The gossip of the street follows him into the desert.
Foreigner,
unknown,
ignorant.
He does not know
No. He does not know
what they have suffered.
He has never met the tyranny of Raum, nor a teryr in the desert
screaming bloodlust at the sky. He does not know what it feels like to wear a silver collar, or a gold one. He never knew the boy-king or had someone hurt by him. He does not know what it feels like to be a slave.
But he does know what it is like to wear a brand.
The canyon’s walls loom up before him and he enters, smooth and quiet and naturally. For one who was not born in the desert, it becomes him, and there is a severity within the sandstone that is familiar. I have been to the bottom of the sea, he thinks, reaching with his mind to grasp at fistfuls of sand and rock. And it is not so different.
Somewhere in these canyons, he thinks, is where Ra and Tut took him to pray. It is where Solis may have given him his magic, when his heart still belonged to the sea and the black cliffs of a distant land. Now the sun beats upon him and he feels as though he is forged into something different, and those memories are far—but never quite far enough.
He doesn’t know what we’ve been through, he has heard them say.
Orestes closes his eyes, lifts his face toward the light.
No. He does not.
But he does know what it is like to be born to be the last. The Keeper. Their Souls weigh heavy on him, today, when he thinks of where he has come from. The wise-man at his birth said, this one, this one is a Prince.
Orestes remembers the way they looked at him, still, with such pristine clarity. Their faces are paintings in his mind, the emotion etched eternally. Hope. The hope radiated out of them like light. They believed he could save them. But he had known, he had always known, they were already gone. There remain too many dark places in his memory where there should be Souls that he bore to death; but there were too many to bear to death, too many to put to sleep in the sea. Too few were reborn. And there was always the killing. The nets and the gold dust and the iron. He had always known and still, somewhere across the sea, rests the last of them in chains and binds.
No, Orestes has never been a slave.
He did not know Raum.
But tyranny comes in many shapes and sometimes
he remembers how the ocean can taste not just of salt, but blood
Enough, he tells himself. He opens his eyes and steps forward. The canyon opens up like a chasm and he thinks, I will understand. The physicality of it is easily translatable, is learnable. Orestes knows his nature; knows he is a survivalist, and he will learn every inch of his territory as though he were born to it. The only way to do that is step by step, day by day, until the sun burns the sea from him and he learns again how to lose what he loves. He weaves through the canyon and wonders what it would be like for it to flood; he thinks of storms and sand and drowning.
But there are no clouds in the sky, only the sun, and the heat of the day has yet to penetrate the early morning. There is a lingering chill that holds to the shadowed earth from the night, and about him life arises in places unexpected and unknown. A roadrunner sprints in front of him, raising a thin line of dust, and somewhere else a snake rattles against rocks. Overhead a vulture flies high above, a solitary silhouette. Orestes strolls quietly, the muscle moving beneath his tight skin, and he wonders what it would be like to transform into such creatures. His mind cannot comprehend it, and so he does not try. He simply admires their beauty for a moment, and continues on.
THERE IS A LONELINESS IN THIS WORLD SO GREAT THAT YOU CAN SEE IT IN THE SLOW MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS OF A CLOCK. PEOPLE SO TIRED, MUTILATED, EITHER BY LOVE OR NO LOVE
There is a law a that her soul understands and it is not the law of this world.
There is a part of her that will forever quiver like a wilting rose between castle walls and merchant stalls. The wind howling through the stone-elk is singing that law to her in hollow, rebellious notes of deaths. They way it screams through their mighty antlers curling towards the too bright sun makes some part of her, some black-magic hole, break wide open.
And she can see it in their gritty eyes that are turned up towards that sun like winter-flowers begging to shed a frost. Her law, there in the stillness.
Thana doesn't need to wonder what they were looking at, all she knows is that it is something long gone (or dead). It is enough that she can walk among this menagerie of stone corpses and death-dust with only her hoof-steps thrumming slow as a heart beneath the howling wind. If her tail blade is dragging marks in the sand it is only one thin line tracing between the tracks of her steps, like the world is cracking wide open.
Maybe one side of herself will look at the side trapped across the split open world and smile. Maybe the parts of her would only needs to know a single law then.
