young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand-in-hand, / into the bomb crater.
will change them, they step, hand-in-hand, / into the bomb crater.
I was barely taller than the gold lapel of my father's hunting cloak when I caught and killed my first teryr.
The lack of iridescence in the beast's dagger-length tail feathers meant it was no older than an adolescent; the gleaming black pearls of its eyes were the size of my mother's best dessert plate. I remember how it had felt, sending that arrow soaring into its breast. The arrow had been made of dogwood; scraped and oiled and fletched by the best craftsman in Solterra, topped with a head of obsidian. It was a wicked arrow, a killing arrow.
I had saved it to crown the young teryr's heart.
I remember the weight of my father's head on my shoulder, the smell of the almonds he rubbed every morning into his hair, when he nosed proudly at my bloodstained cheek. The teryr had scratched three long gashes into my face, just below my eye, as it had thrashed in the sand after my first arrow had snagged it out of the sky like plucking a star.
I remember the sweet ache in my bones when I had bared my throat to the moon and screamed my victory to the sleeping kingdom of blood and sand and savagery. My father's wards had laughed, sweat pouring down all of our faces. Prince Adonai! I had turned and bowed, the very action a jest, my smile of the kind that hurt. Eminence of the Gods!
I have replayed this memory a hundred thousand times. If it was written, its pages would be worn down to papyrus shreds, dogeared to an honorable death. It had kept me company as I collected my father's ashes from his funeral pyre. It had visited me like a lover when I had been knocked into a sleep that, instead of ending, had left its shoes at the door and turned me into a caged canary.
I like to imagine that my first word, when I chewed through the bars of that cage, (when I awoke), was: “how long?”
And I like to imagine, that the nurse who had fallen out of her seat in shock at my voice, had risen with this answer on her breath: “Three days, my prince. You were out three days.”
-----
If Vercingtorix had asked it of me — what changed? — I would have plucked the memory of the teryr out of my head to place in his grasp. I would look up at him, a saint-pretender painted all in gold, and say:
Somewhere in my three month sleep, that cheering boy turned into metaphor and left me behind. I reach for him and he sidesteps me as if I were a ghost; perhaps less. I watch as he walks over to the dead teryr, places a kiss on its beak, rips his obsidian-tipped arrow out of its chest. He whispers, “I thank you for your sacrifice,” and I watch as brilliant exultation sharpens his eyes of dreaming silver.
“May you fly free beneath Solis's sun.”
-----
“What one views as apathy, another understands as composure.” He settles into the surf besides me; I turn and study his sun-drenched profile, the rigidity that refuses to leave his shoulders even when his eyes close, when his pulse steadies.
“I am not difficult to impress.” There is a white shell lying on its back between us. I pick it up, dust off the sand, raise it to catch the light. “Is that true?” I trace the perfect grooves pressed into the scallop's back in ever tightening circles. “That pleases me. Remain that way—” I say, the shell falling back to the sea, “—and soon, I think I will believe you.”
When I laugh again, I conduct it as brightly as if the last one hadn't been speared through by a fit of blood-choked coughs. As if everything to me, the exact moment it ends, is already forgotten.
It is a maddening way to live; he will tire of it soon.
I am tired of myself.
-----
“Damascus doesn’t mind,” he promises. I nod, intrigued by this bond that exists between them. What does it feel like? I would like to feel it for myself. Can he see everything his dragon sees? If he were mine, I would beg him to fly over all the land, every sunrise a different shore, and I would lay back in the sand and give myself over to his sight.
May you fly free beneath Solis's sun.
I lean back to stare mutely at the red horizon, my wings keeping me propped just above the water. My hair is long enough to skim the surf now, longer than I have ever allowed it to grow. I turn to him. “Damascus is more comfortable than a caravan,” I muse, reaching over to examine a stray lock of his hair.
I say no more about the oasis, about my need to see him again, and again, and again. I know he understands. (I hope he understands.) That to demonstrate such a need is something — the old me — the dead me — would compare to a knife between my ribs, placed there myself. My princely pride haunts me like a banshee; I allow it to. It is said that pride is a man's last refuge, both ruin and salvation. I have been prideful since childhood. As the first prince, I had thought of it as my right. Yet now, my older self wonders: what had I been chased from?
What had I been afraid of?
Instead of answering this, I turn to Vercingtorix, more interested in exorcising his demons than my own. (That old reliable princely pride.) I think of his scars. “Tell me of your mother. Was she kind?”
