"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
we all carry these things that no one else can see they hold us down like anchors; they drown us out at sea
It has now been days since he had been pulled from his saltwater-grave and spat onto the beach. It has been days since his body had reformed under the waves and refashioned into something new; his lungs inflating with air and strength flooding back into his body. It had been strange, to crawl back onto he sand where his life had bled away; even stranger to walk back into the meadow where there were more unknown faces than ones he recognized. Still, the part that has been the most surprising was the way his memories had become piecemeal—the way he would grasp onto a thought only to have it filter between his fingers and fall away again. It was frustrating to grasp onto an idea only to have it gone but a second later.
Not to mention that the order had left his temperament…temperamental.
There were times when he felt at peace, like at the dawn, when he sat and watched strangers flood into the meadow one or two at a time. There was a tranquility in that silence before conversation broke it. He almost did not recognize himself in these moments because so little of his life had been peaceful; during these moments, he felt himself anticipating Joelle’s approach. His heartbeat was languid, and he felt at ease.
But it was a lie.
Then there were other times when he felt the sorrow that his life had been steeped in for so long. He felt the grief as deep as his marrow—his failures overcoming him one by one. He saw those that he had fought so hard to protect broken and bloody. He saw his kingdom in flames. He saw Joelle falling into the ocean. He saw his friends being overcome by battle. All the tragedies he had done his best to avoid and yet always seemed so powerless to stop. No matter how hard he worked, he hadn’t been able to stop them.
But, at night. At night was when he felt the rage and the violence. It was part of his bloodline and perhaps what had cosmically tied him to Makai. The fury was his birthright and the darkness was his home. But, unlike Makai, he did not spend his life indulging that desire. He did not exploit it like Atrox. He had, instead, fought against it. He had tried so hard to turn his cheek to the shadows of his very nature and deny the predator within him. Ultimately, it had been a mistake. He could only hold back the dam for so long before it had sprung a leak…and that leak had been catastrophic. It had forced him to look into the mirror and stare at what he had always known about himself, at what his family had always known.
So in the coolness of midnight, he stood under the branches of the same tree, feeling the breeze along his back, sweat sickening his neck. It was easy to get lost in the anger—both righteous and not. He wanted to rail against the heavens for what he had lost; he wanted to break others to right his wrongs. As in his first life, Magnus spent his nights wrestling with his demons—and he often won. Tonight, he did not.
His gold-flecked eyes were sharp and wild as he began to move into the meadow, hoping to distract himself from the poison leaking through him, the memories that slipped knives under his ribs like thieves in the night. His mouth was a harsh scowl, his handsome face stony as he moved with a grace both inherited and learned, his step smooth before he came to a sudden stop, watching the mare with piqued interest. There was something about her that stirred memories. Perhaps there was something about her that reminded him of Joelle—perhaps he was simply fated to meet his fallen brother’s love.
Regardless, he was powerless to stop himself from approaching.
He circled around so that she could see him approaching, the moonlight’s silver light spilling over the golden dusk of his coat, Magnus doing his best to temper the flames in his eyes. Perhaps she too would notice something familiar about him: the anguish that his family wore so well, the barely contained feral nature, the edge to his otherwise polite words. “Hello.” He paused, shifting restlessly as he looked at her, wondering at the twisting in his gut. “My name is Magnus.” Another pause. “Do we know each other?”
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
When Oksana had parted ways with the golden mind-reader, she had told him with a hollow smile that it was time for her to go back home. Back to the Chamber, to her not-sister Straia, to whatever family she still had that chose to remain there. To throw herself wholly into something until there was not even a single extra second for dwelling and self-pity and regret. She had meant it too. Talking with Dempsey had been enough to smooth out those ragged, flayed edges so the wounds in her heart would be able to start repairing. Not healing, nothing would be right again, but at least it didn’t have to hurt so much. But when she had pulled apart from Dempsey in the night, turning to disappear into the thick dark, something had stopped her.
A feeling of dulled urgency flared in the pit of her stomach.
Pausing, she peered uncertainly through the darkness, those flashing green eyes like gleaming emeralds in the night. Behind her, Dempsey had already gone. Her brow furrowed with unease as she turned to face forward again. Through the dark a form appeared, a silhouette taking shape in the cold, silver light of tired stars.
Her heart flung itself against her chest like a trapped bird just as an enormous pair of prehistoric wings erupted from her withers.
