Warset, when she awakens, does not remember how she found herself tucked away in the tropical fronds of the oasis. Nor does she recall listening to the bubbling crash of the waterfall like a siren's call last night. And there is on her lips a slash of blood, metallic and bitter, when she tries to wipe the sleep and sand from between them. She tries not to think of the source but when she rises the press of her collar makes her pulse feel like a war drum instead of the beating of her lonely heart.
Each of her bones feels like steel and rust beneath her skin and her feathers shake from themselves a deluge of sand that sounds a little like diamond-dust burying itself back into the earth. The sound only makes her think of dying here in the dirt, so far below her cosmic sisters and their beds woven out of comet tails. Warset turns towards the waterfall, closing her eyes against the molten sting of tears and the roiling nausea of a half-asleep wildcat dreaming between the fibers of her marrow. She lets the ache, and the grinding feeling of sand and fore caught between her teeth, lead her.
And if the grass whispering against her movement looks tempting, her body has no hunger to drive her to lower her nose like a horse instead of a star trapped in an impossible form. Her belly is full of gore and the last remnants of stardust (like a forgotten religion trapped in the form of a girl...just a girl).
The water almost takes her by surprise as it slips beneath her feathers and washes away the last of the blood from her form. The collar around her neck casts reflections between the sun and the water, painting her in a kaleidoscope of color that is reminiscent of a comet's glory crashing through the night. If Warset had looked down to see it she would have sobbed instead of walking underneath the waterfall. She does not look down.
Against her back the water feels like the pulse of the earth pressing into her skin hungry for the last of the starstuff racing through her veins. Warset, as she closes her eyes and starts to slip away into her own thoughts, does not try very hard to keep it from the water. And in the blackness she prays she will not meet the thing dreaming between her marrow.
Noon. The city hot and crowded, stinking of sweat and shit and hot flesh. He huffs, sides heaving, eyes rolling at the thought:
There’s no place like home.
Dune was hauling goods from the docks to some noble’s house. His shoulders sweaty beneath the yoke. Flecked with white salt like seaside cliffs. It was good money. Hard money. Tough & dumb money too. Naturally, his mind began to wander.
Dune always liked to imagine Solterra from above. Take the oasis, the way a bird would see it; pale blue seed with a halo of green, bobbing in a golden sea. The sunlight today would be slick and opalescent, like seen from underwater or through a haze.
Even in hindsight, it isn’t clear when the daydreaming begins. Dreams are like that, fuzzy at the edges. Slippery. In the moment itself, he is oblivious to the shift in reality: one minute he’s thinking of the oasis, plodding along on solid ground, picturing palms swaying in the warm breeze; the next he’s flying over the on massive black wings that gleam emerald-blue in the sun.
He lands on a rocky outcrop and fluffs his feathers. It does not occur to him that he doesn’t have feathers, he’s not a bird, the sun doesn’t really have that grainy, shifting quality. He tilts his head, narrows his sharp vision on the shifting creature in the water. He can’t tell what exactly it is. Sometimes it looks equine, sometimes feline, sometimes just a chaotic, pulsing blur of light, brighter than the sun.
He thinks it might be a woman.
Dune lifts those large black wings, shakes them, makes himself look as big and imposing as he can. “This place is mine.” Oh but it wasn’t, and he didn’t have the slightest idea! This was hers, all hers, and he was just passing through. At least he was not feeling particularly threatened, not yet.
The bird taps his beak on the rocks. One-- two-- three times. Sharp eyes inquisitive but wary. He does not blink. He does not need to blink, here.
The question in the tilt of his head is clear: “Who are you?”
The stardust in her blood pulls itself into the new-world first. It starts with a bit of light, a flare of moonlight, a shift of silver though the shadows, a coolness where before there had only been molten heat. From her form it rises into the strange place, shifting and watching like a constellation does: all memory and little thought. It has an impression of him first, black on black, silence on a sharp beak.
