Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising: think, the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
T
he world I know passes by in fragments. I breach the surface of the sea in the claws of a dragon; and through those claws I watch the sea meet the land. Sand gives way to foliage; and foliage to thicker trees. A lake might wink brightly for a moment before we pass it by; and the trees might change in nature, from evergreens to thick cypresses. Then the water and the trees meet, and I am certain I must be dreaming or dead.
I have never seen a swamp; and the trunks that rise so serenely from the water seem an odd reflection, as if they are growing from the sky. But then Damascus’s reflection flashes, too, and I am uncertain of whether anything is real anymore. I might have slept; I might have died; but when I awake it is to be surrounded not by Damascus’s obsidian scales, but by men and women I do not recognize. All around me there are trees; the branches form rooms and walkways, and I placed on a gurney and carried through a canopy.
I catch snippets of conversation.
“The wounds are bad. Someone has tended them some; they’ve staunched the bleeding so that he will at least not die, but there’s the onset of infection—“
“I’m worried about sepsis.”
“How did he get here?”
“What do you mean, did you not see that dragon?”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“I have no idea, but—do you see the lacerations? I can’t believe he’s alive at all. Whatever bit him nearly severed the carotid on both sides. If they had, he’d be dead—“
“I don’t even know where to start. Stitches? We need to clean the wound—“
“Ah, we need more doctors here. I know Elena is Champion of Community, but we could really use her experience. Someone go find her.”
Then, quiet.
There is someone—a nurse, maybe—carefully cleaning the wounds on my neck and shoulder. Everything is stinging. Everything hurts too fiercely. I suppose—I suppose I had gotten too drunk, at the festival, and gone back to the sea after talking to Seraphina. I don’t know. I don’t remember. The last—
I don’t know how much time has passed.
My head aches.
Fuck, it stings.
“He definitely has a fever. He’s fighting infection.”
“I think he was attacked by one of the kelpies.”
“That’s all I can figure, from the bite wounds.”
Quiet again. But even the quiet seems loud. I am left alone.
I might have slept, laying on that table. There is a constant creaking of wood; and outside, cicadas are crying into what I assume is the darkness. But it is too difficult to think clearly, and when I raise my head with the intention of standing, the entire room pitches and falls. I drop my head back down and groan.
Let me die, I want to beg. But when I go to speak, I cannot say the words aloud.
I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.
There is nothing remarkable about the dawn that finds her, nothing new about a sky enameled blue and pink, about a golden sun that sits heavy and impatient just below the horizon. The trees are as they have always been, tall, strong, looming, a hundred sentinels gathered. Maybe it is their spindled, reaching branches pushed aloft to hold the pieces of sky and cloud together, or the tangle of roots below that wrap like bony fingers around the heart of this quiet place. She appreciates the morning enough.
She is tired today. The dreams have left her raw, left her shaking, because there is a leaden familiarity to them. She dreams of Hyaline. Keep dreaming of Hyaline. Sometimes Lilli is with her, sometimes she is not. Sometimes it is Kensa beside her, but more often than not she is just alone. It all ends the same, tumbling down from that mountain side. Down. Down. Down. She never stood a chance really, when you think about it. Elena was always destined for tragedy. There is beauty in the way she crashes and burns. A dazzling spectacle of light and sparks. Some how Elena manages to make even a downfall look spectacular.
There is a moment where her breath catches between her teeth, but the moment passes quickly. She cannot explain this feeling that sits behind her eyes like a headache, that something is happening. Elena still hunts for that quiet life she and Lilli talked about so long ago, and, in some ways, Novus and Terrastella have been able to offer her a little piece of it. Elena has a wonderful life, a wonderful position, a beautiful brilliant daughter, the best of friends, and flowers erupting around her with spring air and sunshine. But she hunts for the noise in the quiet around every corner. She will never get what she so desires.
‘Elena!’ someone she recognizes from the Hospital approaches her. They need say nothing else and the golden girl is following after him. Whatever it is, it is urgent. Hooves pound the terrain below her feet as she races off, desperate to reach whoever it is who needs her help. “Update me,” she says as she enters, still moving quickly through the building. She catches only the words she needs. ‘Fever. Infection. Kelpie. Wounds.’ None of this frightens her, nothing sends her reeling, none of this sends her into a panic. She is Elena, the calm and steady healer the moment she enters this building. Even when blue eyes fall along those oh so familiar horns, the stripes, the coloring, everything about him. Even when it is so unmistakably Torix who sits here before her, she does not lose her composure. She cannot afford to. (“One thing that separates healers from the rest Elena, is our composure, our ability to never panic nor grow scared. Just as a solider cannot afford to lose himself on the battlefield, so too must you keep yourself before the illness, the injuries—the death.” It is Lovelace’s voice that guides her through, that keeps her from breaking down and weeping right there. She sends a silent thank you to the obsidian unicorn, but this is all she has time to offer her—later she will go the peak and light a candle for her.)
“You will live,” she says with a voice like honey. It rests behind her ribcage like a promise and it is a promise even if she does not explicitly say the words. She can feel him, letting go, that sense of giving up, the emotions are read by the empath and she grits her teeth against them. She tries again, to push her own emotions into him, the fight, the resiliency. He would not be so easily won over this time, not if he does not let her in, but if she can even push an ounce of fight into his blood, she thinks it could help. “Fight, Torix,” her voice is delicate but commanding. “Draw out the infection,” she orders to the other medics. “That is our first area of concentration. And keep him awake,” she says. She begins to work around the wounds. “This is going to hurt,” she says to him, her voice sounds cold, but she fears the warmth here, that if she lets too much in, it will take over her. Only when the blood runs clean does she begin to sew the skin together. “Torix,” she says, orders. “Tell me something, talk to me.” She says, trying to keep the pleading from her voice. “It’s Elena. Talk to me.”
Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising: think, the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
Y
ou will live,” Bondike says, playfully. His tone mocks the severity of my expression; but I cannot change the furrow of my brow, or the bitterness I feel. He stands besides my hospital bed, bright-eyed and charming. Where the Battle of the Cliff left me wounded, he seems stronger than before, more sure of himself. And yet beneath his cheerful, nonchalant expression lays something more severe, something—heavy, and profound, and too soft for words.
“Go on. I’m sure Dagda and the others are offering you hero worship right now. There’s no reason you have to stay and tend to me.”
He rolls his eyes. “Stop. You and I—were were in it. They only wish they were. They don’t understand—they don’t know what it felt like to—“
He doesn’t finish, but I know what he was going to say. To drag your limp body from the sea. To be the first to bind the wounds on your mangled leg. To shackle the Last Prince and subdue him into reinforcements came. All alone.
All three of them had leapt from the cliff.
How had he made it so unscathed?
I notice, absentmindedly, his mane had just been shorn again. The lack of hair accentuates the handsome angles of his face and spiraling horns. He is smiling, as he tosses an apple in the gray morning light.
He stayed by my bedside for weeks. He stayed by my bedside until I took my first ambling steps; and was the shoulder I leaned on when I could not stand. He stayed.
He stayed.
——
You will live, Elena says, and her voice is the voice of a ghost. I open my eyes and she is blue and gold where before I had seen red, and only red.
Fight, Torix she demands. I remember her skill as an Empath; and the feeling she forces upon me is not one I receive readily. My lips draw back into a jagged-toothed grimace.
See, I think, but cannot find words for. See what I am?
Let me die.
Because if I live through this—
If I am this thing I hate—
What does that leave?
I am too weak to protest as she begins to order the medics. I cannot help the way I groan in pain at the following treatment; and that groan becomes a scream. Torix. Tell me something, talk to me. IT’s Elena. Talk to me.
Clipped. Methodical.
Does she sound that way because she recognizes what I have become?
Tell her something? What could I tell her—
“The last time I thought I would die,” I say through clenched teeth. My words come haltingly. The feeling of the needle through my jagged flesh sends fire through the wound. “The land time I thought I would die,” I repeat, weakly, but stronger than before. “It’s because I fell off a cliff capturing our enemy—it’s because I was going to die a hero.”
A hero.
I do not realize my eyes are pinched shut; but when I do, I snap them open, not to a world above water but to Terrastella’s hospital. Elena remains the only familiar person. I am unmoored.
“The last time—the last time, I had opened my eyes to the light through the water, and then to darkness, and then to red hair spilling out over the top of waves. ‘Stay with me,’ he’d said, not ‘talk to me.’ He’d said, ‘Stay with me.’ And I did. All the way—all the way to the sand, where I first looked at my leg, and he’d groaned, ’No, no keep your eyes up. Keep your eyes up, look at the sky—look at the sun breaking through the clouds.’ Except—except there wasn't any sunlight. Do you know that?” Somewhere, my voice becomes trancelike; somewhere it seems disconnected from myself. “I said to him, ‘But—Bondike. It’s raining.’ And then I realized those were his tears.”
I cannot help the way that my eyes flick from her to everything else; to the swinging lanterns and the busy bodies in the background. To the needle in her telekinetic grasp. To the lanterns again. My life becomes these fragments. My life becomes one painful inhalation and then the next and for a moment, brief, I remind myself that he had nearly died to save me; that he had jumped from a cliff as if it were nothing to do so, as if it were second nature. As if he had wings.
And yet--
How easily I had betrayed him.
"He should have let me fall." And this is another groan of pain, another tattered exhalation. Did Icarus wish this? Did he think, without me, my father might go further? And without him, I might touch the sun?
Did he question his destiny at all, or simply let it be?
I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.
She thinks no one has ever loved all of her.
Just bits and pieces here and there.
Such a hard thing to love, she believes herself to be. She cannot blame them for believing this to be so, a whole person is a hard thing to love. Is that why we find soulmates? To fill in those spots too hard to love?
To love was to lie.
To yourself, to the other person, to everything between you. You lie for love, because of love, in spite of love. There are lies woven in the fabric of every relationship, even when they come to light, even when they are brought to the front and center, they are still lies, hanging there.
In all truth of the matter, Elena and Vercingtorix should never have become friends, should never have seen each other beyond that stormy cliff side. But Elena, she is the kind of girl who waltzes into the lion’s den with a smile on her face. The kind of girl who would love the lions, sink fingers into fur gold as sunlight even as teeth sink in. It will be her downfall, sure as anything, if it hasn't already caused her to spiral, but she’s a girl bred to love disastrous things. And seeing him bloodied and broken and changed, she knows in this moment, she loves him, as she loves Po, Moira, Michael, Anandi, and so many others that have tucked themselves into her heart.
It is strange how quickly things can unravel, stranger still how far they will go once the momentum has built. Her emotions that she conjures for him, she pushes them onto him, keeps pushing because she would claw her way into his heart and grow a will to fight even if it meant she had to tear down every wall, feel every one of his emotions to get there.
“We will get through this.” Words that sound too much like promises not be counted spill from her lips. “You have me, you will always have me.” And she wants to say it this time, how she promises, but she bites her tongue against it. She wants to cry before him, wants to fall into him. He knows her tears, he has seen her pain before. Maybe this would show him, show him why he needs to fight. But the tears do not come. She does not feel her back wracked with sobs. In some ways, she feels completely and totally hollowed out. She has lost too many. Though she does not allow herself to fall into that abyss just yet. She would not lose another.
****She continues sewing, pretends it is a quilt and not flesh, as she nods her head in the rhythm of his voice. “Listen to him now,” she says when there is a break in his words, whether he pauses from pain or for a breath, she does not ask. “Where was the sun?” She asks him as she finishes sewing, starts preparing a salve to place over the stitches, to hold them and ward off infection. ****
Elena wants to cry for him now wants to send those tears down like rain, like another had. “The rain,” she says, swallowing something like agony. “Did it ever stop?” She asks. Rain, it wasn't rain, Elena. But she cannot believe in tears now, not when her own are perched so close to the edge.
