"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
She is drawn inexplicably to the stars.
And they to her.
She emerges from the deep forest long after the sun has gone down. And she is young, you can tell it just by looking at her, but she burns just as the stars above. The stars in her mane and tail pulse and flicker and the deep orange of her nebulous wings seems to glow even brighter in this true darkness.
Perhaps it is vain, the way she sidles closer to the water’s edge so that she might catch her reflection in it. There is some pleased sound deep in the cage of her chest as she studies the lines of her fine head, wondering if she looks anything like the father who’d perished before her birth.
But these are not things worth dwelling on and she wades into the water. It is viciously cold, licking at her sides, but she likes how the stars look trapped beneath the surface. Their light shimmering with the current. It gets her wondering about ice. And for all her want to know what it is to burn, she also aches to know what it is to freeze.
It is not long before the teeth begin to chatter, the muscles trembling and seizing beneath the surface of her skin. The mouth curls around some secret smile as she lingers there in the current, reveling in the way the water tries so valiantly to erode her. Perhaps she will let it.
He’s beginning to grow in leaps and bounds, losing the frail bird chest of a young boy and the knobby knees. His age is still evident in his stature and the short length of his mane, but there is a hint of the man he’ll be one day. He’s there in the sharpening angle of his jaw and the broadening shoulders. Yet the kind curve of his smile lingers there in the corners of his lips as he slips quietly over the Tephran border. His family is distracted in their preparations for the next brood of children. They won’t notice if their youngest child is gone for a few hours, right?
A laugh like warm honey bubbles from his mouth. His long legs carry him over fallen trees and across little streams. Crowns likes the way he can see his breath outside the jungle, especially when he starts running like this. The chill kisses at his cheek. An inner fire keeps him comfortable as he hurries down a low sloping hill. How strange, to think he used to be so slow and tire so easily. Now his muscles sing when he leaps over a thorn bush with hardly any effort.
But he is plucked from his thoughts when he sees her - glimmering and chilled in the river. He comes to a sudden stop and watches her for a while like an awestruck fool. Crowns studies the outline of her back, shining against the ink-black of the water behind her. (Did David stare half so intensely at Bathsheba?)
His muscles relax, but his pulse is still thundering in his ears.
Slowly, wordlessly, he wades into the water across from her, and steam rises off his back. His sapphire eyes trace the barbs running down the length of his spine and they are unlike anything he has seen before. Oh, but he has always loved the night, and all the monsters that it brings with it. She makes his hair stand on end with fear just the way he likes.
“Are you part of the night sky?” he asks, grinning now as he edges closer.
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
She is alone for a time and then, quite simply, she is not.
She turns her fine head to study the interloper, a flash of vivid reptilian light in the eyes as she traces the lines of his face through the dark. The delicate nostrils flare while he stares and the furthest corners of her dark mouth stir with an electric simper.
The stars wink at them from beneath the water’s surface and she turns to face him. How sweetly he grins at her, this boy who sinks even closer still.
She draws in a swift breath and exhales a glimmering cloud of stardust into what precious little space remains between them. She blinks those big, bright eyes, tucks her chin toward her chest. Plays so coy, a sweet, doe-eyed thing but there’s no hiding what she is.
Still, her muscles tremble and spasm but she moves easy through the water until she is close enough to touch him. Close enough to curl herself sweetly against her side. An innocent, a damsel.
“It’s cold down here,” she whispers, “won’t you warm me up?”
Such a vicious liar she is, Altar. The sharp teeth and the barbed spine and the heat of her breath were not made for this faux softness. Her father had built her to burn and yet. And yet. The destruction is so dreadfully boring, she finds, when it is straightforward.
And isn’t there power in convincing them she’s anything other than what she is?
Their curse is a greedy thing. It rolls its serpentine eye open and sees her, and it knows at once that this one belongs to it - to them, both. Crowns hardly minds the way she comes closer and slides her body up against his. He even lifts a wing to make room for her there next to him, warms his body to bite back the stinging cold of the frigid water around them. There is still a gentle kindness lurking in the background of his mind, even if he is so impossibly hungry.
