"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
It was the last time, and she was a wildflower that he had wrapped around then like a weed threatening asphyxiation. He had watched her wilt into him. He had watched her leaves curl and skin prickle. She might have loved him. He might have killed her.
‘You ran,’ he had thought. They always ran. They were always supposed to run. They were bone and stringy off-white sinew and tendon. They were red muscle and yellowed-fat all strung together with flesh and hair, and he was carnivorous. He was teeth and fire and black soot. He was made of different atoms. He was made of magic and hunger. He had been kissed by dirtied nails on witches’ fingers. He had been eaten by fire and come forth unscathed. They always ran. He always chased. He always won.
‘You ran,’ he had thought the last time, and it had turned her from god to mortal in his eyes. He had felt the heat of her body draw him in like the iron tang of blood on the lips of hungry sharks. They were just two bodies tangled, lost among the waves of a black ocean, and they looked just like lovers when his lips pressed against the flesh of her neck while he discovered in his mind all of the ways he could tear her open. They looked just like lovers as he imagined what the life would look like spilled out of her veins and into the sea they were drowning in.
She might have loved him.
He might have killed her.
It took every ounce of humanity inside of him to leave her alive, or that’s what it would look like. It would look like kindness when he left her quaking in a sea of meadow grass lit on fire. It would look like the monster loved the girl enough to let her live because she was a fever inside of him that burned hotter than the flames he was made of, because she pushed at the edges of his insides, curled his innards into cursive letters that spelled out her name.
But it isn’t true.
He has come back.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
At first, he had been the only name written in the constellations of her veins. His had been the name that was was carved into her bones and breathed into her lungs and tangled in the curls of her matted mane—and it had been a name that had stood alone. But she had run, would always run, and he had not chased her. They had become ships passing silently in the night and time, as it does, had continued. His name was no longer the only name buried in the sandy shores of her heart; his name was no longer alone.
There was Sleaze now, with his haunted eyes.
There was Sleaze, with the fragility of his demons—so like and unlike the brokenness of Kingslay. He fell into her and she onto him, and while she granted him the tranquility of quiet, Sleaze gave her the gift of distraction. She was drawn to him as she was drawn to all of the monsters and the demons and ghosts of the worlds and, in time, she had accepted him into the constellation of her breast. He became part of her, and she allowed it—the ash of his presence building the columns of her heart.
Kingslay was no longer the only name, was no longer the only star swirling in her veins.
But he was still burned the brightest. He still cut the way none other could.
So she does not fight the pull in her belly when she sees him, does not even deny that she had missed him. She is utterly open before him, pulled apart for him to play over every detail. He was, and would always would be, master of her fate. “Kingslay,” she breathes in her voice of fog and morning light. She comes up to his smoldering side and, without fear, presses her mouth to his neck, feeling the tendrils of heat that remained and aching for them—wishing they would stay for longer. “It has been so long.”
The world has spun and the moon had been reborn time and time again. She has met Sleaze. She has lost her father. She has still not found home. So much has changed and yet so much remains the same. “It feels so obvious to say,” she murmurs, her voice soft, barely audible, “but I have missed you so.” In the way that the flame misses kindling, in the way that flesh misses the bone. She missed him. Of course she did.
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
The sky splits like mortal flesh beneath a sharpened blade. Instead of blood the sky pours acid clouds and indigo, and he drinks in the weather like he drinks in the wails of the dying – it satiates him, it charges him, it brings him to life. It’s only right that she find him now, here among the chaos and clatter of electricity and fire, here where the magnetic pole draws them both time and time again. “Kingslay,” she says, the way she always will, with a voice that could bring empires to ashes, a voice that holds more tension bundled tight through each syllable of every sentence it speaks than the building storm around it ever could, a voice that is the only beautiful thing about her.
There is a flash and then a crack.
He must hold the empire in his palm, because she brings him to ashes. He must hold the empire in his palm, because his resolve crumbles and falls like the walls of ancient cities. There is a flash and then a crack, and the dark sky breaks open and illuminates the silhouette of her body lying still among an ocean of meadow grass. She is split open, and the carnage is exquisite and laid bare against a ruddy earth littered with the glint of bone, the red of blood and muscle, and the putrid perfume of death.
He moves to see into her eyes. He wants to watch the light fall away, but her body has been dead for so long that the flies suddenly are swarming and the movement of weaving maggots drive his attention to the emptied holes that used to house her eyes.
