Lyr knows, one day, this will be Novus’s fate. Perhaps it is today. He pierces through the fog with one hollow step after the next. They ring out in the darkness, and Lyr feels blind; he knows he isn’t. He knows he isn’t, because he has played in these god’s worlds before, in realms not made for men. He stares out into the vast emptiness until, at long last, stars appear.
There is a chance Lyr would have not found Ipomoea at all, if not for the star that explodes at the other stallion’s touch. The stars leap out by the thousands, forming strange and—to Lyr—incomprehensible constellations. He does not see the death of a star as a thing to fear and so, instead, walks doggedly toward it.
His mind is full of half-myths. Lyr remembers what it was like to sail a ship with crimson sails across an abyss not so different from this, across an ocean still as paned glass. The constellations—and cosmos—had danced in the water, there too, but the water teamed with the unimaginable. We are getting close now, boys, Frasier had said.
Lyr remembers what the skeleton of Atlas looked like, half-mountain and half-equine, with pitted and ridged vertebrae larger than life. His shoulders had rutted, monstrous, against the inky expanse of sky until it seemed the blades would tear it open and let the promised land spill out.
This, compared to that, does not seem so terrible. It is quite some time before Lyr reaches the dead star and the man who stands besides it. Lyr cannot tell if he marvels or simply questions. "Do you think there's a way out?" Lyr skips polite formalities to ask the question; pragmatic; detached. He cranes his neck and looks at the stars above, and then drops it to look at the stars below. The strange, astral space around them seems limitless.
And, of course, Lyr recognises the Sovereign of the Court that ruined his life. But now scarcely seems the time to mention such starved moments of history.
"Speech." || @Ipomoea
so you say you want a deathbed scene
the knowledge that comes before knowledge
