"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
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
The magic has a way of amplifying him. Twisting who he is. It tears him apart every night and then pieces him together in the morning until there is a time and place where he does not recognize his reflection. It draws him away from Beqanna into lands he doesn’t know. Pulls him further and further until he walks amongst the stars, until his eyes are unseeing and he comprehends the world through the other senses. The ones that he knows and the ones that are unveiled to him as he walks, each piece becoming new again.
Then, piece by piece, he returns to himself.
He slowly unravels and then spools together, stitching himself into physical form. The first thing that he thinks of is his hunger. A ravenous feeling that gnaws in his belly—something real and tangible and he nearly weeps with the normalcy of waking up and desiring nothing but food. And thus he eats.
And when his belly stretches and he feels sated, he slakes his thirst.
And when that is quenched, he finally makes his way back to Beqanna—choosing to walk even though his magic buzzes beneath his skin, a temptation to simply walk through worlds. To pinch the fabric of time and space and appear on the other side. But he desires the normalcy. Desires the ache that builds in his legs as he makes his way to Beqanna once more, the common lands stretching before him.
His heart clenches in his chest, something like pain or need or fear, and he simply stands upon the cusp of the meadow. His golden eyes sharpened and lit from within, his mouth a stern slash across his face.
It is home and yet not.
He is both himself and yet not.
And yet not.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
This is how you will know she is near:
frost will gather on the broad side of the blades of grass and then the breath will turn to vapor as soon as it leaves your mouth, ice will collect on your eyelashes and in the tangles of your mane the closer she gets, but the snow flurries are the last to come because they stick close to her.
So this is how she arrives, safe from the heat that lingers well into autumn. Insulated by her personal winter, the thick layer of ice, though she bleeds glacial blue beneath the surface.
It has been quiet in the Isle. She has lived there an entire year now and has not met another soul since she arrived on the barren beach and blanketed it in a layer of snow. (It is a weakness, she thinks, to long for a permanent place to call home. But it must stem from the glow of Tephra, the contentment she had felt there with her sisters, their parents. Even if the heat had been unbearable.) It had been lonely, though, bitterly so.
And so she returns to the meadow and she brings the winter with her and feels no remorse for doing so. (Though her sisters had not loved the cold the same way she always has and she knows that others likely do not crave it as she does.)
But she does not apologize when she and her cold come to rest beside him, the nearest solitary creature. (It is possible that he could not want company, she thinks, but then why would he be here?)
“You seem to have come a long way,” she says, studying him with a single glacial blue eye. Can she smell it on him? Is it obvious in the way he holds himself? Her magic is confined to winter. She cannot read his mind, cannot delve into his memory. Perhaps she is merely observant.
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
She brings the cold, the bite of frost, the promise of winter.
He feels it first as a nip and then as fang against his flesh and then something deeper. Something that cuts to the marrow of him and reminds him of that emptiness that chased him all those nights—of the loneliness and darkness and fear that had set up his mind and had never been able to be shaken.
There is a temptation to banish it from him. To pull the natural heat from all around him and flare it into a summer to combat her cold—to warm his bones and ease the vicious ache that settles into him. But the pain is too real, it sharpens his mind and he leans into it instead, a knife to his throat. Instead of pushing back with his own heat, he draws forth her cold even more. He pours his magic behind it until the snow begins to fall around them, the flurries thickening and the promise of a winter storm a kiss upon the sky.
He clenches his jaw against the way his teeth would chatter in response.
Instead a muscle jumps and he angles a predator eye toward her. “I have,” he affirms, but he doesn’t know how to explain where he has been or perhaps he simply doesn’t want to so he doesn’t elaborate. He just rolls a jaguar marked shoulder in difference, the snow settling along the broad swath of his back.
“Have you come from afar?” he asks.
He could pull the answer from her mind, he knows. Could tear it apart in search for the truth. But he has never been particularly comfortable with such invasions of privacy, with ripping away the mystery that another may hold to their chest and so he lets them remain guarded and tucked away.
Instead he just regards her from a distance, waiting for whatever she was content to give him.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
The flurries edge toward a storm.
The flakes do not dissolve when they land at their feet but begin to collect.
Soon they will be up to their ankles in snow.
This is not her doing. She has not asked the clouds for this, but when she looks at him she sees no obvious signs of concentration. He is not of the winter, not like she is, and it is obvious that she has stumbled upon a magician. A true magician.
A magician like her mother.
(And there is some small thrill in the deep blue heart to think it, to remember her mother, but she is a glacial thing and she is not made of softness. She is made of ice, there is no room in her breast for warmth. But there is always fondness for her family. Always.)
She is a proud thing, Camellia, and if it were not for her deep love for the snow she might have commanded it to stop completely. Because she believes that it belongs to her as much as she belongs to it and it is hers alone to control. But he is a true magician, she thinks, just as her mother is a true magician and she loves the snow too fondly to will it to stop falling.
So they stand there in the beginnings of their own blizzard and he tells her that he has traveled a long way, which can mean a great many things when a magician says it. She nods but does not immediately ask him to elaborate, just accepts his answer for what it is in that moment: the truth and nothing more.
And when he turns the question on her, she rolls an icy shoulder. “Only as far as the Isle this time.”
She turns her head then to look at him fully, training both vibrant blue eyes on him when she asks.
“Have you come from this world or the next, magician?”
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
It does not occur to him that to tamper with her magic would be an insult, would be a violation. That he would overstep boundaries and perhaps insult her by playing with her gifts that pour into the area around them, forcing the very elements to bend the knee and fast forward time to her preferred season. And because he does not enter her thoughts, he does not learn of such thoughts, however mild they may be.
He just feels the bitter cold and the bite of the blizzard and the pain—
the pain that he could cut off at the start but chooses instead to sink into.
He focuses on her, the cold of her, and wonders if she does not feel such pain. Is she indifferent to it? Does she merely feel the cold as a comfort? The rest of the world as something to be ignored?
How he longs for that.
How jealous he is of her perceived protected heart.
“That is no short distance,” he comments, although his mind has fractured and followed along a million different paths—thinking of where she has been, where she is going, who she is underneath it all. It only comes back at her next question, when she labels him a magician. A title he has not yet grown comfortable with, although the earth has spun on its axis and he still has this power flowing through him.
“I came from the in-between,” he says simply, because he doesn’t know how else to describe the place that has he been, the way that he has floated in the ether. “It was cold there,” a quirk of his lip and a shadow of the boy that he once might have been had time and life not stepped on his throat.
“But perhaps not as cold as the winter in your veins.”
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
She is not impervious to pain, no.
It is simply that the ice dampens her perception of it. The cold numbs her to it. Beneath the ice, she bleeds glacial blue. The skin (and there is skin, even if it is not skin like his skin) is chapped and cracked and damaged and it cries out for relief that it will never know again.
It is not that she leans into the pain like he leans into the pain, no.
It is simply that she does not feel it the same way he feels it anymore. It is simply that pain is all in the perception and the ice is all she has known for a long time now. Even from the earliest days of her youth, she has ached for the ice.
It’s true that the journey itself had been long and she could have stopped to find company many times along the way, but she knows that this mortal journey is nothing at all compared to the infinite possibilities available to the likes of him.
She feels no impulse to argue, though, and does not open her mouth to insist that there had been nothing at all to the journey she’d made from the Isle. There is nothing to the traveling when the joints perpetually ache with cold, she wants to tell him but doesn’t. Pain is all in the perception.
The in-between, he says and she goes on studying him a beat longer. She looks away when he mentions the cold and then, finally, relaxes into her own wry grin when he compares it to the winter in her blood. She turns her attention then to the snow gathering at their feet and tilts her head.
“The cold is relative, isn’t it?” she asks coolly, “just because it would not have been cold for me does not mean it was any less cold for you.”
that day even the sun was afraid of you and the weight you carried
Firion has perceived only pain for as long as he can remember. He has breathed it in and let it rearrange his very cells, turning him into something he had not been destined to be. It was only through luck and fate and sheer willpower that he had inflicted his own will upon that pain, molding it into something new instead. Making it a weapon he could wield. A shield he could leverage. A barrier he could erect.
Anything but the crushing vulnerability he knows it is at its heart.
A spear thrown true straight to the core of him.
