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| De Rerum Natura; CLOSED [tw: abusive themes, substance abuse] | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 1 2017, 12:27 PM (71 Views) | |
| Phaedrus | Aug 1 2017, 12:27 PM Post #1 |
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Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.
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(Tw: severe physical/mental abuse, dehumanization, mention of suicide attempts, alcoholism/drug abuse, general [parental] issues.) Tutia, bonemeal, clay… He ran his hand over his arm. Oxen’s blood… The sunlight ignited the red of his hair. Somewhere, birds chirruped. He stared at the man in the mirror, pinned helplessly by his reflection. Sulfur. The yellow of his eyes diffused on the glass, still foggy from the heat of his bath. They came from a dream, another place, shining across Time. A Philosopher’s Stone, henceforth ‘heart,’ to house a soul and animate limbs… That’s what was missing. He stared at the ravaged horror of his chest — as it truly was — as he truly remembered it — the scar that had lingered long after he healed from it, the phantom pain and memory that shot him awake so often. A great cleft ran from the hollow of his neck to his ribs — hacked like a butchered pig, the dark scars thick and ropy, gnarled like the roots of an oak. There, proof… there. He could reform himself — he could take the face and body of any man he wished — but it did not mean he did not remember; it did not mean he did not have some map of himself, artefacts left here and there. Like steel that could be hammered into swords or plate, but would always return to its true form at a forge. The necromancer’s hand trembled as he traced the ravine with a finger, the flesh dead and numb; it felt repulsive, an alien landscape on his own body, but he forced himself to hold it there. To not flinch away. To hold the disgust tight to his breast, to stare it in the eye. This is what you are. His throat bobbed, eyes hard as he stared at himself in the mirror. This is what He did to you. He stood — stock still, silent, allowing the world to drain to the faint chirrup of birds outside, the creaking of footsteps on wood, all the vague sounds of his home. He listened to the silence. The absence of a heartbeat — the absence of Life — and it drove a knife into him, the wound welling with familiar disgust, but he stood with it too, endured it even as it seared up to his throat and expanded to a single point of agony. “Tutia,” he recited again, softly. “Bonemeal. Clay…” And so the ritual went. The first time he could not even utter the word — had been lost in the memory of that cuneiform, trapped in the brambles of his Master’s hand. The passage was seared into his memory forever. Unnatural, his mind screamed. False flesh, false flesh, inhuman… He clasped his own hand, put a thumb over his fingers. Stared down at his manicured nails — the careful ritual he’d gone through that morning, filing them down to perfect half-moons and digging out filth, gently rubbing cream into his trimmed cuticles. He had so many questions about his making — how did Master do it? Did he mix his flesh with the pestle? How did he forge him, wrench him, prize his limbs out of clay? He had so many question about the jarring chaos of his being — the almost humanity of him; he could sweat, but not weep, he could make love, but not shite, he could grow drunk but not sick, he could smell and touch and feel and breathe and yet — There is none like you, Malakar. He shook. Squeezed his own hand, felt the residual heat there from the bath — its springiness — the click of bones, else something like bones — the ridge of his knuckles, the softness of his palms, the jumping tendon at his wrist. If he stayed still he could feel the sluggish movement of ichor, the molasses beneath his skin, and beneath that, the airiness of Death, the here-not-here, the whispering back exit in his mind. “Oxen’s blood,” the homunculus continued, steadying his voice, crawling forward with a quiet determination. Perhaps what ran through his veins once, for he remembered bleeding red, scarring and healing as humans did. It came in bits and pieces. His mind and body had waited for him — had known when he was ready, perhaps, though ye gods, he never felt so — patiently held the tapestry of his memories, unraveling it when it was time. Ink spilled on his fingertips. When he forgot to clip his nails and he accidentally scratched himself. Hair slicking to his shoulders after a bath, blood red and sodden. His stretched reflection in a vase. A long shadow cast by a fire. The fluttering of a handkerchief by his nose when he hyperventilated, the way it clung to his nostrils and mouth like a veil. All fragments of glass in a mosaic… “Sulfur…” he breathed. His hands slipped over his cheekbones, thumbs tracing the