HE HAD BEEN SOMEONE BEFORE THE FALL
The world around me is going to sleep; is dying; is forgetting. For weeks the trees were vibrant shades of red, yellow, orange. They burned and trembled in the cool autumn wind, as if alive, as if living. But now the leaves are beginning to fall, and they shift underfoot like so much rot. I know the trees are not dead. I know they will come back. But for now the branches claw at an overcast sky—not distinguishable clouds, but a blanket of bright grey—as if desperately praying for another fate. Everything is full of a poignant beauty; poignant because it is transitioning into something else, something forlorn. It says, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye and the air bites with a chillness that promises of snow and ice. Even now, in the early daybreak, the yellowing grass cracks underfoot with the night’s kiss of frost. I was born in autumn; I look up at a trembling leaf and although real, it is nearly clinquant, as if garnished for some dazzling holiday. Then—abruptly, violently, I imagine—I shake the branch and watch as the leaf falls, falls, falls. I step on it. Born in autumn, I think again, and wonder if I have ever lost the scent of rot. My mother had not practiced the Old Religion; but my grandmother had, and when I was born—I’ve been told—she whispered he will die young because there were no leaves left on the trees outside, leaving the naked branches to claw against the sky.
What does it matter?
It doesn’t.
Besides, I am moving out of the forest now, into the open plain before Denocte. I am a ghost there, burnished gold like a performer but as utilitarian as any one of their dark soldiers. I do not belong. Some have scoffed at me; the crudest speak foreign curses and tell me to return to the desert of Solterra and a god named Solis.
I think,
My gods would eat these gods, would crack them open like eggs on cliffsides. I used to watch birds of seagulls flock to the nests of cliffside birds and throttle their hatchlings; I used to watch foxes sneak along the cliffs as if the precipice were only a suggestion of decent rather than a promise. Those are these gods. Eggs and nestlings. Eggs and nestlings.
I do not move toward the city but stay in the line of trees just outside it. There is a rumour I do not trust from a city I do not know, despite Denocte being where my pirate hostess docked so many months ago. Boudika, they whisper. I ask. Boudika? They say. Brighter than Copper. A dancer once. A Champion now.
I say, impossible.
I loaded the iron onto the ship she sank on myself. I heaved it sweating beneath deck, feeling the weight of it creak in my bones. I know she is at the bottom of the sea. I close my eyes and breathe and try not to smell the decay all around me, as if I myself am on borrowed time.
I leave the trees and ascend a hill that overlooks the southern coast. I have heard that on a perfect day the sea glistens like polished agate, and the sky above it is the cerulean of heaven. Open, vast, promising. Today it is not perfect. Today the blank slate of autumn clouds drizzle soft and chilling rain that seeps into everything; perforating the earth and the flesh with an inescapable cold. And the sea. Yes, the sea, churning so far away with evils unimaginable, is the colour of chrysocolla. It is dark blue shot through with raging, churning greens the colour of oxidised copper. There are blues so dark they are black and I cannot help but wonder what exists beneath.
I turn away. It is beginning to rain much more heavily; far away, I can smell Denocte’s bonfires and I can see their smoke rising against the cold, as if to shelter them. As if to protect them.
I think of going back to the city.
But something keeps me standing there, my hair turning slick against my face and neck, the torrent stinging like so many shards of ice.
Brighter than copper, a dancer told me, in a rundown theatre where she used to perform. Moth-eaten, dusty. Everything soft and glowing and warm in the firelight. Nothing like our home; and that is what angers me the most. The softness of it, as if her nature is what has died instead of her body.
Of everywhere I could have gone, how is it I am here? How am I here.
It is raining harder.
I can no longer see the smoke, or the city, or the sea.
I can only hear my heart. Steady. Always steady.
"speech"
occ: i am experiment with styles <3 forgive me if I switch back into third person xD
