By all accounts, those are all descriptors of Lyr; he knows it, and if he were another man he might have found humour in the fact the adjectives now regard something else entirely. They are the words that run through his mind as he studies his barrack’s room, having not yet found lodging elsewhere. Although the architecture mimics that of Terrastella as a whole, by nature military dwellings are always less inhabitable than other housing. Or so Lyr believes.
Everything is a hard, unforgiving line. Utilitarian and minimal, his quarters contain nothing aside from the bear essentials. A desk, a lamp, a rack.
There is certainly something disheartening about the fact there is nothing on the walls, and the only personal item in his possession is a journal he has never written in.
(A counsellor his father demanded he speak with a year ago had suggested he begin to write down his thoughts and feelings; he would help him cope with the incident.)
Lyr never did; but rather than wonder why, he thinks of how his mother had decorated their Delumine cabin with poems and breathtaking art. There is a moment when he closes his eye and begins to doze—he has no duties until much later that evening—and Lyr later awakens with a start, some half-remembered dream fresh in his mind. It is the pitching of a ship, he thinks; the sound of wind catching in the masts and the waves breaking against the bow. Lyr would prefer not to dwell on such things and so he rises from his bed; he leaves the room and trots down the long corridor with several conjoined single or double-man rooms.
He does not know where he intends to go until he is there.
Lyr hesitates at the door; there is no reason for him to be there, no reason at all. In fact, he shouldn’t be. Then, before he can talk himself out of it, Lyr knocks his hoof against the door in a succession of three knocks. “Euphrosyne?”
i am nothing but a heart of satin,
nothing but rose petals in a cage of bones
She is a twilight creature; walking on that precipice of night and day, dark and light, temptation and righteousness. Her mother used to call it the witching hour, when the veil between the living and dead was the thinnest and the ghosts of your loved ones would come to haunt the halls in which they once walked.
She didn’t believe in ghosts.
She had heard the stories, the well nuanced songs they sung around campfires. But she never believed them. How could she? She had never seen one for herself. It was all just nonsense you told to scare the children, make them behave, keep them at home and tucked into their beds.
She didn’t believe in them. that is, until she heard the knock.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Euphrosyne?
That voice. It was her mind playing tricks. It couldn’t be him. It just couldn’t. But she would know it anywhere; it was the same voice that soothed her in her dreams, the same one that encompassed her each time she opened the pages of her book. She wanted to believe that he had died in the waves, died trying to come back to her. She wanted to believe that there was something that took him from her, that cut their time short.
Could it be him?
The tips of her wings dance nervously against the door frame, hovering just above the handle. She chews her bottom lip, her brow furrowed and worrisome. The only way to find out was to open the door and see for herself.
She waits until she can hear him turn away, until she can no longer stand it. The door swings open furiously, swept by either wind or disbelief.
“Lyr-Lyric?” The words fall from her lips like cherry blossoms; soft, floating on the space between them.
I AM PRAYING TO SAINTS NOW AS OFTEN AS I AM PRAYING TO GOD: DEAR SEBASTIAN, PATRON OF MEN WHO WAR INSIDE THEMSELVES, PATRON OF HALF-STARVED RUNNERS WHO LEAVE LIPSTICK ECHOES ON MEN'S NECKS, PATRON OF SURVIVING THE FIRST ARROW-STRIKE, TELL ME, WHERE DO I SHELTER NOW THAT MY BLOOD'S BEEN CLEANED FROM THE FLOOR?
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess me up?
you want to screw up the works?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep
I say, I know that you’re there
so don’t be sad
then I put him back
but he’s singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die
and we sleep together like that with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to make a man weep
but i don’t weep,
do you?
It is the poem of his childhood; the poem of his journey; the poem of his life.
The pause on the other side of the door is an infinity, inconsequential to everyone but him. Lyr feels his heart tick in his chest, rhythmic and loud enough he is sure she hears it, and he says;
shh, shhh, shh in his own mind, to steady himself, to steel his nerve, but of course it only works because he lies to himself.
Lyr has grown ancient by the time he has turned away and she has opened the door. He hesitates when she says his name, not the half-dead half-name he gives now. Lyr-lyric.
He sighs.
This was a mistake.
He knows in the emotion of her voice, the way it is hopeful as a spring blossom before the last frost of winter.
Don’t you know, he wants to say.
I had to go.
There was a man to follow.
A sea to swim.
A beast to fight.
A lesson to learn.
He turns toward her and she is all that he remembers.
Wine-red and petal-soft; her wings too large for her; beautiful in the way tragedy can be, in a way that makes his heart weep. But he does not weep and there is nothing on his face except the placid look of a still lake, waiting, waiting for the wind to cast a ripple.
