swallow my doubt,turn it inside out

[Alight]

She had been without him. And therefore, she had been alone.

(‘Don be too late.’ He was never late.)

He had left while dusk was spinning sugary golds and pinks behind the spires of rock and pine, while she was made to stay put – a princess in a tower. More and more often, Giver seemed to take to roaming, always distant-eyed and thoughtful-like. She could not say it did not hurt her – night after night, bereft of his stars, those which he made for her, like a theater around his skin – but she had been determined not to let him see that. It was better to let him go with a firm but cheery reminder than to hope guilt kept him chained to her like she wished it could, selfish it may be.

But he thought she would be safe. And she thought so too, from the monster a-hunting and everything else besides. A naive notion on everyone’s part.

(‘I’m never late.’)

So he left, tracing his way through the evergreens, taking his thoughts and his stars to a faraway land, and she wandered (humming and reciting favoured old passages from mother’s bedtime stories to herself). Alone. Where it should have been impossible to be so. Where mother was, somewhere. Father. Her younger siblings. They were stunted, she more so than him, because unlike him she still occupied the fable. Where they – princess and keeper – had been incubated together, cheek-to-cheek and tangled. Where they – princess and keeper – were bound by the laws of everything that conception and birth entailed. Eternality.

Where she was a damsel in distress and he was a knight, of stars and watchful eyes.

He was too serious, but that’s why he had her!

And though she loved them all – her entire family – there was something more to Alight and Giver. Something she misunderstood; something he understood only a fraction better. Something patrilineal and rotten to the core.

***

Has it been days since her descent? Or has mere hours past since the land had jerked beneath her, throwing her at a pine tree and then into unconsciousness. Minutes, perhaps, since she woke up, bruised and bleeding (offering only a bewildered ‘oh’ when the tissue had been slow to knit back together, and then had refused altogether).

She cannot tell. She used to tell time by the way their shadows turned around them. Or by the way Giver became antsy because he craved the night. But now it seemed the sun hid behind the clouds of dust and debris had have not settled, made by Her rearrangement and ire. So, she has wandered, without time,  sore-throated from having spent every last syllable of their names. Drawing everything from them until she realized, like a stone, they yielded nothing.

When she did not find them – any of them – she fell silent, passing shades of similarly lost and confounded horses. And then, came fear. Giver had always been there, a shield and sword; the veneer of protection, because she had never considered how mortal he was and how little he had for her, in the end. He could armour himself, but he could not afford any of his ancient, celestial energy for her. And somewhere, she knew, there was a monster hunting indigo – she had been milked and weaned on the imagery, and this at least kept from the trees and jumping at every flash of golden skin (finally, it seems, mother words were not wasted).

When she spots the bay stallion by the water she is cautious. Every fiber in her body yells,  ‘go to him’, and in most other situations – at any other time – she would have, without thought and like a child, beaming. But she is browbeaten and instead shifts around, head low and ears in motion, to get a look at his face.

Strange and dazed. It is him, though. A knight, by any other colour.

“Father?” she croaks, her heart picking up its pace. She moves towards him, limping but joyous, stumbling and rolling on river stones as it becomes suddenly far too much to pick up her feet. “I would have hoped you would have mother,” tears come, as they have wanted to for minutes or hours or days, she touches his shoulder and it is more than enough.