“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
All the gods are dead and their bones are not in the mountain buried in the frozen winter stone.
The north star is in the stone.
And she is broken.
Time has ticked away and she has been unable to grasp the hours, and minutes and second. There is no sunlight, or moonlight, or firelight, by which she might count the moments of her suffering. All she has are drops of her blood to count the hours (and there are so few drops left to fall from her).
Drop. One. Drop. Two. Drop. Three.
Between the drops there are the roar of a leopard chained with her ribs slat-sided with hunger.
And between the roar there are the laments of feathers dreaming of the winter air of the cosmic coil. Those dreams are threads of blackness, of crow-faced boys with teeth that smile instead of snarl, of wine scattered across the ground in place of seeds. She waivers between the three as another thread without shine and a knot. If she is anything but a thread on the wind in the darkness she has forgotten what it is.
There is only blood, and pain, and leopard hunger, and the lament of a chewed out star.
Between the only things that there are Warset is awake in the newborn dawn. Her eyes are thick with salt and quicksilver. Each feather in her wings, as they flutter uselessly at her sides, is more torn up than the last. Cruelty is a heavy cloak on her form, an oil thickening her blood, a tear catching in the hollows of her cheekbones. She wears each more gracefully than the last. She is a masterpiece of suffering, and mortality, and broken glass wickedness.
And if there is a name on her tongue, and a song of save me, save me, help me, she does not know how to form the sounds of it with her thick tongue parched of water. All there is the image of a dark pegasus, and a desert boy, super imposed in the places between the constellations etched across the backs of her eyelids. Their names are beyond her.
But the dawn is trickling in through the cracks of her mountain-belly cell. The spiderwebs are dusted in frost and rose-gold and today, this morning, her world is not as bleak as it was the night before. She hums. Her lips feel like a cage of wasps as she sings a song of a hunter caught in a wheel with their prey. The wheel spins, and spins, and spins, and she does not know how to free herself from her.
Outside her blood is glittering silver in the dawn-light where the stone has been watered by her misery. Outside there is no dragon, or stallion, to guard her brutal cage of suffering. The devils have wandered from their inferno.
And inside, in the darkness cracking with light, Warset lifts her eyes to the crack in the stone and lets her song turn to the war-cry scream of the suffering and the hopeless.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
i still feel you, now and then / slow like pseudo-ephedrine / when you see me, will you say i've changed?
"Now," said Caine, tapping the blunt edge of a silver dagger against the merchant's sweating neck, right where the muscle gave way to jugular vein.
"This vial. Look familiar?" A small glass vial glinted like mercury under the ghoulish light of a single lantern. The merchant, dripping blood from a cut on his lip, took one ragged breath in before spitting a wad of spotted saliva at Caine's hooves. Smiling faintly, Caine knocked his dagger against the man's temple. His resistance now was merely proof of his setting desperation; he was beginning to break, like an egg tapped in all the right places. Caine could feel his tremors magnified through the handle of his blade.
Wiping blood carelessly from a gash across his cheek sustained in the earlier struggle, when his newfound humanity had caused him to strike the heavyset merchant a bit too lightly in the chest, he pushed up from the ground, leaving the man to struggle against his ropes, and walked to where the sandstone wall met the slimy rock face of a cave yawning out to the Terminus. Rummaging amongst a tangle of fishing nets with bits of fish still rotting inside them, Caine stilled when, from behind the bulk of a wooden barrel, out fell a plait of hair as gold as wheat.
Attached to the plait was the whimpering head of a young girl, her body folded in the shadows behind the barrel. "Because I lack the time to convince you in another way," Caine said, his eyes as red as blood as he pulled loosely at the girl's braid, "I took the liberty of bringing someone here before you. Do you recognise her, merchant Mikhail?"
The merchant's answer was a stifled choke, falling into a breath of horrified silence. Finally, a broken, "Annabelle." The girl, bound and gagged, answered her father by leaking forth a round of fresh tears.
