10-12-2015, 04:09 PM
He has dreams where he shatters, and when he awakes he is always astounded to find himself still whole.
So he knows, in a strange way, what it is like – for he also has dreams of watching Adaline shatter, watching his twin (his something), fall to pieces before his miserable eyes, to look at his feet and see a face staring up, accusing, as if to say why didn’t you stop this?
The life of a frail thing is a perilous one, and this is a lesson he knows well – a lesson writ in the twist of his wing-joint from where he once took flight, a lesson writ in the flighty cast of his eyes.
And you’d think, for all this knowledge, for all these dreams of shattering, the lamb would not look at the lion so, as if she were a goddess brought down, shining in strength and light and something beautiful and terrible.
Her words are confusing at first - we had a son, she said, but there was no son – but the story weaves itself together soon enough, the dream-horrors, the real horrors of the demon and the unspeakable things done to her in a realm he couldn’t touch.
“Oh, Tyrna,” he says, and it’s not enough, he is not the king of poet who has words for such a personal apocalypse, who knows how to patch together the shattered dreams laid strewn at his feet.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. He wonders if he could have stopped her. But then, he is too weak, too frail, to ever save her from anything – a thought that will haunt him until the end of days, perhaps.
“Don’t go,” he says, as her lips collide with his skin, “please.”
And then, the next part of the story, told still pressed against her skin, glass balanced atop steel, precarious: “My sister is alive. She’s here.”
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark