in my mouth
turning
my tongue into
rivers of blood.
W
arden.It's as familiar to him as his own name. A word anyone could speak from across the room, in a hushed whisper, and it would still ring through him like church bells. When he is called, he vibrates with the sound. Warden. He does not know how to be anything else.
Delumine is sleeping, but not in the haunted, grave-still way that it had through the winter (and the winter before, when-- well, when.) Delumine sleeps like a comfortable thing, bedded down in feather pillows, cheeks pressed into a good night's sleep. It sleeps because it can. It sleeps because it is safe.
The streets are warm with the late-spring sun that bakes his wings to his back, the dark wood of the ships and inns and small houses edged up to path a kind of deep blue where they would always look black as sea-rock or the heart of the woods. As he listens, there are birds, floating free from one broad-leafed maple to the next. He watches them: finches, a dark-faced jay-- they watch him back.
All this: so much peace, so much quiet, a sense of home that they have only just recaptured after the nightmare of the past year.
--But Andras still feels so tired.
Warden, the voice says. He turns to see a man, black on white where he's white on black. For a moment they are strange mirrors of each other. Am I interrupting anything? Or could I invite you to a walk? He doesn't look familiar, but the man calls him Warden and he has learned over time that tourists often don't show him the same kindness. It is not a Warden's job to have a face, unless it is snarling.
Andras almost laughs at him. It's a balloon in his chest. Sheer force of will makes him swallow it before it gets to the back of his tongue. "That's new." he says, in a rare moment of--largely mirthless--levity. "No." No, he doesn't want to. No, he has no good reason to refuse. No, no, no, and yet the world and its people won't leave him alone. "--But I will. Where to?" He shrinks a full inch as his muscles unclench, first from his shoulders and then down his legs and up through his neck.
Andras tries to remember to breathe.
they made you into a weapon
and told you to find peace.