Doubt and suspicion addled her recognition and at once she was beside him with cold eyes and ears pinned viciously beneath a tangle of red mane. In the instant before her teeth would have struck his shoulder, certain details solidified in her mind and she froze. Gold, not black. And his eyes were different, still tortured, less feral. The tension bled from her body with a shuddery sigh as she took an uncertain step back, distrust flashing in those green eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him quietly, uncertainly, the violence gone completely from her, “I thought you were someone else.” She can’t help but fall silent as her eyes explore his eyes, startling when that same sense of dulled urgency flared in her stomach again. A soft, “Oh”, dropped from her lips. “I’m Oksana.” Her nose reached out to brush across the slant of a jaw so disturbingly familiar it made her heart weep. “I’m sure we don’t,” a pause as she considers the turmoil warring within her, “and yet-”. Her sentence ended unfinished as she pulled her nose back.
There was a tiredness to her expression, an apology in the weariness of her voice, “I’m sorry, you caught me on an off night. I should be going.”
And yet she doesn’t.
Not a muscle moves as those aching eyes trace familiar lines on an unfamiliar face.
we all carry these things that no one else can see they hold us down like anchors; they drown us out at sea
Whatever he had been expecting, it hadn’t been the rage. The situation erupted so quickly that he almost did not have a moment to react, and he fell back on instinct. Lifting himself into a half rear in defense, his ears pin back to his head and his lips pull back into a snarl. Later, he would think about how incredible it was that he could so quickly pick up the sword again and be ready for a fight—how easily battle came to him. But in the heat of the moment, he did not consider it. He snapped like a venomous snake startled and came down hard on the earth as she so quickly fell back from the offensive. Sidestepping, he shook his head so that the tangled ink of his mane fell on both sides of his thick neck, ears still flattened.
“You should be careful,” he said darkly, his voice smoke and ash. What goes unsaid is that next time, he may not be able to control himself; next time, he may not just defend. Rattled by the encounter, he takes another step backward away from her, shaking his head in agitation and shifting his weight uneasily. “I would be sorry to be whoever you thought that I was.” Of course, he had no idea how true that statement was; how sorry he would be to be the brother that he had murdered and whose own murdering ways had dragged him back from the ocean. How sorry he would be to come face-to-face with his counterpart.
“What a…” he pauses and the gravel is still in his voice, in his throat, “pleasure to meet you, Oksana.” His lacerated lips pull into the smallest of smiles, the stallion still keeping the distance between them. Not out of fear for what might happen to him, but how he might respond in turn. It had been a long time since he had the release of a fight and he was not sure that he would be able to control himself if she prompted another one again. The last thing he wanted was to lash out like that. “My name is Magnus.”
They say that names can have power, but he has to wonder if they can lose it over time. His was a name lost into the bowels of history; a name that once carried weight and now was covered in dust. There were few that still had it carved into their hearts, and they were few and far between. For the most part, his generation was long gone. Lost to the grasp of death or the wandering of the immortal. Few from his time had lasted throughout the years—and he had no way of knowing that she was somehow tied to his family.
Considering her for a second, he nodded. “Perhaps you should go.” It certainly had not been the most pleasant of greetings and whatever ghost she saw in the planes of his face still haunted the depths of her eyes. He knew those demons; he knew just how difficult it could be to shake them. Silence stretches between them—so taut that he was surprised the air between them did not shatter. “Or perhaps you should stay.” Because they shared something between them that could not be explained by either side.
you taught me the courage of stars before you left
“You’re right,” she agrees with a smile that seems more like a grimace, “I should be more careful.” She doubted he would ever guess that they meant different things. He spoke of her fire and impulsion, she of a heart she needed to guard more closely. “But what have I got to lose?” She gives him another hollow smile that does not quite reach her eyes. It was easy to feel invulnerable after being reduced to nothing, what could be lower than your lowest point. Emotionally she had been obliterated, perhaps mentally too, and she was almost positive there wasn’t room for more pain, not even physical.
A strange desire for violence blossomed like a bloodstain across her chest. She almost didn’t recognize it at first, but the seductive darkness pressed fire under her skin and she found herself craving the way it, for a moment, made the pain dull to background noise. But when she looked into his eyes and saw something there, something almost kindred, the fire suffocated within her veins and the fight (mostly) left her.
“Makai.” She tells him (even though he doesn’t ask) in a voice that seems both filled with longing and cut through with contempt. “I thought you were someone named Makai.” There is a small victory in the way she was able to say his name, not once but twice, and say it without crumbling beneath the shame and regret it coated her with like ash. “I would be sorry if you were him, too.” But she looks away quickly to hide her face, to hide an expression of heartache that threatened to undo her efforts of strength and fortitude.