dark bags that had sprung up and never left under his eyes, found all the cracks and weariness that had appeared after the war. He looked like... shite. Somehow he looked older than before, had shed the veneer of boyhood and edged closer to thirty now. Lines appeared when he furrowed his brow. There was a weary look in his eyes that had not left since the siege of Madrid — no, before then. It started when he returned from the Mulciber, and began to remember… That. It. Him. His face had lost the puffiness of a chronic drunk, the smeared, drooping eyes of intoxication, but it hadn’t sprung back to the tittering boy’s. And frankly, he did not think it could, or would — he did not feel so young and frivolous anymore — to wear such a face would be anachronous, no less jarring than a crone wearing a child’s mask. He'd lost so much weight he looked ill, his fingers and elbows all spindle and his nose prominent in his narrow face. Maedaigh's Conquest had left the fields barren, and even with food ported in from Hoehemi, Morrimian and Angkar, it did not come close to the lushness and splendor of the old markets; many bakeries were dead husks, all the grain and flour used for bread and other necessities; people struggled to eke tomatoes and cabbages from the earth; the siege had lifted, but hunger had not. His lips often wilted to a neutral line. His eyes held a faraway quality to them now — not cold or unfriendly but simply distant, odd, fixed. When he was drawn back to earth he could smile, certainly — had not lost his humor or his love of tea-things and cake, food and fashions, pranks and japes — but he realized just how much drinking had eclipsed the other parts of himself. Ambition — desire — contemplation. He had never been able to think straight in a drunken haze. Philosophy was lost to him. The greater mysteries of the world were lost to him. He could do a grunt’s job in the libraries, translating and shelving and managing the routine — but he had forgotten the joy of crafting ones own spells and delving into books, experimenting with this and that, the idle curiosity of a mage’s mind. He had forgotten he was clever. That his mind could be used to greater ends than crafting lewd limericks. You could do fine things, Ylsa has smiled at him. You have done fine things. He’d gone to the mystic — and nothing had gladdened his heart more to see her house still in tact, miraculously untouched by the forest; but then, even from the first time he’d been it had appeared fae-like, verdant with a great tree in the middle, caressed by plants on all sides. Some work still had to be done here and there — and he helped her as best as he could, for she was still recovering from the grievousness of her injuries. But that was merely an excuse to talk to her, to clear his mind with the easy company of a friend. He often voiced that he simply did not know what to do with himself — had felt so terribly lost — wondered at points if he had only worsened Madrid’s plight, but she stopped him there. We cannot undo the past, she had smiled sadly. We can only learn from it, and move forward. Today is truly all we have. All else is an illusion. But how do I stop thinking on it? he had asked in desperation, helping her arrange this-and-that, clear fallen brush from the tree. How? I cannot stop; it is always there. She had only smiled, softly, in her way — and lent him a book, her willowy hands plucking it from the shelf. “Read this. It is the greatest wisdom from all of Daro, I think.” He had hesitated—but then, he was never one to turn down a book. And after they’d had tea and parted, he retreated to his study and began to read it. It was a slim thing — not an imposing book of philosophy, like so many — and had been translated from Daroan, awkward and limping at points. A scholar had prefaced it — explained that it was the wisdom of a man who had left the chains of this life under a bodhi tree, reached enlightenment… He read it three times. He willed it to make sense. He grew angry at it — hated it at some points — often did not understand it — scoffed at it, threw it down only to pick it up again late at night, when he could not sleep — told Ylsa he simply did not get it — but she elucidated where things grew dense, provided alternative translations, encouraged him, gently, not to give up, to try. 'All suffering is the result of the Self.' Ah, he’d laughed at that! Grown enraged! For who had caused his suffering, but his Master? It was Alloces’ fault; all of it was his fault — to be retroactively cast as the villain set fire to his anger, made him snap it closed right then. “Load of horse shite,” he’d hissed through his teeth. The Daroans and their dense, mystic prose, piss on it… But he tried. Between scrubbing his floors and sweeping dead leaves and repairing the broken windows, he tried. He did as Ylsa encouraged him — locked the door to his study and sat on a cushion, arranged himself into a wretched tangle of limbs, and tried to do as she — and that rambling bother of an author — said. Sit with yourself. Focus on your breathing. Do not judge yourself — simply let what thoughts come be. Acknowledge them — and then let them go. For thoughts come and go — ebb and wane — they contradict themselves — they are fickle. No matter how painful, how consuming, they pass. Return to your breathing, the anchor. He tried. His back hurt. His knees felt odd and stiff in that position, and he felt utterly stupid with his brows furrowed, eyes half-closed, woodgrain swimming in his vision. For the first minute he tried in earnest. Then the second. By the third his mind was already wandering off like an unwatched child — he tugged it back to no avail, squirming uncomfortably on the cushion. By the fourth he grew frustrated with himself. By the fifth his back tingled, nerves crawling with boredom. A laundry list of things to do assaulted him. A hundred milling, buzzing thoughts. I have to feed the cats, clean out the rest of the mildew in my room, fix the balcony… piss on this shite, I’m busy… I have better things to do… where did I put those books? I need to arrange my library. Shite, my library. Did I remember those seals? I kept a catalogue, where is the catalogue, I need to make sure no one made off with— Anxiety racked him. Images of the Fae popped up, unbidden — black eyes — faces — thundering hoofbeats — his mind flashed to the garish red of flowers and dead — no, no! — Nemetona — Octavian, his throat slashed to the bone — He launched up from the cushion, kicking it across the room. Piss on this. Wiping his face, the necromancer shook out his shoulders, stomping to the door and wrenching it open. It banged loudly on his hinges, and he shouted some angry thing at Scathach being in the way in the hall before locking himself in his room, scrubbing the floor like a mad maid. *** He apologized later, of course. He found he had to apologize often, to everyone, it seemed — felt so miserable, like such an angry, wicked creature; gave her an offering of cake and coffee, but really, did it matter? As though gifts made things better — as though gifts and money could balm things he’d done to people, the way they flinched at him, the way they tip toed around his temper and foul moods like they feared him. No, the damage had been done. It hurt him deeply, a pike through his ribs. I don’t want to be a monster. He slept in his study at night because his room was too damaged; the balcony doors had blasted open, let in lashing rains, and much of the floor was sodden and heavy with mildew and water stains—the waterlogged furniture had to be thrown out, as they’d decayed — his old mattress was stained yellow with the elements and unsalvageable, and for the most part his room stood as barren as the day he’d moved in. He almost wanted to abandon it entirely, lock it up and forget about it; nothing good had passed there, except perhaps the times he’d slept with Bast — otherwise it was a nightmare fugue of memories. The bloodstains in the corner… a broken mirror… spewing vomit into a bucket… being fucked like a whore by the third stranger he’d met in a week… trying to kill himself, waking up in a pool of his own offal… jumping off the balcony and into the hydrangeas… smoking on the foot of his bed and hallucinating wildly, slapping at bugs on his skin and whipping around only to find no one there… so many nights of nearly drinking himself to death... nightmare after nightmare after nightmare… It was fitting that it had become the most decayed room in the house. After all, hadn’t it always been? Now it simply matched the events that passed. He felt uncomfortable when he was alone in there, as if a hundred bloodthirsty phantoms bristled in the air, waiting in the corners. At points the work of revamping it felt too much. He simply wanted to crumple, melt into the floorplanks, live in the nest he’d made for himself in his study. It was not so disagreeable. The smell of books comforted him — the mahogany shelves had survived, mercifully, along with his rugs and some of his armchairs — and much of his collection was untouched. He’d set up a mattress in the corner, populated with a mountain of Ashokan cushions and messy bedsheets, awkward but not terribly uncomfortable. The cats liked to sleep with him, perhaps enticed by how low it was to the ground, and he awoke to the sound of motor purrs, nose tickling with hair. In the morning the sun filtered through the large windows, slipping over the table and up to the shelves, dancing with motes as it illuminated the spines of his many books. It was warm, comforting, felt safe… He had explained his dilemma to Bast as best as he could, but it came out in awkward, stammering phrases, bumping into walls and eventually rounding back to an