And then the child of war wakes up. She pulls herself from the moonlight and into the new-strange-world. Feather by feather she moves from the waterfall and the humming of the deserts heartbeat. The sand is strange beneath her feet when she steps onto it: pearl, and stardust. Or is it pearl and dried blood dust? The shoreline changes so quickly she cannot grab an impression of it. Without the constellation she is so much slower to see the world, it's all too close, too full of feeling. It feels like burning even now in the new-strange-world when she presses into the sharp, brittle edges of a frond.
tap, tap, tap.
The child of war turns to look at the bird who does not blink. Something about the tilt of his head suggests language, and something in the flare of his feathers suggests a promise of violence.
That's what wakes up the predator, the knock of violence against a stone and a penetrating black stare that does not waiver. She pulls herself out of the fronds by way of claw and tooth. The shoreline looks like sand, just sand, and sun, and the shadow of a bird on a rock. Nothing looks out of place to her, or hazy, or anything that suggests she is not the ruler of this world.
Somewhere Warset has forgotten that this is the thing she did not want to meet, the thing she did not want to become.
But the predator is ruler here, in the place where horseflesh is not a cage but a conduit. She's devoured most of the star already. Only the child of war is left, the girl who cannot stop saying why over and over again like a wish.
The dark predator ridges the hair on her back. She growls. She steps closer to the bird on the rock and she does not blink. Hungry things never blink. “You are right to be wary,” the flick of her tail says with the hardness of her gaze. She steps closer still, the heartbeat of the waterfall and the desert forgotten (the girl and the stardust with it).
A shifting, a changing. The world distorts, winding and unwinding all while staying the same. A dry breeze blows; he feels every feather on his body lean into it. A trick of the light, a twist of the mind, and she comes into sharp, sharp focus. The ridge of her back, scruff thick enough to burrow in, and the narrowing of her beautiful eyes. Every brushstroke of her posture, every gesture suggests violence. She flicks her tail like drawing a sword and he smiles suddenly.
There You Are.
But crows aren’t supposed to smile. Hundreds of teeth are shoved monstrously in his beak, long and thin as fishbones. Absolutely grotesque. Worthless in a fight, especially here, especially with her-- he’s just showing off, playing games, crows just wanna have fun. And if further evidence was needed, he hops backward, with a ruffle of feathers, the instant she steps forward. She’s a cat, he’s a bird… the math isn’t hard and he's proud to consider himself a clever boy.
(Oh, he’s died before in dreams. This landscape is not always friendly to intruders. But dying’s not something he ever got used to. Didn’t ever want to “get used to”; most tastes were better left unacquired.)
But he isn't afraid, not really. Just cautious. When you’re on the ground and someone kicks you, you break or you get smart. Dune got smart. Smart enough to live this long, at least. It doesn’t mean as much, though, in front of someone like her. Someone who’s obviously never been kicked, never been down, never had to look in the mirror to practice the baring of teeth, the look in the eye, the illusion, the mask…
Someone like her just has to be, and the universe folds itself around her-- or that’s the thought that comes to mind when he meets her gaze and her tail flicks again, a serpentine warning.
It must be the bird in him that looks at her in all her wild rampant glory and thinks mine mine mine. It must be the dream carrying him away, dark nirvana. He’s an addict for this-- in his body, a slurred smile rises stupid on his face. He plods along, surrounded by scents he long ago stopped smelling, yoke so familiar a burden it becomes an extension of the body. And he lets the dream sweep him down and out to where life is just a speck, a mote at the edge of vision; blink and its gone gone nothing left but the too-still oasis and the wings on his back that ache to sail through galaxies.
He squawks at her, something tender, something urgent, sweet nothings, and flutters down to the sand where her carves with his beak:
She is counting the teeth in his beakish smile the moment she can see them. Each is a tally against him, a mark on a list that only a cat can have (sins perhaps, maybe reasons for death, maybe reasons for salvation). The number is upwards to the stars by the time the crow starts to move. She only watches him, a growl swallowed into silence like silence in her throat and a hunger hardly stemmed in her stomach.
