[Girl] The door closes behind her.
And behind her, there is an antique shop, and a nameless shop boy, un/named peradem, which gleam like water, like the scrim of stars. And there is traffic and asphalt and coffee and laptops and parks and crosswalks. Day.
Different here. Kage is inclined to stay by the door, just a step, two, three over the threshold and regard the (cloistered [cloistering]) night garden, to tilt her head back and look at the sky through the leaves, look toward the shadows, toward what might be walls or more trees, indistinguishable shapes, uncandled, to look at the ground she is standing on, smell it, breathe it, adjust, wonder. But the door closes, and as if it's just a continuation of the movement set in motion by the door closing (set in motion by the hand set in motion by the door set in motion by the desire set in motion by),
He grabs her by the shoulders.
Her heart punches a warning that sends her right up onto the balls of her feet, the tips of her toes. Her breath gets caught on a hook in her throat; she opens her mouth to say a word. Probably a dirty one; maybe just a question. What she doesn't do is step back, jerk away, because that isn't Kage's instinct. Kage's instinct is to reach up; to grab His wrists. Hold. Stay, don't. And her instinct is to breathe, because that's the first instinct, even if some need to have it slapped into them (live!). And her instinct is to scream Him, because that's the second instinct (I am!).
But he is kissing her, pushing her into the tree. He kisses her unshadowed, shadowless; he kisses her until she is unlaced by longing. Until her blood isn't craving oxygen, isn't wanting air to carry to the chambers of her heart, to keep her living, life, alive, until -- and this is a cliche -- it's like drowning, coming out on the other side, finding that, hey, if you turn yourself inside out just this way, you're fine, water is air, air is water, you're drowned, but not dead. Until she kisses Him, thoughtfully, thoughtlessly: because she wants to.
Kage isn't gasping for air when he breaks away and stalks a compass around the walled garden, laughing, but she is breathing deeply, as if her lungs were new, as if it was something she had to remind herself how to do. I knew you'd come, He says, and Kage -- finally -- chuckles, soft, smiling, irony only a shadow, distant. The sound unravells: a clot of ash, of smoke, of silver-thread, of spinning fibers, moon-soaked, thistle and milkweed, sent down the river, drifting after mad girls, tragic lovers, boats bearing grave-goods, the king-who'll-come-again-one-day, a useless note.
"Yeah?" she says, peeling away from the tree, swatching Him move, shifting her weight from one foot to another, ready to shadow, or turn away. Kage, flushed, has eyes that are made dark by wistfulness, that're tarnished up with something kinned to awe. "Well, when a girl gets a clear invitation, meet me -- You know -- " A beat, a pause. Serious: "So I'm here." Another beat. "What's your name? What is this place, and what is this place called, and why are we here?"
[Him] This is a garden and there is a sky and he is standing in the shadows shed by the silver stars. There's something whole about him, and indistinct, when she sees him silhouetted against the night, as if his skin were permeable, as if he were bleeding back into the night from which he was born. There he is: at the edge of the garden, where there are green things gone wild and gone dead, this scent in the air that is sharp and humid, that is dry as crumbled leaves in autumn, that is balanced in between the two.
The stars are in his eyes; they are in his hair. There are in his skin; he is luminous underneath, and solid. There is earth on his tongue, and he is grounded. This: illusion, that he does not have feet encased in tooled leathern boots or stylish sneakers or hooves, sometimes they are hooves – but merely roots, slender and knobby, gleaming white, burrowing down into the depths of the earth.
"I gave you a clear invitation," he says; his smile is grave and cold, the laughter dies the way sweet milk goes sour. No, not grave – distant, and superior and unknowable, impossible as the sky. " – it is engraved on your heart. This isn’t - " he turns, opens his arms to the night sky, to the place where the earth and sky are joined, are jointed – which is neither and both, horizon – "easy Kage. None of it is easy. Is that all you want? Come here. Do this. Do it for me, and know that I am?"
"Kage," His eyes are lambent when he says her name. "I thought that you were more than that. I know that you are." When he closes the distance between them and stands tall, bleeding shadow into shadow and light into light, this faint, ineffable smile twisting across his sharpened features. He reaches out and touches her brow, her mouth, and her breastbone, his fingers cool and sharp and white as the bleached antlers, the discarded crown of some great beast.
They come away red. Crimson: that. There is blood on her lips, sharp copper, the metallic promise of a coming storm.
And then they are dark. His hands are dark, and his eyes. "This place," he tells her, his voice a dark baritone, low enough that it seems to rumble in his chest. " - is a garden, and we are here because you opened a Door and walked through it." Except: when she looks, the Door is gone. The wall is whole and high. Beyond it: only the sky, only the promise of the distant stars. "This place has more Names than I do, and I have more Names than you will ever dream or know.
His hands are dark. And his eyes: they are quicksand, for how swiftly she could drown in them.
His smile, though, is wide and rich and generous.
Everything about it is a lie.
"Go on, Kage," he says, flanking her, lowering his mouth to her ear like a lover. " – ask another question. Stay here, stay right here, and I will tell you everything you ever wanted to know."
[Girl] Her eyes narrow on Him when he replies. Her eyes aren't lambent at all: they're of disputable shade, tarnished up like this; dark like this in His shadow. They're full up of something, though, and it's easy to know: awe, still, that thing kinned to it; a direct curiosity, uncertainty; something sharper than the taste of copper, something etched and ardent and still serious. "I -- " she says, is that all you want. But He's still talking: talks right over her, earth burying water.
He closes the distance. Where He touches her, she feels an ache in her bones, under her skin, and she touches her collarbone, startled by that, too, and examines her fingers. There's no wound, and yet, yet, yet: His fingers are bloodied. Kage takes a quick, sharp breath while he flanks her, speaks in her ear, and before He finishes his sentence she reaches up to press her hand across his, to stifle you wanted to know.
"Easy?" she says, an echo - harsh: angry. Then, quieter: "Easy?" The door is gone, and she has noted its absence without surprise. There was something about the way it closed: about the way this was a garden now, the way He appeared, the exulting laughter. And now, this. She swallows a word.
Looks away. At the garden, at the walls: at the roots, at His feet, at her own. Says, quiet: "I'm not staying right here. And I'm not going to be questionless. Here, some garden, some anchoress, walled up: no word except from her priest -- " Here, her (scared?) gaze turns ironic, flicks at Him -- but she's still in earnest: " -- until her eyes go as white as milk and as unseeing as a cobweb." Beat. Boils down to this bone: "I don't want you to tell me. I want,"
caesura
"to know."
[Him] This is how they stand: He flanks She. Taller and broader and sharper but ever-so-much less: real, warm, true.
In profile, his features are sharp and somehow eroded, eroding. The river brings the earth to the sea, silts up its mouth until it cannot speak, until it creates a thousand channels, fingerswidth, rivulets, torrents, so that the water can return to the ocean. The ocean swallows the earth; until something hot, blazing, at its core vomits it back up again. This is how he is: immediate and failing and replenished, fading into the darkness of the sky, defined by and against it. Whole and intact, disappearing back into the night. The dying god who always returns, the new-made thing, born to die.
He flanks her, so close, and turns and bends, presses his cool mouth to the crown of her head; and she can feel the stars, burning behind her eyes. He kisses her ear, the shell of it, his mouth hungry, his breath warmer, pent up, withheld. She can hear the beat of her own heart; she can hear the tidal things underneath his skin. Can hear the pulse minute rustle of dead leaves underfoot, the sap in the oak as it moves under the rought skein of its bark. The roots worming blind through the ground underfoot.
Then he - stops, leans closer, gentle now, gentled, the shadow of the kiss over his eyes, his voice warm, and gentle, and true.
"Then look. See. Seek. Find. Love. Know. Look: to see what you can, to seek what you can find, to know what you can love. Look. I'll be here." His left hand is cool on her shoulder. "Right here." His right hand is warm on her breast.
The wind rustles in the waving branches of the dark trees. The garden is restless, alive, shadowed - cool, dead and dying and being born again. There are trees, with vast canopies rustling in the night sky. There are deep copes, twisted brambles with hearts so dark that even the light of the stars cannot penetrate. There are mounds of leaves, mast on the garden floor, manicured beds where white flowers gleam like shrunken moons, quiet currents where a stream moves through the earth gleaming. There is, somewhere, the sound of a spring, and the eart beneath her feet, soft and dark, rich and crumbling. There is the night sky; and there are walls, unbroken. The walls shine like marble in the darkness, reflect the stars about. And what is marble, but the bones of the earth?
Look, he says to her. Urges her onward. Look. Seek. See.
[Girl] Look, he says. And it's just like a conversation she's had, and recently. Don't you ever Look, she'd asked. Look just to Look. Just to See what there is to see? Hadn't been able to understand that: having the ability, and not using it, because things might be the same; because one thinks one already knows what there is to see.
This is a secret: it's a really good secret. Even Kage doesn't (quite [yet]) realize it. How important it is to her: love; her belief that it exists -- not just as a thing that is felt and temporary; not just as a connection that is fleet, that is seconds, that is siftless, that is balladry: a thing that is more; a thing that is a road; a thing that'll burn fire and light the sun home after it's died in a bloody conflageration to the west. See, he says, and Seek, and her gaze is narrowed, again, this time directly in front of her, because he is kissing her forehead, and she can feel it, and Find, he says, Love, and the word is a river-stone, is a copper-coin, is a needle, and she looks at Him, listening.
She isn't worried that she'll get lost [be lost, though (that's different - what if - )]. She isn't worried that He won't be able to find her [but if she wants Him (oh, always, eventually; right?]. She takes a sideways step, and then, hands finding her pockets, her back-pockets, shoulders up, hair undone, twisting, doesn't say a thing: speaks with a look, maybe. Okay, and We'll see, and Mystery, ahoy.
Then she turns and -- not ignoring Him; she's good at that, but she's not, not right now -- starts to explore. Not by going toward the perimeter, but by turning -- after a hesitation, compass-needle, which-way-North, which-way-does-magnetism-flow, which-way, wayward-thing -- toward the garden's heart, approaching it at an angle, circling. Looking. See?
[Him] Look.
Kage turns her back on the walls, which are white and impossibly high, which are silver, which glow with reflected light from the stars. Turns her back on whatever is beyond them, and defines a meandering vector into the heart of the enclosed garden, the place that remains Nameless because it has too many Names. More than She. More than He.
He shadows her every step. Even when she cannot see him, she can feel him as the wind in her hair, the fusion-whisper at the heart of the stars above. The way the atoms split and burn, the way they make themselves again: something different, something new. She can feel his twin kisses: the crown of her head, cool, the lobe of her ear, hotter than the blood beneath her skin.
The garden is tame. Here is a topiary tree in the shape and shadow of the moon, here are silver bells in a gleaming row. Here is an artful stream cutting through the beds just so, the ferns unfurling their fractal fingers in perfect endless symmetry to the moonshine, furling them again at her touch when she reaches for them. Here is cress wild on the banks of the stream, where it leaves its gentle course and grows rocky, rapids churning under the light of the moon. Here is cress, bitter and sweet, and clover. Chickweed and dogwood and briar rose, the low hum of a colony of bees, mistletoe that wraps itself around the oak, some hidden place, heavy with honey suckle.
The garden is tame and wild, living and dead. Here is autumn. Here is the promise of winter like a bitter heart, when everything recedes into darkness, and night sky swallows the sun until you charm it back into the sky.
--
And so on, and so on, until she comes to a small stone well, long abandoned, the stones tumbled, the boards covering it rotting slowly, the scent of water sharp, seeping in the air. Beside the well: a boy. A bone-thin, bone-white boy with hair black as a starless night, and eyes the color of dying grass. There is blood on his forehead, blood on his mouth, and - worse - a deep wound in the center of his chest, the sternum fractured, the ribs broken, the blood such a deep, livid red it can only have come from the heart. HE is alive, watching her, the bellows of his moving visibly through the shattered cage of his ribs. He is alive and he is breathing - wheezing, constant, the wind sighing through the trees.
[Girl] This is how Kage explores, okay? Kage explores like: the ground -- shifting, untamed and then tame, wanton and then demure, wild and then gentle -- is a prayer labyrinth. Each step she takes, well: that step is careful. Each tree she touches, looks up, up, up, each star she spies, each stream she comes to, crosses, dips her fingers into, gathers-water-up, cups it, doesn't quite drink (fairyland [maybe]), although she thinks about it: she does it carefully, just so.
Kage is thinking about a poem she knows, while she does this; Kage thinks once about people who walk in two worlds at once, and what that does to the one world that others don't also walk in, and whether or not she would frighten people to death, whether or not she'd see them, be able to look at both worlds. And Kage thinks, once, about the taste of the air on her tongue, the way it feels, slipping down her throat, alert, unsteadied.
And that's when: the well, the boy, the blood, alive and breathing and dying, and Kage -- Kage rakes her hair back, out've her face, contains it at the base of her neck, and goes to the boy's side, gauging how bad it is (bad), gauging, quantifying, dismayed: "Hey there," she says, soothing, low -- as if the boy were a deer, were an animal-thing, something that might flee, startled. Blood on his forehead, his mouth: his chest wrenched open. "Can you speak?" She doesn't expect him to.
[Him] "Yes," says the boy right back to her. His lungs move like fish see: they are slippery-visceral. Viscera. But when Kage speaks to him, the boy looks up, looks at her, so directly, his dying-grass eyes in his moon-pale face, his skin like diamond which means: reflective, except occluded somehow. A diamond fill with smoke. Smoke, filled with diamonds, dreaming of the moon. And the boy: looks at her, cants his head at her, all sidelong and curious, each breath a death rattle and tells her again, quiet calm but for the Other in his eyes. "Yes. I can speak."
He coughs once. It is a terrible sound - wrenching, something anchored torn loose from its moorings. The visible organs spasm in his chest and flecks of dark blood spittle over his pale lips. His voice is strong though, even and clear.
[Girl] Her left knee touches the ground. Balance. Kneeling, then. Beside the boy with the clear voice; she pales at the sight of his -- the contraction of: viscera; inner workings. But Kage is a willworker; she wills herself not to throw-up, and she does not: later, save it for later - save it. The fingertips of her right hand touch the ground: sketch a circle: a line: a rune.
There is a word in her head: opens like a rose [opens like a season], and then she is Looking at the boy, skimming the surface of his mind for thoughts, for what-he-is-thinking, extending that sense for thoughts-that-are-near, for another-mind, because what did that, did he do that to himself, couldn't, what did that, and where did it go, and why is there blood where there is blood. More, though: another word unfurls in her head, unspoken, although maybe her lips move, like she's trying to think of what to actually say to the dying boy, and then: more. She is looking at the boy's fate, at the hours he has left, and whether or not he gleams, shines, if he's human, if he approaches human, if this is Dies Irae and nothing else.
And she is also, human, reaching to touch him, although not quite yet, waiting for a sign, touch his shoulder: "I don't know how to mend you. What can I do; what do you want?" Always, this question: it's important, wanting. And, because she isn't a saint, because her voice is shading, horrified, but steady-to-hear: "What did this to you?" Then she does touch the boy with her cool fingers.
[Him] He is near her ear. His hand shadows hers as she works, as she traces her rune, as she blooms her word like a rose in her mind. As she seeks to find. And as she looks, and as she sees, he stands at her shoulder, the shadow of her shadow, the stars in his eyes. Whispers, cruel into her ear, Do you really[/i] think you can save them all?[/i] His right hand is warm on her shoulder, the cool left hand open to the sky. She senses this without seeing it; feels him at her back, the vastness of the night inside of him.
Before her: This boy, this boy with dying-grass eyes, he is a human, a human-thing, this is what her workings tell her. He is Human, which is to say: alive, as the trees and the grass and the silverbells and the watercress and the maidensfern. And not endless, as the fusion-driven stars. The thread of his life is so short that Kage can almost feel it, can almost taste it, can almost knot it between her fingers.
"One of the ladies in the tower," the boy says, his attention unwavering, his words flecked with spittle and blood. With broken bits of shattered bone. " - she stole my heart."
He coughs again, and imagine this: the last leaf of autumn, clinging to some bare branch, rattling in a howling winter wind.
"I want it back." The boy says. "I want it back again."
Look over his shoulder. There is no tower. There are no stones, just a well, and a steeply rising hill that disappears up and up and up behind him.
[Him] He is near her ear. His hand shadows hers as she works, as she traces her rune, as she blooms her word like a rose in her mind. As she seeks to find. And as she looks, and as she sees, he stands at her shoulder, the shadow of her shadow, the stars in his eyes. Whispers, cruel into her ear, Do you really think you can save them all? His right hand is warm on her shoulder, the cool left hand open to the sky. She senses this without seeing it; feels him at her back, the vastness of the night inside of him.
Before her: This boy, this boy with dying-grass eyes, he is a human, a human-thing, this is what her workings tell her. He is Human, which is to say: alive, as the trees and the grass and the silverbells and the watercress and the maidensfern. And not endless, as the fusion-driven stars. The thread of his life is so short that Kage can almost feel it, can almost taste it, can almost knot it between her fingers.
"One of the ladies in the tower," the boy says, his attention unwavering, his words flecked with spittle and blood. With broken bits of shattered bone. " - she stole my heart."
He coughs again, and imagine this: the last leaf of autumn, clinging to some bare branch, rattling in a howling winter wind.
"I want it back." The boy says. "I want it back again."
Look over his shoulder. There is no tower. There are no stones, just a well, and a steeply rising hill that disappears up and up and up behind him.
[Girl] This is almost normal. Something is happening, and He is commenting, and she is not giving an indication that she can hear what he is saying to the person she is talking to. This is almost comfortable (it never is [not really]). Her jaw tightens, sharp, delicate -- there is a minute shift in the color of her eyes.
"You'll still die," she says, touching the boy's forehead now: touching his blood, lifting it, looking at it, gathering herself to stand. And, blood to blood: Kage will Work more, follow the thread of the boy's heat, fading, because blood calls to blood, and a heart is where blood lives, and desire, and love, and revelation, and: well. Blood calls to blood. Her fingertips tingle, wet, dark. "I'm sory," she says, and also: "I'll see what I can do." And then she stands, and says, under-her-breath, to Him --
"Not all, but any."
And behind her, there is an antique shop, and a nameless shop boy, un/named peradem, which gleam like water, like the scrim of stars. And there is traffic and asphalt and coffee and laptops and parks and crosswalks. Day.
Different here. Kage is inclined to stay by the door, just a step, two, three over the threshold and regard the (cloistered [cloistering]) night garden, to tilt her head back and look at the sky through the leaves, look toward the shadows, toward what might be walls or more trees, indistinguishable shapes, uncandled, to look at the ground she is standing on, smell it, breathe it, adjust, wonder. But the door closes, and as if it's just a continuation of the movement set in motion by the door closing (set in motion by the hand set in motion by the door set in motion by the desire set in motion by),
He grabs her by the shoulders.
Her heart punches a warning that sends her right up onto the balls of her feet, the tips of her toes. Her breath gets caught on a hook in her throat; she opens her mouth to say a word. Probably a dirty one; maybe just a question. What she doesn't do is step back, jerk away, because that isn't Kage's instinct. Kage's instinct is to reach up; to grab His wrists. Hold. Stay, don't. And her instinct is to breathe, because that's the first instinct, even if some need to have it slapped into them (live!). And her instinct is to scream Him, because that's the second instinct (I am!).
But he is kissing her, pushing her into the tree. He kisses her unshadowed, shadowless; he kisses her until she is unlaced by longing. Until her blood isn't craving oxygen, isn't wanting air to carry to the chambers of her heart, to keep her living, life, alive, until -- and this is a cliche -- it's like drowning, coming out on the other side, finding that, hey, if you turn yourself inside out just this way, you're fine, water is air, air is water, you're drowned, but not dead. Until she kisses Him, thoughtfully, thoughtlessly: because she wants to.
Kage isn't gasping for air when he breaks away and stalks a compass around the walled garden, laughing, but she is breathing deeply, as if her lungs were new, as if it was something she had to remind herself how to do. I knew you'd come, He says, and Kage -- finally -- chuckles, soft, smiling, irony only a shadow, distant. The sound unravells: a clot of ash, of smoke, of silver-thread, of spinning fibers, moon-soaked, thistle and milkweed, sent down the river, drifting after mad girls, tragic lovers, boats bearing grave-goods, the king-who'll-come-again-one-day, a useless note.
"Yeah?" she says, peeling away from the tree, swatching Him move, shifting her weight from one foot to another, ready to shadow, or turn away. Kage, flushed, has eyes that are made dark by wistfulness, that're tarnished up with something kinned to awe. "Well, when a girl gets a clear invitation, meet me -- You know -- " A beat, a pause. Serious: "So I'm here." Another beat. "What's your name? What is this place, and what is this place called, and why are we here?"
[Him] This is a garden and there is a sky and he is standing in the shadows shed by the silver stars. There's something whole about him, and indistinct, when she sees him silhouetted against the night, as if his skin were permeable, as if he were bleeding back into the night from which he was born. There he is: at the edge of the garden, where there are green things gone wild and gone dead, this scent in the air that is sharp and humid, that is dry as crumbled leaves in autumn, that is balanced in between the two.
The stars are in his eyes; they are in his hair. There are in his skin; he is luminous underneath, and solid. There is earth on his tongue, and he is grounded. This: illusion, that he does not have feet encased in tooled leathern boots or stylish sneakers or hooves, sometimes they are hooves – but merely roots, slender and knobby, gleaming white, burrowing down into the depths of the earth.
"I gave you a clear invitation," he says; his smile is grave and cold, the laughter dies the way sweet milk goes sour. No, not grave – distant, and superior and unknowable, impossible as the sky. " – it is engraved on your heart. This isn’t - " he turns, opens his arms to the night sky, to the place where the earth and sky are joined, are jointed – which is neither and both, horizon – "easy Kage. None of it is easy. Is that all you want? Come here. Do this. Do it for me, and know that I am?"
"Kage," His eyes are lambent when he says her name. "I thought that you were more than that. I know that you are." When he closes the distance between them and stands tall, bleeding shadow into shadow and light into light, this faint, ineffable smile twisting across his sharpened features. He reaches out and touches her brow, her mouth, and her breastbone, his fingers cool and sharp and white as the bleached antlers, the discarded crown of some great beast.
They come away red. Crimson: that. There is blood on her lips, sharp copper, the metallic promise of a coming storm.
And then they are dark. His hands are dark, and his eyes. "This place," he tells her, his voice a dark baritone, low enough that it seems to rumble in his chest. " - is a garden, and we are here because you opened a Door and walked through it." Except: when she looks, the Door is gone. The wall is whole and high. Beyond it: only the sky, only the promise of the distant stars. "This place has more Names than I do, and I have more Names than you will ever dream or know.