understatement. I simply... have a lot of bad memories in here, he mumbled. I’d like things to be different, this time. Why donchae move tae the study, then, an’ move yer books into here? No, no, the light would be terrible… I’d lose my eyesight trying to read in there. And I can’t put a bath in the study… Repaint it, meybbe? Bast had supplied helpfully, when he stood paralyzed with anxiety in his own room. Yes, the necromancer agreed. But what? Whass yer favorite color? He looked at her incredulously for a moment, eyebrow arching — then lost the facade, bursting into laughter. Okeh, okeh! He felt her fist on his biceps, laughed the more for it. I’m not painting it green. Why no’? Study’s already green. Blue, maybe, blue… do you like blue? Or should it be a light color — white? That might let the space breathe a bit, but it can be such a dreadfully boring color. Oh, aye. Wha’ever tickles yer pickle. He could tell he was losing her. She didn’t much care for interior decorating, or all his neurotic domesticity. She wiped her hands on doilies, for all the unholy things… He sighed. I’ll think on it, I suppose. You okeh? Her tiny hand caught his as he made the motion to close the door, soft and warm. He stared at her doeish eyes, her thick brows crinkled in the beginnings of concern. Phaedrus squeezed her hand, swallowing. I’m okay, he promised, and hugged her, and then he was. *** He’d cleared out the guest room for Scathach, made it into a living space proper — not the cluttered storage closet it had become. That left him with an assortment of shite to tangle with; after Scathach had sorted through everything and decided what she wanted to keep in her room, he’d sorted the rest of it into piles. His magpie heart wanted to simply hoard everything and banish it to the basement, but he was convinced out of it. Yeh don’t even like those bonnie-cheeked cherubs an’ a’. I know, I hate them. Wretched paintings. Why would yeh keep somethin’ yeh hate? I don’t know, he stammered. Because — well, someone might want? Them—? I could sell them, I don’t know— it might be useful— How? I don’t know. Listen— Yeh dinnae? Then why keep it? He threw his hands up, blustering something, but really, he had no answer. Eventually he relented under her crossed arms and look, fidgeting awkwardly, sorting things into sell and toss piles, constantly having his hand swatted away from useless junk. Yeh really got tae let things go, Malarkey, Bast sighed, and she was right; she was always right. *** And he did feel better now that all that shite was gone — realized he hadn’t even missed it, certainly wouldn’t now, with a sack of gold jingling at his side. The Sotoans may not have had a shred of coin, but the Angkarians did — and the Morrimians with a taste for southern art and sophistication — not that he needed money, but he’d been surprised at how much all that shite had fetched. Well, it helped to have a silver tongue. He could turn the humblest spoon into a priceless family heirloom. He used it to buy lumber, plaster and paint, fresh furniture for his room and Scathach’s besides— bath things — missing pots, pans, plates, cups — spent a day carving a portal into his basement floor and phased to the markets of Mondragon, bringing back a heap of food. Only some of it crumbled and blackened en route, and he excitedly made notes on the progress. He’d skipped off here and there — puzzled at his books — had proposed the idea to the Mystic Occult — static portals are faster than ships — yes, they’re volatile, sometimes goods go sour, but with enough sustained energy and anchoring sister portals… consider a communication and trade route of that caliber... — here’s a diagram, good day, I have to feed my cats. He knew it was possible. The Bayt Ifrit was full of such portals — doors that led eternally to certain fields, mountains, harrowing parts of the desert, all powered by eldritch, space-warping magics. The mechanism of it was lost to him — perhaps lost to the sands entirely — but he knew the mad architect Raileh had devised it, or at least posited it, as he’d designed the shifting halls and memory-based paths… Sometimes, if he thought on it clinically — if he excised himself from the picture — tried to look at it as an uninvolved scholar — he could see the use in going back there, mentally; he could see the potential for the magics that had been studied there, and abused so cruelly; he could look into himself, and see the things he knew, and mold them to better uses. I can wrench souls out of living bodies. I can tear portals to the nether, and call forth bloodthirsty beasts. I can raise the dead. Bind their souls. Warp space, warp the forces around us. I can possess people, bend them to my will. I can obliterate their minds. I can give someone immortality. I know all these things… I know, I know… I cannot un-know them. There was the person that was