"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
She wants to move to him, curl around him and embrace him as a mist-version of herself, but she remains rooted where she is - intense in her gaze and delight as he tells her he had been drawn to her. Beyza focuses on the words, not the detached way in which they are delivered, happily letting herself be blinded.
But perhaps that is why she doesn’t move. Instead she smiles in her own, faint way. “We’ll make this place your home, build it together. Starting now.”
And here, finally, she comes to why she had called him here. “I have a gift for you.” She says then, in her cool tone, even though she can feel the electricity building in her veins.
The mists part and someone walks towards them - a roan stallion, old, and sick - his eyes are blinding white like Beyza’s and there is something awkward about his gait because she is moving him forward like a puppeteer. This is a mercy for him, ending his life sooner than the sickness would have, and there had been no stipulations on what state the souls needed to be in before she reaped them. She has taken this stallion’s pain away so he is sleep walking - but her eyes are on Jamie. Nerves dancing now with her excitement and she wonders what he will think of this now that they are back in Beqanna.
Once the stallion is standing nearby, the mists close back in around them - surrounding the trio and concealing them.
“In the mists of the afterlife, I made a bargain with Death. With the reaper part of you that you keep hidden. And today I begin to repay what I owe, to give you back the souls I took.” She thinks that each soul that passes into the afterlife is his, believes that with each sacrifice she will not only be settling her score - she will be making him stronger.
And then, well - once he is his true form he can do whatever he wants. Cause worlds to collide and create something seen in a dream on the other side of death.
He does not have to wonder about the cause of the differences in them. The things they had endured together had been strange and painful and frightening. He does not need to ask why she only communicates by injecting her words directly into his head. Or why she stands before him only semi-solid. He does not need to ask why because he knows. Because they both came back changed. Neither of them emerged from the Afterlife the same as they had gone in.
They have learned things about themselves.
More importantly, she has learned things about him.
She will help him make this his home. Starting now. She will start with a gift. He blinks those freakish yellow eyes and turns his peculiar head in the direction of the parting fog. The figure that shuffles toward them is old, weary. Sick. He thinks briefly of the blue roan stallion he’d encountered in the forest some years ago. How he had thought to kill him and then, for reasons he did not understand, had stopped just short.
The reaper. The part he keeps hidden. She knows what he is capable of. And he believes her. He lets himself believe this, too. It is not a fantasy for him. It is the answer he has been searching for. The thing he has been hiding from. She had seen it in him and he had seen it in himself when they had torn his flesh from his bones. And they had been him.
He listens to her but he does not drag his gaze away from the crippled old stallion standing before them. He feels nothing. He does not feel the same sorrow he’d felt when he’d failed to kill Balto in the forest. He feels no grief. No remorse. This old stallion will die and it will be his fault and he will feel nothing.
“How many did you take?” he asks from someplace far away. The tone distant, as if distracted.
He is watching the old stallion but she is watching him, with her white eyes and unblinking gaze. It is a relief when he does not call her a monster, when he does not reject this course of action as being insane - and she smiles a ghost of a smile when he asks a question. Curiosity, she thinks, is a good thing. Even though she thinks he should know already. It still has not occurred to her that the Jamie she spoke to in the fog of the afterlife was not actuall Jamie. Instead she brushes off this incontinuity as a disjoint in his memory depending on whether is is more horse than reaper - another thing that, surely, will be solved by all she has planned.
“Two. My sister and yours - not Liv, another.” This fact she only learned very recently, when speaking to Anaxarete. Bringing the radioactive girl back to life had been an accident, an overshoot of her young and wild magic, but she was happy to know that she had not left one of Ana’s children to die on the bottom of that cliff. “But I promised a third as well. Four might have been more poetic but.. Well, I don’t think either of us were thinking about that at the time.”
It’s only now that she wonders whether there would have been something more ritualistic about four sacrifices in the four directions. But she is still a little queasy with the idea of killing at all, no matter what her cool exterior suggests.
She finally looks away from the shadowy reaper and steps towards the old stallion, her crystalline muzzle brushing up against his cheek. He does not react, so lost in the peaceful haze she has created for him.
“If you do not wish to watch, I won’t mind.” This is a concession made for a differe Jamie, one with more emotion in his voice and one who she hoped to be friends with but she was not. She does not think the young stallion standing with her now will turn his gaze away.