It would be easier that way (if she could love the walls, and the glitz, and the wealth).
But when she finds the circle in the middle of the dead, stone herd she pauses like a beast who has just found home. There are claw marks in the dirt and Thana pauses to look at them like a map to something that she's ever been searching for. Somewhere in the belly of the canyon a hawk is screaming and further out an eagle is crying back a battle-cry. Her heart picks up a gallop through her chest because it's a song she remembers hearing, again and again, calling for her to follow, to come, to chase after it like a comet blazing through the endless black of space.
Thana runs until the dead elk are nothing more than a gathering of howling darkness and wind scream in the distance. She runs until the the feathers of a hawk are drawing out strange shadows across the belly of the canyon. Until she's frothed with sweat that smells of rot instead of salt she runs.
She runs until she seems him-- the man staring at the limestone and golden sun like it's a map only he can understand. Her heart is still thinking of that claw map, the one that sung below the howling wind of the only law her soul understands. And maybe it's why she steps close enough that he might be able to see the cracks of lighting running bone-white down her neck and across her face (like that line her tail drew in the sand).
And maybe it's why she nickers low in her throat at him.
and wonders if it is the blood of his own heart rushing in his own ears. The sound causes the roadrunner to disappear; the buzzard to drift away; the lizards to disperse.
The wind is howling in the canyon; ravenous; hollow. It sounds like a Ghost that remembers what it felt like to live but cannot obtain touch it; the howling of a corpse for the blood of life with a thirst that cannot be sated. It sounds like the cursed pleading for something not so empty, as if by filling the pitted canyon with sound it might be given shape. He closes his eyes and feels the sun against his flesh, and he hears the heartbeat, the
thud-dump
thud-dump
thud-dump
until it stops, and hot breath wafts over his face. He smells decay; but it is sickly sweet, the rot of the forest or the sea. He does not open his eyes until she nickers at him in a way that does not belong to a horse, but something lupine, something that craves meat. Orestes stares at her; after a long moment he nickers back, but in that nicker there is an absence that marks him as something other; it breaks; it cuts; it reaches a crescendo pitch and then he steers it quickly away because yes, yes, yes
Orestes aches to keen back in an old language of forgotten people; he aches to answer her lupine song in the song of the sea but the sea, yes the sea, has long-since stopped singing for her Prince. He closes his eyes again. He does not sound like a horse; but he does not sound like what he once was. After a long moment he opens his eyes again, the blue-blue of something un-belonging, not of sand and sun, and Orestes stares at the fissures in her face as if they reveal the bone beneath the flesh, and he nearly asks, do you know?
He hates that when his eyes return to the red canyon walls he is remembering the sea. He hates that when he goes to speak he cannot.
At last, “You are not of Solterra.” Perhaps it is her otherness; perhaps it is the haunting curl of her scimitar tail or the way she smells unlike any horse he has ever known.
Orestes hates the way when he says it
it echoes in the canyon
as if the desert whispers,
neither are you.
THERE IS A LONELINESS IN THIS WORLD SO GREAT THAT YOU CAN SEE IT IN THE SLOW MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS OF A CLOCK. PEOPLE SO TIRED, MUTILATED, EITHER BY LOVE OR NO LOVE. WE ARE AFRAID.
Looking at him is like looking at something wild, something peering out from pale flesh of the mortal coil. She can see it in the way his skin is pulled tight over sinew. Only wild things, only dirty things, only things that know intimately the feel of death between their teeth have skin like that. It's there in the way his tattoos look like brands instead of art. Otherness, she can taste it on him and on the sand lingering salty and terrible on her tongue.
It's why she steps closer.
And closer. And closer.
Closer.
Until she can trace her nose down the golden brands on his neck. She wonders if it's his muscles or his marks that feel ridged and hard underneath her lips. And she wonders if it's the wild that understands her touch or if it's the beast staring at the stone like a map. She already knows what part her recognizes the other in him. Her black magic, her death, her rot is all humming sweetly in her veins-- like it's still looking, looking, looking.
His song, that almost-sea song, settles it and makes it coo beneath her gaunt skin. When she tilts her head towards him she can hear the waves and the promise of darkness. She can hear teeth.
