"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
Time was fleeting once.
And now every second without her feels twice as long.
She used to know what she was made of. She used to know that she was a wild-thing, that she did not belong at the ends of astringent tethers, or behind the worn iron bars of metal birdcages. She ran from wolves, but nothing else. Time has made her into something else entirely, because she used to move through meadows without regret. She didn’t know then that things existed strong enough to hold her. She used to be a wild-thing without a name, but she isn’t now.
They tried to show her. They came in hordes to cut her wings, to hold her down. They gave her names she would not keep. They taught her the feel of iron and leather. They drove her to madness, but she was still not theirs. They taught her cruelty, but she was still a wild-thing. She still sprouted wings in the suffocating black of a mountain cave. She was still nameless. She didn’t know then that things existed strong enough to hold her, but they did.
Today the air is warm. It tangles with the stifling smell of wildfire smoke and the heat of summer, and despite the heaviness in the air that leaves sweat rolling off the slopes of her hips there is a chill that rattles deep in the marrow of her bones that she cannot shake. It’s hard to feel warmth when half of you is missing, and that’s what this feels like. It feels like she is not whole, like she is one small half of something severed. It feels like seeing with one eye. It feels like trying to breathe when your lungs have collapsed. It feels like singing without a voice.
And it felt like rainfall once.
Like she was the daughter of air and water. Like she was made from the love affairs hidden in the smoke of clouds. Like the skies were a stage that she had danced across for all of her existence, and she had never known the weight of gravity. It felt like rainfall. It felt like leaving home, like falling through the atmosphere and hurdling down at one thousand miles an hour. It felt like a collision. It felt like hitting earth. It felt like breaking apart into one thousand pieces.
It felt like dying once.
It felt like leaving behind her body and her bones. It felt like burrowing trails through the dirt like an earthworm, or the tangled roots of wildflowers. It felt like air, rising. It felt like watching everything she used to know, and everything she used to love, standing in tight semi-circles around a mound of freshly turned earth with black veils drawn neatly across their mourning faces. It felt like reading an ancient white cross with letters etched against the grain of it’s wood, and those letters spelled out her name. It felt like that.
She used to know what she was, but she was eclipsed by the things that she wanted. She was smothered by the gravity of loving something. She was ruined by kindness, and stubbornness. She became something else. Time made her something else. Time made them both into something else.
So, she follows the trails of ash and devastation, and they lead her to this place. She cannot haunt the meadow again, even if she died there once, even if she died there in so many different ways. She cannot stay when every tree looks like a hazel. She cannot stay when the river always reminds her of mermaids with pearls in their hair. She cannot stay when the horizon rolls out in every direction and floods her eyes with the memories of sunsets that broke her and made her whole again but as something different.
So, she follows a trail of black birds with black glass eyes, and she doesn’t realize the correlation. She doesn’t remember the one that circled overhead the day they said goodbye. She doesn’t want to.
12-13-2015, 11:31 AM (This post was last modified: 12-13-2015, 11:35 AM by Killdare.)
now im going to reap what i sow
He knows how to take a break, sort of.
Killdare just doesn’t make a habit of useless wandering anymore, now that he was Lord, now that he felt a sense of responsibility. Or rather, he was trying really hard to figure out what being Lord meant, and how exactly he should spend his time. What he should do, where he should help, where he should sit back and let fate unfold. Whom he should trust, or watch, or ally with. There were so many things to consider now and it caused the most annoying ache in his head, throbbing against his temples like a morning after hangover. Today is not really one of those days though, and he’s not feeling hell bent on stalking down anything and everything that comes near the Chamber border, trying to chat it up or get rid of it. Trying to decide who he is, what he is, and what the Chamber expected from him exactly. She was a coy mistress the Chamber, never fully making anything clear outright.
No, not this day, this day he wouldn’t trouble himself. Instead he’s just kind of walking aimlessly, brushing his wings against the low hanging boughs of the pines. They no longer tremble and fall at his touch as they tend to do during the colder winter months. Instead the branches bend and sway as he clips them, returning to their angles against the sky with a waver. The summer sun sets the world on fire, heating and intensifying the scents of the forest, taking everything from a cold standstill to a boiling gratification. He could feel the oncoming war building, becoming a more palpable possibility with each passing of the moon and the sun, lying in wait for someone to give word.
In truth Killdare isn’t sure if it would be the Chamber to blow the horns of war first, even if they had done a fine job in tilting the scales of conflict. It was there, regardless of whom or what had given life to it, just waiting on the ledge for someone to catch it or set it free. All it needed was that little push, that small nudge into one direction or the other.
