but you said, come here, my bird!
i will give you the dangerous black night
i will give you the dangerous black night
M
oonlight spools between them, carrying with it silvery dust motes that glint, hovering, and drift in the breath of a breeze. A curious hill nudges a swallow from its nose. Erasmus does not unravel like the passage of stars or a valley of bluebells when she rests her soft cheek against the rough tilt of his hip. He does not split against the sharpness of her horn as it tills a line through the plush of his coat – and his blood, rising like a rose garden in the golden dawn, does not bloom with it. He wonders then, pondering the way the horn spirals hollow and cold, as though something should fit inside it, why she should feel his warmth and not delve. He would, he thinks. If he bore a horn that threatened the heavens, sharp and hollow and hungry as hers, he thinks that he may carve its hunger in every thing that is whole.
“Listen closer,” she says like frost over a field, and the shadow behind her (one that looks like everything but her) ripples, and a light catches hotly in the space of that horn. Aether shudders, unraveling from his pores like glimmering smoke – unfurling with feline languor over her form that at once seems so delicate and so great, hanging shadows from that burning light. She speaks not to Erasmus – it knows, it knows – she speaks to it, to what becomes, what has became, and what has yet to be. To the void within what flesh dares to contain, to what is trapped in the cage of bones and flesh and the rapacious famine that stirs there.
Listen, listen, but not from her, these ugly and grand voices exclaim, echoing softly beneath the timbre of a breeze, listen. The stone-souls agree and whisper, some with desperation and others with anguish, and a few with hatred burning idly. “They are screaming for freedom, whispering the secrets of the gods, and laughing at the sight of us so small and fragile in their monolith shadows.” The warmth of her horn threatens to burn a hole in him, and that unwinding row of roses writhe in a note of acceptance. He would let her, if it meant pulling him from aching bones and the torment of skins, undo what he has wrought. Undo Erasmus, the thing that was.
His eyes return to the statues, leering and hovering like guillotines, like a circlet of wolves and salivating jowls, the dark pits of their eyes gleaming soundly from eon-gone reaches of some hellish by. The green hills are moaning with the wind, and roaring like the ocean. It wants.
Dahlia-black and lily red pours from the stone-throat, each turned to a pallor when they are struck by the stern light of the moon – a bruised silver, the rush of of a churning stream belly-up with the howls of aching lore. When the pool of them store flaking petals at his feet, they feel more like crypt flowers than of offerings, pale and sorrowful, a fragrance that is metallic and spiced. Each one is a secret. Each one a lament.
The girl turns, and the heat and sharpness of her horn scrapes the valley of his back like raking teeth. His own fangs knit, tongue pressed between the hollows. Aether dances along her throat, along the tender spots, the thin spots, the pulsing spots. Does she know? Do they tell her? “If you could whisper as they do, what would you say?” she asks, like a tiger in a dream with hot-white mirror eyes. The red reeds bow from her in what is left of a dead planet in his mind, and he knows what rests in them.
It is him. It has always been him. Before Erasmus. Before the Wilds. Before the hunger.
Harvest moon eyes look to the statues and their flower-choked mouths, and one thinks of being the flower and the stone and the howling wind and the rolling hills and the frothing water. Of when he was not an it but an everything, the creatures and the soils and the suns and the moons, the darkness cloying the crevices between like a coarse tongue nestled between bone teeth. When he was not only the nameless, faceless gods but also every breath that held a power like prayer, every ache in every bone and every pulse in every world. His teeth grit. His eyes are scythes, cutting those red, red reeds with the glow of a dying sun.
"I was not always confined." he whispers like a willow-breeze, full of secrets and myths and pathos, glaring at the mare-statue with a coat of stars, "I was... more." The aether retracts and refracts, breaking like wisping tendrils of green-black flametongue - they build at the base of the statue like a pyre, nestle in every crack and granite pore. They pull and push. The statue groans a mouse-whistle tune, like some small thing inside it is breaking. Its eyes are wide bulbs, its teeth bone white gates. A caricature of pain, or despair, or fear. He is not satisfied. When Danaë presses harder into him, he presses harder into the dry veins of the statue. It cracks along a rib, dust expelled into the lunar glow.
"I would sing. I would sing of gods who bled, of heresy and the power that lies in the bones of ancient things. I would sing of the death of the deathless, of the end of worlds and things that have yet to come." Stop, he hears it, the softness of a whisper ushered between the howlings. He does not stop. Another crack. Do you not want freedom? I do, I do, he whispers back to her in a growl, in the weight of his eyes that hunger and reave.
"I would scream into the night, into the forests, into the ocean that roars with a tumult only the soul may ever know – I would thunder into the sky black as pitch, my voice sailing like a sparrow over the howling winds." Shards splinter, dust sprays, aether pulling hot granite veins over the pale surface. Stop! it wails. Enough! it sighs. "I would not whisper." His voice does not shake with anger. It is resolute, full, hungry. He does not stop.
What good are things that cannot be devoured?
@Danaë
