OH, THIS URGE SERVES ME WELL compulsion, the universe contracts and folds in on itself / doe, wide-eyed disbelief / great divine mystery / elusive truth, disguised in the breeze / constantly changing, just to say the same thing
The air – feels wrong. No, maybe not wrong. Wrong is probably the wrong word. It’s right, but it wouldn’t be right anywhere else.
This island feels unnatural. I can’t tell if it feels unnatural in a way that is good or bad – I think it might be neither. I can feel it all the way down to my soul, which seems to shiver where it is nestled in my breast. It seems to burn.
I have lived and lived and lived again. Perhaps that is why the images in the mirrors do not frighten me at all.
From where I am standing, I can see my other two equine-selves on either side; the green knight, plain and pale, clothed in emerald armor, and the near-dead, like pale sun-rays, a sword at her hip. Beneath me is my own reflection - Nicnevin’s reflection. All of these faces are mine, or they were, but there is something alien about seeing the two dead ones staring at me, catching my eye just as I look into theirs.
There is nothing like looking at them to know that I am not them. Not now. Not ever again. I’ve never mourned for it – but looking at them now, like walking corpses, I almost feel sorry for the ends of the lives they lived.
But only almost. It is the natural way; there is nothing else.
I am descending – ascending, moving in some direction that is near-incomprehensible because, wherever I look, there are mirrors upon mirrors upon mirrors, reflecting the impossible, reflecting each other – deeper and deeper into a labyrinthian, unrecognizable expanse. In front of me the landscape opens up, and I can see a massive chunk of crystal which seems to be ripped directly out of another world; I stare into it and realize that I am staring into the great, autumnal expanse of my homeland, and there is a man with golden laurels twined into his hair (only gilded leaves – never a crown for you), working a blade across the bone-hilt of a sword. He scrawls designs in shallow divots; they unwind across the bleached ivory, forming the shapes of oak leaves and strangling vines, of firefly gleam and swirling wind. I walk towards the reflection, closer and closer and closer, until my muzzle is all but pressed to the surface – all but fogging up the glass.
Oh, old friend. I know you. I know parts of you; but I’ve nearly forgotten your face, and now, all but turned away from me, neck bent in work, gold leaf falling into your eyes – I still can’t see it.
I take a deep breath and press my nose to the crystal, and I find it warm and honey-scented – like home. The wind blows through autumnal branches, and I can almost hear it, I can almost remember it, but the sound never comes, and neither does the breeze in my hair. He looks up, slowly, his eyes a color I won’t remember as soon as I look away from him. He looks confused – there is no gleam of recognition in his gaze.
I smile, slowly, and I see his eyes widen.
I turn away.
I walk deeper and deeper into the mass of shards; my reflection is a vine ahead of me, or a lightning bug flying in the opposite direction, or an arrow buried in the shoulder of some warrior from outside of the woods. My mother is a forest cat in the branches of my father’s oak tree, looking down at me with hazy golden eyes, or, in a twirl – a refraction of light – she is herself, but her eyes are that same shade, still feline. Once I look over and my reflection is the same, but my sister, in her owl’s skin and feathers, looks back from where she has coiled her talons in my mane and rest on my neck.
(There are other versions of me, too. I don’t notice them – I don’t notice the ones that are run ragged, or bloody, the one that is teary-eyed where I am smiling. I am too distracted by the wonders to notice the shadows that the island is attempting to show me. All I know is that this place is beautiful and new and wild, so wholly wild, and I am determined to embrace it, just like I am determined to embrace every part - down to the cutting edge - of this new world.)
I breathe deep of winding air – which is cold and sharp, like the crystals, and tastes like something I am just beginning to recognize as winter – and keep walking.
open! ||very enamored w/ this prompt so all the kids have to do it||winding roads, family and friends "Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the Soul
The pleasures of Heaven are with me
and the pains of Hell are with me,
the first I graft and increase upon myself,
the latter I translate into a new tongue.
Damascus walks above him, and beneath the great black dragon the mirrors reflect opaline and strange. Vercingtorix’s world becomes nacre and shards between Damascus’s obsidian scales. The black opal, too, becomes shards of moving colour; kaleidoscoped, first, with the veins of jewel-bright colour through the dragon’s hide. Then:
The red glints become less severe and more movement; the hard edges melt until they scramble in desperate spirals, a herd of running horses where all the horses are faceless and Vercingtorix’s own face stares back from the polished plane of a single crystal. Damascus moves on and the image shatters; but he is left with his own face and a red mare running along a black cliffside and into—
into eternity, he knows.
Veni.
Vercingtorix had come here to understand the magic island whispered across Novus. Each story was different. An island of stars; an island of endless day; an island of endless winter; an island of crystals. It is the island of mirrors and crystals that Vercingtorix walks, unimpressed. It is an island of his worst nightmare that he ventures through, aimless, wondering—trying to suppress his own naturally blooming curiosity, the voice that says in wonderment, what is this, what is this—and all he can answer is sacrilege. These are pagan deities and deceitful folk, he knows.
