{ liminal } sarpedons vs. 2 harpies - day 2
Oct 22, 2016 18:32:00 GMT -5
Post by lucius branwen / 10 — fox on Oct 22, 2016 18:32:00 GMT -5
[presto]
[/presto]s a c h a d u p o n tLike all cyclic things, you come back to the same places in solar rotations – to your house, the sky, the same petrol blues left on your hands, meeting at the curve of your wrists where you find an arrhythmic pulse still searching. Loneliness is an acquired taste,
something to get used to again.
(And again.)
You have learned a pain that recycles itself, calcifies caves, and mends the bones of its ache over time. Because it does not hurt to grow into someone the same way it hurts to regrow into yourself, to break and burn the limbs formed around a person who is no longer there. A skeleton molded from your mother, and your father, and the sunlight on the wall supports you, full of holes and hollows.
She tilts her chin up and looks at the sky. “How dangerous to have someone to lose,” she says.
Maybe that is loss – filling in the missing places that you can only grow around, shelter the space of what once was, safeguard a consecrated emptiness.
There is a danger in giving yourself away like this. You have echoing bones, scars on your hands from holding the burn of the sun, and a heart that is so very, very tired – and maybe you should be more careful this time. But you’ve never found much value in yourself.
You are just a boy. Born without anything but dreamy afternoons and a simple insignificance.
You look at her – a fist, an axe, a premonition of loss;
you are scared, but –
“Okay.”
Okay.
Because this is it.
Because you cannot ask more of her, than you have in return. Because you have never been careful enough to yourself.
You look upwards now, slow your steps towards the mountains as an anthem sounds. They make the patterns in the sky, five starlit faces in the place of your constellations. And you never knew them like that. Just as blood and movement, the training center and the blur of the cornucopia. As earthly things melding into the ground.
They disappear to the dirt.
You wonder if he is watching.
It’s reflex, you suppose. But you wake up before the sun.
You worked mornings, guided by the mellow glow of lamplight from underneath your eyelids. You would wake up to Seve climbing underneath the covers, to the sound of birds and refineries by the water, to a District that made your transit epoch of circles – but never to the sun had that only ever risen for four hours during afternoons.
There is a faint taste of dust in your mouth, the chaos settling, the aftermath of thirst and hunger. The fabric of the backpack pushes into your cheek, leaving an imprint of the texture in skin as you rise to the coolness of some kind of six a.m., the sounds of daybreak all wrong because there is nothing but wind in your ears.
You watch the sun rise, a line of gold against the uneven ground. The horizon milks blue from the sky, stars faint and vanishing before the hazy yellows. And you wear the light in your hair, on your face, your eyelids for a second before you remember that this is not home.
A waterlogged head and a preemptive missing of what is left, and that is all.
Sleepily, you rub your eyes.
The light changes, the dark of a shadow falls at the ground before you. You watch it swirl, dance, grow larger across the earth like running ink, a blot that bubbles from the broken pens he had thrown away by the weeks, colour ruining the things he'd written on the crumpled paper you would never read.
“Ryan. Wake up.” It’s a whisper, a hand on her shoulder. Because you can’t be sure until you look, but –
You have bad luck in your hands. Your gaze turns upwards at a zenith that’s still indigo. A feather, light and pretty, falls at your feet.
“Ryan, I think –”
You think nothing when you hear the mutt shriek, your hands closing instinctually around a knife. Like cyclic things –
But you have a beginning and an end.
something to get used to again.
(And again.)
You have learned a pain that recycles itself, calcifies caves, and mends the bones of its ache over time. Because it does not hurt to grow into someone the same way it hurts to regrow into yourself, to break and burn the limbs formed around a person who is no longer there. A skeleton molded from your mother, and your father, and the sunlight on the wall supports you, full of holes and hollows.
She tilts her chin up and looks at the sky. “How dangerous to have someone to lose,” she says.
Maybe that is loss – filling in the missing places that you can only grow around, shelter the space of what once was, safeguard a consecrated emptiness.
There is a danger in giving yourself away like this. You have echoing bones, scars on your hands from holding the burn of the sun, and a heart that is so very, very tired – and maybe you should be more careful this time. But you’ve never found much value in yourself.
You are just a boy. Born without anything but dreamy afternoons and a simple insignificance.
You look at her – a fist, an axe, a premonition of loss;
you are scared, but –
“Okay.”
Okay.
“Good.”
Because this is it.
Because you cannot ask more of her, than you have in return. Because you have never been careful enough to yourself.
You look upwards now, slow your steps towards the mountains as an anthem sounds. They make the patterns in the sky, five starlit faces in the place of your constellations. And you never knew them like that. Just as blood and movement, the training center and the blur of the cornucopia. As earthly things melding into the ground.
They disappear to the dirt.
You wonder if he is watching.
{ x }
“Ryan.”
It’s reflex, you suppose. But you wake up before the sun.
You worked mornings, guided by the mellow glow of lamplight from underneath your eyelids. You would wake up to Seve climbing underneath the covers, to the sound of birds and refineries by the water, to a District that made your transit epoch of circles – but never to the sun had that only ever risen for four hours during afternoons.
There is a faint taste of dust in your mouth, the chaos settling, the aftermath of thirst and hunger. The fabric of the backpack pushes into your cheek, leaving an imprint of the texture in skin as you rise to the coolness of some kind of six a.m., the sounds of daybreak all wrong because there is nothing but wind in your ears.
You watch the sun rise, a line of gold against the uneven ground. The horizon milks blue from the sky, stars faint and vanishing before the hazy yellows. And you wear the light in your hair, on your face, your eyelids for a second before you remember that this is not home.
A waterlogged head and a preemptive missing of what is left, and that is all.
Sleepily, you rub your eyes.
The light changes, the dark of a shadow falls at the ground before you. You watch it swirl, dance, grow larger across the earth like running ink, a blot that bubbles from the broken pens he had thrown away by the weeks, colour ruining the things he'd written on the crumpled paper you would never read.
“Ryan. Wake up.” It’s a whisper, a hand on her shoulder. Because you can’t be sure until you look, but –
You have bad luck in your hands. Your gaze turns upwards at a zenith that’s still indigo. A feather, light and pretty, falls at your feet.
“Ryan, I think –”
You think nothing when you hear the mutt shriek, your hands closing instinctually around a knife. Like cyclic things –
But you have a beginning and an end.
[sacha attacks harpy no.1, throwing knife]
is1gvrNlthrowing knife
[9050 -- Knife in Calf -- 6.0 damage]
throwing knife
![D6f Carmen Cantelou [aza] Avatar](https://64.media.tumblr.com/2ceaa2e8a0381d01e1f00b9185fef0d9/a3e6c2570227db20-78/s540x810/2789744cb50b2a75b6d37d3e72599aed88e7bfb6.jpg)
[/presto]r y a n s u m m i t
