[FTB] The poem you made of me

[Eik]

*

It all starts with a ruby. 

At first no one notices, for it is small and perfectly lodged among all the other stones in the street; and it is red, a color so at home here between the sunsets and the fires and the blood. But he notices, the thin grey stallion who trudges with his nose to the ground. He stops and he stares, motionless, for a long moment. Eventually a yearling slinks forward, catlike, from the shadows of a nearby awning. The youth looks with wide eyes from stone to stallion back to stone, and then begins to paw at the ruby to unearth it from the street. The man does not seem to see, for there is a faraway look growing wild behind his eyes. 

The ruby was a message. 

He tries to keep himself from running through the streets-- attention was not a good thing, these days or ever-- as he tracks its creator, following scent and sign. He quickly realizes, based on the patterns of her movement, that she is looking for him too. It is almost predatory, how they circle each other across the mazelike streets of the desert city, each leaving hidden messages-- hers fantastical (a ruby in the cobblestones, glass flowers in the cracks on the corner) and his bare-boned. (breadcrumbs of thought, the scent of mania and desperation, snippets of prayer to a god known only to the two of them)

Her messages grow brighter, louder, more reckless. They draw closer, closer. With every turn he expects to find her, but she is not there. Soon he's grasping at the night queen with his magic, flooding her with love and anger, feeling her come nearer until--

there--

His heart shudders in a way that makes him realize how funny it is that we have these hammers in our chests and we don't even realize they're there, most of the time, until it is impossible not to notice. He tastes metal on his tongue. And when he closes his eyes, his heartbeat races across the back of his eyelids. It colors the dark with streaks of yellow-blue-white-red. When they open she's there before him, improbable in the too-bright sun. A cruel mirage to a dying man. "Isra"

He expected time to stop. It doesn't. It lurches forward and he is aware of many things at once-- the strangers that surround them, the lick of the sun on his back, the ocean between them and how its currents draw them toward each other.

"You shouldn't be here," Eik hisses. The distance between them melts like hot sugar. He pushes his shoulder into hers with a roughness that is new to him, to them, and he presses her down one side alley and then another until there are in a neighborhood with less eyes.

She shouldn't be here because it is dangerous, and because her people need their queen, and, most simply and pressingly, he did not want her to see his city like this. He did not want her to count the ribs on the children she passed, or hear the strangled silence in the streets, the hush of fear and uncertainty. Eik had become quite attached to the heat and the maze and the character of the Solterran capital, and above all the headstrong persistence of its people, who reminded him of the better parts of himself. These are the things he wanted to share with her. Instead it is smoke and hunger, pyres and bones.

It's wrong, all wrong. It was not supposed to be like this. 

He is ashamed, and angry, and so stupidly painfully in love-- and maybe what hurts the most is that he never expected to feel like this, to feel this deeply and this broadly for anyone or anything. Her nearness brings it all to the surface, all the things buried and hidden and tucked away. The enormity of his loss, the impossibility of a return to the way things used to be, the ache he strove so hard not to feel is suddenly very real and very present, all the rough edges brought into profile by the piercing blue of Isra's ocean eyes.

"What are you doing?" He grits his teeth in attempt to hold on to anger and callousness. To have the strength to drive her away to someplace she would be safer. Still he pushes against her, as though to remind himself she's here, she's really here, I am too. He might be mad with thirst or hunger or nature, but there is truth in touch, there is clarity and heat and love. All he wants is to fall to his knees and pray at her altar but he keeps them walking forward, shoulder hungrily to shoulder, afraid of the eyes in the shadows and all the things that will catch up to him if they stop moving.

*

@Isra <3
set in one of the outer neighborhoods of Day Court

[Isra]

Isra who splits open and calls it 'home'

"and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart"


It feels like the northern lights have come for her. The heavens have dropped themselves from the sky, like dead stars chewed out of a black sky. Each touch is a color-- bright red, pale pinks, dusky blues, dirt-brown and soft gray. Thoughts are running like comets through her mind in impossible tangles of iridescent color that taste like salt, sand and love on her tongue.