When she turns those stark green eyes back on him, there is a small amount of amusement gleaming there despite the cloud that hangs over her shoulders. “If this has been pleasurable for you, you truly must make a habit of keeping poor company.” Her jaw clenches but for once it isn’t with tension, it’s to mute the laugh that reflexively climbs to her delicate mouth. And then with a single word he quells the laughter and she lifts her chin curiously at him. “Magnus.” She repeats his name and it feels important, feels relevant, but she can’t place the reason why. “Should I know that name?”
She takes a step closer, passive, as if the dark is the reason why she can’t place this man who feels both like a stranger and also achingly familiar. But the closeness changes nothing of course, except maybe the amount of tension rippling beneath the crushed gold color of his skin. Her brow furrows subtly beneath her forelock and it softens the expression of quiet settled over the hollows and angles of her refined chestnut face. At her withers her wings drop and tuck close, the now chestnut leather blending to the skin of her ribs beneath the weak half-light of the stars. “Well, Magnus,” she says with the ghost of a smile, this one the most believable so far, “what do you say? If I promise not to attack you again, can I stay for awhile longer?”
I need to know why I feel like I know you, she doesn’t say.
we all carry these things that no one else can see they hold us down like anchors; they drown us out at sea
She says his name and all of a sudden, his world becomes very small.
It shrinks to that singular moment on the beach when rage and tragedy had struck; it shrunk until all he was became swallowed up by the impossibility of the name. No, it was impossible that Makai was still alive. He had seen him die—saw his young body covered in blood on the sand. His heart squeezed in his chest until he struggled to breathe, and his lips pulled tight into a grimace, forgetting Oksana altogether.
It takes everything within him to not splinter, but he manages, and he pulls back from the precipice just in time to catch the laugher that hides beneath the muscles of her cheek. Afraid to say the name out loud, afraid to even entertain the possibility of Makai’s existence, he tucked it away like a secret in his heart, just giving her a small smile. “My name was once more common.” He shrugged, looking up to the trees above them, forcing his pulse to slow with long breaths. “But it was lost to time a long time ago.”
She steps closer and he returns the favor, feeling comforted by her warmth, the fragility and strength of her stirring memories of Joelle. He ignores the pangs that bite at him as he nudges her neck gently. “I think that I would rather like your company,” he catches her gaze and holds it steady, “but I am not sure that I trust you to not attack again.” He laughs for the first time since he crawled from the ocean, and the sound is both rich and throaty and rusty from disuse, his tongue loosening. “Although I think that I am willing to risk it.”
you taught me the courage of the stars before you left
how light carries on endlessly, even after death
Her confession seems to give him pause, though she can read nothing from the passivity scrawled there and misinterprets the meaning of the silence completely. “I love him.” She says quietly, her smile is sad, her heart raw and dismayed in her chest. “It isn’t a choice I made. I didn’t decide anything. I just do, just as the sky is blue, I love him.” Her words taste bitter in her mouth, like cold metal, the confession bleeding like a stain on her heart. “But he’s got his ghosts, his haunts, and all of me isn’t enough to change that.” She looks away and her mouth hardens with a frown, her eyes darken with hurt. “All I can do is let go of him and it’s killing me.” And when she looks back to catch his gaze, she isn’t sure why she’s told him this, what made her cut open her chest and bare her heart to him so freely.
“I’m tired of everything being so hard,” she says, and her smile is so heavy, her eyes so dark, “but that’s life, isn’t it. This is the weight of living.”
She sighs then, and she can feel her heart rattling like a husk in her chest. It was true, the tiredness she spoke of, she could feel it seeping into her bones like poison, filling her veins with lead and her heart with ash. She had never guessed love would feel this way. She hadn’t dreamt of a fairytale, but she had dreamt of something more substantial, something less destructive. “Well, time’s a bitch.” She says tipping her head with a half-smile hanging by a thread on her mouth. And she wonders if time was what had destroyed everything. If time had poked holes in the weak spots until there had been nothing left but weak spots.
