vercingtorix
—« no one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone »
W
hen he had pulled my head from the water, it had been the opposite of a baptism. Vercingtorix! My name had been the crack of a whip; the vicious slap of the waves against the rocks. My name had risen above all of it, raw and desperate.
But I hadn’t felt anything.
I had stared up toward the cool, indifferent sky, gray as slate and as impassive as any other type of stone. Hard, and flat, and depthless. The light was weak and silvery; reflected from the water, from the black stone, from the turbulent too-dark sea.
Then there was the red of his hair.
And the red of his eyes.
And the way my name was a wound on his mouth.
Vericngtorix, he’d whispered against white hospital sheets. It’s time to wake up.
No, surviving the fall had not been my baptism.
It should have been my funeral.
The memory--or dream, or both--has been haunting me more than the others. It brings with it the realization that so much of what I am, of what I have become, could have been avoided. I might have died a hero, had he not pulled me from the water, from the sea that sought to drown me. The memory makes me reckless; it makes me prone to the unpredictable. This is why my mouth tastes like day-old whiskey. This is why I burn, and burn, and burn when I go to the island, seeking.
I had once been the killer of monsters; the hunter of beasts. I had seen the worst monsters imaginable by a ink-black sea, teeming with innumerable shapes as they spun out of themselves into something other, into something else. When the rumor reaches me that there is a monster in the castle, I feel as if I must find it. Everywhere I go for information contradicts where I had last been. In Terrastella, a white mare tells me the monster is a griffin with a skull clenched in its beak. In Solterra, a rogue mercenary says the monster is a beast with many terrible heads that drools like a dog. In Denocte, they say the monster is black and shapeless as a cloud of ink in water. In Delumine, they say the monster is different to every who see it.
(And I have a fear I will go, and the monster will look at me with my own eyes).
When I can no longer stand the rumors, when I must see for myself, I go to the edge of Novus--to the edge of my new world--and seek out the bridge. Damascus flies overhead with slow, steady beats of his wings. I feel like a harbringer. I bring my own monster.
Perhaps I go to find a shadow of myself.
Perhaps I go to die.
Either way, I am surprised when my long journey across the bridge reveals Elena at the end. Whatever fantastical resolve I had formed shatters with the absoluteness of a glass at a party; I still, breathless and beyond myself. The drunkenness lingers from the night before; she seems less sharp; softer. I step passed her, a telltale snap of brittle rib underfoot, and continue toward the strange city. It burns; it burns like fire from a distance, vicious and bright and too far to feel the heat. It glows as if each room is occupied; as if each window of the castle is full of life. I swear I hear laughter; I swear I hear crying; I swear I hear screams, from this city of magic.
“And why, Elena, are you here?” I inquire, glancing haphazardly over my shoulder. My smile is languid; my smile is the sap in which the fly is caught, the butterfly entombed. I did not mean to find her here.
But strangely, as my thoughts have begun to drown me, I am glad I am not alone.
(And even so, I almost ask:
do I look as if I belong before this burning city? This city that, even now, eyes me as a beast in the woods might?)