Phaedrus — and there was the person that was Malakar — and there were all the people he had been, lined up behind him; a scared, fleeing child; an illiterate; an itinerant; an inn-boy; a shortlived husband; a rake. What am I now, I wonder? He was changing. This much he knew. And how could he not? How could he possibly remain the same? He had been wrong, wrong all along — chasing a fabrication —some inherent image of himself that did not exist, and never had — there was no untarnished, pure self, no Phaedrus before the Conquest or Phaedrus before liquor, no Malakar before Alloces or Malakar without Alloces. There was only a collection of experiences. A collection of changes. And no version of himself was the right one, inferior than the previous. There was one thing, if any, that resonated with him in Ylsa’s book. If you ask a man, ‘who are you,’ what does he say? He may give a name. But a man is not a name. He may give his beliefs and his thoughts, but thoughts come and go, beliefs change with the winds. He may give his profession, but a man is not a baker, or a warrior, or a priest. He may give his age, but there is never a moment he is the same age. Nor is there ever a moment his body remains the same — what self is he? The child? The adolescent? The man? The old man to be? The answer is: he is none of these things. He is the being, the spark of life. He is the observer who says ‘I have this name. I look like this, at this present moment. I think this. I feel that. I have this present occupation.’ The body and mind are transitory — illusory — a man is not his thoughts or his body, but the soul that thinks them, that feels them. This never changes. It cannot be hurt. It cannot be destroyed. That is the Self, the seated one, the observer. Understand this: understand that we cannot have peace if we believe our thoughts to be ourselves, our bodies, our carnal urges; they are fleeting motes, and to believe them to be true is the cause of our sufferings... *** “A philosopher’s stone.” Again, he touched his heart — where it had been, had to get comfortable with the idea of himself, the physicality of his make. To stop judging it, and merely accept it as it was. It was too exhausting to hate himself anymore. And finally. A soul. He did not say it aloud, but thought it, staring at himself with a crumpled brow. “That is the formulation for a homunculus, a Being of artificial Life.” He finished the recitation — like learned Scripture, a verse he kept going back to over and over again, as though Alloces had written the word of god. There is none like you, Malakar, that rumbling voice kept whispering, whispering, turned over and over again in his memory. You’re wrong, his mind snapped. There are endless like me. Every creature with a glint of consciousness is like me. I have a soul — they have a soul — we all have a soul — what does the body matter, Master? No, no, not Master, not Master. Alloces. No. “Alhasan,” he hissed at the mirror, correcting himself. As if his reflection were another being he was having a conversation with — a proxy for the drow, some messenger to the afterlife that would carry on his anger. “Not Alloces. Your name, your true name, it’s Alhasan.” His lips pressed. For a moment his head felt terribly fuzzy — divorced from the creature in the mirror; he stared at someone else. “You named me. Malakar ibn-Alhasan. Son of Alhasan. You gave me that, you called me son, and look what you did to me.” He was talking to himself loudly in old Ashokan. “Alhasan ibn-Alim.” Through endless dredging, he’d uncovered it. Discovered it in bits, pieces, shards — from some fragments of memories, hints in dreams and notes, blood-sealed tomes, a seed of truth buried deeply in himself — a secret the drow had left him with, whether intentionally or unintentionally, he did not know. And it gave him power. For his Master had not been born Alloces. He had not been born that lich, that nightmare-creature with a sunken chest and peeling black skin, clouded eyes and gnarled hands, that monster who could do anything and everything and was the beginning of his world and the end. "Son of a vizier. Bastard son,” he corrected, and somehow that humbled Master — cut his heels and left him at the knees, turned him into a person he could stand over. “You were nothing to your father.” He did not know if it was true — but surely? Surely yes, for who cared for their bastard children? One needn’t look farther than poor Scathach, all the lost urchins of the world— “You did not know the meaning of fatherhood. You have no right to use that word: son. You have no right to have ever thought of me as yours. You are not worthy of me." A slag of iron burnt his throat. He hit the mirror impotently, face twisted at the creature in it, watching it jump and chatter in the glass. “You are nothing.” Heaved. “All your work came to nothing. Your life came