The bay puzzles over everything that’s happened in the last few years, so many changes to the world, so many changes in himself. He was no longer just the boy recruit, ambitiously trying to find his place, trying to gain some smart role to shove under his father’s nose. No, his self serving ambitions had been sloughed away by the trees, by the rough familiarity of their coarse brown bark. She had that certain skill of making things into what She wanted them to be, regardless of what the vessel thought. Just as she was doing now, sending Killdare’s blank mind into a sea of thought and turbulence, showing him who was boss, who had the final say.
It’s not hard to guess why he’s run into her, eyes slammed shut in a worthless attempt to dull the ache in his skull. Driving headlong into a barrier of birds, of white and feathers, grabbing out with a hook of his wing at the nearest trunk. He steadies himself, his lids bursting open into a soft glassy green, and he jerks his head back at the proximity trying to put that personal bubble back between them. “Sorry. You okay?”
She does not belong there, either. She belongs in the spaces in-between something and nothing. She did not know what home looked like until she saw her. She did not know what love felt like until her lips touched the soft patch of skin behind her neck. She looked like dreams looked, hazy on the edges. She looked like the lyrics of songs. She looked like galaxies, untouchable, unreachable.
Time was fleeting once.
And now every second without her feels twice as long.
Shadows crawl across her skin. They have gnarled and reaching fingers, because the ravens above her are stretching their black, feathered wings and forging the shapes of monsters along the plains of her back. And even with their gaping, sharp-toothed jaws, even with their irregular angles and monstrous deformities, even with all of the impossibilities they harbor along their edges – even with all of that, they are nothing compared to the monsters she has known. Monsters she has felt. Monsters she has loved.
She loved them until she drowned in the fissures of their irises. She loved them until they swallowed her whole. The world whispers softly now of the drums of war, but the only war she’s ever followed has lived and raged inside her heart.
He hits her cheek, and it isn’t the first time. The ache on her skin feels familiar. She wrote poetry for feelings less than this. It’s been so long since she’s known anyone else. It’s been so long that she’s walked only in circles that she’s forgotten what happens when you move straight.
‘Sorry. You okay?’
And if she were honest with herself her answer would be entirely different, but time made liars out of both of them. “Yes,’ she says instead, because she has to be okay, because to tell the truth now might split her atoms, because to tell the truth now might turn her bones to dust and she has watched enough of herself float away on the breeze.
“You should watch where you’re going,” she says, not because she’s malicious – because she means it, because she remembers closing her eyes once and wishing with everything inside of her that she hadn’t. Because monsters love the dark. Because monsters are made of the shadows that fall when your eyes close.
It's not that he went barging about the Chamber, it's not that he usually went about that way. However, every day is different, little is constant, and if he couldn't accept that fact then he felt he would be crushed by the vastness of it all. Strange. That's what he thinks of existence, if he allowed himself to really think on it at length. Odd. His body changed, aged, modified itself with age and time. His mind never seemed to catch up, not truly, he never felt his years like he thought he would.
How could he ever feel old, would he ever feel old? He doesn't know, he does not want to know either, age makes the body weak. A weak body is useless, a moping mind was much the same. So many things he was starting to see that way, mostly because life had thrown emotions at him hard and fast, and snatched them back with even more force. Like love, a fickle and dangerous emotion. The taste it left behind was bitter and poisoned in his mouth, turning to ash like the trees had once been.
Perhaps that was Her doing as well, some lesson he should know and be taught. Some way of making it clear that She was his lover, in the end, and She could be unrivaled if she so chose.
He's not angry when the mare tells him to look out, on any given day he would have done the same and in less accommodating tones. Instead he's curious, watching as the ravens lengthen darkness along her, but who is Her? He's just realized it's not any of his kingdom mates, and that the birds do not seem to welcome her. And he can't say that he's afraid of monsters, because he seems to find company in them so often. She brings them and She keeps them- She keeps him.
"I'm less trapped with them closed." He relented, a restless edge to his voice, because he felt trapped within his mind and prisoner to it's thoughts. "You should take care with where you're going." He tells her, knowingly or not she had crossed their borders, had wandered into the darkness and between the shadows.
"Where are you trying to go?" He asks, eyes still squinting as if the half light were blinding and painful.
12-14-2015, 10:29 PM (This post was last modified: 12-14-2015, 11:25 PM by Spyndle.)
‘I’m less trapped with them closed,’ he says, speaking of his eyes.
She doesn’t know if he means to be poetic, but there is an ugly truth that she uncovers in that, about living life in a set of blinders. The fog buried her memories once. The fog let her live, but took everything in life away. She wants to tell him to remember. She wants to tell him that even if it’s miserable, it’s important. She wants to tell him about the fog, and about the way that lightening brought her back but not the same. She wants to spill out her truths like she’s spilled out every drop of blood, every organ, once.
But it’s her truth, and not his.
So, she casts her eyes towards the ground and exhales, and her truths float away in a cloud of vapor.
