It’s there in every white-froth crest, in every shark snarl, in the thunder bowing low over the sea. thump, thump, thump, or maybe it’s lub, dub, lub, dub.
In my ears it echoes in the same way the tide echoes in the hollows of my bones where marrow should be. With every step, every briney breath, every challenging mirror cry of my soul, I hear that heartbeat. Somewhere beyond this dreaming sea of mine I know-- I know-- that my sister is tangled with me in our bed awashed in silk and chainmail with our wolves curled around us like roots a seedpod.
Somewhere I know I am not alone.
But here I am the only monster on the shoreline. My horn is the only crown taunting the straight line of the horizon with a whistling song. I am brightness in the dark-tide, pearl in the ink and gloom of the night, moon in the dark places empty of stars.
And I do not run through the solitude like a wolf looking for a pack.
I walk.
Step after step, slow as a tide first coming to land, my form never quickens and hungers for a place where the darkness might cut open into the light. It is not the light, or the horizon, I hunger for in this ink and gloam.
The sea is a mile of cool-pearl kisses against my belly as I wade into the waves. It curls mother-gentle around my hocks and my knees. It pulls at me like I am nothing more than sand, or dead and pale shell, or driftwood.
And I follow it. Until the sea aches against the pulse below my cheek-- as if it might swallow the heartbeat I have given it in this dream of mine. As if it is jealous that I still fill it to bloating with a roar that is not its own.
Somewhere a drum starts to beat, and a mare starts to scream, and a fire starts to smolder. I close my eyes. Because when I open then, I know, that I will be standing belly deep in a sea of bodies and it’ll be a blood-tide curling around my knees.
I know this is how it starts. This is how it always starts.
DARKNESS IN THE EAST
DARKNESS IN THE WEST
OF ALL THE PRETTY ASHES
I LOVED YOURS THE BEST
The night begins as the best ones do: with wings. Dune takes a form roughly the size and color of an albatross, afloat on huge white wings with a knifelike edge, sharpened enough to cut through the fabric from one dream to another. Crossing dreams is a fresh trick, one that makes him feel restless and hungry and bigger than his body. He moves like a hunter, though not in search of prey... just something-- someone-- interesting.
At some point he cuts through a cerulean blue sky and slips into darkness. There is a pulsing, and a crashing, and the scent of salt and blood. A nightmare? He tilts his head, peers below with sharp, beady eyes. There is a girl, eyes closed but savage as a thunderstorm, waves foaming against her like a rabid animal.
Now this is interesting.
Dune tucks his wings close and he dives into the heartbeat ocean with a soft splash. When he rises from the dark waters it is in his own flesh: white feathers replaced with skin dark and slick as oiled walnut, wings drawn out into long slender legs. The ocean rises and falls, knee to chest to knee. Something about its movement gives the boy a sense that the waters are angry. But what would he know? Dune had never been fond of the ocean-- which is an odd thing, as it is known that all dreamers love the sea-- and Dune is most certainly a dreamer.
(It is worth noting he is a dreamer by circumstance, not desire; his magic a coincidence, and one not particularly complementary to his disposition.)
There is a fish in his mouth (the dream, it takes hold of him sometimes, and the forms he takes have instincts beyond his control) so he swallows it hastily and whole, one-two, the motion garish and unnatural in this herbivorous body. Disgusting, really, he should probably be ashamed… but he just looks at the dreamer with his dark eyes, shameless. His back is to the depths of the sea, for no one ever taught him to not do that. There was no one who cared enough to teach him such nuggets of wisdom, caution, creed-- but he made do. He almost even fluorished.
There is a horn sprouting in the middle of his forehead. It twirls out slowly, a mockery of the dreamer's, and soon there are two unicorns standing in the waves. Dune is restless, and he sways back and forth where he stands. He wants to ask “what happens next?” But in the end he chooses to watch it unfold, and find out for himself the dark dreams of the once-dead.
Red is all I can see. It’s behind my eyes when I close them. It’s in the liquid blurring my vision as it makes a mockery of the sorrow I don’t know how to really feel. And here there is no wolf to wipe the crimson from my cheeks with his nose, or lick it away with his tongue like just the touch of him might heal the deep wound where my soul should be.
Perhaps it’s as a soulless thing that I notice him far later than I should. At first he’s nothing more than a smear of dirt between the red tide, the black sea, red, black, red, as I try to blink away the smoke spires rolling upward. Like gods I can feel them at my back rising and rising until they are nothing more than black carrion wings blotting out the blood-moon. Perhaps it’s why the shards of hope in my wound do nothing more than tremble when I fully look at him.
I am always alone here on the tide of the killing field.
There has never been a horse turning into a unicorn with a fish slithering down his throat.
I step towards him and forget for a moment the sea curling around my bones in frothing waves of blood. I forget the spires of smoke blotting out the light. I forget that soon I will dissolve into a monster of wrath and tear out the throats of those begging mercy. I forget that I will rip out my sister’s throat and my wolf’s throat.
The sound my horn makes when I tap it against his is music. It rings more than it should, like a church bell on the eve of peace.
“Who are you?” I ask, because it’s better than saying, to war! like my mother had. And I think it’s better to tap my horn to his instead of pretending that I’m a creature of peace in a sea of blood and bodies.
Sometimes it feels like a kindness not to pretend that outside this nightmare I’m something else. My sea lub-dubs again as it rises back to our chests. Soon I’ll need to turn and fill my belly with blood and the after-math of a shaky peace. But for now, it’s so much easier, to look at him and find a fish of my own sitting in my belly like a stone.
DARKNESS IN THE EAST
DARKNESS IN THE WEST
OF ALL THE PRETTY ASHES
I LOVED YOURS THE BEST
She looks to him with want-to-forget eyes.
Well, maybe that’s not quite right. It’s almost like she is not looking to him but away from everything else: the smoke, the waves, the many churning shades of crimson. It’s not like she’s searching for salvation, or escape, or a color that isn’t red.
When he looks back at her, he is struck by the thought that she is something crafted. Made with intention, pieced together carefully-- not tossed to the air like Dune, left for the wind to shape at its whim. He thinks he might be jealous, until the fish settles in his belly and the salt-copper scent of the dream forces itself up his nose and down his throat.
She asks who he is. He wonders if she can’t feel the answer in the singing tap-tap of her horn against his. Imposter, is what the rolling bells sound like to him. Intruder, it tolls. Mortal. Orphan. Thief. “Nobody,” he exhales. "You?"
Nobody-- Doesn’t she know?
“Why are we here?” He asks, because this does not feel like one of those strange but happenstance dreams.
Quiet, the sort of quiet in his eyes, is not a sound I know how to fill on the eve of war. All the rage, all the wrath, all the daughter-of-the-sea hunger, is too heavy for silence to hold. Everything I am is made to fill a bellow, a wraith wolf bray, a clash of steel and horn and skin. But I discover, as I step towards him and away from the red-war and the red-tide where it brushes the bloated shore, that I want to learn how to be carried by the quiet.
I want to learn how to fill it slowly enough that it does not realize I am devouring it from the inside out (or maybe I only want to learn how to be devoured by the silence in turn).
“Somebody.” I answer him. Of course I am somebody.
Had we been standing belly deep in a field of daisies, or snow (the same snow my mother told me stories of) I might have given him my name. But it feels like a secret here and I’m not sure that frail meager things, like names, belong here on the shoreline of death. Maybe I should tell him that I will be death, or would be be death, the moment we step from the tide.
Later, when I wake, I might think that I should have warned him. But we are on the eve of war and I am somebody and he is nobody. There are men frothing for the kill between those rising god spires of smoke and there are innocent children trying to flee from their lashes.
We are on the eve of war and my stomach, my hunger, my need, is too hollow a thing for a fish to fill.
The sea is a kiss of blood against my belly and between the tangles of my tail when I move behind him to drive him, like a hound does a calf, towards the shore. I do not pause to wonder, as I know I should, if the spires of smoke or the spire of my horn seem more deadly. It’s the same way I do not pause to wonder if I should drive him away from war or towards it.
War is the only option here.
And I tell him that, in no uncertain way, when I lay my teeth against his hip is a whispering kiss of language. “We are here to fill our stomachs with more than fish.” He almost tastes of more-than-brine when I nip at his flank. “I was told once that if I call death freedom that it would not haunt me. Maybe we are only here to discover the truth of that statement.”
But I think, when I hear the bells start to toll out a body count, that everything I have ever learned is a terrible, bitter lie.