There is the quiver of a smile that threatens the ends of his lips as he falls against the earth on his knees and presses his cheek close against her neck so that the wreak of her demise sinks deep into the cracks and pores of his skin. She cannot speak now, not through the severed vocal chords, but she has never been so beautiful in life as she is in these moments.
She might have loved him.
He might have killed her.
And then there is a final flash and crack, and he blinks his eyes to see her standing against him again – alive, speaking softly of the time. He feels his gut twist as the
animal buried in the cage of his xylophone ribs begins hammering against the bone and drowning the sounds of anything other than it’s hunger for slaughter, and so he does not answer her. Instead, he shudders against the feel of her lips on his neck and rolls a wave of charcoal flesh beneath them while she makes poetry out of his insides and porridge of his mental clarity.
He closes his eyes and pictures her among the grass and carnage.
He closes his eyes, and he breathes the sickly sweet fragrance of decay, but it isn’t real.
He hasn’t killed her, yet.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
The sky is dark, but Etro does not mind. The clouds split open with the pull of lightening, but she finds that she likes it, finds that she enjoys the threat of rain in the swollen heavens. After all, the electricity in the skies is nothing to that which crackles and sparks between them; it is forgotten in the tension of their young bodies, in the touches that linger and then sweep away. He is a knife to her throat, but she leans into it. He is a fearful beast, but she does not fear—not even when his breath rolls over her skin.
He shudders, and her flesh responds in kind, bunching and shivering against his dissipating heat. Her throat is suddenly dry, but it is not because of how he may kill her. It is not because of how she may love him. It is real and tangible, and she feels her skin tingling with sensations unknown. “Kingslay,” she breathes against him again, as if she is fated to say it; as if she is to forever pray against him this way.
“Tell me that you missed me,” she murmurs, and the sentence is both demanding and hopeful, her muddy brown eyes moving to find his, her head blocky and lacking in grace. The older she gets, the harder the lines that draw her up become. She has lost the softness of youth and no longer can hide behind the awkward growth of a child. She is created in this fashion—made up of the colors of earth and rock, tall, perfectly average except for perhaps the extra weight from Percheron blood. In another life, she may have been a warrior; her body could handle the stress of it. In this life, she is nothing of the sort.
“Please.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
‘Kingslay,’ she breathes, and his name sounds like thorns against her skin, his name sounds like hands around her throat, his name sounds like metal through bone. She breathes against him, and he thinks of the ocean, he thinks of the tide, he thinks of drowning.
The answers she is searching for are answers he will never know.
They are answers he is not capable of. They are answers that do not exist inside of him, and so when she says: ‘Tell me that you missed me,” pleading, begging, he will not break. He cannot break. He cannot, because he doesn’t miss anything that isn’t pooling blood, or breaking bone. He cannot, because he doesn’t miss the living. He cannot, because he is made up of awful pieces. He cannot. He cannot.
And the sky is bleeding colours he will not ever see.
He does not see the acid clouds. He does not see the indigo. He sees her flesh rolling like the waves of a tide, and he feels like a thousand tiny grains of sand, and he feels like gravity because of the way she ebbs and flows around him. He sees the vein behind her ear that throbs with every beat of her simple heart, but he does not see the sky bleeding like a watercolour. He cannot.
She might have loved him.
He might have killed her.
‘Please,’ she says, and he does not wonder if he would if he had only the words. He thinks instead about blood in water. It fogs his eyes until the only colour he sees is red. Of course she doesn’t mind. Of course – because she’s always liked the wrong things, the black things, the dirtied, the molding and corrupted things. Of course she leans against him even when she ran, and he ran. Of course.
Of course she stays.
Of course he says nothing.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
She may not be the same child he left behind, but there are still constellations trapped within her breast. There are still impossibilities ground from the dust of her bones and fates not yet writ. And yet. Oh, and yet, there are differences between this encounter and the ones before. Differences that at once seem so small, so trivial, and yet are a yawning chasm between them. A chasm she is not sure that she can cross. Not even for him. Her mouth tastes of metal; it is bitter and cold. She is cold. She is shivering with the disappearance of his heat, and she does not know if she will ever feel warm again—ever feel whole.
With a breath that sounds like a sigh, she parts from him, stops leaning against the knife that is his body. Her eyes shine with tears that do not fall, and she swallows hard, blinking softly, not bothering to hide the emotions that strangle her throat. “Oh.” Her voice is soft, has always been soft, and despite the years that have passed since the last time they had collided, it is the same voice, silver bells not deepened by age. For the first time with him, she is acutely aware of the plainness of her face, the heavy lines of her body.