"I am terribly sorry, little one," Caine whispered, kneeling down to frown into her eyes, bluer than the sky. "Monster! Do not touch her," came the merchant's cry. A thump as he fell to his side, struggling against his ropes. "You are the sole reason she is here," Caine shrugged, before reaching into his cloak and pulling out another dagger, this one as thin as a basilisk's fang. "Does that not make you the monster?"
Silence, until — "I swore an oath with the Guild," the merchant said hoarsely. "Sealed in magic. They will know." His eyes fell to the curled up form of his daughter. "They will kill me."
"Ah. I see," said Caine, reddened eyes slitting in disgust. "Then I will make it simple. Your death, or hers. Answer my question, or — " Quicker than a cobra strike, the dagger became but a pale blur through her leg, bone against bone, slicker than butter; before shuddering to a stop just before it could slice the tendon. The girl's muffled scream ripped through the dark like glass shattering. " — I continue."
The man moaned through his daughter's sobs. "Stop!" Caine's dagger stilled; the girl's screams died to hiccuping whimpers. "Stop. I yield," he hissed. His hair fell in oily yellow ringlets past his bloodshot eyes. "I know little but this. The star you seek, the leopard-star, the vial is of its blood. And the seller of it... he is gold fading to dark, I recall, scars — scarred all over, and horns sprouting from his — I swear, I swear I am telling the truth!" Mutely Caine nodded; if the merchant's uncertainty vexed him, he let none of it show. There was only the pulsing of his eyes and scars, red to orange to dark, like fading embers.
Shuddering from the cold of the cave floor, the merchant continued. "The man sold the bottles to any of the Guild who would take them. I reckon he's yet to kill the star, to stretch his supply for as long as he needs." His voice rasped to a whisper. "That is all I know. He must be keeping her somewhere. I know not where, he would never tell me, to disclose such secrets to a mere mer —"
"Enough. I've heard about this man from others, always recalled with the same uncertainty," said Caine drily. "I merely needed your confirmation that the leopard-star lives." A black ripple, and over his shoulders appeared the suggestion of a fabric more shadow than anything corporeal. "Now, though, I advise you to work through your bonds quickly. As you talked I felt the magic take; the Guild is, as you'd feared, coming."
Caine rubbed at his eyes. Dead, dull silver. "And give my regards to your Annabelle. Your dreams prove that despite your blackened heart you still have someone you love. In that, you are a better man than me." He stepped away from the barrel. A blink, and the daughter of the merchant's gold braid was naught but white fish bones and tangled netting; her body, the damp cave floor.
A blink, and the assassin was gone.
§
Caine retches three times as he climbs up the punishing incline of the Veneror.
The first, because the nausea of overusing his magic still unseated everything he tried to keep down. The merchant Mikhail was the first to experience his nightmares rendered into reality, yet out of necessity there came two others. The second had been the bloodiest; the wife had needed her limb fully severed off, before the old guild master had squealed.
The second time was when the emptied vial fell from his cloak pocket and shattered on the rocks, reminding him of what he had done to bolster his magic from red phantom ravens to fully reconstructed maimings. He had doubled over, gasping at the cold mountain air, before forcing a lump of grass down his throat to wash out the metallic taste of her blood. The grass had come right back out, covered in glistening silver.
The third, had simply been from exhaustion. He no longer remembered sleep. It came to him like a thief, a dawning of black emptiness before he would find himself back on his hooves again, his memory riddled with holes, his mouth as dry as a husk. Somehow, he would draw himself together again. He'd been through worse.
Yet — No. No, surely this is worse than everything. The image of a star bled out to nothing. Blackness would assault him again yet this time it was not sleep but fury, a core of red-hot rage bottled at the very center of him, violence like he had never known before.
If Warset was dead, then the one who'd drained her of life would follow her soon after. Caine swore this to his Saints, to her sister-stars, to this land's meddlesome gods.