Maybe that's why her smile is as harsh as an angry sun on snow. Her teeth ache between her lips like thirsty blades.
“No.” She says the words against his cheek. Her voice puddles in the valleys of his golden mountains like summer fog, like rain, like lightning caught between stone. Above them her horn is lilting like a song waiting to fall-- all sound and no words but the humming of their wild heart and their heavy bones.
Can he hear the wind through the spindle and bone. Can he hear the promise of a midnight howl? Thana wonders. Always she's wondering. Like death she's wondering.
Her body feels alive between the skeleton of the desert, the rock, the animals hiding from all this brightness and the hawk flying hungry as a dog over their heads. Somewhere a sand snake is screaming. Somewhere a lizard is dying in a shadow. Somewhere. Somewhere. Somewhere.
“Who are you?” Thana asks his skin, because she doesn't need to ask his wild, sea-singing heart.
The mahogany mare pushes past what politeness requires. His skin jumps where she touches him; but he does not flinch away.
No.
Her touch ought alarm him; it ought make him shift from her, displeased and taken aback.
Instead;
The heat of her flesh against his is the ringing of a gong; it is a sound that fills the hollowness of his soul, and he nearly sighs.
Nearly.
Orestes turns his face away from her. He thinks he should pray.
He doesn’t.
And his teeth taste like the sea.
No. Her breath, against his cheek. They are nearly eye-to-eye. Among his people it would almost be a threat; but from her he does not see it as such. The nearness evokes in him the visceral instincts of a land he means to forget. Does she not know? He wants nothing more than to become a suggestion of a shape; disembodied; one creature that is in fact a part of many. He has forgotten what it feels like to not be alone.
He hears the song. He hears it, and the hot air beneath a hawk’s soft wings. The mortality trembles in his eyes; old eyes; nearly god eyes. There is a line of white across her face; a lightening bolt; a haphazard and hesitant marking from another world, another time, and it is his turn to reach out and trace it with his lips.
Then, his hot breath against the brilliant amethyst that dangles, just so, beneath her corkscrew horn.
“Something old.” He does not say someone. He steps away from her, and like that, the hollowness within him resounds, resounds, resounds and he is nothing but an abyss.
It is as if she is peeling his new identity away from him,
as the hawk above wheels away, and all signs of life vanish from them.
Orestes closes his eyes a moment. He thinks:
Don’t you know? I am only playing at being a man—don’t you know,
I still dream of what it was like to be anything and everything, to be the sire and the spawn, the sea and the salt.
He feels as if he does not have to tell her that for her to understand the way her lupine call still fills every corner of his soul with cruel longing. He asks, "And what magic has abandoned you?"
Because, when he looks at himself,
he thinks of broken glass.
THERE IS A LONELINESS IN THIS WORLD SO GREAT THAT YOU CAN SEE IT IN THE SLOW MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS OF A CLOCK. PEOPLE SO TIRED, MUTILATED, EITHER BY LOVE OR NO LOVE. WE ARE AFRAID.
Perhaps there should be some terror in being death or in feeling blackness rush in sharp-shard fury through her heart. Thana knows she should wonder on it, the aching of her heart when it pushes out sludge instead of bright life-blood. And maybe that's the magic of her-- the black, the rot, the coldness bright as lightning streaking wild and ravenous through the snow.
She can taste magic (and death, like a memory, death) in the flavor of him when she licks the last of it from her lips like a wolf licking a doe from her whiskers. The space between them seems like an thing inhaling deep of dust and for a moment she looks away from him at the sand. To her it seems that it is breathing too, just as the roots of the forest dream of stars does when the wind comes to howl an eulogy to the leaves. Her own lungs stutter once, just long enough that she might align her breathing to that of the world, like a star shifting in the night sky to form the point of a constellation.
When she tosses her forelock from her eyes it makes her feel like a savage thing, more lion shaking off seeds and snow instead of unicorn shaking of sun and dust. Underneath the wild gesture her voice seems a quiet thing, softer than rust flaking off in the rain. “Yet here you are,” her pause is shorter than the death of a star, “not old enough to be dead.” The look in her eyes is all wild, all snow on moonlight, all sickle bent horn. It asks,are you dead and I only missed it in the golden glow of your skin? And she does not pause to think that he might not understand the fury in her form, or the way her shoulders shiver under her gaunt skin as if a hundred flies have landed upon her like carrion birds.
