Legions of horses are crossing the bridge built on the bones of a creature she once knew the melody of. In each of their gazes, as Warset looks down upon them, there lives an echoing reflection of a cave carved out of the bones of a galaxy. From above them she can draw constellations out of the brightness of their wondrous looks. She can whisper melodies to the way their lashes flutter over the brightness until each face is fat with two lost and flickering stars.
Deep in her chest, below the fresh memory of bloodletting, something trembles and remembers an agony deeper and crueler than a mortal body can understand.
And with that suffering crashing through her soul, shaping it, changing it, she crosses to the city by way of the hollow rib-cage beneath the bridge.
She can taste the musk and rot on her tongue (and it tastes like a cave buried in the snow). The tips of her wings brush the convex curls of bone in whispering eulogies of a song she once sung to the creature’s forgotten name. Warset imagines she can feel that same song in her ribcage, where bone brushes muscle and muscle the blood of a star. No one remembers that song either, no one but the curse in her necklace reflecting her shining eyes in tangles of red and silver on a canvas of death.
And she does not sing, does not whisper in more than wing language, until her hooves whisper against the devious streets of the city. She remembers a galaxy that looked like this once, fields of rainbow dust and glowing kaleidoscope gazes. She remembers how it unfolded into a creature that was a dragon but also so much more than a dragon. She remembers the color of its teeth.
So she knows better, she really does, than to wander the streets with the legions of horses that do not know better. And she knows better than to meander in and out of the shops like another fly begging to be caught between the fangs of a story-telling spider. But she wanders with the horses anyway, and lets her sorrow turn to song in the weeping store (because her own sorrow is not deep enough to make her wail, and wail, and wail, until the world cracks with the coldness of it).
The stones turn to lapis, and quartz, and gold-leaf that gilds the tips of her too long hair as she walks. Marble echoes beneath her hooves as the bloody not-sun, shifts across the cave ceiling until it is joined by a twin. Her own lips tingle with the echo of the same song, the one that lives in the belly of a beast she can almost not remember (as if this body is too frail to hold the weight of such a name).
Her lips tingle, and her belly hums, and her blood races like a sparrow in a storm. But her lips do not make a single sound until she stands in the million gaze of castle doors. The door-eyes blink at her and she at them. And she knows they remember all the things she cannot name but that she can sing of.
The sound her wings make as they snap open is not unlike a bone breaking in the dead-of-night-- death followed by the weighted silence of nothing. Her gilded hair drags across the steps as she alights on the first flight of them. The eyes of the door blink again.
And so do the eyes of Warset when she turns with the sigh of a cosmic song on her lips (instead of smile) to look at the horse that has joined her out of the legions of them.
Deep in her chest, below the fresh memory of bloodletting, something trembles and remembers an agony deeper and crueler than a mortal body can understand.
And with that suffering crashing through her soul, shaping it, changing it, she crosses to the city by way of the hollow rib-cage beneath the bridge.
She can taste the musk and rot on her tongue (and it tastes like a cave buried in the snow). The tips of her wings brush the convex curls of bone in whispering eulogies of a song she once sung to the creature’s forgotten name. Warset imagines she can feel that same song in her ribcage, where bone brushes muscle and muscle the blood of a star. No one remembers that song either, no one but the curse in her necklace reflecting her shining eyes in tangles of red and silver on a canvas of death.
And she does not sing, does not whisper in more than wing language, until her hooves whisper against the devious streets of the city. She remembers a galaxy that looked like this once, fields of rainbow dust and glowing kaleidoscope gazes. She remembers how it unfolded into a creature that was a dragon but also so much more than a dragon. She remembers the color of its teeth.
So she knows better, she really does, than to wander the streets with the legions of horses that do not know better. And she knows better than to meander in and out of the shops like another fly begging to be caught between the fangs of a story-telling spider. But she wanders with the horses anyway, and lets her sorrow turn to song in the weeping store (because her own sorrow is not deep enough to make her wail, and wail, and wail, until the world cracks with the coldness of it).
The stones turn to lapis, and quartz, and gold-leaf that gilds the tips of her too long hair as she walks. Marble echoes beneath her hooves as the bloody not-sun, shifts across the cave ceiling until it is joined by a twin. Her own lips tingle with the echo of the same song, the one that lives in the belly of a beast she can almost not remember (as if this body is too frail to hold the weight of such a name).
Her lips tingle, and her belly hums, and her blood races like a sparrow in a storm. But her lips do not make a single sound until she stands in the million gaze of castle doors. The door-eyes blink at her and she at them. And she knows they remember all the things she cannot name but that she can sing of.
The sound her wings make as they snap open is not unlike a bone breaking in the dead-of-night-- death followed by the weighted silence of nothing. Her gilded hair drags across the steps as she alights on the first flight of them. The eyes of the door blink again.
And so do the eyes of Warset when she turns with the sigh of a cosmic song on her lips (instead of smile) to look at the horse that has joined her out of the legions of them.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