to nothing, Alhasan ibn-Alim. All the sacrifices you made. Nothing. The family you left behind. Nothing. You—are—nothing.” And I am something. He shivered in the draft from the window, looked at the sopping, half-dry wreck in the mirror. I am something. He did not feel that way. Perhaps he never would, not fully. But there it was: a tiny, tremulous voice that wanted better, sprouting in the decay. A whisper in the stillness of his chest. The necromancer folded his arms over the gruesome wound, frowned at himself. You are nothing, Nasir al-Din had howled at him; You are weak, Malakar. You live and die by the passions of an instant, his Master had told him; A maggot, a worm, a Thing, a beast— how many variations of inhumanity had Charon hurled upon him? An abomination, Antenoch had sneered. When he disobeyed, and his Master’s will had bowled him over — crushed him, obliterated him — tossed him like a rag doll — when those moonlit eyes closed in like jaws, left him writhing and screaming on the floor, his nerves alive with too much pain to stay conscious — the thunderous, rolling fury of Alloces’ voice— You dare defy me, Malakar? And he would scream, and weep, till the day he stopped, till the day he no longer wanted to give him that satisfaction— You are nothing. You know nothing. Displease me again and I will crush you, I will destroy you— —you are nothing, — and ah, his blood had splattered the floor — he remembered the pain of cold sandstone — nothing, and he could not breathe, punched of all air by psionic blows — —maggot— for there were times when Master went unhinged — when things just slipped from his fingers — when he felt closed in on all sides by enemies — when he felt he, his only ‘ally,’ was among those ranks — — ah, because no one knew his brutality, no one knew the rage in those gnarled fists and the hatred in those rheumy eyes; everyone else only saw a wise old man, cold, collected, almost grandfatherly — —splatter — — oh no, no, they did not know; how could they know? — he pinned him to the walls once, let the constructs after him — —nothing—— he remembered the wound that gouged his face open — —you want to be human? you want to pursue their frivolities? — Blood had burst off his lips, his nose mutilated; whatever semblance of humanity his face possessed had gone now, slashed away — —go on, show them your face — He wanted to die, knew he couldn’t, so he went far away instead — —I gave you life, and this is how you repay me? — But, his heart moaned, cried, I did not ask for Life. I did not want Life. It was not my choice, and if it was, I would not be… —defy me again, creature — Creature, thing — that’s what he was when he was bad, though in his heart of hearts he knew he always was to his Master, as he always was to Nasir al-Din and to frightened sorcerers and Antenoch — —defy me again — surely he thought he’d die that night. But he did not. Master left his broken body behind — left him to mewl and hiccough and rasp pathetically into the sandstone, gurgling into a spreading pool of his own blood — eyes unfocused on a piece of his nose lying surreally some paces from him — tried to move his numb lips and they flapped open in ribbons — the deactivated construct loomed over his body, unmoving, mocking him. He did die, in a way — after that, nothing mattered, not truly — after that he was no longer himself; the fracture burst open entirely, and he disappeared. That’s when memory left him. That’s when things went mad — blurs of killings — nothing made sense — large patches of ink blotted his senses, up to when he killed Nasir al-Din, and fell gruesomely ill, and then — then—? The birds were chirruping. He was still staring at the thing in the mirror — that old, sad thing, the years written in its eyes, in the curve of its mouth, its bruised old bones and painful scars, in the things it had seen and the things it had done, but oh — it had tried to care for itself in the only way it knew how — and perhaps it was imperfect, but who could blame it? — it had no one but itself to help it — it had no one but itself to raise it — it was its own father, its own mother, its own siblings and family — it had suffered so very much, and he felt so sorry for it, felt his heart well with compassion for the creature that had been denied it for so long, that had shown up in his home and crumpled at his feet for help. Nobody helped you when they should have, he acknowledged. Nobody loved you, when you should have been loved. Everyone failed you. Everyone. And so what? Why can’t you be these things for yourself? Why can’t you love yourself? Why can’t you help yourself? I don’t know, that fractured thing said, him, not-him, and its voice broke. I don’t know. Of a sudden it felt absurd to have denied himself love — to have cheated himself of compassion — to hate himself so much, when all the things he pined for were with