Imagine it not as a point to reach – for all ways
are equal to the compass – nor as a place,
since there is always north of north – go far enough
you’ll find yourself back where you began –
The dream is on my tongue like the recollection of my first breath.
It is something I will never remember, but instead will always know. That punishing gasp for air, straight from the womb. The way that everything transitioned from stable, sane, warm to brazen, bright, cold. I was born in winter. My first breath was punishing; all crisp, frozen air, the kind that burns to breathe.
The dream is on my tongue like the first taste of blood, the hard flavour that tastes like copper smells.
It is something that escapes me even as I grasp for it; illusionary, ephemeral. Made of smoke and mirrors. My mother is in it, I believe, and Capella. There is a sky like lead full of the eyes of dead gods; they stagnate, as corpses’ do, and I am left with the heavy weight of them in my mind. The dead never unsee. The dead never stop seeing. In the dream, I know, there is a monster.
But when I am awake and remembering, I do not remember him.
The rumour reminds me of my dream. The rumour finds me with a crow’s soft wings; it envelopes me; it consumes me. Until I am compelled to discover it. So I search. I listen to the rumours, and then:
I arrive.
The poet in me is a tactile learner; the poet in me breathes via feeling. It comes awake as I step into the meadow.
The dream is on my mind like my mother’s first story. There is a river unlike any other river in the world, that flows beneath us—“
I don’t remember the rest.
The languid heat is cooling; the sun dips, not quite setting and not yet brilliant. It hangs like a tired eye; it hangs, waiting, in a too-blue and cloudless sky. The tree, at first, seems transparent. It is glass and starlight; twilight and magic. A god-thing. It clenches my jaw. A god-thing, in my homeland, in Novus—
And what is the worth of Novus? I ask myself.
But the answer is a lash to my self-deprecating center. It’s where my sister is buried.
There are others, in the meadow, admiring the golden grass and the refracting light that passes through the twilight trunk. The tree is alive, more alive than myself, more alive than the season; the tree is eternal, and larger than anything I will ever be. The leaves dance like the North-farther-than-North, like the night sky where I sold pieces of my soul to survive. A god-thing. I am sure those surveying it at a closer distance are full of wonder. How beautiful, they must be saying, of this impossible tree, this impossible gift! I sneer.
I want to cut it down.
No.
No.
More than that.
I want to watch the damned thing burn.
Rhiaan
***STAFF EDIT
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@lyr has been awarded +1EXP!