For the first time with him, she feels shame. She feels doubt.
“Oh.”
The chasm between them widens, deepens, darkens, and she is suspended over it; there is nothing to catch her now. He has been one of the only truths that she has ever held close, and it is crumbling. He is looking at her but it is not the same; he is not the same. In truth, she is not the same. She does not fear him, but she fears something—fears herself, her doubt, her life now that she has managed to negate even the magic that had once existed between them. She was wrong—always. She destroyed—always.
Now she has destroyed them.
“I understand,” she says softly, although she is not sure that she does. Not sure that she ever will. “I do.” Etro does her best to look strong, but her version of strength has never been the same as the world’s. She wears emotions like armor, and her armor now is vulnerable—it is shadowed by her insecurities, the visible breaking of her heart. “I should stop bothering you,” because that is all she wants to do. She wants to lean against him until his fangs are at his neck. She wants to break him open that she can understand what she did wrong. (What did I do?) She wants to know; needs to know. “I’m sorry.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
He was made of lies and magic. The gnarled tips of witches’ fingers kissed him and made him a god. He was made to bathe in the warm blood of the dying. He was made to curl in the innards of the things he had slaughtered; forged from the fires of hell, grafted from the bones and ash of the things that once were. He is not made for these moments. He is not made to wade a sea of grass for something he does not intend to ruin completely. He is not made for close proximity – to be close enough that the clouds of his breath will fuse with hers until they become one, to feel the thrum of her pulse so deeply in his bones that it feels like his own.
He is not made for this.
And yet it breaks him to have it end. And yet, she pulls away with a sigh and it leaves his body reaching for something he cannot begin to comprehend. “Oh,” she says, and the hurt is palpable even if he cannot understand it. She has grown. She has changed. The sun rose and, and it set, and the transition cast shadows on her skin that have left her vastly different even if the shade never could reach him. She has grown, and she has changed, and he is still the same thing that he has always been. There is still a creature in his bones that is hungry for the living. He still needs to watch the life drain from their eyes. She still needs three words he cannot say.
He is not made for this.
And when she pulls away there is a breeze that will pull through her hair that sifts through the cloud of breath and smoke, and it will make his ribs rattle. “I’m sorry,” she says, and his lips will curl because she reeks of betrayal – because she reeks of the living, because she reeks of him (of nights without death or fire, of conversation, of possibilities that exist without him).
He is not made for this.
He thinks about the crack that echoed through the grass when he broke the rabbit’s neck, and it reminds him of her too-large, dark eyes, and of the questions that looked like lights that she harboured in the black fractures of her irises. And between the murder, between the marrow and the bone, between the screams and the silence, he remembers. He remembers the way her hips looked until they dissolved into the sandstorm. He remembers the way her eyes looked alight. He remembers the way that her legs were too lean and too long, the way her eyes were too large.
“No,” he says, because the edge where she had lain across his chest feels cold without her even if he is made of ash and fire and hell.
“No,” he says, but then he remembers the smell.
Then he remembers that he is not the only creature in her life. Then he remembers that she ran. Then he remembers that she said she never would.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
She would do anything to stop this pain ripping through her chest. She would do anything to quiet the demons screaming in her head. She was made for this, but not this; she is not equipped to handle the way her heart is beating—so fast, so hard, so loud. She is not equipped to handle the way that she is gasping for air or the way that the earth is shifting, revolving, falling from beneath her. Her reality is being torn asunder, and she is gasping, and he is there, but she can’t touch him—and it’s too much.
All of it is too much.
But then he speaks, and she wants to cry from the relief, from the glorious, beautiful pain the blossoms in her chest, bruising her ribs with each breath. No. To what, she didn’t know, but he had spoken, and just hearing his voice—the same, clanging syllables rattling around his mouth—was enough to drive away the shadows for a second. She closes her muddy eyes and leans against the wind that stirs, and she breathes in the faint burning scent of his body, and feels the ash tangle in the curls of her matted mane.
No.
When her eyes open, there are still nebulas swirling there, the constellations of her cells a stark contrast to the plain angles of her face and the slope of her hips. “You can’t tell me no,” she says simply in her voice of sea and tides. She may not be beautiful, but she is the daughter of Yael and Vanquish. She is a princess of the dunes and a daughter of the desert moon. She may not be beautiful, but there are heavens in her DNA that can quiet the monsters and still the storms and bring magic to its knees in her presence.