He would kill him. If he could not save the pegasus, then he would bury her with an offering of vengeance.
When he sees the first glimmering drop of star-silver on the rocks, Caine nearly falls to his knees in exuberance. Instead, the scars at his shoulders groan as he shakes out his wings and pushes off into the clouds, so close now that it takes but a moment, until the air grows so thin around him that his breath comes quick and shallow.
It is not the craggy form of a cave nestled into the mountainside that draws him, but her song. It starts off as hollow notes half-lost within the clouds; as the quickening of Caine's pulse as something reaches deep inside him to whisper her, her, her! He strains his ears, desperate, his wings beating as silent as an owl's in the growing dawn.
And then his hooves clip against cave rock as he glides down, half stumbling to the gaping mouth. There are no guards, no dragon, no man, nothing but a black crystal cave and the song crooning out from its very heart. Grimacing, Caine tucks his fury back inside himself, an ember to sear holes against his chest.
His dagger hovers like a torch in front of him. "Warset!" His voice ricochets hoarsely into the dark, and in the resounding echo, Caine listens for a star to sing.
« r » | @Warset
I guess I am incapable of not writing novels to you???
Any humanity she had discovered in this cursed coil of mortal things, and gods made from the wreckage of her cosmic religion, has long since turned to ash in the marrow hollows of her bones. It lingers there as a dead thing lingers: all smoke, and sorrow, and embers burned down to nothing but black. All that is left, caught in this chew-out form of a dead-star, is hate.
And hate, and hate, and hate.
The leopard, who does not recall the kaleidoscope of colors and all their flavors, languishes in the wrath like a duchess. She picks her teeth on the sharp bones of suffering. Each of her claws has been whittled to a diamond hard point on the metallic agony of a star begging for a blackhole. And in the silence, where the songs of war and peace cannot survive, she drowns out every memory, every whisper, every drop of music with hunger.
But it is the girl, this fresh-faced mortal, caught between the soul of a leopard and the gravitational pull of a star that must be noted for the sorrowful tang of her fragile hate. The girl does not recall, not fully at least, the expanse of a dragon’s wings on the eve of the cosmic making. She does not remember the spiced and fermented taste of a war-song echoing in her chest like a stone in a glass bell. Her feathers might recall the sultry feel of comet sand between their roots and their petals but the girl only knows the feel of sea salt and storm winds.
And what she knows, what she remembers, is tainted by the ice of winter and the blackness that does not abate even when she opens her eyes. If there is beauty in mortality, in being as fleeting as a butterfly on the edge of its cracked open chrysalis, she thinks it is nothing more than a pretty monarch lie.
It’s not the monarch lies, or the dragons on the eve of war, or the cymbals of peace ringing across the corvus constellation, she is thinking of when she hears a whisper through her frail bellow of suffering.
It is not wrath on her wasp-stung lips when they stretch and break against her teeth. But is neither a star snarl, a girl cry, or a leopard growl, that breaks up the drip, drip, drip of the blood falling like dead-wishes from her jugular.
The sound she makes, the one that not a single one of her souls can hold alone, is agony. Agony and nothing else. She is not brave enough to sound like hope or prayer (because what god listens to a cast out star but the devils and their children). She is not brave enough to think about sounding like anything at all.
Her voice, her bleating yell, is the aftermath of song: discordant notes strung together in a way that is harsh as salt in a wound. The sound of her discord carries in it the red sandstone of the desert, the black gap-jaws of comets, the sweetness of sand bloated in the blood of a wine glass. And it vibrates through her lips as much as it vibrates from the wound at her jugular and the holes in her wings.
“Caine.” She stutters, or at least she thinks she does, in those same discordant notes that feel like stones piled up on her tongue. Each alone is heavy enough to drag her to the bottom of the sea. And together, each note stitched to the last, they are heavy enough to sink in the belly of her triad-soul.
