Isra with ten promises
“Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.”
“Then it floats away like a paper boat, taken from her by the water licking at her ankles.”
P
erhaps there was a time, once long ago with a skin of sunshine instead of loam, I did not intimately know the way a skull still gleams white in the almost-blackness. If there was I have forgotten it by route of chains, and winter-fire, and evil. Now I only feel a grim understanding blossom up in my soul at the sight of tomb, after tomb, after lonely bones, rising out of darkness. The petals of it feather against my soul like wings caught in a breeze that comes from somewhere terrible buried deep in the cracks of me. I can feel them. Like kisses.
As we walk on, I do not look at the king who does not smell like the sea anymore. My focus is a sharp, hard living thing on the bones and the tombs (coated in dust without the gleam of well loved things). Each step kiss that furious thing in my cracked, brittle soul. I wonder how he can walk among the forgotten dead, and tell me a story of warriors trapped in this blackness for years, and not feel rage devouring the last smooth edges of his heart.
He smiles, sad and softly golden, and my teeth ache because I want to snarl, and snarl, and roar like a lion among all this forgotten death.
“Strange,” I echo him and my voice is a trembling arrow in a storm. “is not the word I would have chosen for this.” The earth trembles with me as if it's only a dying thing leaking secrets instead of sorrow. I do not flinch as a rock tumbles down from the ceiling between us.
And I do not smile as every pile of dust, and decay, and agony turns to flowers heavy with diamond-dust instead of pollen. I wish I could give them more than flowers, these piles of bones with no stories left to remember them by but this endless maze of suffering.
I wonder if I will ever smile, really smile, again.
How many times will I need to shred myself to save the world? How many times will my soul crack and bleed?
“Where are the soldiers now?” I will find them and beg them for forgiveness for all those mortals that watched their world fall to pieces and did nothing to stop it. And then I will find the gods that did not care to save them. I will devour their idols in stone and turn their mountains into meadows thick with ruby flowers.
My bones ache and bellow at me to turn back, turn back, turn back. There are a million more things in this darkness that I know will break and shatter the last unbroken bits of me. I want to run back to the church-tree and listen to the glass and stone sing a song to me in a autumn storm. I want Eik, and my daughters, and Fable curling his wings around us like shelter given flesh and form. I want, I want, I want--
To raise this Zolin from his grave and pluck his bones loose like weeds from a garden.
Brine leaks from my pores like tears when I finally turn back to Orestes and his lion with their eyes on me like blades I am too hard to feel. My lungs rasp as if I am drowning in this sentient black air so far from the sea. I wonder if I should lie to him.
“Sometimes I hate the sea.” The truth rings like steel on my lips. Another truth for this golden king who smiles and dreams of things I cannot believe in anymore. And I wonder if he will be cut by the blade or learn to brandish one of his own.
@Orestes | "speaks" | notes: <3
