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corusc[1] [2] [3] / [4] [5] [6] /
• • • • •
They walked to the shore, the side opposite their landing — or rather, Loki walked while Victor limped, leaning heavily on the arm propping him up by the shoulders. The skies were streaked with black smoke, and their lungs adraw with ash-filled air. Victor held up a corner of his cloak to his face and tried not to cough. In Loki's other arm lay Ikol. This thing, it was whispering — rumors and gossip, it seemed to Victor, not keys and not puzzles, in meandering, effervescent languages only vaguely familiar, most of it in registers beyond his ken. It had teeth, the bird, and a lizard tongue, and cat pupils, and it was no more a bird than Loki was a child, not like Victor was, becalmed in a raging ocean that was memory, what he had been and could only become again. Feathers fell, one by one, littered the path they stamped upon the glassy dust. Once in a while Loki would let out quiet laughs, sounds cottoned around some seed or curse. The echoes of the sound curled in Victor's ears, worms made of distant thunder.
"Am I owed you, or are you owed me?" Loki said out loud.
"Me," Victor said, stumbling through a many-tendriled pain, the word automatic, and he thought he saw Loki smile. Catching his eyes Ikol laughed, chidden. He flickered in and out of view, in time with Victor's consciousness flashing to and dark.
The graveled road leading out of the city crumbled into dirt, and then into clumps of matted grass that struck their ankles and shins as hard as rocks. They fought through a stretch of coarse, wiry thickets, only to suddenly find the ground beneath their feet soft, and fell gracelessly into the damp sand. The bird's body went rolling and stilled, wings and legs sticking out, crusted with silver grains. The whispering ceased, though their echoes remained, waiting, or so it seemed. Victor felt Loki slowly peel away and sit up and reach out. From the rustling he knew it was the bird in his hands. Victor's eyes fluttered closed. Fatigue crashed over him in like a tidal wave and suffused his entire being. The oceans gelled and time slowed; a long slither of it wound around him, the way snakes do for prey they hold dear.
"It was luck, to have shared the road with another so touched," Victor heard Loki say through the crunching of tiny, brittle bones. "Because it was mad, to think I could—oh. Not so, then. That's right, we're no longer fortune-bound—" The scent reached him in curls like smoke, Loki's, too, the shards of the bird bloodying the inside of his mouth, his fingertips as he sucked the marrow dry. They were still conversing, though the sounds touched Victor less and less; the blood like any other was drying up in the wind full of stinging grit, everything together growing cold and silent, the fires receding, retiring, sleepily banking, the warmth arranging itself about all the worlds and their wounds as it pleased, revelling in some contrary nature, writing its own rules.
"Fare well, thou ghastly egomaniac," Victor heard him say. His eyes pulled reluctantly away from a black oblivion, turned instead to cloud-hazed light.
"Goodbye, you self-serving showboat," he said without particular venom.
"You're one to talk," Loki said, crashing back into the beach to lie prone. He choked a little but didn't spit.
"What now?"
"Mm."
Victor slowly sat up, digging his hands into the flesh of the beach. "I have to go home," he said. It was a simple utterance. A truth that a coward like Loki would never, could never utter, and he said so.
"I never had one," Loki said, unruffled, in that single moment invincible, then the straight line of his lips faltered and he hid his face in the crook of one arm. Victor swayed upright and kicked some sand in Loki's general direction.
"I hope you still remember that you are not welcome in mine."
"I remember."
Victor looked out across the ocean. It was as shallow as a dish at this end of the isle, or the floor could have risen in the time they had lain, time moved without care for laws here. He didn’t like it, not at all. Victor looked up to see strange constellations creeping, black points against a dull white sky. He struggled to recall lessons and accidents of yore, before Loki's selfish gift had brought him here, in a form he did not remember liking, either. He had always wanted to be a grown-up. That was power, power was life, and life was meaning itself. He flexed his hands. The cold had hooked them into claws; Victor carefully unfolded them into a human shape. "What do you want to do?" he generously asked.
"I don't."
Victor snorted. "You want for useless foolhardy things," he said. "Always have."
