I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the Soul
The pleasures of Heaven are with me
and the pains of Hell are with me,
the first I graft and increase upon myself,
the latter I translate into a new tongue.
Damascus walks above him, and beneath the great black dragon the mirrors reflect opaline and strange. Vercingtorix’s world becomes nacre and shards between Damascus’s obsidian scales. The black opal, too, becomes shards of moving colour; kaleidoscoped, first, with the veins of jewel-bright colour through the dragon’s hide. Then:
The red glints become less severe and more movement; the hard edges melt until they scramble in desperate spirals, a herd of running horses where all the horses are faceless and Vercingtorix’s own face stares back from the polished plane of a single crystal. Damascus moves on and the image shatters; but he is left with his own face and a red mare running along a black cliffside and into—
into eternity, he knows.
Veni.
Vercingtorix had come here to understand the magic island whispered across Novus. Each story was different. An island of stars; an island of endless day; an island of endless winter; an island of crystals. It is the island of mirrors and crystals that Vercingtorix walks, unimpressed. It is an island of his worst nightmare that he ventures through, aimless, wondering—trying to suppress his own naturally blooming curiosity, the voice that says in wonderment, what is this, what is this—and all he can answer is sacrilege. These are pagan deities and deceitful folk, he knows.
Magic cannot be trusted—
Crystal breaks beneath his hooves. Damascus, despite his size, moves serpentine and smooth between the towering labyrinth. He stares above boundaries that Vercingtorix cannot surmount. He says, “It never ends.”
Vercingtorix believes the dragon, from where he walks beneath the beast’s chest.
Magic cannot be trusted, he thinks again, but now it is in the vindictive swirl of images along the crystal’s angled planes. He sees his mothers face, or thinks he does, and hears her own voice when she says, we women were always meant to belong to the sea; you should not hate her so—
Vercingtorix might have wandered forever, had Damascus not made a sound low in his throat that was neither a laugh nor a growl but some progeny of them both. He did not see the crystals shifting, but as they turn around a corner that seemed a dead end, they come nose-to-nose with an autumnal woman. Vercingtorix thinks he hears real laughter, and the abruptness of her appearance unsettles him.
But what unsettles him more is the reflection in the glass behind her.
His own face, staring back. Except—
Vidi.
Pinched in hatred, and disdain. He knows it is not the true contortion of his face in that moment; he knows the muscles of his cheeks and jaw are supple, unclenched, and his brow un-furrowed. But in the mirror—
In the mirror he sees a man who burns, and burns, and burns and knows, with a strange knowledge—
That is how I must have looked, when I told him (no, no, her)—
“Hello,” Vercingtorix says in surprise. And Damascus drops his long neck down, until his head—larger than the both of them—is level with the horses. He breathes out a harmless billow of cyan vapour that then dances up in the shapes of running horses that then, turn to fish.
Damascus laughs.
Vici.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable
I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world
