"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
All he remembers is the mist, how it ringed the pines like a promise of forever. The jutting of the stone just beyond, stone that had hemmed in wars and guarded lives (how easily their defenses all came down in the end, history littered at their feet). All he can see is a flash of gold before the kaleidoscope of browns, greens, reds.
He doesn’t remember anything afterwards. Walter wakes with his clouds and his stretching, wracking brain and it is all right. She hadn’t been there, at least. She had been gone so long that it meant little and less to him that the world was ending. Hours later, when he comes down from the mountain, he is still alone.
Nothing has changed.
The meadow hasn’t, anyway. The press of too many bodies trampling too little earth is numbingly familiar (though the fact that there are even more horses here is not lost on him – what happens when their too few resources dry up?) The hurried and hushed conversations are the same (though there are loud ones, too; panic and pain lace too many words). His ears swivel to take them in but his eyes never follow; he’s not really listening, anyway.
He ignores the lightness in his step, the way the crisp air finds his ribs rather than his shielding, downy wings. He tries not to focus too long on any of the others; his inability to read emotions leaves him bare are vulnerable. A few of them look at him with lost, hungry eyes and he cannot move away quickly enough. None of them ask for help and he is immeasurably glad. It is impossible to administer aid when understanding is absent. He has nothing to give them.
An empty copse near the back of the common area calls to him. Walter tucks himself in, knowing it will not be only his for long. There are too many of them in too broken of a world. He wonders if he will miss the Chamber but he knows his answer right away. It isn’t the kingdom he will mourn at all, even if it welcomed him and raised him and homed him. He will miss the moonlight streaming through the fog, the flutter of a raven’s wing. He will remember counting the heartbeats under the soil as a boy until he fell asleep. He will hold the image in his memory of her in the inky hours just before dawn, the way the first rays caught on her golden rings (he’ll smell the sap as he pulled away into the darkness of the pines, keeping his watch a secret for one more day, always, until she was gone without the truth).
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long
Fear is a snarling, terrible thing.
She had forgotten the exact rawness of it, the way it prickled, alive, on her skin – she was used to a more subtle kind of fear, the low and steady haunt of the traumatized. Not this kind, the raw and feral thing that clawed at every organ.
This is why – she is
(was)
a magician, a woman who clothed herself in lightning, who made herself untouchable save to very few. A woman with hard eyes and a lonesome spirit who felt safe in her own skin – safe as she ever had, anyway. A woman assured in her own abilities.
A magician now rendered useless, sterile, the power leeched from her bones by a defiant land and powers she did not understand.
Now, not a magician, but a woman. A woman colored molten silver, with a scar on her hip. A brand. A reminder.
(It does not burn hot, at least. She takes a small, bitter comfort in that.)
And she should not be alone. Alone, she too often hears a distant baying of hellhounds that may or may not exist. Alone, she is a beacon, shining bright as a scimitar, unobstructed.
He is alone and looks out of place, and that is why she walks to him, though still keeps a healthy distance between them.
“Hello,” she says, “you look lost.”
He can feel her before he sees her, pushing into his space.
There’s a shift in the air, a tightening of his muscles, and the silver woman is before him. He doesn’t say anything at first but watches her with impassive eyes. She expects something, he thinks, someone to lean on, someone to cry with or build with or break with. She is like the rest of them, then. They all scramble like ants displaced from under a rock, lost and helpless in this exposed new world. He cannot help her, though, because he is not yet whole himself. It would be like trying to make a seamless line out of jagged pieces, him taking in her problems and making them his own. They are all imperfect. If anything, Beqanna has shown them as much by tearing down their homes and stripping them of their accoutrements. The lesson wasn’t necessary for Walter; he’s never needed a reminder of his otherness.
In some strange way, he’s almost glad for the reckoning that has shaken their world to its core. When the Chamber had inverted and sucked up its pines, ravens, and rocks like the ravenous beast it was, he had been spit out a new man. Maybe not fundamentally (not in the creases of his brain or the chambers of his forever-beating heart, not in the paradoxical way he craves connection but flinches at touch) but he had evolved. It was as if a new skin had tightened across him when he shed his wings, a new face that could deflect even the most earnest of advances.
Perhaps like the one that comes to him now, glazed silver and round edges. He wonders what horrors she’s seen, what wonders. What have the gods deemed her fit to see in the chaos that has consumed them all? There’s an ugly gouge long since healed on her hip that catches his eye immediately. There are so many explanations for it that he doesn’t pause to question it. His heart beats faster but he doesn’t know why; she keeps her distance and it should soothe him. It doesn’t.
He can’t give her anything, but he doesn’t tell her that. Walter doesn’t tell her that she is simultaneously dangerous and beautiful, like a storm gathering. Dangerous, because she is still so close to him, even with the space she puts between them (dangerous, because his skin prickles with the need to get away by whatever means necessary). Beautiful, too, because even with the magic drained like marrow from their bones, she seems to shine angelic in the apocalyptic light (beautiful, because she is parts of Djinni with her gold and closeness; he can almost smell the pine sap).