He looks her in the eyes.
That is when he knows he knows there is nothing he can say to make it right.
(And he hates the monster in him that wonders if he even wants to).
“Euphrosyne.”
Seeing her in the flesh, and not just in rumour, Lyr nearly asks if she followed his stories of his homeland here; the ones he had shared when he was still young enough to be a romantic. She must have. And Lyr admires her for it; for finding her way to Terrastella; for finding her way back to him. It is enough to make him close his eyes for a hairsbreadth and try and remember the way it felt to nestle his face against the crook of her neck, and whisper of a land he still knew to love. His stories had been so colourful, so poetic, he had escaped with her into them. But he told her those things under a singular, significant assumption.
Lyr had been certain he would die.
He had been certain he would never see her again.
He had been certain he would never come home.
He had been another man.
Did you know between 18 and 25 years of age, the number of newly formed cells balances the dying cells in the body? The moment the body quits developing—approximately 25—we begin to age. We begin to die.
Lyr opens his mouth to speak.
There is a bluebird in his heart.
There is something he wants to say.
Instead, Lyr whispers: “Are you well?”
And within him is a glacial cracking, a self that strains and strains and strains to say more but cannot. And so he stands there, half-luminous in the winter light, feeling the weight of Atlas as he looks at the person who had once been his singular refuge.
I KEEP THE SILVER COIN OF MY TRUE NAME TUCKED UNDER MY TONGUE, HONE MY BONES UNTIL THEY BECOME SHARP AND HOLLOW, LIKE A SPARROW'S BONES. BUT STILL, THERE MUST ALWAYS BE BLOOMING. I CAN FEEL MINE PUSH AGAINST MY STERNUM, BELLOWING TO BE LET OUT. IT WILL SHRED THROUGH THE CARTILAGE OF MY RIBS THE WAY NIGHT SHREDS MOONLIGHT. I WILL RELISH EVERY ACHE.
i am nothing but a heart of satin,
nothing but rose petals in a cage of bones
There are so many things she thought she’d say to him.
She had recited them over and over in her head like a prayer. It was something she practiced regularly - this wanting. It had hurt too much in the beginning, to think of all the things she wanted to say but couldn’t, to think of what she should have said but didn’t. But the words just kept coming and coming until it was all she knew. She had only wanted the opportunity to use them.
In my dreams we are walking through the great library of Delumine and reading poetry until we are sick of words and only want each other. In my dreams we are walking through the scorching sands of Solterra and drinking in the sun all day long until we are red and blistered. In my dreams we are soaring along the cliffs of Terrastella until we are breathless. In my dreams we are exploring the streets of the Denocte’s Market and dancing by the fires until daybreak. In my dreams, we are together.
Now, she has been given a chance to say all the things she was too scared to say.
She takes a step back, her ears flattening against the thick of her rose hued curls. euphrosyne. her name in his mouth feels like a dagger to the heart. are you well?
“It’s not real.” the words barely escape, but their strength seems fleeting in the clouded air between them. “You're not real. You can't be.”
Her eyes are shut tight, her cheeks strained with the clenching of her jaw. She can only murmur: “You were supposed to be dead.” before the world feels too dark, too rigid, too close. She had been waiting and wanting for so long that she forgot what it was like to actually look at his face, to no longer see those garnet eyes in dreams and memories but to see him whole, in the flesh.
She had forgotten just how beautiful he was.
The hot prickle of tears threatens to break her already fragile resolve.
“Why did you leave me behind?” She could never answer his question (are you well?) without breaking her own heart, without cracking her ribs and laying it on the table so he can examine it and say: ah yes, euphrosyne, you had felt too much and i had felt too little. we were never meant to be, never meant to live the life you had wanted. we were never going to be together the way you wanted.
All he wants to say is, ghosts never die. His articulate politeness refuses to broach the words; instead they haunt him, as they always do, and that great and terrible cracking seems tremendous inside him.
Lyr closes his eyes, for just a moment; a hairsbreadth, too quick to really even see… and in the pause he remembers:
The great falling of glacial ice from the edge of the world—the way it created a swell that rocked their ship from hundreds of metres away. He had watched and listened and felt a kinship with that broken piece of ice and with a world that felt sharp enough to cut the edge of him, to open up a hole that had all the light left in his soul spilling out and—
That image remains with him. Ice the size of a mountain falling, crashing, entering the sea—the end of the world.
The end of the world. Standing on the precipice, on the edge o fa wooden ship, knowing he had made it to where he said he would.
And Frasier beside him.
Frasier’s thick breath at the nape of his neck, whispering:
this is the land where the gods sleep.