But the anger and the hunger are the brightest and sweetest on all the heavenly things falling down to hang her heart in a noose. They are blinding, like she's not watching the northern lights anymore. Isra feels like she is speckles of gas held loosely in some shape resembling a unicorn. And she does not need to wonder if he feels all the ways his shoulder and his anger are sinking in, in, into her like he is a stone and she the sea.

Isra has never felt deeper, or blacker. She's brackish against all the light, bright light of him. She drowns that word shouldn't and makes a shipwreck of it. It grows barnacles and corals in the deep black of her; it grows weeds out of salt. “You are wrong.” She hisses back, and it's all that sharp dead salt she's tasting instead of her own voice. All of it is wrong, these pyres of dead trees and charred skin. This anger boiling in each of them like acid looking for virgin skin feels wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet some part of her loves it, loves the way violence anoints the fury filling up her bones where once there was only marrow.

And maybe, maybe she's telling Eik that he is wrong to come for her, to love her. Isra is a monster of vengeance now; she's a weapon. Surely there should be some limit to his love, some part of him that knows that she's not the girl with snow and lust making mountains across her spine-- not anymore.

All she knows is that she belongs here in the sand, and salted sweat, with fire a black char on her tongue. She belongs with the slat-ribbed children where she can turn their dead dandelions into apple seeds and oat seeds.

She should not have to tell him that she belongs wherever he is (her northern lights). She should not have to tell him that he is home. So she doesn't. She thinks it, hot and angry enough to singe.

If Eik told her that it was too dangerous she would only have laughed, and turned each inch of sand around them quicksand and each bit of stone into a blade. She could have drowned the castle and Raum and still had breath left to tell Eik that there is nothing she would not do for him and the court he loves. Doesn't he know already? Doesn't he know she is the most dangerous thing in this court? Raum is only a child playing at violence compared to all the justice growing ivy around her rib-cage.

“I am giving you a home.” She etches the words into his neck with her horn. The hollows of it pull at his mane as if to say..- stop, stop, stop, do anything but try to push me into shadows. Because below her crown of bone her eyes are yelling at him. They are saying she will not go, she will not stop cutting herself open to make a home of herself and all of Novus for him.

Isra does not think she even knows how to stop, not anymore.

In their wake all the dust and ash turns to quicksand with glass flower lily-pads spread across it like a message only the two of them could ever read.

@Eik

Art

[Eik]

Of the many unexpected things he’s learned, this is the most recent: when the world starts to lose its color, you don't always notice.

Solterra had lost its color. He could not say where it started. The eyes? It’s what the crows go for first, and perhaps this scavenger affliction worked the same strategy as its feathered cousin. So the colors left– eyes to cheeks to bellies to hooves. Surely the city was next. Upon first glance, it was easy to see Solterra as colorless to begin with, save for every shade of sand. But first glance was deceptive. There were streaks of colors in the sandstone walls- not just the trademark browns and tans but yellows, reds, pinks. In the spring, cacti bloomed in every shade imaginable, some of the flowers so tiny and delicate you would not even notice them unless you walked with your nose to the ground.

All of those beautiful nuances, faded to shades of grey and white. With time, even the sunset lost its vibrancy.

Solterra had lost its color and Eik was so infatuated with vengeance that he hadn't even noticed. He couldn't notice, if truth be told– it would be too deep a blow to an already very delicate conscious. Solterra had lost its color but (she’s here, she’s here) it doesn’t matter now. He paints the sky in a flurry of magic, unseen to the rest of the poor world. His love, his rage, his knowing and unknowing, streaks of color beyond the eye’s imagination. He lights up the sky and she paints the earth with gemstones and water and life– life! In the heart of this place grown barren, strange flowers bloom from soil long gone fallow and fruit trees burst from the sand.

And when they touch,

the colors bleed back into the world. The streets flicker to life (slowly at first, like a fire learning its hunger) in shades of copper, sand, rose, rust. The sky turns a shade of blue that is as close to infinity as a color can get-- when he looks at it, he thinks of what it means to have a soul.

And he wonders– is anger something that lives in the soul? Or does it make its home elsewhere?

Right now the anger seems to live in his blood like a poison that even the sweet-sharp hiss of her voice does not remedy. No his blood sings. No, I am not wrong. I am not wrong to be here. No I am not wrong to love you. No you don’t belong here. Not now. Not now.

Not now.