‘You should take care with where you’re going,’ he says, but what he doesn’t know is that the boundaries carved out by his politicians are flimsy and intangible compared to those that she has known. He doesn’t know that once she was a wild-thing. He doesn’t know that she’s seen so much worse than this. Because they loved like wildfires. They loved like they were made of gasoline. They loved beyond worlds, beyond living and dying, beyond wars and peace. They loved until they couldn’t, and there is nothing worse than that, and lines are just lines drawn by hand.
"I can’t," she begins to say, but she chokes on all of the letters so she catches herself and says instead: "I won’t." He might not hear her. Her voice sounds like an echo, because it rattles and reverberates off the walls of her throat until there is nothing left of it but a sigh that escapes through her parted lips.
‘Where are you trying to go?’ He asks, because he knows the shadows crawl across her skin and brand her an outsider. “Anywhere,” she answers, because before she read words off of Cordis like her skin was made of braille, because now she doesn’t speak the language the rest of them do. Because nothing makes sense without her, and it hurts, even if she wishes that it didn’t. Because she isn’t as acidic as her words pretended to be. Because she said ‘I loved you once,’ when she meant ‘I’ll love you, always.’
12-18-2015, 08:27 PM (This post was last modified: 12-18-2015, 08:29 PM by Killdare.)
now im going to reap what i sow
Won't.
It's a word he can understand at least, better than can't. Can't was for quitters, can't never could. His father had been partial to that saying. "Hmmph. Given up then huh? Well, it's your life I guess....won't" He huffs, leaning away and looking at her with inquisition. He tries to stand very tall and very still, but everything inside of him was just too forced. Her champagne skin, her downy wings, she stuck out. In a way Gryffen had stuck out with his angelic feathers, yet they suited her- she was much softer than he had been.
Softness was a rare commodity in the Chamber. Everything within was corners and sharp edges, everything was angles. It was barbed, needles on skin. The pale mare was like a beacon in the shade of the pines, signaling to creatures and darkness. How come he had not sent her on her way yet? She was new here, that much was evident but that does not mean that she did not belong. That she could not. Does one ever just wander to the Chamber?
Anywhere
An unappealing decision he thought, a breeze stirring behind him, making his mane a wild black tangle. His glassy eyes glared at the swirling avians, ears perking forward at their haunting voices. It was enough. He spread his own wings wide, scales burnished with the color of molten metal, hooked talons protruding at their corners. He thrashed them, creating around her a reptilian sphere as he pushed the things away. Open, shut, open, shut. Quick movements that forced the mist around them both but he didn't touch her, not once.
"Here is anywhere, anywhere else is everywhere. Which is it?" He raised a brow, watching the irritated black birds retreat to the trees. They may have left but their eyes never deserted him- they never deserted them. A nosing brood, a rowdy one at times, like now.
It drowns out the rest of everything, because the noise becomes all that there is. It feels like earthquakes in her ears - it feels like continents splitting into pieces, it feels like countries consumed. But it’s only black birds. They only swarm circles above her head, diving and climbing in ways that are too erratic for prediction. They only swarm circles above her head, singing songs about the losses they’ve known.
And there have been so many.
There have been so many that she cannot help the kinship she feels with them. They cry out the names of their lovers like she cries out her own. They circle, again and again, and she remembers all of the years she has spent chasing herself in circles, but then the thought is quickly overridden when his eyes meet her body. She can feel him burning holes through her flesh, and it makes her shift her weight from hip to hip. She has never liked being seen – it’s always been in the wrong ways,
She is a victim. She is a lover. She is prey.
The shift between them then is palpable. She holds the change in her palms, and clasps her fingers tight. ‘Here is anywhere, and anywhere else is everywhere. Which is it?’ He says, as he binds them in a cage crafted of bone and flesh instead of iron. He doesn’t frighten her. He isn’t the things that she has known. The things that she has known never given apologies for making contact with her skin.
“You sound invested,” she says, weighing feelings out across the expanse of her tongue. He does, but it doesn’t scare her. She’s used to men asking things of her she can’t possibly promise. It was all part of the deal. It was all part of the baggage that came with loving things you should not love.
“I’m running from something,” she says – not someone – and the words are as weak as the ‘I can’t’ from seconds before, barely audible over the hum of life all around them.
“Promise me that she won’t come for me, and I’ll stay. I’ll be yours. I’ll be whatever you need me to be.”
Because the beat of her heart keeps her awake at night. Because she’s so tired of running. Because he’s looking for an answer that she can’t give him. Because she’s never belonged to anything bigger.
Because she’s never belonged between the boundaries of politicians.
12-19-2015, 11:11 AM (This post was last modified: 12-20-2015, 03:34 PM by Killdare.)
when you feel my heat look into my eyes
He can not discern their lament.
