High and Dry (Closed)

[Sondra]

Sondra fit her hand in Caelum’s. While it may have meant nothing to him, the sensation was a soft bliss. She prayed her contentment did not show, betraying her for the hungry creature she was. Her mother had always cautioned her against showing need, it was vulgar as baring a thigh and would only draw exploitation. She was happy to say nothing, letting the illusion set. When Caelum spoke of a curse, Sondra’s wan smile was sad, and her head did not turn from the way before them. “Yes,” she answered, continuing in Kontinese, “They can be very difficult. I do not always know whether the gift is a forge’s fire, meant to make me strong, or an unstoppable decay meant to punish me.” Her gait slowed, pulling him back as she was too small to keep an easy pace with him. As her hand stayed in his, he began to feel old guilts uncoiling. They were worms of soot and fire, dragging their rough bellies across his chest before squeezing his heart. While the memory was kept from his eyes, the regret swelled. And in the midst of it was the shame of being known. Most damning of all, his verdict against himself was revealed, stripped of pity and rationalization. The Konti looked at him, her breath hitching as the pain and memory passed through her. It was a gentler passage in this dream, but the feeling was doubled as she lingered near this golden creature’s chavi. “See.” Her fingers loosed, willing to release him should he choose. “The gods are not the only ones we can accuse of cruel passivity.”

[Caelum]

Worms of guilt that had been buried in the ashes of Ravok opened their mouths upon his heart, burrowing in until his lungs felt filled with lead in reflection of the new dulling sky. He felt her fingers loosen even as his feet slowed, his ability to go on ceased. Some steps back, between left foot then right before the other, the silk clothing him had melted into what was to him more familiar -- the weathered riding leathers and linen of his day to day attire. Dark and worn. Ill fitted by night with Leth held him down, always holding him down. His eyes closed and his head tilted back, thick vines of hair rumpling against the collar of his jacket and a breath of the wind sucked in deep as if Zulrav might bother to still his heart. Tick tock. Tick. Tick. It was within the walls of a different dream on a different night -- walls that waned and waxed like the moon hollow in the sky -- that the pocket watch had swung, dangled from the hand of a dead man. Yet he could hear it now, too, as if the sound could carry and reverberate against the ceaseless flow of Tanroa's water and stain the whole of his chavi, all of his history steadily going to rust. Maybe then it was time frothing at these shores. He failed to pull his hand from the seer's, from the Azenth's and his only companion unfanged in an increasingly traumatic crawl of dreams. "Cora," he said. The name was weighed with mortal power the way his mouth shaped it. He opened his eyes, black behind all of the gold, back in the place where Syna had left him to the dark. "Her name was Cora." And this was the first time he had said it since screaming it in an ash scattered room.

[Sondra]

“Cora,” the Konti repeated, savoring the marine sound of the word. “A name as brief and lovely as her.” Sondra’s heels were sinking into the sand of the seemingly endless shore. “I don’t ask healing or release from the gods, because I don’t deserve it. And yet I am here, and creatures like Cora are gone in a fit of ash and fire.” She idly touched the mark of Ivak creeping above her collar, a blue tongue of flame, remembering even flames could not destroy her. “There must be a reason, or the world is all madness.” Her expression faintly recoiled when she looked at Caelum and found mortality had crept in. He bore signs of living on the same hard earth as the rest of them and being buffeted by the same mercurial winds. Her mouth was a smirk, but her eyes were pity. “You too.” She reached high to pull his hair from his collar, “I thought you might be an exception, son of dawn.” An exception to troubles, to sins, to sucking wounds. Despite the liquid grief in her glance, she laughed. It was a childish sound, almost silly. “You’re hideous now. How can you live with yourself?” Her laughter dimmed to a chuckle, made all the more dissonant by a slippery tear. “The world will just have to forgive you.” The strength of tides rose into her words, until they were thick as the sea, engulfing all the meanings each syllable could give. “I would. Forgive you. But then it is easier for sinners to forgive. We know how much it is worth.”

