The Garden

[Him] Some stories have a beginning. This happened first. Some stories unspool as if you were unraveling the world, as if you were unraveling the word. Sometimes you wake in the middle of the night, a dream like a memory fading in the back of your mind, something urgent, something necessary, something raw-as-unspun-silk and you have to spin yourself back together, remember the warp and make up the weft until morning. This story does not have a beginning, but this is where it starts.

Last night, a coffeehouse in Evanston. Right? A coffeehouse with an open mic and warm art on the walls, some kid singing about a tree. Some kid singing about his lover and a tree and the crowd had this shifting voice, this sort of organic thing overarching the individual sounds - not many-as-one but many-as-many - this chattering symphonic thing and she looked at him, looked at him looking for him, the taste of the sky in the back of her mouth, the night sky laced with the bitterness of myrhh and the sweetness of orange blossom.

Look and look: the boy is a boy, and the girl with him is a girl, and they sit close, leaning into their microphones, that elegant familiarity of long association. She's smiling, looking out into the crowd. He's watching her smile. This is how things start.

The boy and the girl and the song and the dream she cannot remember, back of the throat thing, that, except for the stars. Everything tells her to look and look and morning, and sunlight.

The next day, the day after that - three days, this sense of watching-wanting-waiting is alive under her skin, makes everything else, every thing real seem noisome, permeable, wrong, makes shadows or lights at the corners of her vision. Makes her look for new streets, dream of new stars, pour her morning tea into the saucer rather than the cup, dip her biscuit in cottage cheese rather than clotted cream.

--

The place has blue painted window frames. They're a bright, nearly turquoise blue -- but darker, really, not so pastoral, not so western. There's a chandelier visible in the window, above a white-painted, antique chair upholstered in white, and a stack of portaits of girls, nineteenth century-style, staring out of the darkness, all long black hair and bright red cheeks. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind, sees the girls eyes, this expression that lives more in the bloom of color in her cheeks than in the neat little moue made by her mouth, sees her own eyes, which are different.

The sign in the window says: open.

[Girl] This is what people would see: the young woman, slender, reserved, poised -- almost carelessly so; her hair as red as autumn's dying and her expression when she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror [solitary (where?)] behind the canvas portraits a thing that kins itself to inscrutable. The quirk of her mouth, a touch wry -- self-chiding, un-selfconscious, paradox-thing - when she draws differences out've the paint-girls and flesh-and-bone girls. The look in the eye.

But mirrors are tricks. They're clarity, and clarity's unyielding; they're bad luck for breaking. Kage knows a man who's driven by fear, who calls her Cage, but fond, who was dragged across the gauntlet by a crow, and who wears mirrors in the palms of his gloves, in his tattered, seams un-stitching jacket, and uses them to interact with a world he finds terrible. He's in the back of her mind, somewhere; she saw him, just last week, the beginning of the week. Saw him, because she heard about the crow, saw him, because she reached, and saw him bloody, fearful, fretting, surrounded by such things as'd make the mind want to un-ravel were it weaker. She tried to pluck him out [was it right (maybe it was a test)]. Couldn't. Mirrors, mirrors are her sisters: never jostling, but always claiming, always staking out borders of their Empire, oldest first, youngest next, sometimes. Mirrors are sight, they're look-far-far-away, they're smoke. There's a dream she cannot remember, and her mind starts to slip that way.

This is what people would see: young woman, casual in jeans, a demure white blouse buttoned up to her throat, five hematite rings on one hand, a silver ring on the other, pockets. Not fancy. Easily mistaken for a college student -- except, no. That presence. Kage is sizing the place up. Kage is sizing herself up, Kage is wondering, where oh where, where is He, why hasn't He come around to bother her these last days, when she can almost taste --

There are stories. The sign in the window says: open. And Kage, who is a creature driven by curiosity as much as anything, decides to give in to whim: she steps across the threshold. She has no idea what kind of shop it is, and the quirk is still there, half-wry, giving lie to the expressiveness of her eyebrows, because she knows she's just trying to scrape out've whatever mood it is that has her wanting to scratch off her skin. Melancholy, just held at bay. Maybe that's it.

If a bell rings when she enters, she doesn't look up or over toward the sound. Kage looks for people. And Kage, who's a sharp eye when it comes to details, putting them together into a picture that uncovers a mystery, is looking at this place she's in, with the paintings. And maybe they're for sale, and maybe she'll buy one, put it up in her study half-hidden by a tapestry, or behind a bookshelf. Secret.

[Him] "You have to come down from your summit, so why climb in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below. But what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees, and one descends. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by what one has learned higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least know."

There are bells. There are always bells, right? Something to announce a new presence in the room. Some sort of prescience ñ music from movement, a song from a push against a wall-that-opens, which means: door. So the door opens and the bells ring like so ñ they arenít small, these bells. There is this resonance in them that strikes chords beneath her skin. Like this: like her organs recognize the waves of the sounds in them. Like the way her blood moves, as if it had a voice.

Kage in the mirror. The core of her is the girl, painted in a circle of darkness. The core of her is obscured by a girl, who is younger, and a girl, who is slighter, and a girl, whose hair is brown and whose eyes are black like the night sky. Around the girl, the crown of Kageís head, the impression of her arms, the glimpse of a hand with its hematite rings, and its silver rings.

- hey. Thereís a person. There is a person here, leaning over a glass display case, his arms folded together, pressed between his body and the silvered edge of the gleaming thing. He is fifteen or twenty pounds overweight, and ignores the gleam and sparkle of the contents of the case in favor of the comic book he has open on top of the case. His shoulders are hunched over, his body large ñ not just gone-to-fat, but big-framed, comically so in room that is white and blue and black, crystal and carved wood.

He looks up when she enters and smiles ñ this flashing look ñ and though his hair is stringy black and everything about him is wrong, she almost, almost expects to see the stars in his eyes.

They are amber instead, warm brown flecked with yellow and green, bloodshot too, the right more than the left. ìHey,î he says, straightening. The comic remains open on the display case. The contents, the contents glitter and gleam, crystals arrayed against a white backdrop take her apart and remake her, a thousand times over, the way a prism breaks down like into its constituent parts and lets you see the pieces of everything.

His voice is even and pleasant, maybe rusty from disuse. This place is out of the way and Kage is the only person here. It looks more like a photograph than a store, like a photograph of a store you might take for Paris Vogue. He doesnít fit in here, but here he is, smiling at her. ì ñ howís it going? Can I help you?î

Then a moment where heís looking at her more closely, frowning kinda, this expression at the corners of her mouth the way her awareness is flayed and raw, living at the corners of that dream she cannot remember.

[Him] (the way a prism breaks down light. ahem!)

[Girl] The bells are like a sieve and the human body's made of a lot of water. That's what textbooks say, and as it is written, so it must be true? They're also a little like that moment in a kitschy 50s movie; something about angels or witches, elevators opening up to the underworld. You know: that moment things go just a little bit aslant, knock just the slightest bit askew. The chandelier is made of water, or stars; or glass, which is of neither of those elements, although it pretends - visual alchemy -

Her voice is smooth, easy. A moon and shadow thing, but soft. Has weight. Has knowing in it. "I don't know yet. Not sure this is where I mean to be." Kage tells the truth, even when she misrepresents it: re-defines it; makes it imply something else. Doesn't like to lie, outright. See? She doesn't think about it. She just does it. There's no awkwardness, no stutter, no hesitation - socially awkward, she's not. "What's this place called? Named, I mean?" Kage is a steady, steadying creature, but she feels off-balance. Sharpens her, that - and her eyebrows draw together, briefly, studying the man when he's kinda looking at her more closely. Her eyebrows flick upward.

Beat. " - And hey, I'm sorry," that note of un-directed wry, courtesy, "If I'm interrupting your work. But what were you reading?"

[Girl] ooc: Ahem. 'Her eyebrows flick upwards, after a moment.' Is how that should read!

[Him] "This place?" the man asks. The man, the boy. He's one of those people who is written between the two words. He doesn't have a name there. He means both, he means neither. The smile he flashes Kage is sudden and wide. It's boy-ish, but there's an ish on it that makes her pause. His hair is stringy and dark and his t-shirt is black. It fits his bulk awkwardly. He bulges in strange places. " - heh. It doesn't really have a name. I mean, it's one of those places that's better without a name. Even the business cards, they're just blank where the name should be. The owner says that the right people always find it."

His hands are large and meaty, splayed out over the display counter. Beneath she expects - what, antique broaches and tie-pins, cuff-links made from beyrl or whale-tooth or the woven hair of the dead, memento mori, cameos blushing pale against the inner heart of a pink shell, a girl in profile, demure, looking down and away - not at the sky.

Instead, there are diamonds. There are half-a-hundred diamonds, some the size of an egg, some the size of a mote of dust, of a Who in Whoville, set out on gleaming white fabric.

"I'm reading the Amazing Spider-Man +1," he says with a grin, gesturing to the comic. " - I found it in the back. It's not as good as you'd guess, though. I guess my work is to answer your questions, eh? So you're not much of an interruption. Anyway, I already know what happens next. In the comic, I mean."

[Girl] "Yeah? How'd you find it?" She says that, but she's thinking - one of those. She's thinking - one of these. She's thinking - really, now. And she's thinking - ha. And she wants to know how this stringy-haired, bulky guy came to be hulking over diamonds, spangling bright as gravefrost 'neath the hunter's moon - she wouldn't have asked, otherwise.

Kage peeks at the diamonds. Then: pauses. Looks over her shoulder, toward the mirror; that white antiqued chair; the painting of the bright-cheeked, dark-haired girl [lamia (maiden)], the blooming roses in her cheeks, the chandelier, snow-frozen - her look is disconcerted. "I wouldn't actually think the Amazing Spiderman +1 was that good. A hero with that kind've charm - well, he's got to grow that way, you know? And maybe get flung through a couple of alternate realities before he can make do."

Her eyes, back on the diamonds, set out on white. Snow, she thinks again - winter, and maps. A word for that. Enochian: language of angels.

[Him] "How'd I find it?" he says, he's grinning, you know, grinning like that is a silly question, like that's easy, like he's about to ace this little quiz. So: grin. His face is round like some dime-store Buddha's and there's a bristle of whisker on his cheek and a stupidly twee whisp of a mustache just growning in. Kage looks at the diamonds on white, like salt-crystals on snow, and the boyish man stands back, lets her look, lets her browse. " - well, that's easy, you know?"

"I just - " wait, stop. Shift. He's frowning now, it's faint, that look you make when the word you need has slipped away from your seeking tongue. When you're trying to identify an elusive taste from the last bite of a nameless morsel. "I mean, I guess - I - I just - " and whatever it is that is troubling him, he holds it in, keeps it in the core of his body, makes it an egg, makes it a glass ball, contained but enlivening, but unstable, a liquid that wants to be permeable, free-floating, like one of the noble gases. " - I just walked in. I parked and turned the corner and - walked in. I'm pretty sure about that."

--

Kage says something about heros, and the storekeeper, the man behind the counter, he's deflated, somehow, something leaked out of him, concerned about the answer to the question, the question to the answer, gathers up Spider-Man Number 1 and looks up at her, wry. Says, quiet. "I guess that's why we keep reading."

Then, she's looking down at the diamonds. And he, he taps the glass with a meaty finger, not to interrupt, but to indicate - that which is below. "You can see those? Really actually see them?"

His voice is quiet. There's something contracted about him. Fear as a function of awe.

[Girl] The change in his voice draws her attention up out've the glass. Her gaze is direct, expressive without being eloquent; eloquent without being expressive. There's a speck of warness, now; sifts, behind the glance, like dust motes in a slant of light. Not everybody can raise one eyebrow; it's difficult. That asymmetry, the lilt of it - but Kage manages. "I can see them?" she echoes. "Really actually see -- ?"

There. A look. And a blankness, a place for him to write in his answer. Fill in the blanks, sir.

[Him] "The peradam." He says, watching her. The slightest gesture downward, to the case, full of glittering diamonds, faceted and brilliant, gleaming in the light. They are, she must think, impossible not to see. " - in the case." His voice is soft, is quiet, it occurs to her that he is whispering, that there are secrets at work here. That there is someone he does not want to overhear.

He leans closer, he is nameless, in a nameless place, and he leans closer and smells like liverwurst and bergamot. He smells like a hidden sigh. In his anxiety, he has rolled up the precious Amazing Spider-Man into a cylinder, which is another shape a flat plane can take. The beginning touches the end, and then where do you start.

"The peradam in the case." His voice like a flatline. Eeeeee. The tension is underneath. "can you see them?"

[Girl] "You mean - the 'peradam' in the display case? Wherein things are," a beat, and in another story, she'd look him up and down, she'd raise both her eyebrows, and it'd be so subtle as to be a dictionary of tone, precise, poise, this, "displayed," a beat, "for people with eyes to look?" That was a little cruel. Her voice is even, though - almost takes away the sting, if any. The sardonic inflection: the emphasis, disbelieving - and cautious. "You mean - the diamonds?"

[Him] "Yeah - " he says, waves his meaty hand thoughtlessly below him, at the display case. Where things are displayed. "I've been here," pause, stop, estoppel on the thought. There's this moment where he's thinking about how long he's been here, about time and space and the definitions of the same where things go wrong. Not for Kage, but for the Spider-Man fan, where he gets troubled, looks lost, as if he couldn't find his way from second to second without getting caught in some rather frightening - " well, I've been here, and you are the only customer who's been able to see them."

An irritable shake of his head, when she names them all wrong. His stringy hair goes flying. One thinks, in that moment: snakes. The gorgons, who were lovely women before they changed. Before they were changed. Before the world changed.

" - right, see, they look like diamonds, but they aren't. They're called peradam, and if you can see them, it's for a reason. It might mean you're - " he looks up, confusion chasing itself across his features, as if he were looking at both tomorrow and yesterday. And if she looks up, she sees that there are two doors here. There are two Doors here. She can in through one. It is open to the street, and she can see herself reflected like a ghost in the window. The iron-work is painted blue, and everything shines white. The second Door is in the back, worked into the paneling which is all chased woodwork, elaborate and European, painted white like the chair and the tables, like the walls, like the watered silk beneath the peradam. She hadn't noticed it before. There's no handle. There's no lock.

There's no indication where it goes.

" - well, it means you can take one. It means you can take your pick of them. You get one like everyone else. Since you see them, I can tell you what they are. Or, you can not-Know. Knot-know. It's a choice you get to make: take one, know it. Take one, don't know it. Leave them, and walk away. Right?"

[Girl] The nameless man in the nameless shop isn't careful and the red-haired Orphan (without Tradition) watches him as he speaks, confusion chases itself - lost - across his features, unwrites him - a faint frown between her eyebrows; it isn't a bright thing. Her eyes are cool, though -- seem cool, albeit dark. Her eyes are just: steady, still direct. "What's a nice guy like you," she says, "doing here?"

Maybe she's stalling. Think, Kage, be thoughtful. This whole place: it's got a feel to it. And there's a choice, and it's a little like a deal, like tying oneself into a thread, like - she steps back from the counter, slides her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, lets her eyelashes sweep downward in a blink, thoughtful. This, too: the Door, the back-door, the interesting one, there's no indication what might be back there [the backroom, wherein Amazing Spider Man +1 resides?], and Kage - Kage focuses, for a second, calls up a formulae, imagines an occult drawing, the lines would go here, and here, and uses that to jump off, uses that instead of pure-instinct, to Reach, Reach around for Space, just testing the edges.

If she were normal, or even another willworker, she might be walking away now, walking through the front door, whatever. "That door," she says, lifting her chin to indicate the lockless thing, "or that one," and she tilts her head, to indicate the door-by-which-she-came, and then - " - and three choices, hunh." She wasn't stalling, though. Says - " - are you okay? Is there anything you want?"

He was afraid, wasn't he? Of her. No.

[Him] He gave her three choices. Take and know. Take and not-know. Leave them behind, wash her hands of it, leave without something, without knowing, without touching. There are two doors. Here is the third.

"You can stay here." The look he gives her is nervous, it tastes like truth. There is something utterly fucking naked about this kid when he says it, with the rolled-up Spiderman in his hand, between-places. His eyes are stark and his mouth is slack and he's still, not deer-in-headlights still, but still, aware of her and the doors and the place, like he remembers something he has always forgotten.

- a twitch of his mouth, upward. That's a smile, as real as the naked look he gave her, stark with shame. The smile is real, it is soft and it is quiet, it is sweet and bittersweet, like honey and pith, white, peeled away from the flesh of the fruit. Like an appleseed. "It's not so bad. There's always something to read, the hours are decent - and - and - " a frown compresses his brow. "Really. There's a rhythm to it. I like the rhythm. The days move and it is like so. And the comics are pretty good. The light comes in and it is lovely." He catches her look toward the door, the back one, when she indicates it.

"I've never been back there," he says, quiet. "I - I don't know what's on the other side. I wouldn't go through. And I couldn't go back. I'm okay, yeah. I mean, everyone can come and go, eh? So. I wouldn't mind it if you stayed here with me. Like I said - it's not that bad here. It's - it's fine, really."

[Girl] "I don't think so," Kage says, and the frown has become (brief) more pronounced. "That's - you can't wouldn't or couldn't yourself - well." Here, a self-aware, self-directed curl of her mouth: "Shouldn't use the contraction 'can't.' Not in this context, hm?" A beat. And then, repetition - because repetition is mantra, is easy: "I don't think so. Doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm going to look?"

- so she'll, careful still, walk around the table the nameless man's hulking over, bittersweet, quiet, the display case with the peradem, glistering like a white road, like milk, dreaming itself into grandeur -

and that's where she'll go. That door. But she's not ignoring him; she's still paying attention.

[Him] "It's up to you," he says, that shines in him, bright, like he means it. " - you know? I hope you make it through."

--

She walks through the shop, which is done just so. It reminds her of Paris, this place, in artful disorder. Here is a door, in the woodwork, in the white-painted wainscotting. There is no handle and there is no lock and there is no key. She opens it. There is no back room. There is no back room full of comic books.

There is the shadow of a garden beyond. The trees are huge and enshadowed. It is night. She can see the stars.

--


"You sure you don't want one?" The shopkeeper says, from behind the display case. Sunlight cuts through the wide windows of the storefront, casts him in brilliant light. His eyes are tawny and sad and his mouth is slack, wistful beneath the twee suggestion of a mustache. "It's up to you." The peradam wink and gleam in the sunlight, like dew in the first light of dawn.

[Girl] Before she opened the door, she watched the nameless man; she listened to what she could hear, through the door. And he reminded her about the peradam, and she thinks, Diamonds are a girls best friend, the thought curdles through her blood like smoke, like the children's rhyme it isn't, like the crooning songstress's wise-eyed, knowing advice, tongue-in-cheek, and she also thinks - They just look like diamonds. They look like stars, but they're not. False-things, lovely, but - unmarked.

"I don't think I want one - " is what she says, and then " - they look look expensive. Keep your stars," because Kage's weakness is poetry, sometimes. "I know where to look for them if I need to." Because that: that's one of the things, one of the Knacks, she just knew when she was first-Awake, when the world was dark, and dangerous, and she was going mad, but not really - knowing things, finding them, feeling them like an ache in her tooth.

And that's when she, thinking that, really, she should be a little more cautious [ - but she feels like - ], walks through the door without a lock. Out've tumble-antiqued carefully-arranged Parisienne sophisticate, and into some garden - shadow-thing, shadow-place.

[Girl]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 7, 9 (Failure at target 6)
to†Girl

[Girl]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 8 (Success x 1 at target 7)
to†Girl

[Girl]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
to†Girl

[Girl]
Dice Rolled:[ 2 d10 ] 3, 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)
to†Girl

[Him] The door closes behind her -

She's in the garden and it is night, the air is rich with scent. Something is dry on the ground beneath her feet - leaves, she thinks, leaves falling - and but no, no, the earth is damp and new-turned, she smells that too, fertility sunk into the soil, simmering under the star-strewn sky. There are trees here, which are tall, and which whisper in the wind. There are willow branches and there is water, someone, singing its quiet song, running over stones, the bones of the earth.

- and someone grabs her by the shoulders.

He smells the world sounds after the first snowfall - dampened, distinct, like the night sky. He smells like an interrupted shadow, like a crossroads on some lonely moor, heather and bog-water, the secrets that live underneath the shifting ground. The ground that gives way underneath you. He smells like bone left out in the wind and rain until it is clean of all flesh. He smells like the memory of water in a long-dry well.

He kisses her like the falling rain, gentle, and then it is a raging storm - pelting hard droplets a fractional degree from being or becoming ice. He kisses her like winter kisses spring, like summer kisses snow - melting into her and filling her senses and she cannot breathe without breathing him and she cannot scream without screaming him. His hands are on her cheeks, on her shoulders, on her breasts. His hands are on her hips, ghosting her body, dreaming it like he made it, Pygmalion, this inverse sort of lie. He pushes her into the dim, dark shape of a tree climbing into the sky. It's evening now, it's dark. She remembers the shape of daylight through the picture windows, remembers the way the world pushes itself into being, the shadows through the iron, the white chair gleaming in the sunlight.

Now it is dark and it is night and he kisses her mouth until it is bruised and swollen, until she is breathing the air from his lungs, which tastes like cold flame, fills her up with the dark, churning sense of creation, some essentialism, some fundamental processes, the star that consumes itself.

She knows Him. Knows Him before he touches her. Knows Him before she tastes Him. The stars can dissolve from the sky. She will find them again in his eyes.

She knows Him. And when he has drawn her up, turned her not into a pillar of salt but a pillar of flame-seeking-oxygen, he breaks away from her, sets her forcibly free and turns and stalks a great circuit of the walled garden, the shadows of the walls, the shadows of the trees, the shadow of the sky - shaking his head like a thing apart, the horned god who cannot be contained by walls, who cannot be stopped by spells, essential.

He is laughing. "I knew you'd come."

Girl] The door closes behind her.

And behind her, there is an antique shop, and a nameless shop boy, un/named peradem, which gleam like water, like the scrim of stars. And there is traffic and asphalt and coffee and laptops and parks and crosswalks. Day.

Different here. Kage is inclined to stay by the door, just a step, two, three over the threshold and regard the (cloistered [cloistering]) night garden, to tilt her head back and look at the sky through the leaves, look toward the shadows, toward what might be walls or more trees, indistinguishable shapes, uncandled, to look at the ground she is standing on, smell it, breathe it, adjust, wonder. But the door closes, and as if it's just a continuation of the movement set in motion by the door closing (set in motion by the hand set in motion by the door set in motion by the desire set in motion by),

He grabs her by the shoulders.

Her heart punches a warning that sends her right up onto the balls of her feet, the tips of her toes. Her breath gets caught on a hook in her throat; she opens her mouth to say a word. Probably a dirty one; maybe just a question. What she doesn't do is step back, jerk away, because that isn't Kage's instinct. Kage's instinct is to reach up; to grab His wrists. Hold. Stay, don't. And her instinct is to breathe, because that's the first instinct, even if some need to have it slapped into them (live!). And her instinct is to scream Him, because that's the second instinct (I am!).

But he is kissing her, pushing her into the tree. He kisses her unshadowed, shadowless; he kisses her until she is unlaced by longing. Until her blood isn't craving oxygen, isn't wanting air to carry to the chambers of her heart, to keep her living, life, alive, until -- and this is a cliche -- it's like drowning, coming out on the other side, finding that, hey, if you turn yourself inside out just this way, you're fine, water is air, air is water, you're drowned, but not dead. Until she kisses Him, thoughtfully, thoughtlessly: because she wants to.

Kage isn't gasping for air when he breaks away and stalks a compass around the walled garden, laughing, but she is breathing deeply, as if her lungs were new, as if it was something she had to remind herself how to do. I knew you'd come, He says, and Kage -- finally -- chuckles, soft, smiling, irony only a shadow, distant. The sound unravells: a clot of ash, of smoke, of silver-thread, of spinning fibers, moon-soaked, thistle and milkweed, sent down the river, drifting after mad girls, tragic lovers, boats bearing grave-goods, the king-who'll-come-again-one-day, a useless note.

"Yeah?" she says, peeling away from the tree, swatching Him move, shifting her weight from one foot to another, ready to shadow, or turn away. Kage, flushed, has eyes that are made dark by wistfulness, that're tarnished up with something kinned to awe. "Well, when a girl gets a clear invitation, meet me -- You know -- " A beat, a pause. Serious: "So I'm here." Another beat. "What's your name? What is this place, and what is this place called, and why are we here?"

[Him] This is a garden and there is a sky and he is standing in the shadows shed by the silver stars. There's something whole about him, and indistinct, when she sees him silhouetted against the night, as if his skin were permeable, as if he were bleeding back into the night from which he was born. There he is: at the edge of the garden, where there are green things gone wild and gone dead, this scent in the air that is sharp and humid, that is dry as crumbled leaves in autumn, that is balanced in between the two.

The stars are in his eyes; they are in his hair. There are in his skin; he is luminous underneath, and solid. There is earth on his tongue, and he is grounded. This: illusion, that he does not have feet encased in tooled leathern boots or stylish sneakers or hooves, sometimes they are hooves ñ but merely roots, slender and knobby, gleaming white, burrowing down into the depths of the earth.

"I gave you a clear invitation," he says; his smile is grave and cold, the laughter dies the way sweet milk goes sour. No, not grave ñ distant, and superior and unknowable, impossible as the sky. " ñ it is engraved on your heart. This isnít - " he turns, opens his arms to the night sky, to the place where the earth and sky are joined, are jointed ñ which is neither and both, horizon ñ "easy Kage. None of it is easy. Is that all you want? Come here. Do this. Do it for me, and know that I am?"

"Kage," His eyes are lambent when he says her name. "I thought that you were more than that. I know that you are." When he closes the distance between them and stands tall, bleeding shadow into shadow and light into light, this faint, ineffable smile twisting across his sharpened features. He reaches out and touches her brow, her mouth, and her breastbone, his fingers cool and sharp and white as the bleached antlers, the discarded crown of some great beast.

They come away red. Crimson: that. There is blood on her lips, sharp copper, the metallic promise of a coming storm.

And then they are dark. His hands are dark, and his eyes. "This place," he tells her, his voice a dark baritone, low enough that it seems to rumble in his chest. " - is a garden, and we are here because you opened a Door and walked through it." Except: when she looks, the Door is gone. The wall is whole and high. Beyond it: only the sky, only the promise of the distant stars. "This place has more Names than I do, and I have more Names than you will ever dream or know.

His hands are dark. And his eyes: they are quicksand, for how swiftly she could drown in them.

His smile, though, is wide and rich and generous.
Everything about it is a lie.

"Go on, Kage," he says, flanking her, lowering his mouth to her ear like a lover. " ñ ask another question. Stay here, stay right here, and I will tell you everything you ever wanted to know."

[Girl] Her eyes narrow on Him when he replies. Her eyes aren't lambent at all: they're of disputable shade, tarnished up like this; dark like this in His shadow. They're full up of something, though, and it's easy to know: awe, still, that thing kinned to it; a direct curiosity, uncertainty; something sharper than the taste of copper, something etched and ardent and still serious. "I -- " she says, is that all you want. But He's still talking: talks right over her, earth burying water.

He closes the distance. Where He touches her, she feels an ache in her bones, under her skin, and she touches her collarbone, startled by that, too, and examines her fingers. There's no wound, and yet, yet, yet: His fingers are bloodied. Kage takes a quick, sharp breath while he flanks her, speaks in her ear, and before He finishes his sentence she reaches up to press her hand across his, to stifle you wanted to know.

"Easy?" she says, an echo - harsh: angry. Then, quieter: "Easy?" The door is gone, and she has noted its absence without surprise. There was something about the way it closed: about the way this was a garden now, the way He appeared, the exulting laughter. And now, this. She swallows a word.

Looks away. At the garden, at the walls: at the roots, at His feet, at her own. Says, quiet: "I'm not staying right here. And I'm not going to be questionless. Here, some garden, some anchoress, walled up: no word except from her priest -- " Here, her (scared?) gaze turns ironic, flicks at Him -- but she's still in earnest: " -- until her eyes go as white as milk and as unseeing as a cobweb." Beat. Boils down to this bone: "I don't want you to tell me. I want,"

caesura

"to know."

[Him] This is how they stand: He flanks She. Taller and broader and sharper but ever-so-much less: real, warm, true.

In profile, his features are sharp and somehow eroded, eroding. The river brings the earth to the sea, silts up its mouth until it cannot speak, until it creates a thousand channels, fingerswidth, rivulets, torrents, so that the water can return to the ocean. The ocean swallows the earth; until something hot, blazing, at its core vomits it back up again. This is how he is: immediate and failing and replenished, fading into the darkness of the sky, defined by and against it. Whole and intact, disappearing back into the night. The dying god who always returns, the new-made thing, born to die.

He flanks her, so close, and turns and bends, presses his cool mouth to the crown of her head; and she can feel the stars, burning behind her eyes. He kisses her ear, the shell of it, his mouth hungry, his breath warmer, pent up, withheld. She can hear the beat of her own heart; she can hear the tidal things underneath his skin. Can hear the pulse minute rustle of dead leaves underfoot, the sap in the oak as it moves under the rought skein of its bark. The roots worming blind through the ground underfoot.

Then he - stops, leans closer, gentle now, gentled, the shadow of the kiss over his eyes, his voice warm, and gentle, and true.

"Then look. See. Seek. Find. Love. Know. Look: to see what you can, to seek what you can find, to know what you can love. Look. I'll be here." His left hand is cool on her shoulder. "Right here." His right hand is warm on her breast.

The wind rustles in the waving branches of the dark trees. The garden is restless, alive, shadowed - cool, dead and dying and being born again. There are trees, with vast canopies rustling in the night sky. There are deep copes, twisted brambles with hearts so dark that even the light of the stars cannot penetrate. There are mounds of leaves, mast on the garden floor, manicured beds where white flowers gleam like shrunken moons, quiet currents where a stream moves through the earth gleaming. There is, somewhere, the sound of a spring, and the eart beneath her feet, soft and dark, rich and crumbling. There is the night sky; and there are walls, unbroken. The walls shine like marble in the darkness, reflect the stars about. And what is marble, but the bones of the earth?

Look, he says to her. Urges her onward. Look. Seek. See.

[Girl] Look, he says. And it's just like a conversation she's had, and recently. Don't you ever Look, she'd asked. Look just to Look. Just to See what there is to see? Hadn't been able to understand that: having the ability, and not using it, because things might be the same; because one thinks one already knows what there is to see.

This is a secret: it's a really good secret. Even Kage doesn't (quite [yet]) realize it. How important it is to her: love; her belief that it exists -- not just as a thing that is felt and temporary; not just as a connection that is fleet, that is seconds, that is siftless, that is balladry: a thing that is more; a thing that is a road; a thing that'll burn fire and light the sun home after it's died in a bloody conflageration to the west. See, he says, and Seek, and her gaze is narrowed, again, this time directly in front of her, because he is kissing her forehead, and she can feel it, and Find, he says, Love, and the word is a river-stone, is a copper-coin, is a needle, and she looks at Him, listening.

She isn't worried that she'll get lost [be lost, though (that's different - what if - )]. She isn't worried that He won't be able to find her [but if she wants Him (oh, always, eventually; right?]. She takes a sideways step, and then, hands finding her pockets, her back-pockets, shoulders up, hair undone, twisting, doesn't say a thing: speaks with a look, maybe. Okay, and We'll see, and Mystery, ahoy.

Then she turns and -- not ignoring Him; she's good at that, but she's not, not right now -- starts to explore. Not by going toward the perimeter, but by turning -- after a hesitation, compass-needle, which-way-North, which-way-does-magnetism-flow, which-way, wayward-thing -- toward the garden's heart, approaching it at an angle, circling. Looking. See?

