i know i am deathless
i know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass
Vercingtorix learned otherness from the sea.
He had learned how to recognise the transient shape; the glinting of light against the surface, as if it could not truly penetrate. The whisper, the fury, the scorn, the softness. He had learned how waves could caress; and he learned just how easily, and willingly, they could kill. The otherness, however, had been in all and none of these things; mostly, he thinks now, he recognised it in the apathy.
Those beyond the plain of men belonged to a certain sect of indifference; to quiet solitude; to emotionless retrospection. Black holes, stars, galaxies; the seas, and forests, and plains.
And sometimes, very rarely, men; he had met more touched by otherness in Novus than anywhere else in his life. The Khashran of Oresziah had had it, of course—but here it shows itself in milder forms, in those touched by something beyond his comprehension, by—
Well, in Erasmus, it is the wolf’s smile that betrays him; but not only the wolf’s smile. The book of poisons; the foliage that drifts, haphazard, around them. The veil of silence surrounding the stallion, as a veil of silence always surrounds those hunting. The conversation; passive and yet barbed; discrete and all too pointed. The questions. The darkness, too, betrays him as a man who belongs not to the civilised halls of trees but to the rotten, torrid undergrowth of the forest; the place where things crawled and fought and lived and died, all in an endless circle.
So did he. The phrase itself does not make much sense to Vercingtorix; but the tone does, like confirmation.
Then, the gold-veined stallion has pushed past him with the same casualness of life-long friends. Vercingtorix smiles, now; a wolfish kind of smile that mirrors what Erasmus’s had been, only moments ago.
And what is the story of us all? Where do you begin, then?
Vercingtorix does not rush to answer. If the man were someone else, he might have feigned momentary disinterest; he might have browsed the books before him, or admired the greenery above and beneath. But Vercingtorix is not playing that game, the one of push and pull, of deceit and honesty. No. Vercingtorix is hunting; and so is Erasmus.
So the golden stallion eyes the other with a certain, pointed directness; they are both lions in a world of lambs, and Vercingtorix knows it from a simple glance.
“With me,” Vercingtorix says, boldly. Vercingtorix says, like a God.
There is a nearly metallic quality to his eyes; something void of true sentiment. Hard-edged; a blade’s honed edge. The grin that twitches, then, at Vercingtorix’s lips mirrors the other man’s if not physically, then in essence.
Start, he seems to say, with me.
I know how the story begins.
It is by the sea, when the first wretched man gasps at the border of water and land. It is by the sea, where the seagulls spiral and the dead things rot and the waves crash, and crash, and crash. It is in the sweet ecstasy between flesh and the heart that beats, beats, beats so loud in the ears of the running deer.
It begins with too wicked men looking at poisons, courting knowledge.
Or perhaps Vercingtorix thinks. This is the end.
But that is not what he says aloud. No. Instead, Vercingtorix adds, looking after Erasmus: "At least, if you would like it to be the beginning of something."
"Speech" || @Erasmus
i know i shall not pass like a child's curlicue cut with a burnt stick at night. i know i am august, i do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or to be understood, i see that the elementary laws never apologise.