He is comforted by the anger, the argument. It reassures him he isn’t something she dreamed up. He has agency. And maybe he’s not a home but a grave.

Maybe we could say the same for her.

Oh it doesn’t matter anyway. Home or grave or man or ghost, anger or fear, soul or no. Their story was written long ago. It had simply been sitting (waiting) beneath snow and soil, in suspense for the right actors to take the stage.

“A home,” he echoes. His voice cracks open, a dried out riverbed. It was all the heat, and the thirst, and the rage that still simmers like a caged animal. Why couldn’t their home be on the mountaintop, or the snowy field among the dreaming bison? He doesn’t ask her, aloud or in magic. It’s a stupid, childish question, and he feeds it to the fire of his anger.

At the corner of the next street, a vine sprouts from a desiccated pot of soil. It quickly creeps its green way up and across the crumbling wall of an abandoned storefront, and as the lovers draw near five huge white blooms explode in a veritable bounty of petals and perfume. He stops walking. “Isra,” he rumbles, frustrated, hot breath fanning across her cheek.

(what are you doing to me? he asked her once– didn’t he ask her that once? He can’t remember what she said– he understood it in the moment, but he never really understood. How could anyone follow someone else into a fire? How does logic dissolve around them, around her, like cobblestones turning to lilies?

Who and what are we without reality to tether us?)

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Don’t– she said, the last time he said sorry. He couldn’t, not then and not now, and as he speaks his tongue is hot with defiance. Sorrow is so very much a part of him and he could not erase it, not even for love. “I didn’t want you to see” me “Solterra like this.” his bony hip leans into her full one. A literally starving man, that’s what time made of him. It was supposed to be fixed by now, he was supposed to have fixed it, and all he did was circle closer and closer to death.

"It was killing me, to be apart from you" his body whispers to hers. For every bit of him that yearns to drive her away, there is an equal and opposite force that wants to beg of her- never leave me alone again.


E I K
with words of water, fire, air, and earth
we invent the garden of glances

@Isra

[Isra]

Isra who takes hold

"What was it like to love him? Asked Gratitude.

It was like being exhumed, I answered, and brought to life in a flash of brilliance."


There is something about seeing him so empty of sweet clover and so full of anger that makes her feel wrong. The look of him crawls under her skin and through the muscle. It devours her marrow and eats up every drop of blood until her veins are aching with a billion sickle moons flowing wrongly through her. When he touches his hip to her, she can feel only sharp bones like teeth stabbing at her skin.

All of it makes Isra want to howl, and bellow, and shake down the moon and the sun with her rage. She wonders, oh she wonders, if she could scream loud enough that the chewed out stars would fall down upon this desert like holy fire. Could she open up her mouth then and turn the air to arrows with the gnashing of her angry, angry teeth?

And maybe, if his breath wasn't fanning across her cheek like a flame, she would have grown cold and furious. Maybe Isra, queen of the night, would have chewed out pieces of her own skin and become another white-hot nebula in the inky black sky. But Eik is there and he's painting a sky only they can see and each billowing cloud is rose-gold and fat with water (or is it salt-tears bloating them?). Isra is there with him and she's closing her eyes and falling down, down, down into the sky.

Whenever Eik touches her she forgets foolish things like gravity, and reality, and crowns.

“Eik.” She says, but not because it makes sense in that moment. Isra says his name because she's drowning in a gold sky, and the sickle moons in her blood hurt, and because every inch of her is screaming his name. If she didn't say it a hundred terrible, beastly things would have come out instead like the tide pouring out from dark caverns. She's afraid to tell him that she wants to feel blood rushing between her teeth instead of clover and lavender.

So she paints his skin with a name and each note of it sounds like love and don't let me drown. Isra presses their sides together until she can feel each of his jutting bones dig into the crevices between her rib-cage. And even then she keeps pressing, and pressing, and pressing. She's desperate, and desolate, and hollow.  She needs Eik to fill up those places until she's full of heavy stones that she wants to call love.  Isra does not want to drown in the sky too long.

She wants the fire.

His spine tastes like dust when she drags her lips across it (dust and ghosts, specters and bones). It goes down like salvation and her monster of magic coos and chants and says come closer. “I needed to see it.” Those words go down too like salt and sword-- they cut her up as they run up her throat and across her tongue.

