They say everything you cannot remember represents everything you cannot forget. This the exile knew to at least be true in dreaming.
His closest histories spun out, a skein of memories unraveling through the dreamwalker’s fingers. The colors shifted, the texture ripened and love knots formed, tattered and worn, between two separate Chavi to tie them together like prayer beads.
The first vibrant splatters of knowledge appeared where they came together in the congregation of a life too briefly shared. All of their orisons had not spared them.
- - -
I was a heavy heart to carry
but he never let me down
when he had me in his arms
my feet never touched the ground
When the world is choked with smoke and shadows, one must not try to grapple them into detail, but to instead rely on what is already known to be true.
A starfish gifted him upon his fall he folded into the cradling hands of Lillis’ mother and sisters. It glowed in memory while he shoveled dirt into their grave, muttering half rotted prayers to a pantheon he did not know would feel to be in greater neglect years to come.
Stars splattered and moon dust swirled, ricocheting a fiery death behind the seer’s far seeing eyes. Lillis wore the blessing of Avalis, finding a cursed form of knowing the deaths of those she touched. His had been fire lit and blinding and she unable to tell whether it had come before or was but waiting to happen again.
Their Chevas mark had appeared in the shape of a phoenix, ignited from ashes. She had wept alone, where he could not see and would never know, for its resemblance to her vision of his death.
Candlelight struggled to draw the sun from his skin from where she stood in the doorway, watching him drown himself again in a sprawl of tomes and star charts. He would leave soon. It was only a matter of time between when obsession bit him and he emerged from scholar’s dust in their shop to wander back out into the wild and the road with his desperate, dangerous hope.
He always came back. Sometimes it was broken, others it was bitter, but he always came back. She was still safer for him to love, she knew, than his Bright Lady. A hand speckled with paint pressed against her mouth, holding back the words that would cause him to stay.
Gold paint was brushed across a windowsill, layering over the white wash to shine in the day. It was a declaration of war against the agony in his eyes at any given sunset. It and the distance in his eyes diminished and vulnerable love came back into focus. She lay tangled in his arms, his prayers pressed with kisses all along her limbs, healing her more than his hands ever had.
The pendant was sun or starfish shaped and spun in the yellow light, shooting off tarnished sparks. It made her think of her family, the dead he had buried for her and him, always him. It was the day she had picked to celebrate him, lacking an actual birth date.
Slender hands spread over her belly in the city of shipwrights and scholars, seeking a fullness of fresh springing life that was not there. It drove him mad. Despite all his efforts, he could not heal that in her, for her. He could not heal any of the things that mattered to him the most. She made a face at her reflection in the silver backed glass and turned away, determined this time to create more achievable dreams for them both.
She needed her paints. He could attempt to map the heavens, but she was going to map their hearts; and maybe somewhere in between they could find the way to healing both.
I was a heavy heart to carry
my beloved was weighed down
my arms about his neck
my fingers laced to crown
The prayer beads dropped one, two, three on the floor of the Chavena, the weave of the two Chavi fraying apart from each other and from themselves.
"Wake up."
The demand of Maeclair rocked the world of the sleeper like a kick to the cradle. With words alone the visionary reached deep into dreaming and hauled him up, out while the layers of his Chavi peeled away at quickening pace. It seemed he gulped down the feet of a fleeing dream and promptly choked upon it when his eyes opened to find her -
her - glaring at him through the dank and dim of the ship hold.
“Kasb’el, if you sock me now, I swear on all that’s holy…” The strange Konti’s face formed an expression of warning and the instinctive tensing of his muscles checked itself before striking out.
The bowed walls of the hold groaned around them beneath a crash of rising waves. The world swayed and swam, a collection of hours piling atop each other before bursting through a thick haze of pain and disorientation.
"Who the fuck are you?" Caelum spat and heaved up to his elbows, the soot stained toe of his boot scrabbling at rotting wood as he forced his knees back under him. Sharp pain lanced through his hip and breath clogged his throat. "Where's Lillis? Where are we? What --"
A pitch of the ship was heralded by a volley of footsteps, a man's hoarse voice ringing in what Caelum only knew to be night by the rushing spill of Drykas windmarks over the backs of his hands.
"You used to know me," the woman said swiftly and snatched at his shoulder, surprising strength helping to haul him up. A booted foot kicked at the rat chewed pallet, sending it against a stack of roped cargo crates and what appeared to be medical tools flying. "Trust that. They're coming. I thought the storm would keep them --"
"Lady," Caelum began, "Where is Lillis? I --"
"This has
got to stop," Diarmid Bodei demanded from the black doorway torchlight kept trying to choke. The first mate's haggard features seemed to swim in the play of smoke and shadow. The rest of the ship followed, a dizzying blur of the woman screaming and rough hands tackling and a sky so swelled with wind and fury that Caelum was almost unable to hear the whiz of the flog whistling through the air.
"Bruin!" She was calling, Zulrav's breath tangling pale twists of air into a veil across her face, smearing her features from sight as had the dark of the hold. Blood coursed down his back, strips of flesh peeling off; but the language, that heaven spat language diamond cut in his mind and slicing his tongue to more ribbons than Captain Amadeo Bruin was his back.
"BRUIN!" She screamed it this time, Diarmid's muscled arm cinching about her waist, lifting her feet off the trembling deck. Sailors scrambling through ropes and rigging, jerking ropes and hoisting beams against the primary mast. The captain's arm paused and Caelum's fingers released, knees giving out. "It isn't worth the money! I told you, Delucia will sling you under the sea so's you won't go telling tales! Stop! Stop-stop --"
The flog fell again and the world erupted behind Caelum's eyes. Lighting had cracked, thrown by a small Konti's righteous fury, but it was not enough. The last thing he heard was her screaming, screams that sounded like Lillis, swearing to Bruin that he would get what he deserved.
who is the betrayer?
who's the killer in the crowd?
I'm so heavy
heavy in your arms
Flames consumed the antique book shop, sending smoke signals spiraling toward a deaf heaven. The hand over Lillis' mouth tasted of Caelum's blood and ashes, smothering back her screams. Every star chart, every map, every desperately sought tome in her lover's starving bid to heal the Ukalas was speckling the sunset with soot. Where was he? Where had they taken him? Syna closed her eyes in the west and pain bloomed against her skull. Lights doused.
An oil lantern shattered against a silk papered wall, the dark canals of a city besieged by a chaotic god slithering beyond the windows. A pale cat howled in the hall and the third set of journals were thrown into the miniature bonfire. She could see it all the way from her cell in Sunberth, the kiss of Avalis a searing grace. The chains they had around him, both the seen and unseen, were strangling his soul.
Shock cold water split beneath her swan dive, liberty lost beneath the waves. They fished for hours, but she had long since reached the shore.
Hungry cheeks, hollow eyes. A glance in a shop window and the last, regretful letter from an old contact in Zeltiva. It was crumpled in her fist, left to drop in the corner of a walled city to be swept up or forgotten. That afternoon she painted his image on a crumbling wall, and the day after she left. He haunted her everywhere his road had once led him. She had to find a place, she had to find him. Her Chevas mark blazed brighter than her eyes still.
The call of another goddess tolled like a bell through his skeleton, flinging him off course. Ruined and broken, all the precious colors of his frozen while in chains, he tried to ignore Her. He failed and was gone again.
A press of warm lips, a smile that knew only kindness. Exhaustion went past her blood, the sick caught on the edge of a city destroying the remnants of her endurance. He was a good man, a nice man with blue sky eyes; but she dreamed of starfish and golden windowsills while lying in his arms.
Sweet Rak'keli whispered in Caelum's ear, the grasses rustling; and when he rose again it was to shoulder the sky. The hunt was begun anew, but lost in holy thrall.
Beautiful. So beautiful. Ten tiny fingers, a single little nose. She smelled of milk and blood, red cheeked and opal beneath the birthing fluids. Lillis saw shooting stars behind her eyelids before her heart beat a final time.
is it worth the wait?
all this killing time?
are you strong enough to stand
protecting both your heart and mine?
Night sang with cicadas while Caelum stared at Kavala with heavy eyes. He waited, studying the pendant in her hands, the lace of lash shadows against her cheeks. The scars on his back itched and a length of hair braided like a love knot drooped out of its tie as he slumped further down.
heavy, I'm so heavy in your arms
by Rorugir on November 30th, 2011, 1:31 am 
