"upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty."
If Caine closed his eyes he knew it would take six or ten paces before the buffalo grass hardened to chalk bluffs, then three or five more before his hooves bore down on nothing but sky and the faint stench of sea. He would drop like a stone, gulls singing in his ear, and just before salt could season his lungs he would open his eyes and remember his wings and catch the updraft at its most unguarded.
In another version he would forget his wings and plummet to the end of the world.
He unsheathed his dagger from his hip and held it up to the sun; the rubies encrusted on the hilt glinted hungrily at him, as if remembering that before they had been jewel they had been blood. And blood still they could become, if only he pressed that sweet blade to flesh.
Instead he slipped it back inside its steel cocoon, as gently as he knew how, before tossing it towards the felled log he had scattered the rest of his belongings over carelessly. The wood was faintly rotten, tiny white death caps spilling out of every other orifice like teeth; a crow pecked doggedly at a worm rooting through the sun-softened bark.
If Caine was more poetic, he might have noticed the metaphor. But a sudden misplaced gale had thrown his mane into his eyes and robbed him of the chance—though impermanently, for he had poet's potential if not awareness, and most importantly he had the grief. By the law of statistics, there would come a day when they would meet in the middle.
But before—
Tangling at the foot of the log lay the limp, watery silk of his cloak, cold as the shadows it ate even as it cooked in the forge of high noon, ten thousand leagues above the sea. He had stripped it off because he had not wished to lose it—his belongings would never leave him behind, not of their own volition, and he returned their loyalty by treating them well.
Silently Caine noted the location of the dead log to the cliff's edge—southwest, twenty paces—and before his tongue could finish the palatal glide in 'twenty', his hooves had skipped off the edge.
He had grown to savor the feeling of falling.
What other feeling, butterflies in the stomach, heart in the mouth, was as easily anticipated and just as easily put away after it had served its time? A pump of blood to the brain, a burst of adrenaline through the arteries. That was all it was. The byproduct of fear, though absent of the emotion itself, was what Caine had learned to love.
A dull pain coursed through his body when he crashed through the surface of the water. Again he had failed to calibrate the exact strength now required by his leftover wings to lift his body—which had never felt so much a burden—and again the updraft had not been caught duly off guard. He spat seawater from his mouth and wiped salt from his eyes, before beginning the long swim to the shore.
When he saw the pegasus on the beach, dark against the white sand, he wondered if she had seen his plummet. It had not been elegant—if Caine had cared, he would have felt a tinge of embarrassment, right in the lining of the stomach.
But he did not, and so when he emerged from the black waters at last he took his time squeezing it from his hair, shaking it from his coat, coughing it from his lungs. On a whim he extracted the dream memory of a crow from his mind, a perfectly normal specimen save for the third eye and four wings and the inconvenience that his illusions all came out red as carnations on fire after he had bled out half of his blood on a white marble slab.
The crow perched unsteadily on his shoulder and pecked at his wet hair. Satisfied, Caine began his walk down the jagged strip of beach, back to the cliffs, where his path would invariably cross with the pegasus.
Warset's first thought when she watches him plummet from the cliff, is that today another star has fallen from the cosmic throne. Her own wings flutter at the memory, lifting out from her side, too large for the delicate bones of body.
But then she realizes that he is not lightness streaking through the darkness. He is a bladed streak of darkness cutting through the high noon sun. The weight of her wings settles into the sand, drawing stripes on the shore like claw marks. And when she blinks it is to shutter out the sorrow of his darkness cleaving through the low clouds and the brightness.
A drumming starts in the blackness of her eyelids when he hits the surf. She can almost feel the violence of it, bones and shore, froth and feather. The drumming intensifies as her heart picks up the rhythm of it. Her body begs for flight. Her wings unfold again. Refold. Unfold. Catch the sea-breeze. Always her wings are speaking but it's the language of the stars, a memory of before, a feline snarl of hunger. Warset has yet to learn the poetry of them.
