High and Dry (Closed)

[Sondra]

They were walking two abreast beside the stream on a slim earthen path. It crumbled where their boots scraped the sides, black clods of earth tumbling into the current. It smelled of clay and cold. To their right was a high drift of snow and beyond that giant pines, creaking with the weight of winter. She knew this path. She and her brother had taken it a hundred times over, but at least her brother was quiet on these trips. Jaren wouldn’t shut up. He whined about his wet fingers and tight boots. It was his own fault, if he hadn’t taken off his gloves to cram snow down her collar, his fingers would be dry. They both would be dry, instead of clenching their bodies against the cold. Jaren whimpered and sniffed, blaming her for taking too long and going too slow. He’d push her shoulders forward, like she was a stubborn mule. “Stop it Jaren, the path’s narrow.” “Then walk faster, dog. I’m perishing of cold.” “Don’t call me dog.” “Dog-Dog-Dog.” She would have plugged her ears but for the basket of fish in her arms. Instead she chose to ignore his moist taunts and press her nose against the cold. Vallen never listened to her. Even when the adults told him to. She breathed warm air on her fingers thinking of the greater shame of having a boy’s mum tell him to be nice on account of who her father was. Thinking she couldn’t hear, Vallen had grumbled complaints to the other boys. When they left, she could feel all their irritated and restless eyes on her. Vallen’s back filled her sight, and he swayed from side to side, pretending to be burdened by the fish. It wasn’t as big a catch as Vallen seemed to think. There was no reason to remind her that she’d caught nothing. Every word about the abundance of the catch and the gratitude their mother’s would have for it was a stab at her insufficiency. “The basket isn’t that heavy. You can go faster.” Vallen looked over his shoulder, “How would you know?” She pushed Vallen’s shoulder again, her arms stiff with anger. She lost her balance on the path, the basket slipping from her hands. She watched Vallen fall with sudden horror. The water was so cold the feeling was indistinguishable from being set on fire. Emptiness filled her and a terrible, terrible dread as she watched Vallen tumble over the river rocks and eddies. She couldn’t get a grip on the stones and the water was beating her about. From a distant place she wondered why she couldn’t breathe. The merciless water rolled over Vallen, dragging him over the black jagged stones and plunging him into depths. Her hands broke the surface, but for what purpose? Her heavy boots sucked her under and she felt the final blow of her head against the rock. Vallen’s white fingers and all evidence of him were swept backward. So very far away. Her life was over and fleeting. So unfulfilled. She suddenly knew her life was over. So hollow. ~~~ Sondra awoke on the shore. A small corpse white as a fish belly and bloated to distortion was draped across her. Suddenly desperate she cried out and tried to push the body off her. Even in the cold it smelled. Its limbs flopped and stroked her damp skin as she tried to roll it away. When it lolled to its side, she saw her own eyes in its face, covered in a white gelatinous film. This was her fault. This was her. Her head was bleeding and water mixed with blood as it dripped into her eyes and mouth. So much pain. It carved out her head and her lungs were filling with dread and water. Sondra began to lift her hand, only to find it was tied to the dead boy’s wrist. The Konti’s will crinkled as her body shriveled in horror. Her face twisted as if to weep, but no sound came out. Her hands went to her face but she could not lift them. Her other wrist was suddenly bound to another boy. This one was in the process of dying, as if being gradually bled to death. He had a plump face and his eyes were darkening slowly as he looked at the drowned boy. Sondra finally lifted her arms, death on each of them, in a wordless petition to the white sky and sobbed. When she unclenched her eyes, red ropes were still tied about her wrists, cutting into the flesh and on either side of her were gray cairns. The winter river rushed before her. She saw her blood and the water from her clothes and hair seeping slowly past her boots towards the tide.