"No one likes a know-it-all."
"Unlike some people, I do not need to be liked."
"And yet!"
Victor hummed under his breath. It could just have been shock, an illusion rendered from the pain and the cold, but regardless, he was feeling better, and he never wasted an opportunity. "Suit yourself. I will find my own way back," Victor said, self-assured. He looked out across the ocean again and thought he saw a thin gray line, land of some kind. He cautiously splashed into the water. Loki stayed where he was. "Stop being an ass," Victor told him. "You are embarrassing yourself."
"I'm not."
Victor waited patiently.
"I won't," Loki said, in almost a whisper, winding up something inside himself. Victor would have tsked if he had had energy to spare. Loki sat up all of a sudden and violently struck sand from his arms and legs. "Well?" he demanded.
"Hello, Loki," Victor replied. It pleased him to be kind, this one time. Their acquaintance was long enough for that, if he wished it, and he wished it. Loki made an ugly face at him, the knave. But he drew to his feet and obligingly walked with him into the water. It barely came up the top of their feet, but was thick with mud and debris. Victor led, in a way, but if not for Loki helping him he might have crawled most of the way. It was a long walk, but one unnaturally flat, and not empty of sights. First they saw only the carcasses of shellfish, piled like dunes, and blue-gray rocks stippled with dead coral, all churned up and topsy-turvy, but further out, their progress slowed as they encountered the skeletons of fabulous vast ships and monstrous whales alike, the giant curving bones petrified. Other treasures littered the whole of the raised and ironed-flat ocean floor, and under different circumstances Victor would have been sunk deep in some brilliant scheme to make proper use of such resources, but with Loki huffing by his side, it all just seemed like a colossal nuisance, or maybe it was simply that his feelings about Loki was spilling over to the unaffected parts of his brain. The prospect of that should have troubled him more, but Victor was rather tired. He hoped that it did not seem obvious, but it was unfortunately in vain.
"Mortal," Loki said.
"I thought you said it was eternal."
"You did something to it," Loki guessed. "Effects cannot be guaranteed in cases of tampering."
"Bah," Victor said. "Can you see the other shore?"
"I don't think it's anyplace living," Loki said, squinting at the far-off lump of gray. "But it seems closer than before."
The shelf of a continent, also silent, certain to have been styled a realm but with name unknown — it was vaguely familiar, but like anything else dead, Victor could not quite place it. "Time is not time here," he said, tasting it on his tongue, not salt but something burnt, when they set foot on the shore with mud clinging to their every surface. Loki just flung his arm off and grinned cheekily when Victor did not go down.
"Nothing is nothing here," he said, harsh.
Victor didn't answer. He scanned the sloping edge of land they found themselves on and pulled a protesting Loki behind him. They climbed. Like the isle here there was grass, unrelenting, but together they sheared a way, toward the ruins of something that might have been a palace once, a great building that stretched nearly out into the sea. Entering through one of the holes in the outer walls yielded up corridors, dimly lit and clear. Globules of auricalke were strewn everywhere, hung in unruly strands from the carved rafters of the halls. Where the halls opened up, they climbed again, and went over an overgrown earthen ramp, maybe an old fortification that had been built over. At the top of the hill were more structures that had seen better days, but otherwise only the passage of time, not war. They saw no weapons: no broken swords, no spearheads, no seige engine fittings, no incised bones. They passed under the shadow of a tremendous barbican, its deep passage once fitted with hundreds of gates, going by the grooves, and entered an expansive green whose raised center held dozens of triliths, scabbed over with lichens and stained with blood yet unfaded, though entirely ancient. At the clearing's center was a shattered bell, its chain still suspended from a beam astraddle trunnions, pillars made of mirror-black obsidian. Square caskets of the same material lay open all around in the expansive space, and a threadbare, black-haired girl, her back turned, sifted through them, hands floured with the dust of books, bones, the contents of the opened reliquaries. Victor stopped where he stood and gazed at her in astonishment. Loki went a step further and let out a stricken sound.
"Leah," he said.