It's only when he comes close enough that she opens her eyes. Brine hangs to him like a cloak and she thinks about the whisper of sea-monsters (dragons, kelpies and all the things stars remember the birth of). She wonders if he has the sea in his blood, caught between his bones like a seaweed caught in the tangle of his mane. Warset steps closer to pull the weed from his air. It tastes salted, like a moon-tear, like a bit of stardust caught in a river.
It tastes like she wants to learn the secret to falling into the ocean not like a star but like a weapon of darkness made to cleave instead of sing. She inhales and pulls away.
The red crow is a strange thing, she thinks, like a bit of blood smelted down and banged into form. She wonders what it would have looked like, falling from the sky beside him. Somewhere a memory of a crow itches at her thoughts. The leopard beneath her skin half-rouses and stretches. She starts to pay attention, for the noon is half-way to the twilight. The predator has been dreaming lilac dreams.
Warset steps further away from this dark man with his blood crow and his salted skin. The moonlight of her gaze reflects across the water on his wings, even from the not-large-enough distance it reflects. Everything inside her starts to feel an echo of a hum, a phantom memory of a dream. Everything in her starts to crack and break and all she knows is that it hurts.
Oh, it hurts.
“Why?” She asks with that moonlight on her tongue and stardust between her teeth. If there a secret to being darkness falling instead of light, she needs to learn it.
"upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty."
Caine had always disliked the ocean.
Vast churning depths, impenetrable black surfaces that revealed nothing yet encompassed everything; in his youth he'd come across a drawing in a tattered diary—broad brush strokes, a scholar's hasty scrawl—that depicted the ocean as if one had trapped it all in a glass and looked at it from the side. Floating at the top was a strip of land (Dratheria, it was labeled), thin as a layer of oil, sepia washed. Not even a tenth of the black spill of ink stretching below it to the edge of the page, leaking into the very binding.
Creatures the likes of which have never been seen, scrawled in what little margin remained, nor caught. Imagine! Dissections preserved in pickled jars, rows and rows of unfathomable life lining the Institute's dark cellar shelves like jam.
It was at that moment that he'd decided: he was a desert creature, as much a slave to the sands as he was in love with it. The poets were wrong. A sea of sand was not remotely the same thing as the Sea.
Absently Caine dragged a lock of wet hair out of his lashes. The sound of the waves foaming upon the shore sounded less like a crooning hush, hush and more like an omen. Thick as a heartbeat, a symphony of crow wings.
The red crow on his shoulder shifted from foot to foot, docile as a lamb, and pecked at a piece of seagrass hanging from his neck. He couldn't feel it doing so; rather he knew that it did, like one knew the whereabouts of one's limbs without seeing them.
Softly he clicked his tongue twice and the crow quieted, nesting into his mane like a hatchling.
The girl he kept to the very edges of his awareness as he moved glaze-eyed and sullen down the path. A dark little wisp; he would not do her the misfortune of speaking to her. Yet the crow had other ideas. What Caine had mistaken for obedience was instead a mask for cunning—they were no less than a yard away, him carefully ignorant, it calm on his neck, when suddenly it leapt into the air like a spooking cat and dove straight for the girl, talons outstretched.
He bit back an order and simply watched.
The crow hit the boundaries of his magic before it could touch her (though she would not have felt it) and dissolved into a shower of red motes, then—nothing. Quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. Yet it had not even dust to return to. Inexplicably, Caine felt a pang of old sadness.
Carefully he moved his eyes to her, wary yet unrepentant. Up close she was so slender, bird-like, that he did not know whether he would call her delicate or a wraith. Her hair, sleek and lush, cascaded like water down her neck. And her eyes. He startled, a bit, when he saw them—it was like looking into a mirror.
No—(he had drawn closer but had yet to realize it)—her eyes were so bright silver it was like looking into a star. His own, flat as coins, pale as a gaunt moon, were mere reflections to her image.
She stepped closer, stardust on her skin, and Caine stood so still he could feel the sea breeze whisper salt into his wings, slip coyly over his legs like a ribbon, teasing, teasing. When she drew so near he could smell her (smoke and galaxies—strange as it sounded he couldn't describe it any other way) he flinched, yet still—did not move.