[Him] Look.

Kage turns her back on the walls, which are white and impossibly high, which are silver, which glow with reflected light from the stars. Turns her back on whatever is beyond them, and defines a meandering vector into the heart of the enclosed garden, the place that remains Nameless because it has too many Names. More than She. More than He.

He shadows her every step. Even when she cannot see him, she can feel him as the wind in her hair, the fusion-whisper at the heart of the stars above. The way the atoms split and burn, the way they make themselves again: something different, something new. She can feel his twin kisses: the crown of her head, cool, the lobe of her ear, hotter than the blood beneath her skin.

The garden is tame. Here is a topiary tree in the shape and shadow of the moon, here are silver bells in a gleaming row. Here is an artful stream cutting through the beds just so, the ferns unfurling their fractal fingers in perfect endless symmetry to the moonshine, furling them again at her touch when she reaches for them. Here is cress wild on the banks of the stream, where it leaves its gentle course and grows rocky, rapids churning under the light of the moon. Here is cress, bitter and sweet, and clover. Chickweed and dogwood and briar rose, the low hum of a colony of bees, mistletoe that wraps itself around the oak, some hidden place, heavy with honey suckle.

The garden is tame and wild, living and dead. Here is autumn. Here is the promise of winter like a bitter heart, when everything recedes into darkness, and night sky swallows the sun until you charm it back into the sky.

--

And so on, and so on, until she comes to a small stone well, long abandoned, the stones tumbled, the boards covering it rotting slowly, the scent of water sharp, seeping in the air. Beside the well: a boy. A bone-thin, bone-white boy with hair black as a starless night, and eyes the color of dying grass. There is blood on his forehead, blood on his mouth, and - worse - a deep wound in the center of his chest, the sternum fractured, the ribs broken, the blood such a deep, livid red it can only have come from the heart. HE is alive, watching her, the bellows of his moving visibly through the shattered cage of his ribs. He is alive and he is breathing - wheezing, constant, the wind sighing through the trees.

[Girl] This is how Kage explores, okay? Kage explores like: the ground -- shifting, untamed and then tame, wanton and then demure, wild and then gentle -- is a prayer labyrinth. Each step she takes, well: that step is careful. Each tree she touches, looks up, up, up, each star she spies, each stream she comes to, crosses, dips her fingers into, gathers-water-up, cups it, doesn't quite drink (fairyland [maybe]), although she thinks about it: she does it carefully, just so.

Kage is thinking about a poem she knows, while she does this; Kage thinks once about people who walk in two worlds at once, and what that does to the one world that others don't also walk in, and whether or not she would frighten people to death, whether or not she'd see them, be able to look at both worlds. And Kage thinks, once, about the taste of the air on her tongue, the way it feels, slipping down her throat, alert, unsteadied.

And that's when: the well, the boy, the blood, alive and breathing and dying, and Kage -- Kage rakes her hair back, out've her face, contains it at the base of her neck, and goes to the boy's side, gauging how bad it is (bad), gauging, quantifying, dismayed: "Hey there," she says, soothing, low -- as if the boy were a deer, were an animal-thing, something that might flee, startled. Blood on his forehead, his mouth: his chest wrenched open. "Can you speak?" She doesn't expect him to.

[Him] "Yes," says the boy right back to her. His lungs move like fish see: they are slippery-visceral. Viscera. But when Kage speaks to him, the boy looks up, looks at her, so directly, his dying-grass eyes in his moon-pale face, his skin like diamond which means: reflective, except occluded somehow. A diamond fill with smoke. Smoke, filled with diamonds, dreaming of the moon. And the boy: looks at her, cants his head at her, all sidelong and curious, each breath a death rattle and tells her again, quiet calm but for the Other in his eyes. "Yes. I can speak."

He coughs once. It is a terrible sound - wrenching, something anchored torn loose from its moorings. The visible organs spasm in his chest and flecks of dark blood spittle over his pale lips. His voice is strong though, even and clear.

[Girl] Her left knee touches the ground. Balance. Kneeling, then. Beside the boy with the clear voice; she pales at the sight of his -- the contraction of: viscera; inner workings. But Kage is a willworker; she wills herself not to throw-up, and she does not: later, save it for later - save it. The fingertips of her right hand touch the ground: sketch a circle: a line: a rune.

There is a word in her head: opens like a rose [opens like a season], and then she is Looking at the boy, skimming the surface of his mind for thoughts, for what-he-is-thinking, extending that sense for thoughts-that-are-near, for another-mind, because what did that, did he do that to himself, couldn't, what did that, and where did it go, and why is there blood where there is blood. More, though: another word unfurls in her head, unspoken, although maybe her lips move, like she's trying to think of what to actually say to the dying boy, and then: more. She is looking at the boy's fate, at the hours he has left, and whether or not he gleams, shines, if he's human, if he approaches human, if this is Dies Irae and nothing else.

And she is also, human, reaching to touch him, although not quite yet, waiting for a sign, touch his shoulder: "I don't know how to mend you. What can I do; what do you want?" Always, this question: it's important, wanting. And, because she isn't a saint, because her voice is shading, horrified, but steady-to-hear: "What did this to you?" Then she does touch the boy with her cool fingers.

[Him] He is near her ear. His hand shadows hers as she works, as she traces her rune, as she blooms her word like a rose in her mind. As she seeks to find. And as she looks, and as she sees, he stands at her shoulder, the shadow of her shadow, the stars in his eyes. Whispers, cruel into her ear, Do you really[/i] think you can save them all?[/i] His right hand is warm on her shoulder, the cool left hand open to the sky. She senses this without seeing it; feels him at her back, the vastness of the night inside of him.

Before her: This boy, this boy with dying-grass eyes, he is a human, a human-thing, this is what her workings tell her. He is Human, which is to say: alive, as the trees and the grass and the silverbells and the watercress and the maidensfern. And not endless, as the fusion-driven stars. The thread of his life is so short that Kage can almost feel it, can almost taste it, can almost knot it between her fingers.

"One of the ladies in the tower," the boy says, his attention unwavering, his words flecked with spittle and blood. With broken bits of shattered bone. " - she stole my heart."

He coughs again, and imagine this: the last leaf of autumn, clinging to some bare branch, rattling in a howling winter wind.

"I want it back." The boy says. "I want it back again."

Look over his shoulder. There is no tower. There are no stones, just a well, and a steeply rising hill that disappears up and up and up behind him.

[Him] He is near her ear. His hand shadows hers as she works, as she traces her rune, as she blooms her word like a rose in her mind. As she seeks to find. And as she looks, and as she sees, he stands at her shoulder, the shadow of her shadow, the stars in his eyes. Whispers, cruel into her ear, Do you really think you can save them all? His right hand is warm on her shoulder, the cool left hand open to the sky. She senses this without seeing it; feels him at her back, the vastness of the night inside of him.

Before her: This boy, this boy with dying-grass eyes, he is a human, a human-thing, this is what her workings tell her. He is Human, which is to say: alive, as the trees and the grass and the silverbells and the watercress and the maidensfern. And not endless, as the fusion-driven stars. The thread of his life is so short that Kage can almost feel it, can almost taste it, can almost knot it between her fingers.

"One of the ladies in the tower," the boy says, his attention unwavering, his words flecked with spittle and blood. With broken bits of shattered bone. " - she stole my heart."

He coughs again, and imagine this: the last leaf of autumn, clinging to some bare branch, rattling in a howling winter wind.

"I want it back." The boy says. "I want it back again."

Look over his shoulder. There is no tower. There are no stones, just a well, and a steeply rising hill that disappears up and up and up behind him.

[Girl] This is almost normal. Something is happening, and He is commenting, and she is not giving an indication that she can hear what he is saying to the person she is talking to. This is almost comfortable (it never is [not really]). Her jaw tightens, sharp, delicate -- there is a minute shift in the color of her eyes.

"You'll still die," she says, touching the boy's forehead now: touching his blood, lifting it, looking at it, gathering herself to stand. And, blood to blood: Kage will Work more, follow the thread of the boy's heat, fading, because blood calls to blood, and a heart is where blood lives, and desire, and love, and revelation, and: well. Blood calls to blood. Her fingertips tingle, wet, dark. "I'm sorry," she says, and also: "I'll see what I can do." And then she stands, and says, under-her-breath, to Him --

"Not all, but any."

[Him] "Any, then," says He. He is close now. He is behind her, somehow, his voice curling around her, his presence certain. "Do you think," she can feel his smile, backgrounded against her skin. It moves through her and she knows how she would see him were there a mirror behind the boy, standing close as a lover, his eyes full of stars, his face in profile, his mouth twisted into a smile that is both fond and disdainful. " - you can save any?"

--

He speaks. She works. She finds the thread of the boy's missing heart unspun. See this: a skein of something twisted together, split down into its constituent fibers. They stand at the base of the hill, Kage and the Boy and He-who-knows-her. They stand beside a well. Here is a thread that goes up the hill. Here is a thread that goes down the well. Here is thread that stays, in place and intact. Or rather: here is a thread that coils around her feet the way the serpent coils itself around the world-tree.

Call this a cross-roads.

"Bring me back my heart," says the dead-white boy with the broken breastbone and the missing heart. His mouth is painted crimson, and his smile is like death's own. His voice is attenuated with grief. "Find it. Bring it back to me."

Another coughing fit brings up clots so gleaming-dark they could be patent, could be oil, could be tar the way it oozes up from wounds inside the earth.

" - or give me yours."

[Girl] Kage wishes He hadn't played Echo on those words because they come back at her like the horns of elfland. The horns of elfland: blue shadows, distant; haunting, intangible: unreachable. Do you think you can save any. Words that're like webs: some cocoon a busy, poisonous spider spins, ravelling up the insect [angel], until they're just so, until they're caught, still, silent, ready to be sucked dry. Because she's human, and flawed, and she doesn't know, so she doubts, the echo unlocks her doubts, makes her stomach knot itself into the heart of a maze, her heart contract. Kage is flushing; she can feel heat wash across her face; feel her eyes darken, deepen, in comparison: or imagine she does.

Does she think that there's a way, really? Does she believe? Didn't save Dylan Willis. Couldn't find him to save. Didn't save the nameless 'crow. Couldn't find his heart and give it back. Didn't save Margot. Doctors did that. And radiation: pain did that. Not Kage. All Kage could do was see: look, that black-cloud, that clot of ill-fortune, of dissolution, dessication: a stain where she touched things, her shadow, lengthening, signs.

What does it mean if even He's asking that question?

--

The thread splits. There are three roads: the heart is in the well, or the heart is up the hill, or the heart is her heart, and each way is right. Not all: each. Kage hesitates. Her fingers are bloody, and she hesitates; her eyes are tarnishing even darker, now. They're all pupil, or would be: all pupil and grave-moss. I am stretched on your grave and I'll lie here forever. Kage is not, by instinct, a martyr.

--

"I don't know," she says, to Him: her voice is quieter-than-quiet; the stars don't hear it. No shadows do. Just the shadow of her tongue: just Him. "But I believe so."

--

- or give me yours, the Boy says, and Kage inhales: to say no. To say: No. Wouldn't fit. I'll give you days, instead; I'll give you heartbeats to sustain you: seconds, time, trimmed off the end-of-days, the beginning-of-days, too: the smoke of memories, just so's you'll last long enough for me to go to the tower, to speak to the ladies, to sacrifice unto them whatever it is they're going to ask or to trick them out've whatever it is they're not going to ask. She inhales to say: No. Wouldn't be yours. Would change you. You'd lose your name. Wouldn't be enough.

But thinks, ultimately: Why wouldn't it be enough? - giving it isn't the same as losing it. And Kage, Kage is an ardent creature: passionate, at the core. And this isn't a metaphor, this garden-place, this boy-without-a-heart, ribs-splayed, organs twitching: Jesus. Could she?

"If I give you my heart," she says, instead: "Then it's yours." Always was. Transformative property.

[Him] "Yes." This is what the Boy says, looking at her dark eyes without wavering, without failing, without falling. His own are a tangle of color, green and its absent, the failure of photosynthesis - yellow, brown, autumn-crisp before winter-dead. And he says what she is thinking, what is inside her, the knowledge of it, " - then it always-was. And always-is, until it always-wasn't. Until it never-was." His death is written into his eyes. He is choking on the promise of it. "Give me your heart. Get my heart back.

"I can't live without one."

And He, to She, in the shell of her ear, in the heart-that-may-be-another's own, says to her, Can you?

--

His hand is on her shoulder, His mouth is near her ear. His body is at her back, she can feel him, holding her now in a near-embrace that feels familiar as her favorite winter coat. No. That's not it at all.

She is His winter coat. He has almost stepped into her, inhabited the space between the atoms of her cells, where electrons orbit and neutrons spin in balanced harmony between the spaces of her being.