She is not beautiful, but he cannot tell her no.
The pain is still washed over her features, and she smiles at him—the curves of her lips sad, wistful. “I love you, Kingslay,” not so much a confession as a truth of the world, “but you cannot tell me no.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
Some he breaks quickly – they combust, all smoke and flames, burn alive with bubbling veins from the inside out until everything that remains is ash and debris that the wind wipes cleanly away. They are the lucky ones. They are the ones that feel a little less. They are the ones that don’t realize what he is until they are alight. They hear the sounds of screaming but are ended before they realize that the sounds are from their own mouths.
Some he breaks slowly – he bleeds them out, breaks the bones in fragments only a little at a time. Some he will follow as they stagger on fractured limbs, sometimes for miles, close enough that they can feel his presence in their shadows and far enough that there is this sliver of hope that he can hold in the palm of his hands until he grows bored and snuffs the light in their eyes.
And some he breaks without realizing.
Some he breaks while he stands next to them, flesh to flesh, leaving them living, leaving them suffering in ways he cannot comprehend. If he were made for this it would be different. If he were made for this then the hurt in her eyes would be palpable, and maybe he would recoil, maybe his throat would ring with the same choking breaths, maybe he would stutter, maybe he would struggle to find the words that mean what he needs them to mean. If he were made for this it would be different, maybe.
“I love you, Kingslay,” she says, and he likes the words even if he doesn’t feel the gravity behind them.
If he were made for this he would stop her there, but he is alive in a foreign world that has a separate language and separate formalities without translation. “But you can’t tell me no,” he hears, and he remembers the sand in his eyes and all of the ways that he and Yael turned that sand and heat and made it glass. They left an explosion in the deserts that could not be erased that would remind them both until the end of time about the thing that they had both lost.
If he were made for this he would tell her: “Yes.”
But he isn’t.
Instead, a rustle near the shrouded, tangled roots of a nearby hazel tree leaves his head slanting away from her and toward the sound. And he isn’t looking because some small part of him recognizes a distant parallel that lingers intertwined in the roots of that old tree. He doesn’t watch because fragments in his cells gravitate towards the place that he was made, of magic, of lies. He looks because what she loves does not exist. He looks because he is made of tendon and sinew, of mass and muscle, hardwired by an instinct he should not possess – an instinct that even here, even now, even with the palpable hurt mingling in the constellations in her eyes, is bigger than she is.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
She is dissolving before him, but he still remains quiet. She is shattering, and still has only uttered one word (no) that rings and echoes in her ears. She is falling, falling, falling, and the only motion that he makes—the only reaction he has is to look away at the rustling of a nearby tree. That is perhaps the saddest part of this entire encounter. That single slant of his handsome, haunted head is something that will play through her memories over and over again until it is burned, seared, branded there for eternity.
Tears spring into the corner of her eyes as she realizes the futility of this exercise. She is shaking him at the shoulders, screaming at him to love her, and he cannot. It is not within his DNA—and she, she cannot fall upon this spear again and again. She is made to love and, in turn, be loved. Perhaps not in the way that is expected (she loves like the wind loves the swirling dunes of the deserts; she is to be loved as the sun loves the ever waning moon), but she is to be loved. She expects it—was raised to expect it.
And he—well, he could not.
She sighs again, and this time it is intertwined with bitter acceptance, with pain, with heartache. This time, she knows that she is closing a chapter that will never be re-opened. So, despite the fact that her lungs are alive with her agony, that every cell is burning with need to go away, she draws it out. She watches him with muddy brown eyes, tracing the hard angles of his body, his flat shark-eyes, the places where ash settle into the slopes of his shoulders and the faint traces of fire can be seen on his hide.
She studies him, memorizes him, loves him in spite of it all.
“Go, Kingslay,” she finally says, and her voice is barely a whisper. She nods her head toward the trees, the borders, the area where she is not. “You should go.” Etro feels hollowed out, and she wonders how much more she could stand (how much could one soul bear?), but she forces herself to straighten. She is a daughter of Yael and Vanquish. She is a princess of the dunes and a daughter of the desert moon. She will not let this—him—break her, even if she feels the cracks running like fault lines through her flesh.
“I will think of you,” she confesses, one more time. “I do not expect you to think of me.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
