ira
do not mistake me for my mask
you see light dappling the water and forget
the deep, cold dark beneath
I
f he had been even a few months younger, Ira might have asked her what she was thinking. He might have wondered aloud what thoughts—what demons—plagued her mind, staring up into Caligo’s black face. But because he is older than he was, because he is more aware—he only wants to say, be careful.Be careful, Bexley.
Be careful.
(There is an abyss, here; an abyss opening up beneath Caligo's dark gaze. The saying, Ira wants to say, is true: if you stare too long, too deeply, you will become it).
At first, he ignores her question. Ira’s eyes return to Caligo’s; his posture a shadow of what Bexley’s had been. Neck craned; head upturned; eyes on the goddess’s dark, dark face. Ira has always seen less of the statue and more of the eyes; he has always wondered if Caligo does not exist within them, animated and restless, with a void just waiting to open. An abyss, an endless night.
(And what is the abyss, if not both sleep and death? And what is the abyss, if not the opening of the woods beneath a new moon, dark and endless and somehow full of life? What is the abyss, if not the way he turns to look at this strange, golden girl now; edged as a blade, expressionless as a wolf on the edge of the trees).
His eyes drift from the goddess to Bexley and he stares, above the dying smoke of his offering. The smell of his father’s braided, burnt hair. The letters Saige had written, turned to ash.
There are so many things he would like to say in response; the gravity, however, does not belong to him. Ira’s answers do not come cheaply and so, first, he asks, “Why do you want to know?”
No. Ira quiets for a moment, feeling the coldness, the proximity, the strange chasm that opens between their conversation. He could go now. He could leave his offering on the mountainside beneath Caligo’s hooves and return to the woods. He studies this stranger with a practiced eye; her scars; the nearly limitless expression, tangled, gnarled, in her too-blue eyes. He knows he should leave, that he should leave this stranger a stranger. But Ira doesn’t want to. Perhaps it is because he has never seen her here before, or because he has never seen her in Denocte. Perhaps it is because he feels called to act by his goddess.
More realistically, it is because Ira is curious. And his curiosity is not a cheap, playful thing; Ira’s curiosity has barbs.
“I find most people don’t understand the gods of this country,” he adds, at last. He breaks the silence with a voice so soft it is barely more than his breath in the cold. “That they believe soft offerings and prayers satiate them. Sometimes, I even believe it. And then—I remember.”
His smile is a wolf’s smile; a wolf, in the woods, with the snow coming down. A wolf who knows winter will bring not death, but prosperity as the rest of the forest, the less predatory, the less sharpened, begin to struggle, and weaken, and die. “Caligo is a goddess of vengeance—not peace treaties or kindness. A goddess who plunged the world into darkness to make them suffer.”
Ira turns, now, so Caligo is at his flank—he turns, now, to pin the golden mare with his eyes. He knows he is too intense. He knows the look on his face belongs less to him and more to his father. But when he speaks, the words are his and his alone.
“I brought a wolf," Ira answers. More somberly; perhaps the most somberly. "I brought her a creature she would understand."