More words boil up like lava from the molten core of her.

Isra doesn't say them but they wrap around the map of roots between them. It's made me dangerous, and then, and then, and oh, I welcome it. Each word is a thorn in the drowning sky she's falling into. They cut. She wonders if Eik can taste the blood that no one else but him would ever see.

She wonders if she tastes like metal or like a burning, almost exploding star.

And when she presses closer (can she get closer?) her body sings back to him. It sings and chants and twists more roots and thorns between them. Then never leave me again. She dashes herself upon the shore of thorns, takes those roots between her teeth, and then, and then--

She pulls.


@Eik

Art

[Eik]

He knows it hurts.

All those moons tearing through her,

all the wanting and unwanting, quivering like cicadas,

ebbing and flowing like tides, following a pattern that could be known but never understood. A pattern he knows but does not understand.

As a boy he used to stand at the water’s edge on that endless black beach, looking out at the horizon. He never went in- it was too cold, and the current too strong. In that place, nothing good came of the ocean. Most called it the blue devil, and to enter it was to never leave. But oh, even then he knew (somehow he knew!) there was more to it than death. There had to be more.

But he could not begin to imagine what the ocean would give to him.

She stands before him, a flame flickering in a multitude of different colors, some of which are beyond his wildest imagination. (but then again, imagination was not his strength) And oh, how something inside of him splits into a hundred fault lines when she says his name. It is something porous, and hungry, and full of empty spaces for roots to take hold.

"I needed to see it," she says.

“I know,” he replies softly, a lamentation. “So tell me, Isra, what do you see?” Her name is so sweet on his lips, he can’t help but to say it, and to repeat it over and over again in his mind Isra, Isra, Isra. The vine on the wall that erupted into flowers continues to snake its way up the abandoned building, shedding cream-colored petals that fall to the sandy ground.

Eik tastes her words, her blood, her magic, and the roots deepen and tighten. He feels something inside of him soften, yet he still presses against her in a way that is almost violent. Sometimes violence is the only vessel that can hold sorrow, and anger, and desire all at once… But they can’t exist in equal measures for long. Two of the three begin to crumble and one begins to rise, not unlike the creeping vine that sheds its flowers as it climbs. Isra, Isra, Isra, His lips press her name into her cheek, her ear, her hair. The air rises in a snakelike dance where it dares to touch their skin.

When she pulls, a great rush of heat blooms between them, tinder that yearned to burn, and burn, and burn. For the first time in a long time he is not thinking about vengeance or rebuilding or the places he loves (canyons shaped over eons by wind and rain, dunes of sand like hip bones and spines, the ocean at sunrise) but just a woman. A woman who is more than just a woman. “I will never leave you,” he wraps her with intent, shows her how every cell of his body is bursting with it.

“I want you,” he groans, whisper-soft, and his words are bursting with all the heat and magic in him. “Let me show you how much I want you”

@Isra

[Isra]

Isra who holds a holy man

"so I love you because I know no other way than this:"

Isra does not tell him that he is all she can see anymore. She does not tell him that she saw him in each stretch of sandstone with a noose of silk around its throat. He is all she saw as she walked through the ghosts left behind here, and when she turned part of a wall to diamonds that made a sound like sorrow as they fell to the earth. Since she felt snow at her belly instead of sand or brine, Eik has been all she can ever see.

The clouds overhead cut themselves into the letters of his name as Fable swoops low and ferocious over the city in which evil has hold. Below him soldiers starts to scream and Isra laughs, and laughs, and laughs because everything but this moment, in this broken hut, is falling apart. She laughs and she drags her teeth along his hip because violence is the only way she knows how to hold herself together now.

And she thinks, she knows, that teeth on his skin is all the answer he will ever need to what shades of color she sees the world in now.

When two of his three crumbles, she's left standing there with violence rising up in a cage around her. She still has roots in her teeth and blood rushing too hotly, too swiftly, too moon-sharp through her heart. She still has the echo of the way she only sees him cutting through the blackness like summer lighting when she closes her eyes and presses against each of his kisses.

Isra imagines that each edge of her his a tide, and Eik is a shore of rocks. She imagines he is a cove and she is a sea full of salt and weed that is begging, and pleading, and forsaking the moon because it wants to be caught.