“And had you fallen, I would have had nothing to cry onto that night but a shattered shoulder of a man I never got a chance to know,” she admits so selfishly. “And had you fallen, I would have been lost inside a city, a belly of a beast. And had you fallen—,” she doesn't want to say the rest. Selfish girl.
“What is the thing that breaks a poet’s heart most, Elena?” Ramiro asked her one day. This had been a time she had returned to Windskeep, to see her grandmother. “The ending,” he had answered for her. She smiles then, for herself, for Torix, for all the poets out there. No hearts would break today.
Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising: think, the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
W
e will get through this, she says, and the words drift through my mind as if buoyed, kept above the turmoil of pain and disorientation. We will get through this, she says, and as she pushes all of her magic into me, I have no choice but to believe her, to feel the budding resilience within my soul. Yes, we will get through this. Yes, we have to. Yes, I will endure.
(Later, after the worst of it, I will wonder if it is Elena that saves me, or my pride. Is it the way my father’s voice rises, immutable and incessant, telling me that quitting is never an option—that if it ever becomes one, I am already dead).
Listen to him now. Where was the sun? Do I answer? Do I answer, in the red-hot, white-hot undulation of my pain? I think I do. I think I say, Nowhere to be found, but that is beyond—or beneath?—my screams that pierce the air with each stitch of my infected, jagged flesh. Behind his too-red eyes, I think I answer, but the lights and the shadows and the scents and the smells overwhelm me. I might as well be underwater again; I might as well be dying all over.
The rain—did it ever stop?
The rain? What does she mean, the rain? I think I taste saltwater at the memory. No, no, she doesn’t understand—there had been no rain! Only sea and tears. Had I not said that—?
“No,” I rasp, because even half engaged to the memory I cannot part from what I wanted to believe then and now. Never tears. It had always been rain—
And had you fallen, I would have had nothing to cry onto that night but a shattered shoulder of a man I never got a chance to know. And had you fallen, I would have been lost inside a city, a belly of a beast. And had you fallen—
“And had I fallen,” Torix adds. “I would have died who I was meant to be. It was a shattered shoulder; you just didn’t know it.”
I think I say it. I think I say it through the pain that rolls over me as a surf has; tossing me amongst the waves; drowning me.
There is a moment of clarity, I think, before unconsciousness takes me. A moment of clarity, that locks my eyes to hers and seals us again in some sick twist of fate. I am still, and breathless, and staring at her above the tattered grin at my throat.
“Elena?” I say, and do not hear just how feverish my voice has become. “Elena? Would it not better for us all if we ended the moment we reach the pinnacle of ourselves? Would it not be better to end at the junction between assent and decline, today and tomorrow, ourselves… and a stranger? Would it not be better—“
I don’t know if I am speaking, or Damascus through me—if this last burst of strength, of clarity, comes from the shattered piece of my soul speaking through a monster’s mouth.
It seems there is much I no longer know. I turn away; I turn away and close my eyes.
It had not been rain, I remember.
It had not been rain.
The unconsciousness sweeps over me in a way I cannot—even if I had wanted to—fight. I let it. I let it take me.
There is nothing remarkable about the dawn that finds her, nothing new about a sky enameled blue and pink, about a golden sun that sits heavy and impatient just below the horizon. The trees are as they have always been, tall, strong, looming, a hundred sentinels gathered. Maybe it is their spindled, reaching branches pushed aloft to hold the pieces of sky and cloud together, or the tangle of roots below that wrap like bony fingers around the heart of this quiet place. She appreciates the morning enough.![[Image: ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db...0iFb4PvyXE]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/8026a53b-dc57-41ab-b574-9f8a8fe57ce4/ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db0780.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzgwMjZhNTNiLWRjNTctNDFhYi1iNTc0LTlmOGE4ZmU1N2NlNFwvZGR2b3R3ZS01OTMwMmJhNi02YTgxLTQ3YmYtOTg0Ni0zMGM1YTVkYjA3ODAucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.ujCJH7FAbsQhfZlQniMmEd_vw-VmvaTDn0iFb4PvyXE)
