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THE WAR
in the end, there is only so much you can do before you become part of the wreckage, and you have done nothing.
so let yourself be buried, make yourself the hollowed out shell; your ribcage like the looming body of a church, a pyre in the darkness made of your blood, your body like the body of millions.
in the end, there are only so many times you can walk past the burnt out building before your eyes reflect the ashes, only so many times you can share the dirt with the dogs before becoming one yourself. you do not want to become anything. you do not want to become anything, so you become the burnt out building, the hollow shell, the starving dog. you become nothing at all. let's set the scene, one last time.
the tragedy: you have never known the building before it burnt out. you have never seen a street not run through with blood. you have never been anything but the byproduct of a thing you haven't been taught the word for.
the comedy: you are all of it, everywhere, forever, and the pain does not make way for joy but becomes unrecognizable from it, and you have known laughter and purpose, and you get to know it again, in the streets ran through with blood or the shadow of a fire. you are the war, and the war may never take this from you: the laughter that springs from nothing at all.
so you become part of the wreckage. an icarus that never flew dreaming himself wings by sticking sooty hands into the pockets of soldiers and nobles and whoever dares draw near. you take as much as was taken, and you never quite learn how to give.
you become part of the wreckage. the dogs bite but you bite harder, more vicious, more bloody; you will yourself to not be afraid so often the shaking becomes second nature, infinite.
you become part of the wreckage. you fight fire with fire, raze yourself to the ground daily to survive, bite harder, fight harder, run faster. and then, in the end, you are a wreckage in an era of construction. no one ever taught you this – shaping clay into bricks into a house that used to be burnt out, raising a church from hollow wooden frames, turning your ribcage back into a thing that houses a heart. you remain the war.
THE FIRE
a royal decree, your mother had said, face blank like fresh paint, against the traitors of the war.
you did not yet know what it means to be a traitor, but you knew that sometimes a feeding hand gets bitten still by rabid dogs, and you knew that your mother has taken to covering her horns with scraps of fabric that pass as a wimple because you are poor, and you knew you were different.
this is what it means to be a traitor: they bring them up onto a stage, town square, midday; read the charges, levying war against the mighty kingdom of Soluna and the crown, adhering to the Enemy, providing them with aid and comfort, the crowd boos, then cheers at the sight of the executioners. there are ten pyres, seven men and three women, and they will burn, and the crowd will cheer, and you will be an orphan.
this is what it means to be a traitor: there is no smell quite like burning. there is no sound quite like the scream of someone who knows they are dying. the crowd cheers, because tieflings are warmongers and demons and devil children, treasonous and ungrateful, and this is the lesson they must learn.
tieflings are the war, you are the war, you are very small and very alone in this crowd of men all screaming for blood, you are the war, you are the war, you are the war.
THE OLD HOUSE
and then your heart is like a candle wick already burnt through, and you have never known how to turn your grief from stones into wings, so you must drown in it.
you have never known grief like this.
laying yourself out on the wooden boards row upon row like gravestones in the night, you are ready to be devastated, to devastate, what is love but violence?
and then the war is over but you are still the war, and the fire has burnt out but you are still the flames, you are the body of a hollow thing, you are emptied.
and then you still leave space for two people beside you, shrink into a shape that cannot stand alone like a cathedral unsupported. and the war that lives inside makes your body a trench full of mud and your heart the tripwire to bring it all down, you are the war, forever and always, you are the war.
and then, when you put your fist through the teeth of some kid trying to steal the shoes right off your feet, it feels like an act of love. it feels like watching the flames dance over the ashes of people you've loved, and it feels like turning your back and walking away.
so you take him back home with you.
he says his name is ro, through bloodied teeth and a smile that must ache, sitting there at your kitchen table, taking up two people's space. for a second, you forget to be the war, like it is not a part of you at all.
aching still, you cannot fill the hole dug out of you with bombshells much longer, now that there is someone else to care for. burnt down buildings do not make for great shelter.
so now it is just you and ro here, stuck with the grief neither of you know what to do with – it shakes your whole body and freezes ro right down to his bones, and there is a war still thundering inside the well of your hearts, a darkness too cruel to face.
you are both just boys in a house playing roles not cut out for you.
but ro is like nothing you've ever known, and he makes you forget that you are flame and war and hollow, because you are no longer; he fills the empty cavern of your ribcage with a sweet humming song, heartbeat of love.
he fills you with a light that burns righteous and good.
(you dream of him with blood in his mouth and empty eyes and afterward do not know what to do with yourself. you dream of him collapsed under that hollow building and burning in an empty marketplace and becoming war, like you.
and somewhere deep inside you, where love is violence and death is endless, you are very afraid.)
ro keeps you tethered. you are on the edge, running on the tightrope, and ro holds your hand over an endless abyss where your dreams are real and he keeps spitting blood in your face, but the future is nothing but a blank darkness, and this place has only ever made you feel afraid.
you don't know anything but fear and ro's hand in yours and the walls of this house, charred with the fire-bright hurting of your thoughts.
so ro does not let go of your hand as he leads you out of the door he has carved into your prison.
in the light, you become–
THE KNIFE
someone who loves me wouldn't do this to me, repeat it, if he loved me he would not do this to me, and yet here you are with blood in your hair and ro red-handed like some unflinching executioner – the whole, horrible truth of it you already know; sometimes intimacy and violence are much the same. sometimes they are not to be distinguished at all.
and mustn't you love him, still? to ask this of him, to have him comply?
