What's a king to a god
The path unwinds to riches, to ash, to serpents, to dust motes rising and falling like the studded breath of a forlorn guardian – the trees, bidden, lower their heavy heads, and the thorns sharpen their points. In the thistle thick there are the whispers still but distant, and Erasmus remembers the sallow face of mist-things gathered in a faerie ring. There were hunger in their eyes like elders in a sacrificial rite. The fawn bleats, the knife drives, and all is never silent again.
These are not his memories, these are not his images flashing precariously on into the spooling light that seems curiously unnatural the further they go. As if milk-white becomes a hot-white, a luminescence that is blue and yellow and red and orange and all things refracted and undone and done like lapping waves. A derision rolls steadily through him, and it should feel like hunger – but instead, it feels mortal, hideously flawed, a stirring in his core (or his lungs, or his ribs, or his heart?) that brightens like the light onset.
It darkens in response.
It is tangled in aether until it is made less of bones and flesh and mortal things like derision or love or fear. His eyes are not eyes – his mouth is not a mouth – his feet do not carry but sway, weightless, against the motion of moving on. The unnatural-ness of the light reminds it of a star in its final gasps of life, a sudden exhale of power and might as though it may save itself from the impending disaster prophesied from the moment of its birth. It compensates for the things that swell up in him like secondhand curses from an ignorant boy, as though Erasmus – the true Erasmus, the real Erasmus, the dead Erasmus – fights his new-flesh like fists against a cage.
When they break into the glade where the old man leans on his best leg like a cane, the thing that Becomes is almost unrecognizable, a tangled mass of dark stars and gaping vortex which, peeling from a shadow of a horse like skins shedding from a serpent. His hooves hiss over the soft grass, no longer remembering the clod and clap of shoes on rocks. His eyes do not see but feel and hear and touch, for the world is vibrant and full and aether reaches for each nuance of nature that it knows it can never again mold. Beneath the tonguing fibers of black smoke, shimmering iridescence, the cuts of gold glint faintly, pulsing weaker, weaker.
“Who are you?” the old man begins, but Erasmus does not answer. Nor does the Aether. “I do not believe you are the same.... that you were earlier today.” There is only silence, shivers, shudders, and the great perilous Nothing that opens within It like a flower plucked from the path. The old man fades, fades, until his grin is all that remains – a wound in the tiger-striped ash tree, pale and bowed. “I warned you not to let the forest trick you...” but there is nothing that follows, the cold breeze chasing away the distant sounds of the festival.
It does not turn to comfort Euryale and the thing or being that she has become. It is not until long after it leaves the glade, and the clever magic of the Wood falls from his flesh again in sloughs, an outline returning slowly, painfully, that It realizes that it had been the finest trick of all.
exit.
Who don't believe in anything
♤♧