“Aren’t we all,” he says, suppressing a shudder. But he’s gotten better, he tells himself, grits his teeth. The palomino takes one step towards her. He’s not sure if the next step will be to stay or to flee, so he lets the earth make anchors of his feet before he can decide either way. His smile is awkward and late, but it comes next. “Some places never change, at least.” She doesn’t have that lost look, he concludes, she doesn’t look like the universe has birthed black holes all around her. “You lived here, didn’t you? In the meadow? Soot and soil doesn’t cover her; clouds don’t pass in front of her eyes. He tests her. “You haven’t lost much, then.” It isn’t a question. He wonders if she’ll answer, anyway.
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long
09-15-2016, 05:04 PM (This post was last modified: 09-15-2016, 07:47 PM by Cassi.)
There were never kingdoms, for her. She could have entered into any of them easily – new magicians were few and far between – but she did not flaunt her power in the same way. She only used the lightning, really – clothed herself in it the way prisons build fences topped with razor wire.
(And was she keeping them out, or her darker self in? To this day, she doesn’t know. She likely will never know.)
The meadow was kingdom enough, because it was here where she most truly lived. Here, she met a gold mare, swam with her in the river. Here, they loved and left, a cycle that repeated itself endlessly, a Sisyphean romance.
He steps closer and she hardens – instinctual. She is not one for closeness. But she stands her ground. She doesn’t trust him, not a whit, but being distracted by this is better than being alone, than running until she can run no more, sides heaving. You haven’t lost much, then, he says, and she laughs, bitter. She’d burn the meadow to the ground to bring back the things she’s lost.
“I was a magician,” she says, and the word – was – is painful to say, like speaking around a canker sore, “I lost my lightning.”
She’s lost Spyndle, too, but that’s not the land’s fault – she is always damned to lose her.
“My name is Cordis,” she says, because it seems like he should know her name, now that he knows some of what she has lost.
There is a certain irony at the end of the world as they knew it.
Nothing is spared the punishing hands of the gods: not their kingdoms, not their powers, not even their sense of security. Nothing survives the waves of destruction and bending and molding. Nothing re-emerges untouched besides the places they hate the most, those squeezed in-between the others. The uncivilized, disorderly spaces where rules and etiquette could be pushed aside. The favored haunts of the vagrants and homeless; the untamed, amorphous countries without defined borders.
Like Cordis, though, the meadow has been more of a home to Walter than anywhere else. He has always reveled in the brush of tallgrass against his belly after a long stint away. The wide, sweeping vista topped by unrestricted sky is more familiar to him than even the Chamber. Here, he is more himself than anywhere. Here, he is reset to his default each time he tries and fails to make a living outside of it (in the Far Lands, in the Desert, in the Chamber). Better to watch the world pass him by from a familiar vantage point, make his own opinions where he has the freedom to do so. Better not to make ripples or throw in his lot with the rest of the law-abiding sheep. Here, he is his own king.
Dangerous, he finally decides, when she hardens at his nearness. There is still lightning in her eyes, even if she is bare of it otherwise. She tells him she’s lost it, but he doesn’t believe her. Just as he feels the phantom weight of his wings on his shoulders, he imagines she feels her lightning simmering below the surface of her skin. He wonders, though, if it empowers or weakens her – if its absence opens her like a bloom or withers her.
Walter is bolder, no longer mired down by his wings or emotions. Perhaps it is foolish, the way he takes one step closer to the silver-spun lady. He doesn’t know – or pretends not to know – what her defensive posture indicates. It is easier to ignore the tightening in her legs because his empathy does not scream fear, does not tell him to back off. He knows that she is without her lightning, without her magic, and that is all the information he needs. Her name is merely a bonus. I could touch her, he thinks, and almost believes it. Because the apocalypse has robbed him and gifted him all in one fell swoop; his inhibitions cracked like the earth beneath his feet.
“I’m Walter,” he concedes, looking away (feeling like he’s lost something more for breaking the pressure between them). He rocks back on his haunches, still too close but no longer predatory. No longer a desperate man with much and more to prove to himself. The milling horses in the distance are of no interest to him, but he watches them anyway, lets her do what she will with the time he gives in apology. “Do you think it is worse for them or for us?” He doesn’t elaborate, but he is sure she knows what he means. He isn’t sure, however, that she will still be there to answer.
Walter
come down from the mountain
you have been gone too long
She does wonder sometimes if there is still lightning within her – for it had come from nothing, once, catalyzed by the rotting wayfarer, so why couldn’t it come again?
This time feels different, though – a certain hollowness she feels bone-deep but can’t quite articulate. And thing time, all around her others have grown powerless, like birds falling from the sky.
There is only the memory of the lightning haunting her eyes.
She follows his gaze to the horses in the distance (though remains acutely aware of him, making sure the distance still exists between them, that he does not use this as a distraction). She watches the nameless, faceless forms and wonders.
“They lost homes,” she says. It’s not an answer. She knows what it’s like to lose a home – Spyndle had been home. Cordis had felt a certain safety pressed against her. Whispering to her. In those few moments where things were not wrong between them.
“But homes are easily rebuilt.”
(Assuming you do not make your home in the embrace of a fickle, golden mare.)
“We lost…” she trails off, unsure as to what word might fix next. She has never been much of a wordsmith.
“We lost more. Lost ourselves.”
She looks back at him.
“Unless you feel differently?”
She knows so little about it. She doesn’t know what missing pieces he is made of.
