A turn of the chamber followed the roar of the gun is all that divides. Or the obsidian’s edge, if you prefer, for that line is silent and cuts the threads fine. Or that final chest rattle in the nadir of night, while kin look on.
Gasping revenants clutching at vapors threading their path through the mists and ways, our hands wither to dust. And for what? The illusion of the infinite when we are but dirt and dust.
We color ourselves with the shadow of our own ash gathered from down there, in the pit. Try to give ourselves light from the shadow, by way of contrast. But few seem to see.
You’ll find me at moorwanders, following smalltrails and playing at touchstone for the only thing that is real. Here, elder ways draw to base: flame crosses chill, rain mists slick the stone, and the growl of winds between the ways. Here, the animals sing underhill, a call to slumber.
I know you tire at the mention of Raven, but they are here too.
The best magic is that which seems not to be magic at all, and it lingers here like it did in the old, doing a lot of nothing much at all: wind waves barley, skies trading slate for blue and then back again, small birds ducking in and out of the tall grass and the lone tree upon the hill. Them, big oak and me as all acorn, resting underneath and waiting.
Thunder the skies drum to rumble and many ears blind to the coming storm, yet calling some home to wrap themselves under both cloak and shield. Come the mists that deaden sight but for those with the spears driven to pierce.
We cast to birch, cleave to stones rising grey in undergrowth. Her rasp cuts the winds as she calls forth. Children! Children, come in!
Let the hunters flail; they are not our kin. Let them blindstep the pathways, missing us, their quarry, just beyond the thin.
It is more clear than ever that most cannot understand my sometimes, those veilgliding moments on betweens — this river of mine of many dreams that flows within. Come to rest within the hollows and eddies spinning and turning with me and you might see how I see. And then, you may ask yourself…
In a flurry of down and feather I came to rest. There she is, the I that was. There he is, the I that will. Onyx eyes wander the memory wastelands, sipping at an oasis of color; a little here, a little there. I am so many. And they all want to talk, some just more silent in their speech than others.
If only one person understood the sometimes… But the thin places are only rarely found.
Dark eyes haunting the wrinkled silver of dust-etched mirrors, they are the ghosts that trail behind like scarlet ribbons on mountain winds as the snow drifts over age-worn cairns.
“I told yer ma, that’s a season — tain’t no name for a girl,” her father used to tell her when she was young, before he had choked on all that ash that started falling from the skies and died. He was never one to wear a mask, and refused to cover his face after the Ashfalls began. The particulates, buried deep under the earth until recent years, made quick work of his cigarette-ravaged lungs.
“I n’ver did know why she gone did that, but she made me promise to name y’that after you was born.”
“Maybe it was because my hair was white as snow?” she would always suggest, knowing the answer even as she said it. It was a game they played, this conversation of theirs.
These birch at the riverbank, boulder-fractured of growth resting bottom of the mountain scree — they are me. Standing defiant, I insist on being though stone pushes and gravities are drawn, I drink strength of river.
Granite sings, should you open your eyes to listen. I can tune my growth to their song. I am woman, that pale goddess. And I insist you try.
Gathering of breath from wind, from rain, my arms have set to wave. For I bend, not break under the song of the heart. You would too, if only you could see.
How do I write a story? I forget. Perhaps one goes a little like this:
There once was a little girl, and she liked red and so she wore red. Except that her mum called it crimson and her da preferred scarlet. But the fae said it was more poppy, and so that stuck because her mum thought it a more cheery thing than those other blood colors.
The girl said nothing at all and not because she did not have a mind of her own, but because someone had stolen her voice before she was born and she had no head for writing, though she knew plenty of words like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “snicker-snack” and “albatross” (a word she dreamed of shouting from the top of the radio tower that rose over the place she was born). But writing those words? Oh, well, that just was not something she could do.
A fever of climbing, each foot thorned on ossified remains of the other selves of his, those forgotten parts laying wasteshattered on this hill of broken dreams.
Cut hands, his own slivered bones shredding flesh to ribbons as he crawls his pile of human debris. Sunlight at the center, high above, mocking. It is not obtainable, but he has his own Sisyphus path, and that path involves the play of light and shadow with his burden being self — something far more weighty than stone.
A blink away of bloodstained sweat, he looks away from the improbissble past placed there in the fore. There is no sense in entertaining goals. Goals imply a chance at success. Success brings hope. Hope? No.
Right arm right foot left arm left foot, shudderdream quakes and shakes, and involuntary scream. But still, he carries his leadself up, an empty skull of his staring from the hill. All the whispers shout encouragements, but he cannot remain still to gather them in.
Rumors lead to hope. And “hope”, as the song goes, “is no good”. You would think we would not learn to base our decisions on hope. That is what we get for thinking, as my grandmother was fond of saying.
Better to put that bear to slumber once again. Help him to hibernate and sleep this long, cold winter of the soul away, away.
We can try to explain but the words come out all wrong and we speak of pain, people think we like it here. Ever the tears to hide, slip on a smile — wooden and hollow — and give in to the dreaming on.
Of the rubble they wandered, she and the one she called Puck; she dressed in crimson and ash while Puck was dressed in Puck, a shadow somewhere between chrome scuffed and tetris blocks that might have been mustard yellow, if not for the scorching and scratch. Azur, too, if you looked atop his aluminum pate from above or when not aloft — a rarity given the nuclear pellet fueling his eternal flight.
Stones rattled for reasons only stones know, and fell to the scree near her feet with wonton abandon. If Puck did not have encyclopedic reference to the circuitric contrary, it might have thought the stones were rushing down from the remnants of highrises to worship the angel at their base. Puck certainly did, but that was his nature. The girl was its goddess and its life and, even if they had been programmed otherwise, it would still choose this life of servitude under her wing. Call it love, for even machines may become such things as the capacity for love.
Puck tensed at the howl of greymalkin prowling distant, yet close enough to warrant caution. She dressed of vermillion tensed not at all, which was her nature, such as was her trust given to Puck. It was for Puck to worry while she wandered and his servos did whine at the unexpected danger lurking the shadows beyond. How far was far enough? it wondered. Almost immediately, it responded, Never enough, but was loath to leave his charge for the time required to chase the great cats off.
So Puck did the only sensible thing and flew closer to her and did what all things must eventually consider as their final option when danger lurks nearby: hope.
And so, Puck hoped while the greymalkin cast out more mewls and cries, suggesting the hunt had begun.
Puck sighed relief when the sounds moved away from their location, and it embraced the momentary calm, as short-lived as it was like to be.
