03-23-2014, 11:48 AM
Here is a truth: the dreams continue for each of them. They repeat themselves, some quiet and certain infinity. They come to have a familiarity and flavor and an insistence. They feel like old – no, not friends. There must be something strange about them, yes? The flotsam of their unconscious minds organizing itself with such repetitive precision. Erich, here is the bed and the room and the awareness of place, of a place you have always been and will always wake to be. He can imagine the curtains in his hands, parting them to look down at –
- at what? Something outside, waiting for him. Someone, maybe. Something he does not know and has never remembered.
And on, and on. Melantha at the edge of the woods, something ritual, something funereal in the air. She can read the circuit of dark birds against the dawning sky. She can read the patterns in the smoke and the change in the wind. She can read the loss at the back of her throat; which is familiar, familiar, and strange, strange.
Tamsin always expects salt when she comes here. Salt in the air and salt on her skin and there is no salt anywhere, just the road that hugs the curve of the mountain, which is not merely a mountain but a Mountain and has the shape and the shadow of a thing that has not erupted and then eroded over the course of millennia, but has Always Been. There is no salt, she knows that before she breathes. There is no salt, just a sort of sweetness on against her skin.
Thomas, through that door. Dawn behind and the shadows of an as-yet unlit room in front of him. And he knows it will be a simple place, made of plain, planed boards, hand-hewn and handworked and handfitted. Bows of long use in the sturdy stairs, and there is work to be done but it is good work, solid work, true work. Not this madness of war. Work that can be done, you see, all day and every day for fifty years or more without ever tiring of it, because there are places where work is a prayer and prayer is an exercise in meditative understanding that this is where we were meant to be. And yet: just that door, just that ceiling. He wakes every morning and remembers that door and that ceiling and he imagines he must have something in hand,
But he never, never once remembers what it might be.
The blood is soaked into the wood. The wood is shorn. It is solid and it is splinted and it is shorn; here is where the axe hits. Here is where the head falls. Here, Keisha, is where something is severed. And that insistence, that space between spaces, that ruminative certainty of the thing itself, is all she has and all she knows. For days and days and days, and she wakes up, night after night, morning after morning, with a keen awareness of blood and iron, though a memory, only, of wood.
- at what? Something outside, waiting for him. Someone, maybe. Something he does not know and has never remembered.
And on, and on. Melantha at the edge of the woods, something ritual, something funereal in the air. She can read the circuit of dark birds against the dawning sky. She can read the patterns in the smoke and the change in the wind. She can read the loss at the back of her throat; which is familiar, familiar, and strange, strange.
Tamsin always expects salt when she comes here. Salt in the air and salt on her skin and there is no salt anywhere, just the road that hugs the curve of the mountain, which is not merely a mountain but a Mountain and has the shape and the shadow of a thing that has not erupted and then eroded over the course of millennia, but has Always Been. There is no salt, she knows that before she breathes. There is no salt, just a sort of sweetness on against her skin.
Thomas, through that door. Dawn behind and the shadows of an as-yet unlit room in front of him. And he knows it will be a simple place, made of plain, planed boards, hand-hewn and handworked and handfitted. Bows of long use in the sturdy stairs, and there is work to be done but it is good work, solid work, true work. Not this madness of war. Work that can be done, you see, all day and every day for fifty years or more without ever tiring of it, because there are places where work is a prayer and prayer is an exercise in meditative understanding that this is where we were meant to be. And yet: just that door, just that ceiling. He wakes every morning and remembers that door and that ceiling and he imagines he must have something in hand,
But he never, never once remembers what it might be.
The blood is soaked into the wood. The wood is shorn. It is solid and it is splinted and it is shorn; here is where the axe hits. Here is where the head falls. Here, Keisha, is where something is severed. And that insistence, that space between spaces, that ruminative certainty of the thing itself, is all she has and all she knows. For days and days and days, and she wakes up, night after night, morning after morning, with a keen awareness of blood and iron, though a memory, only, of wood.
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula