Flashback "Thank you," and his voice was quivering.

[Johanne]

Flashback. 18th Fall, 507AV.

Johanne had been watching the Zeltivan cargo ship inch its way closer and closer to Denval for the last while. She always thought it was ironic that they'd sailed so far, from one end of the continent to the other, only to be delayed by the shallow and treacherous waters around Denval. She swung her legs as she sat on the edge of the passenger quay, watching the way her shadow flickered over the murky waters, giving glimpses of rocks, pebbles and debris around the base of the structure. She smiled slightly when the wind picked up, residual warmth from summer caressing along her flesh. Glancing down, she picked at a cuticle with her other fingers, tearing away the dead and useless skin, only to hiss slightly when blood welled to the surface. Cursing, she looked up. The ship had not inched any closer, approaching the shore as slowly as Time. It was time for the shallow Denvalian boats to ferry the Zeltivans in to their isolated town. Johanne sighed again.

At seventeen years of age, Johanne felt malaise seep into her bones and become more potent with each inhalation of breath. She was young and filled with melancholy, her long and gangly limbs creaking with discontent. This town was small, suffocatingly so. She saw too many familiar faces, the same cobblestone streets, the same drunkards stumbling home each evening. She knew every nook and cranny of the bars and temples around the place, even knew the piles of rubble intimately, those closest to the town. How she longed to scramble over the debris, cutting her knees and scraping her palms, before jumping and setting flight to Wind Reach, or the mystical Sylira. Everything seemed so far away and so desirable, and everything that she had within grasp, she wanted less and less with each passing moment.

Save the Quay. She loved the quay, the way she was so close to the water and thus, the rest of the world. It was here she came when she felt she was inches away from stabbing her mother in the eyeball or somewhere equally unpleasant. It was here she came when her brothers were too loud, or her father's silence, deafening. She would watch the rare ships bring stories, tales, accents and goods to her home, her home that she loathed and loved more than anything. She would watch the Denvali ferries bring in strange men with tans and tattoos, tattoos she admired and would seek to emulate on those Denvalians brave enough to let ink stain their flesh. Here, at the Passenger Quay, with its rare hustle and plentiful silence, Johanne could watch the reflective water and try to see inside herself, tried to make her desires, wants and needs as transparent as the sea. She didn't know what she wanted, and that was half the pain of existing.

Syna's light was blocked by the everpresent grey clouds around this time of year, the world seeming muted and gray. Everything was dull, and seemed trapped within a cage of silence, as the ferry reached the cargo ship and began to hoist the Zeltivans onto the boat. They'd return later for the cargo, but right now what was most important was the pressing need for beer, hot food and tales of a world that had forgotten them for so long. If Johanne squinted, she could just see the small shapes jumping into the ferry, watching the Denvali ship bob in the water. She waited. Not long now, until she saw strangers from a world that she was beginning to want to see.

(Perhaps somewhere inside her, Johanne knew that she would one day leave. But not today. She did not know it today.)

The slightest light change, a flash of shadow across Johanne's face alerted her to the presence of someone else. Without looking up, but clutching her personal belongings closer to her, Johanne watched her feet dangle over the stone quay.

"Hello, Jo," she said, quietly.

"Hey, Jo," chirped Jolan, and with a flop, the young Kelvic sat beside her. The two had the barest of knowledge of each other, Johanne knowing Jolan from seeing him about the quay so often. Their comaraderie sprouted mainly from their shared beginnings, both being known as Jo. Jo looked up, saw the sprightly young Kelvic, and smiled. While Johanne was so discontent with her world, Jolan revelled in his small little domain, where he begged and busked and stole happily. Perhaps, though, it was comforting to Jolan to know he could fly away at any one time. Johanne had not the luxury of wings.

The two watched the ferry come closer and closer quietly for a while, until they could see the burly men sitting side by side in the little boat. Their features became more and more pronounced, until Jolan jumped up, just as suddenly as he had arrived.

"Business as usual?" Johanne smiled, watching the young boy almost quiver with glee, watching his fingers itch.
"Of course! See you, Jo," and he ran down the quay as quickly as he had come, ready to do some honest thieving. There was a boy who knew how to live, whilst Johanne felt suffocated in the routines of mundane existence.

When Johanne turned away from the last flicker of Jolan disappearing, she saw that the Zeltivans had just arrived at the quay, and were alighting the rickety ferry.

[Johanne]

The sailors trooped tiredly up the steps and along the quay. Johanne could smell them from where she sat, their pungent scent wafting down towards her, the nearer her they came. They'd been too long at sea, near a season as they sailed the rough seas from the university town to Denval, so quiet in comparison, she'd heard. Already she heard the clamour of young voices and older murmurs of restraint at the end of the quay, as children screeched in excitement, knowing stories of strange lands were not far away. Even when Johanne had been young, even though she had loved stories as passionately, even more so, as the other children, she had never been allowed to screech, but rather to stand quietly and wait for a sailor to speak to her first. Her mother wasn't here though, to lecture her about what was and wasn't polite, so Johanne had no qualms about staring openly.

They smelled of sea salt and sweat, and looked as if they were crusted in both. They were all men, burly, their muscles straining against their raggedy shirts that may have once been white, but were now a grungy colour. They were tanned by the unrelenting sun, and their fingers, Johanne could see as they moved closer, were calloused and blistered, crusted over at the tips from hard work and hoisting ropes. Sailing looked extremely difficult to Johanne, who had never been on a boat. She had simply seen the men who survived journeys, and judged the difficulty from men. They barely looked at Johanne, who still sat on the edge of the quay with her feet dangling over the edge. Their eyes were fixed on solid ground, where the children gathered and their mothers smiled nervously, and beer lay at the end of the dock, housed in The Stranger's Welcome.

Her eyes danced over the men who trudged past her, looking at their height, their breadth, their weight. She noted the colour of their eyes, the texture of their hair, if they were missing a limb. But beyond that, she looked at the way their eyes stayed either downcast or fixated on the bar ahead of them. She saw the way their shoulders sagged with pure exhaustion, how they picked at scabs on their wrists absentmindedly. She watched and saw that they were tired, and a long way from home, and that they would treat the incessant questions from the Denvali folk as a small display of humanity - humanity that they had missed for nigh on a season, being trapped in a ship with the same twenty men.

And then she saw the man who walked alone at the back, who walked with his back straight and his eyes bright.

[Johanne]

Johanne could not take her eyes from the young man who walked a little apart from the rest. He was tall, lanky, thin - not the same build as the other sailors at all. He wasn't tanned, in fact he was rather pale, and seemed to have a hint of the night about him. His eyes were dark black, as dark as his hair, a shocking mess above impeccably sharp cheekbones and full lips. The man was, simply put, very good looking, and very out of place.

But what was the most striking were the scars that ran over his skin.

Johanne could tell they were scars, raised bridges of healed flesh dusted all over his body, from what she could see. They ran from his wrists, entwining up his forearms, over his shoulders and biceps, disappearing beneath his shirt, only to reemerge up his neck and onto his cheeks. They were more than just scars, though. They were a work of art. The man had, for whatever reason, for whatever sick and twisted reason that Johanne could not fathom, carved patterns and shapes into his delicate skin, slicing into himself to draw images of ships, flowers, constellations and maps with a knife. Johanne was no stranger to pain and art, having learnt tattooing for four years, but to take a knife to the flesh humanity worked so hard to preserve seemed odd, unfathomable to her. Her eyes were wide as she stared at the man, an oddity amongst the self-preserving population of Denval. He had even torn open his cheeks, to carve an image of Leth chasing Syna.

And when she raised her eyes from his cheeks, she saw that he was staring right back at her, smirking as he traipsed past with the rest of the crew. She blushed, her hands flying to her mouth as if to hide herself from sight, but he did not look offended by her staring in the least. As the last of his crew staggered into the Stranger's Welcome, he winked at Johanne, looking at her over his shoulder with all the intensity of someone who knows they have captured something, before being the last to disappear into the inn.

She sat, shocked, still, in the silence, with beautiful scars carved into flesh stained upon her memory.

[Johanne]

The door had closed behind the young man, and Johanne was left alone on the quay once more. Jolan had disappeared, perhaps running off with one of the men's moneybags, counting his coppers with glee. The children were ushered off home, while the Denvali men who worked at the docks lumbered into the inn after the newly arrived Zeltivans, to hear stories and news from the outside world. There was an everpressing curiosity amongst the Denval peoples, even with their militaristic ways and strict training, and this led to constant movement, always wanting to know who these strangers were and what their stories were. Johanne would normally have been inside with them, memorising their words, the lilts of their accents, racing home after they had stumbled off to bed to write down her reminiscences. She knew that had it been any other day, any other batch of arrivals, she would have been beside the men in the inn, listening.

But this man was an anomaly, and Johanne was struck still by the strangeness that seeped into her skeleton.

