"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
Michael wants to be a place of rest.
He knows he cannot, knows that shores built of jagged rock are nowhere for a ship to moor. But Michael wants to be sun-soaked sand and the breeze that blows off the ocean instead of the one that churns it up. He wants to be church bells and heart-ending hymns but he knows he is nothing but dirges and hands that pull bodies from the earth - dirty hands, coarse hands, hands that want to build but can only grip, tighter and tighter (as if that has ever saved anyone.)
So Michael goes to the mountain with a pen and paper. On a ridge he can see the coast: gulls keening and circling, waves rolling in from the deep, and between it and him there's a city on the hill, glinting in the late autumn sunlight, as if it had been there all along.
There is a fist around his heart when he sees it. Something that squeezes too hard and he doesn't know why. Michael pulls his scarf over his head like a hood, but it doesn't keep out the cold. Nothing ever quite keeps out the cold.
Michael wants Denocte to be a place of rest. He wants to love it like Isra loves it - and maybe he does except for the fist around his heart - but its streets are so full of music and its castle is so cool and dark and everywhere he goes there are ghosts, whistling in the empty space. Michael would not stay if Caligo herself had begged him, stretched down her night-sky hands and kissed him to sleep. He would not stay if the earth cracked open to bring him back. But he stays because Isra asked him to, and that's enough.
Another litany, a thing repeated ad nauseam - Michael is here on the mountain, staring down at Denocte, aware that there is so little rock between him and certain death - and there are footsteps at his back.
He turns only far enough to see her, scarf flapping against the gold of his cheeks. "Hey, stranger." he says to Isra. "I've been writing."
Isra and the mountain call
“It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. ”
The mountain has always felt a little like home to all the parts of me this world has turned deadly. I remember walking these paths once before and imagining by body as nothing more than a sword of mist. Sometimes I still dream of exploring the thick trees and the edges of the rock trails where the sky seemed more like a kiss than a death. The darkness here, with the wind cooing a song of winter in my ears, reminds me what it felt like to wish for the abyss of the long sleep.
It reminds me of how to felt to become this brutal thing the world demanded of me.
So now I walk the paths with my nose tossed into the almost-winter wind like a wolf. My hooves do not run fleet-footed like a doe between the rocks as if the world below is something I must avoid at all cost. And my heart does not scream at me anymore that death is snapping at my heels hungry and waiting and wanting. I am death now as much as I am a queen. I can taste it on my tongue. Steel, even here, steel.
The slope up hardly seems like a slope now that my lungs have tasted the ocean wind and my heart has felt the thrill of flying. Part of me thinks I should come here more, work myself into the mountain with the ancient rocks that have always knows how to hold the weight of a god. Somewhere a snow gryphon is calling a war-song and a snow leopard is answering back with another call of battle and blood. My own lips tingle with the urge to howl before Fable answers back as she flies lazily between the clouds. His own cry sounds like hello instead of a war and I wonder at how horrible we have become that we only answer the screams of survival with hello.
I laugh and the forest echoes with it just as it echoes with the calls of hungry animals preparing for winter.
When the trail turns sharply towards the edge I hardly pause-- even when rocks skitter down the edge as I walk and the wind starts to make smoke out of my breath when it whips against me. And even if I thought about things like caution now, the glimpse of blue waving in the wind like a flag (like another hello) would have been enough to drive the thought from me.
A smile runs across my lips and for once my teeth don't ache beneath it. The earth feels sharp and hard beneath my hooves when I move to him. I relish in it. Can he feel it in the way I rest my head across his back as if the death kissing at the edge of us is of no concern to me?
“Tell me what you've written.” And I know I should have asked it of him instead of this sharp sound of demand that's falling from me into the crease of his spine. But I don't take it back. Instead I let the sound of it, the sharpness of it, float away into the open air towards my city half-asleep below us.
"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
Tell me what you've written.
Michael's heart beats a little faster, in time with the near-winter wind blowing off the mountain, in time with the scarf that taps at his cheeks and his eyelashes. He is watching a plume of smoke rise from the bakery's chimney, curling as it casts itself up. He doesn't want to tell her. Doesn't want to tell anyone. He isn't sure why he mentioned it at all.
At first the gold horse is balling up his piece of paper, folding it into smaller and smaller pieces until it is as hard as the rock in his stomach. Somewhere her dragon is flying, circling the mountain, and if Michael sees him at all it is only for a moment, one blink before he is buried in the canopy of pine trees that rattle with his passing.
