slow burns . chapter two: seers and artists [Callum]

slow burns . chapter two: seers and artists [Callum] Jun 27, 2020 10:05:56 GMT -5

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Post by pogue on Jun 27, 2020 10:05:56 GMT -5

C A L L U M

They’d laid her to rest with her arms crossed over her violin.

The alcohol slips smooth between his lips and he realizes that was the only promise to Kestrel Volant that he had been able to keep.

There’s a bottle shaking in the weak fingers of his right hand, and a flimsy memento to the girl who won’t stop looking up at the fading sky in his left. He gulps heavy now, sickened with the aftertaste of a swig and sore lips, chewed through and bloody and mingling with the taste of the wine that flows through them.

He’d torn the page from his journal as soon as the life floated from Kes’s body, forever put to rest on the red stage that had pooled beneath her. Curtains drawn, somewhere in the back of his mind he remembers that even without the dancer the show must go on-

and on-

and on the thump of a heartbeat in his chest he remembers the way Bird’s eyes had looked when he’d finally spoken to her again, venom staining his teeth and fired like arrows at his own ally.

”Is this what you wanted for your escape, Bird?”

He doesn’t remember what she had said in response, he had been half gone at that point. Kingdoms fight and kingdoms fall in the land of the damned, and when they’d finally sewn the lips of their stories shut it had brought with it the kind of dead silence Twelve only experienced during the harshest part of Winter. Ice and snow and fangs bared, clawing at his ally out of one part desperation and one part jealousy. At least she had gotten to choose her fate. He had thought, memories of his ally from Twelve’s hand parting the sea and her ascension to a position that should never have been usurped.

Him, he had been born into this world by a slip of paper clasped between bloody red fingernails, wrongful heir to a throne of rotting skulls, sentenced to a severed heart and a grisly death. From that same world he had been born again, chewed up and mangled and spit to stumble and rot in the dust of the eighty fifth arena.

Some kings can keep their heads and some are forced to lose them.

He’s on his way towards the latter as the wine roots itself into his system, and the sound of a heartbeat in his chest goes from a scream to a whisper. All at once it is as if the world blooms around and into him, gemstone stage he performs on pinching and burying itself into his skin, carving a permanent reminder that at any moment it is ready to turn from his stage to his coffin.

His vision drifts slightly, swaying with the wind of a wine bottle and he forces his mind to drift towards the note clenched within his grasp, vision following shortly after as it trudges through the alcohol that now warred within his system. He’s pressing shaking fingers into the note until it crinkles under the weight of his fingertips, bending slightly at the corner. She’d willed his life to be full of music, letters scrawled across the page of his journal still bleeding with the same hope and optimism that had flowed from her violin. Wish it could be filled with that, too. he thinks to himself.

But it is not, and all he can hear is the deafening silence around him, twisting and tumbling in his ears until it’s replaced with the scream of ringing bells and trumpets, a chorus for their own deaths. The ringing mixes with the occasional burp and gurgle that escapes from his mouth in between gulps of the alcohol, the same sins he is swallowing desperately attempting to claw their way back out and into the world. He burps as the note falls from his grasp, resting easy against the colorful gemstones beneath him.

Blink once and he sees Kestrel’s dying eyes looking at him, at bird and at the sky, tracing the lines of her own story as it rapidly approaches its end. Blink twice, blink three times and the face of another entertainer pierces his memory: Hellemine Cauchemar. Rumble and tumble and the way she’d captivated his own story that night in the Training Center, effortlessly making her way through the halls and his mind as she’d spoken to him.

From stage to solemn conversation, he can still see her eyebrows scrunching together in confusion when he told her their stories were already written. ”You’re not even going to try to write your own?”.

The words she’d scrawled within his journal had kept him up that night, soft embers flickering at the back of his mind. As he sits in the gemstones it goes from embers to a full flame, coursing through his brain and bringing flame to everything it touches. He doesn’t realize that his fingertips are carving their way through the page until it is ripped from its resting place, bending and flowing ever so slightly in the soft wind of the arena as he clenches it in his hand.

Sinners and saints dancing across stages of their own creation, as he looks at the two notes he realizes that both entertainers had predicted some form of a future, in one grisly way or another.

He buries Kestrel’s hope with the weight of Hellemine’s questions of his dead-end future, pointed letters and hearts above the i’s carving her words into his memory. Is it even worth anything? And he believes he has found the answer, laced between the lines of a story written for him. Flint against gemstone and the pages come alive for their final show, flames dance across the surface and the crackling cackling laughter of a fire fills his ears. Like a symphony, he thinks somewhere in the back of a foggy mind.

Perhaps his life was now full of music like Kes had hoped. Just, not the kind he enjoyed.

”You’re not even going to try to write your own?” Helle had asked him.

”No, I’m not.” Wine-laced words hang dead in the air around him, shaking legs too thin and heart too bruised to let him get to his feet.

I can’t. He thinks-

and the nothingness he sits in swallows him whole.

[ Thank you to d10f ekta ram // [earthling] and Stare for writing your stories in Callum’s journal. Much love!]