He had seemed so comfortable in himself, that was the strange thing. She knew there was such a thing as religious self-mutilation, but the man, the pale, dark haired man had seemed too laid back to be concerned with the religiosity those sorts of gods required. You could see in his swagger, in the way his shoulders leaned back and his grin casually lazed on his expression, that the man was self assured and content within his existence. And yet he had taken a blade to himself, and carved his skin asunder.

Unless he had not scarred himself. Johanne shuddered, imagining the kind of torture a man would undergo to have his entire body scarified. But if it were torture, why would the madman who had taken a blade to him have created such neatly defined art? Johanne knew art, and she knew how to place it on one's body. As a tattoo artist, she had to know how. This man had been calm throughout the process. From the brief glance she'd had over his milkwhite skin, she could see that the lines were smooth, clean and purposeful. He had definitely taken the blade to himself. Johanne could not understand why.

She stood suddenly, before she could think about it. At seventeen, Johanne could be impetuous, strong, decisive one moment, and fragile and craving solitude the next. Johanne was scared by this man. She could not isolate why. She felt some stirring beneath her ribcage, an itching in her palms that wasn't just longing for a story. She didn't know what this man meant or who he was, but in a brief moment of inevitability, Johanne knew that this man was someone significant to her. She could not deny that she was drawn to him. She could not deny that in seeing those scars, she wanted to run away, and yet stay and trace them with her fingertips. She had so many desires in that one moment, so many wants and needs driven in her young mind, so confused by who she was and who she wanted to be, that there was only one thing to do.

She stopped thinking, and walked with purpose to the inn. Without thinking, she opened the door and ducked inside the bustling inn filled with chatter, flowing drink, and somewhere a man who was alluringly strange.

[Johanne]

Johanne was faced with the haze of smoke and low candlelight upon entering the Stranger's Welcome. The room smelt of sweat, tobacco and the roast meat that was being passed around to the sailors that had just arrived. It was raucous inside the tavern, with men cheering and toasting and threatening in every corner. Johanne could not see a woman at all within the building. Thin and lanky, with no weapons, Johanne felt very out of place in this darkened inn, and very alone.

She walked cautiously up to the bar, trying to observe each and every patron without them knowing that she was ogling the clientele within. Two drunken men heaved themselves up and stumbled in front of Johanne on their way to the lavatory, knocking Johanne to the side. She shrieked, about to fall, arms waving for something solid to grab onto. She was about to hit the floor when an arm looped around her waist, and she was tugged into the lap of some stranger. She struggled, attempting to get away, before she realised two things.

First, the man holding her smelt very clean. Second, she could feel the raised ridges of scars on his palms against her forearms.

Johanne turned her head, slowly, as the arms around her loosened their wiry grip. There, holding her close, with his thumbs caressing her youthful, unmarred skin, was the tempting sailor she had followed on a whim. His gleaming black eyes promised secrets, and she stopped struggling against him. He held her like a lover, now, and she trusted him like a babe.

“What is your name?” Johanne asked, breaking the silence between the two. Beyond them, the sailors laughed and gambled. Johanne knew that they would be telling valuable stories at that very moment, stories that her paper in her bedroom wept for, but the smirk of this sailor’s lips held her heart still.

“Joseph,” he said, and his voice soothed her like warm milk in winter. She blushed, without knowing why. Another Jo.

“I am Johanne.”

“Jo, then. Like me.”

“Yes, like you.”

[Johanne]

“You were looking at me earlier,” Joseph said, quietly. His fingers traced shapes and strange words on her wrists, and she found herself wishing that she were Eyris in this moment. That she could know what these Zeltivans thought and said and spoke of back in their home. This Joseph, as lithe and dark-haired and soul-eyed as he was, was someone she wished to impress. She felt her heart pound as their pupils connected and he looked deep inside her.

“Yes, I was.” She acknowlegeded the truth quietly.

“May I ask why?”

“You may,” said Johanne, gaining courage as she became immune to the paralysing effect of a handsome man’s skin. “But only if you tell me why you, too, were gazing at me.” His grin was like a jackal’s; wide and toothy, showing off the animalistic potential deep within his jaws.

“Very well, Jo.” He paused, tickling her palm for a moment. She squirmed ever so slightly, but tried to keep her gaze on Joseph solemn, so that he must tell the truth.

“You’re beautiful.”

Her heart stopped. Her eyes widened. She was like a teenage girl being courted by her first lover. She was a teenage girl being courted. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re beautiful.” He said it so nonchalantly, that Johanne half-thought he was taking the easy way out. But his eyes, through which people could never lie, unless they were wizards or demons or gods, were truthful and hollow and pulled Johanne in. “Your skin is milky. Your eyes are honest. You hold yourself so weakly but you have pulled me in like a comet. Your lips are peach-like, your cheeks hold roses within them. I, Joseph, say that you, Johanne, are beautiful.”