Their cries are a hammering of nonsense to his ears, meaningless in their chaotic makeup. They did not compel him to feel their sorrows, nor would he know them if it did. He only knows his own hurt, his own loss and he does well to lock it away. He would sooner discard those memories than to live with them, to be a victim of their agony. It's not a useful memory, it is just that, memory. A stolen sun, a light extinguished, he doubted she be'd back.
A cradle, one of membrane and sinew is where he holds them. Driving the flock away so that they may speak but flesh does little to diminish the turbulence from above.
Then she startles him, his eyes wide and wild. He owned nothing, not anymore, not ever. He was owned, first by his father and now he was kept by no one but the Chamber. The flesh and sweat that had given him anything else in return was gone, a dream, a nightmare. He can't make promises, none as grand as she asks of him. He is no one.
"You'd give me the same promise then? That she won't bother coming for you at all?" He didn't ask something of someone that he wasn't willing to give or do himself. Promises, they meant nothing when you broke them. He was a man of his word, it was all he had, all he had left to give anyone. He can't promise what she asks, he has no dominion over others, he can't shield her from sight. The Chamber could, might, but not likely in the way she seeks. "I can't be your protector." His green eyes grow hard, hurt. He had failed at this before, he couldn't protect what he couldn't keep and she had severed their ties with ease.
He was strong, strong enough to go on, strong enough to fight- not yet strong enough to let go. "You don't have to give yourself to me, you can give yourself to the Chamber." He paused, thoughtfully considering her plight. They were not the Gates, they didn't console the weak, aid the needy. The did not protect the meek. "I serve the Chamber, I defend it's lands, its subjects. If you stay, I would be expected to defend you." Perilous words for one who does not know their meaning, does not know to whom or what the price of them will be paid. Words.
But he holds the blackbirds back, and she thinks that maybe he is capable of more.
It’s a mistake that she’s made a thousand times before this moment, because she judges their worth by the feelings that they shield her from, and in these moments there are so many he barricades her from. For a second she forgets the way the sunlight lit her eyes. For a second she forgets the way the river lapped at their ankles and left them aching for more. For a second she forgets everything else except the leather of his wings.
But he doesn’t want her.
And she can’t blame him, because she wouldn’t want her either, because she is carved full of holes and can’t hold anything for long. She can’t blame him when there are fissures that run deep splitting her skin and exposing the ugly truths she harbors under her flesh.
‘You’d give me the same promise, then?’
No, because she can be a hypocrite. No, because she doesn’t promise anything anymore. No, because she isn’t capable of giving anything real like that.
“No,” she whispers, and her voice cracks along its edges.
Because she can’t promise Cordis won’t come, even if she isn’t violent, even if she hurts in ways that aren’t tangible. If only she knew. If only she knew why her silver skin was wrapped in lightning that last time. If only she knew about the boy. If only she knew all the ways he cried out, and all of the ways that Cordis did not stop.
‘I serve the Chambers,’ she hears, when at last she is listening again, instead of thinking about all of the places they once knew each other. It turns out nothing stays barricaded for long.
12-21-2015, 07:35 PM (This post was last modified: 12-21-2015, 07:39 PM by Killdare.)
no matter what we breed we still are made of greed
Here in this garden, in his garden of scale and wing, in the trees and lingering smell of ash- it is safe. It is home now. The birds may cry, may scream at him for his dismissal but they can not reach him in here. Not because it is physically impossible but because they choose to listen, they choose to scream at him instead. They know, they know he hates it, they know the ache of his temples. They know. In here they can not reach her, and though he is so close, he can not reach her either.
No.
She can't make promises either, she is smart not to.
No.
It is a word he is not unaccustomed to uttering himself. No is easy, no is safe. Yes takes time, yes takes commitment, yes takes pieces of yourself that you will never get back. Yes is an uncertainty, a risk, it is dangerous.
He doesn't know who she runs from, he doesn't know why. Truth be told he wouldn't know even if she had spoken the name. He doesn't know a Cordis, he doesn't know why she runs, he doesn't know her. Not in the way he knew himself, not in the way he had once known a woman. He only knows himself but he is still young, he can learn more. Shouldn’t he learn more?
It’s the stillness that speaks first, sharing this long silence with a stranger. Neither speaking, only thinking of faraway places, of lost things. She says she once served the wicked, he only stares back. He is not ashamed, he is proud, proud he knows how to serve.
“Is that why you run? To get away from something wicked? You’ve picked an odd place to seek saving, you ask favors from an odd sort of savior.” His head tilts, scenting at the air because he simply can not help it. “I can’t promise it won’t find you, but I will. I will always find you.” He stores that smell in his memory, something that is slick with tendrils of river water, though she is sunlit she smells of things that call only to the dark. Of something that is severed and pieced back together not with intent to repair, but because it must.
It must go on, it must splinter and mend, over and over. Perhaps he can not keep her, but for now he can hold her. He can serve.