you must, for it to mean something. so goes the prophecy of your doom: you must love him, for it to matter; the violence only ever a byproduct. because if it were not for love it would be for nothing at all.
the golden thread fate spins is crueler yet.
it makes it so easy, to hurt strangers. taking a knife and tearing apart what keeps a man alive is so damningly easy, but love cannot be, shouldn't be, hasn't ever been, for you, for him, for anyone that calls violence an art form and intimacy a threat.
it's hard. it's the resistance of tissue and marrow against a butcher's knife, trembling hands and agony, it is agony like nothing else, and it hurts you both forever because it has too.
it is ro red-handed, it is you with bloodied hair, it is blood that will never wash off, it is violence that does not come easy.
but it is love, or it is nothing at all. an easy choice, then, here in the sodden and desperate darkness, before your own gallows. it is death then, too.
because you have always known you'd die with your parents, with the fire, with the violence that haunts; because a royal decree is just that, and you have never been able to stop being the war.
so the knife is bloody in ro's hand, his reflection in it old and haunted and laughing at his readiness, his hands so accustomed to hurting others that they did not have the decency to shake, that the movements came to him without any thought, the way he kept trying to look into your eyes.
this act of love, the eternal unkindness of it repeating ad infinitum; how could you ever ask this of him? how could you ask, so vulnerable and open, for ro to tear you apart?
rhetorical questions, of course. the answer is right in front of you.
you give him this, though – not a single tear like blessed acknowledgement on your face, biting down on cloth and wood with the stillborn screams clogging your throat, not an ounce of regret shown openly on the suddenly unfamiliar landscape of your face.
you give him deniability, repentance, the easy way out; still thinking, someone who loves me wouldn't do this to me, knowing ro repeats the same words to himself, again and again.
in a way, both of you are right. in a way, both of you are very wrong.
and still, you both did it.
THE STONES
you push your hands against his throat, push your hands against every part of his body vulnerable, smear red fingers over pale skin like the bleeding beauty of a sunrise and do not permit yourself the simple agony of watching his face.
oh, his face, the desolate lines of it, the ugly rawness that splits it open so rarely, you cannot watch his face, where blood runs from his mouth, where, if you checked, his eyelashes were softened by tears.
instead you push your hands against his throat, his stomach, and think, gods above, do not have him leave me, like you are still allowed the respite of prayer.
his black hair hangs over his eyes like it always does, like he is merely sleeping, here in the desolation of your mistakes – like he could blink open his eyes any second, any second now, and absolve you of this; your tears like silver coins, passage fare.
(the blood on your hands is something you can't lose, spoke had said once, like a prophecy, you can only ever choose whose it will be.)
so here you are, with the blood on your hands, here you are, the sinner, repentant, the angel fallen, with blood you never chose running through the ridges of your hands right into the cracks of your heart.
and all wisdom is brought kneeling in this moment, in the primal anguish of loss; you have never known anything like it, like the severing of a bond unbroken in life, like the scream torn out of you, as if it were your death playing out beneath the sun-gold banners.
tell the truth, child of anguish, now that it is over; you knew he was dead since he fell, even as you put his head in your lap and brushed the dirt away from his eyes, you knew he was dead.
but the great injustice of it felled you too, and you were halfway to insanity with his blood soaked into your pants, so you pretended, and pretended even longer still.
there will be no songs sung for him, no gravestone carved in his name, and no word spoken in defense of his honor.
it will be you, carrying his body and legacy and name forward. it will be you.
but for now, you pretend, and the wind in his hair makes it look like he is breathing.
fresh dirt.
spoke buries his hands in the dirt like he's trying to uproot the earth, and you want to tell him to be gentle without having to say it at all, and you want him to need this as much as you do, as selfishly as you do – you want him to hate it every step of the way like it is his punishment right alongside yours.
maybe that is the problem with you. you want and want and want, nothing ever more than this, because the song in your blood has fallen silent and no echo calls to your heartbeat anymore, and what you have buried in the darkness can never be regained like this.
because you are alone, and scared, and very young and small in the face of the things you've done. will do, now.
you can't be anywhere but together. that's the problem with you.
spoke digs his fingers into the dirt and mumbles something under his breath and everything–
stops.
the wind halts, the clouds halt, the birds halt, the grass around spoke begins to wither and blacken and the fine little hairs on your arm raise and raise and raise and–
Mapicc doesn't wake up.
One does not wake up from death. Instead, he is flung open-eyed and helpless, back into the brick wall of reality, choked back into life still halfway buried.
It is like this – the road not taken stretches out before him like the wine-dark sea, and being alive is a vision come too early, too late. It is an ill-fitting mantle, now, the fact his chest raises.
The fact that there is anything at all.
Such was the uncanny mine of souls, where a blind gray lake hugged the emptiness, and Mapicc, set to rot, had already loosened. Such was death, endless and distant, nothing besides everything, a whole world erected in mourning.
So Mapicc doesn't wake, because dead people do not wake up, and he is dead, dying, distant like a memory – steady, his heart beats still, his eyes still clear.
The whole great tragedy of it summarizes in the simple fact that now, the blood pumping through his veins sings of fear, like lyre song echoed, perpetually fear, even when Ro's eyes meet his and soften like fresh dirt, and there should be relief, risen like a naiad from the depths.
There should be so much, but it is unreadable to Mapicc now, hieroglyphic and blurring, understanding not quite returned and not quite gone.
Mapicc has died, and now, twice revived from the same death, he is no longer Mapicc at all.
That is the tragedy.