Johanne looked down at her palms, looked at his long fingers (they, too, milk-white) caressing her young skin. She thought of the times her mother had insisted she put on weight, gain curves. She thought of the times her father has looked right through her. The times her brothers had called her weak, the children her age calling her spidery. She thought of the times she had hated her eyes and her hair, dull and mousy. She thought of this all and then she thought of the dark haired stranger who thought her beautiful. She looked up, away from her own skin, and into his eyes. She smiled. She grinned. She laughed.

And then he kissed her.

[Johanne]

Johanne’s eyes fluttered closed immediately, and her hands tightened on his thin wrists. His lips moved against hers with a fiery passion, pressing against her, seeking entrance to her mouth. Joseph’s arms tightened, bringing Johanne flush against his body. She could feel his skin warm against hers, feel his heart beat fast against her back. Her lips remained still while he kissed her: this was the first time Johanne had ever been kissed.

Joseph’s hands slid up her arms until they cupped her cheeks. His kiss slowed, losing fervour but not passion. His lips moved more gently against Johanne’s, and he sighed contentedly against her lips. Johanne awkwardly moved her hands to grip Joseph’s shoulders, her whole body feeling stiff, locked, unsure of what to do. When she felt the tip of his tongue press against her lips, Johanne jolted backwards, breaking the kiss. Her cheeks were flushed red, her entire body felt aflame and she could not look Joseph in the eye.

“Johanne?” Joseph’s voice came softly. She chanced a glance around the Tavern: everyone was too concerned with the other sailors, raucously telling stories of Zeltiva and the treacherous seas they had crossed, being ploughed with ale and requests for more stories. No one spared Johanne another glance. “Are you alright?”

Johanne swallowed, awkwardly, managing somehow to nod and shake at the same time. She kept her eyes on her hands, still gripping Joseph’s shoulders a little too tightly. “I…” She slowly raised her eyes, glancing over the Syna on his right cheek and Leth on his left, until she met his gaze. His eyes were dark, and inscrutable, but the set of his lips were kind.

“I’ve never done this before.” Joseph smiled, and raised a hand to stroke her cheek. She shivered. His finger was calloused, and it sent a shudder down her spine. “I’ve never been kissed.”

Joseph’s eyes suddenly seemed to shut off, pulling themselves away from her. She no longer felt intimately connected to him. It was as though Joseph had decided that Johanne was no longer someone he could fully give himself to.

“Then I have not the right to take it from you.” His hands pushed at her forearms, lightly, and Johanne, without thinking, stood up and moved off of his lap. She stood awkwardly before him, looking for the warm and lively sailor she had stared at on the docks. Instead, before her, sat a scarred myth, someone strange and distant.

“You’re still beautiful, Johanne.” And he looked back down at his entwined hands, as though signalling the conversation was at an end.

Johanne stepped back, feeling suddenly awkward. She could still feel his lips on hers, could still feel the rush of being wanted, of being desirable, and longed to feel them again. But she was shy, and young, and above all inexperienced. She did not know how to want someone or be wanted. Without saying a word, she turned, after gazing once more at his scarred cheeks, and took her steps towards the door.

[Johanne]

But before she had taken three steps she thought of something she had yet to say. She turned back, only to see Joseph’s eyes fixed on her form.

“I asked you why you looked at me, on the docks,” she began, quietly, her voice a little shaky. “And I said I would tell you if you told me. You did. And then you kissed me, in a way I did not and will not ever regret.” Joseph opened his mouth and leaned forward, as though to speak. Johanne hurried on, though, cutting him off, before she lost her nerve. “I never told you, though, why I watched you.”

“It’s because of your scars.” Joseph’s expression suddenly became guarded. Johanne hurried on before he could assume the worst of her. “I work in a tattoo parlour. I see men come in every day and look to have something permanently etched into their skin. I see men, drunk, blemishing themselves with images that mean nothing to their sober hearts. But your scars…”

“I have never seen anything more beautiful, Joseph.”

Joseph’s body seemed to move ever so fast, hoisting himself off his chair and moving with such purpose to Johanne. In two strides, he had reached Johanne and grabbed her cheeks and pulled her mouth to his. And this time, Johanne responded, her lips moving passionately against his, her tongue dancing a complex dance of want and lust and need and desire and thanks with his. The kiss seemed to go on forever and her body was searing, flush against his. And only when neither of them could breathe for fear of melting into the other’s skin did the kiss end, and their bodies separate. Joseph rested his forehead against hers, looking deep into her eyes.

