“Truth," said a traveller, “Is a breath, a wind, a shadow, a phantom; long have I pursued it, but never have I touched the hem of its garment.”
T
he truth, she had said, can be monstrous. Boudika’s own words haunt her on a spring day that is trying very hard to be something else. It is midmorning, with rain coming down not in a torrent but a steady, miserable drizzle. The streets of Denocte are largely abandoned due to the weather, waterlogged with puddles from the night’s heavier storm. The chill in the air is more reminiscent of winter than spring, but Boudika does not mind. In fact, the cold is almost welcoming—she is glad she has the streets to herself. The absence of Denocte’s busy citizens leaves the city strangely quiet, and veiled in fog; the rain makes the middle-distance impossible to see, and bleeds the world around her of color.
The atmosphere of Denocte promises to be hiding secrets. It promises to be mysterious, cryptic, in the way that it changes her most vibrant color to shades of burgundy. She is almost someone else, despite not having changed shape. Through the fog, she watches a feral cat cross the street. She cannot hear the sea, but knows the storm was brought in by it; the distance does not seem too great and she remains in Denocte, wandering.
Boudika listens to shopkeepers and residents; the smell of woodsmoke from chimneys, to keep the lingering chill at bay. The city of Denocte has always been a place she has loved, fiercely; and it has always been a place she had never quite belonged. Only now does Boudika begin to accept that fact; that she is not so unalike the feral cat, slinking along the corners of the alleyways, a visitor, an observer. Her movements are slow and leonine; they lack the ferocity, the energy, she otherwise possesses by the sea.
She lifts her head, as if for some type of prayer. The rain kisses down her nose and mouth; she closes her eyes against the soft pinpricks.
When she lowers her face from the caress of the sky, the truth finds her.
It comes, unasked for and unbidden, in the shape of a little girl.
A girl with too-blue eyes, eyes that eat up all the gray light of the rain and remind it that, ultimately, it belongs to the sky. Eyes like a clear, summertime day or a cool winter afternoon. Between them sits a heart, but when she turns as if to continue on, a crescent moon flashes on her shoulder.
"Wait." Boudika’s voice cracks.
(Why, lately, is her voice always cracking? Why is it, in these matters of the heart, she no longer sounds like herself?)
When the truth finds her, when it comes, it is a levee breaking. It is a flood. It is a natural disaster.
And she is left asking if a lie could have been better.
If a lie could have been more merciful.
"Wait, please." Her smile does not feel as if it belongs to her. It is uncertain, and shaky, and too thin. Her voice, too, seems too thin. "I know your parents. I'm friends with them. Please--tell me, how is your father? You look so much alike."
“If I loved him, if I kept him, my child, my daughter, would be his, but she isn’t," Elena had said.
Elena had said it cooly; a hard fact.
But Boudika can only see Tenebrae.
