This darkness is thicker than darkness should be.
It coagulates like blood, and warms like wine, and is harsh bitterness instead of snow-flake sweetness. It lingers on my lips like threads of wire woven between the flesh and whiskers.
I cannot sing here. The words gather on my tongue. My throat is raw with the scratch of moth wings, and butterfly wings, and wasp stingers. My song, my words, my language, flutters in my form like magma dances beneath the brightness of a star. Each time, each time, every time, I try to open my mouth the wire threads grow thorns (and more thorns, and more thorns) until I am dripping silver rain.
My silver, my blood, the weak dregs of my light, do not brighten the darkness as they should. Nothing grows where they fall. There are no horses, no foals, no mountain peaks tickling my belly, no crowns rising on sunflower stalks to fall upon my brow.
The darkness reigns.
And if I am flying in it, another stitched together thing in the darkness, it is a movement that has no direction but agony. Somewhere a leopard is snarling, and wailing, and picking clean the bones of her future kills. I know she is there, my heart knows she is, but I cannot hear the wonder of her roars and taste the iron on the wind running through the ribcage of her kill.
I wonder if she is woven shut with wire and caught in a net of blackness as I am..
I wonder.
My feathers do not sing as I move though the darkness (am I moving? am I? am I? am I?). Perhaps there was always a wish in my belly weighing me down like a stone blotting out a pillar of flame. Perhaps this darkness, the one that is not mine, is the wish.
Maybe I have to find the golden language of that wish.
And so I look for gold in the coagulated blackness with my throat that is raw with a song I cannot sing. I look.
And I look.
And I look.
And I look.
And.
I.
Look.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
the fire be gone and the wood but some dreams hang in the air like smoke touching everything.
He had been looking for her. It was difficult, although each night it got a little easier. At first he could not exit a dream once it began, and he could not change the dream world. Slowly, over time, he grew stronger, and with great focus he could step, slowly, out from one dream and into another.
Now he skips from dream to dream as naturally as the crest of a boat jutting over the waves. He glides and changes his form, he drifts and flows like shadows at twilight.
He had been looking for her, but of course- when he finds her, it is by accident. Earlier that night, he had been in a nice dream. He walked quietly alongside the dreamer beneath tall, vaulted arches, while honeyed sunlight shone sideways and white-winged moths fluttered lazily in the warmth. Somewhere close there was water flowing; a sound he always associated with luxury.
He closed his eyes. The nicest dreams were like that; you could fall asleep inside of them. He didn’t mean to leave.
When he opens his eyes, he is elsewhere. This dream is different. It is almost not-a-dream. The darkness of it coats him like tar. It sticks and clings and pulls the way nightmares do. He’s standing, motionless, but it feels like falling. And he knows, suddenly, he knows where he is, even though it’s different from the last time, and the realization quickens the beat of his heart.
Warset, he thinks, and just like that-- there she is. Moon-crowned and lovely as ever, casting her eyes but not seeing, never seeing. The slick tar sickness is everywhere around them, between them.
Dune calls to her. “Look at me, Warset.” His eyes glow the color of hot sand, molten not-quite-gold. Over his shoulders and fanning out behind him is a long cloak made of feathers, inky blue, darker than midnight. They fall from him and swirl about his ankles, drifters on a strange tide. “Don’t look away.” His voice is deeper than the last time they spoke. He is bolder now too, a princeling of dreams with power broadening his chest.
He takes a step closer, but it only brings him farther from her. He frowns, but his face explodes into a leering smile, packed with a hundred needled teeth.
From somewhere in the dark, he hears a low growl. “What happened to you?” He asks, but the words he hears are different: “You are truly a monster.” And the feathers keep falling from him, black and slender, curved and sharp as little daggers. He draws the cloak closer, sensing somehow that it protects him from the eyes of the dream. The eyes! "Are you alright?" he asks, but on his lips the words form: "Girls don't dream like this." He scrambles forward-back, holding her with his eyes across the senseless darkness.
