The grand highway
is crowded w/ lovers & searchers 
& leavers so eager to please & forget.

It had all ran out from between his fingers. 
It had been like trying to keep water cupped tight. An impossible task – unfit for his mind, his body, his blood. They dropped, bright gems and quiet looks, into the damp sand far below – irretrievable. It had not been easy to leave the salty air behind. He had come to believe that it would be the place where he would finally steel himself. Where he would find the last pieces of armour to guard the softer inches of his skin. (Such naivety. His brother always told him he was searching for a breath – a quixotic impossibility.)
What he had found was rusted through, eaten away at by the sea. It had not been meant to be, that rugged, glittering, beautiful place. 

Or the sun-yellow and gentle motherhood caught therein.

He had stolen away from them, as dawn burned orange and bright on the sky. He had taken his last hungry inhale of briny air, shoring himself up, watching from the precarious (dangerous, exhilarating) edge of his cliff as the infant sun intimated clear and stormless day on the shivering water. 
And then, he had left. Down the familiar, craggy slopes cut deep into the ancient mountainsides. He had left them sleeping, tucked away in rugged, wild grass. He had left them unguarded and hadn’t come back.

Rillion, weaned and bright red, trailed along behind him, tottering but strong.

Strong enough, at least, because he had survived. Thrived, even as they left Beqanna and meandered, together, through places known and unknown; savage and utopian.
The boy had been unharmed, it would seem, by the piteous circumstances of his birth. For that, Chessur was glad. He thought of his mother, sometimes. Asked, more than once, and Chessur had felt obliged to tell him, in time, who she had been. Not one of the mares from the Ridge – who had helped Chessur clean the boy’s coat of blood and fluid when first he arrived, and who had nursed him happily. ‘Our mother,’ Chessur had told him (a lie – a kind one; not entirely untrue). That she was young and beautiful and sung lullabies (lies, white and fluffy like clouds). 
And from then on, Rillion called him ‘brother’.

---

Jeweled coasts and vast, bleak marshes had become his familiar.

He had known the quiet long before they crossed back into Beqanna. Perhaps it was because he was away from her that he had not been abducted onto the Mountain's peak. It had simply left him, sucked from his body and transmitted through the air to join the collection there.

It had been jarring. Rillion had quizzed him, more intrigued than anything. Chessur had been frustrated – confused, scared, perhaps, for the loss of the thing that had been his failsafe. 
And then, a day later, he awoke with an agonizing pain. Two great, white wings broke through his firm, blue shoulders, connective tissue mending them together and making them usable.

---

This land is what is unrecognizable, now. Save the few territories that he knows like lines on his legs – the licked shores of the Beach, the Meadow. Everything in between seems stitched, pell-mell, like a monster made by something mad – Frankenstein hulking in the distance, purple and stony on the horizon. 

They part, Chessur and Rillion, with the assurance that the Meadow will be where the young man will find his makeshift brother. The red stallion had never known Beqanna beyond the crags of his very early childhood home. Here, in fact, was where he had been laboured over. Here, where Chessur had found him (unharmed, curiously) in pulp and viscera, Pollock over them like a contented man, having just spent himself.
He remembers none of it. A gift.

But Chessur finds where Thyndra’s bone would be. Where they are not. They have been retaken, more like than not, and all the better. He needs no reminders of that night, but Rillion, of course. That is a necessary thing to bear. He owns her that much. Chessur has tried his best to discard the other remnants of it. The crowded, sick feeling of his older brother’s thoughts rattling in his skull. Anger, like nothing he had ever let himself feel before. 
And it had been so pure that it had become Chessur’s too, had sent him spiraling through the night to find the bloodshed himself.
He has tried to purge it all, made that his crusade. Over the oblivion and fecundity that he and Rillion had traverse; the salt flats and ancient forests. Pieces shook loose, to be sure, where he could find peace.

But always another jolts loose. Joining the ancestral poetry of shame and disgrace that grounds him to this land, in blood and madness, both.


CHESSUR
Trashlip and Phina's