[Caelum]

A storm cloud crawled out of the horizon to swallow the sun. It shrouded the world with the simple expedient of covering Syna's face and all the day must wait for someone brave enough now to pull back Her hood. The white of the sky had bled to the hue of hydrangeas, turning the heavens so blue they could break your soul; but that had been before, in the queer, crawling fleet of dream time. It grew sick, the sky, beneath the shadows of the cloud and drenched the riverbank upon which the Sinspeaker suffered in ill shade. Lightning walked as it had the day he fell, clapping hands of thunder at the frantic explosion of a flock of gulls; and he broke the waters with a meteor fist, steam and foxlight flaring. Syna's light burned to blood beneath the swell of black clouds, diffusing against the distant skyline until it shifted and reshaped to the construct of what buildings had lined the canals of Black Rock near a decade gone. The elysium existence which had ascended him beyond earthly tribulations of pain and hunger, cold and loneliness shattered beneath the buffet of the winds to swirl away like so much dust half the naked distance between hell and heaven's ceiling. Water chopped and he flailed, but unlike the first time this had happened -- unlike the only time it had actually happened -- he did not close his eyes and submit to the murderous tug of the tide. This time, this time, he did not want to die. This time he knew Lhex kept tallies. Sand scraped against hands and knees, white foam running with another's blood sliding past him while he swam and then crawled. No confusion clouded his mind, no bafflement this time to dull his agony and spare him a time yet from the blows of realization. These were all, to the last, killing truths that had long done their killing. What sunlight remained without found a home within his flesh, goose-bumped and numbing as it was. Embers burned through the bark of sodden hair, dripping water the color of blood as if trying to rid itself of the pigment. His eyes crawled up, unearthly amber, as his chest heaved and his heart cried within his chest the tears the rest of him did not rightly remember how to produce. Lillis, was his first thought upon focusing on the woman's face. Fair and light, wracked and ruined. He had dug the mass grave for her family the day they met. It was not Lillis, however, and it never was. Even in his dreams, she eluded him. Wraiths walked aplenty, but never her's. This was someone else, someone suffering and bound and when he reached out the opalescent kiss of Rak'keli glinted in the storm glow. He opened his mouth to speak, but sea water chose to choke its way up his throat instead and he coughed it out like sin.

[Sondra]

Sondra lifted her head as smoky black clouds filled the sky. One crackled with a terrible power, light and flame seething within it. The cloud rolled a vortex around molten gold and then vomited its contents into a rising gray sea. Water hissed and turned to vapor where the star shard landed. The bank where she sat had stretched wider and flatter, and a shadow city was slowly raising itself on the opposite shore. Behind the familiar domes and elegant towers the sky was purple fog. She watched the choppy water, the white peaks were its bared teeth as it snarled back at the storming sky. Her dreams were always so small, the scope of this made her marvel. Her pain did not leave, but temporarily cowed under a new fear. What could this herald? The water was violently thrown aside by a man’s arms. He was wrestling for the shore then crawling across the sand. Dazed, Sondra stood and haltingly walked nearer. Her motions were jerky, as if each movement required great persuasion from her mind. Finally she could walk no more, but tottered in the wind. Newly born and goddess gilded, a statue of a man collapsed near her feet. His bare skin was coated with sand, the bits of mica and gold in the grit fading into his luminous body. Curling gracefully from his temples were horns, smooth as glass. Russet and copper misted within the horns before permeating them. His amber eyes lifted to her face looking for something then promptly losing it. That and his breath. It came out in torrents of bracken bile. “Rhysol petch me sideways…” She helped turn him off his back with her booted foot, wary of touching something so unlike her usual dreams. A sharp juxtaposition to the Eth, she was a Konti without grace. Water had turned her pale hair gray save where a gash made it incarnadine. Her wrists were swollen where red rope chafed and squeezed out blood, and her face had been battered. “What are you doing here?” she asked softly. Still marveling that such a creature could find its way to her shores. "This is no place for you."