And then she withdrew, quick and effortless, as darting as a doe. A strip of limp seaweed dangled from her teeth. It looked scarcely different from a lock of his hair.
"Why?" she asked, so calm and soft that he became, suddenly, angry. It disorientated him—his anger, her closeness, the fact that she had almost touched him when he had always thought himself untouchable, like his Saints.
"Why—" he said, equally soft, though his was cold and hoarse while hers was a clear spring river, "—do you wish to know?"
High above them, two white gulls screeched high and keening, and in their despair he felt his own.
When the crow disintegrates and explodes into a shower of blood-red rust, something buried harsh and shallow beneath her skin breaks with it. The jagged pieces races though her blood, her marrow, her organs. They echo beneath the moonlight of her gaze, shards of blackness breaking off from her pupils. The sensation of shattering is so normal to her that she thinks no more of it than a wolf at the coldness of a doe an hour after the last drop of blood has leached into the roots like summer rain.
There is no second crow to replace the first, only the sun highlighting his edges like a halo. And for a moment her gaze catches on that line between gold and darkness. She looks at it like it is the line of a horizon she's been waiting to discover. If there is a wrongness to the shine between his spine and wing she does not notice it, not with all that wet gold.
She's as fluid as a river, as the sea, as a breeze too weak to move the tangles of his mane, when she moves closer. There is warning in her own skin, a shiver, a tremble, a rustling of feather and hollow bird-bones. It's the look of something lost, something caught between hunger and some nameless, molten longing. There is a beauty in the almost-sorrow, almost wanting, that hangs from her expression like lace.
There is terror too, perhaps, when the sun sends her shadow reaching long and shallow for his.
Stars have always wanted this closeness, this brush of light to darkness, fire to icy stone. Perhaps it's the most mortal part of her, the craving of skin to skin, the hollowness of a loneliness that is as endless as a chasm with no bottom. And perhaps, later, she'll say it's the mortality of this form that made her step closer to him on the empty shoreline. The sand sounds like whispering silk beneath her hooves.
The curse in her begs for another crow, another cool slip of seaweed down her throat, a burn from the gold still clinging to his skin. Her ruby moon swings in the same breeze singing to their feathers and echoing off across the white-water curls of the tide.
It all feels like crashing, like falling out of orbit, like watching a cord lash in the darkness before grabbing it with lip and tooth.
“Because,” Her voice reaches for the hoarseness in his voice, the simmering ink of it, like it's nothing more than another bit of weed. “nothing is ever the same after it falls.” The snap of her wings is stark against the clarity of her voice, a wound in the skin of something as beautiful as it fragile.
Beneath her skin, the leopard starts to snarl. The gulls still sing of despair above their heads. And her lips start to tingle with the need to hum, and sing, and soar between those spaces between hunger and sorrow.
"upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty."
The second crow materialised like an afterthought.
Less—worse. Like insubordination.
He had not summoned it, yet there it was, balanced precariously on whispery claws atop the bone jutting out between his scar-laced shoulders. It was all wrong. He had not summoned it, but it had come anyway.
The girl had not drawn back, and neither had he. Instead there was a swinging in front of him, back and forth, little controlled arcs of red-rose gleam; his eyes followed it, back and forth, thick with despair yet cold with apathy. It was a charm. Crescent-shaped and carved all of red. Red, like his blood; red, like his crow; red, like his eyes. Everything was about him. Nothing was about him.
"Because. Nothing is ever the same after it falls."
And just like that: it shattered. (A star through the atmosphere.) The spell she had worked over him, that he had not known he was under, that she, perhaps, had not known she had cast—once again: quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris. To dust, to dust, to dust.
There was only but a sliver of space between them. Caine could see the red of his eyes reflected in the swirling silver of her own: pupils in pinpricks, bathed in blood. It entranced and repulsed him in slow, methodical turns. Entranced, repulsed, he looked and looked. Agenor had not done this to him. Raum had not done this to him. He had done it to himself.
Finally.
To Warset it was only an instant, but to Caine it was hours and lifetimes. Within her eyes he studied himself, without shame, without regard, and without mercy. The crow on his shoulder opened its beak and shrieked to an audience deaf to its cries.