Magic cannot be trusted—
Crystal breaks beneath his hooves. Damascus, despite his size, moves serpentine and smooth between the towering labyrinth. He stares above boundaries that Vercingtorix cannot surmount. He says, “It never ends.”
Vercingtorix believes the dragon, from where he walks beneath the beast’s chest.
Magic cannot be trusted, he thinks again, but now it is in the vindictive swirl of images along the crystal’s angled planes. He sees his mothers face, or thinks he does, and hears her own voice when she says, we women were always meant to belong to the sea; you should not hate her so—
Vercingtorix might have wandered forever, had Damascus not made a sound low in his throat that was neither a laugh nor a growl but some progeny of them both. He did not see the crystals shifting, but as they turn around a corner that seemed a dead end, they come nose-to-nose with an autumnal woman. Vercingtorix thinks he hears real laughter, and the abruptness of her appearance unsettles him.
But what unsettles him more is the reflection in the glass behind her.
His own face, staring back. Except—
Vidi.
Pinched in hatred, and disdain. He knows it is not the true contortion of his face in that moment; he knows the muscles of his cheeks and jaw are supple, unclenched, and his brow un-furrowed. But in the mirror—
In the mirror he sees a man who burns, and burns, and burns and knows, with a strange knowledge—
That is how I must have looked, when I told him (no, no, her)—
“Hello,” Vercingtorix says in surprise. And Damascus drops his long neck down, until his head—larger than the both of them—is level with the horses. He breathes out a harmless billow of cyan vapour that then dances up in the shapes of running horses that then, turn to fish.
Damascus laughs.
Vici.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable
I sound my barbaric yaws over the roofs of the world
OH, THIS URGE SERVES ME WELL compulsion, the universe contracts and folds in on itself / doe, wide-eyed disbelief / great divine mystery / elusive truth, disguised in the breeze / constantly changing, just to say the same thing
Labyrinth after labyrinth. Turn after turn. I move unhindered – not stumbling, not cautious, not afraid of a thing. The trouble with dying – and doing it again, and again, and again, as so many different things, in so many different ways – is that it starts to lose its bite when you’ve done it enough. What is the worst thing that can happen to me now? Dying again?
(No – the worst thing is failing. But that hasn’t sunk in, yet. I am still too young to process the weight that has been pulled across my shoulders like a heavy blanket. Later, it will feel more like lead.)
I don’t notice the man or his companion until I am upon them. Considering the size of said companion, I think that it is an accomplishment – and likely a strike against me. But the crystals are thick, and the reflections are deceptive. I almost mistook them for a part of the landscape, at first. There are so many strange things in the mirror.
He is dark and pale at once, with a sizable set of horns that do, to my credit, catch my attention; my warrior’s training has not been forgotten entirely. Hello, he says, with a sort of surprise that suggests to me that I am just as unexpected to him as he is to me. “Oh-“ I say, still smiling broadly, maybe foolishly, “oh, hello.” I wasn’t expecting to see anyone else here, but, then, I don’t know anything about this island. Maybe people live here. I imagine it would be difficult to do so, considering that every single surface on the island is- strange and magical and reflective, but, with time, I’m sure that you can learn to deal with it.
What catches my attention, more than the man, is the creature who is with him. I don’t notice the shifting of scales, at first – it is so big that I nearly mistake it for a part of the landscape -, but, when it lowers its head to rest level with the two of us, I gasp. It is not a fearful gasp. (I am not afraid of much.) If anything, I would say that the sound is more like exhilaration, or pure delight.
The reptile breathes out sky-colored vapor, and I watch it wide-eyed as it twists in the air, first like racing horses and then like- fish, I think, but not any fish I’ve ever seen before. (I only recognize them by their fins, and even then, I am not certain. Discovering the ocean has led me to realize that there are far more types of fish in the world than I could ever have imagined.) I take one step closer to its huge skull, and then another, marveling at the sheer size of it. Goodness. The only creature I’ve ever heard of that seems like the massive beast before me is a-
I turn back to look at the man, wide-eyed, still grinning from cheek-to-cheek. “Is that a dragon? I’ve heard stories, but I didn’t know that they were real!” Oh, maybe I should be more cautious – but I’ve stumbled right into them now.
In front of me, my first life stares at me disapprovingly – her dark eyes narrowed to slits, the drip of blood from her drawn blade, her emerald armor coated in a thin sheen of ash. But my eyes are on the dragon, and on the man, and I don’t notice her stare at all.
@Vercingtorix|| hdiwdhowefjoweijwe there are two types of people in the world ||winding roads, family and friends "Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