But such things are beyond him now, his mind still not fully his own yet, his body distracted with the weight of snow on his back and the coming bitter cold. He focuses instead on the woman of winter by his side, the ice that builds on her skin and underneath it. “It’s all relative,” he agrees and with a breath of cold that plumes in front of his face, he disappears. He collapses on himself like a dying star, turning into the wind that begins to howl around her, the snow that begins to fall with more fervor.
Firion becomes the winter that she summons, that she embodies, that she commands.
He writes it on his cells and races past her before circling back and causing the snow to spiral up by her side. “I was both alone and not,” the wind whistles in her ear. He is everywhere at once. He is the snow beneath her. The water that freezes in the air. The clouds that look down upon her.
He is it all.
And he is not cold anymore, he thinks.
Perception indeed.
“I was alone as you are now,” this said only in her head, whispered between her thoughts.
so you saluted every ghost you've ever prayed to and then buried it where bones are buried
These are her faults:
pride—for when he had moved to manipulate her winter, her first impulse had been to call an end to it altogether, because she felt the cold and all that came with it belonged to her alone and how dare he think he should be able to command it as she did.
(In the end, of course, her love for the terrible storm had won out and she had merely leaned into it instead. Because she would rather let a magician tamper with the magic than be without it.)
envy—for when he is there one moment and gone the next, the first feeling that seeps into her cold heart is jealousy because she knows that he has become the storm, that he has dissolved into the wind and the snow and the cold and how she longs to become these things, too.
He who is not him but the wind and the snow and the cold spirals upward to murmur in her ear about the dichotomy of being alone without really being alone at all and she closes those glacial blue eyes and, for a moment, simply exists. Alone and not alone.
He had been as alone as she is now, which is to say that he had not been alone at all but his companion had not been a companion at all but an idea.
She draws in a long, cold breath and opens her eyes, searches the surrounding winter and finally smiles.
“And which do you prefer, magician?” she asks the storm, head tilted, “a companion of flesh and blood or the wind?”
Her smile is a cruel, beautiful thing and were he to have a heart in this form, it would perhaps catch. He would feel it trip and stutter, because her face—so fierce and sharp—nearly softens with the smile in the same breath that it grows in intensity. Like staring into a blizzard and seeing both the beauty and the death. He wonders if her mother had seen that when she had first opened her eyes.
Had she always been such a creature of cold?
But he has no heart and he can only respond with the howling of the wind and the increasing of flurries in the air between them. He can only reply with air that grows more frigid by the moment, winter gathering on the edges of the horizon like a promise made only for her. “I prefer no companion at all,” he lies and it comes easily, even though the shadow companion now severed from him yips in protest.
“It is much more difficult to disappoint that which doesn’t exist,” this at least is true.
There’s no self-pity in his voice to be found as the snow by her side begins to pile up. It gathers and gathers, quickly, until it stands above her shoulder and when he shakes, it falls down and he is revealed underneath. The snow sticks to his lashes and in his roped golden hair and his eyes are overbright.
“I have an ability to even disappoint the wind.”
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
09-06-2021, 04:58 PM (This post was last modified: 09-06-2021, 04:58 PM by camellia.)
camellia
Should she take offense?
Any other proud thing might, but she is a cold thing. (Is the heart also made of ice? It is so hard to tell when everything in her is so hypothermic.)
To hear him say he prefers no companion at all perhaps should have chased her off—why should she stay where she is not wanted?—but she stays all the same and he materializes from the snowbank at her side. How easy it would have been simply to dissolve, leaving her there with only the storms of her own creation and she would never have known the difference except that the quiet would have been different, deeper.
A disappointment.
Her smile remains, though something in it shifts, as if this is some dark joke between the two of them. She does not know what it means to disappoint or to be disappointed, not yet.
Would she have been disappointed if he had left her there alone in the storm?
She studies him a long moment then, the gold of his face, the new light in his eyes. And instead of asking him what it had felt like to be the cold, she asks, “and why are you such a disappointment?”
As if it is that simple. As if it can be broken down so easily. She tilts her head while the snow continues to fall, accumulating every place it can, including along the long trail of their spines. And the smile is there even still, lurking in the furthest corners of her cold mouth while she waits for his answer.
