c e y l o n
C
eylon breathes in the moments between seconds passing by, letting tension fall from his shoulders, pressing it into the world, into the earth beneath him that houses the great tree. How old must it be - this giant - to have withstood storm and sea, creation and death in its branches, in its roots? Families of birds must live and die here, building their own empires to rule from on high.
He does not let himself wonder if his own father felt godly when he destroyed the world. Or if he felt remorse. Or saw only a sky of ash from fires still burning, a world so golden and ripe he could bite it in two.
By the time Ceylon was old enough to remember anything, the doors were shut and his future decided. There would be only one route to take, one option left bare. His, a bleak existence, a fate decided by a hand that is not his own. Forever cursed, doomed, paying for the mistakes of his father’s hunger that is not his own.
Ceylon looks at the tree with eyes so blue and distant, he could be a ghost begging to fade into its ancient skin just to glimpse the time it has seen, the stories it knows, the pages it would be pressed into and everything it would come to possess.
He does not look at the girl when she stops beside him. Something about her is feral, and maybe, he thinks, she is somehow like his father - starving, craving, rabid.
Like a fool he states “It’s beautiful,” and perhaps this is the only thing alive he has ever allowed such an honor. Isolt is beautiful, but her bones, reaching to the sky, forever still, are moreso. She will rot as all flesh does and in her death will come something that will last, perhaps, longer than her mortal years. A reminder. A remembrance of a once-girl, a wolf with the skin of a horse.
He does not care for rotting things.
But he is interested when she wraps herself about the trunk. Scythe-tail snaps skin from its base, wilts it where it once, moments ago, had been so vividly alive and flourishing.
At last, at last!, the man (barely more than a boy) - who is more mausoleum than he is flesh and bone - looks to the blood red of her skin and bone white of her splashes. The sharpness of her horn is not lost to him. Gently, softly, like the call of a mother to her panicked babe: “Does everything crumble beneath your skin?” Because she would be lovely to remove all that he ruins.
Every malformed cut into wood, every slip of chisel into stone, every window carved wrong. Vanished as though it never was.
And she would be such a beautiful tool under his meticulous eye and careful hands.
—
and when the time comes that i am reduced to fragile bones,
know that my soul will always search
and when the time comes that i am reduced to fragile bones,
know that my soul will always search