She doesn’t flinch when his mouth touches her neck, doesn’t step out of reach with that moments-from-detonation look of agony stretched across her face. She only smiles, nods once, and there is the hint of a something bright (something trapped, wounded) buried like a precious stone in those emerald eyes. “Then don’t give me a reason to, Magnus.” She says, adding some weight to his name when it rolls off her tongue. And then, with her eyes still quietly searching his face for a hint of why this feels like meeting an old friend, “You’re from around here, yes?”
you and I both know that the house is haunted and you and I both know that the ghost is me
He does his best to keep his composure as she talks about Makai although internally, his mind is racing. What had happened to his brother? Why did death seem to elude his family so? His mouth is tight and his gold-flecked eyes burn with intensity, but he is still and attentive, his head nodding along with her words, and sympathy catching in his throat at her hurt. “Love is a fickle thing,” he finally says, when he trusts that his voice will be steady—when he trusts that it will be smoke and not crackling fire wood. “You rarely have much say in the matter, and it is rarely as pleasant as the stories would lead you to believe.”
He himself had been in love. The kind of love they write in constellations. But it had not been a painless endeavor. Although, he supposed, he only had himself to blame for that. Their love had burned bright, and it had singed them both. It had both splintered their bones and then knit it back together again. It was the kind of love that was too hot to hold for too long, and they hadn't been able to—only finding peace for moments before the turbulence tore them apart again and, eventually, led them to their demise.
So he empathizes with her as he mourns his bloodline's infatuation with tragic love.
“I have found that the things that are the hardest are also the most valuable,” he says with a softer voice. He was not sure what comfort that he could impart to her, even less sure what comfort he was entitled to impart when he seemed to be intrinsically tied to the center of her pain, but it was in his nature to try. “But don’t let it kill you—whatever it is. It is not weak to want to survive. It is not weak to protect yourself.”
The silence between them stretches, along with tension, both of them taut with it. They were seconds away from snapping, he knew, but for now, there was comfort in knowing exactly where each other stood. “I will do my best,” he promises, although he wonders if he has already given her plenty of reason. If only she knew the truth. He would tell her if he believed it. He would tell her if he could manage to face it.
“I am,” he says, voice trailing off before he corrects himself, “I was.” Confusion flickers across his features before he just shakes his head. “I don’t know anymore.” He shrugs his strong shoulders, the scars rolling along the golden dusk of his coat. “Coming home is more difficult than I thought it would be.”
you taught me the courage of the stars before you left
how light carries on endlessly, even after death
He sinks into his thoughts, falls away into his memories, and for a moment she is left alone. It is a short moment, maybe little more than one single beat of their hearts, but it is long enough. She can feel her own mind drifting dangerously as she considers this poisonous love that burns like acid in her veins and eats holes in her heart.
It had felt like an easy love at first, like there was nothing to question, all instinct and impulse and meant to be’s. He gave her the strength to take the Falls, and the support to keep her wild, reckless heart tethered there for as long as was possible. And when he became sick and the smell of death followed him like a devoted pet, she had lent him her strength and her soul, everything she had was his to take. But after that, things had changed, an impossible shift in a perfectly flawed world. She had become a mother, and he a father, and now looking back she cannot help but wonder if she was the first one to press a knife to the seam of their relationship. If the things she had wanted, a family, a child, were not the same things he had wanted. She wonders, with a lump of guilt and sorrow lodged in her throat, if she had asked him to be someone he wasn’t.
Her chest heaves with the silent whimper of concealed sorrow and she turns her face from him for a moment. She does not know why she does, why she cares if he sees something crawling through the shadows in her eyes like a wounded animal. Maybe it’s reflexive, or maybe she’s just tired of falling apart in front of everyone. But she doesn’t look back to his face until she is certain he will only find a softness there, a lie, and a stormy quiet in the bright emerald of her guarded eyes.
“It won’t kill me.” She tells him when she is certain her voice won’t crack and betray her. It was already killing her. But there was so much to live for, so much to hold on to. She had a family in her children, a beautiful family, and an even stranger one with Dempsey. But it gave her purpose, even when she could feel the missing part of her soul like a ragged hole in her chest. It wasn’t perfect, sometimes it was barely enough, but it was good, and it was so much more than she deserved.
Despite herself, she reaches out to press her nose to the curve of his gold cheek with the ghost of a smile pulling at her whiskered mouth. “Just don’t hurt anyone I love.” She says pulling away, and the smile widens and deepens into a warm laugh that just barely touches the corners of her quiet eyes. He doesn’t strike her as someone who would.