Slowly, he lets little scales bloom from beneath his skin that shape themselves into barbs all down the length of his back. They will become an ouroboros, a serpent endlessly devouring itself in an effort to feel full. How perfect, how poetic to have found another shard of the thing that gave him his magic. He parts his lips and exhales a sigh of blue flame that flickers over her face without burning at her skin and hair.
“You’ll only be colder when I’m gone, you know,” he says as he grins. And he knows he would not stay, that she would not follow him where ever he went. Without even reaching into her mind or the pool of knowledge available to him, he knows this.
He wishes it wasn’t so. Crowns wishes he could drag his heart, kicking and screaming, where ever he willed it to take up space. But it merely haunts the cage of his chest without promising anything. It speaks in hypotheticals and maybes, then it drops its ideas like a bad habit.
Maybe he can pretend for a while, though. So he kisses her cheek and admires the glow of her stars beneath the water.
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
He does not cast her away, though she had not expected him to.
How sweet the thrill that spirals through her as the scales bloom across his skin. He is like she is (though she has no way of knowing that he is so much more than she is, too). But the smile that slips seamlessly across her face is practiced in its sweetness, its breathless wonder.
But the thrill is replaced quite suddenly by something altogether different. A kind of darkness burrows its way into her chest, the place where it lives, beats a wing against her ribcage as she exhales. How obediently she ducks her head away from the flame, exhaling a tendril of bell-song laughter. Flirtatious.
“Will I?” she asks with those same doe eyes. The cold lingers in the marrow of her bones despite the heat of his skin. She does not want to be rid of the cold, not really. She wants it to whittle away at her until there is nothing left. She wants it to devour her.
“You only just got here and you’re leaving already?” A pitiful kind of pout then, the brow furrowed so precisely. “You haven’t even told me your name.”
She is a star thing and isn’t this how a star thing would behave? She belongs to the night sky, not to the dark thing that lives in the narrow space beside her heart. Star things lean into kisses and so she does, too.
He is, like her, not born of love. That his parents came to love one another is a fortunate happenstance, but there was only want when he was wonderfully made. (The leech has two daughters: Give and Give.) He watches her dodge his harmless flame and he laughs softly. It is a cruelty that he is rather fond of, he thinks. Crowns had not shied from her stars but she declines his fire. Oh well, it can’t be helped.
He shrugs his shoulders when she asks her question. Maybe she’ll be just fine when he decides to slip from the water and head back home. Maybe the cold will grow twice as fierce the moment he’s out of her sight. The curiosity gets to him, though, and he steps a few paces from her. His wings settle comfortably across his back as he wraps himself up in that perfect warmth without sparing any for her.
“I suppose I could linger around a while longer,” he muses as he comes to stand before her. His eyes are cold when they search hers curiously. Crowns doesn’t spare even a sliver of the wild inferno burning within him, though he does continue to grin. “My name? Names aren’t really anything special, are they?”
What would a girl like her be named? Plenty of girls their age have crossed his path but he never sees much similarity between them. Rosemary is soft and kind while Rosebay would let him die at her feet if it amused her. Then there’s Olena, the wild thing in the jungle who seemed to hold too many secrets. Perhaps it’s greedy of him to want them all for himself.
But he doesn’t stop himself.
“But if you think they are, then my name is Crowns.”
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
She is spared the flame-tongued lick of irritation when he moves away from her.
Had she really hungered for warmth, she would have had no choice but to succumb to frustration. But she has so little interest in weakness now. The cold has sunk so deep into her bones now that she doesn’t believe she’ll ever fully exorcise it, but she savors the burn of it. She savors the pain it brings with it.
She is no damsel, though she plays one so well, and she feels nothing at all as he turns to face her. There, in the furthest corner of her mouth, the flicker of some dark smirk that burns out like a supernova. Collapses in on itself like a blackhole as she studies his face bathed in the soft glow of her nebulous wings, the stars tangled in her hair.