"It's not very good.
And it's not really a story.
And it's also not done."
Michael says this, one on top of the other, until they all fall out of him at once and crumble down the slope with the pebbles rolling in from uphill. He can feel her weight on his back and Michael is thinking of white giants with ache in their step and laughter so sad and so nervous he wonders if that's what it's like to hear him laugh. He has many apologies to offer and he plans to offer none of them.
Tell me what you've written.
It rings in him again, sharp and hungry - and Michael smiles against its rough edges. He has seen this in her, scuff marks on her bones that mark her as something more, something special--or something terrible. And Michael has smiled against its sharp edges, still.
He shifts his weight, swings his eyes from the plume of smoke to the unicorn with the fist around her heart, and draws in a breath to speak--but, instead of opening his mouth, Michael simply unfolds the balled-up piece of paper and hands it to her.
His handwriting is neat but simple, looping only where it has to, and half of the page has been crossed out, beyond recognition. If Michael is embarrassed, or worried, it shows only in the way he holds his breath, giving her a time to read:
When the sun came up
we took our hands to the water
and our hearts to the water
and fed them to the sea.
I remember the light
on your jaw,
on your ribs,
on your mouth,
on the pieces of me going out with the tide.
--before pulling the scarf further up around his face, burying the heat in his cheeks under the thick blue fabric. "Anyway," he says, "Were you going somewhere? Why are you here in the mountains?"
Isra knock, knock, knocking
“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
If there was a way to cut confidence into the marrow of Michael's bones I would peel his skin off and write miles of script beneath his muscles. I wonder how he cannot feel the way the world is trembling and almost-virgin beneath us, the smoke rising from a chimney nothing more than a first, fragile breath of exploration. I trace lines down his spine when he starts to fold his paper into a stone and I don't know if I'm offering comfort or asking his body and let all my awful magic in.
And I'm disappointed when he inhales and nothing comes out. That fist around my hard tightens its hold, it digs in, and in, and in. His words are messy and my trembling, suffocating heart shivers beneath my skin where it's pressed so tightly to his side. The fist holds harder still and I feel like my magic might burst free and devour the word when my heart breaks beneath all this tension of the world pressing in.
Michael writes about the sea, and the tides, and all the bits of me are there scattered like diamond dust in the hollow curls of his ink. I want to ask him if he can see the dark blue of the sea-floor when he closes his eyes. I want to ask him if his tears taste like brine when they fall into his smiles. I want to ask him a hundred different things (and my magic still wants to ask him if he might open the door of his skin).
But all I mange, when I grab his hood beneath my teeth and pull it back from his face, is this--
“I would have liked to hear the sea in your voice.” There's sharpness in my voice, of course, and a little bit of fury that he tried to hide from me still. I thought we were past this uncertainty between us, as if our sorrows and our hurt had not already found a body for the weighty soul of it.
Don't you know... I want to cut it into his bones with all that confidence I could give him. Don't you know that I would drain the sea to keep you? My magic wants to etch it across all the warm planes of his cheeks kissed by the scarf I made him. It wants to fill each heavy crack of his hollow looks and his aching, dissolving cracks. It wants to make art.
I pull away and his scarf falls like a body from my teeth. My eyes flash and dare him to pull it back up, to hide, to do anything but look at the newborn world below us and claim it home. He promised me. He promised.
“I was going to find a memory.” I'm not smiling now and Fable isn't cooing a hello to the canopy of fat clouds promising snow. “Would you like to come with me?” The question falls above the clatter of stones rolling downhill.
Isra pulls the scarf away from Michael's face and he feels the late autumn wind like he has never felt it, cold against his cheekbones, howling through the hollows of his skull. She is sharp when she whispers into his skin, all blades and bent things and jagged rock. Lately Isra is always blades and jagged rock. Michael will break himself on her shore nonetheless.
He looks over his shoulder at her, still pressed against him, still warm in spite of all this deep, deep cold. Michael takes his scrap of paper back gently, probably too gently, and folds it in several neat squares before tucking it into his scarf, where it sits as if cradled, lovingly.
She is going. It sounds like somewhere far away. Would you like to come with me?
Whatever hole she had dug in Michael opens wide with gnashing teeth and slobbering jaws. He wants to say, of course. He wants to say, I would follow you anywhere, do anything if you asked me. Michael would pull the blue of the sky down, fist by fist. He would uproot every ancient tree in Delumine, swallow every grain of Solterra's sand, if only she asked it of him. He wants to say, yes, as many times as my old lungs can say yes and as loud as I can say it, if I could only have a moment in your sun.
But, here on the mountain, with the cold wind and the punctuation of falling rocks, Michael is sloughing pain at an alarming rate, and his churchbells, his ocean roar, sound like funeral music.
"Are you sure?" he asks. His voice does not shake. The wind howls along.
He would go, he would go, he would go, but--"Should I?"
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
Isra dripping like a weeping star
“because you'll never be this way ever again.”
“Yes.” I say the word into the howling wind like it's a word of claiming, of taking, of war. The autumn wind takes it and I hope it will make it out across my city, past the horizon, and to that gleaming shore. Yes. I want it to say the word there, against the tide and the shore and the general's lips,
Yes. I am coming for you. Hopefully the wind is still howling then. I hope it's full of hail and thunder.
If I can see anything in Michael, anything at all, it's the sad sorrow curling like a sleeping lion under the thick tangles of his mane. And if anything in me matches what is in him it's that, only my lion is awake and she's sharpening her teeth on stones every day. Maybe Michael can see the way she's calling to his, the way she's begging in the way of wildcats and hungry things for him to wake up, wake up, wake up.
Time is slipping by faster, and faster, and faster. Even all my magic, and my rage, and my purpose cannot hold it back for long. It's like a river and my lungs are parched for water. I'm always parched.
Rocks clatter under my hooves. I let them be just rocks as I pull away from him. Even years later it still feels like a ghost is nipping at my heels, pushing me onward towards that memory. “Follow me.” I know he will. My lions knows too and she walks with us with a stone in her teeth even though she already has a belly full of them.
Too soon I'm at the burned pass. There are young saplings bare of leaves, sprouting between the graves. Each is no more than a pile of dirt packed down by the rain, and snow, and time. It's almost hard to image them as graves at all, it seems more likely that they have been left behind by the shifting of the mountain. But I know what's below all that dirt. Bone by bone, with bloody knees and a dirt horn I had made them.
I didn't have magic then. Maybe if I did there would be no graves to greet us.
The scar on my hip tingles when I turn back to Micheal. My lion bares her rock-ground fangs, she roars. Wake up, wake up, wake up. I wonder if maybe this is where my daughter got her magic from-- from a lioness with a belly full of stones. My cheek burns when I press it against him to ground myself, to keep me in this body of flesh and blood. Without something to ground me I'm worried that I will explode and there will be nothing less of the world for anyone to put back together (certainly nothing of me, I would be stardust and glass shards).
“There was a wall here once to keep the rest of Novus out of Denocte. Merchants would come to seek fortune beyond the gates and children from other courts would look up with wonder in their eyes at all the magic held secret in the streets of our home. I imagine that even then, it was more a warning than a wall.” I know I might be wrong, but I've always hoped for something different. Even when I was running from the fires I hoped.
Michael is almost cold under my touch. I feel like I'm burning up (like I'm awake, awake, awake). “And then the last leaders of Denocte burned the entire pass and called it our salvation and our protection.” If there are any tears falling from my eyes they are diamond hard and begging to shaped into weapon. I know he can see them even when I tuck my nose into his hair, even when I breathe there with an echo of the howling wind that is even now carrying my voice across the horizon.
Isra looks at Michael but their eyes do not meet. She is somewhere else, across an ocean he cannot see through the thick, dark pine and alpine chill around them. She looks like rage. She looks like volcanoes, and earthquakes, and the roar of a dead star.
He wonders how long he will have her, with her heart on a pyre, always burning, and her body on a pike, always raging, raging, raging. He wonders how long it will be before he looks at Isra and he does not see a unicorn at all, just a god, as angry and as vengeful as the rest of them. It makes him sad, in some deep and endless way that he doesn't understand. He wonders how long any of them will have her.
In fact it makes him very, very sad--the way his soul heaves as if he is falling says more than he ever has, in this life or any other.
It certainly says more than he does, when Michael opens his mouth and only "Then I will," comes out. He always would have, reaching toward the heat of her burning star, sloughing his skin in the light of it. He will go. Though he is begging her why, why me, why me, he will go. Through the dark, and the fog, and the heart of winter. Through her hatred and her rage and her vengeful magic. Through his heart, sobbing harder every second. He will go.
Follow me, she says, and he does: up the steep slope of the mountain, amid the clattering stones and the tall black pine, until dirt gives way to rock gives way to ice and Isra stops. Michael pulls the soft blue of his scarf back around his face to keep out the cold. Its tassels lick his cheeks, his brow. The sound of it hums along with the mountain.
She says there was strife, here. Fire. A wall to hide behind, or be buried under. He cannot help but feel like that: all dead walls, scorched earth, the crackling of fire or maybe of ice. He thinks he sees now. Isra does not often say things out of turn - each word is carefully chosen, consciously or not, so that it stings like a fist or rolls in like the sea. Isra's cheek is on him, warm and brown, and all he can see is the curl of her horn.
He lays his telekineses against the other one, like a palm.
He says a quick prayer, to someone. Not Caligo. Maybe the god of his homeland. Maybe the many gods of his many homelands at once. Maybe Isra. He doesn't know. She cries. A part of him breaks that he didn't even know he had--he supposes he doesn't have it, after all, if it is this broken.
"Has it been?" he asks. He remembers fighting in the dark, dark so thick it fills his lungs, his blood--everything. Through blood and bone they had willed the sun to rise again. It had not felt so much like salvation to him, either.
"So you will burn your memory, then. To the ground. Maybe more."
So be it.
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
@isra <3
01-02-2020, 10:52 PM - This post was last modified: 01-02-2020, 10:54 PM by Michael
Isra the young god
“and if you see a fire from the shore tonight it’s my chains going up in flames.”
In the moment between his touch and the silence I am lost, in a way I have not been for so long, I am lost. Just like he must-- I find myself leaning into the touch of him upon my cheek because it is nothing like a kiss and I must. I find myself leaning into it like it's the bark of my church-tree, like it's soil and I'm lightning hungry for the molten heart of the earth. I lean into him because I'm hungry from something other than stones, and fury, and memories that beg to be eviscerated.
And it feels like the only mortal thing I know how to do anymore, to lean against a touch and beg my skin to tear apart so I might feel it in my broken, dying star soul.
Behind me a grave turns golden, and then the one after that, and then all the rest. They all turn golden until whatever light is dappling through the clouds reflects in a kaleidoscope of beautiful, perfect sorrow all around us. I make my memory into a masterpiece, I make it as eternal as this body of mine. Because even when I'm gone, even if I die on that distant shore, someone should remember how cruel sovereigns can be.
I don't answer him. There is no need to, not when the answer is in the shadow of the crown I never wear and in the way my horn seems endlessly hungry for war. And sometimes I wish that this horror around us saved me, I wish it burned my skin from bone, I wish it did anything but turn the wheel of my evolution in the direction of whatever it is I am now.
I wish it stopped the beasts of the world. I wish it made it so I didn't have to become one. I wish, I wish, I wish.
I wish and each one is as empty as a poem tossed into the fiery tail of a comet.
When I pull away it feels like pulling my body out from the tide, it feels like ice against the roof of my mouth. It hurts, this distance, it hurts. “Not this memory. This one doesn't need to burn” My edges catch on the sharp edge of a golden grave and I wonder if the bones beneath care that they are remembered at all. For a moment I watch the wind in his scarf, I watch the way it flutters against the planes of his face like it's begging him to wake up. And I wonder if he can even hear how the world is begging him over and over again. Like a sonnet of begging instead of sorrow it is begging Micheal.
“But there is another memory, another land. There is a country there, one that does not call its cruelty salvation but life. They call it the way of the world. Like a motto that entire world says, Cut the weak with their own bones.. I am going to find that memory next.” I smile at him, and it's my god-smile, it's the smile of my sea-touched soul that is star begging not to die. It's a smile that feels heavy with all the stones held between it.
If it hurts I try not to let myself feel it. I try not to miss the touch of him against my cheek.
“And I will try not to burn it. But if I must, if it demands it of me--” In the corner of my eye all the pyres around us look like stars making up the points of a constellation. And between all the stars there is me, staring at Micheal, and wonder what poetry he will write about me when I am dead. I am burning too hot to touch him now, burning like the bolt of lightning that found the molten heart of the world.
I should look away but I don't. I should not let him see; I should not let anyone see this. I am bare, and broken and, dashed in a hundred pieces of weapon on the shore. “Then I will raze it to the ground.” And I let him see it anyway, the look of a slave that has just woken up to discover that beneath all her bruises she is young god.