[Caelum]

"Why did you burn the translation?" The words were a mutter, a question repeated but not posed to the woman standing before him in this purgatorial dreamscape. The brush of her fingertips against his neck, his jaw when she pulled his hair free of his collar was warm, was contact and it stilled the air in his lungs he had put there while trying to inhale some leftover divinity. He ought to have known better. "Why did I burn the translation? That was the question," he explained while falling right out of the mother tongue, the language of women he could only borrow rather than own. It was not his anyway. None of them were but the one he was incapable of using. For the space between heartbeats, his words threatened to drop through the floor of them both; but then they went on as he caught her wrist, his grip gentle, the pad of his thumb sliding down the shadow of her vein and slipping across the red cord. "But there were rising suns," he whispered leaning in, hideous. "And no excuses. None. You would grant me absolution, lady? You are more forgiving than the gods if you would. The world must forgive nothing, or is it that the world must forget nothing? Here, listen --" A finger hooked into the red cord cinched about her wrist, giving it a tug as he lifted her hand so as to press a drenched kiss against the flesh over which it lied. With the first brush of his lips her heartbeat amplified like the strike of a war drum. It was the ensuing silence he wanted her to hear, swelling and bottomless and empty of sin. It was life and creation and thus the sound of redemption trapped behind the teeth of even the most unforgiving god. "You shouldn't always have to ask."

[Sondra]

Sondra tried to follow Caelum’s explanations, only to let the words give way to the feeling. She listened to the notes of guilt and desperation, all the want in the world, radiating out of him. And then he kissed the thread and the scarred skin beneath it, as if trying to bless the portion of her she found most monstrous. It was quiet then. The cacophony lowering and she could not hear the voices of anguish and hate, the perpetual hum beneath her thoughts as all the sins crashed against one another. She was listening for him and he gave her quietude. A thing found only in dreams, but never hers. No longer afraid to touch, she gave up the rigidness of her frame and leaned in, her head resting against the ponderous sound of his heart. Time passed strangely and she didn’t know how long this silent communion lasted. Perhaps neither of them breathed, so even the thrum of blood dissipated into peaceful nothingness. “I am grateful for you, son of dawn. You are a gift of the gods as much as any of these. And I will thank them for the crumbs from their table.” When she withdrew, they were no longer on the shore, but in the Sea of Grass. A white oak with gold leaves grew over them, majestic as an Alvina of Caihya. “You may not belong here, but it does not mean you are not wanted here.” She looked around, finally understanding the setting. The Konti marveled, having never been to Cyphrus in her life. The openness made her feel both reverent and hollow.

[Caelum]

"I wish I had to no sins for you to see," he confessed with the blur of the wind that erased the sand and shore to replace it with raival oak leaves and the endlesss rush of the Grasslands. When she withdrew, he let his hand slide down her arm, tangling their fingers and ignorant of their already entwined fates. His eyes crinkled, wincing against the sun that though it gilded him felt blinding. He dropped his chin to the side, watching the wind flip and flicker against the tallest stalks. It may have been quiet, a fierce peace, when tangled in his arms; but beneath it waited the drum of guilt and want, old wounds never healed and he -- and they -- left to walk with them. He found himself watching her, the wonder that was wasted in him work miracle on her countenance. An idea of a smile reminded itself to his face. "She pulls me north," he said while the shadow of the tree reached for their toes. A flicker of his eyes up, toward the radiant sun signatured whom he meant. "She pushed me out. Have you a place too then? Beyond the Chavena? Or are the reflection of," words dried, the Lacun mark on his chest stung. "Others?"

