09-28-2018, 05:24 PM
KINGSLAY
They stand together a moment in quiet reverie.
Even the skies are still; the wind is hushed, and the lightning pacified. This vulnerability is new to him, and in unique irony, tastes like ash in his mouth. For so many years he has denied her, denied any attempt of normalcy - but there’s a thirst in her eyes now that he hasn’t noticed before (a hunger, a greed). It surprises him, as much as there is room in him to be surprised, because it’s cold, and raw, and doesn’t look easily satisfied when he is meant to be the monster of the two of them.
“I know,” she says, but he should doubt her.
He was born into obliteration; the only warmth he has known before her has been his dead mother’s entrails wrapped around his throat like a noose - all of it, reeking and wet, spilled out across the river shoreline like garbage. When she looks at him and there are pieces of things that once existed set out like shrines all around them, how can she know?
When slaughter was bred into his bones, how can she know?
He isn’t made for this, but here they are, and her lips are soft against the plane of his jaw and they smother any reserve left untouched in him.
There is no future for them, no possible normalcy. There’s poetry in their ebb and flow, certainly, but what could possibly come next for them but ruin? How many of their children would die at his feet? Skinless, wearing entrails like scarves, or burnt past the point of recognition - their bodies feebly curled, charred black, pieces pulled away and leaving with the wind. Would she still love him then?
It’s what Yael had never wanted, and Etro confirms it when she says: “You will kill me one day.”
And then, at last, his hungry eyes find the meadows edge where the ferns part to reveal the pink nose of a white rabbit. He remembers how the whistles of its screams while it was dying sounded. Here, in these moments, they’ve come full circle - but she’s not the same girl he met when they both began. He doesn’t see the galaxies in the fractures of her irises anymore.
“Life,” he says, echoing the first time (because they have come full circle now).
“Take it.”
Even the skies are still; the wind is hushed, and the lightning pacified. This vulnerability is new to him, and in unique irony, tastes like ash in his mouth. For so many years he has denied her, denied any attempt of normalcy - but there’s a thirst in her eyes now that he hasn’t noticed before (a hunger, a greed). It surprises him, as much as there is room in him to be surprised, because it’s cold, and raw, and doesn’t look easily satisfied when he is meant to be the monster of the two of them.
“I know,” she says, but he should doubt her.
He was born into obliteration; the only warmth he has known before her has been his dead mother’s entrails wrapped around his throat like a noose - all of it, reeking and wet, spilled out across the river shoreline like garbage. When she looks at him and there are pieces of things that once existed set out like shrines all around them, how can she know?
When slaughter was bred into his bones, how can she know?
He isn’t made for this, but here they are, and her lips are soft against the plane of his jaw and they smother any reserve left untouched in him.
There is no future for them, no possible normalcy. There’s poetry in their ebb and flow, certainly, but what could possibly come next for them but ruin? How many of their children would die at his feet? Skinless, wearing entrails like scarves, or burnt past the point of recognition - their bodies feebly curled, charred black, pieces pulled away and leaving with the wind. Would she still love him then?
It’s what Yael had never wanted, and Etro confirms it when she says: “You will kill me one day.”
And then, at last, his hungry eyes find the meadows edge where the ferns part to reveal the pink nose of a white rabbit. He remembers how the whistles of its screams while it was dying sounded. Here, in these moments, they’ve come full circle - but she’s not the same girl he met when they both began. He doesn’t see the galaxies in the fractures of her irises anymore.
“Life,” he says, echoing the first time (because they have come full circle now).
“Take it.”
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
@etro