When she lifts her neck to howl in the darkness, her skin stretches veneer thin across her atrophied muscles. And it’s so hard, she knows it’ll be so hard, to look at the glory of her form and pray to the legend of a constellation. Greed has eaten her right up until all that’s left is little more than bits of shell, and dust, and quicksilver.
She is no girl now, no leopard, no star with vitality in her blood. She is. She is. She is. Oh, she does not know what she is.
Her nose rises again into the never-ending blackness so that the blood at her jugular grows in it a pale and sickle moon. And she still does not know what she has become when the words, “end me”, stumble out in jigsaw notes of music.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s only hate that can send a dead-star tumbling through the mountain with nothing more than a hum of death. And maybe it’s that same hate that feels only the discord and darkness in the trembling of the mountain and nothing of justice smelted down to creation.
She had meant to say save me. Or at least, in the dappled shine of her sickle-moon-neck, she had thought that was what a girl was supposed to say.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
mr. sandman, bring me a dream / make her the best that i've ever seen / give her two lips like roses and clover / and tell her that her lonely nights are over
Could drops of her blood bloom into milkflowers?
Perhaps he could make it so. Perhaps, when he found her and brought her out of the cave's stomach whole and well, he could sprinkle a little bit of his magic onto hers, and make this barren field bloom.
Blades of grass were crushed by his unsparing steps like stones flung out of the sky. When he reached it, his head pressed flush against the cool crystal mouth, dewdrops of sweat left behind like salt deposits. He had already called out her name. All that remained was for him to listen for his.
(And to expel the taste of her blood from his mouth before she could smell it on him like rancid wine. He would repent for using it by turning her shed blood into meadows of white flowers. Larkspur, camellia, amaryllis; seed to bud to bloom, brilliant, heartbreaking, alive. If she did not reach down to touch a silk-spun petal, she would never know it was all in her head.)
His wing skated against a gash at his cheek, curved in the trajectory arc of a steel-tipped hoof. Blood rolled off its rippled edges to quench the struggling moss below; Caine looked at it, at its violence, and was macabrely satisfied. That the color of his blood was the red of an auschariot rose was filed away with fury masquerading as apathy.
He couldn't turn Warset back into a star, but a field of cosmos, he thought, as he entered stumbling into the dark, was as close to transcendence he could offer her.
Corners were turned with a businessman's stride; Caine was uncaring, now, about theatrical concepts like secrecy and strategy and restraint. His dagger was sheathed at his shoulder. He doubted there was anyone left for him to cut into ribbons and bonemeal. All of the energy that had sustained him when he was outside of the cave peering in had concentrated into a gaseous ball lodged in his throat; his eyes were fresh poppies. In his head, he was trailed by a murder of crows.
One sat on his shoulder; it chattered at him which way to turn. One flew low, yanking at his ears when he tired. Another traced the symbols carved into his forehead and wondered aloud why he couldn't go faster. The others existed only to laugh. He turned a corner and slammed shoulder-first into a bulging stalactite; it broke off; he stumbled, neglected to catch himself, bloodied his knees. A crow swooped down, mid-cackle, and pecked at his eye to get him up up up!
He got up. The crow raised its ugly head to the ceiling. She's here, you fool, it sang. Go and say hi!
He looked over.
"Caine." His eyes were fresh poppies. He was a tower and she a bed of bracken, her skeleton wreathed with vines. He shook his head; the vines cleared, the crows scattered, the skeleton grew a skin of stardust and ruin. He sank down to his heels. Reached out his nose to brush softly against her cheek. "I did not follow you." Drew his eyes over her form again. "When you turned into a leopard, if I had chased after you—maybe he would not have found you."
Laid his head against her shoulder. "I will kill him."
"End me," she whispered. His breath blew out softly over her ear.
"And return to being a star?" he whispered back. Drops of blood from the gash on his cheek rolled onto hers. His eyes were fresh poppies. He tried to reach into her dreams, but the magic of her blood was spent — it slipped away, out of his reach, and his grip closed around nothing.