D U N E
art
@Warset Hi I'm terrible please forgive how long this has taken me <3
Soon the blackness, choking and clawing, starts to feel like a memory. It cools like the space between the galaxies once had. Each feather, when I move my wings protectively around me, shines with frost. In the winter-chill my bones crack in the silence like echoes of stars falling into the mountains and the sea. I wonder if there will be any light, anything but blackness, in this terror.
I am still wondering, head swinging like a dragon in the darkness looking for the light, when I see him.
At first the shape of anything else but black sends my heart careening against its cage in some terrible sort of joy. I think I recognize the shape of him, down in the places where I am just a girl and not a cursed and monstrous thing. I think, I think, I think….
I think this is a memory when his eyes start to blaze like embers who burned their way through flesh and bone. This is an image of the war, of that terrible moment I cannot really recall, of my last war. A song boils the moths in my throat and eats the wings of my wasps. My spirit snarls in my chest at some nameless feeling I cannot remember the shape of (and I think perhaps it knows all the things I do not). I want to step closer and rip his eyes from his head as much as I want to dissolve into colorless shards of nothingness until I am too scattered to ever be made again.
But when he backs away and his feathers shift into a veil around the terrible shape of him I step closer. Every part of my body bellows to run, run, run but the darkness too thick is clawing to go anywhere but closer.
“Why?” I ask him without wrath, or hurt, or anything in my voice. My eyes, I am sure, blaze at him like two reflectionless dead stars in the face of a mare. It makes me think that somewhere I am fading, and weak, and almost dead.
My form waivers when I try to step closer. I shift my legs like a ghost and there is no sound to follow the moment. Wings flutter uselessly at my side and when I look at them it seems strange to see anything attached to me at all. “If I am a monster,” another memory flickers in my trapped soul and it starts to scream a warning, “are you the thing come to slay me?” I wish I knew what my soul was trying to say.
I wish I knew how to run.
But here I am just a girl staring at a god with a look that screams lamb.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
the fire be gone and the wood
but some dreams hang in the air like smoke
touching everything.
She asks him why in a way so like a dying thing that it makes him angry. And she steps closer, she steps closer even though he stepped away. It makes his skin burn. It makes his heart hurt. All he wants to do is touch her, to hold her. Dune smolders with everything he does not- cannot- have.
Why should she look at him?
"Because-" he tries to say- he moves his lips, but there's no sound- "Because-"
"I care about you."
It physically hurts to say, to open his chest like that; he's glad his voice fails him.
Warset flickers then, and glances to her own body like it’s betrayed her. He almost laughs at her expression, how it reminds him of the memory of the pegasus with pollen on her nose. (you are a girl!) But this place is not meant for laughter, or hope, or love. This place is meant to crush without mercy. To rip the wings from butterflies, then grind them to dust.
Dune grits his teeth. His unused to not being in control here, and the dream knows it. It tightens its grip, and the feathers melt from his back like wax. Perhaps like Icarus he flew too high, too close to the heat of a star he should know better than to even dream about.
“No.” He only thinks it, knowing how the dream loves to twist his words, but the sentiment comes out as a growl; low, back of the throat. “Not you.” He’s not talking to Warset, the girl, or Warset the star, or Warset the panther. He’s talking to the dreamer like god to a child, and the next time his eyes glow hot as the sun it is when he changes form to something shorter and longer, thick and tense in the shoulder. A big cat, but nothing like anything in the real word: its sides are dark brown, dappled chestnut, its tail long and thin and sharp as a whip.
If you are a monster, hell is a paradise.
Dune turns and scratches at the thick tar walls of the endless dream, sinking his massive claws into the rot again and again. The darkness fills the tears as soon as his claws pass through, like a fluid that can be displaced but never destroyed. Still he scratches and scratches, and still there is a growl in his throat, angry and rising as it shifts from plea to demand.
He knows that as strange as this place is, it is just a dream, and all dreams have boundaries, all dreams have light.
All dreams bow to him.
He will show her.
He bites deep into the darkness and he pulls with a violent shake of his head. The oil-slick gloom is all over him, heavy as an anchor, and the melted wax of his feathers burns holes through his dream skin. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters, but to show her the light.
