"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Change!
Again and again the world changes. A mountaintop crumbles, a land sinks, another one rises, darkness falls like a curtain, worlds crumble. Again and again and again until she can hardly keep it straight.
But she likes it. Because she changes, too. Her change is slow, and often cumbersome – how often she dreams of her, how terribly often – but it occurs. There is still a frailty to her, in a certain light – when you look past the lighting that crackles around her, look deeper into the part of her that once stood in the river and first began to fall in love, or deeper still to the girl who’d been a dark god’s prisoner – but she has worked to shield those parts of her, to encase them in the years so that their ache dulls. And it does dull, eventually. Decades will do that.
On the outside, she is the same. Ageless in her form, her face, a bright silver woman with lightning all across her body, crackling as she moves. She likes the noise of it, likes the prickle of it on her skin. She likes the constant reminder of her power; of the things she can do.
She does not head for any of the kingdoms. She has never been one for such things.
She goes instead to a familiar place, though it too, she is sure, has changed.
He has lived so many thousands of lifetimes.
(How long now since he was young? How long now since he’d blinked into existence, curled sweetly around his sister? He’s lost count.
Just as he’s lost count of how long it’s been since he stood beside Anaxarete and realized that he loved her.
He loved her.
He loves her still.
How long since he’d tried and failed to protect Keiran? How long since the child had brought absolute darkness? How long since he’d died, since he’d been reborn, since he’d become the storm?
It doesn’t matter.
It never has.)
The world has changed so many thousands of times over and the truth of it is that he’s tired. Tired of change, tired of the way time marches steadily onward. He has been alone so long now that he does not remember what it means to touch, to be touched.
Lightning crackles across her skin, just as the thunder roils in his chest. They are two parts of the storm and there is something in this that amuses him. He almost smiles.
“Hello,” he says and it comes out strange, stilted, as if he’s not sure any sound will come out at all. (It has been so long since he last spoke.)
( I SWORE MY DAYS WERE OVER OF COURTING EMPTY DREAMS
I WORSHIPPED AT THE ALTAR OF LOSING EVERYTHING )
Once, she might have been fearful of him. She was like that, for a long time – quick to jump at shadows, unendingly wary of strangers. Of everyone, really. That is wont to happen, of course, when you spend so long running with a dark god’s hellhounds at your heels, never quite catching – perhaps by design – certainly by design – but there, hot chuffing breaths in the dark.
But that was a long, long time ago. Their baying has long since quieted, and she has learned that strangers – most of them, at least – are harmless, and even those who aren’t tend to become so with a jolt of lightning to their bones.
She watches him coolly, this new stranger, and feels as if there’s something familiar in his movements. Perhaps after enough years, they all move the same way, these immortals – bodies reborn or preserved in youth, but not forgetting, and instinct changing the gait almost imperceptibly. She notes the frost on his skin, and feels something more emanating from him, though she cannot say exactly what it is, not yet.
“Hello,” she replies, and her own voice is soft and low, for she mostly speaks to herself, these days.
“Did the change bring you back, too?” she asks, wondering how many of them there were, Beqanna’s remnants rising again, returning to these haunting grounds.
She does not let herself think of Spyndle, of the remnant she most aches for. Hope – at least on this one topic - would be far too vicious a thing to allow back into her chest. Some things are best kept buried.
Here is what coaxed him out of the darkness: storms call to storms, thunderheads beget thunderheads. There is lightning skipping across the surface of her and thunder shuddering through his bones and he has lived long enough as the storm to know what it means and yet it remains a mystery to him.
He still does not know how to live as nothing at all.
(He had been whole once. And then he had lived as a dead thing. And then, for a blessed year, he had been restored. Until.
Until?
The son had been born made of shadow, but that had been so many years before.
There had been absolutely no explanation for why he had woken up one morning to find that he himself had been reduced to vapor, fog.)
Finally, he smiles.
Smiles and turns those black, black eyes (they had been blue once, blue and kind and steady) out over the ever-changing world and kind of nods, contemplative.
“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?” he asks, shifting his focus back to her face. “All the ways things can change?” He asks it as if they are old friends and perhaps they are, kindred spirits at least, relics as they are.
The Chamber has risen, he’s heard. He wonders if he might find Ana there, but he is too afraid to go looking. Perhaps the two of them are more alike than they realize.
“My name is Kensley,” he says. “It’s strange to be so impossibly old.”
( I SWORE MY DAYS WERE OVER OF COURTING EMPTY DREAMS
I WORSHIPPED AT THE ALTAR OF LOSING EVERYTHING )
She is no longer sure how many iterations of this world she has seen. How many iterations she herself has been.
(She was born a mousy brown, with another name. She had been a different girl, when she was first taken by the dark god – and she’d emerged something else, and then she’d changed, and changed again, and again, and again --)
Some of the shifts she had been almost entirely absent for, as she often left Beqanna – telling herself she would find somewhere else. But it called her back, and she returned, and sometimes she stayed for a long time and sometimes for only a day. Time has begun to shift for her in the way it does for the immortal, the days bleeding into one stretch, years passing in what seems like a blink. She is grateful for this sensation, to be honest, because the easier the time passed the more callused she becomes, the more her pain – the pain that had once felt as immortal as she was – ebbed.
She likes the way he talks, the way he seems to know this sensation – the pointlessness of time for the old.
(And oh, though she is old, she is nowhere near the oldest here – by some standards, she is almost young. Almost.)
“It seems like every time I come back, something’s changed,” she says by way of agreement, nodding her own head.
“I’m Cordis,” she says, and she’s smiling now, grateful for this moment of kinship amongst the old.
He knows what it means to be fleeting.
He has never been a permanent thing, Kensley. (This is the thing he resented most about his father, his impermanence, and it is the only thing he seems to have inherited from him.) He has roamed and cursed his wanderer’s heart the same way he cursed his father’s.
But this means that he knows exactly what she means. He knows what it means to be gone, to surface, to find whole landscapes changed, to find entire places altogether erased. As if they’d never been there at all.
As if the Chamber had never stood. As if he had never fallen in love there. As if he had never tried to stay.
(And he knows that it has risen, but he is frightened of what he might find there. Or, perhaps, of what he might not.)
He does not recognize the name and he wonders if he should. Not as someone he had known once, but rather as someone who had been Known. He had never had a mind for things. He had not loved Ana because she’d been a queen, perhaps he’d loved her in spite of it. (He who shied away from such things, he who had only ever been ordinary.)
“It seems every time I come back I have changed,” he says and exhales something that might have been a laugh in some past life. “Those changes seem to be the hardest to come to grips with. I would give anything to be a plain thing again,” he murmurs, shaking his head. What he means to say is he’d given anything to be young again.
( I SWORE MY DAYS WERE OVER OF COURTING EMPTY DREAMS
I WORSHIPPED AT THE ALTAR OF LOSING EVERYTHING )