His hands are dark. And his eyes: they are quicksand, for how swiftly she could drown in them.
His smile, though, is wide and rich and generous.
Everything about it is a lie.
"Go on, Kage," he says, flanking her, lowering his mouth to her ear like a lover. " – ask another question. Stay here, stay right here, and I will tell you everything you ever wanted to know."
[Girl] Her eyes narrow on Him when he replies. Her eyes aren't lambent at all: they're of disputable shade, tarnished up like this; dark like this in His shadow. They're full up of something, though, and it's easy to know: awe, still, that thing kinned to it; a direct curiosity, uncertainty; something sharper than the taste of copper, something etched and ardent and still serious. "I -- " she says, is that all you want. But He's still talking: talks right over her, earth burying water.
He closes the distance. Where He touches her, she feels an ache in her bones, under her skin, and she touches her collarbone, startled by that, too, and examines her fingers. There's no wound, and yet, yet, yet: His fingers are bloodied. Kage takes a quick, sharp breath while he flanks her, speaks in her ear, and before He finishes his sentence she reaches up to press her hand across his, to stifle you wanted to know.
"Easy?" she says, an echo - harsh: angry. Then, quieter: "Easy?" The door is gone, and she has noted its absence without surprise. There was something about the way it closed: about the way this was a garden now, the way He appeared, the exulting laughter. And now, this. She swallows a word.
Looks away. At the garden, at the walls: at the roots, at His feet, at her own. Says, quiet: "I'm not staying right here. And I'm not going to be questionless. Here, some garden, some anchoress, walled up: no word except from her priest -- " Here, her (scared?) gaze turns ironic, flicks at Him -- but she's still in earnest: " -- until her eyes go as white as milk and as unseeing as a cobweb." Beat. Boils down to this bone: "I don't want you to tell me. I want,"
caesura
"to know."
[Him] This is how they stand: He flanks She. Taller and broader and sharper but ever-so-much less: real, warm, true.
In profile, his features are sharp and somehow eroded, eroding. The river brings the earth to the sea, silts up its mouth until it cannot speak, until it creates a thousand channels, fingerswidth, rivulets, torrents, so that the water can return to the ocean. The ocean swallows the earth; until something hot, blazing, at its core vomits it back up again. This is how he is: immediate and failing and replenished, fading into the darkness of the sky, defined by and against it. Whole and intact, disappearing back into the night. The dying god who always returns, the new-made thing, born to die.
He flanks her, so close, and turns and bends, presses his cool mouth to the crown of her head; and she can feel the stars, burning behind her eyes. He kisses her ear, the shell of it, his mouth hungry, his breath warmer, pent up, withheld. She can hear the beat of her own heart; she can hear the tidal things underneath his skin. Can hear the pulse minute rustle of dead leaves underfoot, the sap in the oak as it moves under the rought skein of its bark. The roots worming blind through the ground underfoot.
Then he - stops, leans closer, gentle now, gentled, the shadow of the kiss over his eyes, his voice warm, and gentle, and true.
"Then look. See. Seek. Find. Love. Know. Look: to see what you can, to seek what you can find, to know what you can love. Look. I'll be here." His left hand is cool on her shoulder. "Right here." His right hand is warm on her breast.
The wind rustles in the waving branches of the dark trees. The garden is restless, alive, shadowed - cool, dead and dying and being born again. There are trees, with vast canopies rustling in the night sky. There are deep copes, twisted brambles with hearts so dark that even the light of the stars cannot penetrate. There are mounds of leaves, mast on the garden floor, manicured beds where white flowers gleam like shrunken moons, quiet currents where a stream moves through the earth gleaming. There is, somewhere, the sound of a spring, and the eart beneath her feet, soft and dark, rich and crumbling. There is the night sky; and there are walls, unbroken. The walls shine like marble in the darkness, reflect the stars about. And what is marble, but the bones of the earth?
Look, he says to her. Urges her onward. Look. Seek. See.
[Girl] Look, he says. And it's just like a conversation she's had, and recently. Don't you ever Look, she'd asked. Look just to Look. Just to See what there is to see? Hadn't been able to understand that: having the ability, and not using it, because things might be the same; because one thinks one already knows what there is to see.
This is a secret: it's a really good secret. Even Kage doesn't (quite [yet]) realize it. How important it is to her: love; her belief that it exists -- not just as a thing that is felt and temporary; not just as a connection that is fleet, that is seconds, that is siftless, that is balladry: a thing that is more; a thing that is a road; a thing that'll burn fire and light the sun home after it's died in a bloody conflageration to the west. See, he says, and Seek, and her gaze is narrowed, again, this time directly in front of her, because he is kissing her forehead, and she can feel it, and Find, he says, Love, and the word is a river-stone, is a copper-coin, is a needle, and she looks at Him, listening.