Is it bad not to miss mine?
-----
And then I recoil from him because I am a hypocrite. I know this, and yet feel no shame. He asked me, why do you not want to be saved? and my answer had exploded from me as fury masked as despair trying to be anything but hypocrisy.
I wish for death because I cannot have back what I have lost. I am mortally afraid of death yet because I know it will always remain just out of reach, just out of completion, I invoke it like Solis's name. Sand streams off my wings as I pace a frothing rut in the retreating tide. My sister's voice chimes like funeral bells in my head: The doctors keep saying that you are recovering. Recovering. Never recovered. I can’t say for sure why you’ve improved, or survived.
(Prince Adonai! Eminence of the Gods!) It is because I am Solis's own personal joke, dear sister.
“‘Let me not then die ingloriously and without struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.’”
My breath escapes me in white clouds. I do not trust myself to speak. Nothing about my expression betrays me — I am too well raised for that — yet I am standing on a precipice and do not know how to jump, nor how to retreat. I flinch when Vercingtorix stands, water raining off of him; I turn to him warily; wearily. There are a thousand things I can say. That he does not understand. That I have always hated poetry. That I am sorry. That I am sorry.
That I wish I can hate him for giving me another thing to remember him by when he leaves.
“... choose something else. Become something different; something more ...”
I cough, yet the hoarseness does not clear from my voice. “I am not a saint,” I say softly. The ocean whispers its agreeance. “And I am running out of reasons to become — more.” This last is spoken for him; to him; at once accusatory and something so, so close to begging.
Give me a reason, Vercingtorix.
I bend down to retrieve my cloak.
“I have found something — I have found something, I think, that might save you.” I freeze; my cloak slips back to the sand. I have not had enough practice, yet, of hiding my shock. It is worn too openly, and if I could see myself, it would trouble me. “What? The best of our House has searched, Torix, yet none have ever —”
“Do you trust me?” Embers of dying sun glance off of his eyes. I am struck silent for a full heartbeat. Inexplicably, I think of my brother. Of his scales, his smile, the wineglass. I had trusted him.
So how could I not trust you?
I suppress a shiver, when, cloak-less, a whistling gale chills me down to my bones. I nod.
The lack of iridescence in the beast's dagger-length tail feathers meant it was no older than an adolescent; the gleaming black pearls of its eyes were the size of my mother's best dessert plate. I remember how it had felt, sending that arrow soaring into its breast. The arrow had been made of dogwood; scraped and oiled and fletched by the best craftsman in Solterra, topped with a head of obsidian. It was a wicked arrow, a killing arrow.
I had saved it to crown the young teryr's heart.
I remember the weight of my father's head on my shoulder, the smell of the almonds he rubbed every morning into his hair, when he nosed proudly at my bloodstained cheek. The teryr had scratched three long gashes into my face, just below my eye, as it had thrashed in the sand after my first arrow had snagged it out of the sky like plucking a star.
I remember the sweet ache in my bones when I had bared my throat to the moon and screamed my victory to the sleeping kingdom of blood and sand and savagery. My father's wards had laughed, sweat pouring down all of our faces. Prince Adonai! I had turned and bowed, the very action a jest, my smile of the kind that hurt. Eminence of the Gods!
I have replayed this memory a hundred thousand times. If it was written, its pages would be worn down to papyrus shreds, dogeared to an honorable death. It had kept me company as I collected my father's ashes from his funeral pyre. It had visited me like a lover when I had been knocked into a sleep that, instead of ending, had left its shoes at the door and turned me into a caged canary.
I like to imagine that my first word, when I chewed through the bars of that cage, (when I awoke), was: “how long?”
And I like to imagine, that the nurse who had fallen out of her seat in shock at my voice, had risen with this answer on her breath: “Three days, my prince. You were out three days.”
If Vercingtorix had asked it of me — what changed? — I would have plucked the memory of the teryr out of my head to place in his grasp. I would look up at him, a saint-pretender painted all in gold, and say:
Somewhere in my three month sleep, that cheering boy turned into metaphor and left me behind. I reach for him and he sidesteps me as if I were a ghost; perhaps less. I watch as he walks over to the dead teryr, places a kiss on its beak, rips his obsidian-tipped arrow out of its chest. He whispers, “I thank you for your sacrifice,” and I watch as brilliant exultation sharpens his eyes of dreaming silver.