And oh, oh, oh----

oh!

When he closes up the last of the distance between them and his rocks trap all the violence slashing through her waves, she sinks into it. She sinks into the sand of him like the sea sinking into the earth, and the floor of the hut turns to mud that grabs and pulls at their ankles like a beast. It makes a great gasping sound when she pulls a leg from it (it does not sound like sorrow, but like a sigh at midnight).

“And I need you.” She says out loud and it echoes in that silent garden in which their minds are blooming. It echoes in a roar, and her roots tremble with all the ways in which she needs. The sea does not just want the cove, it's still begging for it in salted tears and broken shells.

Isra needs Eik like the tide needs the shore. She has always needed him

And then, it is not only the mud pulling her down, and down, and down.



@Eik

Art

[Eik]

At the beginning of the day, they were small gods. 

When Fable flies overhead and the soldiers scream, he does not hear the sound of retribution. He only hears fear, basal and familiar. (we're just animals in the end, all of us, no matter how we've spent our lives). The sound is not one of justice. The sound is violence, a song he knows too well, a secret madness etched on the inside of his skull, coiled in his DNA.

(a song that never and never seems to cease, not when he's looking for an ending, not even when he's not-looking. when will it ever end, and who will we be if it does?

Surely, not myself.)

The screams echo down the empty street, not unlike the chiming of a bell Eik once heard, and there is some small part of him that becomes... uprooted.

It doesn't matter. (right?) It's not the first or the last time a thing has come undone. Anyway, Isra fills the empty spaces with her seeds, her daggers, her fire. She takes root where ancient trees once stood and he welcomes her in without hesitation or fear or consideration for what the violence will make of their love, and vice versa.

At noon, they were scions of melancholy and retribution. 

Words seemed to lose all worth between the two of them. It was thought and feel that drew them together, a primordial tug that ran far deeper than the patterns letters make.  Her teeth on his hip, electric, an answer and more. "I need you," the words, the intent, quiver silver-blue in a place deeper than bone. 

"I know." 

All those roots nestled in him, they tremble and shake to an ancient beat, older even than violence. He squeezes them, pulls her deeper and deeper. His teeth grab at the base of her mane and he tugs her forward, playful and forceful, asking and commanding. He's known a fire like this but oh, never a hunger. Never a hunger like this. Would there ever be an end to it?

At the end of the day, no matter what we thought or believed of them, they were just animals. 

And like an animal, he guides her through the doorway and into the crumbling shadows. With their animal skins and animal teeth and animal magic, there was nothing left to do but touch.

@Isra Eik's exit/FTB <3

[Isra]

Isra destined to flame

"And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.”

Once Isra thought of skin as something golden to be shed. She thought of it as a cage, a thing to be rattled and whipped but never cracked open. Skin, she used to believe, was for lash, steel and blood. Everything she was stayed protected under that bleeding cage. And down beneath the nerves, and marrow, and teeth, she stayed hidden like a light trapped in the blackness (flicking, flickering, faintly).

But now, with the lash of animal teeth (and animal magic, and animal need) she does not think she wants to shed this skin of scale and dirt. Now it feels like steel is cutting away all the boundaries of her body and her blood is rushing through her like a tsunami instead of like small, forest creeks. Now it feels like skin is not a thing to shed.

Skin is a thing made to burn.

Each touch of his teeth feels like a track of oil painted across her in furious, looping swirls of need. Eik is painting, and tasting, and consuming. Isra is burning, and smoldering, and exploding. They are animals and the world is their forest, and their beach, and their endless sky. She has never felt more feral, or more like a thing too heavy for mortality to hold, when she drags her horn across his cheek and begs in violence.

The world around them, the shadow thick enough to choke on, turns to gold and diamond-dust and flowers catching the darkness like newborn glass. Isra is helpless against the tide of her power rushing out in waves from the burning wreckage of her skin. It's all she can do to hold together what soft pieces of her are left in the onslaught of all this animal want.

Eik pulls her along like a wolf and she follows like a lioness. Isra is all teeth, and roar, and endless hunger.

And in the dark, like a lioness gnawing on a bone, Isra discovers the true purpose of skin.



@Eik

Art