"You speak as if from experience." Through the red that had painted his world, he watched her, like the crow on his back watched him. There was no smile on his lips, but it was there in the dryness of his voice. His hair, slick with seawater, covered all but the last of the symbols cut into his forehead. Water traced gullies down his cheeks. Had Warset not been there to see him climb out from the sea, she might have mistaken seawater for tears.
She had drawn so close (or had he?) he could feel her breath warming his skin. Blinking, Caine brought his nose just shy of the collar, woven with diamonds, that sparkled with every bob of her throat. Moved so close, he could see every facet. Two thousand red eyes in a thousand bright surfaces.
Slowly, though it took only moments, a twin materialised below the hollow of his own neck. It was identical down to the facets, save for one glaring difference: all of this collar was red, as red was all its wearer's magic knew.
Perhaps he did it to prove to himself the control he still held over his magic (the unsummoned crow was nothing, a mistake, not a sign of anything slipping) or perhaps there was no reason. Perhaps, because he had fallen, actions had lost their reasons. He could not admit to the girl how chillingly she had gotten it right. How, in a half-breath and a whisper, she, a stranger, had placed in front of him the truth he had struggled for weeks to understand.
If nothing was the same after it had fallen, then it was death he had plunged into. Death at the bottom of the sea. There was a reason the spirits of the dead were so feared, and he was slow, so slow, to realise. It was this: the dead had nothing more to lose.
(Would Warset ever know of how the memory of her collar had stirred the memory of another, worn in the same fragile place, that Caine had never seen but imagined many times by the mark it had left on another girl, in another kingdom, in sands as golden as theirs was pale?)
When he knew the illusion was complete he stepped away, so that she could see his creation in full.
"Forgive me." A lie—(dead) men like him cared very little for forgiveness. "But which, do you think, is better?" A breath—he did not know her name. (Which is better, Warset?) "Mine, or yours?"
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
A million somethings, a million memories, rise inside her like a rain cloud rises above a mountain before it's caught in the currents there (like a cage, like a noose, like a glass shard pressed on her tongue). They all tremble like tides in her bones and in that black space behind her chewed-out star shine gaze. Each feather, spread wide at her sides like both a warning and a siren call to come closer, rustles and whispers as her sinew sets to shivering.
It would be hard then, to look at them and say which of them had risen out of the black-depth like a bruised ghost (and maybe one of them has risen and one has fallen into the darkness of this coil).
And she does not confirm or deny the thousands of thing she knows about falling, and being chewed out of the sky for a reason no one remembers.
She hardly notices the second red crow perched on his gruesome bone. And she hardly notices the salt-water running down his cheeks like sorrows instead of brine. All she can see the the steady pulse of his heart aching against his cheeks and the way his eyes shine, and shine, and shine like all the blood on her once battlefields. He is a song, a poem, a bit of religion she has forgotten the notes of. And when she crosses that last boundary between them, and presses her nose to to the tangle of his hair before he pulls away, she strains to remember.
It slips away, like all things do in this terrible and fallen form of hers, and she cannot hold on tight enough to keep it.
When she spots the necklace around his neck, swinging like a fresh guillotine in a hurricane, she shatters. She is made of constellations without lines to tie the stars together, comets fallen dead and gray to the earth, and stars flicking out of the last on their life between one blink and the next. She becomes three broken lines of pieces that have forgotten how to fit together. They battle between her bones and her own lips hum, and tremble, at the war she does not know how to sing of.
Words glitter like needles beneath her aching lips begging for song. For a moment she only stares at him, and his crows, and the mockery of her charm swinging, and swinging, swinging at the base of his throat. She wants to pluck it loose, and pluck him loose from the cosmos, and save him from the sea all at once. Warset leans towards him and away from him in increments, as if she's fluctuating on a storm-current at the precipice of a cliff side. As if she doesn't know if the falling should be up, or down, or not or not at all.