Have their necks not already arched like two mountains leaning into the valley, saying I am here, and I am falling into the magma too.
Thana still does not move closer when he opens up more space between them. She does not open her throat to sing to him of the wolves and the wild and the winter again. Instead she thinks about bedding down between the stone elk with their stone fear and their silent, heavy hearts. She thinks about the magic curdling in her blood and how she can only see lightning and decay every time she blinks.
And she thinks about golden sun on a sapling frosting over and turning black.
“No magic abandoned me.” At her hooves a rock is starting to crumble as if the wind has been pushing sand against it for years and years. The lines her tail is drawing in the dirt start to bloom black-rot-moss facing the sun. When she inhales the air tastes not like sand but like the forest floor where the worms reign on their thrones of bone and brittle fur. If there are any bones beneath the sand they are all bleached and worn by the time she finally takes back that distance between them like it's her throne, like it's her right. “It came here too.”
Her teeth ache to touch him, to whisper the ocean roar back into his throat like the sickle moon singing a weak siren song back to the sea. “What does it feel like to be...” When she pauses there's a look in her twilight gaze, like there are words stumbling over each other in a furious current. Already she's forgotten what question she wanted to ask him, because the hawk is looping lazy over their heads again as if there are bones around them waiting to be picked clean.
And by the time she remembers what she wanted to ask, all that comes out below the curling of her nose to her chest is-- “lost.” It sounds like a prayer, like gold on a sapling, like the secret to making her black-blood flow 'right' through her aching heart.
The end is always so clear to him. That is how it has always been, for Orestes, since his people came from the sea and asked the land to love them and the mother asked him to carry her memories for as long as his Soul lived.
He wants to say, I know the way death clings to you, because it clings to me too.
It is his last life.
The wild in him rises to meet the wild in her. In the red canyon, where he had come to learn the history of his new people, everything he meant to bury reemerges. There are so many things dying within him, including the memory of the sea; he cannot smell it here; he cannot even recollect the salt, the brine, the fish. He smells the rot of her black moss and her skin and feels the heat of a proud god. Orestes wonders if it is all a test; and if he were another man, he might even wonder if it were all real.
No magic has abandoned me. It came here too. He knows too much about magic that is not meant to be, in the way there is the memory of another magic rotting in his blood, in the way his limbs tremble with the desire to become something else and cannot. The hawk is above, the shadow beneath, and there is something that spirals within him in the same way.
What does it feel like to be—
An eternity passes—
—and then another.
He aches with all the things he wishes to become and cannot.
Lost?
Orestes almost laughs, but he knows pain too well now to let it defeat him. It feels like—
it feels like—
it feels like—
A straining, a seeking, a longing, a wanting, an aching—
A reaching, a failing, a falling—
A loving, a leaving—
An unraveling—
“It feels like an unfinished poem sounds.” Tragic, bewildering, and maybe a little beautiful. Orestes cannot help himself—he steps forward again, and the space he had allowed to grow between them is again eliminated. Perhaps her rotting magic calls to his dead magic—perhaps it is the way the sun makes him feel strong even as his heart feels weak. Perhaps it is the way there is an echo of something unfinished, or forgotten, in her twilight gaze and prayer-like words. He aligns his shoulder with hers, so that they nearly touch and his neck twines about her own, a hairsbreadth from touching.
But he does not touch her. No. Orestes does not. He looks at her from the corner of a sea-blue eye and thinks of how his living magic, his sun-given magic, boils within his blood like a star ready to become a black hole. They are almost touching, the way her presence opens a void in him—
Well, that feels a little like being lost, too.
THERE IS A LONELINESS IN THIS WORLD SO GREAT THAT YOU CAN SEE IT IN THE SLOW MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS OF A CLOCK. PEOPLE SO TIRED, MUTILATED, EITHER BY LOVE OR NO LOVE. WE ARE AFRAID.
