Any humanity she had discovered in this cursed coil of mortal things, and gods made from the wreckage of her cosmic religion, has long since turned to ash in the marrow hollows of her bones. It lingers there as a dead thing lingers: all smoke, and sorrow, and embers burned down to nothing but black. All that is left, caught in this chew-out form of a dead-star, is hate.
And hate, and hate, and hate.
The leopard, who does not recall the kaleidoscope of colors and all their flavors, languishes in the wrath like a duchess. She picks her teeth on the sharp bones of suffering. Each of her claws has been whittled to a diamond hard point on the metallic agony of a star begging for a blackhole. And in the silence, where the songs of war and peace cannot survive, she drowns out every memory, every whisper, every drop of music with hunger.
But it is the girl, this fresh-faced mortal, caught between the soul of a leopard and the gravitational pull of a star that must be noted for the sorrowful tang of her fragile hate. The girl does not recall, not fully at least, the expanse of a dragon’s wings on the eve of the cosmic making. She does not remember the spiced and fermented taste of a war-song echoing in her chest like a stone in a glass bell. Her feathers might recall the sultry feel of comet sand between their roots and their petals but the girl only knows the feel of sea salt and storm winds.
And what she knows, what she remembers, is tainted by the ice of winter and the blackness that does not abate even when she opens her eyes. If there is beauty in mortality, in being as fleeting as a butterfly on the edge of its cracked open chrysalis, she thinks it is nothing more than a pretty monarch lie.
It’s not the monarch lies, or the dragons on the eve of war, or the cymbals of peace ringing across the corvus constellation, she is thinking of when she hears a whisper through her frail bellow of suffering.
It is not wrath on her wasp-stung lips when they stretch and break against her teeth. But is neither a star snarl, a girl cry, or a leopard growl, that breaks up the drip, drip, drip of the blood falling like dead-wishes from her jugular.
The sound she makes, the one that not a single one of her souls can hold alone, is agony. Agony and nothing else. She is not brave enough to sound like hope or prayer (because what god listens to a cast out star but the devils and their children). She is not brave enough to think about sounding like anything at all.
Her voice, her bleating yell, is the aftermath of song: discordant notes strung together in a way that is harsh as salt in a wound. The sound of her discord carries in it the red sandstone of the desert, the black gap-jaws of comets, the sweetness of sand bloated in the blood of a wine glass. And it vibrates through her lips as much as it vibrates from the wound at her jugular and the holes in her wings.
“Caine.” She stutters, or at least she thinks she does, in those same discordant notes that feel like stones piled up on her tongue. Each alone is heavy enough to drag her to the bottom of the sea. And together, each note stitched to the last, they are heavy enough to sink in the belly of her triad-soul.
When she lifts her neck to howl in the darkness, her skin stretches veneer thin across her atrophied muscles. And it’s so hard, she knows it’ll be so hard, to look at the glory of her form and pray to the legend of a constellation. Greed has eaten her right up until all that’s left is little more than bits of shell, and dust, and quicksilver.
She is no girl now, no leopard, no star with vitality in her blood. She is. She is. She is. Oh, she does not know what she is.
Her nose rises again into the never-ending blackness so that the blood at her jugular grows in it a pale and sickle moon. And she still does not know what she has become when the words, “end me”, stumble out in jigsaw notes of music.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s only hate that can send a dead-star tumbling through the mountain with nothing more than a hum of death. And maybe it’s that same hate that feels only the discord and darkness in the trembling of the mountain and nothing of justice smelted down to creation.
She had meant to say save me. Or at least, in the dappled shine of her sickle-moon-neck, she had thought that was what a girl was supposed to say.
And hate, and hate, and hate.
The leopard, who does not recall the kaleidoscope of colors and all their flavors, languishes in the wrath like a duchess. She picks her teeth on the sharp bones of suffering. Each of her claws has been whittled to a diamond hard point on the metallic agony of a star begging for a blackhole. And in the silence, where the songs of war and peace cannot survive, she drowns out every memory, every whisper, every drop of music with hunger.
But it is the girl, this fresh-faced mortal, caught between the soul of a leopard and the gravitational pull of a star that must be noted for the sorrowful tang of her fragile hate. The girl does not recall, not fully at least, the expanse of a dragon’s wings on the eve of the cosmic making. She does not remember the spiced and fermented taste of a war-song echoing in her chest like a stone in a glass bell. Her feathers might recall the sultry feel of comet sand between their roots and their petals but the girl only knows the feel of sea salt and storm winds.
And what she knows, what she remembers, is tainted by the ice of winter and the blackness that does not abate even when she opens her eyes. If there is beauty in mortality, in being as fleeting as a butterfly on the edge of its cracked open chrysalis, she thinks it is nothing more than a pretty monarch lie.
It’s not the monarch lies, or the dragons on the eve of war, or the cymbals of peace ringing across the corvus constellation, she is thinking of when she hears a whisper through her frail bellow of suffering.
It is not wrath on her wasp-stung lips when they stretch and break against her teeth. But is neither a star snarl, a girl cry, or a leopard growl, that breaks up the drip, drip, drip of the blood falling like dead-wishes from her jugular.
The sound she makes, the one that not a single one of her souls can hold alone, is agony. Agony and nothing else. She is not brave enough to sound like hope or prayer (because what god listens to a cast out star but the devils and their children). She is not brave enough to think about sounding like anything at all.
Her voice, her bleating yell, is the aftermath of song: discordant notes strung together in a way that is harsh as salt in a wound. The sound of her discord carries in it the red sandstone of the desert, the black gap-jaws of comets, the sweetness of sand bloated in the blood of a wine glass. And it vibrates through her lips as much as it vibrates from the wound at her jugular and the holes in her wings.
“Caine.” She stutters, or at least she thinks she does, in those same discordant notes that feel like stones piled up on her tongue. Each alone is heavy enough to drag her to the bottom of the sea. And together, each note stitched to the last, they are heavy enough to sink in the belly of her triad-soul.
When she lifts her neck to howl in the darkness, her skin stretches veneer thin across her atrophied muscles. And it’s so hard, she knows it’ll be so hard, to look at the glory of her form and pray to the legend of a constellation. Greed has eaten her right up until all that’s left is little more than bits of shell, and dust, and quicksilver.
She is no girl now, no leopard, no star with vitality in her blood. She is. She is. She is. Oh, she does not know what she is.
Her nose rises again into the never-ending blackness so that the blood at her jugular grows in it a pale and sickle moon. And she still does not know what she has become when the words, “end me”, stumble out in jigsaw notes of music.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s only hate that can send a dead-star tumbling through the mountain with nothing more than a hum of death. And maybe it’s that same hate that feels only the discord and darkness in the trembling of the mountain and nothing of justice smelted down to creation.
She had meant to say save me. Or at least, in the dappled shine of her sickle-moon-neck, she had thought that was what a girl was supposed to say.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