She isn't worried that she'll get lost [be lost, though (that's different - what if - )]. She isn't worried that He won't be able to find her [but if she wants Him (oh, always, eventually; right?]. She takes a sideways step, and then, hands finding her pockets, her back-pockets, shoulders up, hair undone, twisting, doesn't say a thing: speaks with a look, maybe. Okay, and We'll see, and Mystery, ahoy.
Then she turns and -- not ignoring Him; she's good at that, but she's not, not right now -- starts to explore. Not by going toward the perimeter, but by turning -- after a hesitation, compass-needle, which-way-North, which-way-does-magnetism-flow, which-way, wayward-thing -- toward the garden's heart, approaching it at an angle, circling. Looking. See?
[Him] Look.
Kage turns her back on the walls, which are white and impossibly high, which are silver, which glow with reflected light from the stars. Turns her back on whatever is beyond them, and defines a meandering vector into the heart of the enclosed garden, the place that remains Nameless because it has too many Names. More than She. More than He.
He shadows her every step. Even when she cannot see him, she can feel him as the wind in her hair, the fusion-whisper at the heart of the stars above. The way the atoms split and burn, the way they make themselves again: something different, something new. She can feel his twin kisses: the crown of her head, cool, the lobe of her ear, hotter than the blood beneath her skin.
The garden is tame. Here is a topiary tree in the shape and shadow of the moon, here are silver bells in a gleaming row. Here is an artful stream cutting through the beds just so, the ferns unfurling their fractal fingers in perfect endless symmetry to the moonshine, furling them again at her touch when she reaches for them. Here is cress wild on the banks of the stream, where it leaves its gentle course and grows rocky, rapids churning under the light of the moon. Here is cress, bitter and sweet, and clover. Chickweed and dogwood and briar rose, the low hum of a colony of bees, mistletoe that wraps itself around the oak, some hidden place, heavy with honey suckle.
The garden is tame and wild, living and dead. Here is autumn. Here is the promise of winter like a bitter heart, when everything recedes into darkness, and night sky swallows the sun until you charm it back into the sky.
--
And so on, and so on, until she comes to a small stone well, long abandoned, the stones tumbled, the boards covering it rotting slowly, the scent of water sharp, seeping in the air. Beside the well: a boy. A bone-thin, bone-white boy with hair black as a starless night, and eyes the color of dying grass. There is blood on his forehead, blood on his mouth, and - worse - a deep wound in the center of his chest, the sternum fractured, the ribs broken, the blood such a deep, livid red it can only have come from the heart. HE is alive, watching her, the bellows of his moving visibly through the shattered cage of his ribs. He is alive and he is breathing - wheezing, constant, the wind sighing through the trees.
[Girl] This is how Kage explores, okay? Kage explores like: the ground -- shifting, untamed and then tame, wanton and then demure, wild and then gentle -- is a prayer labyrinth. Each step she takes, well: that step is careful. Each tree she touches, looks up, up, up, each star she spies, each stream she comes to, crosses, dips her fingers into, gathers-water-up, cups it, doesn't quite drink (fairyland [maybe]), although she thinks about it: she does it carefully, just so.
Kage is thinking about a poem she knows, while she does this; Kage thinks once about people who walk in two worlds at once, and what that does to the one world that others don't also walk in, and whether or not she would frighten people to death, whether or not she'd see them, be able to look at both worlds. And Kage thinks, once, about the taste of the air on her tongue, the way it feels, slipping down her throat, alert, unsteadied.
And that's when: the well, the boy, the blood, alive and breathing and dying, and Kage -- Kage rakes her hair back, out've her face, contains it at the base of her neck, and goes to the boy's side, gauging how bad it is (bad), gauging, quantifying, dismayed: "Hey there," she says, soothing, low -- as if the boy were a deer, were an animal-thing, something that might flee, startled. Blood on his forehead, his mouth: his chest wrenched open. "Can you speak?" She doesn't expect him to.
[Him] "Yes," says the boy right back to her. His lungs move like fish see: they are slippery-visceral. Viscera. But when Kage speaks to him, the boy looks up, looks at her, so directly, his dying-grass eyes in his moon-pale face, his skin like diamond which means: reflective, except occluded somehow. A diamond fill with smoke. Smoke, filled with diamonds, dreaming of the moon. And the boy: looks at her, cants his head at her, all sidelong and curious, each breath a death rattle and tells her again, quiet calm but for the Other in his eyes. "Yes. I can speak."