him; like a starving, dying man who never realized there was food in his pockets. He reflected on this, frowned. Thought on the things he had always wanted. A mother and a father that loved him. Who never beat him. To have sprouted from a safe, happy, warm place — a stable place — to have been helped up in life, gently, easily, assured that there was no mistake too great that would make them hate him. To know there were people in the world that would never cast him out, never forsake him, that would be a spring of unconditional affection. What madness! Impossibility! A child’s dream. He could almost laugh at the maudlin nature of it, but still, it was his. Dreams were free: dreams had kept him alive when reality hoped to kill him. He’d never have it for himself. Not in the manner he imagined. But he could give it to another. He could be that for them, if he tried… he could crush out that cycle of sickness, pull it from the root, protect someone from what had been done to him. Perhaps that’s the only thing one could truly do with pain: to never repeat it, never inflict it on another. Alhasan’s words floated back to him — an endless chastisement he loved to remind him of when he got too many ideas — when he chafed against his collar, tugged Master’s leash too far — oh, yes, he liked to remind him of his nothingness, of his stupidity and his naivety, his ingratitude and his cruelty. He liked to punish him for the sin of himself. You are a blade of grass in a field. A single grain in the dunes. Nothing, Malakar, nothing, do you understand-- Oh, he understood. He understood very well now, flipped the coin and saw its other face. After all these years he finally had an answer. A gale could bowl over a field — lighting could strike above — the heavens could open in a downpour — all the cruelty of the elements could unleash themselves, but even their combined fury would only bend a blade of grass. Never break it. And what is a grain indeed, Master? A rock that has been pulverized, beaten to powder, but remains a small version of itself. A tiny rock part of the sand seas that swallow kingdoms. And every grain has a razor edge -- every grain, given enough time, bites into monuments, towering cliffsides, and wears them to nothing… So yes. I am a blade of grass in a field. I am a single grain in the dunes. But they are not nothing. He sat on the edge of the tub and thought till his rump went numb — he’d always spent long in the bath, but this was a new record. At length he stood and wiped his hands over his chest; the flesh knitted back together behind his trailing fingers, disappeared in a white tide. He toweled himself off, pulled on a green tunic and taupe trousers -- looked wearily towards the door, creaking it open. A long slat of light crept down the floorplanks of his room, up the warm, Ashokan-orange walls. Idly, he trailed a hand along the plaster, and it came away a tad dusty. Blinking at it, the necromancer wiped it away on his pants, tottering towards the balcony instead. He creaked the doors all the way open and took a deep breath of the summer air, bracing his hands against the stone. I am so tired. The thought had occurred to him, over and over again; he could sleep for a hundred years and never feel rested. Frowning, Phaedrus propped his cheek on his hand, eyes roving around the neighborhood. It was barren, still, empty -- someone had moved in next door, but to the pain of his heart, it was not Leda; they were an odd, furtive stranger that did not belong, and they did not speak to him. Else the rest of the houses stood cold and empty, some looted, some so overgrown with vines that it was hard to imagine they existed at all. What happened to my city? He thought for the hundredth time, swallowing. What happened… It would take a long time to heal. But things did heal -- even though scars and phantom pain still lingered, even though the flesh still felt them, they were no longer mortal wounds. He had not bled out -- nor would Madrid, Madrid with its proud people, slowly trickling back into their homes and squares, setting up meager markets and hammering wood, trying to grow crops and raising old statues again, despite it all. Ylsa had not abandoned it. Aniketos had not abandoned it. All the Councilors still stood and attended to the matters of state, for Soto was not doomed. The sunlight was warm, drowsy. He found his mind oddly still, turgid, full of the chirrup of birds and faint buzz of insects, opening its windows to the quiet. For a moment he did not think. For a moment that was all there was — all he was — the feeling of sunlight and wind, the chirrup of birds and humming bees, tutia and clay, oxen blood and sulfur, the stone under his hands and the planks under his feet, his slow inhales and his quiet exhales, a living, breathing creature. A man. |
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