Until he starts to write words on the sand like a civilized thing, instead of a black omen of death. And then the child of war sheds the wildcat skin in a rush of shaking skin, bone and gore.
Warset shakes out her feathers and looks down at the words etched in the earth like scars. Her first feeling is rage. Stars are not things to be told to dream. They are the dreaming things. There is a hint of fury in the toss of her head, and the rattle of her feathers sighing like a death knell. It lives in the step she takes towards him and the way she drags a feather across the words to smear them like blood on a battlefield, a line to divide one side from the other.
And as their lines are drawn the oasis dissolves.
It starts with a rush of stardust around them and a comet's tail wrapping around their necks like rope. The comet rope tugs her forward, him with it. It drags them into the freezing blackness between stardust and rainbow, where the light dissolves quick as a current on the river into nothing more than pinpricks of lights. Frosted blackness draws in around her, caresses the curl of her belly, the hollow of her hock, the fragile bones of her wings. It steals the breath from her lungs that don't inhale and exhale as they should here.
She steps forward and it's onto the curl of a planet. A sea pillow her hooves and an atmosphere crowns her brow with teardrops of water and air. A mountain kisses the bottom of her muzzle and a forest brushes against her ankles like meadow-grass. Somewhere a drum starts to bang, and echo, and rattle all the pieces of her still pretending to be a girl loose. Warset looks at the crow and still knows the number of this teeth without seeing him.
Part of her asks why.
Part of her only smiles, with teeth, and walks further across the world kissing the bottom of her wings and doesn't look back again. Because ahead of the universe spans further than any horizon and it is the first time she has felt like herself. Warset starts to sing to that drumming beat of a distant stardust war.
And even when the comet wraps tighter and tighter about her throat she does not stop.
When the comet tightens its noose around his neck, he only stares at her. Because the dreamer is the only way through this. Because he doesn’t want to die another dream-death. He doesn’t want to return to the yoke on his neck, the heat, the smell of sweat. He isn’t ready to leave.
He wants to stay here, wherever they are, wherever they might go, for as long as he can. The dreaming was always better than its opposite.
So he stares at her, the calm serious in his eyes asking-- careful not to beg-- mercy and magic,
mercy and magic,
… And from the vacuous darkness between stars, there is form and color and sound. Atmosphere blooms around him, fills his lungs with blue. He can see now how the forests sway far below at the crook of her hocks, and the cresting of alien waves on an alien shore.
When she sings-- when she sings the universe responds. Dune begins to change. His wings spread longer and longer, and his claws lengthen, and from his shoulders burst two dark brown legs, almost black.
All the while his mind is caught on a memory, or something he thinks is a memory. His mother, humming. Backlit by the sun so he can’t see her face, but he can just place the outline of a tired smile. It was probably made up. A false memory, spun up by an orphan with time to kill, wondering what his mother’s voice sounded like.
It wouldn’t sound like this. Like war drums, like breaking bones. Like the swirling heart of the universe. Oblivion, in song.
Her wings brush against his. He remembers how earlier they brushed against the oasis floor, cutting a line in the sand. what side are you on. But her feathers against him only feel like feathers. Not a blade. Not a finality. It might be the softest part of each of them. And then with a grin the stallion touches ground with four hooves. He liked these wings. He was keeping them.
He does not stay grounded for long. With a soft grunt he swings his legs into a buck. Clouds scatter at his heels. The itch to move, once scratched, only grows, and with a bouncy lope he careens toward her endless horizon. Testing the bounds of his cosmic leash. A few lengths ahead of the dreamer, with a soft snort, he glances back to see if she would follow. Something like a dare in the jut of his chin. He was not sure how far he could get by himself.
If there are words to her song, beyond the visceral vibration in her throat, Warset has forgotten them in the falling. There is only the swelling of her heart, the roaring of her blood, and the way the comet feels like it's pulling something out of her when it tightens. She presses her lips to the center of it and hums a hush, hush into the fire and molten rock. The comet pulls away from them, dissolving into a virgin nebula with muffled a roar.