He coughs once. It is a terrible sound - wrenching, something anchored torn loose from its moorings. The visible organs spasm in his chest and flecks of dark blood spittle over his pale lips. His voice is strong though, even and clear.
[Girl] Her left knee touches the ground. Balance. Kneeling, then. Beside the boy with the clear voice; she pales at the sight of his -- the contraction of: viscera; inner workings. But Kage is a willworker; she wills herself not to throw-up, and she does not: later, save it for later - save it. The fingertips of her right hand touch the ground: sketch a circle: a line: a rune.
There is a word in her head: opens like a rose [opens like a season], and then she is Looking at the boy, skimming the surface of his mind for thoughts, for what-he-is-thinking, extending that sense for thoughts-that-are-near, for another-mind, because what did that, did he do that to himself, couldn't, what did that, and where did it go, and why is there blood where there is blood. More, though: another word unfurls in her head, unspoken, although maybe her lips move, like she's trying to think of what to actually say to the dying boy, and then: more. She is looking at the boy's fate, at the hours he has left, and whether or not he gleams, shines, if he's human, if he approaches human, if this is Dies Irae and nothing else.
And she is also, human, reaching to touch him, although not quite yet, waiting for a sign, touch his shoulder: "I don't know how to mend you. What can I do; what do you want?" Always, this question: it's important, wanting. And, because she isn't a saint, because her voice is shading, horrified, but steady-to-hear: "What did this to you?" Then she does touch the boy with her cool fingers.
[Him] He is near her ear. His hand shadows hers as she works, as she traces her rune, as she blooms her word like a rose in her mind. As she seeks to find. And as she looks, and as she sees, he stands at her shoulder, the shadow of her shadow, the stars in his eyes. Whispers, cruel into her ear, Do you really[/i] think you can save them all?[/i] His right hand is warm on her shoulder, the cool left hand open to the sky. She senses this without seeing it; feels him at her back, the vastness of the night inside of him.
Before her: This boy, this boy with dying-grass eyes, he is a human, a human-thing, this is what her workings tell her. He is Human, which is to say: alive, as the trees and the grass and the silverbells and the watercress and the maidensfern. And not endless, as the fusion-driven stars. The thread of his life is so short that Kage can almost feel it, can almost taste it, can almost knot it between her fingers.
"One of the ladies in the tower," the boy says, his attention unwavering, his words flecked with spittle and blood. With broken bits of shattered bone. " - she stole my heart."
He coughs again, and imagine this: the last leaf of autumn, clinging to some bare branch, rattling in a howling winter wind.
"I want it back." The boy says. "I want it back again."
Look over his shoulder. There is no tower. There are no stones, just a well, and a steeply rising hill that disappears up and up and up behind him.
[Him] He is near her ear. His hand shadows hers as she works, as she traces her rune, as she blooms her word like a rose in her mind. As she seeks to find. And as she looks, and as she sees, he stands at her shoulder, the shadow of her shadow, the stars in his eyes. Whispers, cruel into her ear, Do you really think you can save them all? His right hand is warm on her shoulder, the cool left hand open to the sky. She senses this without seeing it; feels him at her back, the vastness of the night inside of him.
Before her: This boy, this boy with dying-grass eyes, he is a human, a human-thing, this is what her workings tell her. He is Human, which is to say: alive, as the trees and the grass and the silverbells and the watercress and the maidensfern. And not endless, as the fusion-driven stars. The thread of his life is so short that Kage can almost feel it, can almost taste it, can almost knot it between her fingers.
"One of the ladies in the tower," the boy says, his attention unwavering, his words flecked with spittle and blood. With broken bits of shattered bone. " - she stole my heart."
He coughs again, and imagine this: the last leaf of autumn, clinging to some bare branch, rattling in a howling winter wind.
"I want it back." The boy says. "I want it back again."
Look over his shoulder. There is no tower. There are no stones, just a well, and a steeply rising hill that disappears up and up and up behind him.
[Girl] This is almost normal. Something is happening, and He is commenting, and she is not giving an indication that she can hear what he is saying to the person she is talking to. This is almost comfortable (it never is [not really]). Her jaw tightens, sharp, delicate -- there is a minute shift in the color of her eyes.
"You'll still die," she says, touching the boy's forehead now: touching his blood, lifting it, looking at it, gathering herself to stand. And, blood to blood: Kage will Work more, follow the thread of the boy's heat, fading, because blood calls to blood, and a heart is where blood lives, and desire, and love, and revelation, and: well. Blood calls to blood. Her fingertips tingle, wet, dark. "I'm sory," she says, and also: "I'll see what I can do." And then she stands, and says, under-her-breath, to Him --
"Not all, but any."
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