Her ears flick at his next words and her face softens in understanding for him. “Coming home is never what we think it will be. Everything changes- if not home, then we do. It’s hard to find the way back in, but it isn’t impossible.” She pauses thinking of the Chamber, of a place she wanted to be home, a place that seemed as though it would never be home. Even though she drifted back, every time she drifted back, there was nothing strong enough to tether her there. Nothing strong enough to tether her anywhere, not since Makai, though Dempsey and the twins came so painfully close. “Where have you been?” She asks looking back at him, her eyes soft beneath a furrowed red brow. “Where will you go?”
you and I both know that the house is haunted and you and I both know that the ghost is me
‘Just don’t hurt anyone I love.’
His heart shatters in his chest at the request, but the anguish doesn’t show on his features. His eyes blaze a little brighter, but he fights for control, just nodding. “I will do my best.” Because what else could he say? How could he bring himself to tell the girl with haunted eyes that he had already done that—that he had been weak and brought death to his family? Even explaining it felt foolish to him. To tell her of the way that Makai had looked, so young and covered in the blood of those two mares. How Magnus had simply reacted, how he had done what he would do with any viper—and how he had mourned all the same.
So he locks the secret in his heart, hating himself for the deception. He just closes his bruised gold-flecked eyes, leaning into her touch and letting the warmth of her wash over him, soothing the ache in his bones. Her laugh is deep and rich, and he does not wander at how Makai fell in love with her, although there are plenty of questions of how he let the love slip away. Not that such questions had strong roots. Magnus knew all to well that even the grandest of loves came with a heavy cost for his family. They were often lucky in finding those they did not deserve, but holding onto it was like holding onto the sun.
The men in his family crumbled to ash under its heat.
“It feels like I have been asleep for a very long time,” he answers and there was truth to it; death had indeed felt very much like slipping into a long, restful slumber. “And I don’t know where I will go—but I imagine I will try to find my way home.” He pauses for a second, considering her with a somberness that seemed to follow the rogue stallion around. “If you would ever like to see Heaven, I would very much like to show you around sometime, Oksana.” His voice drops to a murmur, “Anytime you’d like. Just tell me when.”
you taught me the courage of the stars before you left
how light carries on endlessly, even after death
She doesn’t notice the change in him at her warning, doesn’t see the shadows appearing like bruises in the bottoms of those dark, gold eyes. But it’s better this way, hiding such ruinous secrets, filling the hollow spaces between truths with false smiles and too much silence. Perhaps the truth would destroy her, and perhaps it wouldn’t, but it was not a truth to be discovered now, not a secret to be pried from his heart and unwrapped like a bandage on a wound that would never heal. It would find her on its own eventually, secrets always did - nothing seemed to stay buried for too long, not even the dead as they rose like wilted flowers from graves long-lost, long forgotten. There was no hurry.
‘I will do my best,’ he says, he promises, and she smiles a little when she touches his shoulder with the soft of her whiskered mouth. “That’s all any of us can do, Magnus.”
‘It feels like I have been asleep for a very long time.’ He says again and she can feel her mouth tighten with a frown that seemed to surface from the depths of her ragged heart. It was something she understood, though much less literally than he meant it (and how could she know that), but the times without Makai, the days turned weeks turned months when he had fled and left only heartache and loneliness echoing in his wake, those hollow in-between times, that, felt like sleeping. Days that meant nothing, only empty, only gray, only waiting for those hours when they found each other again and the world would set itself on fire and burn with them until the sleep came again, until he left because he always did.
She knew what it meant to be asleep for a very long time, waiting for the days that mattered in an endless, immortal life to find her.
She wondered if he knew it as well as he thought he did.
Those bright green eyes settle back into the gold of his face, into an anguish he could only just barely hold together, an anguish she knew so intimately. “Do you make a habit out of luring strays home, Magnus?” She asks lightly, and for a moment that frown dissolves as the corners of her mouth quirk subtly upwards. “I have daughters there,” she says instead, ignoring his invitation, “Pyxis and Ilka.” She pauses for a moment and those green eyes darken a shade beneath the furrow of her brow. She often wondered if they had left to hide from her, from the misery she wore like a second skin each time Makai left. “I try to give them their space.”Because I’m a terrible mother, she doesn’t say.
But when her gaze falls into his just a little further, she can feel the glaciers melting in her chest. “But forever is a long time, it seems very likely that I’ll see Heaven at least once in my life. When I do I’ll be sure to see it through your eyes.” A quiet sigh tightens and rattles in her chest as she turns her delicate face from him for a moment. “I’d return the favor and invite you to my home, but I’m afraid this is it.” Her eyes trail across the meadow and then back to his face even as that small smile darkens on her lips. “The Chamber just never stuck.”
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