Warset walks in that direction, the stardust hanging about her head like glittering, cosmic halo. If there is anything divine in it, in the way the stardust pulls to her like a moon to sun, she has forgotten the why of that in the falling too. A mountain cuts at her knee and light pools in the wound and runs down her leg like a river. And where each drop hits the world below them flowers and foals bloom, each unfolding their heads to the light like poems from the ink of a old book. Her wings flutter in the same way, folding and unfolding like a thing caught in an eddy of the whitewater river of life.
And even that has no meaning to her anymore. The blood, the blooming, the language of her wings-- it's all nothing more than motions of a dream, a flicker caught in between brightness and darkness.
She turns to him with a question in her eyes and that visceral hum still caught in her throat. There are words there, beyond the hum, but each scrapes like a blade at her lungs and refuses to find easy purchase on the tip of her tongue. It's only when he pulls away and stops that she realizes that this time, in this world with mountains cutting her knees and children running around her hoofs like each an an idol, that she is the knot and he the rope.
There is nothing playful in the way she moves up to brush against him. There is only the heat of contact, of idols brushing (gold to stone, silver to ore). There is only the way she breathes against his skin and presses her nose to his neck as if he might smother the humming in her lungs. I did not create you. She chokes out on a stardust hum, each word falling from her lips tangled with cosmic dust and the light of creation.
A tremble rattles though her body and somewhere in the world bellow her belly it starts to rain.
She sings a song without beginning or end. It is the thread that runs through this world. The water, the earth, the trees, the clouds... She sings, and they fill with being. And as they do, Dune feels a thousand eyes pinned to him. Watching, wondering eyes, keenly aware of his otherness.
He is distracted when she cuts herself. The dreamer bleeds without blinking. Thick, weeping blood that drowns the creatures and the cities far below. The sight makes him feel less like they’re gods and more like night horrors. He extends a dark wing to sweep feather-light across the trail of blood, then folds the blood-tipped appendage closer to his face with a small frown. It is quicksilver. Moonlight on water. Blood, but… not blood.
It occurs to him with agonizing slowness that she is otherworldly. Logic comes slowly in dreams, particularly dreams such as this. Not that it matters where she’s from. What she is. They have this moment and this moment alone: chances are slim he’ll stumble into her dreams again, even slimmer they’ll meet in real life. And even if they did, there’s nothing he could say or do that matters. The real Dune is here and now; the invader of dreams, the crow-winged intruder. And my, what lovely teeth he has.
Her touch might frighten him, if this were not a dream. The heat of her breath makes him think of the way a star dies. The flash of light-- the darkness that follows-- the vacuum, the question mark. It's said nature abhors a vacuum, but that's not true, not really. True nature is love. It embraces all things, even in their unbecoming.
“I did not create you.”
Her humming vibrates through her lips, a siren song, a sun with such gravity he has no choice but to revolve around it. With his eyes meeting hers, he gently shakes his head no. A sly half-smile curls toward her. He looks forward again, debating if he should say anything. What he should say. Finally he clears his throat, and the sound sheds golden sparks where their skin touches.
“Does that bother you?” The question does not resonate with Dune’s voice. The sound is bigger, richer. More nuanced. It sounds like laughter. It feels like shedding a skin; and as soon as that thought crosses his mind, black feathers fall away from his wings and golden ones take their place.
He looks across the landscape she made. All the things she's created-- or is this a memory? The two taste slightly different, in dreams-- at least, they usually do. This one he's uncertain of. This one is new, and it thrills him. He hungers for more.
Slowly he begins to beat his long, powerful wings. The force builds technicolor storms in the landscape below, crushing forests, flattening plains. When he kicks off, without a sound, stardust billows at his heels.
He smiles (a normal-toothed smile, this time) for this is a good dream to be in.
There is a certain loneliness here, even with a world blooming at the drop, drop, drop of her molten blood. It's the only thing that blooms in her, the silver idol, as the flowers start to drown and the foals lay their heads down to dream. Her feathers, her world devouring wings, start to sing the song of it as she rises out from the gravitational pull of this world to follow him. No. He's already gone by the same she says the word, off dancing through the galaxy dust and stars.