She knows the way sea-mist gathers on eyelashes in the winter and the way it freezes into sharp-edged diamonds. If there is any beauty in the unraveling of flesh from muscle, muscle from bone and veins from between the tangle of a skull she knows the art of it. She knows all the patterns of black and sunlight and how leaves look blooming from dead branch. There are so many things she knows, so many bits of this world she's pulled apart like a meal.
But she does not know anything about poetry.
If there is anything elegant about the barbed mess of words rolling around and around like a stone down a hill in her mind she does not know it. She's too wild, too black, too hungry, too wanting, to know about unfinished things. And if she knew she was unfinished, nothing more than a hundred lines of other stories woven together into something grotesque, she would have torn down every poet into veins and broken bones. If only she knew--
He twines around her like a snake, like a lion opening up its mouth and wondering at the last moment if teeth growling beneath it are poisonous at the last moment. Everything in her that is unicorn, and feral, and death opens a salt-crusted eye and starts to pay attention. The part of her that is female, and jewel crowned, and wanting starts to wonder if there is anything about poetry that she should know.
And Thana, the part of her that is just Thana, wants to pull him apart as much as she wants to press her chest to his so that their hearts might howl together at the moon as they pull it down, down, down.
In the end she only waits there, tucked below him like a secret (like a sickness waiting for just the right angle of the sun in the sky) with her eyes closed against all the blood-red sand around them. If her blood is calling out the same scream of the hungry hawk she does not give away that song to him. “I don't know what that sounds like.” She says even as she wonders if the trick to it is in the blood humming so close to the point of her horn or if it's in the valleys between the mountains softly gleaming on his skin. Or maybe it's in the way their shadows stretch out long and low like a horizon across the sand. Maybe it's just another one of the million things she does not know.
“But maybe that means I'm lost.” Because there are walls in her future and death in her wake and everything in her is screaming at her to run, and kill, and feast until this world is nothing more than molecules. Even now there is a monster in her chest and it's as cruel as this longing aching in her heart for another touch, another whisper of his sea to her wolf.
And she still doesn't know if she wants to pull whatever a poem is from his chest or if she wants him to trace the white cracks on her skin again.
She doesn't know.
Even when she turns her head to rest the tip of her horn against his skin (a warning and a wanting) she's not sure what that iron, dusty taste on her lips is. It's like brine and not-brine all at once. Another horse might have smiled against him and the way he almost touches her in the same way roots almost touch the edge of a steep cliff. But she's a unicorn and so she only presses her horn against him, hard enough that they both might feel the weight of it, and says “finish it.”. Like the words mean anything to her at all.
Orestes knows both the ecstasy of the shark and the panic of the seal. That is why when she says finish it with her horn against him, he thinks of death and all things bottomless, like the way the sea opens up endless in the trench. Boudika had once asked him how deep he had to swim before the light was gone and he had thought, and thought, and thought but had no answer. The answer is here, now. The answer is that you do not have to swim at all. The dark is all around; and the only thing that is bottomless it the aching of a lost soul in a lost world.
The Prince of a Thousand Tides, the Prince of the Lost People, turns his head into her horn and lets it prick blood against his skin. His eyes are heavily-lidded against the glaring brightness of the sun, against the heat, against the way everything is salt and sand and the weight of eons. He says, “It is a great stag running and running in a beautiful forest, with dusk fading upon the horizon. Everything is blue, soft, cold. Everything is still except the deer that is running, so fast, so elegant. There is a wolf at its heels but you hardly see it against the foliage; it is a blur, not a shape, as the stag bounds endless and graceful. The wolf fades back, away from the deer’s heels, and as you watch the sun edges the end of the world and the stag leaps toward safety—“
Orestes narrates it with a voice that matches the tempo of the run he describes; he fills his tone with tension and a strange hardness. His voice does not sound like his voice. “—but as he leaps the forest comes alive, and a wolf that was in the shadow leaps to meet the stag just as he believes himself free from the jaws of death, just as the light of the fading day fills his eyes, just as he reaches the brilliant pinnacle of survival, of tomorrow, of life.”
He closes his eyes. He wonders what she will do; the wondering fills him with a bit of life that he has not felt in many weeks, in many months. He says, “It feels like the moment the stag leaps and sees from the corner of his eye his own death; he thinks, I made it, but even as he feels the truth of that thought he knows the truth of his fate.”
There is a part of Orestes that wishes to touch her breast with his nose; there is a part of him that wishes she would do the same, just to tell him that he is, indeed, alive and in the moment alongside her. He cracks his eyes open. Orestes asks, "What poem would you write?"
THERE IS A LONELINESS IN THIS WORLD SO GREAT THAT YOU CAN SEE IT IN THE SLOW MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS OF A CLOCK. PEOPLE SO TIRED, MUTILATED, EITHER BY LOVE OR NO LOVE. WE ARE AFRAID.
There is a moment, when her horn pierces his skin, that she thinks about how easy it would be to kill him. She teeters on the edge of that thought, like it's cloud and she's the moon deciding whether to glow or to dim, and wonders if she should toss her body into the abyss with a furious joy. He's seaweed on her tongue,
something holy and salted and full of a trove of priceless metals. Beneath the point of her horn, and the feel of how soft he is, Thana trembles like a dying thing. It feels like each drop of her blood is sinking into the clay and limestone at their hooves.
And she does not know what will be left when her body disintegrates.
In their shadows her tail starts to thrash and cleave great jagged lines into the sand. There is nothing graceful about the movement. It's both too feral and hungry to be the patient twitch of a lion's tail. The gesture is more rabid than anything. She's all scorpion backed into a corner with badger teeth clacking spit and fury at her. His poem is driving her mad, mad, mad.
All at once Thana is the stag and the wolf. She's running through the forest and there is life in her eyes and death in her blood. They are fighting, and raging, and tumbling together between the light and darkness of the edge she's swaying on. It feels like there is a frayed noose around her neck and it's pulling tighter, tighter, tighter.
She's swinging. She's screaming.
She's aching, always aching.
Her horn is sinking deeper into his skin just as the wolf and stag racing through her heart sink into the tissue of it. She almost tosses her self over the edge. She almost kills him. Can he feel it, the way everything in her is aching to feast on everything in him, the way she wants to tear him down just to see the color of his soul? She presses her shoulder into his. She presses her horn into his golden (so golden!) skin--
The stag dies, and the wolf settles down to sleep with its belly full of flesh, blood, and gore. Thana's soul settles even though the trembling of her skin continues. When she pulls away the sunlight makes the blood on her horn look like rubies, it gleams in the corner of her gaze when she lifts her nose towards the blood pooling like tears on his skin. She presses her nose to the wound, hard enough that she knows he will feel the sting of her almost-kiss.
She doesn't say anything about his poem. She knows he could feel the why she trembled against him like both the dying thing and the hungry hunter.
Thana presses her lips harder into the blood, she draws spirals with it across his skin. Arcane marks that only the death magic pooling hot in the marrow of her bones understands. When she whispers against him she can taste brine and sand on her tongue (she wants the sea and the drought all at once). “I don't write.” She says the words on the curl of a bloody spiral and she says it with teeth.
Wolves do not write. Kings do and Thana is anything but royal.
“But if I did it would be about the way your skin is begging to die. I would write about a the forest in winter and way everything is dead and we call it sleep. Maybe I would write about the way your blood is more lovely out than it is in.” She's running out of blood for the spirals by the time she pauses. He's still on her tongue, lingering like rot and fermented fruit. His eyes are so blue, blue as the winter-sea, blue as the noon-sky.
Thana remembers another sea. She remembers another horse she wanted to tear apart and save all at once. And oh, oh, oh she wants to tear this golden boy apart with his words that sink into the tissue of her heart like disease. She wants to press their sides together too, until their ribs fall in line one after the other. When she puts distance between them it makes her hungry, but she pulls away anyway.
His blood still looks like rubies on the point of her horn. The glare makes her hungry too.
“Perhaps it's better I don't know the sound of poetry.” Because she would want to learn it as well as she knows the way of form and flesh. And she would want to pull it apart piece by piece in just the same way.
It is the way of the wolves, and unicorns, and sharks.