He grins at her but she merely flutters her heavy eyelids, her chin tucked up to her chest. “Crowns,” she coos, a saccharine echo. She supposes he’s right -- the name is meaningless. She does not offer hers in return. Not in any great display of pettiness nor any desire to feel like she has convinced him to share with her something she’s not willing to share herself.
“What an interesting name,” she murmurs and then turns from him, cuts her way through the water back to dry land. The burn of cold in her bones will linger, she knows, and she will let it.
She shows nothing on her surface and it begins to frustrate him now as he watches her flutter her pretty eyelids. She’d asked for warmth, and he’d supplied it. She’d asked his name, and he’d given it. His bright blue eyes narrow and his grin breaks into something far less kind when she moves to escape the bitter cold of the river they stand in. Crowns has been eager to find his weaknesses and he wonders if she’ll find a way to fight him if he pulls her back into the current with him.
So he reaches, rough and careless, as blue flames pour from his body and across the water to take her by the ankles. They drag her backward quickly and drop her back in front of him. Whether her head goes under the water’s surface matters little to him. She’ll recover easily enough with a few coughs and ragged breaths if it does.
The fire flickers and vanishes without even smoke to mark it had existed. His smile returns and he watches her now, as though nothing had ever changed.
“So what should I call you, then?”
Crowns moves through the water and lifts his wing, making room for her against him if she finds herself cold enough. Mostly he just wants to see if she’ll comply or if her pride will keep her standing alone in the frigid water just far rough to avoid any of the vibrant heat he offers.
get up off your knees, boy
Stand face to face with your god
Something vicious kicks all the air out of her chest as the flame curls around her ankles. There is little time to react before it drags her swiftly back into the water. It occurs to her, as she splashes back into the freezing current, that they are nothing alike. Dragons both, yes, but their magic is not the same.
There is a moment of hesitation while she decides how to proceed. Should she unleash the vicious tongue, gnash the sharp teeth, surrender to whatever murky fury exists in her? Or continue the charade?
In the end, she simpers. Exhales a peel of bell-song laughter. Tilts her head like this is all some kind of wonderful joke. Like she is so deeply enthralled by it all. Wide-eyed and breathless in her wonder. What an exceptional adventure, that coy simper says.
“What would you call me?” she asks. A dangerous thing to ask, certainly, because there is no guarantee that she’ll like his answer. He moves closer again, lifts his wing as if to invite her back into the heat. Were she not so entrenched in this fantasy, she would have shrugged it off, stayed rooted several feet away. But she is the damsel so she sinks against him again, feels the heat of his skin pulse against hers.
He wants to pick her thoughts apart and pin them up on display like perfectly preserved insects, but the mystery of her is too great. To simply wonder and guess keeps him intrigued even when she tries to shed the cold in favor of the shore. So he sits back and observes only what she is willing to offer him - practiced smiles and perfect hostess laughter. She swallows whatever she truly feels whole and returns the questions back to him.
He has never named anything, nothing other than the flower-birds Isilya had shown him. But they were simple creatures and naming them had been obvious. Crowns shifts his weight as he weighs his options and curls his wing over her back to fully blanket her in the raw heat of him. Something in him snaps its teeth and says to call her ‘Mine’, but the word tastes all wrong when he balances it on the tip of his tongue.
“Trouble, maybe. Or Reckless. What do you prefer?” he asks as he curiously touches his lips to one of the barbs growing along the back of her neck. They are sharper than he anticipated and a bead of blood swells from his lip. He makes no move to clear the drop from him. Instead, he turns his head to admire all the ink back darkness between the trees around them. He thinks if he holds his breath, he might see one of the monsters who lurk in his nightmares, something beautiful and terrible all at once.
“Do you always lie this much, or is there someone you’re honest with?” he asks in a whisper without looking back to her.