[Sondra]

Sondra followed Caelum’s glance, but she could not bear Syna’s painful radiance. He said she pushed him out. The word pealed in her ears, it was important, but she couldn’t lay a hold of it. It drifted to the bottom of her thoughts, where it nestled gleaming amongst the silt and stones. Was she a reflection? More than anything. Sondra’s halos would be mirrors, where faces would drown hypocrites and rise sinners. But, no, he meant the eldritch semblance of life, the deceitful face of water or a shadow on the grass. “You live still?” Her voice quickened as if exposed to light. “I am accustomed to echoes. I knew you were not of my making.” Her voice was hoarse as it dipped into a bittersweet observation, “You feel too warm to be one of my shades.” Remembering his first question she answered, “I have no place, but I am in the world.” Her answer slipped into a shameful admission, “And it is in me. I am a reflection of it. All that I have seen has become a part of me. Joy and cruelty are equally true things, but I see more of the latter.” Smiling wanly she continued her confession, “Pale as I am it has colored me. Blood in water. Or perhaps it has revealed what was already there.” Hungry for Caelum’s northern world, she began to part the high grasses. Her first steps were a child’s restlessness, a craving for unbound spaces. She might have run for the sheer illusion of feeling free. Could she out pace the voices, could she fling off the grinding sounds of the universe? A new string came to her grasp. It slid through her hand like water, passing from verdant shades into gold. As she lifted it up, she smiled and asked Caelum, “Yours?” In the distance was a funeral pyre exhorting the sky with tongues of smokeless fire. Sondra walked towards it, unafraid, the tether still in her hand.

[Caelum]

"I never died," he told her. A queer curve took his mouth as if by expression to indicate he spoke with uncertainty rather than fact. His gaze slanted away from her, toward that string spilling through her fingers, following it to its end in smoke and flame. "I never died," he repeated. How then could that string be his? It was only in these last years that the Grasslands had known him horned and clad the flesh of stars, his clothes always better fitting when he was tall with Syna's stolen grace. He followed the Sinspeaker, falling a step behind while watching the smoke gust and swirl. "North now," he explained, "That's where I am. On the edge of the world where the gods bid me." Nikali's profane grace pulsed within him, fresh and sore. "Maybe they'll try to bury me in that bedrock," he muttered, hand rising to shield his eyes. "Why don't they ever want the heroes?" The tree kept drawing his glances. He had seen it before, memory shapeless and almost cultural where it pressed upon his conscious. It was a wearingly familiar feeling. "Careful," he said suddenly, hurrying a step forward. Something soot smeared and threatened teased his memory. Fingers closed about her elbow, tugging backwards, intending to stop her dance toward the flames. "Careful," he repeated. "Fire always burns. What's your name?" Her name was suddenly very important. Remember who you are.

[Sondra]

“My name?” She was momentary lost, her eyes turning to water and then switching sharply to black mirrors that only saw the pyre’s light. It spoke to her and she shuddered at the sound before growing still. “The Unburning One.” Sondra smiled and it was terrible, as if blood should have been on her teeth. With a jerk of her arm she passed from Caelum’s grip and began the climb atop the pyre. The flames whisked around her, turning cloth to cinders. Each piece fell from her, as she shed the mundane skin. Between her struggling steps she spoke. Her voice becoming the pillar of fire’s. “Never I. I will never burn. Not then, not even now.” She turned, showing a dark lily that bloomed above her heart and a blue tangle of flame coiling around her shoulder to her décolletage. “She hears too much. So much that she cannot listen to me. A small smoldering voice.” Now atop the pyre, she pointed towards Caelum’s heart. “You have heard me, though. Heard me and lost me.” Caelum’s string evaporated in her hand, joining the flame and leaving no ash. Her mirrored eyes lifted heavenward, as if tracing where it went. The final shreds of her clothing were spiraling above her like moths. The revealed skin was fully wound with red cords, a hundred wounds from their cinching. Though all else burned, these would not unravel. “We are coming.”

[Caelum]

Within the protective walls of Denval's Opal Clinic, Caelum open his eyes. It was with a shout crunching in his throat, unable to be released. Flames reflected off of eyes the color of the dawn that was breaking beyond the windows, spreading blood and fire over the sky to chase away the stars. We are coming. Every scrabbling, besieged need of the city on the edge of the world collapsed open him through the links of Nikali's newest chain. The Unburning. "Denval," cold lips mouthed, gasping to nothing, to no one in the winter chill. "Denval, defend yourself." He all but flew out of bed, stumbling over shards of dreams and strings of sin as he went. end