i sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief
H
eat evaporates from my skin like a snake fleeing a flame, the archway behind disappearing around a bend. It rests, as I now do, under some old path into sacred lands that have since been levelled with the rest of the world. Perhaps I should laugh at the irony, at the reminder that all great things fall. I do not.
There is only silence as I am left to walk forward into the shade.
Miriam...she would have loved a secret adventure here. A picnic with the skeletons who do not lie in her past. Perhaps, one day, I will take her. Then I will remind her that she is godly. I will remind her that she is divine. She, who hid so much from me. She, who I left in the end.
I want to feel shame.
I want to regret.
But there is a purr inside of me. A slumbering beast that is all too content with our decision. She will not let me know the taste of failure. My sails are pulled into shadow by her command, and even when she slumbers she pushes me onward, ever onward, to a destination that will bring me...what?
Glory.
Yes.
We have promised my father glory once more on the Dumas name. I will not disappoint him. I cannot. Now, Henry is still a ghost in his armor. Beautiful and winged and serving the Halcyon as best he can, but he is not the man I once knew. His life is as much an enigma to me as my future.
I know so few things anymore, but I know that I will rattle the stars.
I know the taste of Miriam as much as I know my own name. I know her bleeding heart and woeful ways. I know this is the home she so loves to hate…
Is that what drives us now around another bend, toward a light that glows not from the sun? Rounding the corner, there is shadow and light for but a moment. It flares before my eyes and I step back, squinting.
My little monster opens a single eye, just a crack, and smiles her little smile. I beg Vespera to send her to sleep again.
”Were I ghost, what would you say?” I whisper to Dune who is so like and unlike an Ieshan. His skin is brown as theirs could be. But he does not carry himself as a noble. He is not her.
Disappointment is ash on my tongue and I scrape it away with the fruit jelly I’d had for breakfast. ”It’s awfully far away to be so alone.” Does he fear this as Henry has come to fear these dark places?
My brother cannot be alone in the dark any longer.
I pity him most of all.
A fallen giant.
An angel un-winged.
An utter disappointment.
