I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He's been here before.
Perhaps something links him here. He has been pulled into unreality, again and again – as a toy, as a slave, as a thing hunted – and he doesn’t know why. He heals, or thinks he does, and he sometimes forgets what the weight of chains on his ankles felt like, or how, long ago, he’d lost himself to other worlds.
He knows there’s changes in Beqanna. But Beqanna has always changed. Sleaze is old enough to have seen many of them, crumbling mountains and lands sunk and drawn back, plague and monster and darkness. The fog, the land beneath the sea, none of these are of much importance to him.
So why does he come?
He walks here without know why. He has not been chained, the way he had before, but his feet move without listening to his body. He feels a strange sensation as his skin ripples, as wings unfurl where there were once none. They are a dark, iridescent purple, matching his body, and they feel strangely heavy on his back.
Surely these can’t carry me, he thinks, shifting them across his back.
He looks at the fairy. Tries to speak.
I don’t know why I’m here, he wants to say.
Send me home, he wants to say.
Where is home? What is home? Sleaze is alone again, his child gone, Isakov gone. Sleaze will always end up alone.
The wings flex on his back, like living things meant for flight, and flight only.
They can’t carry me. I will fall and I will be hurt, or die.
How many times has he died, in those unrealities? Teeth and laughter, a knife carving a name into his belly, a fire, a monster.
The fairy looks at the storm. Of course there’s a storm. Dark horizons and the taste of thunder in the air. And he will go, because-
Because why?
Because right now the reality is he’s alone. The reality is the wings can’t carry him.
But there’s other worlds. Unrealities.
The wings twitch at his side. A gust of wind ruffles his feathers.
Because maybe, somewhere else, he can fly. Maybe, somewhere else, he won’t be alone.
Payment, says the fairy, and asks for a nightmare. Sleaze would laugh if he could talk. If he wasn’t so heavy. It seems, sometimes, like all his dreams are nightmares.
How to choose?
“I dream of him,” Sleaze says – oh, so now he can speak, “I dream of him as he first came to me, in the river. How he looked at me kindly. How he became everything I wanted – this was his nature – and then he did not have to become, did not have to pretend, because he was everything I wanted.”
Why is that a nightmare? asks the fairy.
“Because he is gone,” says Sleaze, “and I am alone.”
The wings begin to move at his sides. They pump harder, and his hooves leave the ground, and then he is flying, the mountain growing smaller behind him, and a draft of wind catches, lifts him higher, a smile catching on his lips as he is carried into the storm.
Sleaze