[Caelum]

"I know." The words came out harsh, fled from a salt raw throat, trying to squeeze themselves out of a language that had nothing to do with this world and into one that might. Air broiled in his lungs and he heaved it out with another mouthful of bracken, hands and knees in the sand that whispered as the wind died down. The heel of his palm rubbed over his mouth, onto a cheek slick with sea damp and maybe too the amniotic fluid of the Ukalas. "I know," he said again, more stable this time, and felt the protest of long bones and worn muscle as he sat up and sank back on his heels, hardly conscious of his nudity. Matchstick lashes were crusted with salt and star dust as they flickered and he peered up at the woman, bidding his heart be still. He had known worse than this. The daughters of Avalis had riddled his life, nieces of sweet Rak'keli who had taken pity on his soul's skin. A Konti had dragged him from the waters when he had actually spilled out of Syna's grace, and another Konti had whispered words to him of his deaths years later. Now this one, battered and suffering in a different kind of beauty, supported with her first words to him what he had known for a very long time. He did not belong here. No matter how far he roamed, no matter how hard he rode and to what half forgotten home he sought, he did not belong. He was outlander, exile. "Here," he murmured, reaching for her hands. "Here. You're injured, lady. I can heal you." He had to believe he could heal. Had to, had to believe. It was the only thing that had kept faith in him.

[Sondra]

From his groveling position, the creature reached upward. Conviction and steely need radiated from his hands. The demand in his eyes was painful as sunlight. The Konti faltered, reeling from such a blatant insistence to mend her. Not since Avari had anyone pressed aid on her with such force. “Oh, bright thing,” her voice was dear and soft as she addressed him. Sondra’s eyes drank him entirely. He felt like the ache and longing that shadowed all beauty. She wanted to touch his face, but was afraid that it would dim like a gardenia under her pale fingers. “Some things are only whole when broken,” an implacable verdict, warmly spoken. Leaning forward, she put her battered face and arms within reach. “If it please you…” The Konti’s natural voice was sandy and worn, a strange vessel for such childlike words. “…Mend the symptoms but not the cause.” Her expression was all silvers and gray, from her smile to her eyes. It recalled heavy winter seas, blue stones, and herring scales. “I think only the gods can mend that, anyway.” Her eyes closed, as she was embarrassed by their sudden permeability.

[Caelum]

It was by some scattered blessing of dreaming that his hands were warm when they touched her, when they slid with exquisite care up bruised cheeks to cradle her face. The sea might have chilled him down to the bone -- or maybe that was the fall -- but his hands were warm when he touched her, when she closed her eyes against him yet perhaps more so against herself. "The gods cannot mend themselves," the words were whispered, an apology caught in them somewhere. A deeper warmth emanated from the worn flesh of his palms, permeating her battered skin and chasing out the pain like a candle chased out the dark. The blossoms of bruises riddling her spread in more vibrant shades of wildflowers until withering out. It was more grace than Rak'keli had granted him in the waking world, and more too Syna as with the gradual disappearance of Sondra's physical ills shredded and dispersed the storm clouds too. Smears of blood turned to mist and the mist was absorbed by the suddenly sun drenched air. The world surrounding them softened, it seemed, in its entirety. Maybe all it had needed was a little bit of belief.

[Sondra]

His hands were soothing as earth warmed by summer light and did no harm. No sin rose to her thoughts and the dread of any was washed away. In this impossible space touch could be pure. Part of her wanted to hold one hand where it was, as if prolonged touch could take away the other wounds that had winnowed into her thoughts. Sondra’s eyes opened slowly, realizing they were speaking on perpendicular planes, so close in meaning but never intersecting. Even with this nearness, perhaps they still lived and dreamed alone. But it was beautiful where they were meeting. The sky had sighed warmly, breathing vapors of light over them in violet and apricot. For a moment, nothing had weight and she swore they were as permeable as the rosy air. Then the red cords cinched. They sprung anew around her wrists, and she pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, hiding the wince of pain. She further obscured her expression by daring to embrace him, shading her features with his body. As she touched him she could not shake the feeling she was still bloody and dripping mire on white satin. When she let go, her posture was a child’s uncertainty, embarrassed by the quickening of need. And he was even more resplendent now, dressed in carmine, vermilion and gold, wrapping him like a lord of Eyktol. When she spoke her thanks it was in Kontinese. Her throat longed for its mother tongue in the midst of all the unknown. “This is not a place I know,” she added in blunt common, “If I stay too long, I am afraid it might change.” She looked behind her nervously, as if the landscape of her usual dreams would open its jagged maw on the horizon.

