bury my heart on the coals; ramiel

[gail]

tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us She doesn’t put a name to it because she can’t – or shouldn’t – because giving it a name is like breathing life into it. She doesn’t put a name to this – the inevitable nature of them, two creatures met and meeting in a limbo, ghosts and death-queens. It feels like limbo, a certain repetitive nature of things. (How many times, she thinks, how many times will I call his name before he ceases to answer? She wants an answer, and she doesn’t.) She doesn’t put a name to it because their dark god might sense it, that naming it would strengthen it, give it shape and form and breath. Maybe a name doesn’t even exist, for such a thing built on impossibilities – he’d traversed space and time itself to find her, and say I won’t leave you and it hadn’t ever been a promise she’d expected to be seen kept. She breathes in. The air tastes strange here and she thinks sometimes she probably doesn’t have to breathe at all but she’s scared to stop. She breathes and drinks and eats because it keeps her normal, keeps her sane, distracts her from the way things thrum in her skim, old magic weaving itself like ivy on her bones. Can you come home now, he asks, but she doesn’t know where home would even be – she’s been queen of the valley, once, years and years ago when Carnage was still mortal and neither one knew all the things that lay ahead. (He says home and she thinks of the beach at the end of the world, the plastic chewing noise of the langoliers. That wasn’t home but it’s the first time that comes to mind, and it’s awful – both the place itself and the small part of her that misses it.) “I don’t know,” she says. If anything, this feels more like an anchor, like she is growing and sinking into the piece of land like a forgotten monument. But perhaps she will become strong enough – perhaps she is strong enough – that maybe she could scramble across the earth and go back – Go back to what, though? She knows the Beqanna that exists now is not the one she once inhabited. She is a relic, a piece of the old world. But he touches her and her thoughts dissipate like mist, her neck arches under his touch and she returns the touch. It lasts only a moment but it’s enough to smell the life on him, earth and plants and other horses, ones too alive to come here. “It’s not him” she says quietly, though maybe it’s a lie, because Carnage is mixed into everything – he’s even the reason they’re here, now; the reason she knows Ramiel. “Not directly, at least,” she amends. Better. She wants to say other things but saying them means putting names on it. So she doesn’t. She breathes in. “I’m scared,” she confesses instead, “of trying to leave. Even with…this.” (This – a vague, stupid term. Does she mean her powers? The strange energy between them?)