when our prime has come and gone / and our youth is all but melted / we can listen to this song / so we don't have to accept it
W
hat do you say — to the ones who ask, to the ones you love, and lastly, to the unblinking self — when you are chosen by a god? I suppose I should start drafting my answer.
I am Adonai, of House Ieshan: first-born, first-blessing, god-favored. Ask me to tell you how a god speaks and I will say, “Like a reckoning.” Ask me to tell you what a god says and I will whisper, “What you wish most to hear.”
I do not remember the color of Solis’s eyes because I did not look at them when he had summoned me to the base of the dias. Had he whispered my name into my ear? (And you, Adonai. Come here. Sibilant s’s. Gliding i’s.) Had his mouth been sun-hot by my cheek? In moments as fragile as these, you see, you cannot possibly remember everything. You cannot possibly be so greedy. Do you want to remember how it felt, or do you want to remember what you wish you’d felt?
And because we are mortal, we will always choose the second.
* * *
I think—at the very least, I had expected pain. Perhaps it is because I have been drunk on pain for so long that I cannot imagine a world without it. (“How does one know to worship perfect happiness, if one does not first learn misery?” our priests had asked me, when I had been young enough to mistake it for a riddle. “How will one know misery,” I had recited, my eyes bright with silver cleverness, “if one has never felt happy?”) To receive something you were born wanting, born dreaming, as painlessly as a season turns—how strange it is.
* * *
There is a desert below me and a white-moon smile above me, the night like a black ermine stole. I am stumbling on the swallowing sands because, for the first time in a long time, I am drunk not on pain but on life. ‘I am happy,’ I tell myself, the words melding together with ‘because I am chosen.’ I am happy because I am chosen. Because enough of Solterra had chanted my name to the mink-sleek clouds — my name, alone. Cleaved of its Ieshan, cleaved of its nobility. Cleaved of its Firsts and its Gods and its Blessings.
Me, alone.
* * *
I go home first, of course.
* * *
“Where is Pilate?”
The gardener pricks his ears to the house, his eyes perfect spheres on my wings. I had flown here. I think they had forgotten what that looked like. He hesitates, before answering, “Prince Pilate is in the house, Prince Adonai. I will send someone—” But there is no need. “I will find him myself.” A smile forms, now, porcelain between the lips.
I catch glimpses of my reflection in our mirrors as they drift by, pale windows blinking out from storied tapestry. I note with detached interest: my eyes are still of a blue like drowning, yet, with the shadows gone, they are less like the bottom of the river and more like raw lapis in a mine; my hair waves to mid-neck, pale gold, wind tossed; grains of sand rain down as I pass. Shed skin.
Am I better like this? Who can say.
The dragging edge of his spotless white robe lounges in the doorway of his room. I reach it in three swift strides. “Pilate.” The knot of his robe rests on his scaled shoulder, beckoning me to pull him around. I pull—something to touch that is not him. (That would be asking too much of me.) His snakes greet me first, snakes so much like our mother’s they terrify me—he is so much her son he terrifies me. As my breath slows down to even lengths, I wonder: has Pilate ever needed the reassurance of a god’s blessing, when he was born loved by one?
Hours ago I had stood on a sandstone dias. Hours later I stand before a brother made flesh from sand. A shaft of bright light spears in from an open window, painting the dark parts of him gold. He had loved me once.
“You are the first. Can you believe it? Even after—” Even after everything. “You were the first I wanted to tell.”
And I had loved him back.
BRIGHT SPLASH OF BLOOD ON THE FLOOR. ASTONISHING RED.
(All that brightness inside me?)
(All that brightness inside me?)
♦︎♔♦︎