[Caelum]

Strong arms caught her when she came to him with an embrace, a spill of sunset satin abruptly robing him as if fled from the garments of the sun.' He paid them no heed. This was dream and in the tumultuous string of them recently had, he had learned they were to the last beyond his control. Scents that caused him to think of spring surrounded her, wafting from the spill of her hair and the tangle of her arms she had him in. Salt and splash. Green and copper. He felt her wince more than he saw it, as if it happened in his stomach and his skeleton wanted to object. No. Not her. Not here. Not now. He had harbored many objections over the years. These waited unread while he followed the trailing abomination of the cords cinching her wrists to their spectral lines. They created the weave of a phantom's veil, to his imaginings, a wind labyrinth of too many sins. Sins against man, against gods, against self. She let go and his arms loosened in an instant, unwilling to hold when unwanted; but he remained on his knees, sitting on his heels, as the tide frothed at his toes and the iodized bleed of his horns attempted to fade. "It would be worse if you left," he decided with words framing the sounds and slants of Kontinese. He spoke it with greater fluency in dreaming than he ever had in the waking world. But then the same could be said for the language of the stars.

[Sondra]

The sound of Sondra’s mother tongue eased the deepening lines on her face. “How rare and wonderful: a man who speaks the words of women.” Her smile was quick and sweet, despite the following words it framed, “Imperfectly, of course.” She was still looking behind her, suspicious of the halcyon of calm and the kneeling shard of divinity before her. “Stay? I’ve only been asked that once before.” Sondra finally made her eyes settle on Caelum. “If I remain, I may learn more of you than just. Ivak allows me to feel, Avalis to see and my gift to know. Here, I am close to the spring.” With a long intake of breath, she tried to conjure peace, but instead was dragged over truths. “I have not requested anything of the lily in eras. There was no one whose past I felt clean enough to search. She still blooms when she wills.” Looking at Caelum, she poured more of her doubts at his feet. “Marks wasted. But, son of the dawn, do men owe me their secrets just because I can reach them?” Her arms involuntarily raised to cover her heart. She wrapped her fingers around the red threads on her wrist, trying to soothe them with cool hands. “I have abandoned much of the awareness offered me.” Suddenly weak, her arms dropped. Using what little strength was left in her limbs, she extended a hand to Caelum. “Will you walk with me, son of the dawn? And risk being known?”

[Caelum]

"The spring?" He echoed her and the words were grabbed and chopped by the rustling waves. The corners of his mouth twitched with her quip regarding the language of women being imperfect in the mouth of man. The mother tongue was one of doorways where as the father words were utilized for the framing of walls. "Do you mean the Ukalas? Is this then the Chavena, lady? Son of.." He trailed off, words fading. They dried into dust in his throat, but he took her hand, using more of his own momentum than her offered strength to climb to his feet. His legs did not want to hold him, knees feeling watery as he caught his palms against them and for a little while but breathed. In and out. In and out again. "I will walk with you," he said, gulping in a breath and shoving up to his full height. Bare toes curled into the sand and he swiped a drying slick of hair from his brow. A troubled study was given her wrists anew as he remembered how to walk, the first steps awkward as grace hunted him up again. "Men may not owe you their secrets," he gave her the only answer he had once a few steps from the sea and the sky above above it were behind them. "But it may be you owe a duty for having that ability. The gods do not grant gifts so that they can be wasted. Though some --" And he looked at her, taking in her profile and finding it beautiful. It settled heavy in his chest, but warm. He did not want to sound harsh. "Some of the gods gifts are more curse. Aren't they?"