02-02-2024, 10:38 PM
selaphiel—
Why don’t we talk about the lonely things?
How sparse the trees in the winter, how cracked the earth in the summer. Look and you’ll see all the places it splits and certainly it would bleed if it were not so impossibly dry.
This place weeps regardless of season. Press an ear to the earth and you’ll hear it keening.
There is this lonely thing: Selaphiel. And he knows exactly what the earth mourns because he mourns it, too. It is Death and its insufferable stench. (Once he had pressed his nose into a jasmine vine, desperate for relief. But the vines, too, had known Death. It did not matter how sweet they smelled, it was inescapable.)
He cannot discern one Death from another now. The whole world reeks of it. (And does it matter? Does it matter who it belongs to or why? No. It cannot matter anymore. Not to Selaphiel.)
So, he wanders, much as he has always wandered. And sometimes he looks up, searching, but the searching has become less and less frequent. Mostly he watches the ground. Mostly he listens. Mostly it doesn’t matter.
He could go back to the Gates, though he had spent precious little time there. Hyaline is gone. There is nothing for him in any place in particular. And hasn’t it always been so? Hasn’t he always lived in a kind of purgatory? Never here, never really there. Hasn’t he always been just on the brink of running for fear of being found out?
What does he have to hide now?
Certainly there are new secrets in the cage of his chest.
What Death has he witnessed?
What Death, now, has he failed to stop?
How sparse the trees in the winter, how cracked the earth in the summer. Look and you’ll see all the places it splits and certainly it would bleed if it were not so impossibly dry.
This place weeps regardless of season. Press an ear to the earth and you’ll hear it keening.
There is this lonely thing: Selaphiel. And he knows exactly what the earth mourns because he mourns it, too. It is Death and its insufferable stench. (Once he had pressed his nose into a jasmine vine, desperate for relief. But the vines, too, had known Death. It did not matter how sweet they smelled, it was inescapable.)
He cannot discern one Death from another now. The whole world reeks of it. (And does it matter? Does it matter who it belongs to or why? No. It cannot matter anymore. Not to Selaphiel.)
So, he wanders, much as he has always wandered. And sometimes he looks up, searching, but the searching has become less and less frequent. Mostly he watches the ground. Mostly he listens. Mostly it doesn’t matter.
He could go back to the Gates, though he had spent precious little time there. Hyaline is gone. There is nothing for him in any place in particular. And hasn’t it always been so? Hasn’t he always lived in a kind of purgatory? Never here, never really there. Hasn’t he always been just on the brink of running for fear of being found out?
What does he have to hide now?
Certainly there are new secrets in the cage of his chest.
What Death has he witnessed?
What Death, now, has he failed to stop?
these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes,
i just bite my tongue a bit harder—