He had walked, like many before him have walked, often to exhaustion and sometimes to the bring of death, or in the dead of winter, through a field scored by the claws of war and mountain after mountain that rise high above the sea. He had thought, once, that he would see the end of all things, that time would spin itself down to nothing before his ancient bones had even thought to thin, before his old, old heart turned soft and quiet in his chest.
Isra turns her pain to gold, her suffering to art, and her rage to nothing but the same deep drums that say war as they rattle. Michael sees, now.
This, not time's thin threads, not death, not anything else, but this is what it's like to stand face to face with armageddon, to hold it with arms too small and hope it will stop before it and everything around it is gone. Maybe this is why he feels so cold when she pulls away, a sort of bone-deep cold that bites far harder than the mountain.
She looks at him -- and she has always been one of the only people, ever, to look at Michael like he is not a ghost that rolled in with the fog -- in a way that makes Michael scared, for just a moment. The Earth has always told him to wake up but it's so loud, now. It sounds as close as she is, and twice as holy.
Michael knows. He knows like he knows few things.
If he does not close his eyes and lay down his head then who will? Not her. He wouldn't ask her to. But there must always be a grave to turn gold, and there must always be a body to fill it. This is the way of things. Michael will slough his skin in her fire because it is all he knows how to do: die, like a hero, like a martyr, like a thing that is not quite as small as he is.
Not today, maybe. But someday. "I hope--" he starts, but she is staring at him and Michael fixes his face into one of vague resolve. "I hope they'll see reason, then."
Michael turns, again, to look over his shoulder at her graves, at her broken wall, at her burned pass. He is quiet for a moment, a long, long moment, almost to long to be a moment at all. Michael lowers his brow, tucks his mouth into a neat frown, and draws a breath.
"I think I'd have burned it anyway. But perhaps that's too spiteful."
She is looking at him and he feels like he is dying because she cannot. She is looking at him and she is bent the wrong ways, tied down by her rage and her pain and what he thinks is exhaustion but the edges are too blurred to tell for sure, and he is dying for her.
"Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."
Isra the rolling stone
“I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down”
Looking at the suggestion of resolve on his face is like looking at something holy. Maybe it's the flash of gold beneath the pillow of his hair, maybe it's the way his face holds it as gently as a cocoon. A hundred worlds could grow in the lines of that look on his face and I would still want to learn the oceans in each of them. And I wish I could shape my lips into something like his, like I'm only pondering how to change the world instead of shredding it down to rock over and over again in my dreams.
But of course I'm still that lion with stones between her teeth. Of course I cannot tell him all the black words I want to breathe life into. I cannot tell him that every time I close my eyes all I can see is blood, and war, and things as beautiful as they are grotesque. But I touch him anyway because there are words I cannot say in the shape my lips take against his frozen cheek.
And when I say, “He won't,” the shape my lips make against his skin is one of a promise. There's a story in the touch of them, in the way my throat vibrates around the syllables like a lion roaring around her stones. Later, when we're curled together underneath the moon like weeds, I'll sing to him in roaring lyrics and bloody poems. I'll tell him all the ways I once learned to break.
(after I can tell him, whisper to him, of all the ways I know how to break things now).
I wonder if he'll still love me in the same way. I wonder if he'll learn how to fill up the cracks running through me with gold.
The next breath I take is a trembling thing, a stone rolling downhill thing, a bitter like death thing. It tastes like grave-dirt and ash and I wonder if the tongue tracing the cracks of my teeth is black as silt. I wonder if he can taste it too, the things that I would never think to name spite. It feels like bits of me are melting down between each place we touch, like I could be all the things in the island that died in the sea not so long ago. It feels, it feels, it feels--
Like--
“Will you come with me?” It feels like that, like pearls falling out between my lips because if I will choke on them if I don't spit. It feels like finding a new home even as you walk away from one. It feels. Oh he makes me feel regret. I feel disjointed too. Each moment I want to run towards the city. Each moment I want to run away from it. Each moment I want to drown in the sea. Each moment I want to burn. I want a hundred different things all at once. And yet--
There are still those words, will you come with me, living like stars in the space between us. I will not take them back. I do not want too. I cannot bear the look of his holy resolve if he says, no. So I do not look.
I pull away to walk down the mountain my eyes don't snag on him like a river on stone. I know I cannot look at him, snag on him, because I have a hundred things I must do. There is no one else to do them, to suffer them, to consume them, and so I must.
But I leave one ear cocked towards him. And I pray so hard I tremble that I will hear his hooves racing through the shadows of graves to me.