Another ghost; how does he tell her that’s all he is? The man she had once held so close to heart is dead, dead dead.
He drops his head and says, “Let’s discuss this in your room.” Lyr stands in the open corridor and the vulnerability of it strikes him. He presses past her, pretending not to see the hot rush of tears threatening the edges of her eyes. Pretending the feel of her soft feathers brushing his side as his passes does not ignite something volatile, something electric.
Once within the safety of her barracks room, he turns to face her a second time. Lyr forces himself to hold her gaze. He counts off in his mind, one, two, three, an acceptable amount of eye contact, before glancing away again. He struggles like this for a few breaths before settling, to say:
“I had to leave you.”
At first that is all Lyr will offer her. At first he intends to say nothing more. The explanation he owes her is too complicated, and besides… there is that monster rubbing against his tongue, enticing him to say things that are not exactly true, and anyways, perhaps its better that way, perhaps the truth is too much as it often is…
Finally, Lyr adds:
“It was not my choice.” He speaks with clipped, halting words. They leave little room for argument, and express a militant kind of practicality. “I was told to go, and I was not always truthful about the crew I was apart of—there were… there were contracts I could not break.” Now he holds her eyes. Now he does not count. No, the muscles in his face have tightened like granite; those expressive eyes turn as hard, as uncompromising, as garnet.
“I am sorry leaving hurt you.” Not, I’m sorry I left. Not, I’m sorry I hurt you.
Frasier haunts him, Frasier reminds him:
Blood spilled in brotherhood is blood owed. And you owe me everything and because of that, I own you. Call it heretic, call it demonic, the only gods on this ship belong to me.
A pact. Dark magic.
Ambition. The pursuit of… godhood, immortality, forever. He blinks; his tongue feels heavy. He says, nearly wistfully,
“I wish I could have stayed.” But even as he says it the impracticality of it is too large, too impossible; Lyr knows it, and he knows everything they had been had been a lie. What he means: I wish there was a part of me that hadn't wanted to know...
The trailing thoughts are all a distraction. Seeing her face-to-face, seeing her not as he remembered in his dreams and memories... it evokes something raw within him, something raw as a wound. She had been his safe haven. Softness, in a hard world.
And what is that, if not an illusion? He examines the barracks with a critical eye and says with a critical tongue,
“I did not know you planned to become a soldier, Euphrosyne.” That sets an aching within him, too, and it feels as if another tremendous piece of ice has fallen within him and sent the seas of his self rippling. He supposes at least it means no man will ever take advantage of her kindness again and... and... and,
even as he thinks it
he knows that is the exact reason he is there.
"Speech." || @Euphrosyne
i know i am damned for the pyre
no matter how bright you glow when you call for me
i am nothing but a heart of satin,
nothing but rose petals in a cage of bones
There is a snap in the air like reality has slapped her; the tears threaten to spill over and her throat clenches with the effort it takes to seize the sobs from leaving her lips. Let’s finish this in your room. She swallows, heavy and loud, as he pushes past her. The brief touch of his skin against her wings sends a shiver through them; she feels them quiver long after he is gone. She still faces the door even as he takes up the space behind her, only letting it glide gently shut as he declares: I had to leave you.
She shakes her head, letting the curls fall loose from their binds. Her forehead presses against the doorframe, then, and she clamps her eyes shut so she doesn’t have to look at him. She will not cry. She will not cry because of him. But even as she says the words, feels the venom she wished would edge its way into her voice, she feels herself weakening. He had a way of prying her open, exposing the vulnerable parts of her she tried so hard to smother.
It was not my choice. I was told to go, and I was not always truthful about the crew I was a part of—there were… there were contracts I could not break.
“You should have told me. I would have understood. I would have…” But even as she says it she knows it wasn’t true; she would have begged him to stay, to be the only good thing she had left in her life. But that would have been selfish, and she knows he had to go. Contracts are contracts, afterall. She could understand that, she thinks, more than anyone.
I’m sorry that my leaving hurt you. I wish I could have stayed.
Does she wish he would have stayed, or that he cared enough to take her with him? He knew what her life was like, he knew why she was there. He knew, and yet, he had left her behind. He hadn’t even gone back to find her. He had come back to his home.
There is a pain in her chest when she realizes that she was not, is not, his home.
She straightens her shoulders, sets her jaw, clasps her wings tight to her sides. “You are a liar, Lyric, as well as an asshole.” She knew that he would eventually find his way beneath her newly resolved armor. She knew that she would give in to anything he asked of her, because, deep down, she was still the girl that loved him. And it hurt to know that it would never be the same.
I did not know you planned to become a soldier, Euphrosyne.
