Enter again the sweet forest - any

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

‘You don’t look too good, boy.’

Her eyes are cold, dead bone. Sockets—empty but for the grave worms that tunnel their way in and out. Her voice is drawl and repulsive lust and she is the skin and come-hither hips of mother; the demented and viper-minded second coming of mother, damp with saltwater and rancid with necrosis. It is because she is mother that she lords over him, now, like an idol goddess of annihilation, boring into him with cold, dead bone.

He does not look back or sideways, he blinks his eyes, clearing his vision. 

(He does not look at her. She’s dead, come to ferry his wasteland to the afterlife. But not him.

Not just yet.)

He hangs onto the briny edge of the world, the roar of destruction popping his eardrums, watching the water smash the rocks below, rushing up to kiss his split feet and spit spray in his face. The earth shakes below, throwing him sideways against grey-toothed stone, blood gushing from a cut deep between his eyes. He grunts and takes his feet again, the clouds above—black and putrid with storm—roil like a hungry belly, spreading wide over his doomsday. 

Over his kingdom. 

Like a jaw, it all begins to hinge shut.

“But at least I was a king,” he yells, cackles madly, over the din at nothing and nobody, into the endtimes, spitting blood from his busted mouth.

Water, thick with foam and poisoned with salt, washes over him, slicking the rocks just so and drags him into its wanting mouth. He gasps in air, when he can, kicking against the ungiving heave of the undertow.

It takes him under.

Under. Down—like falling, but with the friction of a hundred leagues of sea, so he sinks slowly until the depth eats the light and the wild way his body tosses rends sense from his brain. Dark. Black—like space, but here it is starless and bleak and so, very wet. 

---

He picks up his crown—leaves catching in the salt-stiffened messes of white hair and feathers; dust looses from his golden pelt, supplanted by rich, muddy earth. He makes his way, slow and stunted by aches, through the hall of nude and partially-dressed trees, becoming more and more shapely with each passing day.

He had missed her. 
It is a shame, of course, that he has lost his repugnant, barren demesne—he had just begun to make her, his; only just sunk his hooks... Ah well. One day he could gather his grandkids up onto his knees and tell them tale of how he, and he alone, had made Pangea wet.

He supposes she had not enjoyed herself.

He had, and is that not what matters?

the gift-giver

[Ygritte]

BETTER BEWARE, I GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
DEVIL-MAY-CARE WITH A LUST FOR LIFE

Beqanna had been good to her. She had been once founder and queen alongside Kreios, reigning from the gentle roll of hills, swathed in coniferous trees. She had known all their faces. All their names. They had been happy but then the skies grew dull and the laughter stopped. Her children had grown, suffered, left. She too had escaped into the thick of the brush to find the spotted king but only to return disappointed, empty, alone.

Beqanna had made her suffer.

The amber eyed mare breaches the ground (now foreign) as each salmon tinged leg moves her, nearly gliding over the damp soil and dew drenched flowers. There had been a time when she could bend the very forest to her will but now she is nothing.

Had they all forgotten?

Ygritte shakes them all away, the memories, the change. The sienna woman breathes in the new air as her gaze solidifies upon a glint of gold, a crumpled wing at his side. She does not know fear and would not start now. The woman approaches with the slow roll of shoulder and hip. "Hello." The word is simple and well recognized as it tip toes from her tongue. The stallion is taller but not by much. Ygritte eyes the crippled wing but makes no remark. Perhaps a time or two ago she would have smiled, lifted her head with warmth and welcome but no such thing resides in the bone cage any longer. Long lost is the flower crown that had adorned her pretty head.

The bay mare stops not far from the heavy headed male, his horns undeniably seated in the tangle of mane. He could be impressive but Ygritte does not shy away. Her attention flits between the heavily pregnant bodies of women and the cry of new foals before returning to the goat man. "You seem familiar." She can not quite place him in her history but the scent that radiates from his coat is not a memory she has forgotten. The wasteland lingers on his skin, dry and choking. At this time she could introduce herself, nod and do the royally polite thing but no.

Not this time.

She is no longer a queen.

Ygritte.

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

Pretty, colourful things come to him. He sees them for what is on the inside—that’s just the kind of man he is. 

(Nothing about it is ever bird-delicate—it is always strong, hardy bones held together fast by flexible, giving tendons; cushioned by gummy cartilage—but with enough perseverance, it breaks all the same.)

They come to him lost things, all. They come to him in ghoulish nights, bereft of sleep; they come to him for abasement, absolution; they come to him looking for shepherding in the wastes. They come to him bowed low. Humbled.

Always so pretty.
Always so colourful.

(—sometimes, he finds something pure. Something untouched and smooth below the spires of ribby bones and knots of spine. He finds things that are innocent. Pink.

Usually they come to his spoilt by old hands, already. Rutted earth and bruised anima—they are riddled with holes but more often than not, their defenses are shored by the scar tissue that forms when the soft, pink places are intruded upon.

He knows this better than anyone.)

“Do I?” he allows her the cursory glance at his wing—many years ago that would have been an unfortunate transgression but now he is shameless, arrogant and he wears all his tatters and rags like gilded mantles and jewels. (Everything else goes deep, deep into the inside—most decidedly not pink or smooth—settled in the suck of mud by his dust crown and his milk teeth.) 
“I don’t think I have ever seen you in my life,” he wonders if it cuts deep—hopes, of course, that it draws against something papery and egotistical—but the void in him stares at the void in her and recognizes itself, scar tissue and all.

Crownless, indeed.

“I would remember.”

the gift-giver