A roadway of galaxies - Jenger pony

[Giver]

“Where have you been?”

Her voice had shook, and he shivered with it. It had cracked in the middle of her sentence, and that interrupt contained a measure of relief and a note of tenderness – grace, as she had moved to him and buried her nose in the center of his forehead, and held. Breathing in, slowly, the scent that was no more his than it was theirs.

“Never do that again, Giver. Never leave me like that.”

His brows furrowed, and he wondered afterwards if she had felt the skin bunch up beneath her lips. Known that those words had rattled him and understood it to be guilt that worried his mind. He could never be sure what she did and did not know. 

When they were young, he imagined it to be some kind of arcane and age-old power they both had, a twin-thing. As he grew up, he had untangled himself from that white lie, but she had not. Still, he could not deny that she knew him better than anyone else, and perhaps he, her.

Entire conversations between them could be played out in shivers and furrowed brows.

He leaves her as he always does, just before nightfall, when she falls asleep and he can remove himself from her skin without stirring her. Carefully, so quietly, until he feels something like freedom. Then he follows it, through the heady and gaseous new land, almost begrudging the absence of pine trees, down to the westernmost beaches. Slowly, Giver submerges himself in the cold divide of water that separates Tephra from the mainland – first to his knees, then slides in completely.

It is like black glass, alive with the reflection of stars.
A galaxy, liquefied and poured into the earth’s cracks.

The Meadow is where he always ends up. This, at least, has not changed. It is where he had run to, furious and frenzied, to find her (the wrong her, half his mind had screamed, as his knees were whipped to a pulp and still he ran on.) And where he had, with great relief, found her unharmed. (She lives in Tephra, too. He tries to keep them separate by a great divide, like deepest, darkest space brought to earth.) But the respite does not come as intended. His mind is black with thoughts, muddied and swirling. It might almost be a comfort if the headache could blot out the mighty weight of his starlessness.

It does not.
It is compounded by the loneliness he feels, as above they twinkle on, the coldest they have ever felt.

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[dark]

it seems only by the hand of God or death,

This world is not hers, and so she cannot love it. Everything about it is wrong- large, she can find no end to it when she turns her back to the roiling black of the ocean. Home had been smaller, a slab of rock and soil sailing lost in the endless sea. The mountains are wrong too, the shadow of them would have dwarfed everything, eternal night. Even the trees and their forests, the meadows and especially the horses within feel out of place. It was only as night fell that she found some sameness, some familiarity when they dark blurred out and swallowed the landmarks, when the stars blinked into existence one by one against the black velvet sky.

Her chest loosened a little, the tension in her muscles softening in the wake of the cold silver light. It had only been a day, already been a day, and she had not found the will to tear herself from the beaches she had washed up along. It was as if some part of her hoped the storm would come again, would pluck her from this uneasy unknown and let her wake safely within the stone of the bay at home.

Home.

She slips away from where Peat rests, not so far that she will lose him in the dark, but far enough that he will not notice, or wonder, when she slips back into the ocean. Once, she had loved the way the water felt against her skin, warm and weightless, like freedom. But it feels different now because she knows its heart, and she no longer mistakes that threat of power, that brewing dark, for anything other than what it is. Still, she slips in further, further, until the water is above her chest and she can feel its weight against the pounding of her wild heart.

For a moment she closes her eyes, but that is a mistake because suddenly she is back beneath the surface, watching pale bodies bob past in the swirling currents. Her eyes flash open again, a shock a pale sea-green in shadow against the silver of her pale face, and she swallows the gasp that climbs from her throat to her lips. A part of her wills her back to the bright and white sediment of the beach, to the safety of the shore, but she cannot.

Out here, it feels like floating in night, with dark and stars above, and dark and stars below – and she, at its heart, the pale and lonely moon. Out here, it feels like home again. She is not lost, she is not broken inside. But then someone splashes past her and it is reflexive how she shies away from the sudden, unwelcomed closeness. Her eyes follow him to the shore, wary, though she did wonder for a second at his smooth paleness, if maybe she knew him like she knew Peat. But when she draws closer, close enough to trace those starlit silver lines on his pale face, she recognizes only one more stranger in an already strange world. With one delicate ear flicked in the direction of Peat where he rests silently further down the beach, entombed in the night, she takes another cautious step closer to the stallion. The waves reach only her knees now and she pauses, suddenly startled by the way he glows in the night. It is not like how she glows, a smudge of pale light, blurry and bright in the moon and stars, it is more like of the stars themselves.

She recoils just a little, frightened by something she has only ever known to be impossible. Something that, despite being impossible, now stares back at her through the cold dark. Her brow furrows and her eyes flash warily as she watches him, waiting for that glow to fade. But it doesn’t. “I don’t understand.” She tells him finally, softly, and to her credit, in a voice that does not shake. “Are you glowing?” Her tone rises just a little at the end, a reflection of the uncertainty she feels brewing in her quiet chest. And then, softer now, wistful - “you look like you belong in the sky.”

will they truly change their silhouettes

[Giver]

He had not noticed it at first, that trace glow that emanated from some internal, iron core in his gut. It had clung to him, like a lover’s embrace, when he lay sleepy and violated on the mountain’s back. Stayed with him, even as he trembled down her, confused and alone – screaming women’s names in his head, because his lips, blue and dry, would not obey.

It was resilient, despite the hazardous atmosphere and the alien forces of gravity, that galactic glow.

At first,  it had been an unrecognizable haze. As if his coat had become so thirsty for that ancient energy, it begun to stretch itself out to the above, so much so that somewhere in the endless, dark between, the stars bent down to kiss him. To wish him well. To invite him places he could not go.

He had not noticed it.

Not at first.

And he could not follow, so they left him a postcard made of their of bodies.

It grew. It grew bright, brighter until he could see it blooming from the rounds of his knees and the flats of his shoulders, stronger, of course, at night than during day. He could see that he was like a moon, chained to earth.

And it hurt.

He met Loneliness, then. (Even when she was by his side – clay and grass and beauty, though she numbed it like an earthy remedy, she could not eat it completely. Sister tried, to – tried too hard, to be the only thing he needed to heal.) Giver felt, so intimately, what it was like to be suspended in a deserted corner of space – pale and silver; pockmarked and barren. A moon, without stars. A moon in a black hole.

A moon chained to earth.

Sometimes, he thinks, this is not his world, either. Sometimes, he thinks, he is meant to be oxygenless and still, silent and inanimate. Poetic, lifeless, cosmic to the very nucleus – to be part of same vast, navigational constellation, drawing ships safely across purple oceans and men through endless, red deserts. Free of soul or bonds of body, waiting a trillion years for the moment to consume himself and go out.

But he is blood and flesh and bone, instead. A pretender, damp with salted water and sticking sand – and he loves, for too much, the view from down here.

He it too lost to hear her approach, even with the same sucking sound the ground makes with her own wet hooves. Only when she speaks, disrupting the quiet of his tiny universe, does he turn, almost as taken aback as she is with him. She smells so deeply of seawater, like a well-sailed ship or a treasure chest pulled from it’s briny grave after a century of rest. His brow furrows, her confusion feeding his own. We are so far apart, he thinks, light years. Oceans and space. “No,” he says finally. “I mean, I am. Glowing, I mean,” he turns to face her square, “but, no… I don’t belong in the sky. Not really.”

“They’ve just shared with me a bit. The stars, I mean,” he examines her with tired, troubled eyes. Like a conch shell, all porcelain and pink, washed up on the shore. “You… aren’t from here?” He knows what that is like.

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