Her wings blot out the sun and nibbles at the edges of their shadows as she decides to step closer, and closer, and closer. She wonders if she can drive him back into the deep like the stars had driven back the red bull of the universe when time was nothing but newborn fire and blackness. And she wonders if he sees fury, or pity, or fear in her gaze when she looks at him.
She doesn't know, oh she doesn't know that he only sees himself. And perhaps if she did it would have been pity settling in her silver eyes like a black stone.
“Neither.” She says but she does not settle the massive expanse of her wings, or the pieces of eternity lighting embers in her gaze. “But if you'd prefer the real thing to a mockery, you only have to take it.” Stars, oh stars, do not know how to go gently into their sorrow, or their brightness, or their fear. They only know how to blaze, and devour, and upon dying how to turn a forest to cinders.
Warset smiles at his crows as if to say, I know, I know, I know.
And perhaps she does know how to be red, and magic, and illusion without the bones to break. Perhaps she knows all the things that live in the seawater racing down his cheeks like tears pretending to be rain. Maybe it's why she moves to touch him again, and to whisper like a star to the red bull, “If you do I promise you'll never fall in quite the same way again.”. She whispers like a constellation, and a galaxy, and a bit of blackness at the bottom of a moon. She sings, and coos, and bleats like a lost lamb at a wolf.
But when she looks at him the sound of her voice hardly seems to matter, not with a universe of tempting and challenging watching him wander though this black abyss between them.
"we rose up from the rocks in half darkness with stars beginning to appear in the sky like pale, ethereal jewellery."
"Neither," she said, silver eyes like black stones, and Caine could not help the laugh that clawed out from his lungs, a light startled thing, because he had not realised there had been a third option.
"But if you'd prefer the real thing to a mockery, you only have to take it."
He could still hear the sea behind him, still feel the spray of heartbreak-blue waves slashing the white slick sands one pulse after the next, the rhythm droll and eternal, the rhythm droll because it was eternal. They were not far from the water. The necklace that was really a collar, that horrendous imitation she had called a mockery, shuddered as a sea breeze tore lovingly through it, as if it still remembered that divine laws like gravity and wind must be obeyed. His illusions had always been precise. Though Caine forgot it often between bursts of arterial blood, in his chest beat the heart of an artist.
There was a terrible malice in Caine's red-pulsing eyes when Warset raised her wings above him like they were pieces of the night sky made flesh. It was accompanied, and then swallowed utterly, by a terrible wonder. His shoulders ached with the weight of wings half-remembered and never properly grieved. It was the closest to mourning he would ever come.
Who was this girl, he thought, with eyes of light where his were blood, who plucked the sea from his mane and touched her nose to his neck and closed her wings above his head like she was the Night itself, like she was an archangel sent from the Goddess Caligo all the way down to sully her divinity as she brought a sinner to his unrepentant knees?
He could not stop looking at her. "If you do I promise you'll never fall in quite the same way again." The crow had fallen silent. Caine no longer registered its phantom weight on his shoulder. It had gone completely, he realised, abandoning him to her, or really, him abandoning it. He had taken it back into himself out of an illogical desire to be the only creature, living or magical, under her death-dark wings. It was the closest to jealousy he had ever come.
He did not speak when she stepped closer, and closer, and closer. Instead he held his words close, cupping them in his chest and picking them through like he had picked Fia's flowers, as he gave, and gave, and gave. Until his ankles sank deep into surf; until his eyes cooled back to silver; until malice and something else bled like a slashed throat out of the corners of his bleak smile.
“You would let me?” He had stopped moving. He had become a thing immovable. He could not stop looking at her. “But you shouldn’t.” And then his mouth was at her ear, soft and chiding: “Not for anyone. You will end up giving away pieces of yourself until there is nothing left.”
You must always keep your possessions close, Agenor had once cautioned him. Because they are the only things that cannot leave you, that instead can only be left.
The crow had taken the necklace with it when it was banished. Caine's neck rippled black as fate, naked from adornment, cold from the touch of the sea. His wings trailed limply in the pummelling surf, gathering weight and losing flight. His mouth continued to hover near her sleek ear as he thought, his breath warm on her neck (as hers had been on his).