[Girl]
Kage is standing. Looking down at the boy by the well with his hair so dark. Looking at his face as he speaks with his blood on her fingertips, drying in the air and water-cool and wave-dark. Looking at his face because the ruin of his abdomen, his chest: it's too horrible, that he's speaking like that, cracked open, broken, it's too terrible a thing to see: but she can't not-see it. There it is. Still: his eyes; his face. That's where he isn't empty.

Behind her, He is touching-close; He is close-close. He is getting into her bones; into her blood. He's there, though: already there -- she can feel it; her shadow replaced, replacement of His shadow. Her throat is dry; she swallows, to clear it. Can you, he says, and Yes.

To her credit, maybe: once she has chosen a course - if her hands go to her chest for a moment, if her palm presses downward, if her pulse is leaping, if she is still flushed, flushing, if she touches her shoulder, or His hand, or the weight of His shadow there for a second, if, if - she stays it:

"Okay. Yes. Mine is yours." And when she's said this, her lashes come close enough to kiss, to meet, but-not-quite-to-close. And then, inhale: she'll look for the tool to do the deed, if knowing doesn't strike her.


[Him] The garden is dark. There are stars in the sky above them. There are trees on the folded ground, rising beyond the boy. The scent of dark water somewhere deep in the well. The garden is filled with slanting silver shadows, which cut down through the branches from the spangled sky. He is behind her, his hands on her shoulders.

There are no tools in sight. No ceremonial knives, no scalpels, no spears. No arrows, and no cupids to loose them at her chest. Just a dying boy, blood on his mouth, shadows in his dying-grass eyes, his skin milk-white, moon-white, stone-white, bone-white. She has only her hands. Her hands and her mouth and her heart. These are her tools: her hands and her knowing, her mind and her body. Him, behind her, inside her, quiet now.

[Girl] No stone. No edge: no convenient knife; no ritual dagger. No hook, as silver as the moon, as sharp as salt; just her fingernails. There is nothing else. Except: the well, the walls, the roots, the earth -- except for her pulse, wild in her temples, for her heart, hammering against her collarbone. Except for Him, and herself, and her Self, and she bites the inside of her lip, bites until she tastes blood, salt. There is nothing sharp except for her resolution; except for the need, the itch of it, the end-of-times, winter-coming, can't-happen-like-this. Kage doesn't notice that she's bitten herself, bloody, when she kneels again next to the boy, when she kisses him on the forehead, presses her mouth to his forehead like [alms] a name. I would like your help, she says: asks. Not-quite-aloud; she isn't talking to the Boy.

[Him] Not-quite-aloud.

He is there. Behind the Boy, somewhere, watching them. He was her shadow, and now He is her mirror, a dark one, still and reflective. She knows his mouth, the stars in his eyes and his hair, the often cruel edge of his smile. His clothing is dark, neglible, something modern she knows - unremarkable. She always sees his eyes or his mouth, the shadow of his hair around him, the vast suggestion of the night in his body.

I need your help, she says, kissing the boy with her bloodied mouth, already mourning that which isn't hers to lose, her sacrifice. His eyes are cool and distant, the flicker of silver in them feels like a prayer, feels like benediction. While she kneels at the feet of the boy, He reaches up to the crown of his dark head, wraps his hands around something she has never seen before, that she does not see now until he wrenches it from his skull and offers it to her, holding it above the boy's head, holding it out for her. A crown of antlers, bone white, visible now in his outstretched hand, living bone, the scent of the stars a sharp counterpoint in the cool night air of the breathing garden.

[Girl] If one day, years from now, years and years, after the world ends, after the world is reborn: if, one day, there is ever a Book of Kage like there is a Book of Revelation and a Book of Daniel and a Book of Mary and a Book of Mysteries and a Book of Dionysus and a Book of the Nameless King, they will not write that -- faced with Him, with Him as immanence, inside her, within her, without her, with Him: wearing her, being worn by her, melting, dissolving -- Him, holding a crown of antlers, of living bone taken from His own head over a Boy, dying, a Boy who might very well continue to die for ever, for an eternity (and that would be intolerable [that would be worse]), because he's been dying, lying heartless for who knows how long, and he's still dying, and still not dead --

If, one day, there is this Book, they won't write that Kage looks at him and for a moment humour surfaced like a fin from a dark river, something that gleams in the sunlight, something that catches the edge of a star, makes it earthly, and she thought: well, well, is that your party hat, is that --

That is a surface thought: it signifies nothing. Kage takes the crown; careful. Do the antlers sift in her hands? Do they re-connect, re-settle? Do they prick her, make her bleed? Do they scrape against her skin, or are they cool? This is/n't a sacrifice: not really. It's just hard. Giving isn't the same as losing. And Kage, Kage -- smiling, a little ruefully, a little wistfully, until the rue, the wist, fades into something more concentrated, less conscious -- unlocks the crown, unbends it, because it's sharp enough, and she kisses the boy again, until she's found the point that will do the deed, the point

at which she can

press

and there it is.

[Him] There it is.

There is blood, and pain as shearing hot as the pain of a new born star. This is what it means to split, to be split through to the heart. Blood fills her mouth and her nose and her throat and her eyes. Blood fills her ears, roaring like the ocean. Blood spills over her hands and the crown of antlers slips in her shifting grasp. The cut deepens and there is just this: in her hands, her heart. On her sleeve, her blood. In her hands, His crown. In her heart, His stars.

This is what she will remember: her heart in her hands, beating. Her blood painting her skin, her mouth full of it, the way her lungs burn for what of breath, this errant darkness closing over her like a crown, the cool kiss of the fallen god on her brow, the spasm of it, all meat, all muscle, electic impulses worming across the surface, like a closed fist, she holds it out to him: the boy, already on her knees, her blood a torrent, her own breath a distant, disordered thing, the heart like frog in her hands and the boy, the boy smiles, smiles at her as she's drowning in her own pain and her own blood, kisses her eyes and her mouth and her hands, takes his heart from her and

- whole, sings the song of her blood back at her.

His bones reknit, calcium accretes into the broken spaces, cartilage then blood then bone; her heart is safe within the cage of his body, and she's dying, falling forward, the earth swimming up to meet her. This is what she will remember: His arms, around her and beneath her, His crown intact. He knows what it means to die.

And he knows what it means to be reborn.

Later: she awakens, in her own bed, or on a park bench, in an antique store or a coffee shop. There's blood in her mouth. She can taste it. When she spits, discretely, into the gutter or the sink, there it is: blood, deep blood, heart's blood, clotted crimson. There's an ache deep in her bones. There are two seeds in her mouth, and a new world open inside her.