“My father told me once that women were not meant to be soldiers.” Once, her eyes were the soft blue of forget-me-not petals when she looked at him. They seemed to soften with just his presence. Now when she finally meets his gaze they are the same shade of lightning over the ocean.
You should have told me. I would have understood. I would have…
A younger version of him would have set his jaw, would have fixed her with a hard, almost condescending stare. That self, that younger him was quicker to rage, quicker to burn, quicker to patronise.
This Lyr only feels weary. He looks at her not with emotion, but with fatigue, with a solemn acceptance at his fate. He does not understand how she can assume something so blatantly wrong, but his tired eyes do not show it.. She couldn’t understand, not for lack of intellect but simply lack of experience. Lyr wants to say, one does not go untouched into the mouth of hell. But he is tired of speaking of the unexplainable. One does not walk the graveyard of gods and emerge unscathed. He is still that falling glacier, that swelling sea. He is still awestruck, standing before the sight that changed his world: how long must I drift, he wonders, until the loneliness will end?
Lyr had thought, once, she was his answer. Her voice, the soft, feminine scent of her room—it all takes him back to a place candlelit and sacred, sacred in a way it had no right to be. Lyr remembers her soft touch and softer voice, the stories they had shared with the delicate intimacy of those who feel lost.
“Euphrosyne.” Lyr says her name. He does not look at her again but stares beyond, out the barracks window, where the wind blows and soldiers drill. He works his mouth, preparing to say more, but she calls him again by his full name and he closes his eyes. Oh, it is a heavy thing to hear.
There are old gods, somewhere, searching for his name and all the power within it. The power of life, the power of death—and this, this in and of itself, is what she cannot understand. But he says nothing at all, for a long moment, for so long the silence drags upon him with all the things he should be saying.
Lyr looks away, at last, from the window.
“Euphrosyne.” This time, her name is soft from his mouth, soft as down, soft as a dying breath. “I had to go. The truth would not have spared you that pain.”
Then, rawly, haltingly, one laboured breath and pause after the next:
“I thought I would die... And when I didn’t, I wish I had—I couldn’t bring that back... back to you."
When he closes his eyes to blink he see’s Frasier’s as they bled with newfound immortality, with a god’s soul. When he closes his eyes he remembers blood-red irises bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, the way the light went out of one man's eyes and was replaced with something older than stars.
Lyr almost wonders why it matters where he went, what he did; it seems inconsequential. How does she know, the knowledge of those things will not spare her the pain? How does she—she, of all people—not understand? Lyr feels at once an unbearable urge to reach out and close the distance between them, and another urge, a despicable one, to make the distance even further. There are a innumerable comments he ought make, hurtful things neither truth nor lie—
I was using you the whole time. I just needed comfort. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you—
You never even knew who I was.
Of course I was going to leave. Why would I stay?
But Lyr cannot say them; they would cleave from him the remnants of… of what? But he knows. To say any of it would cleave from him the last, hopeful remnants of his boyish soul, a self more sensitive. The child his mother read poetry to, and his sister loved. It is the thought of them, and all that they made him, that causes Lyr to hold her gaze steadily for the first time—and oh, how he falls into it.
When she mentions her father, Lyr feels a strike of anger. There is something in her eyes he has not seen before—but, Lyr knows, there is something in his eyes that has changed.
He does not pretend to know what has happened to her since.
“Your father was a fool. Women should be soldiers before they should be... be... what you were forced to be before.”
Lyr turns toward her. He moves as if to touch her, and then refrains. There are more things he wishes to say, things that would not cleave her from him but restore their bond:
He closes his eyes. When they are closed, he finds it not so difficult to bare the pain he has caused her. When they are closed, he does not have to acknowledge her so actively as a real person before him. Instead, she can remain a memory, awoken, brought back to life. He does not have to cringe at her accusing, hardened gaze. He does not have to come to terms with... with... with.
Perhaps he does.
He imagines another glacier, crashing into the sea. But in his mind, the image is silent save the beat, beat, beating of his heart.
Lyr loathes himself for the weakness. Oh, he detests it when, trembling, he drops his head almost to her shoulder and closes his eyes. There is an apology in that almost-embrace he cannot say. There is an apology in the way he cannot meet her eyes.
“Things are very different now, Rosy.”
He should say, we don’t need each other like before. He should say, you’re stronger now, and I’m bad for you, I’ve always been bad for you.
Lyr doesn’t.
He raises his eyes and looks at her. “I know you are mad, and will be for some time. But we need each other. Now, more than ever. I will make it up to you. I have to.”
"Speech." || @Euphrosyne
i know i am damned for the pyre
no matter how bright you glow when you call for me