Caine did not move away. Not this time. He did not want the weight of her fathomless eyes clapped upon him when he asked, with the fatal curiosity of the sinner,
“... Where did you come from?” Not a court, he thought. Farther than that.
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
There is a memory that blooms in her, one from this flesh, of another horse that had looked at her like this---
Like she is nothing but a chewed out bit of light pretending to be flesh, and bone, and sorrow. Like she is a predator pretending to be a girl. Like she is a mistake that has not yet learned all the ways, all the curves, all the dark swirls of quicksilver and feathers, in which she is wrong.
Warset wonders if his wings, the incandescent or the sea-drowned ones, know the poetry of the sun or of the moon. She wonders if he can read the notes of almost-forgotten sounds in the flash of her teeth as her lips hum in laughter she does not know how to make. Her wings snap, and billow, and sing like the sails of a siren anointed ship on the horizon. They do not know how to go gently, not yet, not like his bloody spectral crows.
And they speak where she stumbles like a lost lamb over this language of mortals. A feather whispers to him in satin notes that say come closer. Another coos and sings like a siren of drowning, and salt-water bloating lungs into lanterns heavy with wishes and ghosts.
Her entire form, from the delicate curled tips of her ears to the fragile bones of her hocks, trembles when he lays his lips against the shell of her ear and exhales like a wolf. “I would beg it of you.” She exhales back, like a lion and a doe. He still smells like the sea, this nameless man who feels like a dead comet, and she can taste the salt on his skin when she presses her nose into him in turn. “Take a piece of me if you can hold it.” Because she is so full of pieces, each sharper than the last, and when she shifts to lean a bit of her weight against him she can still feel blood in the bottom of her belly.
In another life, one in the blackness with the cosmos running like water between her wings, she might have wondered if they looked like horses or two comet-tails tangled together. In other life she might have known enough of the song of his soul to give it a name. She might have plucked a song from his lips as easily as she might pluck a feather from his space-black wings now.
Which would cause him pain? Which?
What could she take from him, in the same way he takes the memory of this flesh from her? What can she do, but pull away and blink the salt from her quicksilver gaze and shake the crystals of brine from her eyelashes? What can she do but inhale, and exhale, because these mortal lungs demand that she remember how to do something as simple as breathe?
From one moment to the next. Breathe.
Warset tries not to think of all the ways in which he feels like a stone washed up from the black bottom of the sea when she drags her nose along the bottom of his chin. And she tries not to memorize the flutter of his pulse in the hollow of his throat so close to her teeth. “There.” A whisper, frail and thin and full of almost-music, as she pushes his gaze into the glaring sun and the moon hiding behind it. And she does not ask him the same, because she already knows.
His wings had not spoken back to her. All he has given her is magic, and brine, and the language of mortal men who have forgotten the color of light.
"I think of the clasp of the bullet in the gun, the gun in the hand. I wonder—was he invincible then, in his happiness? I wonder—are we ever?"
“I would beg it of you.”
There is an emotion clawing its way across Caine's face and he is trying his hardest to deny it of everything it wishes to take from him.
“Take a piece of me if you can hold it.”
“Your name, then,” he says, and his voice is hoarse not from the salt but from her. “Allow me to leave with your name.”
He does not know why he has so easily let her—nameless girl, diamond choker, ethereal and not-quite-mortal—touch him. When he had refused Moira’s embrace so cruelly. When he had never quite dared with Seraphina. (Except for a feather-light brush of her hair.)
He invariably arrives at the conclusion that the problem must be buried deep within himself. How he scorns touch. How he has always scorned it. The worst is how Caine cannot quite blame it on Agenor, either, though he has tried—he has tried—because when Raum had driven iron stakes into his wings, when he had not seen daylight for weeks, when he had sneered up into the silver king’s face and saw not blue eyes but black—he had felt not fear but deeply wrong elation.
This is what I remember, his body had whispered to him. This is the touch I know.
The problem is buried deep within himself. There is something vital in him that was made intrinsically flawed, a cog never fully righted, and Caine has always known this.
Yet it has never bothered him like it does now.