• • • • •
[1] [2] [3] / [4] [5] [6] /
• • • • •
They walked to the shore, the side opposite their landing — or rather, Loki walked while Victor limped, leaning heavily on the arm propping him up by the shoulders. The skies were streaked with black smoke, and their lungs adraw with ash-filled air. Victor held up a corner of his cloak to his face and tried not to cough. In Loki's other arm lay Ikol. This thing, it was whispering — rumors and gossip, it seemed to Victor, not keys and not puzzles, in meandering, effervescent languages only vaguely familiar, most of it in registers beyond his ken. It had teeth, the bird, and a lizard tongue, and cat pupils, and it was no more a bird than Loki was a child, not like Victor was, becalmed in a raging ocean that was memory, what he had been and could only become again. Feathers fell, one by one, littered the path they stamped upon the glassy dust. Once in a while Loki would let out quiet laughs, sounds cottoned around some seed or curse. The echoes of the sound curled in Victor's ears, worms made of distant thunder.
"Am I owed you, or are you owed me?" Loki said out loud.
"Me," Victor said, stumbling through a many-tendriled pain, the word automatic, and he thought he saw Loki smile. Catching his eyes Ikol laughed, chidden. He flickered in and out of view, in time with Victor's consciousness flashing to and dark.
The graveled road leading out of the city crumbled into dirt, and then into clumps of matted grass that struck their ankles and shins as hard as rocks. They fought through a stretch of coarse, wiry thickets, only to suddenly find the ground beneath their feet soft, and fell gracelessly into the damp sand. The bird's body went rolling and stilled, wings and legs sticking out, crusted with silver grains. The whispering ceased, though their echoes remained, waiting, or so it seemed. Victor felt Loki slowly peel away and sit up and reach out. From the rustling he knew it was the bird in his hands. Victor's eyes fluttered closed. Fatigue crashed over him in like a tidal wave and suffused his entire being. The oceans gelled and time slowed; a long slither of it wound around him, the way snakes do for prey they hold dear.
"It was luck, to have shared the road with another so touched," Victor heard Loki say through the crunching of tiny, brittle bones. "Because it was mad, to think I could—oh. Not so, then. That's right, we're no longer fortune-bound—" The scent reached him in curls like smoke, Loki's, too, the shards of the bird bloodying the inside of his mouth, his fingertips as he sucked the marrow dry. They were still conversing, though the sounds touched Victor less and less; the blood like any other was drying up in the wind full of stinging grit, everything together growing cold and silent, the fires receding, retiring, sleepily banking, the warmth arranging itself about all the worlds and their wounds as it pleased, revelling in some contrary nature, writing its own rules.
"Fare well, thou ghastly egomaniac," Victor heard him say. His eyes pulled reluctantly away from a black oblivion, turned instead to cloud-hazed light.
"Goodbye, you self-serving showboat," he said without particular venom.
"You're one to talk," Loki said, crashing back into the beach to lie prone. He choked a little but didn't spit.
"What now?"
"Mm."
Victor slowly sat up, digging his hands into the flesh of the beach. "I have to go home," he said. It was a simple utterance. A truth that a coward like Loki would never, could never utter, and he said so.
"I never had one," Loki said, unruffled, in that single moment invincible, then the straight line of his lips faltered and he hid his face in the crook of one arm. Victor swayed upright and kicked some sand in Loki's general direction.
"I hope you still remember that you are not welcome in mine."
"I remember."
Victor looked out across the ocean. It was as shallow as a dish at this end of the isle, or the floor could have risen in the time they had lain, time moved without care for laws here. He didn’t like it, not at all. Victor looked up to see strange constellations creeping, black points against a dull white sky. He struggled to recall lessons and accidents of yore, before Loki's selfish gift had brought him here, in a form he did not remember liking, either. He had always wanted to be a grown-up. That was power, power was life, and life was meaning itself. He flexed his hands. The cold had hooked them into claws; Victor carefully unfolded them into a human shape. "What do you want to do?" he generously asked.
"I don't."
Victor snorted. "You want for useless foolhardy things," he said. "Always have."