“May you fly free beneath Solis's sun.”
“What one views as apathy, another understands as composure.” He settles into the surf besides me; I turn and study his sun-drenched profile, the rigidity that refuses to leave his shoulders even when his eyes close, when his pulse steadies.
“I am not difficult to impress.” There is a white shell lying on its back between us. I pick it up, dust off the sand, raise it to catch the light. “Is that true?” I trace the perfect grooves pressed into the scallop's back in ever tightening circles. “That pleases me. Remain that way—” I say, the shell falling back to the sea, “—and soon, I think I will believe you.”
When I laugh again, I conduct it as brightly as if the last one hadn't been speared through by a fit of blood-choked coughs. As if everything to me, the exact moment it ends, is already forgotten.
It is a maddening way to live; he will tire of it soon.
I am tired of myself.
“Damascus doesn’t mind,” he promises. I nod, intrigued by this bond that exists between them. What does it feel like? I would like to feel it for myself. Can he see everything his dragon sees? If he were mine, I would beg him to fly over all the land, every sunrise a different shore, and I would lay back in the sand and give myself over to his sight.
May you fly free beneath Solis's sun.
I lean back to stare mutely at the red horizon, my wings keeping me propped just above the water. My hair is long enough to skim the surf now, longer than I have ever allowed it to grow. I turn to him. “Damascus is more comfortable than a caravan,” I muse, reaching over to examine a stray lock of his hair.
I say no more about the oasis, about my need to see him again, and again, and again. I know he understands. (I hope he understands.) That to demonstrate such a need is something — the old me — the dead me — would compare to a knife between my ribs, placed there myself. My princely pride haunts me like a banshee; I allow it to. It is said that pride is a man's last refuge, both ruin and salvation. I have been prideful since childhood. As the first prince, I had thought of it as my right. Yet now, my older self wonders: what had I been chased from?
What had I been afraid of?
Instead of answering this, I turn to Vercingtorix, more interested in exorcising his demons than my own. (That old reliable princely pride.) I think of his scars. “Tell me of your mother. Was she kind?”
Is it bad not to miss mine?
And then I recoil from him because I am a hypocrite. I know this, and yet feel no shame. He asked me, why do you not want to be saved? and my answer had exploded from me as fury masked as despair trying to be anything but hypocrisy.
I wish for death because I cannot have back what I have lost. I am mortally afraid of death yet because I know it will always remain just out of reach, just out of completion, I invoke it like Solis's name. Sand streams off my wings as I pace a frothing rut in the retreating tide. My sister's voice chimes like funeral bells in my head: The doctors keep saying that you are recovering. Recovering. Never recovered. I can’t say for sure why you’ve improved, or survived.
(Prince Adonai! Eminence of the Gods!) It is because I am Solis's own personal joke, dear sister.
“‘Let me not then die ingloriously and without struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.’”
My breath escapes me in white clouds. I do not trust myself to speak. Nothing about my expression betrays me — I am too well raised for that — yet I am standing on a precipice and do not know how to jump, nor how to retreat. I flinch when Vercingtorix stands, water raining off of him; I turn to him warily; wearily. There are a thousand things I can say. That he does not understand. That I have always hated poetry. That I am sorry. That I am sorry.
That I wish I can hate him for giving me another thing to remember him by when he leaves.
“... choose something else. Become something different; something more ...”
I cough, yet the hoarseness does not clear from my voice. “I am not a saint,” I say softly. The ocean whispers its agreeance. “And I am running out of reasons to become — more.” This last is spoken for him; to him; at once accusatory and something so, so close to begging.
Give me a reason, Vercingtorix.
I bend down to retrieve my cloak.
“I have found something — I have found something, I think, that might save you.” I freeze; my cloak slips back to the sand. I have not had enough practice, yet, of hiding my shock. It is worn too openly, and if I could see myself, it would trouble me. “What? The best of our House has searched, Torix, yet none have ever —”
“Do you trust me?” Embers of dying sun glance off of his eyes. I am struck silent for a full heartbeat. Inexplicably, I think of my brother. Of his scales, his smile, the wineglass. I had trusted him.
So how could I not trust you?
I suppress a shiver, when, cloak-less, a whistling gale chills me down to my bones. I nod.
BRIGHT SPLASH OF BLOOD ON THE FLOOR. ASTONISHING RED.
(All that brightness inside me?)
(All that brightness inside me?)
♦︎♔♦︎