There is some thrill in it, certainly. Some darkness that he takes great comfort in.
He had lost his conscience but he had not lost his capacity for emotion. There is delight in this. In the prospect of her owing him something, though he would never admit this out loud. In the prospect of his dark home being dragged out of the depths in which he’d found it to this world so he would not have to die again to reach it.
It is evident, plainly so, that both of them emerged from the otherworld changed. Darker. He remembers the girl who had wanted to help heal him. There had been darkness in her then, too, but this is something altogether different. How far the two of them have sunk.
But he’s still watching the old stallion when she tells him what he is owed. Fourth would have been poetic indeed, but he has never been concerned with the concept of poetry. Three is plenty, he thinks, especially because she does not truly owe him anything. He is not what she thinks he is, but he will let her go on thinking it. There is some strange power in it, he finds, and he sees no purpose in relinquishing it.
He watches her go to the old roan, watches her touch him, and the thrill at the very core of him compounds. It flutters outward until his veins are humming with it. He drags in a sharp, rattling breath when she gives him permission to look away. But he will not. He will go on watching like the dark thing that he is.
He is not the weak thing he had been once. He never will be again.
But he does not say this, merely shakes his head and, almost giddy, says, “go on.”
Beyza steps back just a little and her eyes remain on Jamie for a moment - and though it would be thrilling to keep her gaze on him the whole time, her magic is still not quite at full strength and she needs to focus. So she turns away, her burning white gaze on the old roan and in a flash it happens. Just like that, she steals his life - quickly, painlessly, and in that same instant branch-like creations burst and arc out of the earth. Crystalline white structures pierce the roan’s body and spear through him - holding him aloft instead of allowing him to collapse to the earth.
As she watches slow drips of blood seep down the thorn-like protrusions, she remembers when the same structures had pierced her heart on the beach as she choked on oil and rats.
If the numbers could not be poetic then at least she has this - symmetry in death.
Her heart is racing and she feels sick but she shoves these feelings down with the rest of her emotions, locking them away like everything else so they cannot hurt her. Beyza is the opposite of her sun-warm dove sister. She is a moonlit shrike. Her sacrifices will not rot on the ground like any common body, they will rise and be remembered, honoured. Over time the structures will crumble, and he will be returned to the earth and the worms. But for now his death belongs to her.
To them.
It is done when her gaze looks to Jamie and she drifts closer to him - ignoring that twist in her heart that still fears he will turn from her even now. The fog is still thick around them, concealing this tableau a little longer, and there is the soft splash of death-slow blood drip dripping to the ground behind her.
The same muzzle that had kissed the skin of the sacrifice reaches to brush a ghostly-soft touch against the shadow reaper as her eyes dance with both fear and delight.
There is something deeply repulsive about it.
Some sordid thing tightens a vise grip around his windpipe while he watches. But the old roan seems to feel no pain, even as the blood drains out of him. Even as the life in his eyes flickers and fades and then goes out completely. The eyes remain open, though, peering glassy back at them.
A moment of silence passes between them while the old roan, dead now, continues to bleed. Whatever giddiness he’d felt is gone now, tempered by the gravity of the situation. But he feels no remorse. How he would have mourned the old roan if he had not lost his capacity for guilt! How he would have wailed and thrown himself at the foot of the funeral pyre. And it would not have made a difference that he was owed the soul, that it belonged to him, still he would have been consumed by grief.
But he understands that this is the way things must be done now. And it is in the silence that the old roan materializes. The soul, he thinks, when it is really only a ghost. A shimmer with soft edges that stands between them.
“You understand, don’t you?” Jamie asks it, though there is no sorrow in his tone, no apology. The ghost nods and moves - so fluid that it almost floats - to Jamie’s side. Stations himself there. And it is there that he will stay.
Beyza returns to him - them - then. And he must convince himself that he can feel the way she touches him. He swallows down whatever desire thrums in him, whatever greedy thing that wants her to seep even further past his edges. Sink into him. She does not and he does not ask her to.
Instead, he turns that freakish yellow gaze on her, studies her face. How casual she is in her killing, he thinks, and this brings with it a new thrill.
“Where has your voice gone, Beyza?” he asks, finally, “why are you only in my head?”
jamie
