Soon the blackness, choking and clawing, starts to feel like a memory. It cools like the space between the galaxies once had. Each feather, when I move my wings protectively around me, shines with frost. In the winter-chill my bones crack in the silence like echoes of stars falling into the mountains and the sea. I wonder if there will be any light, anything but blackness, in this terror.
I am still wondering, head swinging like a dragon in the darkness looking for the light, when I see him.
At first the shape of anything else but black sends my heart careening against its cage in some terrible sort of joy. I think I recognize the shape of him, down in the places where I am just a girl and not a cursed and monstrous thing. I think, I think, I think….
I think this is a memory when his eyes start to blaze like embers who burned their way through flesh and bone. This is an image of the war, of that terrible moment I cannot really recall, of my last war. A song boils the moths in my throat and eats the wings of my wasps. My spirit snarls in my chest at some nameless feeling I cannot remember the shape of (and I think perhaps it knows all the things I do not). I want to step closer and rip his eyes from his head as much as I want to dissolve into colorless shards of nothingness until I am too scattered to ever be made again.
But when he backs away and his feathers shift into a veil around the terrible shape of him I step closer. Every part of my body bellows to run, run, run but the darkness too thick is clawing to go anywhere but closer.
“Why?” I ask him without wrath, or hurt, or anything in my voice. My eyes, I am sure, blaze at him like two reflectionless dead stars in the face of a mare. It makes me think that somewhere I am fading, and weak, and almost dead.
My form waivers when I try to step closer. I shift my legs like a ghost and there is no sound to follow the moment. Wings flutter uselessly at my side and when I look at them it seems strange to see anything attached to me at all. “If I am a monster,” another memory flickers in my trapped soul and it starts to scream a warning, “are you the thing come to slay me?” I wish I knew what my soul was trying to say.
I wish I knew how to run.
But here I am just a girl staring at a god with a look that screams lamb.
I am still wondering, head swinging like a dragon in the darkness looking for the light, when I see him.
At first the shape of anything else but black sends my heart careening against its cage in some terrible sort of joy. I think I recognize the shape of him, down in the places where I am just a girl and not a cursed and monstrous thing. I think, I think, I think….
I think this is a memory when his eyes start to blaze like embers who burned their way through flesh and bone. This is an image of the war, of that terrible moment I cannot really recall, of my last war. A song boils the moths in my throat and eats the wings of my wasps. My spirit snarls in my chest at some nameless feeling I cannot remember the shape of (and I think perhaps it knows all the things I do not). I want to step closer and rip his eyes from his head as much as I want to dissolve into colorless shards of nothingness until I am too scattered to ever be made again.
But when he backs away and his feathers shift into a veil around the terrible shape of him I step closer. Every part of my body bellows to run, run, run but the darkness too thick is clawing to go anywhere but closer.
“Why?” I ask him without wrath, or hurt, or anything in my voice. My eyes, I am sure, blaze at him like two reflectionless dead stars in the face of a mare. It makes me think that somewhere I am fading, and weak, and almost dead.
My form waivers when I try to step closer. I shift my legs like a ghost and there is no sound to follow the moment. Wings flutter uselessly at my side and when I look at them it seems strange to see anything attached to me at all. “If I am a monster,” another memory flickers in my trapped soul and it starts to scream a warning, “are you the thing come to slay me?” I wish I knew what my soul was trying to say.
I wish I knew how to run.
But here I am just a girl staring at a god with a look that screams lamb.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
