[P] twice-bitten

[Nicnevin]

BEDE WROTE HOW A SPARROW FLEW
from dark through a lighted meadhall into dark again. / Tiny wing of your lungs - each beat a breath.

I don’t know how I expect him to react to my words. I think that they sound very foolish, but I do mean them – I am simply not sure that their sincerity matters. At any rate, his eyes are not on me, and that prevents my mortification from overwhelming me entirely. In fact – I look away from him, tracing his stare down, down, down until I find the strange, horned thing that he is watching. I recognize it, and, although I cannot see the gleam of my own blood on its horn from this distance, I know that it is there.

When he speaks, his voice is distant. Airy. I almost miss it – but my head snaps up, and my eyes swivel to stare at him again.
 
They do not speak your language, he says, They speak the language of this earth, only, without words. and they share secrets only with one another.

Your language. Your language. The wind is reduced to a distant echo. For a moment, I am simply frozen in place, rolling his words around inside of my head. He still isn’t looking at me; he is looking at the creature that gored me as it grazes amiably in the shallow valley below. I tilt my head at him, slowly, and, when his gaze does returns to me, he might find that I have the look of someone hovering on the verge of some great precipice, some understanding – about to fall off the edge and crash on the jagged rocks below. Whatever man this is, or boy this is, or creature this is (it is so hard to say; my understanding of this world is so fragile), I am abruptly sure that he is not a newborn soul.

And his stare - his stare is a question that I don’t know the answer to.

“You’re right,” I say, slowly, because of course he is, “but I forget, sometimes.” Maybe often, now. I think that I forget myself and my own limitations more with each passing life; I become a little bit less of the creature that I am meant to be and a bit more of a composition of all the parts of all the other lives I have lived. I am myself, but sometimes I forget what it means to be myself.

But I have never been one of them. Their language is unknown and unknowable to me; even if I could recall all the strange languages that I have known, the ones that my clumsy tongue and teeth can no longer pronounce, I could never speak to them. There is a gaping chasm between us, and wanting to bridge it is not enough to bring me to the other side.

“But you…” I say, suddenly, my head still cocked at that half-angle, like a dog, “do you speak their language?” I wonder. I don’t know, but he speaks so strangely that I think he might. If I had to describe it like anything, I would say that he resembles those strange, ancient spirit-things that live in the deepest, darkest depths of the Gold. We avoid them, most often, on principle; they are dangerous, and they will lead you astray if you let them.

Sometimes they would come to us, clothed in horseflesh. We could tell – we could always tell –, but we never spoke a word of it, because it was too dangerous to let them know that we knew. Sometimes they would lead people out into the woods, guised as a pretty girl with bright eyes or a handsome, virtuous young gentleman; sometimes the people that they lured out would come back, but they would return changed, as though they were another person entirely, save for the character of their skin. Sometimes they would never return at all.

They met, I know, a horrible fate. The priestesses call it an undeath. I try my best not to think of it.

Now, this man, this thing – I do not know what he is, but I do know that we are not the same. That always begs caution, but I have not been very cautious lately.

As my mind stammers and stumbles over my own intentions, I see his lips curve up and into a grin. It is not a dangerous smile, nor a smile-that-is-not-a-smile, which I would have expected; no, the gesture is bizarrely genuine. When he speaks, it draws me out of my troubled ramblings. You are not…from here, are you?

What he says, I think, is: you aren’t from this prairie, are you?

What he means, I know, is: you aren’t from this land (or world, maybe; I am not so sure of where Novus is, compared to my home), are you?

I consider, for a moment. Even hesitate. I should not speak too much of the Gold to outsiders, especially strange ones; we are in danger enough without more of them knowing of it than do already. The priestesses told me that much, as though I did not know; so long as they fail to understand the nature of death and rebirth, they will always pursue their misguided ambitions of immortality. I might have questioned this, in my first life, but, at the time, I did not understand death, either – I grieved without understanding.

Now, I am far past that.

But – if I speak to this man-boy-creature, and I tell him the truth of things, I have the strange feeling that he might understand it. Maybe it is the way that his soul is too big for his skin; how it leaks out his edges.

(Maybe it is telling a fox about a henhouse.)

“No, I’m not,” I say, slowly. “I’m from a land far, far away from here – a forest where nothing changes, where nothing that dies stays dead forever.” Of course – I think that is everywhere. I cannot imagine a death that is permanent, a black and empty void that could swallow you up forever. Where would you go? I cannot accept that your soul might simply end, be snuffed out like the flaming end of a candle. (Even a flame has a soul, after all.)

I look at him. I have not forgotten his words – how he called our language mine, not his. “And you…you aren’t from here either, are you?”

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@Erasmus || !!! 

"Speech!" 

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