How he hates the wave of weakness that avalanches over him when skin blushes hot beneath skin, when a soft touch on the neck or the shoulder or the haunch transmits a message he cannot understand, cannot ever hope to understand.
When he touches, he does it to kill. To snuff the life out of someone who, as horrible as they may be, as young or old or ugly or beautiful or damaged as they may be, may not deserve a fate as finite as death. Caine—when the letters arrived on his windowsill, or from Agenor’s hawk, or sometimes, from the bloodied pockets of a scene he'd arrived too late to finish—didn’t know what they deserved. He was not justice. He was not mercy.
He was merely a deliverance, from one dark world to the next.
And this has never bothered him. He tells himself this desperately. The emotion dragging across his face, as the girl made of shadows and light begs him to take something of her with him, is desperation.
You do not really want me to, he thinks. You do not know what you are asking of me.
How he hates it when she leans into him (and he leans back); when she drags her nose along the hollows of his chin (and his eyes flutter closed); when he hears her breathing against him as if it were his own.
How he hates it, and — how he utterly craves it.
She whispers to him that she is from somewhere far, far above, and Caine believes it. So she is an angel, of a sort, he thinks. So she comes from somewhere bright, and holy, and warm.
Of course she does.
“Angel,” he says, seawater leaving salt lines down his face, all of him screaming from the cold when he, at last, moves away from her. Far enough away, this time, that she cannot move back.
“Where I come from, those who fall from the sky are angels.” There is something that is breaking in Caine’s low, toneless voice, as he stands there apart from her, wondering if he will ever see her again.
He knows he shouldn’t. He knows this with the certainty that there is something broken in him, something vital, that he fears knows will never be fixed. But when the red crow reappears on his shoulder, its cries still silent, its very presence as hollow as death—
He turns back to her and says:
“Will you walk with me? I left my things on the cliffs. I am going back to get them.” His ears perk towards her, to catch an answer if it comes.
Slowly, painfully, Caine begins walking back down the beach.
rallidae | fin <3 thank you so much for a beautiful thread ;__;
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
The sun is ticking out the death of an hour in golden rays of saltwater, brine, and the sand particles falling from their wings like burnt out months fresh from a flame. Warset, with her head angled towards the cosmos hidden in the light, cannot help but feel like another thing by which time is ticking, ticking, ticking out the sound of death.
She cannot remember how to feel time like this, like a quiet knell that should be screaming. There had been war-fields, and broken bone melodies, and her sisters laying their feathers across her cheeks to wipe away the tears left behind when the music stopped. For them there had been no hours, or days, or nights, or seconds whittling their bodies into the shape of death like deadwood. There was only-- forever.
But now she can see the seconds in the curls of his hair as it dries and in the salt on his feathers that looks like glitz instead of sorrow dried out. She wonders, so forcefully that it hurts, when time and death melded together to make something almost beautiful. And she thinks perhaps that there is an elegance in the noon, and the ticking clouds, and the way he asks for the simplest thing she has ever been asked to give.
“Warset.” She does not ask him to hold her name as close as a heart, but she hopes that this mortal man might. And in her heart she tucks the wish in close so that it might rest between the soul-song and the constellation-song like a shadow no light can touch.
Here a sister does not have to die to hold it and she is already a dead star, a fallen star, a lost star. There is nothing left to weigh down her old light.
She does not correct him. Warset is no ‘angel’ fallen from the sky but the way he says the word sounds like a sigh that her name has never folded into the shape of. And whatever an ‘angel’ is surely must be something better than a star tossed from the cosmic realm with no wish to cool her fever as the dying creeps closer, and closer, and closer (like an hour, closer). Perhaps it is better to be whatever he would shape her into instead of another lost thing with no compass to point her onward towards the right horizon. Into his shadow she tucks that hope, her lips twisted into something as secret as light bent and caught in a blackhole.
She follows him towards the cliff and in the silence, where his feathers brush against her own as their steps stutter and re-learn patterns, her soul (her tossed out soul and that wishless belly) starts to sing. Into the seconds, and the sunlight, and the clouds creeping overhead like death, it sings.