Her black feathers seem almost sinister beside his golden ones as they overlap in flight. There's no smile on her face, no look full of sharp-teeth and wonder, there is only the silence falling heavily down her throat now that the hum has worn out. Without it she feels empty, hollow, a god without her moon-blood.
A tiger's eye falls between them, crashing through their wings like a thing both fiery and lost.
And soon more stones are falling: lapis and sapphire, quarts and ore. Each has a ring of light around it, lost light, starlight, cosmic light that's been chewed out and is falling, falling, falling to a distant silver, misted shore. An ivory crown appears on her brow with fossil thorns digging into her skin.
Oh, how violent, how full of molten fire, are the dreams of a mortal star cast out from the cosmic glory.
Inevitability hangs like spice and wine on her tongue as she swoops above him, around him, a distant noose winding its fibers together into a circlet to grace his brow. Jewels appear in the braid of her tail, diamonds and rubies that drip, drip, drip as they run down into the blackness like raindrops. A tremble flows over her like a tide and the edges of the dream waiver, ripple, and the wildcat tries to claw against the feeling of empty air and fire-cold blackness.
When she opens her mouth a feral roar pours out. Language is slipping away, away, away.
More stars fall, more stones fall, their feathers brush together as she dives around him. Her tail is dripping liquid diamond and ruby still as the world shivers back down to a shoreline in the desert. The skin covering her soul starts to glow as the cat scrapes her claws down the inside of it and pulls at the bones with the strength of her jaw.
A bell is tolling, a clock is ticking, a story is pouring out and it's discordant instead of lovely. Warset, trembles between the dream and the hunger. And she's almost lost to both but yearning, yearning, yearning for one.
For the boy with the golden wings and the crow's smile full of teeth.
The dreamer rises, pure glory made flesh, and soon overtakes him. They twirl higher and higher with the graceful abandon of hawks; masters of their universe. The silence expands, palpable as fog, and perhaps for the first time he resents it.
Before he can brood too much over the absence of her song, the silence is broken by the pok! of tiger’s eye crashing through their outstretched wings. He looks at her, nothing more or less than a steady look. And then an ethereal rain begins to fall, the light dancing off it a rainbow of shimmering color.
She’s spinning round and round, she’s dancing and spell-casting, and he just watches, not daring to blink. He watches her cast a golden noose, and without struggle he lets himself be caught. But this noose settles sweetly on his brow instead of tight around his throat. It takes too long to realize it is a crown, to match her own, and when he does Dune stirs up stardust with a molten rumble of laughter. She would have no idea how sweet this moment is, and he does not know how to begin to show her.
It is so beautiful, so beautiful to feel like a king, even if only in dreams, after a lifetime of destitution. He feels his soul rising just as his body-- with gold-winged grace.
A sapphire falls into his rich brown cheek, where it remains lodged in a crimson embrace of blood. A ruby hits his spine and his dream skin stretches to absorb it. Amethyst strikes his shoulder, and sinks in deep. So the sky falls around them and so he transforms, bit by bit, until he wears a body not of flesh and bone but ore and precious stone.
And feathers, of course, golden feathers that brush against her inky black.
Somewhere far away, another Dune sweats in the mid-day heat, trudging ever closer to his destination with a flutter of growing panic. Not yet, he thinks, this clever boy who taught himself to cleave the mind in two. So deeply entangled in the daydream, he can’t smell the city around him. Escapism at its finest. I’m not ready... He clings to his dream crown, and his richly ornamented body, and the cosmic rain.
It’s a slipping sensation that seizes him. A visceral understanding of the grains of time slipping through the hourglass, the fabric of this universe slipping away beneath him. Time was not reversible; not here, not anywhere. Dune swallows the lump in his throat, stretching his wings toward her with an urgency that approaches feverish. He wants to say something, but he doesn’t know where to begin.
When he speaks his voice is pure Solterran. Sand, grit, countless shades of heat. Fearless. “Can I see you again?”