“Thank you,” he said, and his voice was quivering.

Johanne turned and ran from the Tavern, images of Syna and Leth as scars assailing her mind.

[Johanne]

Johanne did not stop until she reached her small, rickety home on the outskirts of Denval: the poorer areas, where the rubble encroached on the housing until it felt as though history was trying to swallow them whole. Her heart was pounding and she was short of breath, but the seventeen-year-old girl did not stop once. She was torn between elation and confusion. Still she could feel his lips against hers, his fingers caressing her cheek, his smile when he called her beautiful. She replayed the moment over and over in her mind, watching his desire grow until he took her lips for his. That is what caused her joy; those memories were what made her want to run faster and faster until she took off and flew with the birds of Eywaat.

When she reached her house, she quickly unlatched the door and flew inside, hiding from her mother and family, sprinting straight to her small bedroom at the back of the house. It was covered in paper and ink bottles, scrunched up pulp drying on the desk, strips of leather she had earned with her savings dangling from the windowpane. She collapsed onto her small and lumpy pallet, and sighed. He had made her feel the world but not the world was gone. She was never to feel the sensations that he had made her feel, never again to feel the shivers that Joseph, the sailor from Zeltiva had inspired. Johanne fell more and more in love with the man (a fanciful imagining from a young girl who had just been wanted outright by a man for the first time) the more she thought on him. He was the future, and she was the past, and together they would merge and feel, see, everything.

But he would be gone: he was a Stranger, welcomed by the inn at the quay and her lips, warm ale and even warmer foods. Soon he would board his cargo ship again and fly away from her, sail back to the busier and more glamorous cities. Johanne the plain would be forgotten: the beauty he imagined her to have would fade from his memory and become a twisted phantom for him to laugh on. She lay back and watched the afternoon sunlight play on the roof, glinting onto the far wall, off her tools for bookbinding.

The sun hit metal, and the flash of light glanced across her eyes. There, on the wall, was the stiletto knife she had taken from her brother’s room in curiosity. There was a way that Joseph would belong to her forever.

[Johanne]

Johanne raised herself from the pallet slowly. She moved automatically, her eyes fixed on the knife hanging beside her other equipment. It was though she were watching herself move, rather than being the one moving. The afternoon light, a dark golden glow, set everything in the room aflame, and Johanne’s vision began to melt until all that remained was the knife. She moved until she stood before it. She reached out to take the knife from the wall. And then hesitated.

She looked down at her milky white skin, seeing the way her flesh was knit together to make a beautifully functioning human. All of her joints worked, her nose was not broken, her lips not cracked. Nothing inside of her was less than whole and less than beautiful. But with a knife, an innocuous piece of metal mined from the ground and imagined into something destructive, Johanne could create something within her that was never meant to be a part of her soul.

She picked up the knife. Its grip felt worn and smooth to her touch, as though it belonged in her hand, with her fingers curled around it. She watched the light glisten off the tip, before moving in slowly and looking at the sharpness. The blade was dangerous, so thin it seemed to disappear into air and yet could slice through the most precious fabric of skin. It was, Johanne surmised, like Joseph: strangely and threateningly beautiful.

Johanne looked over her forearm, her smooth and unblemished forearm, and tried to pick a spot. She wanted to avoid veins, as she would have to cut deep enough to make a lasting scar, and yet not deep enough to die. She needed space to work with, enough to make a lasting impression, not just some tiny little nick that she herself would forget about. She looked at the underside of her forearm: a smooth expanse of pale skin that was wide enough to carve an image. She took the knife and moved the tip so that it was on an angle to her skin. She took a deep breath. She let art and Joseph’s eyes fill her, and began to overflow with beauty.

She moved the knife carefully, slowly, not wanting to make a mistake. She exuded a deep pressure, slicing the layers of skin open and discovering the blood wells inside of her. If humans could drink blood, she thought, and be sustained, then we would never die of thirst. She could barely feel the pain, just a deep and steady burn: like what her clients at the parlour told her a tattoo felt like. She treated the knife just like an inking: move it slowly and on an angle. She paused and redid sections that looked too shallow, or too weak. She made sure every line was bold and deep and full of the honesty in her heart. And all through the curvatures and the straight lines she etched deeply into her skin, she thought of the fire in her arm as the fire of her lips when Joseph kissed her. Her self-mutilation turned into an act of reflection.

And when she pulled the knife, glistening with droplets of blood, from the depths of her forearm, she was left with a single pattern, a single art-work. Leth chasing Syna.

Joseph lived inside her flesh now.

FINIS.