"No one likes a know-it-all."
"Unlike some people, I do not need to be liked."
"And yet!"
Victor hummed under his breath. It could just have been shock, an illusion rendered from the pain and the cold, but regardless, he was feeling better, and he never wasted an opportunity. "Suit yourself. I will find my own way back," Victor said, self-assured. He looked out across the ocean again and thought he saw a thin gray line, land of some kind. He cautiously splashed into the water. Loki stayed where he was. "Stop being an ass," Victor told him. "You are embarrassing yourself."
"I'm not."
Victor waited patiently.
"I won't," Loki said, in almost a whisper, winding up something inside himself. Victor would have tsked if he had had energy to spare. Loki sat up all of a sudden and violently struck sand from his arms and legs. "Well?" he demanded.
"Hello, Loki," Victor replied. It pleased him to be kind, this one time. Their acquaintance was long enough for that, if he wished it, and he wished it. Loki made an ugly face at him, the knave. But he drew to his feet and obligingly walked with him into the water. It barely came up the top of their feet, but was thick with mud and debris. Victor led, in a way, but if not for Loki helping him he might have crawled most of the way. It was a long walk, but one unnaturally flat, and not empty of sights. First they saw only the carcasses of shellfish, piled like dunes, and blue-gray rocks stippled with dead coral, all churned up and topsy-turvy, but further out, their progress slowed as they encountered the skeletons of fabulous vast ships and monstrous whales alike, the giant curving bones petrified. Other treasures littered the whole of the raised and ironed-flat ocean floor, and under different circumstances Victor would have been sunk deep in some brilliant scheme to make proper use of such resources, but with Loki huffing by his side, it all just seemed like a colossal nuisance, or maybe it was simply that his feelings about Loki was spilling over to the unaffected parts of his brain. The prospect of that should have troubled him more, but Victor was rather tired. He hoped that it did not seem obvious, but it was unfortunately in vain.
"Mortal," Loki said.
"I thought you said it was eternal."
"You did something to it," Loki guessed. "Effects cannot be guaranteed in cases of tampering."
"Bah," Victor said. "Can you see the other shore?"
"I don't think it's anyplace living," Loki said, squinting at the far-off lump of gray. "But it seems closer than before."
The shelf of a continent, also silent, certain to have been styled a realm but with name unknown — it was vaguely familiar, but like anything else dead, Victor could not quite place it. "Time is not time here," he said, tasting it on his tongue, not salt but something burnt, when they set foot on the shore with mud clinging to their every surface. Loki just flung his arm off and grinned cheekily when Victor did not go down.
"Nothing is nothing here," he said, harsh.
Victor didn't answer. He scanned the sloping edge of land they found themselves on and pulled a protesting Loki behind him. They climbed. Like the isle here there was grass, unrelenting, but together they sheared a way, toward the ruins of something that might have been a palace once, a great building that stretched nearly out into the sea. Entering through one of the holes in the outer walls yielded up corridors, dimly lit and clear. Globules of auricalke were strewn everywhere, hung in unruly strands from the carved rafters of the halls. Where the halls opened up, they climbed again, and went over an overgrown earthen ramp, maybe an old fortification that had been built over. At the top of the hill were more structures that had seen better days, but otherwise only the passage of time, not war. They saw no weapons: no broken swords, no spearheads, no seige engine fittings, no incised bones. They passed under the shadow of a tremendous barbican, its deep passage once fitted with hundreds of gates, going by the grooves, and entered an expansive green whose raised center held dozens of triliths, scabbed over with lichens and stained with blood yet unfaded, though entirely ancient. At the clearing's center was a shattered bell, its chain still suspended from a beam astraddle trunnions, pillars made of mirror-black obsidian. Square caskets of the same material lay open all around in the expansive space, and a threadbare, black-haired girl, her back turned, sifted through them, hands floured with the dust of books, bones, the contents of the opened reliquaries. Victor stopped where he stood and gazed at her in astonishment. Loki went a step further and let out a stricken sound.
"Leah," he said.
• • • • •
[1] [2] [3] / [4] [5] [6] /